The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “Of course not. It wouldn’t help you anyway because she never met him. I couldn’t reach her to give her his contact information, which is why I sent the card. When she finally did call back, it was to cancel the service.”

  “Cancel the service?”

  “Yes. She said something had come up. She didn’t want her money back, but she knew it was not going to work out for her. She resigned her membership before she ever met one man. I was astounded because she had been so… so…” I waited, but she became transfixed by a spot on the desk, and it seemed as if her batteries had just run down.

  “Excited?”

  “No. I think determined is possibly more accurate.”

  “How much money did she forfeit?”

  “Eighteen hundred dollars.”

  “Eighteen hundred? What do you get for that?”

  Julia lifted her chin just enough so that she could look down her nose at me. “We are a very exclusive service, Ms. Shanahan. The fee is for an annual membership, and it includes one match each month.”

  I wanted to ask about guarantees and warranties and liquidated damages, but that would have been pushing it, especially since I wasn’t here to plop down eighteen hundred clams. “Okay. So if you sign up and pay the fee, you’re probably serious about meeting someone.”

  “We only accept candidates who are serious and—” she fixed me with a meaningful, clear-eyed, all-seeing look—“emotionally available.”

  I felt exposed again. Worse than exposed. X-rayed. The radiator in the corner, painted off-white to match the walls, had kicked in and the office was filling with that dry radiator heat that I always found so uncomfortable. Finally she continued.

  “I told Ellen I would keep her account active for a few months in case she changed her mind. She thanked me and told me to close the account.”

  “She was that sure?”

  “Yes. She said she knew she would never be back…”

  Her voice died and I watched Julia’s face transform as Ellen’s statement came back to her with new meaning. The lines grew deeper and she was now looking all of her sixty years.

  “If you’re agreeable, Julia, it would help me to get copies of Ellen’s materials.” I pulled out Aunt Jo’s power of attorney and handed it to her. “As I said, I have authorization from the family.”

  She put on a pair of glasses, perused the document, and then looked at me over the tops of the lenses. “May I make a copy of this? I’d like to check with my attorney before I release anything, if that’s all right.” Julia was not a spur-of-the-moment kind of person.

  “Would it be possible for me to wait while you did that? Maybe I could use the time to watch Ellen’s video.”

  She took off her glasses, turned and watched the steady rain outside, and I thought she was considering my request. “You meet all kinds of people doing this work,” she said, still staring, “and they all come in saying they’re ready to change their lives. But it takes courage and so many of them don’t have it. I thought Ellen did, which is why I was so surprised when she quit. I thought it had been a long, hard struggle for her, but that she was ready, and though I didn’t know her well, I believed that good things were about to happen for her.” She set her glasses softly on the desk and looked at me, her face still strong, but her eyes glistening like the wet windowpane. “I find this all very sad, Miss Shanahan, very sad, indeed.”

  I didn’t know what to say and my voice was stuck in my throat anyway, so I just nodded.

  A still photograph is perfectly suited to the memory of the dead. An image frozen forever, it captures the very essence of death to the living, the infinite stillness, the end of aging. I’d seen the pictures of Ellen, but when her video image came up on the bright blue screen and when I heard her voice for the first time, she came alive, alive in a way that made me feel the void where she used to be.

  The first thing I noticed was her hair. I’d known it had been red, but the color was richer and deeper than I’d imagined, and under the lights it shone like polished mahogany. She wore it in a chin-length blunt cut that softened her square jaw. Her hazel eyes were riveted to a point just off camera, and she wore the same expression that we all do when we’re at the wrong end of a camera lens—horrified. But even as uncomfortable as she appeared, I felt her presence. It was strength or determination or perhaps the sheer force of will it took for her to sit there and subject herself to something I knew I couldn’t do. I was impressed.

  “We’ll start with an easy one, Ellen.” It was Julia from off-camera, her blue-blooded Beacon Hill voice easily recognizable. “Why don’t you tell us about yourself?”

  “I’m originally from Fort Lauderdale. I went to college at the University of Florida, then graduate school at Wharton in Pennsylvania.” I was surprised at Ellen’s voice. It was almost husky with a tinge of a Southern accent.

  “What did you study?”

  “Finance.”

  “Your graduate degree is an MBA?”

  “Yes.”

  The pause was long enough to be awkward, and I imagined Julia hadn’t expected such spare, to-the-point answers. But she was a pro and she recovered. “I must say, I’m not very good with numbers, and I always admire people who are. I think you have such an interesting job, Ellen. Will you tell us about it?”

  “I work at the airport. I’m the general manager for Majestic Airlines here in Boston.”

  “That sounds like a big job, and a tough one, especially for a woman.” Julia was definitely not of our generation. “What exactly does a general manager do?”

  “That’s the first thing I had to learn when I arrived. I came to the field straight from a staff job, which means I didn’t have the experience to do this work, and it’s been challenging.”

  She gave an articulate, detailed description of her job—our job. As she talked about her work, her face relaxed and grew more animated. Her voice grew stronger, and she spoke with such pride about her position, I felt bad for ever having questioned her right to be in it.

