She passed the photograph to Connelly, who had just finished reading the newspaper article. He handed her the clipping, but before she could even scan it, Fiona was dangling the chain in front of her face.
“Look at this necklace. Can I try it on?”
“Let me see that, please.”
Fiona reluctantly gave up the chain, and Sasha studied the worn and tarnished metal disks. They were identical. Each disk had the letters ‘BC CCCP’ embossed across the top half of the oval. Beneath the letters, there was a horizontal line. Beneath the line, ‘И-176348.’
Connelly set the photograph on the table and leaned in to look at the tags with her.
“These are dog tags, right?” She asked.
He reached out and rubbed his fingers over the smooth disks. “They sure seem to be. But they’re not ours.”
“Ours?”
“Um, I mean no branch of the U.S. military has ever used this style of identification tag, as far as I know.”
“Do you know which country does, or did?”
“Not offhand. But that backward N on the bottom, does that look …”
“Cyrillic?”
“Yeah.”
Sasha pictured the Russian alphabet that her Nana Alexandrov had taught her when she was just about the twins’ age. “It does. It’s the equivalent to our letter ‘I.’”
“Interesting.”
“What about BC CCCP? Do you know what that stands for?” she asked.
“I’m not positive, but I think—”
Whatever theory he was about to propose was interrupted when Fiona sighed heavily, and Finn let out a small whimper.
“What’s wrong with you two?” Connelly asked, furrowing his brow.
“This stuff is boring. Worst treasure box ever,” Finn pouted.
Fiona nodded in firm agreement.
Sasha looked at her children, wide-eyed. “Are you two serious? We have an article about a missing airplane, a photograph of an unknown man, and a set of tags with a secret message on them.”
“It’s probably a stretch to call it a secret message. They’re almost certainly military ID tags, and it should be easy enough to track down their provenance with a bit of research,” Connelly protested.
“Still. Right now, the message—or meaning or whatever—behind the tags is a secret.”
He shrugged.
“Do you know what this all adds up to?” she asked the kids.
“No. What?”
“It’s better than a treasure,” Connelly assured them. “It’s a mystery.”
“And we get to solve it!” Sasha explained.
Fiona gasped dramatically, and Finn clapped his hands together.
Over their heads, Sasha and Connelly exchanged a grin. She could tell from his bright eyes that her husband wasn’t feigning his enthusiasm for the sake of the kids.
He was every bit as excited as he seemed. And so was she.
3
“Whose turn is it to pick the story?” Sasha asked.
“Finn’s,” Fiona answered before her brother had the chance.
“Okay, let’s do it.”
Connelly paused in the hallway, on his way to switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer, to kiss two bath-damp heads goodnight.
“Sleep tight, satellites.”
“You too, buckaroo,” the twins sing-songed.
They padded along the hall beside Sasha, headed for Finn’s room. Until last summer, Finn and Fiona had shared a room. But when they turned five, Fiona had matter-of-factly informed her parents that she was far too old to share a room with a boy.
So, Sasha’s home office had become Fiona’s room, and the nursery had been redone as Finn’s. The two bedrooms were situated right next to one another.
And, despite Fiona’s stated need for a room of her own, more mornings than not, Connelly and Sasha would find that, during the night, one or the other of the twins made the short trip to the other’s bedroom. Now, they left a sleeping bag on the floor of each room, just by the bed, for the visiting twin.
Despite the separate rooms, they always read the bedtime stories in Finn’s room. It was slightly bigger and the more comfortable of the two, but the real reason was that Finn would conk out during the story, without fail. Fiona, on the other hand, had inherited Sasha’s sleep patterns.
After the story ended, she’d take Sasha’s hand and make the short trip to her own room, where she’d lie awake musing about the day and making up scenarios for her own amusement until her brain quieted enough to permit slumber. Just like her mama.
Sasha smiled at the thought as she herded the kids into Finn’s room. They piled on his bed.
“So what’ll be?” she asked, as Fiona curled up against her right side.
Instead of picking a book from the basket beside his bed, Finn nestled into her left side.
“I don’t want you to read a story. I want you to tell us a story.”
“Make one up?” she asked.
“Yep. A story about the treasure box.”
She leaned back against the pillows, stretched out her legs, and crossed her ankles.
“You got it. A long time ago, back before cell phones or YouTube or iPads, in a city called Pittsburgh, something mysterious and amazing happened.”
“A plane crash,” Finn interjected.
“Shh.” Fiona glared at him.
“Yes, a plane crash.” She thought back to the article she’d finally managed to read while Connelly had done bath duty. “One cold, winter’s night, on a night very much like this one, except without all the snow and ice, a large plane, a military plane, twenty feet tall, crashed in the river and sank to the bottom.”
“Crash, bang, sploosh,” Finn helpfully provided the sound effects.
Fiona raised her head and glared across her mother’s chest at him. “Shush up, Finny.”
“A brave tugboat captain hurried to rescue the pilot and passengers and took them ashore, where the kind people of Pittsburgh gave them warm, dry clothes, food for their bellies, and comfy beds to sleep in.”
