I gave her an ‘I know exactly what you mean’ chuckle and said, “But hang on a moment, are we talking about Paul or Danny here?”
She stared at me for five whole seconds, which when you are staring at somebody is a long time. “You don’t miss much, do you?”
“No.”
She sighed. “It was kind of odd, because it was like Danny was obsessed with UFOs and the X-Files and that whole world, but somehow he made it fascinating. Plus he was funny, happy, inexhaustible and he just made you feel alive by simply being in his presence. But Paul…” She flopped back in her chair and sighed again. It was a sigh of real regret. “Paul was obsessed with Danny! I guess we all were to a greater or lesser extent. Or, if not obsessed, at least kind of really aware of him, all the time… you know?”
I nodded. “I feel you are leading up to something, Jane…”
“Yeah, I am. I’m sorry. I’m getting there, but it takes some explaining. So, Danny’s whole life was his UFO research. Which was, in a sense, why I was with Paul. With Paul, we could go out to the cinema, or watch a movie at home, maybe sometimes go out to dinner or whatever. We had a life that included more things than just aliens. But, sooner or later, the conversation would always come back to Danny.”
She paused, staring down at her hands. After a moment, she looked up and searched Dehan’s face. I thought I saw a hint of guilt, a plea for understanding. She went on.
“With Danny, the subject always came back to UFOs. With Paul, the subject always came back to Danny. I fought it, I really did, but bit by bit I began to lose respect for him.”
Dehan nodded a few times, and in a voice that was not unsympathetic she said, “It sounds to me, Jane, as though all along the one you were in love with was Danny.”
“That obvious, huh?”
“You said so yourself at the beginning. The only reason you were not with Danny was because his whole life was UFOs.”
“I said that? Yeah, I guess I said that.”
I sat back. “So what happened?”
“Something you have to understand is that Danny never fell in love. There just wasn’t a woman on Earth who could keep up with him, and he needed a woman who would not just keep up, but would challenge him. So he never gave his heart to anyone. But he was the ultimate flirt. He didn’t even know he was flirting. He didn’t care if she was ninety, two, a drop dead gorgeous supermodel, a homeless tramp, or the First Lady. It was all the same to him. If she was female, he would flirt with her. Just because flirting was fun. He would make her laugh, tease her, make her feel good about herself. And believe me, if you were a woman and you spoke to Danny for two minutes, you felt like a million bucks.” She smiled. It was a private smile between her and some special memory. “I guess there were not many girls who didn’t have a bit of a crush on him.”
I scratched my chin. “Jane, did Danny have occasional girlfriends? Did he have passing affairs…?”
“Yeah. They weren’t quite one night stands, but you knew that if you hit the sack with Danny, it would not develop into anything serious.” She laughed again, without much humor. “They were more like three or four night stands. He never lied or pretended. I guess he slept with most of the girls in the group, and some who were not in the group. He was hard to resist.”
“Where did these encounters take place?”
Her cheeks colored a little. “His parents were pretty liberal and if he took a girl home to meet them it was generally accepted that she would stay the night. But they drew the line if the girl had a boyfriend, or if they knew she had a boyfriend. So he had a van.”
Dehan raised an eyebrow. “A van?”
“Yeah. Sometimes we would use it to go on field trips. It was pretty luxurious in the back. He had music.” She smiled and shook her head. “He told us what it was for.”
We fell silent for a moment and I drummed my fingers on the table. “OK, Jane, we have been talking around this for a while. Do you think it’s time to get to the point?”
She nodded a few times, then took a deep, reluctant breath.
“Paul and I didn’t have a row or anything. We didn’t start arguing or anything like that. I truly believe he was not aware that there was a problem. But I had grown really bored with him. With him and his kind of adulation of the ground Danny walked on. And at the same time, my attraction for Danny was growing to the point where I was kidding myself that maybe I could be the one. Stupid, I know, but that was how it was.
“On the Friday night, we all went up to Macomb Mountain. Donald had his equipment there and we were trying to pick up signals or transmissions that might confirm there was a non-terrestrial presence in the atmosphere, the stratosphere, or even just in orbit. He also had some kind of visual scanner that could pick up light beyond either end of the visible spectrum. I’m no scientist, but the equipment seemed pretty sophisticated to me.
“So, around midnight we picked up some signals that Don said were not naturally occurring, and were not of human origin. I don’t know how he knew that, but he did. And then we saw lights in the sky…”
I asked, “Visible to
