Beverly Hills.
Or why.
She was going for dinner.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“Do you think something is seriously wrong with all of this?” Sean glanced over at his wife, Sarah, then turned the steering wheel of his car at the end of his father-in-law’s street before entering the busier Encinal Avenue.
They had just spent what would be their last day clearing the damage from Sarah’s father’s home, which one or more people had smashed up with the rage of a band of soldiers from Game of Thrones.
It had taken nearly two walk-in bins to hold all the debris they cleared out, but Sarah was finally satisfied it had all been done.
Now the repairs would have to start. She knew if her father were to do it all himself, it would take months of hard work.
She turned to Sean, and he knew the answer just by her expression.
“You and me both, honey.” Her face looked tired. “Do you think there a whole lot he’s not telling us?”
The married couple fell into silence, both of them deep in thought, and for another two miles said nothing to each other. They were trying to puzzle out what had happened, though Sean did, for a second, think of a couple of cold beers and pizza for dinner.
The thought of beer made him recall that time he had sat on the balcony of their townhouse and sipped his favorite ale with Sarah and her brother Ben. The story Ben had told, about how his father had been told what happened to five missing planes—also known as Flight 19—in 1945, haunted him.
He looked over at his wife, who was still thinking about her parents’ home, and about her father. Tim seemed, to her, to have lost his reason for living since Sarah’s mom had passed away. And Sarah missed her dearly.
“Babe,” he said slowly, taking a cautious breath, “do you think this may somehow—” He debated with himself whether to say it. “May have something to do with Ben?”
Sarah glanced at Sean; memories of her little brother, his wife, and their three children came flooding back. She felt sick every time she thought about what had happened. Today was no different.
Ben and Jenni Erwin were avid scuba divers, having both found their love of being underwater years before they discovered their deep love for each other.
Not surprisingly, that had happened underwater, too.
Ben had recently joined a new scuba-diving club in San Francisco that catered for single people looking for other lone divers to go diving with. It wasn’t set up as a matchmaking service, but it had resulted in a few weddings over the years.
After six months in the club, Ben realized joining was one of the best decisions he’d ever made. The day he’d joined was the day he’d met Jennifer Hill. Within weeks, they were diving only with each other and not with anyone else from the club, which to the other members typically meant romance, even though the Ben and Jenni tried not to class their dives back then as dates.
Their mutual love of the water saw the three children they brought into the world over the next seven years virtually grow up in the sea. Ben and Jenni looked forward to the day when they could take all three children on a proper, fully fledged dive as a family.
Ben and Jenni had decided to take their three children to see the Farallon Islands, 48 miles off the coast of San Francisco, in the Gulf of the Farallones, one fine and sunny Saturday. The area was a favorite place among the more serious scuba divers, with shipwrecks dotted around the three main islands. All three kids were excited at the prospect of seeing sea lions.
Their oldest daughter, Miley, envisioned African lions with webbed feet, swimming around with their big heads bobbing on top of the water. Jenni and Ben gave up arguing that this was not how the creatures looked in real life.
Ben had wished his parents could have been around to come along on the day trip. It had been nearly two years since they had vanished along with the other 200-plus people on-board the Pacific International flight, and it still hurt him to think he would never see them again.
The weather on the day could not have been better for a relaxed boat trip. The forecast spoke of sunny skies, little wind, and tranquil water. Ben and Jenni were pleased, when they arrived at the dock, to be told that the boat they had booked and paid for was not working—so they would be getting upgraded to the slightly better boat sitting nearby.
The Farallon Islands themselves were off limits to the public, and only Southeast Farallon Island was inhabited. Staff from the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Point Blue Conservation Service lived and worked on the island for most of the year, monitoring and documenting the lives and movements of the lion seals native to the island, and the great white sharks that visited for a few months each year.
These sharks all shared one trait of concern to those who dared swimming around the islands in the fall.
The great whites who dropped in for a snack of lion seal were big.
Jaws big.
One, nicknamed “Steve” for the director of Jaws, was the shark most people living on Southeast Farallon Island particularly wanted to avoid.
Estimates of his weight ranged from one to one and a half tons. Twenty-two hundred pounds.
That’s a lot of seafood linguine at your local seafood restaurant.
Most believed Steve was somewhere between six and eight meters long, which made him one of the biggest sharks ever seen. One worker on the island swore he could be closer to ten meters, but the guy was renowned for exaggerating.
When the Erwins didn’t return their boat by the designated hour, late in the afternoon of their day trip, the part-time worker at the vessel charter business didn’t panic. Lots of people lost track of time and ran late. Often, weary day trippers showed up with tall stories of adversity and a fistful of apologies.
But time wore on and eventually the clerk had to admit that 99% of the time, people didn’t run this late.
When the clock on his office wall told him it had three hours since they were due back, with the late afternoon sky turning a light gray, he knew it was time to call the Coast Guard.