“That’s nice,” Finn murmured.
Sasha paused to glance at his face. His eyelids were fluttering. It wouldn’t be long now.
“The next morning, the Air Force came to tow the plane up from the river. But, even though the river wasn’t very deep at all—only thirty feet at its deepest point—guess what they found on the bottom?”
“What?” Fiona breathed.
“Nothing! The plane was gone. Vanished.”
“Maybe it was invisible, like Wonder Woman’s plane,” she suggested.
“Maybe,” Sasha allowed.
“No, it was a ghost plane,” Finn mumbled, mostly asleep.
“A ghost plane?” Fiona breathed. Her eyes shined.
“Well, that’s a possibility, I suppose.”
Finn made an indistinct muttering sound, then turned onto his side, eyes closed.
“Good night, love bug.” Sasha smoothed back his hair and kissed his forehead.
Finn sighed.
Sasha turned to Fiona and whispered, “We’ll have to finish tomorrow. Come on, sugar bear, let’s get you to bed.”
“Can I just sleep in here tonight?” She pointed to the sleeping bag laid out on the floor.
Sasha pursed her lips. “Are you afraid? I can stay in your room until you fall asleep.”
Fiona straightened her shoulders and gaped at her mother. “No, I’m not afraid. I’m going to protect Finny. He might have a nightmare about the ghost plane and wake up scared.”
Sasha’s heart swelled at the protective heat in her daughter’s voice. “That’s a great plan. And you’re a great sister.”
Fiona smiled and wiggled into the sleeping bag. Sasha zipped her in and gave her a good night kiss, then pulled the covers up over Finn’s shoulders.
As she tiptoed out of the room, Fiona said in a soft voice, “Mama?”
“Yes?”
“That part of the story, about the plane disappe
aring, it really happened, right?”
“Apparently.”
“But how can a big plane just disappear like that?”
“I don’t know, Fee. That’s part of the mystery.”
“Maybe Finn’s right. It was a ghost plane.”
“Hmm. We’ll have to do some research tomorrow. You try to get some sleep now, okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Swipe all your thoughts away like clouds . . .”
“Until my mind is a clear blue sky. I know.”
Sasha smiled down at her, then crept into the hallway and eased the door mostly shut. She left it just far enough ajar so that Java could go in and curl up with one of the kids after his nightly prowl around the house.
As she stepped lightly down the stairs, careful to avoid the creaky board on the third step, Sasha couldn’t help playing back her daughter’s words in her mind. How could a twenty-foot-tall bomber go missing from a thirty-foot-deep river in the space of a few hours?
‘Ghost plane’ seemed as plausible as any theory she could muster. But maybe Connelly had come up with a more reasonable explanation while she’d been putting the kids to bed.
“Well?”
Connelly looked up from his laptop. “Well? That’s a deep subject.”
She groaned. “They’re asleep. Or at least Finn is. Why don’t we also put the dad jokes to rest until morning.”
He grinned at her, put his laptop to sleep, and set the device aside. “I assume you want to know if I hit on a reason for the disappearance of the B-25 bomber.”
“Clever as ever.”
He exhaled, shaking his head. “Not so clever, evidently. I’ve poked around in every secret database I’m authorized to access—and more than a few that I’m not.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. Having a husband who worked for a shadow government agency sometimes meant swallowing one’s questions.
He went on. “There’s no record of any clandestine salvage operation to recover the plane, no record of any hostile government action to destroy or steal it, no evidence to suggest where it went after it sank in the river.”
She tilted her head. From his spot on the couch next to Connelly, Mocha mirrored the action.
“So, a giant hulk of metal just vanished?”
“A giant, expensive hulk of metal owned by the military. They didn’t just shrug and walk away the next morning. They launched an extensive, multi-year investigation.”
“And they came up empty?”
He shrugged and patted the couch beside him. She snuggled in beside him, and Mocha moved over to the end, curled into a ‘C,’ and buried his nose in his tail.
Connelly draped an arm around her shoulder. “Well, yes and no. The Air Force wasn’t about to end an investigation into the disappearance of a state-of-the-art bomber with no conclusion—especially not in 1957, when they closed the matter. They couldn’t allow speculation that the Soviets were behind it.”
She blinked up at him. “So, what did they say?”
“The official explanation is that the heavily polluted river waters dissolved the plane.”
She choked back her laughter so as not to wake Finn. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Listen, I know the City of Steel was dirty and polluted back then, you know, coal dust blocking out the sun and all that. But I don’t think the water could dissolve a freaking airplane. Especially not overnight.”
“Yeah. Anecdotally, the barges that regularly traveled up and down the Mon, the Ohio, and the Allegheny did show signs of corrosion. The mills dumped tons of who-knows-what in the water back then. And it’s beyond dispute that the rivers were filthy. But …”
“There’s no way. That’s not the reason.”
“No, it’s the coverup.”
