by Sandra Brown
“Good, Sam’s here. That’s his truck.” Kirsten pointed to a beat-up Blazer parked beside a corrugated tin airplane hangar.
Rylan wheeled her Mercedes beside Sam’s derelict vehicle and said, “I’m going to have to buy me one of these.”
“What? The Mercedes or that?” she asked, indicating the mud-splattered red-and-white truck.
He pretended to seriously weigh his decision. “What the hell? Maybe one of each.”
Her laughter affected him almost as pleasurably as her kisses did. The sound of it made his middle feel warm. He looked forward to the day when this was behind them and they could laugh frequently and freely. He didn’t doubt for a single second that it would happen. He’d knocked down far larger obstacles than Kirsten. Even larger obstacles than Demon Rumm.
They entered the cavernous building. Inside, it felt like an oven. Though it provided shade from the grueling sun, the airless heat was stifling. They walked between the disemboweled carcasses of airplanes and followed the sound of livid cursing until they spotted Sam. He was standing on a platform scaffold, bending over the exposed engine of an airplane.
“Sonofabitchin’ bastard. Heap of—”
“There’s a lady present,” Rylan interrupted dryly.
Sam spun around so suddenly that he almost toppled off his perch. “You damned bastard, you scared the—”
“Careful, Sam,” Rylan teased. “I’ve brought a lady to see you. Show her some respect.”
The mechanic, wearing oil- and grease- and sweat-stained overalls, tromped down the metal steps of the scaffold. He wiped his hands on a faded red rag— obviously not for the first time. Stuffing it into the hip pocket of his coveralls, he eyed Kirsten up and down. “Not just any lady, North. The prettiest one around. If I weren’t stinky, I’d give her a whoppin’ hug.”
“That never stopped you before,” Kirsten said, holding open her arms.
Sam smothered her in a bear hug. The embrace produced tears in both their eyes and caused a flurry of awkwardness when they finally broke apart. Sam led them to a desk, which was as disorganized as the rest of the hangar. He pulled up an extra chair for Kirsten and nodded toward a wooden crate for Rylan. The mechanic could hardly take his eyes off Kirsten as she lowered herself onto the ripped, cotton-sprouting, plastic-covered seat of her chair.
“You could come to see me more often, you know,” he said grouchily.
“I know. I apologize and promise to do better.”
“You said that the last time. You live like a hermit up there in that fancy house on the hill. Oh, well, I’m old, ugly, and half blind. Can’t say I blame you for not wanting to come see me. Not when you can toot around with studs like him.” He rudely hitched his head in Rylan’s direction. “What are you doing with him anyway?”
“The same thing you did with him, talking about Charlie.”
Sam cast a jaundiced eye toward Rylan and pointed a finger with a week’s collection of grease beneath the chipped fingernail at him. “You try anything funny with her and you’ll be in a world of hurt. You Hollywood pretty boys don’t scare me. I’ll nail your balls to the floor.”
Wincing, Rylan covered his heart with his hand. “My intentions regarding Mrs. Rumm are of the purest nature.”
“My ass,” Sam grumbled. “If you want action, I know where to find the flooziest, the nastiest, the raunchiest, the cheapest whores—whatever you want— in a hundred-mile radius. But you leave this lady alone.”
“Sam,” Kirsten intervened quickly, “do you have something to drink? Rylan insisted on taking the top off my car for the drive out here and I’m parched.”
“Strawberry soda,” Sam said, without even having to check the contents of the retirement age Frigidaire.
Kirsten and Rylan worked up a false enthusiasm for the bottles of syrupy-sweet red sodas he passed them.
“Guess you want to talk about Charlie,” he said after taking a long pull on his own drink. He propped his feet on the corner of the ramshackle desk. The popular brand of his jogging shoes was the only thing that dated him. He could have been born in the airplane hangar and never cut the umbilical cord. He could have been the mechanic for Orville and Wilbur.
“That’s right, Sam, we do.”
