So, in the interest of expediency, she thumbed out her message:
Hope your holiday was great
and you’re safe and warm.
Just in case you were planning
to come in today, the office
is closed, obvs.
Jordana responded immediately:
Obvs. I’m cozy in my apartment. :-)
Then, immediately after, she added:
Do you need help with F & F?
In addition to being the office intern and carrying a full course load at the Chatham University, Jordana was Sasha’s go-to babysitter when the grandparents weren’t available.
Nope, we’re all set.
I have a question about the house.
Jordana was also the daughter of the former owners of Sasha and Connelly’s home—a fact that could prove helpful in getting to the bottom of the mystery that had been locked in a box in the attic for decades.
Um, kay?
Do you happen to know who
owned it before your parents?
She rolled her neck and drank her coffee while the three little dots on her screen blinked to indicate that Jordana was crafting a reply.
Yeah, Mr. Cowman. I swear
that’s really his name!
He’s dead, tho.
…
Mom and Dad bought the place
from his kids. Do you think
they tagged the joint when
we moved in?
Sasha laughed at the memory. She’d met Jordana when the teen had jumped the backyard fence in the middle of the night, intent on spray painting graffiti on the shed. Her parents’ divorce and the subsequent sale of the home she’d grown up in had left her furious and ready to lash out.
Being nine months pregnant had left Sasha more understanding (and slower) than usual, so instead of taking down the intruder or pressing charges, she’d offered her a part-time job. It had turned out to be one of the best hormone-addled decisions she’d ever made.
LOL. Any chance you know
Mr. Cowman’s first name?
Sorry, no. But he was
a newspaper reporter.
I remember that.
Sasha grinned down at her phone. A newspaper reporter named Cowman? She had all the leads she needed.
Ah, you’re the best! Thanks, J!
She abandoned the phone and dug her laptop out from under the pile of books and journals perched atop it. Coffee forgotten, she logged into the Carnegie library’s electronic archives and dived deep into the annals of Pittsburgh’s journalistic history.
When she came up for air and headed upstairs to retrieve her printouts from the printer in Connelly’s office, she was surprised to learn she wasn’t the only one diving.
As she reached the top of the stairs, she heard squealing, and a flash of purple streaked past her into the bathroom.
“Did Fiona just run past me in her bathing suit?” she asked her husband’s back.
He turned from the shallow hall closet where they stored out of season clothes and extra linens. He held a swim mask and a plastic breathing tube in his left hand and Finn’s swim trunks in his right.
“Good morning. Yes, she did.”
Finn raced out of his bedroom and tugged the swim trunks from Connelly’s hand.
“Thanks, Dad!” he called over his shoulder as he dashed back into his room and banged the door shut.
“So, um, the pool’s closed.”
He grinned at her. “But the bathtub isn’t.”
“They’re going swimming in the tub?”
“Nope, they’re going diving in the tub. It’s research. We’re going to recreate the B-25 bomber crash using a LEGO airplane. You know, the one with the pilot mini-figure that you switched the heads on so it would be a woman.”
She knew the one. She’d also swapped out the head on the doctor so he’d be a Black man.
“Do you want me to supervise while you get a cup of coffee and take care of Mocha and Java? Or do you want to play lifeguard, and I’ll handle pet duty?”
“I’ll feed the animals and take Mocha outside if you’ll be in charge up here until I’m back. You want me to bring you a cup of coffee when I come back up?”
“What do you think?” She laughed.
“Noted.”
Finn’s door swung open, and he darted out, calling, “Don’t forget the pollution!”
“The pollution?”
“Don’t worry, it’s all-natural. I’m going to steep some tea, and we’ll dump it in the tub once it’s cooled to make the water murky.”
“Nice touch. Oh, that reminds me. I did some research of my own this morning. The man who lived here before Jordana’s family was a reporter for The Pittsburgh Press.”
“The what?”
“Right, of course, you’re not from here. I think it was the first paper in town. It definitely had the biggest circulation. When I was growing up, the Post-Gazette came in the morning, and the Press was the evening paper. My parents got both delivered.”
“That sounds like Val and Pat.”
“Yeah. The Press had better comics,” she remembered. “Anyway, the owner of the house, Archibald Cowman wrote for the Press. In fact, he wrote that article we found in the box.”
Connelly’s left eyebrow shot up. “He clipped his own piece and stuffed it in a box? Weird way to preserve your work.”
“He didn’t keep it for posterity. He was trying to solve the mystery. He wrote about it every so often for years, decades, on the anniversary of the crash, trying to nudge people’s memories, generate new leads, solicit tips. He was obsessed.”
“Well, did he make any progress?”
“He stopped writing about it in 1980. He did a big, long-form piece for the twenty-fifth anniversary. And guess what happened?”
“He solved the mystery.”
“Nope. He was threatened. Someone called and told him that if he wrote another article about the missing plane, the only thing anybody would ever find in that river was his body. It must have rattled him because that was his last piece on the subject.”
