“I asked Erin to bring you here,” Addison began, a bit too slowly, “because we…that is, my team and I…came to a definite conclusion about the crash today. There’s no more doubt in our minds. We have evidence now that we didn’t have before.”
Jason stood up and took a few steps toward the water, keeping his rigid back to the other three. Maureen’s eyes misted over, but her brave, tired expression didn’t waver. Erin frowned down at the grass, plucking blades with one hand.
“You don’t have to walk away, Jason,” Addison said quietly. “Your dad’s cleared. It was absolutely not his fault.”
Jason swung around, and Erin looked up.
“Then what was it?” Maureen asked, confusion distorting her face. She wore an expression of disbelief, as if she couldn’t quite comprehend that the nightmare had ended.
Addison laid his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. “It was a malfunction on the airplane.”
Erin wasn’t going to let the statement go that easily. “What kind of malfunction, Addison?”
“In the elevator system,” he said. “It wouldn’t engage. Mick thought he was steering the plane, but nothing was engaging.”
“Why?”
Addison looked at Erin, knowing he would have to provide details. But just how much should he tell her? The faces turned attentively toward him, waiting for an answer. “Because the plane had been built with some counterfeit bolts. One of them snapped just as Mick was making his approach.”
Maureen placed her hand over her mouth. “Oh, no,” she whispered.
Jason went to his mom’s side, knelt in the grass, and set a hand protectively on her shoulder. His face was weary and drawn when he regarded Addison. “Then…Dad didn’t know what was happening? He never had a chance?”
Addison shook his head slowly. “I’m afraid not, Jason.”
Erin stared at Addison as the implications of the discovery became clear in her pilot’s mind. “How many bolts like that were in the plane? All of them?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I’m going to have them all analyzed and recommend that every plane built by that manufacturer at the same time have spot checks to determine where other counterfeit bolts might be. I’m sure there’ll be a full-scale investigation.”
He turned back to Maureen and Jason, a look of deep regret in his eyes. His voice dropped in pitch, and his tone became intimate, like that of a friend. “I owe you two an apology. I intruded on your privacy, turned your lives upside down, made things pretty bad for you at the worst possible time. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
Maureen wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “There’s nothing to forgive,” she said. “You did your job, that’s all. If anyone else had been investigating, he probably would have stopped at uncovering the obvious.” Her voice wavered, but she forced a smile and held out her hand. “What we owe you is our gratitude.”
Addison took her hand in both of his own, savoring her authentic thanks. It was odd, because no one associated with a crash had ever thanked him before. After a moment, Jason held out his own hand, the gesture more that of a man than a boy. “Thanks,” he said simply. Addison shook his hand, unable to escape the dreadful feeling that he’d given them both something entirely new to grieve about.
“If you don’t mind, I think Jason and I need to be alone for a while,” Maureen said, her pale face drawn as she came to her feet. She wiped her eyes again and wrapped her arms around her son who seemed so much stronger than she was.
Addison and Erin watched until they were out of sight.
“You can take the tape now,” he almost whispered, setting his eyes on her, memorizing her soft lines and the sculpted perfection of her face. “I promised you could hear it when the investigation was over. It’s in the apartment.”
Erin turned back to him, gauging his mood in the waxing moonlight. “Thank you, Addison.”
He laughed mirthlessly. “For what? For giving them—you—some new injustice to grieve over?”
“No,” she whispered, moving closer to him. “For giving them back their pride and the untarnished memories of Mick that they had before. Anyone else, any other investigator, would have given up the investigation long before you did. They never would have found the truth.”
“I upset them,” he said, gesturing to where the two had gone out of sight. “Did you see how upset they were? And so are you. I can see it, Erin.”
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s a matter of the better of two evils. Neither conclusion alters the fact that Mick crashed, that he’s gone—” Her voice broke off, and the moonlight caught the tears in her eyes. “But the fact that it wasn’t his fault does make a difference. You’ve got to believe that.”
Pulling herself to her knees, she slid her arms around his neck. “I love you, Addison,” she whispered.
He leaned his head against hers and closed his eyes, his body shaking with the emotion rising up inside him. After a moment, he whispered, “I never thought I’d hear those words again. And I never thought I’d say them. But I love you, too.”
He kissed her, struggling to keep his volatile emotions from getting out of hand and forcing him into making snap decisions that would change his life. He needed time to think, time to weigh one loss against another. The kiss broke, and she reached up to wipe the mist under his eyes. “I thought it would be over when I discovered the truth,” he said, his voice rasping. “I thought I could file the report and wash my hands of it. But it never ends. It just gets uglier and uglier. Tomorrow morning I have to go back to Washington, come up with recommendations to the FAA for something to be done about those bolts…”
“Tomorrow?” She released his neck and sat back on her heels to face him. “You’re going back to Washington tomorrow?”
The hurt on her face broke his heart. “It’s headquarters, babe. You knew I’d have to go back. They’re impatient for me to be available for the field again.”
“Addison, we just got started. I don’t want you to go.”
“It’s my job,” he said dismally, repeating the words that had become so distasteful to him over the past few weeks. “I have to go.”
