Ghosts on a Plane

by M. L. Bullock

  “I see. That explains why you’ve never heard of her.”

  Starr Garcia’s voice rose above the whine of the plane engines. She clearly wasn’t happy with Antoinette’s help. She shouted, “You better find her, damn it! Get her out here now!”

  Glancing down the aisle, Heath said, “Uh-oh. I think I’ll go see if I can help in some way.”

  Before I could say another word, he was down the aisle and walking toward Antoinette and Starr. Typical. I bet he would like to help her. I guessed the rumors about Heath Blake being a playboy were true. I dug in my pocket for my toy airplane. This was as good a time as any to meditate or at least feel a little lucky, but it wasn’t there. The darn thing must have fallen out of my pocket. I patted my hips to be sure I hadn’t misplaced it, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I dug around the seat and looked behind me. What in the world? How unlucky could I be to lose my lucky charm?

  “Don’t tell me to calm down!” Starr Garcia wasn’t going to be coddled by anyone. I could see Heath’s handsome face lean toward her as if he wanted to offer her a warm, comforting shoulder.

  Didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t interested.

  Starr stomped her feet and screamed profanities at Antoinette, who appeared unmoved by her anger. The blond air hostess remained oddly aloof, smiling and mannequin-like.

  Heath put his hand on Antoinette’s shoulder, an alpha male move for sure, but it didn’t work the way he planned. He immediately withdrew his hand as if something had bitten him, but Antoinette never acknowledged him or stopped smiling at Starr. She was a weird lady, for sure. And what was up with that yellow smile? Had her whitening toothpaste stopped working mid-flight? I was amused at seeing his flirtation skills go to waste on both women.

  The plane lurched, and my stomach threatened to do cartwheels if it happened again. I leaned over in my seat and put my head between my legs, instinctively reaching for the airsickness bag. I prayed I wouldn’t need it, but just in case… I could feel the rum and coke churning in my tummy.

  My phone jingled in my purse. The captain had asked us all to turn off our electronic devices, but I’d forgotten. I didn’t get many texts, usually advertisements, and only my sister called, and the bookstore when my orders came in. This was a text message from Amy.

  I am so proud of you, Bonnie. You are the best big sister ever. See you when you land. Love you!

  After reading it, I shoved the airsickness bag back in the seat pocket in front of me and clamped my hands on the armrests to steady myself. God, I wish this queasiness would go away. After the world stopped spinning, I texted her back. Surely, the captain wouldn’t begrudge me one text. In mid-text, my phone rang and displayed Amy’s number. Despite my concerns about breaking the rules, I answered it in a whisper.

  “Hey, Amy, you caught me at a bad time. We’ve got some turbulence on the flight.”

  Sanguis eius…

  “Amy?”

  Sanguis eius exquiritur…

  The voice on the other end of the line certainly wasn’t Amy’s. I listened again, hoping to make out the words, when the man’s voice screamed in my ear, “Sanguis eius exquiritur!”

  With a muffled scream, I dropped the phone on the floor, but it didn’t shut the caller up. His voice got louder and louder until I kicked the phone away. It was a reflex. My heart pounded in my chest, and I searched for the couple behind us, hoping someone besides me heard the devilish voice. Walter and his wife were gone. Probably got tired of dealing with crazy old me and found another place to sit. Good riddance because I knew someone had grabbed my ankle. In fact, just thinking about it made my skin tingle where that hand had been, and now my phone was screaming Latin phrases at me.

  I looked around the half-empty plane and didn’t see the older couple anywhere. I decided I didn’t want to be back here alone. And I was very much alone right now.

  Sanguis eius exquiritur.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” I called to Heath as I stepped over the phone, which had somehow ended up in the aisle. I slid it back under Heath’s seat with my foot but refused to pick it up.

  “Starr’s daughter is missing. Excuse me, her stepdaughter. I’m going to help Antoinette search for her. You want to help?”

  “Sure. Where do we start?” I glanced at my vacant seat. Was someone hiding behind it? Couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. I’d just left there.

