Flight 19

by Grant Finnegan

  Tammy also had to come to terms with the certifiably horrible way her parents had dealt with her returning to their lives.

  It was beyond weird.

  It was beyond uncomfortable.

  Most of all—it was beyond betrayal.

  “It’s not my fault, for Christ’s sake,” Tammy had screamed at her parents the first night she saw them in their home after her return. They’d looked at Tammy as if she were a ghost.

  Or maybe it was Tammy’s taking the Lord’s name in vain.

  Her parents were the typical religious type, and had gone to their church every Sunday, without fail, for the last 20 years.

  Much to her parents’ chagrin, Tammy had weaned herself off the Sunday ritual around the time she turned 18.

  And to their over-religious minds, Tammy’s return from the dead was nothing short of an “abomination”—in their actual words.

  Tammy’s mother had even said that her reappearance from nowhere was the work of the Devil. Then, as if to confirm how crazy she was, her mom had turned to her dad and said, “Tammy must have been in hell for the last five years.”

  At that very moment, Tammy genuinely wondered which would have been worse—being in the depths of hell where the fires burned 24 hours a day, or being in her parents’ house.

  “You have to admit, darling,” her mother said as she reached for her husband’s hand, gripping it as if she were hanging off a cliff, “it just seems too unusual to believe it’s not the work of the…”

  Tammy’s father then chimed in, cutting off his wife of many decades near the end of her utterly ridiculous comment.

  “It’s obvious, honey: this is the work of someone very evil, who does not respect God’s wishes.”

  Tammy was lost for words.

  She’d always thought her father was the slightly smarter one. Well, he’d just proved that wrong.

  In the end, after just a few minutes of the conversation going along that path, Tammy knew she’d need to have it out with her parents another time. She didn’t care where they thought she’d been for the five missing years; it couldn’t excuse how they’d treated what was hers, especially her most priceless possessions—her children.

  She walked out of her parent’s house hoping they would one day see her point of view. She was the innocent victim here. It wasn’t her fault the plane had disappeared.

  Proving that you can’t always get what you want, they never would.

  Tammy had a hunch that things with her parents would be bible-belting weird the first time she set foot in their home since returning to St. Louis from California.

  She’d been in touch with one of her oldest and dearest friends, Lee Lather, earlier in the day, and Lee had told her the spare room in her apartment could be Tammy’s for as long as she wanted, if she needed it, starting that very night if need be.

  Lee also reminded Tammy, during that conversation, that it was a Friday, and that as she didn’t work on the weekends, they’d be free to crack open a bottle of Pinot Gris and talk well into the night if Tammy felt like it.

  Tammy now had the feeling that Lee might have known what was coming.

  Luckily for them both, there was more than just one bottle of Pinot Gris in the fridge, since they did end up talking well into the early hours of Saturday.

  Tammy met Lee outside her apartment in downtown St. Louis not long after her friend had come home from work. True to her word, her friend pulled out the first bottle within minutes of them walking into her apartment.

  “What the hell do I do now?” Tammy said, staring at a full glass.

  Lee finished pouring her own drink, and after taking a sip said, “Well, firstly, let’s establish this is your home as long as you need it to be.”

  Tammy was already sobbing by the time her friend finished the sentence. The enormity of what was now starting to unfold was ruling her emotions. Lee was the first person she’d since arriving home that made her feel she belonged somewhere and treated her like a normal human being.

  As though things were no different than they had been five years ago.

  “How could she do this to me?” Tammy whispered as Lee hugged her. Lee knew who Tammy was referring to.

  Tammy’s twin sister, Annie.

  “I don’t know, Tam.” Lee looked for the answer in her misty glass. “We both know the woman is—” She took a breath before saying it, “A slut.”

  Lee wondered for a second if she’d crossed the line.

  Tammy and Lee’s friendship went all the way back to junior high. From Lee’s perspective, they’d been apart five years, but from Tammy’s, there had never been a break. They understood each other as well as friends could, and Lee need not have doubted herself. Tammy squelched her anxieties in an instant.

  “So true.” Tammy shook her head and almost gulped her next mouthful of wine.

  Tammy looked at the floor and closed her eyes. Lee was expecting that Tammy would break down and fall into a black hole at some point. She just didn’t anticipate it would come so early in the night.

  Lee sat closer to Tammy on the couch and patted her on the back as her sobbing grew louder.

  “It’s okay, honey.” Lee put her arm around Tammy and rested her head on her best friend’s shoulder.

  Tammy eventually leaned forward and extracted a big handful of tissues from the box nearby. She seemed to compose herself, and turned to Lee and smiled.

  Tammy took another mouthful of wine and decided she was ready to ask her most burning question.

  Lee sensed something was coming down the pipe. Well on the way to feeling a little tipsy even before she’d ordered pizza, she pretty much guessed what Tammy was about to ask. If she’d been in Tammy’s shoes, she’d have wanted to know the same thing.

  How long after Flight 19 disappeared had it been before Annie made her move on Ben?