Kirsten’s gentle voice and the compassionate way she pressed the old man’s wrinkled, oil-smudged hand made Rylan fall in love with her all over again.
“Well, shoot.” Sam coughed to cover the emotion that congested his throat.
“We want you to tell us what happened that morning,” Rylan said.
“What morning? You’ll have to be specific.”
“The morning he died,” Kirsten said softly.
“What about it?” Sam reached forward to straighten the calendar on the wall, a ludicrous gesture since the topless blonde with the glittering G-string and glittering teeth was the most decent thing in the entire hangar.
“Was it a routine morning?” Rylan asked, knowing that getting anything out of Sam was going to be as joyful and easy as extracting an impacted wisdom tooth.
“Routine? Yeah, it was routine.”
“What stunts was he going to practice?”
“I don’t know. Nothing spectacular because he didn’t have anybody flying along to spot him. He’d called and told the other fellows not to come in.”
From the corner of his eye Rylan saw Kirsten’s surprised reaction. She had told him that Rumm and his crew were virtually inseparable. It was significant that they hadn’t been at the practice airfield the morning he died. “He called the others on the team from here?” he asked Sam.
“From that very phone.” Sam pointed at the old-fashioned, black, rotary dial phone. “Told them to take the day off, said he wouldn’t be needing them.”
“Wasn’t that unusual?”
Sam belched and shook his head. “He was the boss. He could do whatever he wanted to. Sometimes they all up and decided to take a vacation on the spur of the moment. Remember, Kirsten?”
She turned to Rylan. “He’s right. The team kept no rigid hours. Charlie impulsively announced vacation time, things like that, when a big airshow wasn’t coming up.”
Rylan let them both collect their thoughts, but he didn’t want Kirsten and Sam to become immersed in sentiment. This was a fact-finding mission, not a requiem. “How was the weather that day?”
“Perfect. Not a cloud in the sky.” Sam sighed. “That was the hell of it. We’d flown through gale force winds, dodged lightning, penetrated fog so thick you couldn’t see the nose of the airplane. Helluva thing, for Charlie to crash on a clear day.”
Sam suddenly looked very old. The lines on his face seemed to be attached to strings that were pulling the skin down. His eyes looked rheumy, as tired and unsalvageable as the retinas that had grown old long before their time.
Kirsten reached out and covered his hand again. “I’m sorry to put you through this, Sam. Believe me, I wouldn’t if it weren’t vitally important.”
Rylan’s heart soared as high as the airplanes around him were capable of climbing. “Vitally important,” she had said. So she must care, and care a great deal, about him. Then again, maybe she only wanted all rumors of suicide to be dispelled once and for all.
“He was flying a Pitts Special that day,” Rylan said. “Did Rumm go through the preflight check himself?”
“Yep.”
“Were you with him when he checked it out?”
“Nope. I was working in here. But he did it, because I could see him out yonder. We shouted several things back and forth. He didn’t take any shortcuts.”
“What kind of mood was he in?” Kirsten asked.
“Normal,” Sam replied with a shrug.
“He didn’t seem depressed about anything?”
“No.” Kirsten glanced at Rylan, but before her expression became too smug, Sam added, “Kinda distracted.”
“How?”
“Distracted?”
Both Rylan and Kirsten had pounced on the word like tig
ers on raw meat.
Rylan gave Kirsten the right of way. “Distracted how, Sam? It’s very important that you remember any detail. Did anything out of the ordinary happen?”
Sam tipped his billcap forward to scratch the back of his head. “Thought it was odd at the time, but . . .” He paused to shrug again. “After the accident and all, there was so much commotion, I guess I forgot about it.”
Rylan didn’t think Sam had ever forgotten a thing in his life. Until now the old man had withheld the forthcoming tidbit of information from the widow and from the world because he knew damn well that it was significant. Maybe Sam needed to be cleansed of Demon Rumm too. Maybe he had realized that it was time to let go. Facts, particularly unpleasant ones, had to be faced and reckoned with before they could be laid to rest.