She widened her eyes to keep from breaking into tears. This couldn’t be happening. Not when everything was coming together. Not when she was beginning to feel good again. She sat stiffly, as though a rigid spine could give her courage. “Then…then I’ll come with you. I’ll get a transfer to Washington. Then we could see each other when you’re in town.”
Addison shook his head, the effort deepening his own pain. Sid’s warnings began to take shape, setting their love on shakier ground. “Except that I won’t be there for long,” he said. “As soon as I get back, they’re sending me to Albuquerque, and after that, who knows? It depends on where the next accident happens.”
He saw that Erin tried to smile and not surrender to panic just yet. She blinked back the tears forming in her eyes. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to fly to wherever you are on my days off. I usually have three days off at a time, unless Zarkoff changes that. It would be something.”
“It would be nothing.” Addison stood up, took a few steps away from her, turned back, and studied her as best he could in the growing darkness. She looked so broken, he thought, and he had broken her. Somewhere the hurting had to stop. “I’d be working, having to concentrate on my investigations, probably depressed at the discoveries I was making. You’d be depressed, too, and neglected, and it wouldn’t be fair.”
He ground his teeth and kicked a stone, sent it rolling a few feet away. “Aw, Erin. I want more than a casual relationship whenever we can spare the time. An afternoon here, an evening there. It won’t work. It couldn’t work that way for either of us.”
Erin scrambled to her feet, and he could see the fight rising inside her. “It does work, Addison. All the time. It’s the nature of a pilot’s job to be away a lot and to take advantage of the time he has. Lots of pilots I know have adjusted, Addison. We can, too.”
“Pilots adjust,” Addison said. “They fly off on a trip, come back, and all’s well. But not guys like me. When I go off, I’m buried in wreckage for weeks. I take the recorded voices of victims to bed with me at night. I rack my brain trying to dig through to the truth. In every town there’s a Maureen…a Jason…”
“And an Erin?” she bit out painfully.
“No,” he said quickly. “Not an Erin. But in this town there was, and for a big percentage of the time, she hated me for what I do. You won’t forget all that just because it’s someone else’s life I’m profiling. You’ll still think it’s callous, and we’d wind up fighting and, finally, drifting apart.”
Erin no longer tried to conceal her pain. Tears fell over her bottom lashes. Her lips quivered. “Then…then you’re telling me that it’s over? That there’s no use? That it was fun while it lasted?”
No, he thought miserably. It can’t be over. Not like this. He caught his breath, cleared his throat, and struggled with the truth. She had to know. “Erin, listen to me. I’m just saying that it’s going to be complicated. The truth is that I’ve been given a choice. You or the job. My father-in-law is my boss, and he’s pulling the strings. I have to work some things out, Erin. Some very important things. I need some time to think.”
“I can’t believe it,” she whispered, amazed. “It isn’t a choice between me and your job that man wants from you, Addison. It’s a choice between me and your wife, isn’t it?”
“Maybe in his mind, it is,” Addison admitted quietly. “Not in mine, though.”
Erin turned away from him, wiping away her tears.
“Erin,” he whispered. “Don’t turn away.”
“Don’t turn away?” she echoed, flabbergasted. “Me? Tell me one time that you aren’t saying good-bye.”
His expression became clouded as the sky before a storm. “I can’t tell you that,” he whispered. “Not until I’ve reevaluated some things, made some decisions. I feel like my work isn’t finished. It’s too important to leave my job without thinking long and hard about it. I feel tied to it. Please try to understand.”
She stood motionless, desperately trying to absorb the shock, desperately trying to cope. “I understand,” she lied, her voice wobbling. “Of course you have to think. Reevaluate everything…people depend on you…”
“Erin, I don’t want to lose you. There’s got to be an answer. I’ll think of something.”
“I have to go,” she whispered, then turned and hurried back to the parking lot.
Addison didn’t move to go after her as Erin ran through the grass. There would be time for that later, he prayed, when he found some concrete answers, some peace, some resolve. But not now. He had nothing to offer her now, except confusion and more despair.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Good-byes. They were getting harder all the time, Erin thought as she sped home, the tape of the crash lying in her lap. She had gone into Addison’s apartment for the last time and taken the tape that had preyed on her mind for so long. Then she’d simply walked away.
But she wouldn’t think about Addison now. Not when her life was on the verge of coming together. Not when everything was working out. She was flying again, and Mick was cleared.
Somehow, none of that mattered when Addison was fading from her life. But did he have a choice when people were dying because of substandard materials? When the country needed men like him to fight for their safety?
Almost defiantly, she pulled the tape out of its protective box and jammed it into her tape deck. Her neighborhood came into sight, but she kept driving. Night began to invade the car, lending an eerie quality to the cockpit static that came across the speakers.
And then came the sound of Mick’s voice, as if he were right there next to her.
She drove aimlessly as the tape played, listened and embraced the calm confidence in his voice, the idle conversation with the first officer who’d replaced her, and with the flight engineer. She smiled when he made a comment that if “Erin weren’t so hardheaded, that bump she took in the accident might have done some damage.”
