The Note

by Hunt, Angela

King’s brows lifted as his gaze shifted toward the window and thoughts unknown. “Anything else useful in the content?”

  Peyton shook her head. “Not really. An I love you, of course. And an offer of forgiveness.” She leaned back against the counter, crossed her arms, and frowned at him. “Now you’ve done it. I’ve told you everything, and I didn’t intend to. Be sure to keep your mouth closed about the details, okay?”

  “That’s it?” A half-smile crossed his face. “I love you, I forgive you, signed Dad?”

  “That’s pretty close to the exact wording. Now you have to promise to keep quiet about it, or I’ll have to kill you.”

  “I won’t say anything.” Taking a deep breath, King adjusted his smile. “Well, kiddo, if you want to know what I think—”

  “I do. I don’t cook breakfast for just anybody.”

  “Then I’ll say this—I think you’ve saved your pretty little neck from Nora’s cleaver.”

  Peyton couldn’t stop a grin from spreading across her face. “You really think so? I knew the note would make a great story, even a series, but—” Good grief, she was as giddy as a two-year-old with a new toy.

  King sipped his coffee, then nodded slightly. “This thing has major tearjerker written all over it. I’m almost jealous. This puppy will run for a week, maybe even two.” He glanced down at Samson, still in his lap. “Sorry, kitty. Didn’t mean to offend.”

  “I was up all night thinking about it.” Peyton picked up her coffee mug and grinned at him over the rim. “In the first column I can explain how I got the note—and I’ll be honest about not being certain of its authenticity. It could be genuine, but I can’t think of any way short of an FAA investigation to prove it.”

  “People will believe it,” King said. “They will want to believe a bit of good could rise out of the tragedy.”

  “And I’ll ask Mandi to help me with the research— it’ll be good experience for her. We have the passenger list, so that’s where we’ll start. We’ll go through the list, name by name, and look up every single obituary. We’ll search for men who had children whose first names begin with T. Those children, the survivors of the victims, will make up our pool of prospects.”

  King nodded, his eyes flashing as he followed her thoughts. “If you have time and space, you could write about each of them. Profiles of the children, with an emphasis on how the tragedy has affected their lives.”

  Peyton’s mouth opened as another thought struck. “I could visit them—that’s so much more personal than a telephone interview. And during the visit, I could learn about their relationship with their fathers. At some point, if all is going well, I will share the message of the note—”

  “And see how they respond.” King reared back in his chair, then pounded the table for emphasis, scaring the cat into flight. “This is solid gold, MacGruder.”

  Peyton bit her lip as her spirit soared. In her ten months of writing “The Heart Healer,” she had never encountered such a unique opportunity. Not only would this column interest every reader in Florida, but the story suited the stated purpose of her column: mending wounded hearts. One in particular.

  “This project will require a lot,” she said, pointing out the first obvious pitfall. “Nora may not be wild about me jetting off to visit these people. There’s no guarantee they live in the Tampa area, or even in the state.”

  “Of course she’ll balk.” King shrugged. “Part of an editor’s job is guarding the paper’s assets. But it depends on how many prospects you find and how much interest you generate. If you find several T names, perhaps you could invite them to Tampa. I have a feeling these folks would be eager to come if you could promise them another glimpse of their father . . . especially if they’ve been estranged.”

  Peyton closed her eyes, mentally envisioning a dozen men and women with T names, all clamoring for a piece of the note. “I foresee problems,” she whispered, opening her eyes. “What if I have fifty potential prospects? There’s only one note.”

  King rubbed a hand over the morning stubble on his chin. “Wonder if they could pull fingerprints from the paper or the plastic bag?”

  Peyton considered the idea. “Even if they could, what good would it do? The people on that plane weren’t criminals or government employees. Most of them were ordinary folk, probably including the man who wrote the note. The chances of him being registered in a fingerprint database are slim to none.”

