The Sixth Idea

by P. J. Tracy

  One of the last stragglers to board was a pretty woman definitely young enough to be his daughter and perhaps young enough to be his granddaughter. She had a sweet face and an obvious case of nerves. Her eyes were darting this way and that, probably making note of the emergency exits and any potential terrorists she might have to subdue mid-flight.

  She slowed, then stopped to stand next to the empty seat Chuck had cluttered with his paperwork, and gave him a timid smile.

  Chuck smiled back and started gathering up his papers. In the ever-capricious lottery of air travel, this lady was the jackpot as far as seatmates went. She was thin and would take up no room at all, she was attractive and seemed quite shy, she didn’t smell like English Leather, and she wasn’t coughing or sneezing or carrying tissues up her sleeve. “Sorry about the mess.”

  “No worries.” She sat down abruptly once he’d cleared the seat. “I’m Lydia Ascher,” she mumbled at her lap, frantically trying to fasten her seat belt.

  “Chuck Spencer.”

  She was obviously terrified of flying, and that could go one of two ways. Nervous fliers either went dead silent during takeoff and pulled up on their armrests as if they could hold the plane up with the sheer force of their will, or they chattered like magpies and looked you straight in the eye and pretended they weren’t on a plane at all. The latter was the worst-case scenario for anybody who valued solitude of any kind, even on a crowded plane, as Chuck did.

  He stole a crafty, peripheral glance at his seatmate, trying to assess her demeanor so he could form an isolation strategy if need be.

  Since she was just sitting there rigidly, staring at the seatback in front of her, Chuck figured her to be one of the silent types who suffered their terror alone, and thank God she wasn’t investigating the puke bag. He relaxed a little, then turned his attention back to his papers.

  A few minutes later, he realized he was completely distracted by a creeping guilt. This poor thing sitting next to him was clearly fighting off demons, and he was just sitting there doing jigs in his mind because she was mute. And really, what could be so bad about having a conversation with a pretty young woman if she chose to engage in one, especially if it helped calm her nerves?

  Chuck finally decided to breach the silence, for better or for worse. “Don’t worry, it’ll be a smooth flight. No weather between here and Minneapolis,” he reassured her.

  She turned her head slowly to look at him, as if she were afraid any sudden movement might tip the plane on its side. “It’s that obvious, huh?”

  “Only to anybody who pays attention, but your secret is safe with me, because nobody pays attention to anything but their phones anymore.”

  She let out a great sigh and leaned back in her seat. “Isn’t that the truth.”

  Chuck let the comment hang, and she didn’t pursue it, which was fantastic. When a flight attendant announced that the doors were being closed for takeoff, he leaned back and closed his eyes. Just as the plane began taxiing and he was starting to nod off, he felt a light hand on his arm.

  “Thank you, by the way.”

  Chuck straightened from his dozy slump. “Uh . . .”

  “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry, I woke you up.”

  “No, no,” Chuck insisted in classic sleep denial. He’d never understand what compelled most humans to deny they’d been wakened. Phone call at four in the morning? No problem. Hell no, I wasn’t sleeping, what can I do for you?

  “Yes, I did, and I’ll shut up. I just wanted to thank you for trying to make me feel better.”

  “I’m sorry it didn’t help,” Chuck finally said earnestly, looking down at her white-knuckled grip on the armrests.

  She gave him a sheepish look. “I’m pretty hopeless.”

  “Is there anything that distracts you?”

  “A stiff Bloody Mary would distract me.”

  He was surprised to find himself chuckling, even more surprised to be enjoying this little conversation with a complete stranger, another of his later-in-life peeves. “We can take care of that once we’re airborne. What can I do for you between now and then?”

  She let out a shaky sigh. “Well, you could tell me your life story.”

  “Trust me, reading the in-flight magazine is a lot more interesting than my life story.”

  Lydia let out a breathy giggle, part anxiety, and maybe, Chuck thought, there was a little mirth mixed in, too. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  “Then you haven’t seen this month’s edition. You can now buy a seven-foot gargoyle statue for your lawn for two hundred dollars.”

  She looked at him in disbelief. “Really?”

  “Really. Are you interested?”

  “I’m only interested in what kind of person would want a seven-foot gargoyle statue in their garden.”

  Chuck was pleased to see that Lydia seemed to be relaxing. It made him feel good; paternal, even, in spite of the fact that he had no children of his own. And then the pilot came on the PA and announced, “Flight attendants, prepare for takeoff,” and the poor girl gave him a look of pure, crystalline terror.

  “I hate this part the most,” she whispered, her voice all apologies. “My grandfather died in a plane crash. On takeoff,” she blurted out.

  Chuck’s thoughts slammed to a halt and he suddenly felt a little panicky himself. He’d never actually met anyone who knew someone who died in a plane crash. No wonder she was terrified. And how did you respond to that? He could lecture her on the physics of flying, how it worked, why it was so safe, but that would probably just make things worse. She was in the red zone already. “It’s going to be okay,” he said lamely.

