The Color of a Promise (The Color of Heaven Series Book 11)

by Julianne MacLean

  “And maybe,” Jack continued, “if the FBI has begun digging into Reg Harrison’s business affairs, they already know what I’m about to tell you, but I wanted to bring it up just in case. You can pass the information along to the right people if you think it’s relevant.”

  I sat forward slightly. “What information?”

  Jack reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew one of his own business cards and a ball point pen. He wrote something down on the back of it and handed it to me.

  “In 1984,” he said, “the company that supplied the oxygen tanks that caused the fire was called PineTech. They went out of business after what happened to that flight in Arizona. But this afternoon, I had some of our people do some research, and it turns out that PineTech was a subsidiary of another of Harrison’s umbrella corporations, and that same corporation—which still exists and is based in Switzerland—now operates another oxygen supply company called Oxy-GeoTech. Interestingly, they service a number of the major European airlines, and also sell oxygen supplies to hospitals.”

  I took the card and flipped it over to see what Jack had written on the back: Oxy-GeoTech.

  “I think I see what you’re getting at.”

  Jack slipped the pen back into his pocket. “I have no idea if this same company supplies oxygen to Jaeger-Woodrow Airways, or if oxygen had anything to do with this crash, or if it was another case of improper storage of something in the cargo hold that caused the plane to go down, but it might be worth looking into. If Harrison is still operating an airline without giving a hoot about safety, I’d hate to think history has repeated itself. If that’s the case, he really needs to be stopped.”

  “I agree.” I touched my finger to the card. “Thank you for this. I will definitely mention it to the FBI and the rest of my team, and get them to find out if there were any canisters on board that came from this company.” I slipped the card into my purse. “I’m really sorry about your friend. I know it was a long time ago, but something like this must bring it all back.”

  “It does,” Jack replied, rising to his feet as I stood. “Reading that accident report made me think about her and imagine what her last moments must have been like.”

  We regarded each other intently, and I felt a heated wave of desire course through me. It was not just a physical desire…although I did feel an incredible physical attraction to him. But it was more than that. It was a need to continue this conversation. I wanted to keep talking to Jack about his friend who had died, and so many other things—his childhood, his life experiences, his work. I wanted to know everything about him.

  I wanted to sit close to him, lay my head on his shoulder, curl up against him and tell him about my conversation with Malcolm that morning and how it had frustrated me. I wanted to ask Jack what he thought I should do. I wanted to hear him tell me again that there was more to life than work.

  Although clearly, I already knew it.

  Nervously, I cleared my throat. “I should probably get back now.”

  “Of course.” We began to walk out of the lobby together, but we were interrupted by a young couple who approached Jack. They told him they were “huge fans” and wanted to have their picture taken with him. Jack graciously agreed, and they posed while I snapped the picture on the woman’s phone.

  A moment later, Jack and I stood outside the hotel, under the overhang at the entrance. The roar of an airplane taking off on the runway nearby was thunderous in my ears, and I looked to the left to watch its ascent toward the sunset.

  Jack waved to his driver, and I waved to mine. Both cars pulled up.

  “What time will you be finished tonight?” Jack asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I replied. “Probably not until sometime after midnight. Then Gary will insist that we all go back to the hotel and get some sleep. How about you?”

  “I have my show to do,” he replied. “Then I’ll probably head to my parents’ place.” His driver approached, but Jack turned to look at me before he got into his car. “The offer still stands if you want to have a drink later, or any time. Or if you just want to call and chat for a bit. It doesn’t matter how late it is. And I’m not trying to get the inside scoop from you. I promise.”

  “I wouldn’t think that,” I said, as my driver pulled up behind Jack’s car.

  Jack walked me to it and opened the door for me. He was such a gentleman. I felt a little breathless as he stood there, so handsome in the glow of the summer twilight, his gaze roaming all over my face.

  “Can I ask you a really weird and totally inappropriate question?” he said.

  I was momentarily taken aback, and very curious about what he wanted to ask. “Go ahead.”

  “How old are you?”

  My head drew back in surprise, because it was a strange question, not at all what I had expected. “I’m thirty-one. Why?”

  He shook his head, as if embarrassed, and looked down at his shoes. I found myself staring at the top of his head—the thick, wavy dark hair blowing in the breeze.

  “No reason,” he replied. “I don’t know. I was just curious. That was stupid.”

  “It wasn’t stupid,” I replied, “because I’d love to ask how old you are, except I already know. You’re forty-five.”

  His eyes lifted, and they were intense and penetrating. “How do you know that?”

  “Because I googled you,” I explained with a sheepish grin. “Don’t be freaked out. I’m not stalking you or anything. I was just curious, too. I don’t know why. You’re an interesting person.”

  Electricity sparked in the air between us, and this time, there was no doubt in my mind. I knew it wasn’t just me. He was feeling something, too. That awareness caused a commotion in me…an intoxicating thrill.

  Although it was long past time for me to get into the car, I hesitated because I didn’t want to say good-bye to Jack. I just wanted to keep standing there, to remain in his presence a little longer.