  “Makes you yearn for the days when Big Brother will have all of us registered in a DNA database.” King sipped his coffee for a moment, then looked up at her. “I’m not sure you should go for infallible proof. Think about it—say you have two people whose situation fits the note. What’s the harm in letting them both think the letter was intended for them?”

  Frowning, Peyton shook her head. “I want to give the note to somebody. The note is the prize, isn’t it? I mean, consider that Survivor TV show. All of those people won the opportunity to experience the island, but only one person walked away with the million bucks. If this is going to work, I’ve got to be able to give the note to one person.”

  A smile broke through King’s mask of uncertainty. “How about a lottery? You could have the prospects write letters explaining why they think the note came from their father. You could print the letters over a period of weeks, and let your readers vote on which applicant’s letter they liked best.”

  Peyton shook her head. “Too subjective, and too long. I doubt Nora would let me spend more than two weeks on this. She’s already sick of covering the crash. Yes, the story may save my job, but she won’t let ‘The Heart Healer’ turn into an airplane disaster column.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky and discover there was only one guy who had a child whose name began with T.”

  Peyton snorted softly. “Are you kidding? Have you noticed all the Tylers, Taylors, Toms, Tims, Tonys, Todds, Terrys, Teds, Taffys, Tabithas, Teresas, Tinas, Tesses, Tracys, Trixies, and Tallulahs out there? I’ll be lucky if our search doesn’t turn up four hundred prospects.”

  “So—when are you going to begin?”

  “Soon. With Monday’s column, I think. If I can get my thoughts together.” She laughed. “Nora wanted me to do something to attract readers. Well, this ought to do it. Best of all, she won’t have a chance to stop me. She doesn’t work weekends, so this first column will slip right by her.”

  King’s eyes flashed admiration. “Sneaky girl.”

  She grinned. “I’ve learned how the game is played.”

  “So you have.” He clapped his hand on his cheek and nodded toward the bowl of scrambled eggs on the table. “Are we ever going to eat or are we going to let the food petrify first?”

  “We’ll eat. But wait—I’ve got bacon, too.”

  Peyton turned to the microwave and pulled out the platter where six strips of bacon lay like burnt offerings above grease-filled ridges. After using a spatula to flip the bacon onto two plates, she set both plates on the table, then dashed back to a drawer for silverware.

  Poor King. If he’d ever thought of her as Dorothy Domestic, those visions had been shattered this morning.

  Sighing, she dropped a fork and knife next to his plate, then placed her own silverware on the table. After a quick glance to be sure she hadn’t forgotten anything else, she slid into her chair and gave him a stiff smile. “That’s it—eggs, bacon, muffins, and coffee. If you were expecting anything else, I’m sorry.”

  “Just one more thing.” He pointed to the crowded napkin holder on the table. “I was hoping to find something to wipe my hands, but I can’t quite tell if that is supposed to hold letters, bills, or napkins—”

  “Hold on, I’ll get it.” Reaching across the table, Peyton tugged on a white corner, dislodging a clump of napkins as well as a stack of envelopes. After peeling the napkins apart—how long had it been since she used one?—she gave one to King, then demurely placed the others in her lap.

  King picked up the scattered letters. “Don’t you open your
mail, MacGruder?” he said, studying the handwritten address on one envelope. “This was postmarked last month, and you haven’t even opened it. And here’s another, two months old. Aren’t you reading your fan mail?”

  Cheeks flaming, Peyton took the half-dozen envelopes from his hand, then tossed them onto the counter. “Not that it’s any of your business, but those aren’t from fans. They’re letters from my dad.”

  She saw a tiny flicker of shock widen his eyes, then a wry smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “So you ignore his advice, too?”

  “My father and I”—she straightened her spine as she reached for the eggs—“scarcely know one another. I’ve read his letters, and they’re all the same: newsy notes about his wife, his kids, his patients.” She dropped a spoonful of eggs—hard, now, she noticed with dismay—onto King’s plate, then dumped the rest on her own. “Truth is”—she lowered the bowl to the table—“I think he writes me out of guilt. I think Kathy nags at him, and so he writes. Like clockwork.”