“Tell me . . . us,” Kirsten said.
“Well, you know that silly little superstition we had.”
“The thumbs-up signal?” Sam nodded. Kirsten looked toward Rylan.
Rylan nodded too. “Just before takeoff,” he said to Sam, “Rumm would look down at you from the cockpit and give you the thumbs-up sign. You saluted him.”
“Yeah, right, well, that day he . . . uh, almost forgot to do it.”
They all sat still and silent for a very long time. Finally Kirsten asked thinly, “Forgot? How could he forget? It was something the two of you did automatically.”
“I know, that’s why it bothered me. Later.” Sam would look neither of them in the eye. Nervously he rubbed his rough hands up and down his thighs. “I was standing there on the tarmac looking up at him, expecting him to do it, but he was staring straight ahead, like he was thinking real hard about something, you know? I called up to him. He kinda shook his head, like he was coming out of a daydream, and then looked down at me. He smiled regular, white teeth and all. Then he gave me the signal and taxied off.” Thick, salty, substantial tears rolled down the creased face. “That’s the last I ever saw of him.”
Rylan reached across the console of the car and covered Kirsten’s knee with his hand. “You feel badly,” he said intuitively. Despite her sunglasses he knew her eyes were still damp.
“Sam broke down and sobbed like a baby the first time I put him through that. I hated to do it again.”
“I know.” Rylan squeezed her knee.
“And it was so unnecessary.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because we don’t know any more than we did about the cause of the accident. It was all there in the NTSB’s report.”
“But Sam confirmed that there were discrepancies that had no explanation.”
“That’s true in every airplane crash. Some things just can’t be explained.”
Rylan didn’t want to contradict her to the point of being argumentative. She was cooperating with his quest for the truth and the reenactment of Rumm’s last day. Anything jarring might send her retreating into her shell again, perhaps for good. What he was doing was not only beneficial to him, but therapeutic for her. Otherwise, he would have dropped it. It must be unbearably painful to learn that someone you loved had considered his life not worth living and chosen to end it.
“How do you explain the radio?” he asked. If he could get her to talk about it, she might reconcile herself to the truth that had become apparent to him. He didn’t know the reason yet, but he was convinced that Demon Rumm had deliberately crashed his Pitts Special that day, or had done nothing to prevent the crash.
Kirsten rested her head on the back of the seat. “I can’t explain why he lost contact with the tower.”
“When they examined the radio after the crash, it was working perfectly.”
“But the fuel line was blocked.” There was an intensity behind her voice, as though she were trying to persuade herself.
Rylan kept his inflection as reasonable as possible. “But that was something he should have discovered during his preflight check.”
“It might not have been blocked then.”
“Maybe. But if the trouble started after he took off, he was expert enough to glide the plane to a safe landing, especially since the weather wasn’t a factor. Those stunt planes are so light—”
“I know all about that, Rylan,” she said sharply, turning her head away from him.
They drove for several miles before she looked forward again. Rylan took that as an indication that she was ready to reopen the subject.
“How do you explain his distraction that morning?”
“A bad mood,” she said offhandedly.
“Kirsten, I’ve been studying the man for months. I’ve never heard of him having a bad mood. According to every source I’ve used from his high school yearbook to interviews with his crew, men who saw him every day, he was the least moody person to ever draw breath.”
“He was human,” she exclaimed. “Everybody has off days.”
“And if Rumm ever had one, you would know about it, wouldn’t you? You lived with him. Was he having an ‘off day’ that morning when he left?”
She was clasping her hands together so tightly that her fingers, at various points, were either very white or very red. “I don’t know. He left the house before I woke up.”
Rylan filed that away for later use. “It doesn’t seem likely that he would forget to give Sam the thumbs-up signal when it was something they never failed to do.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“And Sam said that the day before the accident, Rumm had been perfectly normal. Smiling. Cracking jokes. Alert and brilliant in the cockpit. He left the airfield apparently without a care in the world.”