  “I guess the best thing to do is start at the back and work toward the front?” His question was for Antoinette, but she’d hurried to her drink cart to fix Starr a drink. The diva had collapsed in a seat with her phone in her hand. Antoinette appeared wholly unconcerned that a child had gone missing. She came back with a drink and offered it to Starr, who took it with shaking fingers.

  “I’ll let the captain know we’re searching,” Antoinette said. Then she was gone again.

  Starr was crying now, but I noticed she hadn’t shed one tear, what my grandmother Minnie would have called crocodile tears. Starr squeezed her phone with her ultra-long brightly painted fingernails, her anguished face turned up toward Heath. “They better find her! These people better not have lost Sasha! She’s all I have left! When we land, I’m going to make sure the FBI knows about this crap. It’s like they don’t even care that she’s missing.”

  “You’d think they’d have an air marshal on here, but I guess they don’t do that as much for smaller planes. Bonnie and I will look for Sasha. She’s probably playing a trick on you or something.”

  “Please,” she said as she lowered her voice, her dark eyes squinted and sad. “Don’t tell anyone she’s missing. I can’t let the word get out that I lost Gray’s daughter on an airplane. I just don’t need this right now.”

  “I understand, Starr. We both do. Come on, Bonnie. We’ll head to the back and work our way up.”

  We began to walk toward the back of the plane when I heard the voice again.

  Sanguis eius exquiritur.

  I stopped, and Heath bumped into me. “Do you hear that?” I asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “I keep hearing a voice. I’ve heard it more than once.”

  His dark eyes widened, and I instantly felt foolish. Why would I tell a stranger I was hearing voices?

  “It’s probably someone’s phone or laptop. You know, they’re listening to a movie or music or something. I think we need to go find Sasha before she gets into mischief.”

  “Fine, don’t believe me, but you can’t deny this flight is weird,” I whispered.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he shrugged, but I wasn’t going to be deterred. I wanted him to admit I was right. I needed to know I wasn’t going crazy. “Tell me the truth, Heath Blake. Something is off here. And another thing: where the heck are all the people? We had a plane half-full of folks when we took off, or so I thought, but now, well, I’d say we have half that. Where are Walter and his wife? Those kids? And where the heck did that nun go? Where could they have gone?”

  Again, he shrugged. “I didn’t count heads when I came on, but we could always ask Antoinette how many passengers there should be.”

  “Have you looked at Antoinette lately? The less I have to talk to her, the better. She gives me the creeps.”

  “Yeah, me too,” he admitted as he rubbed his hand. We were at the back of the plane now, and he took a deep breath. “All right, so let’s get this search going. If you were a ten-year-old girl, where would you hide?”

  The plane bounced again but only for a second. Out one of the windows, I saw a strange green cloud. And in the cloud, I saw a face. An angry, distorted face.

  It grinned at me before it disappeared.

  10

  Heath Blake

  Bonnie and I spent half an hour searching for the girl. We didn’t find a trace of her—not so much as a hair ribbon, or any indication that Sasha Garcia had been on the plane. The only proof we found was with Starr, Sasha’s boarding pass and her Hello Kitty backpack. If I hadn’t seen the child myself, I wouldn’t have believed it was a p
ossibility, but she was gone. Either the girl was the hide-and-seek champion of the century or something bad had happened to her.

  Confused, Bonnie and I walked back to our seats and left Starr in the care of Antoinette, who did a good job of feeding the woman drink after drink.

  This was certainly a head-scratcher. Well, I’d done my part. Starr was correct; the feds would undoubtedly get involved. They would tear this aircraft apart looking for Sasha, and no doubt they’d solve the mystery before the day was over. The only thing that concerned me was getting those stones onto the property. A lengthy interview with the FBI would slow me down. Think, Heath! Where could she be? It seemed impossible that a child could disappear in a confined space. This wasn’t a large plane, and there were no decent places to hide except for storage cabinets in the hospitality area, the restrooms, and the overhead compartments. We’d checked all those, with no sign of the girl.

