Bellamy didn’t believe he was as indifferent to the parental neglect as he pretended, but, for the time being, she let it go. “When did you first meet Mr. Hathaway?”
“He would hate you calling him that.”
“All right, when did you first meet Gall?”
“I was twelve, thirteen. Thereabout. One day after school I didn’t want to go home, so I struck off on my bike. No destination. Just wanting to put miles between me and my house. When I got pretty far out, I spotted this small airplane swooping down and disappearing for a few seconds, then soaring up over the horizon again. I rode toward it and wound up out at Gall’s airfield, where he was instructing a student. They were doing touch-and-goes. Man, I envied them. I wanted to be in that airplane so bad.”
“Love at first sight?”
He fired a finger pistol at her. “Right on target, A.k.a. You’re a writer, after all.”
“You fell in love with flying that day.”
“Head over freakin’ heels. I stayed there watching until they landed. The guy taking the lesson left. Gall had noticed me lurking, waved me into the hangar. I figured he was going to tell me that I was trespassing and to get lost.
“Instead, he offered me a Dr Pepper. He asked if I liked airplanes, and I told him yes—although until that afternoon, I didn’t know it. He motioned me out to the airplane they’d been flying and asked if I’d ever been up in a single-engine. I hadn’t been up in anything, but I lied and told him I had.
“He pointed out all the parts and told me what they were called. He let me sit in the pilot’s seat, and gave me a rundown on what all the gauges were for. I asked if it was hard to fly one. He looked at me and laughed. ‘If it was hard, could I do it?’
“Then he asked if I wanted to go up. I nearly wet myself. He asked if my folks would care, and I told him no. Which was the truth. So we switched seats, and he took off, flying directly into the sunset. We made a wide sweep and were back on the ground in under five minutes, but it was the best time of my life up to then.”
He was smiling at the memory and remained lost in thought for several moments before resuming. “Gall let me help him secure the plane. By the time we’d finished, it had grown dark. When I got on my bike, he asked me where I lived, and when I told him the general vicinity, he said, ‘That far? Jesus, kid, you don’t even have a light on your bike. How are you going to see to get home?’ I came back with something like, ‘I got out here okay, didn’t I?’
“He called me a damn-fool kid and a smart-ass to boot, got in his truck, and drove along behind me so I could see my way by his headlights. That was the first time—” He broke off, leaving the thought unspoken.
“The first time what?”
He averted his gaze and mumbled, “The first time anybody had ever been worried about me.”
Bellamy reasoned that he had fallen in love with more than flying that day. He had started loving Gall, who had paid attention to him, talked to him, been protective of him. But she knew the man the neglected teenage boy had become would rebuff any discussion of that, so she returned to their original topic.
“Detective Moody raked you over the coals.”
Emerging from the nostalgic recollections, he frowned. “Several times. I told him over and over again that Gall and I had been test-flying a plane, that I wasn’t at the barbecue, and that I didn’t get to the park until after the tornado.”
“Why did you come to the park at all?”
“There were thunderstorms around that forced Gall and me to return ahead of schedule, so I figured I had just as well try to smooth things over with Susan. Given a choice, though, I’d have stayed in the air. Every minute I spent in a plane was better than being on the ground.”
“Better even than the time you spent with Susan?”
He grinned. “Tough choice.”
“She was as good as all that? As exhilarating as flying?”
“Susan, no. Sex… hmm. It’s the only thing that comes close.”
“What time did you get to the state park?”
“Hold on a sec.” He folded his arms on the table and leaned across it toward her. “Let’s explore this some.”
“Explore what?”
“Sex and flying. Sex and anything. Sex and, say… writing.” He narrowed his focus on her mouth. “Given a choice right now, which would you rather be doing?”
“Are you flirting with me?”
“What do you think?”
She thought her cheeks were growing so warm he probably detected her blush. His grin was unrepentantly suggestive and made her feel twelve years old again. “It won’t do you any good,” she said. “Because even if I was open to comparing sex to my lifework, I wouldn’t want to be compared to my late sister.”
His grin faded, and his eyes reconnected with hers. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Yes you would.”
“No I wouldn’t. In any case, I don’t even remember how it was with her.”
“Because there have been so many since?”
“I’m a bachelor with a basic sexual appetite. I make it clear to the women I sleep with that there are no strings attached to my bed. We fine-tune the hormone levels, then go our separate ways, nobody gets hurt.”
“Are you sure? Have you ever asked?”
He gradually eased himself back into the chair. After a moment, he said, “Tell you what. I’ll elaborate on my sex life after you tell me what went wrong with your marriage.”
Refusing to be baited, she said, “What time did you arrive at the state park?”
He snuffled a soft laugh. “Figured.” Then, “What time did I get to the park? I don’t know. I never could nail down a time for Moody, either, which he saw as an implicating factor. On my way there, I saw the funnel cloud. I realized the park lay in its path. I was minutes behind it, and when I got there, all hell had broken loose.
“It looked like—well, you know what it looked like. People were screaming. A lot of them were bloody and broken. Hysteria. Panic. Shock. Next to war, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You were in war?”
“Air force. Iraq. Our base took some rocket fire and the bastards got lucky with their aim. Left those of us who survived it with a… a lot to clean up.” His expression turned introspective. “War looks different from several miles up than when you’re scooping up red mush that used to be your wing man.”
He reached for his glass of tea and took a drink. They didn’t look at each other and neither said anything for a time, then she asked what else he remembered seeing in the wake of the tornado.
“Your dad. He was running around like a crazy man, his hands cupped around his mouth, calling your names. Steven appeared first, looking like a zombie, acting like one. Howard shook him, trying to snap him out of his daze. Then Olivia appeared.
“She was… well, that’s the only time I’ve seen any real emotion from the woman. She grabbed Steven and wrapped her arms around him like she was never going to let him go. Your dad was embracing both of them. He and Olivia were crying with relief over finding each other unharmed. But the group hug didn’t last long because you and Susan were still unaccounted for.
“When they saw me, Olivia ran over. Had I been with Susan? Had I seen her? Where was she? She was yelling in my face, making little sense, ranting at me for breaking my date with Susan, making it my fault that she was missing, accusing me of causing trouble as always.”
“She must have been out of her mind with worry.”
Dent fell silent and stared into near space for a moment, then said, “Yeah, but later, after Susan’s body was discovered, I thought about what she’d said. And in a way she was right. If I’d been with Susan that day as planned, she wouldn’t have been in the woods with Allen Strickland. She might have been injured or even killed by the twister, but as least she wouldn’t have been choked to death.”
“I suppose both of us suffer a bit of survivors’ guilt.”
“I guess. But I never let on to Moody about it. He would have misread it. It was bad enough that I was within thirty, forty yards of Susan’s body when the fireman found it. I’d been searching the woods with them. So were a dozen other men, but none of the rest became suspects. Only me. Later, Moody said it was like I had returned to