  Lee made a smart decision seconds before Tammy asked—she stood up and reached for the cordless phone. “Before we go any further, let me order pizza before we get too drunk.”

  Tammy nodded. She realized the wine was quickly taking hold of her senses; food wouldn’t be a bad idea.

  A few moments later, Lee sat back down and steeled herself for the question.

  Tammy peered out the window and saw the sky turning a dusty gray. “I know if anyone is going to tell me the truth,” she said, and turned back to look her friend straight in the eye, “it’s you.”

  Lee nodded. For some reason she was nervous, though she could not understand why. She took another mouthful of wine and followed it with a large intake of air.

  “How long did she wait?” Tammy had struggled to get the words out. Now it was Lee’s turn.

  Lee swallowed more air and knew her time was up.

  “One—”

  Tammy gasped, leaning forward and hastily resting her wine on the coffee table. She knew it would be safer there.

  Lee hadn’t even finished, and Tammy was already reeling.

  Tammy’s face twisted in anger, “One year? That complete whore!”

  Lee looked abashedly at her glass, thinking of downing it in one go.

  “A month?” Tammy said. “It wasn’t a year; it was a fucking month?” Now she was almost shouting.

  Fuck it, Lee thought, and gulped almost half her glass in one hit.

  Tammy was now cursing as if her sister had been in the room.

  She probably would have knocked her out with one punch. With Annie well out of reach, Lee worried she might take the punch.

  “No,” Lee cried, “No!”

  She leaped from the couch, and before she headed to the kitchen to fetch another bottle, she turned to Tammy and said, quietly—

  “One week.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Sandra Erwin’s funeral took place six days after her final heart attack.

  As people started to leave the church of St. Barnabas in Alameda, Tim stood at the entrance with his daughter Sarah, thanking the attendees for their condolences. He could no
t help but recall the sound of his late wife’s last breath, and the agonized look etched across her face.

  He’d been there, by her side, for each of her heart attacks, but this one to him seemed brutal, devoid of the one thing Sandra had wanted from her death.

  Dignity.

  After her first heart attack, their doctor had taught Tim what to look out for with Sandra and her heart condition, hoping he would be able to see the signs and get her medical attention before it was too late.

  In hindsight, this time around, Tim knew there could have been no chance of saving her. It had all been too much.

  First, the news that the last five years were gone. Then, learning that her son, his wife, and their three children were dead. And then, the final nail in her coffin, as it were—opening the front door of their home to see it torn apart as though by chainsaws.

  Sandra had treated her home as her kingdom. Every room bar Tim’s workshop (that was his castle) was just as she wanted it. She’d spent years decorating and redecorating every room in the two-story place. That modest house on Alameda Island was the envy of many of her friends and locals alike, and Sandra relished it.

  In those seconds after opening the front door, seeing the carnage, Sandra’s last thoughts before her heart shut down were simple.

  Why?

  Why would anyone want to do this to my home?

  Now Tim was left to answer those questions on his own.

  Had it been thieves, high on drugs or something, who had destroyed the place for kicks after stealing enough of value? (No.)

  Had it been neighbors jealous of Sandra’s picture-perfect home? (No. They counted their neighbors as friends. The thought was too outlandish.)

  Tim would later reflect that as far as he and Sandra were aware, they had no enemies.

  On first entering the house after being called there by the paramedics who responded to Tim’s frantic 911 call, the investigating police officers had noticed how precisely and methodically the damage had been inflicted.

  To the detectives’ eyes, this was not a drug-induced attack on a lovely old couple’s home. They could not escape the thought of robbery as the primary motive. Tim confirmed for them that key pieces of furniture were missing. But it was the lengths to which the perpetrators had gone in destroying the interior that niggled at them—as well as how most of the contents had been left behind.

  They began to use the word “planned” in their discussions of whatever had gone on at the Erwins’ place.

  It was as if they—whoever they were—had been looking for something very, very particular.

  And this seemed to be confirmed by the unusual fact that Tim’s workshop had not been touched; it was as immaculately orderly as he had left it. Whatever the looters had been after, they had known it wasn’t there.

  Sarah, Sean, and a few neighbors had helped Tim clear the house of debris over the days leading up to Sandra’s funeral, in the hope it would give him a sense of moving forward.

  After Sandra’s first heart attack, the family doctor had informed Tim privately that there was a significant chance of her having another attack at some point.

  This had made Tim appreciate every day with his wife even more, knowing there was always a chance it could be the last.

  After her collapse at Vandenberg, Tim steeled himself for the inevitable. He was aware she would probably never recover from losing her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren in one hit.

  And she hadn’t been the only one struggling.

  Tim’s relationship with his only son had been as stable, and as close, as a father would want it to be.

  Ben had, like Tim, taken the path through college into the complicated world of aerospace engineering. And his father, ironically, was not especially pleased.

  Tim had told Ben there was much more to the world than engineering. But Tim had unintentionally put Ben on that path long before he even thought of a career. As a child, Ben spent hours with his old man tinkering in the garage workshop. Add the fascinating stories Tim would tell him about work, and the kid was hooked.

