The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  Chapter 7

  Skull.

  From the deep, tangled sleep of high-stress exhaustion, a single word bubbled up. Christensen had been ignoring his clock radio for twenty minutes, filtering the drone of Tuesday traffic reports, seven-minute headline breaks, and bright morning banter into a comforting broth of white noise. But at some point he crossed the line between sleep and consciousness, and he did so with the word “skull” stuck in his thoughts like a wood tick.

  He rolled over and felt for the gentle curve of Brenna’s hip but found only the cool hollow where she’d been. Probably already gone to the office. She’d stayed home Monday to make sure the younger two were OK—they’d taken Sunday night pretty hard—but he knew how tightly Brenna’s secretary at the law firm scheduled her. Things were backing up.

  “Coming up at twenty-one after the hour, news headlines, sports and traffic updates,” the drivetime jock said. “But first, we gotta sell some stuff.”

  Christensen rolled left and put his feet on the hardwood. At least his schedule was clear; a university funding glitch had stalled his research into misattribution, the memory phenomenon commonly known as déjà vu. He was doing private counseling three days a week, but it was a light and flexible schedule. He’d made some calls to clear the week, needing to focus on his daughter.

  Melissa’s doctor had released her late yesterday, still weak and depressed, but medically sound. The fetus had survived, though any damage from the blood loss wouldn’t show itself for months. She’d agreed to genetic testing to help fill in the blanks of her medical history, and the results were due back before her upcoming appointment at Planned Parenthood. He shambled down the hall toward her room at the end. From just outside her open door, he watched her chest rise and fall with each deep-sleep breath, watched until he realized how desperately he was looking for something—Reassurance? Hope?—in the mundane rhythm of her respiration.

  It was normal. It told him nothing.

  Across the hall, in the kids’ bathroom, he pretended to study the splintered doorframe as his eyes strayed to the tub and the tiled wall behind it. It sparkled—he and Brenna had cleaned it with obsessive attention to detail, so there was no sign at all of what happened there. The thought pleased and depressed him at the same time.

  On the way back to his bedroom, he peeked into the rooms of Annie and Taylor. They were up and gone, too, their beds unmade. Brenna must have dropped them at the pool for their summer junior lifeguard program on her way to work. He arranged the bedclothes into some semblance of order then headed for the master bath. News headlines were streaming from the radio in machine-gun bursts as he passed through the master bedroom: A deadly house fire in Oakmont. The Parkway East jammed. More rumors about selling the Pirates. A skull found in sunken airplane wreckage.

  The face in the shaving mirror was changed. Its angles usually seemed powerful and lean; now they made him look anxious and gaunt. Its jawline, defined by the silvered edge of his close-cropped beard, had somehow lost its strength. After one night without sleep and a second of restless worry, his eyelids felt like sandpaper. Dark crescents had bloomed beneath each eye. He smiled, but it looked as forced as it was. His runner’s body was still hard, but he found no satisfaction in the tight muscles across his shoulders, chest, and abdomen.

  By the time his shaving water was hot, the news jock was filling in details. Christensen listened as he lathered his neck beneath the line of short whiskers: One dead in the Oakmont blaze. An overturned grocery truck near the Forest Hills exit. Lower-than-expected attendance at the team’s still-new PNC Park. That mysterious skull.

  The razor was dull, so he popped in another disposable blade cartridge, absently tuning an ear to the radio as he did.

  “—skull inside the plane’s sunken fuselage yesterday. The discovery startled salvage workers who expected to find nothing inside the wreckage of the military airplane that crashed and disappeared without a trace in 1983. The cargo plane was in the final leg of an international flight when it ran out of fuel and ditched in the icy Mon River between the Homestead High Level and Glenwood bridges. Government records say nobody was on that plane except the two-man flight crew, and their bodies were recovered downstream several weeks after the crash. Stay tuned on this one, folks. The Mystery of the Mon goes on. In sports—”

  The new blade helped, but Christensen’s hand stopped mid-stroke, leaving a half-plowed path in the foam on his neck. He felt a strange, unexpected sensation, a déjà vu of sorts. Two more words were now stuck in his head—icy and bridge. The radio—he’d just heard them. But weren’t they part of a conversation he’d just had? When? Where? He finished the shaving stroke as he struggled for a connection.