  Beside me, Bonnie, the woman who looked like a porcelain doll with perfect skin, pink lips, and dark blue eyes, wrung her hands and stared out the window. If nothing else, this had given her something to think about besides plane crashes and airline disasters. She smelled delicious and strangely familiar. What was that scent? I couldn’t place it. I’d been trying to place it for the past half-hour. It suddenly came to me. Bonnie smelled like taffy, the old-fashioned kind Gloria and I used to pull as children in our kitchen.

  Sanguis eius exquiritur.

  I sat up now and glanced to my left, the direction the voice had come from. Nobody was over there. I felt Bonnie tug on my arm. She asked with wide blue eyes, “Are you going to tell me you didn’t hear that?”

  “I don’t know what I heard,” I said, unwilling to add fire to her fears. “Hey, I think the temperature has dropped in here. I’m freezing; are you cold? You want a blanket? I think there are some up here.” I began rummaging through the overhead and found two blankets. Offering her one, I tossed the other on my seat.

  “I have a jacket,” she said impatiently. “Now, tell me you don’t think this whole flight is weird. Shouldn’t we have landed on the island by now? According to my watch, we’re thirty minutes late.” I stuffed the extra blanket back in the overhead compartment while she held her watch up to her ear. “What are the odds of that? I just bought this watch battery, and it quit working.”

  “It’s not a Timex, I take it,” I joked because I didn’t want to agree with her. That would mean she was right, and I’d have to face the fact that we were in Weirdsville, ten thousand feet above the earth.

  “Mr. Blake? May I bring you a pillow? I think I have some left in storage,” Antoinette purred as she rubbed my neck with her freezing hand. I shrank from her touch and wrapped the blanket tighter around me. I glanced up at her and recoiled. Her perfect lipstick had been smeared away, or something. Her lip color wasn’t at all natural-looking. Were her lips blue?

  “No,” I said quickly. “No, thank you.”

  “Very good.” She smiled and showed grimy-looking teeth. How in the hell could I have ever thought her attractive? Pushing her wobbly drink cart down the aisle, she paused every few seats like she was searching for something until she rattled away behind the curtain that separated us.

  “You can’t tell me you think she’s normal. Something is wrong with her. Just look at her. And where is everyone else? What happened to the couple behind us, Heath? Are you going to pretend that they haven’t disappeared too? Like Sasha?” Bonnie’s whisper rose to dramatic levels.

  “Please, Bonnie, don’t get worked up over it. I think you should remain calm. Take deep breaths.” She wasn’t listening to a word I said now but pointing to the foggy window. A chill crept up my leg, and I fumbled with the overhead air.

  “Don’t get worked up? We’ve got a little girl missing, and a zombie airline hostess.”

  I couldn’t help but shiver. “That’s a bit unfair. She’s obviously having a bad day.”

  “And I saw something earlier—a face in the cloud, a man’s face. He was staring at me and grinning, then he vanished, and now we haven’t landed, and…”

  “Bonnie, I know you don’t know me, but I wish you’d take my word for it. Things like this happen all the time when you fly. It’s just part of the experience. As far as seeing faces in clouds, that’s not a mystical experience. It’s easy to do when you spend your time staring at them. People call the phenomenon ‘matrixing.’ It’s when you’re looking at something like a dull mirror, a shadowy area in your house, or even a patch of clouds, and your brain tries to find familiar images. That’s all it was.”

  “And what about the voice? You want to lie to me and tell me you didn’t hear that voice earlier?”

  She had me there. I had heard it too, but telling her wasn’t going to help our situation. Bonnie was determined to freak out on me, and why did I care? She wasn’t my girlfriend, just a co-worker. An employee, technically. And how should I know what it was? Could have been anything. I squeezed her hand comfortingly, but the airplane began to shudder as if the pilot were trying to put on the brakes. That wasn’t how flying worked, was it?

  Bonnie gasped beside me and squeezed my hand. Both of us closed our eyes, and I whispered, “It’s all right. Just some bumpy air.”

  Finally, the captain came on the intercom. “Ladies and gentlemen, we continue to experience turbulence and have had to alter our flight plan to adjust for the unexpected weather. Because of the adjustment, there’s been a slight delay in our arrival time. We should arrive at Rachel Island in approximately forty-five minutes.”