When the Erwins’ charter boat was found drifting off Middle Farallon Island, the craft was partially submerged, and the family was nowhere to be seen.
As the news of their disappearance hit the airwaves, there was one fact Ben and Jenni’s families could not accept.
There was no trace of the couple’s brand-new diving equipment.
Could this have meant they had decided to dive together?
But the families agreed Ben and Jenni would have never left their three children alone on the boat.
As the days after the tragedy turned into weeks, the couple’s friends, families, and a growing number of other Americans started to grow more uneasy (and suspicious) about the disappearance of the five Erwins at the Farallon Islands.
Steve, the enormous great white, had not been seen in the area for at least a year before the tragedy, though the media had all but come straight out and pinned the deaths of the five Erwins firmly on the great white.
The other glaring inconsistency surrounding the shocking deaths was that no trace of any of their personal belongings had been found on-board the chartered 15-foot boat.
It was if all evidence of the family ever having been on the boat had disappeared along with them into the Pacific Ocean.
Alternative theories about the Erwin family disappearance began turning up on conspiracy websites around the world.
As findings from the police investigation became public, more concerning facts made it online for YouTubers to relish, debate, and add to their cases.
There were no fingerprints, DNA, or any other trace of any Erwin family member found on the boat when it was discovered off Middle Farallon Island.
Around three months later, one of the detectives investigating the deaths made the careless mistake of speaking to a friend at a city bar one night about the case, without checking if anyone was eavesdropping.
And someone was. That guy told a friend, who tweeted it, and the stor
y made the news the next day.
None of this was a secret to the Erwins and Hills, but it made their deaths, and the inconsistencies surrounding them, that much more of an irresistible mystery to those who lived and dined on top-shelf conspiracy theories.
Straight out of college, Ben had followed his father into the field of aeronautical engineering, relying on his father’s connections to bypass the sometimes years-long vetting process and start work on projects most in the air force wouldn’t have known about. Like his father, he wasn’t even enlisted.
Did Ben love working in the clandestine world of secret aeronautics projects kept hidden from the public?
Hell yes.
He had dreamed about since hearing his father’s stories in the workshop at home.
Learning about his work was enough for the online conspiracy theorists to claim that Ben’s death, along with that of his entire family, had been no accident.
They claimed Ben Erwin was involved in projects that stretched across the Californian desert to a little strip of land stretching across a salt flat known to most as Groom Lake, Nevada. Google it.
But this was never proven, and the government flatly denied it.
Sarah and Sean, while recalling the painful loss of Ben and his family, had decided to close their kitchen at home for the night and drop into their favorite pizza and pasta restaurant, Tomatina’s, on Park Street.
Sean would get his beer and pizza after all.
After settling into their favorite window booth, they toasted to the end of the day with the chink of a cold Sierra Nevada Pale Ale against a glass of Groth Sauvignon Blanc. While waiting for Sarah to choose something from the menu, Sean’s mind wandered unnervingly to the connection between Ben’s death, and the trashing of his parents’ home that had led to his mother’s fatal heart attack.
He thought back to that conversation with Ben on the balcony of their townhouse. Ben had told them about a few things his father had mentioned over the years that even his wife had never known about.
Sarah ordered her favorite pasta, chicken fettuccine alfredo, and told the waiter her husband would have his usual, a medium Carne Combo pizza. And at that moment, for a split second, Sean felt a prickly sensation sprint across the back of his neck.
A guy sitting way over in the corner of the room had stared at him just that little bit too long before looking away. It unnerved him. He tried to arrange his thoughts about the Erwins quickly and tuck them away in a private vault in his head, as if the guy could see into the less-guarded corners of his mind.
As he reasoned with himself that he was tired and his thoughts were playing tricks on him, as far as the guy staring at him went, one last idea could not escape him.
His father-in-law’s workshop.
Why had the vandals not touched it?
Had they not realized it was there? Were they disturbed while pulling the house apart, and never had a chance to get to the garage underneath?
Both Erwin men had spent a truckload of time in that workshop. Both had worked in areas of aerospace few ever got to see. The reason it had been left alone had to be the key to the mystery, he thought.
And, just as he had been when he thought the guy in the restaurant had looked at him a little too long, he was right.
Chapter Forty
“How the hell did you pull that off?’
“Mate, did your plane divert to Mars for the last hundred years?”
Tony glanced at Ross and rolled his eyes, still waiting for him to answer his original question.
“There’s this thing called Facebook.” Ross grinned at him with a cocky expression. “You may have heard of it, no?”
“You’re on Facebook?”
Ross looked over at Tony and pulled his best Donald Trump pout before whispering, “Not sure if you’ve noticed, brother, but I don’t have a lot to do at the moment.”
Tony had flown 13 hours straight from Brisbane and had arrived in LA late the night before last. After arriving at Ross’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel an hour and a half later, he’d crashed for almost 14 hours straight in what would be his room for some time to come, until both men decided what they were going to do with their lives.