  It hit him an hour later as he poured whole-wheat waffle batter onto the griddle. At the hospital. His conversation with Melissa about her water dreams. Icy water. A bridge.

  Lowering the waffle iron’s lid, Christensen retrieved the morning Pittsburgh Press from the kitchen table and scanned section pages for local news. The story was on B-l, headlined: “Sunken Plane Raises Shocking New Question.”

  He knew a plane had crashed in the river many years before, but he and Molly had been so amped about Melissa’s impending adoption back then that nothing else mattered. He hadn’t been following these latest developments. The story repeated much of what he’d heard on the radio—the news guy had read it pretty much verbatim—though the printed version gave a few more details. The plane’s final descent had brought it low over winter rush-hour traffic on the Homestead High Level Bridge. The flight manifest had listed only two adult passengers: the pilot and the copilot who’d flown the plane into the country from a military base outside the US. They had both been accounted for after the crash, but the skull suggested that there’d been at least one other passenger.

  There was no clear reason for the hair on his arms to suddenly stand on end, but the information he was reading had triggered some neural hot wire. It felt significant, but why?

  “Bacon?”

  He spun, startled. Melissa was at the kitchen door, frail and lost in her oversized terry bathrobe. But she was smiling.

  “And waffles?” She went to the griddle and lifted the lid, breathing in the sweet, eggy aroma of his calculatingly fortified breakfast. She forked four golden brown squares onto a nearby plate.

  “The rest of it’s in the oven, ’Lis, the cheesy eggs and bacon. I was about to bring it up to you.” He poured her a tall glass of pulpy orange juice. “There’s coffee, but drink this first.”

  She took it and sipped, but grudgingly. “Don’t be a noodge,” she said.

  “You need to eat right.”

  “Dad, it’s the size of a pea.”

  Her unborn child. He’d been thinking more about the blood she’d lost, and building up her strength. Now he was reconsidering the coffee.

  “I’ll make decaf,” he said.

  “You’re obsessing.”

  “Maybe.”

  When she turned to butter her waffles, Christensen folded the B section of the morning paper and tucked it beneath his left arm. “I’ll be in my office for a bit if you need me.”

  He grabbed the juice jug before leaving and topped off the glass his daughter had set on the counter. Melissa turned, and he braced for another reprimand. Instead, she pulled him into a tight hug, rose to her tiptoes, and whispered, “Thank you.”

  Chapter 8

  Christensen sometimes imagined the Internet as a global memory, its infinite pages and hyperlinks mirroring the chemical codes of human neurotransmitters, hundreds of millions of pages connected by billions of haphazard electronic links that mimic neural cells and synapses. Like memory, the Web was littered with information both useful and useless—great works of literature, celebrity sex videos, random spasms of love and death, do-it-yourself instructions, favorite recipes—and the digital chaos was expanding at a rate of a million new electronic pages every day. Like human memory, that universe existed nowhere and everywhere, etched
in nothing more tangible than electrons.

  The cursor awaited his command, and curiosity was getting the better of him. He sipped his coffee, lukewarm now, and typed the keywords into his browser’s search box: “airplane crash” and “Monongahela River.” Ten seconds later, he faced a screen of blue-tinted hyperlinks, a dozen at least, dedicated to discussing, investigating, analyzing or sensationalizing the events of a January evening twenty-two years before.

