But it doesn’t escape my attention that she is checking everything more thoroughly than usual, as if she suspects something or is uneasy.
“Everything A-okay?” I ask her. “Everything in good shape?”
“Making sure of it,” she says, and I feel her distance more strongly. I sense her secrets.
She trusts no one. She shouldn’t. I never should have trusted some people, either, going back to day one. People who manipulate and lie and claim it is for a cause. The right cause, a godly or just cause. Noonie Pieste and Joanne Rule were smothered to death in bed, probably with a pillow. That’s why there was no tissue response to their injuries. The sexual assaults, the hacks with machetes and slashes with broken glass, and even the ligatures binding them when they were tied up in the chairs, all of it postmortem. A godly cause, a just cause, in the minds of those responsible. An unthinkable outrage, and they got away with it. To this day they did.
I open the left-front door and climb up on a skid, the wind gusting hard. Maneuvering myself around the collective and cyclic and into the left seat, I fasten my four-point harness as I hear Marino opening the door behind me. He is loud and big, and I feel the helicopter settle from his weight as he climbs into the back, where he always sits. Even when Lucy flies with only him as a passenger, he isn’t allowed up front where there are dual controls that he can nudge or bump or use as an armrest because he doesn’t think. He just doesn’t think.
Lucy gets in and begins another preflight, and I help her by holding the checklist, and together we go through it. I’ve never had a desire to fly the various aircraft my niece has owned over the years, or to ride her motorcycles or drive her fast Italian cars, but I’m fine to copilot, am handy with maps and avionics. I know how to switch the radios to the necessary frequencies or enter squawks and other information into the transponder or Chelton Flight System. If there was an emergency, I probably could get the helicopter safely to the ground, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
“… Overhead switches in the off position,” I continue going down the list.
“Yes.”
“Circuit breakers in.”
“They are.” Lucy’s agile fingers touch everything she checks as we go down the plastic-laminated list.
Momentarily, she flips on the boost pumps and rolls the throttle to flight idle.
“Clear to the right.” As she looks out her side window.
“Clear to the left.” As I look out at the dark ramp, at the small building with its lighted windows and a Piper Cub tied down a safe distance away in the shadows, its tarp shaking in the wind.
Lucy pushes the start switch, and the main rotor blade begins to turn slowly, heavily, thudding faster like a heartbeat, and I think of the man. I think of his fear, of what I detected in those three words he exclaimed.
“What the…? Hey… !”
What did he feel? What did he see? The lower part of a black coat, the loose skirt of a black coat swishing past. Whose coat? A wool dress coat or a trench coat? It wasn’t fur. Who was wearing the long, black coat? Someone who didn’t stop to help him.
“What the…? Hey… !” A startled cry of pain.
I replay it in my mind again and again. The camera angle dropping suddenly, then fixing straight up at bare branches and gray sky, then the hem of the long, black coat moving past in the frame for an instant, maybe a second. Who would step around someone in distress as if he was an inanimate object, such as a rock or a log? What kind of human being would ignore someone who grabbed his chest and collapsed? The person who caused it, perhaps. Or someone who didn’t want to be involved for some reason. Like witnessing an accident or assault and speeding off so you don’t become part of the investigation. A man or a woman? Did I see shoes? No, just the hem or skirt of the coat flapping, and then another jostling sound and the picture was replaced by different bare trees showing through the underside of a green-painted bench. Did the person in the long, black coat kick the headphones under the bench there so they didn’t record something else that was done?
I need to look at the video clips more closely, but I can’t do it now. The iPad is in back, and there isn’t time. The blades rapidly beat the air, and the generator is online. Lucy and I put our headsets on. She flips more overhead switches, the avionics master, the flight and navigation instruments. I turn the intercom switch to “crew only” so Marino can’t hear us and we can’t hear him while Lucy talks to the air traffic controller. The strobes, the pulse and night scanner landing lights, blaze on the tarmac, painting it white as we wait for the tower to clear us for takeoff. Entering destinations in the touch-screen GPS and in the moving map display and the Chelton, I correct the altimeters. I make sure the digital fuel indicator matches the fuel gauge, doing most things at least twice, because Lucy believes in redundancy.
The tower releases us, and we hover-taxi to the runway and climb on course to the northeast, crossing the Delaware River at eleven hundred feet. The water is dark and ruffled by the wind, like molten metal flowing thickly. The lights of land flicker through trees like small fires.
4
We change our heading, veering toward Philadelphia, because the visibility deteriorates closer to the coast. I flip the intercom switch so we can check on Marino.
“You all right back there?” I’m calmer now, too preoccupied with the long, black coat and the man’s startled exclamation to be angry with Marino.
“Be quicker to cut through New Jersey,” his voice sounds, and he knows where we are, because there is an in-flight map on a video screen inside the rear passenger compartment.
“Fog and freezing rain, IFR conditions in Atlantic City. And it isn’t quicker,” Lucy replies. “We’ll be on ‘crew only’ most of the time so I can deal with flight following.”
Marino is cut out of our conversation again as we are handed off from one tower to the next. The Washington sectional map is open in my lap, and I enter a new GPS destination of Oxford, Connecticut, for an eventual fuel stop, and we monitor weather on the radar, watching blocks of solid green and yellow encroach upon us from the Atlantic. We can outrun, duck, and dodge the storms, Lucy says, as long as we stay inland and the wind continues to favor us, increasing our ground speed to what at this moment is an impressive one hundred and fifty-two knots.
“How are you doing?” I keep up my scan for cell towers and other aircraft.
“Better when we get where we’re going. I’m sure we’ll be fine and can outrun this mess.” She points at what’s on the weather radar display. “But if there’s a shadow of a doubt, we’ll set down.”
She wouldn’t have come to pick me up if she thought we might have to spend the night in a field somewhere. I’m not worried. Maybe I don’t have enough left in me to worry about yet one more thing.
“How about in general? How are you doing?” I say into the mike, touching my lip. “You’ve been on my mind a lot these past few weeks.” I try to draw her out.
“I know how hard it is to keep up with people under the circumstances,” she says. “Every time we think you’re coming back, something changes, so we’ve all quit thinking it.”
Three times now the completion of my fellowship was delayed by one urgent matter or another. Two helicopters shot down in one day in Iraq with twenty-three killed. The mass murder at Fort Hood, and most recently, the earthquake in Haiti. Armed forces MEs got deployed or none could be spared, and Briggs wouldn’t release me from my training program. A few hours ago, he attempted to delay my departure again, suggesting I stay in Dover. As if he doesn’t want me to go home.
“I figured we’d get to Dover and find out you had another week, two weeks, a month,” Lucy adds. “But you’re done.”
“Apparently, they’re sick of me.”
“Let’s hope you don’t get home only to turn around and go back.”
“I passed my boards. I’m done. I’ve got an office to run.”
“Someone needs to run it. That’s for sure.”
I don’t want to hear more damning comments about Jack Fielding.
“And things are fine elsewhere?” I ask.
“They’ve almost finished the garage, big enough for three cars even with the washing bay. Assuming you tandem park.” She starts on a construction update, reminding me how disengaged I’ve been from what’s going on at my own home. “The rubberized flooring is in, but the alarm system isn’t ready. They weren’t going to bother with