She found herself driving down Biscayne Boulevard, and wondered how she’d wound up there. Still she drove aimlessly, listening to her friend, her captain, engaged in the business of flying a plane.
The car seemed to head toward the airport of its own accord as the tape played on. She heard the routine checklists being exchanged, weather reports gathered, transmissions to approach control. Her muscles tensed with
apprehension, and her heart twisted with misery as Mick got closer to the point where the tape would end.
Just before Mick began his descent, tears streamed down Erin’s face. “It’s a bolt, Mick,” she whispered aloud. “Just a stupid little bolt. You can’t even fix it.”
She heard the first officer calling out the descending altitudes, the mention of the plane being below the glide path, the frantic cry to “Pull up! Pull up!”
And when there was nothing else to be heard, Erin pulled her car off the highway and slumped over the steering wheel. She was suddenly weeping for the losses she’d encountered in the last few weeks; weeping for the losses yet to be encountered; weeping over the guilt for believing, like everyone else, that Mick had panicked.
When the worst of her misery was spent, she leaned her head back on her seat and looked out the window. The taillights of a commercial jet caught her eye, slowly making its way through the pitch-dark sky.
With the eye of her heart, she could almost see Mick in the cockpit, smiling down at her and offering her a thumbs-up. It’s okay, Erin, she could imagine him saying. It’s okay.
A sob rose up in her throat as that feeling of forgiveness from him, and from herself, overwhelmed her. Silently, she returned the thumbs-up gesture. “Good-bye, Mick,” she whispered. “Take good care of him, Lord. I can’t wait to see him again.”
She dragged a Kleenex out of a box on the floorboard and
blew her nose, then wiped the tears from her face. Still looking up at the sky, she whispered, “What now, Lord? I thought I could see your plan forming. I thought it was all working out. That the crash had led me to Addison, and so there was some way that it all worked for good. I thought I saw your hand.”
She sobbed harder, her heart pleading with God for some sign that he heard her. “I know you’re still answering prayers, Lord,” she whispered. “You answered my prayers about Mick’s guilt. And you answered my prayers about my flying. Could you just answer this one, too? Could you work it all out, somehow, so that I don’t have to say good-bye to Addison?”
Silence filled the car, except for the quiet sound of her weeping. As peace descended over her, her tears slowed, and she wiped them away and blew her nose. She took in a deep, ragged breath and leaned her head back against the seat, watching the sky as that peace poured like warm honey through her. A shooting star arced across the sky, and she sat up straight, watching it disappear. God was listening. He had heard.
And she would trust him, whatever his will was in her life.
She started the car and waited for a space in the traffic.
That peace stayed with her as she pulled back into the flow of life again. She had managed to say good-bye to Mick once and for all. And she was leaving it up to God whether she had to say good-bye to Addison.
Without actually making the decision to do so, Erin wound up at the airport. She went to the Southeast Terminal, to Frank Redlo’s office, and knocked on the casing to the open door.
“Come in,” he mumbled.
He didn’t look up until she’d come all the way inside, and he smiled. “I took a chance on your being here,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you.”
Frank checked his watch, saw how late it was, and rubbed his bald spot wearily. “Yeah, I’m still here. I was kind of waiting to see how the negotiations went. The bargaining committee is meeting with Zarkoff right now.”
“I know. Lois is on the committee. I thought I’d wait for her and see how
it went myself. Meanwhile…”
“You wanted to come see if you could still have your job back,” he said smugly.
She nodded. “Exactly.”
Frank shifted in his chair and leaned his elbows on his desk. “The next time I tell you what’s best for you, you’ll listen to me, won’t you? Storming in here, telling me you want to quit…”
“I was confused, Frank. And I was terrified. I’m over it now.”
“Are you sure, Erin? To tell the truth, you don’t look so good.”
Erin realized that she must, indeed, look awful after all the tears she’d shed. But fear of it being too late for her career invaded her hopeful heart. “Didn’t Addison Lowe talk to you? He said he was coming here today—”
“He came,” Frank said, nodding. “Talked to Jackson, and the chief says it’s time to put you back on the schedule. Says you’ve been tearing up the airways with Jack Griffin’s Cessna.”
She tried to smile. “Yeah. I’m ready to go back to work, Frank.”
Genuine pleasure softened the otherwise harsh lines on his face. “I’ll put you back to work this week, Erin. It’ll take a while to work you into the schedule, but I want to hurry before we find ourselves with a strike on our hands. Otherwise it could be a long time before you fly again—that is, if you even have a job left. You need to get back to work before the strike, so you can prove to yourself and everybody else that you can do it. If you have to wait until the strike’s over, you might lose your courage again. Let me get to work on it, see where I can schedule you. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve gotten you in.”
She stood up. “Thanks, Frank. I really appreciate your standing behind me.”
He shrugged, embarrassment making him resume his gruff facade. “It was nothing. I just don’t take kindly to losing my pilots. I only hope I’m not about to lose the whole lot of them. I just might, if Zarkoff doesn’t ease up.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “If anybody can get Zarkoff to change his mind, Lois can. It’ll be all right.”
Broken Wings Page 20