  His own recollections of the crash were vague, at best. He wasn’t long out of grad school then, a new faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh struggling for tenure. What little time he didn’t spend on his fledgling memory research he spent with Molly trying to navigate the labyrinth of a domestic adoption. Nothing—nothing—had challenged his patience before or since like the waves of paperwork, home visits, and endlessly revolving door of county bureaucrats. Twice they’d reached the verge of parenthood only to have their caseworker reassigned and another opportunity missed. By the time his sister’s husband stepped forward with an alternative, with muttered references to his friendship with an administrator at one of Buenos Aires’s overburdened orphanages, he and Molly had all but given up.

  Somewhere in the middle of all that, an airplane crashed into the river and disappeared. Now, the discovery of its wreckage and the sudden onset of Melissa’s deep depression and terrifying water dreams seemed somehow related—more a visceral reaction on his part than logical, but a reaction nonetheless. He’d learned to follow his hunches.

  Christensen clicked through the menu of relevant websites. The “Mon Mystery Site,” the first listed, was the electronic Rorschach test of a borderline paranoid who claimed to have an “affadavid” from a twelve-year-old boy who watched “federal operatives” pull the plane from the river just hours after the crash, blowtorch it into portable chunks, load the thing, piece by piece, onto empty coal barges, and cover it all with heavy tarps for a clandestine trip downriver. The site’s creator presented a shadowy black-and-white photo of a “torch-wielding operative” working over a dark shape at a river’s edge to underscore the boy’s claim. He could have used the same picture to prove that Bigfoot had advanced welding skills.

  The next site was better designed and edited, but advanced a crash theory no less bizarre and amateurish. In it, military divers supposedly were in the icy river less than an hour after the plane entered the water to retrieve its unthinkable cargo: a tank full of toxins and crop-dusting equipment! The residents of Pittsburgh had been unsuspecting guinea pigs for a covert government experiment to test chemical weapon dispersion techniques! Christensen counted the exclamation points on the home page and found twenty-three, including a breathless quintuple after an assertion noting the scant distance in air miles between Pittsburgh and Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the center of US. government bioweapons research!!!!!

  Three more sites were dedicated to speculation about who, rather than what, was on the plane, and what nefarious mission might have brought them to Pittsburgh on that particular day in the early 1980s. A defecting Soviet spy? The Shah of Iran, who, it turns out, was not dead after all and headed to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center for a secret and lifesaving transplant?

  Christensen winced as he sipped his now-cold coffee. Last one—“Ray Krug’s Mon Mystery Public Documents Site,” which at first glance was the product of someone with no web design training whatsoever. The home page was a patina of blindingly small text beneath an unassuming headline: “Personal Biography and Event History.” The first few lines explained the author’s credentials as a private pilot and former Air Force crash investigator, and affirmed his commitment to sound reasoning based on available evidence rather than “rehashing the misguided fantasies of an ill-informed few.”

  Christensen sat forward. Here, it seemed, was the Wall Street Journal on a news rack of tabloids. He scrolled down the page, reading Ray Krug’s dry and wonkish recap of what was known about the plane, its capabilities and crew, and its crash. At the bottom of the page were links to “Related Materials,” including a map of the crash site, a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder, a standard fuel consumption chart for a C-130 Hercules, the official flight log for the doomed plane, the official USAF accident report, the transcript of his interview with “Towboat Operator Trey Brosky,” and a link that said simply “Contact Ray Krug.”

  Obsessed, maybe, but at least the man was thorough.

  Christensen clicked on the link to the crash site map and was struck immediately by the close quarters in which the plane went down. That section of the Mon River snaked past what remained of US Steel’s once-mighty Homestead Works. The crash site, which Ray Krug had marked with a fat, hand-drawn “X,” was square in the middle of the watery canyon between two of the city’s many transportation landmarks—the Homestead High Level Bridge and the Glenwood B&O Railroad Bridge. The radio report said the plane had run out of fuel. Would a plane like that drop from the sky like a stone? Or could the pilot guide the powerless plane to a water landing in the short gap between the two bridges? Christensen found the map’s scale indicator and estimated the distance at less than a mile.