  “I have the ultimate responsibility for getting our passengers where they want to go on time with all their belongings. But it’s my employees who determine how well we do that. My most important job is giving them a reason to want to make it work.”

  I couldn’t have said it better myself.

  “Do you get to fly for free?” Julia asked the question with the sense of awe and wonder that always made me smile. For people not in the business, flight benefits are absolutely irresistible.

  “Yes,” Ellen said, smiling as well, “that’s a great benefit. I don’t travel as much as I’d like, but I’m hoping for some changes.”

  Julia jumped on the opening. “Can you elaborate on that? It sounds as if you’re making lots of changes in your life.”

  The quick shift seemed to catch Ellen off guard. She tried another smile, but it was tight and tentative, and it came out more like a grimace. We weren’t talking about work anymore.

  She began slowly, reaching for every word. “I started working when I was in high school. I worked through college, worked through business school, and started my job with Majestic two weeks after I graduated. I would have started sooner, but I needed two weeks to move. I’ve been working ever since.”

  I sat in my curtained cubbyhole at Boston-in-Common with my earphones listening to Ellen talk and nodding my head. Except for the fact that I went to graduate school at night after I’d started working, she could have been describing my life.

  “I love my work,” she added hastily, “and I have no regrets. I love the airline. But there are long hours and you move every couple of years. It’s hard to… there are sacrifices… you can get fooled into thinking that you’re happy and sometimes you make choices that aren’t right for you.”

  She seemed torn between wanting to sell herself and needing to unburden herself. For someone with no regrets, she looked very sad as she stared down into her lap.

  “I’ve always picked people, situations that were
never going to work out. I’m here because I want to stop doing that.” She reached up with a manicured finger and gently brushed away a strand of hair that had fallen into her eyes. She wasn’t even trying to smile anymore. “I hope it’s not too late.”

  “It’s never too late, Ellen.” Julia’s response was automatic, but then there was a pause and I imagined that she was a little stunned by Ellen’s frankness. Some of the perkiness had gone out of her voice. “One final question, dear. Describe for me a picture of your life if all your dreams came true.”

  Ellen turned slightly and for the first time gazed completely off-camera, the way she might if she was looking for her response through a window. But I knew she wasn’t. I knew she was looking inside and she was struggling, trying to hold off her natural inclination to close herself off, to deny herself even the simple pleasure of saying her dream out loud. Because if you never say it out loud, you can still pretend the reason you don’t have it is because you never wanted it to begin with. Anything else hurts too much.

  “I believe it’s a gift to know your dreams.” Ellen had gathered herself and leveled her gaze directly at me—at the camera. “If I’d known before what my dreams were going to turn out to be, I’d have made different choices. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t have worked, but my priorities would have been different. I want…” She paused, started to speak, stopped, and tried again. “I want to learn to let people know me. I want to meet a man who wants to know me better than anyone else does. I want to be a mother so that I can leave something behind. If there’s a place for me in this world, I want to find it. That’s my dream.”

  She smiled into the camera, a radiant, hopeful, almost triumphant smile. That was the last image of her as the tape ran out and the screen went blank.

  I stood in Boston-in-Common’s sheltered entryway and stared out at the cold rain. It was one of those gloomy days where indoors you have to keep the lights on and outside there’s no way to stay dry because of the wind. It was the kind of winter day that seeps through to your bone marrow and makes you feel that you’re never going to get warm again.

  Ellen’s video was under my coat where I could protect it. I’d watched it twice waiting for Julia, thinking both times that she’d been wrong; it can be too late. It had been too late for Ellen, and I had the feeling that when she sat for that video, Ellen had somehow known that.

  I turned on my cell phone and dialed the airport.

  “Molly?” The rain started to pound the bricks harder, and I had to step back not to get splashed.

  “I’ve been calling you for an hour,” she said. “Where have you been?”

  “I had to run an errand. I told you I was going out.”

  “You didn’t say you’d be unreachable.”

  “Can’t I have an hour to myself?”

  “No skin off my nose.” I heard her taking a drag on her cigarette. “I just thought you’d like to know that your bag room blew up.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  When I saw the news trucks parked in front of the terminal, I knew it was going to be one of the days where I wished somebody—anybody—had my job instead of me. Bombs at the airport always made for good press, but reporters scared me almost as much as anything that could happen in the operation, including bombs.

  I went the back way, where I could enter from the ramp. I followed the flashing lights, the official uniformed personnel, and the acrid, sinus-searing odor. I pushed my way through the crowd of employees at the door, wondered vaguely who was working the trips, and flashed my ID at the trooper standing guard. He lifted the yellow tape and let me in, where I joined what must have been twenty-five firemen, state troopers, inspectors, Port Authority employees, mechanics, and various others crowded into the concrete, bunker-like space. The way they were milling and talking, it almost looked like some absurd cocktail party, except that one wall and part of the ceiling was totally black, fire hoses were lined up on the wet cement, and right in the middle of everything was a blackened bag cart, misshapen and still smoldering, its singed contents splayed around the floor. There were lots of skis—actually, pieces of skis.