  “See? Nothing to worry about.” My confident grin wasn’t helping the situation. Bonnie pulled her hand away and gave me an accusing stare before she went back to staring out the window and pretending I wasn’t there. I leaned back again, hoping to close my eyes for a minute. Not to sleep. There’d be no sleeping on this fright flight that I could see. Bonnie was right, this place was a damn nightmare. Without letting on, I glanced around the cabin and had to agree with her. There were fewer passengers now, and the ones who were left were kind of sketchy looking. Who was the guy in the hoodie? I didn’t remember seeing him earlier, or the nun either. I wrapped my wrinkled jacket around me and tugged at the blanket.

  The crinkling of paper in my jacket pocket reminded me of the letter I carried. Taking it out, I rubbed my hands over the thick envelope. My name was typed on the front in careful letters. The name hadn’t been printed on any fancy printer. The depressions in the letters proved someone had typed my name in hard, even strokes on an old-fashioned typewriter.

  Rubbing the seal on the back of the envelope, I felt frustrated about not knowing what was inside. Who put wax seals on envelopes nowadays? And why all the secrecy? If Bonnie hadn’t been sitting beside me, I would have held the envelope next to the overhead light to see if I could take a peek at what was inside. Damn it! This was ridiculous, but the elderly attorney’s instructions had been clear.

  Take the remnants of Blake Castle to Rachel Island, your official address, and place them at the four corners of the property. Then come to my office, and we’ll break the seal. At that time, all will be revealed, and all will be yours.

  Funny thing was, I rarely went home to Rachel Island anymore. This whole archaic inheritance process would have been much quicker if I’d made my official address my loft downtown before crazy Uncle Alistair died, or so I guessed. I wasn’t sure how all this worked. Maybe I should have argued harder about it, but it hardly seemed like a big deal considering I was about to become a multi-millionaire with almost no effort on my part. Too bad my mother hadn’t lived to see this day. She would have been proud; I was sure of it. And Gloria.

  I’m sorry, Gloria. For the thousandth time, I’m sorry.

  I rubbed my finger on the seal. Was that a crack? Damn it! How had I done that? As I examined it closer, I could see the seal did have a crack in it. Somehow, I’d cracked the thing during my travels. For better or for worse, the damage had been done. I ran my finger over the crack, and the seal
fell apart in my hands. What was I going to do? Surely I wouldn’t lose the estate over an accidental crack.

  Well, the damage was done now. Might as well know what was inside. What could it hurt? If a broken seal meant I’d lose the inheritance, I wanted to know what this was about. Stuffing the seal remnants in my pocket for safekeeping, or proof, I unfolded the heavy notepaper.

  There was only one line on it. In Latin, of course.

  Sanguis eius exquiritur!

  I whispered the words. I wracked my brain, trying to drum up information from college. I’d taken two years of Latin while I entertained the idea of going to law school. And then it came to me. I knew what it meant.

  I whispered the words just to be sure.

  Sanguis eius exquiritur! Blood is required!

  My hands felt sweaty, my throat dry. Even though the cabin had gotten increasingly colder during the flight, I was sweating profusely again. What was going on? What the hell did this mean? Blood was required. Required for what?

  I folded the note with shaking hands and tried to slide it back into the envelope.

  It burst into flames.

  11

  Starr Garcia

  Getting a signal on this plane proved impossible. I’d never had problems on other flights, but now I couldn’t even get one bar. Never again! I thought as I swallowed the last of the 7 and 7. Where the hell had the hostess gone? I needed a refill. As I sniffed away another round of tears, then tapped on my phone screen again. Nothing. I had to talk to my agent or my public relations team, somebody who could help me deal with this mess. I glanced around me to see if someone else had a phone, but my earlier and nearest seatmates were nowhere to be found. Where was everyone?

  Right on cue, freaky Antoinette appeared with another drink. I accepted it with a dismissive wave and watched the woman hobble away. She must have broken a high heel or turned her ankle or something. And I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like she had a stain on the hem of her skirt. Was that blood?