They fell into silence. Sasha rested her head on his chest and contemplated the mystery of the missing bomber and the contents of the metal box.
“Those dog tags, do you think …?” She trailed off. It was too ridiculous to say aloud.
“Do I think they belonged to a Soviet spy who somehow managed to get rid of the plane?”
“Well, yeah. I know, it sounds improbable.”
“And yet … ‘when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”
She rolled her eyes at the quote from his favorite Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story.
“Okay, Sherlock Holmes. But we haven’t ruled out every other possibility. What about the photograph of JCP? We should run that down, too, in the morning. Maybe, if we can identify him, we can craft a competing theory. One less fit for a spy movie.”
He laughed, and his chest rumbled against her ear. “Maybe. You should call Jordana, and ask her if she knows who owned this place before her parents.”
“That’ll be public record.”
“It is. But, given the Mega-Polar-Snowbomb Ultrastorm of 2020, all the government offices are going to be closed, and some of the databases are off-line. There are scattered power outages, and Downtown is currently without power.”
“Yeesh. I should call my parents and make sure they’re okay.”
“They called to check on us while you were putting the kids down. They’re all set, and so are your brothers’ families out in the ‘burbs. They were worried about us.”
“Well, we’re safe and warm, and we have plenty of food. And coffee, right?”
“Right. I checked that the flashlights all have fresh batteries and even set up the French press, just in case the power does go out. You’ll get your morning mug of coffee, and that’s a promise.
She snuggled in closer. “Then I have everything I need.”
He stroked her hair. “Me, too.”
“And we have a puzzle to solve. What could be better?”
“I can’t think of anything.”
She sighed and let her eyelids cover her eyes. Tired as she was, her mind chugged on, teasing out connections between the dog tags, the photo, the plane, and her house, until at last, her breathing slowed and her brain settled.
She was already half-asleep when Connelly stood to carry her up the stairs to their bedroom. He waved off her murmurs of protest, and she wrapped her arms around his neck.
Tomorrow, they’d make pancakes, play more board games, and maybe solve a sixty-five-year-old mystery. If nothing else, it would be a fun diversion to pass the time.
4
Tuesday, December 29
Sasha slept in. When she opened her eyes and saw the time glowing on her bedside clock, she bolted upright in surprise.
7:53?
She was going to be late for work.
Then the heavy, oppressive silence seeped into her brain, and realization dawned: There would be no work today. The entire city was blanketed by snow and encased in ice. Shut down, closed up, and muffled. The lack of ambient noise must’ve lulled her into a deeper than usual slumber.
She flopped back against her pillow and tried to remember the last time she rose after the sun. She certainly couldn’t recall sleeping until nearly eight o’clock. Probably back in 2013, after her almost-fatal stabbing. Definitely not since she’d become a small business owner/mother of twins.
The twins. Surely they weren’t still sleeping?
She glanced at the lump of covers beside her to confirm that Connelly was, in fact, still in bed. He was.
She popped to her feet, grabbed her robe from the hook on the back of the bathroom door, and shrugged into it as she hurried down the hall to the kids’ rooms. She stopped at Fiona’s room and peeked in through the open door. The bed was empty and hadn’t been slept in. She’d spent the night in the sleeping bag on Finn’s floor.
Sasha belted her robe and crept the few feet to Finn’s room. The door was ajar, no doubt the work of Java, who blinked up at her from the foot of Finn’s bed, then yawned and closed his eyes.
Finn was also in bed, mouth slightly open, pillow damp with drool, one arm flung over his face
, sleeping hard.
On the floor, Fiona mirrored his position, also drooling, while Mocha stretched out beside her, snoring softly.
By some blizzard-induced miracle, the entire McCandless-Connelly household was sound asleep. At eight a.m.
Far be it from Sasha to let a gift from Mother Nature go unappreciated. She backed away from the door and tiptoed down the stairs, reveling in the unexpected peace.
In the kitchen, she poured a mug of coffee and executed a series of quick stretches. Then she padded into the living room and took up her spot by the fireplace, unlit for now. But it was still one of the coziest nooks in the drafty old house.
She scrolled through the new emails on her phone. Her new messages were few, as to be expected during the slowest week of the year. The fact that a massive storm had dumped feet of snow and ice on the city had only lessened her already light workload.
With a series of swipes and taps, she approved the payroll run for her accountant, entered the previous week’s time into the electronic billing database, and reviewed a proposed order of dismissal that would resolve a thorny contract dispute.
“Done,” she announced and set aside her phone with an air of victory. A full morning’s worth of administrative work finished before she’d drained her first cup of coffee—it had to be a record.
She leaned back and closed her eyes, breathing in the silence for a moment, then savored the last few swallows of coffee and headed out to the kitchen for a refill.
She poured herself another cup and returned to her phone to text Jordana, her part-time intern.
Jordana, like any self-respecting college student, preferred to communicate via text. Sasha knew if she called the younger woman, the call would roll to voicemail, and, eventually (but maybe not today) Jordana would text her a response.
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