  The map page also included PennDOT aerial photographs of the two bridges—the Homestead High Level with its table-flat passenger-car road and swirling ornamental iron street lamps, the Glenwood Railroad Bridge with its three muscular steel-girder arches and massive stone pillars designed to carry freight trains across the river.

  Other pages raised more questions than answers, thanks to Krug’s strict refusal to speculate. The control tower transcript was short and incomprehensible, a jumble of codes, beacon coordinates, and directives between the flight crew and a controller. Christensen recognized little more than the word “Mayday.”

  The C-130 fuel consumption chart was taken straight from an Air Force operations manual. It listed flow rates and main tank capacities and reserve fuel tank options—nothing related to this particular plane or its fate.

  The accident report was straightforward and not especially informative: The plane apparently developed a fuel leak after taking off from a Texas air base on the last leg of an international flight that originated at “Bullock Air Force Base.” Neither member of the flight crew noticed the critical fuel shortage until the plane was in airspace over western Maryland en route to the National Guard armory near Greater Pittsburgh International Airport. The situation was further complicated by the pilot’s confusion about which ground beacon would lead him to the military installation, “forcing a midcourse correction during which critical fuel was expended.” The four turboprops lost power at 3,400 feet and, after a powerless glide, the pilot landed it belly first in the river. Both crew members were killed on impact, their bodies swept miles downstream by the currents. Only the plane’s sheared wings and engines were found during the three-day search.

  Christensen hit the back button several times, returning to the crash site map. So the plane hadn’t dropped like a rock, but rather glided to a water landing. To do that it must have passed just above the Homestead High Level Bridge on its final descent. He scrolled down and again studied the photographs of the bridges.

  “I know that place.”

  He whirled in his desk chair, heart in his throat. Melissa was standing at his office door, a glass of orange juice in one hand, the other pointing at his computer screen.

  “Sorry, ’Lis. You scared—”

  “It’s a bridge, right?”

  His daughter moved across the room, her arm still stretched toward the screen. She advanced until her index finger touched the screen, where she traced the scrolled elegance of one of the bridge’s overhanging streetlamps. “From my dream. I’m looking down, and I see. It’s almost dark, dusk, but there’s a light shining down. And shadows like this.” She traced the ornamental ironwork on the streetlamps once again. “They’re moving in circles, like they’re dancing all in a line. There are cars, too. People out of their cars, looking up at me.”

  Christensen stood and
offered his daughter the chair. She sat but never took her eyes from the screen.

  “It’s the Homestead High Level Bridge, Melissa. You cross it every time you go to the South Side.”

  “What is this you’re looking at?”

  “A website.” Christensen weighed his next words carefully. Melissa was struggling to make sense of the percolating images in her head. In case they were memories, he didn’t want to influence her interpretation of them. “About something that happened a long time ago.”

  “I just never noticed those,” she said. “I even went to the South Side last weekend.”

  “Why do you think you noticed them now?”

  “The dreams, I guess. They’re just such an odd shape. It’s not something you’d see if you’re driving across, but the angle of that picture—” She shrugged. “Weird.”

  Melissa sipped her juice. Christensen waited.

  “Thanks for breakfast,” she said, and kissed the top of his head.

  “I just think you need to eat right.”

  His daughter’s face clouded, reminding Christensen that Melissa was still struggling with a decision about her pregnancy.

  “To regain your strength,” he added.

  She finished her juice and turned away, pretending to read the spines of books on a nearby shelf.

  “I have my appointment coming up,” she said. “But I don’t think I’m ready.”

  “Appointment?”

  “Planned Parenthood. Gene test results. Counseling.”

  He nodded. “Want me to call them for you?”

  Melissa shook her head, still absently studying the book titles. “I’ll reschedule. Maybe later this week.”

  She finally turned, and their eyes met. “Would you go with me if I asked?”

  “Whatever you want, ’Lis. Just say the word.”

  “Let me think about it, OK?”

  “OK.”

  She turned toward his office door. “I’ll be in the shower. You’re home today?”