  King reached for a muffin. “Do you write back?”

  She snorted. “I send a card at Christmas.”

  King didn’t answer, but peeled the paper wrapping from his muffin.

  “It’s cranberry walnut,” she said, grateful for a chance to change the subject. “Margie Stock gave me the recipe. Since she’s the food writer, I figured it ought to be good.”

  King dropped the wrapper onto his plate, then held up the muffin. “MacGruder,” he said, examining the bread as if it were an object of great value, “you’re hard on all the men in your life, aren’t you?”

  The question snapped like a stinging whip, but Peyton kept her head down, her eyes upon her plate.

  King Bernard didn’t know her life story. He didn’t know about her father’s distance, her husband’s death, the missing part of her life. He was just running off at the mouth, a victim of verbal diarrhea if ever there was one.

  She picked up her fork and stabbed a stolid lump of egg. “You’re on my turf now,” she said. “Be quiet and eat.”

  SIX

  MONDAY, JUNE 25

  Treasures from the Deep

  By Peyton MacGruder

  “The Heart Healer” is a regular feature of the Tampa Times

  Dear Readers:

  I met a woman last week—a woman a few years younger than I, with blue eyes as over-whelming as her compassion for others. This lady, who has asked to remain anonymous, pressed a priceless treasure into my hand and begged me to find its rightful owner.

  If you’ve been reading my column for a while, you know I’m not easily given to flights of fantasy. I did a quick investigation of my visitor—she’s a longstanding resident of this community, active in her synagogue, respected by her neighbors. She’s raising two children and supporting a professional husband in her role as homemaker. As far as I can tell, she’s as dependable as the sunrise, so I can find no reason to doubt her story about finding this treasure in the water behind her bayside home.

  The treasure, which came to me wrapped in a square of fine linen, is not jewelry or currency, but a simple note. From inside its protective plastic sleeve, its words speak of a love as wide as the sea and as unfathomable as the ocean. The note was, I suspect, another scrap from Flight 848, but no single piece of luggage or debris carries the emotional weight of this fragile slip of paper. It is addressed to a particular person, and it is signed simply Dad.

  Some of you are already shaking your heads. Flight 848 exploded, you’re thinking, and the surviving pieces of debris have already been claimed and cataloged by rescue and relief workers.

  But couldn’t one small message, scrawled on a scrap approximately the size of a note card, survive the flames and the subsequent impact? The paper is small and the message simple, but perhaps the key to its continued existence lies in those very attributes.

  Some of you might suspect this note is a forgery, a cruel joke. Perhaps it is. But if someone planted this within the waters of Tampa Bay in some cruel machination, I fail to see the purpose. Aside from the possible glow of publicity—which the woman who found the note has refused—no one could benefit from such a scheme.

  If, however, if the note is genuine—if there is even a chance the message was written in those final few moments of Flight 848, then it is the last communication from that plane to those of us still living.

  A popular Paul Simon song from my younger days talks about not giving false hope on a strange and mournful day . . .

  Like you, the events of the last several days have moved me beyond words and my limited powers of understanding. In the days since Flight 848 took its fatal plunge into our sun-splashed waters, I have observed both stunning grief and amazing endurance. I have sat with families at the airport and handed out coffee to weeping rescue workers who came streaming out of the bay, their arms burdened with vestiges of sorrow.

  Like you, I have lifted my eyes to heaven and demanded to understand why.

  I haven’t found any answers . . . yet. But I’ve been given a treasure, and I’m going to do all in my power to unite the father on Flight 848 with his child, whomever and wherever he or she may be. I have a clue—a strong lead— and in the coming days I will do all I can to convey the last message from Flight 848 to a sorrowing soul.

  I would not give you false hope, friends, but I do believe at least one man aboard that PanWorld flight cared enough to send a message in the moment before his death.