Tony had received offers for television appearances, radio interviews, and other media-related activities. But the last thing he wanted to do right then was talk about Flight 19 and, more to the point, what it had done to his life.
Ross had told Tony he needn’t worry about money. He had plenty of it and would cover his friend for the foreseeable future.
He’d just agreed to discuss a book deal, and possibly even a full-blown motion picture based on his experience with Flight 19.
Tony nodded before pouting. Ross called this “pulling a Zoolander,” since Tony looked so much like Ben Stiller, and it always made him laugh.
Tony glanced at the big flat screen suspended on the mustard-colored wall of the living room, before turning back to Ross and this time rolling his eyes deliberately and very slowly. He then turned on his impersonation of Sherlock Holmes, exaggerating every word and expression.
“So, let me get this right.” Tony sat up straighter as to emphasize the pantomime, “You create a brand-new profile on Facebook—”
Ross was doing his best not to break into unabashed laughter.
“That would be correct, my big-eared friend.”
Tony ignored the jibe; he knew his ears were not small, and he always told anyone who had hung shit on him that if a guy had big ears, it meant he had a big—
“And of all the people on planet earth you hear from,” he said, “a beautiful lass who was on our plane, who is now a single woman, friend-requested you?”
Ross couldn’t believe it either. When he had first met her on the flight, she smiled at him, sending a pulse of electricity through every fiber of his body. The feeling dissipated a little when he peered down to her left hand and noticed a wedding ring.
They’d only spoken for a moment, but Ross had felt a tingle pass through his entire body.
Then they had officially met at Vandenberg, though their conversation there was in no way flirtatious, or anything like what you’d see in a romcom. In fact, it had been somewhat businesslike.
Ross had become, almost by default, one of the dozen or so counselors who had spent their time at Vandenberg trying to help others among the passengers and crew adjust to the news that their life would most probably never be the same again.
They had crossed paths again at Vandenberg, in the hours after Ross had told the passengers and crew what had happened to them all. She was one of the few that seemed anything but perturbed by the event.
Ross had heard what happened to Melanie since they left the base. Like many others involved in Flight 19, he would always take a keen interest in news stories that included one of his fellow passengers or crew.
The death of Melanie’s husband had made front-page news around the world. It was the first death to result directly from Flight 19 that was not a suicide.
Ross had been shocked. And at the time, he would admit to no one but himself that he was relieved she had survived her husband’s attempt at killing her.
Ross, like many Sydneysiders, had been gobsmacked as the guy’s dirty laundry went public. Charles Lewinson had been a rotten egg, with too much money for such an asshole to have. But not anymore. He was no longer a threat to his beautiful wife, who now had a fortune of more than $250 million.
“Earth to Captain Moore. Come in Captain Ross ‘the romancer’ Moore,” Tony said.
Ross snapped out of his daydream about Melanie and smiled at his friend.
“Yes, what can I do for you?” he said, in a terrible attempt at an aristocratic English accent.
Tony muttered something under his breath that Ross knew was in Italian—probably involving swear words—before leaning forward and saying, “So—Mr. Moore—she friend-requested you on Facebook, and then?”
Ross leaned forward and grinned. “I accepted her
friend request.” He leaned back on the couch, looking satisfied. Tony seemed about to explode in frustration, and Ross held out his hand, knowing he’d tortured tired old Tony enough for one day.
“We just sent each other a few messages.” Tony could tell Ross liked her; it was written all over his face. “And she recently said she felt like a break from Sydney. From Australia, in fact.”
“So, what is a strapping young lad supposed to do when an elegant woman tells him she wants to get out of town?” said Tony.
Ross leaned forward and smiled from ear to ear. “She has the most beautiful green eyes you will ever see, bud.” He shook his head as if in disbelief at the vision of them. “And her smile knocks me for six.”
Tony patted Ross on the shoulder before breaking into genuine laughter. “So you invited her over for dinner, huh?” Tony thought he’d have done the same thing if he were in Ross’s shoes.
Ross held up his hand a second later to get a restrained high-five from Tony.
As both men sat back more comfortably on their plush couches, Ross reached for the television remote control and turned up the sound. Ross’s timing was uncanny—CNN’s 24-hour news feed soon switched to a report about the ongoing dramas of Flight 19.
“Pacific International Airlines has announced that they are currently in talks with a private company offering to purchase the plane,” the newsreader said.
The feed played footage of the A380 taxiing across an airport neither of the men could recognize, and then of it sitting in the giant hangar at Vandenberg, before the newsreader came back on the screen.
“The airline is refusing to reveal who the company is at this stage. Commentators agree that the sooner Pacific International cuts its ties with the mystery of Flight 19, the sooner they will have a chance at saving the airline from possible collapse. Many believe the company should offload the plane even at half its value; the board continues to discuss the issue.”
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