Kirsten looked at him questioningly. Rylan drew a deep breath and said, “Which means that whatever distracted him that morning, whatever had him upset, happened here at home the night before.”
Eight
They walked up to the front door. Rylan held it open for her. “What time did Rumm get home that day?”
“Early. Around three o’clock.”
He checked his watch. “Close enough. What did the two of you do?”
“We watched old films. Or rather he did.”
“Film clips of him?”
“Yes. Videos taped off ‘Wide World of Sports’ and such.”
“Why do you say, ‘Or rather he did’?”
“Because I was in and out of the study. I was cooking dinner that night.”
“Why?”
Kirsten seemed reluctant to answer, but he held his stare until she did. “Alice wasn’t here. She had taken those two days off.”
Alice’s toneless, tuneless humming had never seemed so loud as it did then, coming from the direction of the kitchen. “Go tell her she has the next two days off,” Rylan said.
“I can’t just walk in there and—”
“Then I’ll do it for you.” He headed for the kitchen. Kirsten lunged after him and caught a fistful of his shirt. “I will tell her.”
Through the walls, Rylan overheard Alice’s exclamation of surprise, then her series of feeble protests, before she finally capitulated by telling Kirsten that she’d been hoping for a free day to go see her daughter and grandchild.
“What did you cook that night?” Rylan asked Kirsten after Alice left. Having been in residence for so long, he no longer felt like a guest in the kitchen and made himself at home by pilfering an apple from the basket on the countertop.
“We ate shish kebabs.”
“Lamb?” he asked unenthusiastically.
“Beef.”
“Good. Got all the stuff?”
“This is pointless, Rylan. What good is this charade going to do?”
“Got all the stuff?” he repeated while extending toward her mouth, at the tip of a paring knife, a slice of apple.
She took the bite of apple between her teeth and mumbled around it, “I think so,” in answer to his persistent question. She checked the contents of the refrigerator, freezer, and pantry to make sure she had the necessary groceries on hand. “If I thaw the meat in the micro
wave, I can start marinating it.”
“Okay. I’ll help you with the grill later.”
“Charlie—” She broke off without finishing.
“Charlie . . . what?”
“He—he didn’t help.”
They looked at each other for a long moment. “I’ll help,” Rylan said quietly. “Are all the videotapes in his study?” She nodded. “I’ll get started on those. I wanted to watch them anyway. Join me as soon as you can.”
It was almost a half-hour later when she came into the room. Rylan had made the room as dark as possible by closing the shutters and turning off all the lights. He had put the videotapes in chronological order, according to the dates on the labeled boxes.
He explained this to her as she sat down on the opposite end of the leather sofa. “I’m only into the second tape,” he said. On the wide screen TV set, a youthful Charlie Rumm was being interviewed at an airshow in Minnesota.
“I remember that show,” Kirsten said animatedly. “Everyone but me considered it a warm, spring day. I was freezing. Charlie sent one of his gofers into St. Paul and he came back with a fur coat for me.”
“Wasn’t impulsive gift giving one of Rumm’s traits?”
“Yes. He was extremely generous.” Her gaze remained on the screen. “Charlie performed right before the Blue Angels. We went out to dinner with them that night. They all thanked him for warming up the crowd.”
“In the figurative sense, you mean?”
“In the figurative sense,” she said, laughing.
He loved the way she laughed because it was so unexpectedly husky and sexy. One would guess that her laugh would be like the gay, tinkling sound of a small bell. Instead it was whiskey-mellow.
She was still wearing the casual, wide-legged cotton shorts and blousy shirt she had worn to the airfield. As Rylan watched, she kicked off her sandals and tucked her feet beneath her hips in a pose that he affectionately recognized as her favorite. Her legs had the satiny sheen of a woman who shaved every time she got in the bathtub.
Her shirt was unbuttoned all the way. Beneath it she was wearing an elasticized tube top. Her breasts were squeezed into beguiling crescents over the top of it.