“How did you find out about the call? Was that in the paper?”
She shook her head. “No. After I read everything in the library’s archives, I did some Naya-style digging.”
Her law partner, Naya Andrews, had a talent for finding dirt on the Internet. And now she did, too.
“And?”
“And Archie stopped writing articles about the crash, but he didn’t stop searching for answers. He filed FOIA requests with every agency you could imagine, and he also filed a police report about the threatening telephone call.”
“Anything ever come of it?”
“The police traced the number back to a payphone … in some village in the English countryside.”
“Like England, England. With the Queen and the clock tower?”
“And the boy wizard and the double-decker buses. Yes, that one.”
“Hmm.” Connelly’s sleepy expression had vanished, replaced by keen interest. “And this English mystery man never contacted him again?”
“Nope. Never. Mr. Cowman lived another thirty-one years, and died in his sleep in 2011.”
“So, what are you thinking?”
Screams echoed off the bathroom tile. The splash of water over the side of the tub sent a chill racing along her spine.
“I’m thinking I need to get in there now. But I can tell you what Cowman thought. He thought the man in the picture—JCP—was behind the call.”
“JCP? MI6? That’s what it said on the photograph, right?” He scratched his neck.
“Right. MI6. The United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service.”
“What James Bond movie have we landed in the middle of?” he mused.
“No kidding. And you know what today is, right?”
His eyes widened. “Wait. Our anniversary isn’t until tomorrow. Right?”
She let him panic for a moment before shaking her head. “Righ
t. But it’s the sixty-fifth anniversary of the crash of the B-25. I say we try to track down this JCP person and rattle his cage.”
Relief washed over his face. Then he narrowed his eyes. “If he’s even still alive. He’d have to be in his late eighties, if not older.”
Before she could respond, Mocha streaked out of the bathroom, screeched to a halt, and shook herself vigorously, from tail to ears, spraying water all over the hallway. Then she hurtled herself down the stairs.
“Good luck with pet duty,” Sasha called as Connelly scrambled after their soaking wet dog.
5
Connelly’s cell phone rang while he was mixing up the pancake batter. He craned his neck to catch Sasha’s eye.
“Could you grab that for me? It’s not locked.”
She blinked in surprise. Her husband’s cell phone, much like his laptop, was usually kept locked with a password, and sometimes his fingerprint, to protect any national security secrets that he might be working on.
She shrugged, rested the knife she was using to cut up strawberries on the cutting board, and wiped her hands on the nearest dish towel.
“Sure thing.” As she grabbed the phone from the charger, she glanced down at Hank’s name scrolling across the display. “It’s Hank. I’ll put him on speaker.”
Connelly nodded.
“Hi Hank, it’s Sasha. Leo’s got his hands full—he’s making us a late breakfast.”
“How are you folks doing?” Hank’s deep voice rumbled out of the speaker.
“Uncle Hank!” the twins cried. “Are you coming over so we can all play?”
Sasha shook her head. As great as it would be to get together with Hank and his six adopted children, the roads simply weren’t passable.
“Ah, I wish we could. The kids are out in the back, trying to build a snowman. Last I saw they had Calla up on Mark’s shoulders so she wouldn’t get lost in a snowbank.”
Finn and Fiona giggled, and Sasha smiled at the image.
“Is Cole still home from college?”
“He sure is. He’s not set to go back until the second week of January. It’s nice to have an extra set of hands around here. Listen, Leo, I’ve got that information you want. Is this a good time to talk? Once they all come back inside, well, you know the chaos that’ll ensue. I won’t be able to hear myself think.”
“Uh …” Connelly hedged.
Sasha arched an eyebrow. “Seriously? I can take over at the griddle.”
Finn groaned.
“No, no, noooooo,” Fiona moaned.
“Come on now, I’m capable of flipping pancakes.”
Connolly handed over the spatula and said in an undertone, “You do know how to do this, right?”
She pretended not to hear Hank’s choked-back laughter through the phone. “Go.”
Connelly took his phone from her and headed into the living room.
Sasha poured a glob of batter onto the griddle in a not-quite circular shape and stared down at it. Bubbles were forming in the pancake’s surface.
What did that mean?
Flip it, she decided. She edged the spatula under the pancake and turned it. It broke in two, and raw batter oozed out from the middle.
“Son of a … biscuit!” She scooped up the mangled mess and tossed it in Mocha’s bowl.
She muttered under her breath and started over.
From the living room, she could hear the low timbre of Connelly’s voice but couldn’t make out what he was saying.
After a few moments, he returned to the kitchen and eyed the small stack of lopsided, unevenly cooked pancakes at her elbow.
“Thanks for pitching in. Why don’t I take over?”
She snorted and slapped the spatula back into his hand. As she poured herself another cup of coffee, she pretended not to hear Finn and Fiona whispering about her cooking and pointing toward the dog’s dish.
Connelly looked over at them. “The first pancake never turns out.”