  Lydia just nodded, her wide eyes fixed straight ahead.

  “Lydia? Why don’t you tell me your life story.”

  Chuck had no idea what had made him say such a dangerous thing, but apparently it had been the right thing. She seemed to calm a little as she began speaking to the seatback in front of her, and by liftoff she was making eye contact with him, and he knew both her parents were deceased and she lived on a small lake an hour from Minneapolis.

  By the time the aircraft had banked over the Pacific and turned toward the country’s midsection, he found out that she was a successful artist who was returning home from some important gallery visits in L.A., and her posture seemed much looser, almost normal.

  Somewhere over Nevada, Chuck realized he was genuinely enjoying himself despite the fact that the conversation was one-sided. They ordered Bloody Marys and the serpentine route of their conversation somehow ended up on the topic of her mother’s childhood, and that was the moment the lopsided conversation grew another leg. As she was listing every city that her departed mother had lived in as a child, ten cities in ten years, to be precise, Chuck’s jaw went slack, because he had lived in every one of them.

  Good God. His own childhood was a mirror of this girl’s mother’s. He probably went to grade school with her. What kind of odds were we talking here? “This is really weird. I lived in all those towns at about the same time your mother did,” he said.

  When she didn’t reply, he turned to look at her. She was staring at the clutter of paperwork on his tray table, her eyes wide and her mouth open. He quickly looked down at the tray table, hoping there wasn’t a nude centerfold in the pile. He didn’t see anything offensive at first glance. Maybe she was just having a fear-of-flying seizure or something.

  Finally she reached over and pulled a photograph from the middle of the pile. “Where did you get this?”

  “It belonged to my father.” He pointed to one of the men in the photo. “That’s him, and the rest are some guys he worked with about fifty years ago. Why?”

  She shook her head in disbelief and pointed to the man standing next to Chuck’s father. “Because that one is my grandfather.”

  “What?”

  “That man right t
here. He was my grandfather. The one who died in the plane crash.”

  Chuck gave her a skeptical look. “Whoever it is might look like your grandfather, but I guarantee it isn’t. There were only eight men in the world who even knew about this project, including the President. See? That’s President Eisenhower at the end of the line.”

  “I know. I have this very same photograph at home. These were the men who supervised the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb.”

  Chuck just stared straight ahead for a moment, sorting through all the calculators in his brain, estimating the odds of being seated next to one of the very few people in this world who would know who the men in that photo were. “I never knew any of this until my dad died six months ago and I started going through his things.”

  “Your dad never told you?”

  “I hadn’t seen him in years. When I started cleaning out his house, I found this mess”—he gestured at the stack on his tray table—“and a whole lot of other records. Up until that moment I never knew what my dad did for a living. I always thought he was an engineer.”

  Lydia raised her brows. “The project’s been declassified for a couple decades now.”

  “Like I said, we didn’t see each other. We didn’t talk. It was kind of a weird childhood.”

  “So was my mom’s. Let me guess. Your dad traveled all the time with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. You moved every year or so, and men in suits came and talked to all your little friends, asking if you ever told them what your father did, right? And all you knew was that he was an engineer and worked for American Iron Foundry.”

  Chuck closed his eyes. “Jesus. That’s exactly what it was like. This is unreal. Wally’s never going to believe this.”

  “Who’s Wally?”

  “A new friend. When I did a little research on the Web and found out what Dad had really been doing all those years, I started a website dedicated to finding other descendants of those eight men, or maybe even some of the original men still living. Just for fun, you know, like going on Ancestry-dot-com. Kind of a strange mystery I wanted to follow. Wally and several others found my website and signed into my chat room. He lives in Minneapolis. That’s what I’m doing on this flight. We’re getting together tonight. And suddenly, I find myself sitting next to another descendant. It’s kind of freaking me out.”

  Lydia smiled. “It is pretty unreal.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a business card. “Give me a call and let me know how your meeting with Wally went. If you’re going to be in town for a while, maybe we can all get together.”

  “I have a better idea. Why don’t you come along tonight? Hell, the three of us have more in common than a lot of siblings.”

  Lydia was tempted, but clearly not as obsessed with the past as Wally and Chuck, maybe because she was a generation further down the line. “The thing is, I’ve been away from home for ten days, and I am truly whipped. Tomorrow? I could come into the city and meet you both for lunch, say around noon?”

  “Terrific.” He scribbled on a cocktail napkin. “That’s my cell and my hotel. Give me a call when you’re close and I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

  THREE

  There was something terribly wrong about growing up in a family of secrets. Chuck had never understood why his parents never talked to each other or to him; why strange men in suits questioned his friends; or why they had to move every year or so. It seemed that every time he started to make new friends in a new town, they packed up and left. Maybe it was his fault.

  Children drew the straightest lines between cause and effect, so Chuck concluded that by making friends, he doomed the family to another move. He started to withdraw after that twisted epiphany, hoping that would enable them to stay in one place for a while. It never worked, but it was, apparently, a perfect recipe for a solitary existence, because he’d been a failure at relationships all his life, and very nearly friendless.