  There’s a father and child reunion coming, and it’s only a motion away.

  (Peyton MacGruder can be reached at the Tampa Times in the following ways: e-mail pmacgruder@tampatimes.com, phone 813-555-8573, or fax 813-555-8574.)

  As usual for any morning when her column appeared, Peyton slept until seven-thirty, took a leisurely shower, and then drove to work. As always, she stopped into the Dunkin’ Donuts shop next to the Times office and ordered a cup of coffee, then sat at the counter and sipped it while pretending to be disinterested in her fellow patrons. Nearly every regular customer at the bar read the paper as they breakfasted, and this morning she was delighted to see three people—count ’em, three!—reading her column.

  Smiling, she turned her attention back to her French cruller. The light and sugary doughnut had never tasted quite this good. She was about to take another bite when her cellular phone chirped. Peyton dropped the cruller to her napkin, then wiped the sugar off her fingertips.

  “Looks like they caught you playing hooky.” The wasp-waisted, blonde waitress who poured coffee for Peyton on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays paused before the counter, a wet towel in her hand. Her plastic nameplate identified her as Erma.

  “Looks like.” Peyton pulled the phone from her backpack, the question of who might be calling mingling with musings about whether or not Erma wore some kind of gut-cinching girdle to achieve that tiny waist.

  She snapped the phone open. “Hello?”

  “MacGruder, where are you?” The voice was Nora Chilton’s; the tone was not pleasant.

  Peyton rolled her eyes at the bemused waitress. “I’m next door at Dunkin’. I’ll be up in five minutes.”

  “Come directly to my office. We have to talk.”

  Peyton lowered her gaze, her stomach contracting like a fist. She could sit here and say nothing, or she could stand up to Nora—

  Time to stand. She had a great idea, solid gold, according to King, so Nora had no reason to complain.

  She lifted her chin. “What seems to be the problem, Nora?”

  “It’s—it’s this note business. Where did this come from? When we spoke in the elevator Friday, you said nothing about it. This thing would have made a better feature story, yet you kept it to yourself. If this note did come from the plane, it probably should be handed over to the authorities even now.”

  “I didn’t receive the note until late Friday afternoon,” Peyton answered, taking pains to keep her voice low and level. “I didn’t give it to you because I didn’t think you were interested in any mor
e air disaster stories. And it’s not hard news, so I’m not handing it over to anyone. It’s a possibility, that’s all. An opportunity I intend to fully explore.”

  For a moment the phone hummed in Peyton’s ear, then Nora said, “So why didn’t you tell me about it before filing the column?”

  “Because you don’t work weekends.” Peyton caught the waitress’s eye again, then pointed to her half-empty coffee cup. “And because I didn’t think it necessary. You told me to broaden my readership, Nora, and this seemed like a perfect way to do that.” She glanced around the coffee shop, pleased to see a pair of women huddled over the lifestyles section at a nearby booth. One of them was pointing to her column.

  “Come to my office as soon as you can.” The phone went dead.

  Sighing, Peyton disconnected the call, then dropped the phone into her backpack. Erma smiled and came closer, one hand resting on her hip. Laugh lines crinkled the corners of her eyes. “Rough day ahead?”

  “Rough week, I’m afraid.” Peyton pulled two dollar bills from her wallet, spread the bills on the counter, then gave the waitress a lopsided smile. “I may have made the biggest mistake of my career, but at least I’ll go out with a bang.”

  Peyton did not proceed directly to Nora’s office (do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars or a pink slip), but went first to her own desk and powered up her computer. Sipping on her coffee, compliments of a sympathetic Erma, she took a few minutes to fortify her courage for the upcoming encounter with the Dragon Lady. After the computer blinked to life, she logged on to the intranet and clicked on the icon for e-mail. She blinked. Her mailbox held forty-five messages, a record for any Monday, and it wasn’t yet ten o’clock.