  It was a fierce, inescapable desire, and it made me think of Malcolm again—but not because I felt guilty. To the contrary, this was making me realize how little Malcolm truly meant to me.

  And how little I meant to him.

  It was the same for both of us. Our relationship had become a habit. A safe, easy habit, with no passion or longing or thoughts about the future. When we were apart, it was simply “out of sight, out of mind.”

  “I wish we were meeting under different circumstances,” Jack said quietly, as if to hide our conversation from my driver.

  “Me, too.” All thoughts of Malcolm vanished from my brain as I continued to stand there. All I could think about was what it would feel like to kiss Jack. I couldn’t take my eyes off his lips. I just wanted to step into his arms.

  “I should go,” I said, feeling a critical need to bolt before something actually happened between us, because I didn’t want to be a cheater.

  I got into the car. “Good luck with your show tonight,” I said. “Maybe we’ll talk later.”

  Jack closed the door and stepped back.

  As my driver pulled away, I laid a hand on my belly, where a gazillion butterfly wings were flapping wildly, causing a rush of heated exhilaration in my veins. I couldn’t seem to stop my heart from racing, and it aroused an unexpected euphoria in me.

  How was a feeling of euphoria even possible under circumstances like these? When I was in the middle of a crash investigation?

  My emotions were spinning out of control. It wasn’t something I was accustomed to because, out of necessity, I had honed my ability to detach.

  This scared me.

  A lot.

  Chapter Thirty

  Jack

  As I stood on the curb outside the airport hotel, watching Meg head back to the aircraft hangar, I told myself to get a grip.

  Don’t be crazy, Jack. Just because you’re hot for the smart female crash investigator doesn’t mean it’s anything more. You’re attracted to her because she’s beautiful and there’s some chemistry there. This
sort of thing happens all the time, especially under intense circumstances like these.

  It doesn’t mean she’s Millicent.

  I started walking to my car and got in, lounged back on the leather seat and tapped my finger on my knee.

  “Let’s head back to the hotel,” I said to Curtis, knowing I’d have to contact my producer soon about the show. But I needed a minute first. A personal minute.

  I raked both my hands through my hair, feeling frustrated as I looked out the window at another plane taking off into the sky, its engines deafening in the peace of the early evening. The sunset was incredible and the clouds were lit up with splashes of pink and red. It was a beautiful sight to behold, yet I felt like I was losing my mind.

  Why was I so wound up?

  Probably because there was no way to know if it was true—if Meg Andrews was actually the reincarnation of my friend, Millicent. What proof did I have to even suppose it?

  I took a breath and went over the facts.

  Meg was thirty-one, which meant she was born the year after Millicent died.

  But that wasn’t proof of anything. Lots of people were born that year.

  Meg had a fear of flying that she couldn’t explain, and she experienced extreme symptoms of anxiety at a crash site.

  But who wouldn’t? That didn’t mean she died in a plane crash in a previous life. It just meant she was sensitive to tragedy. Most good people were.

  But why choose this line of work? I wondered, still tapping my finger on my knee.

  I had asked her that once, and she told me she had fought through her fear to get her pilot’s license and had become hooked on aviation. She later said she “lived and breathed” airline investigations. That she was obsessed.

  Why the obsession? Interestingly, that was her word, not mine.

  I thought back to the moment when it first occurred to me that she might be Millicent. It had struck me only a few hours earlier, while I was reading the accident report and began to recall my friendship with Millicent in the seventh grade.

  It wasn’t anything specific that caused me to make the connection, just a feeling that if Millicent were alive today, she would be just like Meg, because Millicent had also possessed a personal drive that bordered on obsession when it came to anything she wanted to have or do.

  School, for instance. Millicent was a high achiever in that area.

  The clubhouse. She was unstoppable in our quest to build it.

  And Aaron. She had nearly lost her sanity trying to make my brother fall in love with her.

  Millicent had a way of attacking things, and Meg struck me as the same. Their personalities were freakishly similar. And whenever I looked into her eyes, I felt like we already knew each other very well. It had been that way from the first moment.

  But still—and I told myself over and over—it didn’t mean Meg was Millicent. They could be similar without being the same. And maybe it was just the frustration of lust because she was completely unattainable. She was already in a relationship—a nine-year relationship with a surgeon.

  I shook my head at myself. Why couldn’t I learn this lesson: that it was pointless to live in the past, always trying to recapture something that was never meant to be? Like with Katelyn.

  What mattered was the here and now, and what lay ahead in this life.

  So even if I was overwhelmingly attracted to Meg, for whatever reason, I shouldn’t be imagining that she was someone else. She was just Meg—thirty-one-year-old Meg—an unavailable crash investigator I found heart-stoppingly attractive.

  Damn. Talk about life being unfair.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Meg

  As soon as I arrived back at the hangar, I called Gary and told him everything Jack had gleaned from the report about the Arizona crash in 1984 and the oxygen supply company that had caused the accident. I asked Gary to share the information with the FBI and also have our team look into what had been loaded into the cargo hold of Flight 555—which my highly skilled team was surely doing already—but to specifically be on the lookout for any connections to Reg Harrison’s company, Oxy-GeoTech.