  I felt the same way I do at cocktail parties, as if the action swirling around me had nothing to do with me, but not for the same reason. I looked around at the destruction, and I knew that of all the people in this room, I was the one, the only one, responsible for what had happened here.

  I spotted my rotund supervisor talking to someone who looked important. Norm introduced me to George Carver, the fire chief. The chief was a large man, late fifties, with stem hazel eyes.

  “It could have been a lot worse, Miss Shanahan,” he said.

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “No. As luck would have it, there was no one at all in the bag room when the device went off.”

  I wasn’t feeling that lucky. “Can you tell me what happened? I was off-site and just got back to the field.”

  We stepped over a fire hose as he led me over to the bag cart, basically a metal box on wheels with two open sides covered by plastic curtains and a bisecting shelf. This one was slightly cockeyed, and the curtains were shredded and melted. I could smell the burned plastic.

  “You had some kind of a small homemade explosive device that was probably about here.” He pointed with his pen to a spot on the floor of the cart. “You see how this is bowed up?” He was referring to the shelf, which now looked like one of the golden arches. “And it was on this side. You see how the blast went out this way?” The concrete wall on the ramp side was covered in black soot. A computer that had been sitting on a rickety table lay shattered on the ground. He took me around to the other side. “Virtually no damage over here to your bag belt. This side of the cart was packed to absorb the shock and force the damage the other way.”

  Damned considerate. “You said there was no one in here at the time?”

  “Right.”

  “And it was a single bag cart in the middle of the floor? Not a train?”

  He nodded. “You people will have to do your own investigation to rule out whether or not the thing came in on an aircraft. I don’t think it came in in a checked bag. My eyeball opinion is that someone rolled this cart in here, packed it, stuck in a device, and ran like hell.”

  “Jesus.” I stared at a B727 parked on the gate less than two hundred yards away. Through the porthole windows I could see passengers moving down the aisle to their seats. My knees felt weak as I began to absorb the enormity of what could have happened.

  Chief Carver followed my gaze. “Like I said, it could have been worse. We’ll be conducting our own investigation and giving you a complete report. I should be able to tell you what kind of a device it was. We’ll put it with all the rest of our reports on Majestic Airlines incidents at Logan.”

  “You’ve seen this before?”

  “Bombs, bomb threats, fires. You name it. Your guys are real flamethrowers. I keep warning you people that someone’s going to get hurt.”

  “Have you ever identified any of these flamethrowers?”

  “No, and unless someone who saw something or heard something steps up, we won’t catch this guy, either.”

  “If anyone knows about this, we’ll find them.” I tried to look and sound confident, but I knew full well how the union closed ranks. So did he. He responded with a look that was the equivalent of a pat on the head.

  We had to step out of the line of sight of a trooper taking photographs. Someone from the Port was motioning to me. “Chief Carver, I’m glad to have met you, although I’m sorry about the circumstances. I’d like to come over and talk about some preventive measures we could take to avoid this sort of thing in the future.”

  “That would be refreshing. You know where to find me.”

  I grabbed Norm, who seemed to be standing around observing. “Where’s Dan?”

  “He heard you were on your way, so he decided someone had to keep the operation going.”

  “Good.” I turned him toward the faces peering in
at us through one of the open garage doors. “You see all those people? Get the ones in Majestic uniforms to work and tell the rest of them to go back to their own operations.” I pointed out a train of carts on the ramp filled with inbound bags. “Then figure out how we’re going to get all those bags back to the pissed-off people on the other side of that door. See if we can use USAir’s claim area for the evening.”

  “They’re going to want to get paid.”

  “We’ll pay them. Let me know what you find out. And get as many agents as can be spared down to baggage claim. It’s going to be a nightmare out there.” I took one quick look to see if Big Pete was among the gawkers, but I didn’t see him. It wasn’t his shift, and that wouldn’t have been his style anyway. But I felt his presence. He might as well have written his initials in the black soot on the wall.

  I stood in front of the damaged cart with my hands in my pockets so that no one could see how they were trembling. Things were getting out of hand, and I had to start asking just how far they would go. Norm was herding people back to work, but some remained in the doorways staring at me. I was in charge. I was supposed to know what to do, but nothing in my experience had prepared me for anything like this.

  I kicked at the remains of a suitcase at my feet. The Samsonite logo was still intact, and the handle had a tag with a business card inside. I did the only thing I was sure I could do. I picked it up, walked through the door to the passenger side, and started looking for its owner.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I was hoping my phone would stop ringing by the time I’d found my key and opened the door to my hotel room. No such luck.

  “Hello?”

  “God, what’s the matter with you? You sound like you’re on your last legs.”

  It was Matt. I dropped down on the bed and just kept going until I was horizontal. My left hamstring—a constant reminder of an old running injury—was throbbing, my neck was stiff, and the rest of my muscles were tightening so rapidly I’d be lucky if I didn’t fossilize right there, staring up at the spackled ceiling. “My bag room blew up today. The union planted a bomb to send me a message.”