  One of those stories still haunted Ben after the disappearance of Flight 19, and two years after they lost their parents, he reminded his sister of it.

  The siblings had caught up for a casual Sunday afternoon drink on the balcony of Sarah and Sean’s townhouse in the San Francisco Shipyard development, which looked out over the breathtaking harbor.

  “He made this up,” Sarah had said. “There’s no way this can be true. Dad loved filling your head with his conspiracy theories; this has to be one of them.” Sarah didn’t buy the story at all.

  “I know Dad was full of shit sometimes.” Ben grinned at Sarah, who couldn’t help but smile at his candid assessment of their father. “But he swore this one was legit.”

  Ben told the story from the start so Sean could give his opinion of the tale, too.

  After a few moments and half a bottle of beer, Sean looked to both Erwin siblings with a nonplussed, almost vague look. His expression gave away nothing.

  “So, your father once told you that he worked with a guy whose own cousin was one of the 14 airmen who disappeared in 1945, on five planes which,” Sean shook his head in amazement at the coincidence, “were known as Flight 19.”

  Ben took his turn at looking out over the harbor before taking a sip of beer and nodding to his brother-in-law. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. Sean and Sarah met each other’s eyes and without any expression, turned back to Ben. “Mom and Dad went missing on a plane with the same flight number.”

  Sarah took a sip of her white wine and scratched the side of her head as if it would help clarify her thoughts. Then she showed Ben and Sean her signature pout.

  “Ben, do you want me to tell Sean the other part of the story?” Sarah said.

  Ben nodded. His face was beginning to flush with the feeling that Sean thought he was bonkers.

  Sarah stood and walked over to the balcony railing. Turning and leaning against it, staring at her brother and husband.

  “Dad said this guy told him he knew what happened to the five planes.”

  Sean didn’t look that convinced, so Ben said, “This guy said the planes were designed to disappear. It was a navy experiment.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I’ve never met a guy who can drink more than Michael E. Darcy.

  He could hold more beer than the Heineken brewery in Amsterdam.

  I’ve also never met another man who could make you think he was the world’s biggest asshole but then, behind closed doors and once you got him drunk, might give you the impression that you’d been wrong about him.

  I’m still trying to figure the guy out. I’ll admit that the first night we bumped into each other at the poolside bar at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I couldn’t help but believe every story I’d heard about him.

  But when he bumped into my stool at the bar, the guy couldn’t have been more genuinely apologetic. If he’d been that much of an asshole, I thought, he wouldn’t have even cared.

  It wasn’t the words he used or that he had apologized at all. It was his tone. I’d been shoved in bars before, but it felt like the first time I’d received what seemed like such a sincere and heartfelt apology.

  I smiled and said, “No problem. It’s all good.” Then I offered to buy him a drink.

  “I’d like that, thank you,” he said, shuffling the nearest stool a little bit closer to me.

  As the waiter left us with our round of drinks, I finally had the opportunity to get to know the man who would, in time, become one of the pivotal people in my life.

  “It’s nice here, huh?” Darcy looked out beyond the bar at the city lights of LA shimmering beneath a sky where light gray was mixing with a hint of orange from the sun.

  “I can’t disagree with you,” I said. “How are you holding up—” For a second, I thought it might be too personal, but thought I was far gone enough that I might as well finish the sentence. “—with everything
?”

  Darcy looked over at me, and I figured he wasn’t going to answer. Then he peered down at the giant ball of ice jiggling around in his old-fashioned, and without looking back to me, he said, “I’m dealing with it as best I can, as we all are.” And then added, “I always knew my life might turn to shit someday.”

  Darcy then seemed lost in thought for a moment before he raised his glass and downed the drink. He motioned to the barman for another round.

  Then he turned to me, and with sad eyes, he said, “Do you believe in karma?”

  I thought about that for a moment.

  Had all 210 people on-board Flight 19 done enough wrong in their lives to warrant the whole flight disappearing as cosmic retribution?

  I didn’t have an issue with anyone who believed in karma. But I did often wonder if it was just a figment of their imagination.

  I turned back to Darcy and, hoping not to sound too offensive, said, “Karma, to me, is a load of bollocks.” Then I set my near-empty glass on the bar for effect.

  The barman brought us both a fresh drink a moment later. I reached over with my glass and clinked it with Darcy’s by way of a toast. Then I looked at the billionaire and smiled. “I should have asked you before I answered your question,” I said, “is it something, karma, that you believe in yourself?”

  Did Michael E. Darcy, the larrikin billionaire businessman from Melbourne Australia, once nicknamed “the grazier of Silicon Valley,” believe in the one thing his money and influence could never have any sway over?

  “Since what happened to us,” Darcy said, “I’ve begun to rethink that.”

  As we both had nowhere to go, the night was relatively early, and between us we had enough money to drink the bar dry, I could tell the conversation would be slow-moving. There was plenty of time. Darcy motioned to the barman. “Get us both the biggest New-York strip, bone-in, that you can find.” He leaned in for a closer look at the young guy’s name tag. “Thanks—Henry.”