  Ironically, the death of his father had led him to Wally, a man with an almost identical childhood, sharing a history so similar to Chuck’s, they might have been siblings. Even though he had yet to meet the man face-to-face, they’d made a strong connection in the past few weeks through their Internet exchanges and phone calls. And then today, along came Lydia, another connection. Chuck felt like he was acquiring a family one person at a time. He’d been a little disappointed that she hadn’t wanted to meet with him and Wally tonight, but he understood what it was like to come off ten days on the road—he’d done plenty of business traveling before he’d retired. At least she’d agreed to a cup of coffee at the airport before they went their separate ways.

  He’d never been to Minneapolis before today, but it seemed almost magical as he drove through downtown to his hotel. Christmas lights sparkled gaily from the streetlamps and garland seemed to be looped everywhere, trumpeting the festive season. Shining store windows proudly displayed their holiday swag, and cheerful people bundled up in their winter clothing strolled the streets as if they didn’t have a care in the world. There was even a pristine dusting of fresh snow to complete the Christmas card feel, and more snow was sifting lightly down from the darkening sky.

  But after his day so far, Chuck felt a deeper magic drawing him to this city like an unseen magnet. First he’d found Wally here, then the unbelievably serendipitous meeting with Lydia. It was like the cogs of fortune had finally caught, telling him there was a more important reason for him to be here than just the simple pursuit of an old mystery. It sounded stupid and New Agey, even in his own private thoughts, but with his spirits so high, he didn’t care.

  He found the Chatham Hotel, parked his rental in the ramp, and checked in. The place was a little too modern and hip for his personal taste, but the service was impeccable and the room and amenities were on par with the hefty nightly rate. In a bigger city he would have paid twice as much and gotten much less.

  Once he’d settled into his generously sized suite, he pulled a Heineken and a fifteen-dollar bag of cashews out of the minibar, unloaded his laptop and external backup drive, then dialed Wally’s number from his cell. He couldn’t wait to tell him about Lydia, but he’d save that until they were together.

  “Wally!”

  “Hey, Chuck, are you in town?”

  “Just got to the hotel. And you’re not going to believe what happened to me today. Are we still on for six?”

  “You bet. Think you can get here all right?”

  “I’ve got your address programmed into the GPS already.”

  “Great. And I’ve got some things to tell you, too. I’ve been going through some of my father’s old files I never bothered to look at before, and . . .” Wally paused for a moment. “Chuck, hang on, would you? There’s somebody at the door.”

  “Sure, Wally.” Chuck put his cell on speaker and walked over to the big window that looked out onto the street below. Minneapolis was even prettier four stories up.

  There were some muffled voices coming out of his phone as Wally greeted his visitor, but then he heard a much louder noise, almost like a crash, then shattering. “Wally?”

  “Who are you? What do you want?!” he heard Wally shouting, then a protracted, “Noooo!” before the connection went dead.

  Paralyzed, Chuck stared at his phone in horror for a moment, then called 911 while he scrambled for his briefcase and car keys.

  FOUR

  Chuck’s shaking hands felt slimy on the wheel of his rental as he tried to focus on the directions the GPS was squawking at him. The female voice was supposed to be soothing, he supposed, but right now it seemed shrill and grating. He felt acid churning around the expensive cashews in his stomach. Jesus. Who would attack a nice man like Wally in his own house?

  Stupid question, he chided himself. It seemed like there was more senseless savagery in the world now than there had ever been. Then again, there hadn’t been a twenty-four-hour news cycle when Christians
were getting fed to lions and gladiators were chopping off people’s heads in the Coliseum or when the Roman Catholic Church was burning witches. Maybe humanity was just as brutal and depraved as it had always been, you just heard about it now, every time you turned on the TV.

  The GPS harpy commanded him to turn right on Gleason in fifteen feet; still, he almost missed it because the snow had started to fall harder and the headlights of passing cars turned into fuzzy, disorienting halos in his aging eyes.

  He pushed his speed as far as he dared on the residential street that led to Wally’s cul-de-sac, but after fishtailing on the slick pavement and nearly sideswiping a parked minivan, he slowed down.

  When he was less than a quarter of a mile from Wally’s, he heard the sickening bellow of sirens and saw a raft of flashing lights ahead. But maybe that was a good sign. The police had responded fast, he prayed fast enough, and Wally would be okay. Shaken by his home invader, most certainly, but okay.

  But his tenuous optimism morphed into a leaden sense of doom when he saw billowing plumes of ugly black smoke and orange flames rising above the bare trees and into the dusk. Emergency vehicles of all kinds were jumbled every which way in the middle of the street, and there were uniforms everywhere, frantically barking out orders and admonishments to the gathering crowd of wide-eyed, frightened onlookers.

  There were barricades across the street a good two blocks from Wally’s address, and officers were stopping every car, turning them back.

  “I’m sorry, sir. We’re evacuating the area. No through traffic. There’s been a natural gas explosion.”