She wondered if that was true. But even if it was, it didn’t explain the rest of the sad, misshapen lumps she’d made.
She placed a bowl of cut strawberries on the table between the twins. “Everybody’s a critic. Here, share these.”
“Thanks, Mama,” they chirped.
A moment later, Connelly slid two perfect silver-dollar-sized pancakes each onto two plates and handed them to the kids.
“I figure you and I can eat the, um, practice ones,” he said.
She shrugged and watched Finn pour a small lake of syrup onto his plate. Fiona wrinkled her nose at the syrup and reached for the butter.
As they ate, Finn and Fiona spun a tale about the ghost plane. When they finished, the twins dragged their step stools over to the kitchen sink to rinse the dishes.
“I need to talk to Mom for a minute. Do you two pancake monsters think you can load the dishwasher and wipe down the table, too?”
“Yep!”
“Yep!”
“Thanks, pumpkins.” Sasha grinned at them, then she poured herself another mug of coffee and trailed her husband into the sitting room.
“So,” he began as she settled in next to him on the oversized club chair.
“So, what’s new with Hank?”
“You remember how I told you I couldn’t get any information on the missing bomber through my usual channels?”
“I do.”
“I knew I wouldn’t have any better luck with those dog tags. But BC CCCP stands for the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union, so they likely date back to the crash.”
“Sure.” She’d figured as much.
“Even if I could sneak into a database, any information that old would be mothballed in a paper archive, not anything I could easily access.”
“So, you reached out to Hank.”
“I did. And he called a friend at the War College in Carlisle. She’s a war historian specializing in Soviet-US relations during the 1950s and 60s.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said the serial number indicates that the tags belonged to a Soviet soldier with the last name Ivanoff.”
She frowned. “That’s not much.”
“No, it’s not,” he agreed. “But she also said that a Vladimir Ivanoff, assigned to the Chukotski Base in Siberia, was declared missing in action in 1956.”
“Huh.”
“Right.”
“What action?”
“It wasn’t specified. But this professor friend told Hank that, from the way the description was written,—the wording, certain turns of phrase—it was clear to her that Ivanoff was an officer with Soviet Intelligence. The GRU.”
“The dog tags in Archie Cowman’s box belonged to a Soviet intelligence officer?”
“Apparently.”
“And what does this have to do with a downed U.S. bomber in the Monongahela River?”
He spread his palms wide and shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine. And Hank’s, and the historian’s. But there is one other thing that’s interesting. After she accessed the file on Ivanoff, Hank’s friend got a call from the Pentagon. They were very interested in why she was reading up on a Soviet intelligence officer who’s been presumed dead for more than six decades.”
Sasha sucked in a breath. “Yeesh. What did she say?”
“She sort of fudged it. She said a friend of a friend was working on a genealogy project, running down the family tree.”
“How did that go over?”
“DoD—the call came from an aide to the Secretary of Defense, Sasha—DoD told her not to repeat anything she saw in the Ivanoff files and not to access them again.”
“Wow. That’s … weird.” She hugged her long cardigan tight around her torso.
“Yeah. So Hank obviously can’t help us any more. And he wants us–”
“To let it go.”
“Right. It’s probably not the best choice of family project for us and two five-year olds.”
“That’s true,” she agreed.
H
e stared into his hands for a moment, then looked up at her, his gray eyes searching. “But, we’re not going to let it go, are we?”
“Can we? I mean, can you?”
He screwed up his face.
“I can’t,” she plowed ahead.
He let out a relieved sigh. “Me neither.”
“Do you think the Department of Defense is really going to care what some random Pittsburgh family of four does to pass the time while snowed in?”
He pinned her with a look. “Let’s not pretend we’re a normal family. I’m an off-the-books agent for Department of Homeland Security and you’re a …”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m a trouble magnet.”
He pulled her closer and hugged her to his chest. “You said it, not me.”
She inhaled his cedar and citrus body wash scent for a long, heady moment before she pulled away. “Hank’s friend’s cover story gave me an idea. I think I know another way to track down Agent Ivanoff.”
“Oh, really? Care to share?”
She dropped a kiss near his ear, then hopped to her feet. “Nope. You herd the twins for an hour or so and give me some quality time with my laptop. I’ll have something to report in no time.”
As she headed toward the front of the house to grab her laptop, he called after her, “Hey, Sasha?”
She twisted her neck to look back at him. “Yeah?”
“Pancake pro tips: use medium heat, and don’t crowd the griddle.”
She stared back at him for a long, wordless moment, then straightened her shoulders and marched out of the room, ignoring the soft laughter that followed her.
Sasha holed herself up in the bedroom to do her research. As promised, in a little over an hour, she came back downstairs, clutching a sheaf of papers and wearing a triumphant grin.
She hurried into the kitchen to find Leo and the kids. Finn and Fiona looked up from the table where they were coloring to greet her with victorious smiles that matched her own.
Full Fathom Five Page 3