  Hanging up the phone, I returned to the reconstruction area, where we were still cataloguing pieces from the wing and parts of the fuselage. I could feel my body temperature rising with frustration. I felt restless and short-tempered.

  I wanted to start putting this aircraft back together now, to see exactly what kind explosion we were dealing with, but everything was spread out all over the floor, and we still didn’t have the tail or any major portions of the rear fuselage, not to mention the flight data recorder. I couldn’t help but feel annoyed by all the holdups. I was consumed by impatience, because there was something about this crash that was eating away at me, more so than other crashes I’d worked on. I wanted to be at the finish line, at the point where we had concrete answers and were ready to publish a report. But I knew I couldn’t rush it. I had to be thorough.

  As I stood looking around at the unsolved puzzle—at all the tiny, battered, and torn-up pieces of metal spread out on the floor—I felt weariness at a bone-deep level.

  I wanted this finished so that I could move on.

  But move on to what, exactly? Another crash?

  The thought of that caused my mood to take a dark turn, even though it was already in a gloomy, agitated place.

  Would there ever come a day when there would be no more plane crashes? No more frightening, untimely deaths and paralyzing grief for those left behind?

  Every day, that’s all I wanted. That’s what drove me—the inescapable need to prevent the next disaster from happening.

  But was it even possible in this world we lived in? Or would I live out the rest of my days with this frustration, always feeling a sense of failure whenever another plane went down and I had to pack up and travel to another morbid crash site and start all over again?

  Knowing that assurances of total safety would never be possible in the world of aviation, I dove into my work that night as I always did, with ferocious concentration and focus, wanting to tackle this investigation and find the answers the families so desperately needed.

  After about three hours of inspection and cataloguing—and answering dozens of questions about the tiniest details from different workers—my cell phone rang.

  When I checked the call display, my stomach turned over with dread.

  o0o

  “Hey…” I said in that quiet, intimate voice Malcolm would expect when I answered his call. “How are you doing?”

  I walked through the giant open door of the hangar to stand outside on the tarmac, where I could watch planes in the distance, taxiing to and from the runway. A nearby truck sounded its back-up alarm as its reverse lights came on.

  It was completely dark now and the sky was clear with a half moon.

  “I’m doing okay,” Malcolm replied. “I just got home a little while ago and I’m about to dig into a giant container of Pad Thai.”

  “That sounds yummy.” I looked down at the worn hem of my trousers and my black leather shoes as I paced in small circles in front of the hangar.

  Suddenly, I found myself trying to remember the last time I wore a skirt or a sundress. Or flip flops? God, it was the middle of summer. When had I last painted my toenails?

  More importantly, why didn’t I have a normal life, like most people?

  “How was work today?” I asked Malcolm.

  “Oh, you know. Same old, same old. Did a couple of knee replacements and put a pin in a guy’s elbow. How about you?”

  I breathed deeply and looked up at the sky, then turned my gaze toward a tiny, distant light—a plane on its final approach, still many miles away.

  “Do you ever think about what it would be like to die in a plane crash?” I asked Malcolm. “Do you wonder what you would be thinking when the plane was going down, in those last few seconds?”

  “Jeez… What kind of question is that?”

  I cupped my forehead in my han
d and shook my head. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s been a stressful day. I must be losing it.”

  Malcolm was quiet for a moment, then surprisingly he answered the question. “I’d probably freak out about who was going to cover my shift the next day. I’d be fumbling with my phone, trying to make a quick call to let them know I wouldn’t be in.”

  I stopped in my tracks and felt a sudden rush of anger—first of all, that he would actually think that in his final moments. Second of all, that he was making fun of this. “Seriously?”

  He scoffed. “No, Meg, I’m joking.”

  But I wasn’t sure I believed him. He probably would think about his job, and not about me.

  Another plane took off noisily.

  “You must be at the airport?” Malcolm said.

  “Yeah, we’ve set up shop in the hangar.” I began to pace again, and looked down at the toes of my shoes as I put one foot in front of the other.

  Left, right, left, right…

  It’s time for us to break up.

  How odd that I felt no regret or sadness over the fact that I had finally come to the conclusion that this relationship wasn’t worth fighting for. It hadn’t been working for many years, and maybe Malcolm knew it too. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t worried about hurting him.

  Or maybe I was numb inside. Clinically detached, emotionally. Incapable of feeling my own personal pain because I was constantly surrounded by the pain of others and I’d had to protect myself.

  “Do you miss me?” I asked Malcolm, just to see what he would say.

  He laughed awkwardly. “Of course. Why would you ask that?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. You never tell me that you miss me.”

  “You never tell me either,” he replied.

  I couldn’t be upset with him over that response, because it was completely true.

  And I wasn’t upset. Not in the least. That was the problem. I felt only indifferent about Malcolm’s lack of desire to hold me in his arms, to kiss me, or tell me that he loved me.