The Falling Woman: A Novel

by Richard Farrell

  Did she think about what she was doing? Did she consider the consequences of her actions? Did she feel any responsibility to anyone? Not then. She still couldn’t unsort the scramble of memory and fact, her past a patchwork of disconnected stories and forgotten events. But during those first quiet days at the cabin, she simply allowed herself to be still. Everything slowed down. For the first time, she stopped trying to figure out what it all meant.

  But soon solitude yielded to loneliness. The morning was manageable, but by lunchtime, she became restless. The afternoon loomed, and the evening ahead suddenly felt empty, sad, lonely. She needed company, something to break up the monotony.

  Adam had left enough supplies to last a month, but she had to get out of the cabin, to do something, so she made a grocery list, put on a pair of running shoes, and decided to venture out.

  Behind the cabin was an old bicycle. She oiled the rusty chain, adjusted the seat, and then pedaled the four miles into town.

  During their affair, when she and Adam escaped to the cabin for an occasional weekend, they spent little time in the village. With its gas station, its hunting supply store, and grocery market, there wasn’t much to see or do. They preferred privacy, preferred the intimacy and anonymity that the cabin offered. But sometimes they’d go out, and of the two restaurants in town, she favored Sandy’s over the Mexican place with its oily empanadas. Sandy’s was a quaint country kitchen that doubled as a biker bar on the weekends. Today, it was the first place Erin stopped when she reached town.

  Her legs burned from pedaling the hills, but the smell of meatloaf on the afternoon breeze made her forget her discomfort. The gravel parking lot in front of the restaurant was mostly empty except for a couple of pickups and an old Harley. By nine o’clock on any given night, there might be fifty bikers inside, drinking and howling at the moon, but at one-thirty, Sandy’s ample wooden deck also sat empty. The patio furniture remained in winter storage despite the balmy conditions. Inside, kitsch adorned the walls: black-and-white photos of miners and lumberjacks next to glossy eight-by-tens of Virginia Tech jocks turned pro. Above the bar, the head of a stuffed moose shared space with a beaver. To the right, in the main dining room, a young kid was setting tables in anticipation of the evening rush.

  After college, she had worked in a place much like this, while Doug finished his dissertation work at Penn State. Back then, she squirreled away her tips while he researched complicated packet-switching algorithms and taught linear algebra to undergrads.

  Behind the bar, an older man—handsome in a rugged way, with white hair, a thin beard—smiled at her and slid a menu in her direction. Without even looking, she ordered a beer and a burger with french fries. The man reached for a napkin and silverware and introduced himself.

  “Hazard,” he said.

  “That a name or a job description?” she asked.

  “Little a both,” he said.

  She liked him immediately. When he returned with a beer, he asked if she was on vacation. Not having thought to prepare for questions, she found no answers readily available.

  “My friend has a cabin on the Middle River,” she said after a pause. “I’m staying out there.” She stopped, unsure how to proceed with this emerging story.

  “Who you hiding from?” Hazard asked. The man gave no indication either way if he was kidding or serious.

  Twenty minutes later, emboldened by the beer and by Hazard’s quiet charm, she asked him if they were hiring.

  “You don’t look like you need a job.”

  It was the first time in six months that someone had commented in a positive way about her appearance. It was the first time in twenty years that she asked someone for a job.

  “Well, I do. And if you know of anyone in town who’s looking for help, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know.”

  She had not walked into Sandy’s that day with a plan. She didn’t expect to lie, or hide, or ask for a job. She never planned to reinvent herself. Because she had very little control over what happened to her in the past year, she felt a profound freedom in this new situation, as if she’d become a child again, free to do whatever she wanted.

  She pulled a book from her bag and placed it on the bar. Hazard glanced down at the cover.

  “You a reader?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I used to like Hemingway. Read the occasional whodunit.”

  “I read once—I think it was Susan Sontag who said it—that people used to hope for tuberculosis,” she said, finishing her beer. “They wanted to get sick so they could go to a sanatorium and escape from their routine lives. They could read books and go for walks or just be still.”

  Hazard looked at her as he thought about her remark. “We’re all running from something,” he said. “If you’ve stopped running from something, you’ve probably stopped living.”

  Was that her? she wondered. Was she running? Did she even worry about why? For the first time in her life, she did not. She still sensed darkness in the void, still felt the sinister beast lurking in the shadows, but in that moment, she was profoundly happy. She felt the sheer joy at being cut loose from life.

  She ordered another beer. She and Hazard chatted about their lives in a general way. He told her that, years ago, he’d served time for armed robbery. She told him that she’d left her husband but said nothing about the accident as she picked at the last of the fries.

  “We were so strict with the girls,” she said. “I always made them get fruit for dessert when we went out to dinner. We never allowed McDonald’s or ordered pizza just because.”

  Hazard smiled. “Something’s gonna get ya,” he said. “My mother lived till she was ninety-seven, and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day until the hearse pulled into her driveway.”

  “All those years of worry and calorie counting,” she said, feeling a little drunk from the second beer. “I treated my body like a goddamn shrine. Shouldn’t there be a reward for such diligence? Shouldn’t someone else get cancer? Someone who smoked and drank too much and ate processed cheese and antibiotic-loaded beef?”

  Hazard nodded and asked if she wanted another beer. In a few more hours, the evening crowd would begin to arrive. She hadn’t meant to spend this long in a bar and certainly couldn’t stay longer. Soon headlights would shimmer through the front window. Soon country music would come on, lightly over the din of chatter, and elderly waitresses would shuffle between the tables, delivering plates of meatloaf, fried chicken, catfish, all served with mashed potatoes and gravy. It was a wonderful image, but she knew she couldn’t stay to see it. Above the bar, the mounted moose head stared down while she settled the tab.

  “I didn’t know you had moose in Virginia,” she said.

  Hazard glanced up at the trophy.

  “Came with the place,” he said. “Damn thing frightens me, to be honest, always staring down.”

  More than anything, she wanted to stay longer, to be around people. She knew better than to order another beer but didn’t want to go back to the cabin yet, just to be alone. Suddenly, the cabin seemed a sad and desperate place. She thought about her girls. She wanted to see them so much, and wished they were sitting here with her.

  “Hi, sweetie,” a drawling voice said. “I’m Sandy. This little gem is my place.”

  A woman appeared, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, the spitting image of a saint. Her bleached golden hair fell in soft curls down her back, and thick glasses magnified the wrinkles beneath her eyes. She was beautiful, a vision in a green apron, with a yellow pencil tucked behind her ear. Gravy stained the apron, and she smelled of lemon soap, bacon fat, and home. Sandy looked like she could shoe a horse, sling a mean hash, and put the grandkids to bed with a tender lullaby. “Hazard tells me you’re looking for a job.”

  23

  Radford made his way to the hangar early on Tuesday morning. He was still waiting for an answer from Ulrich on his report. On the tarmac outside, an air force flight crew was preflighting its cargo plane. Radford envied
them as well as their mission. He wanted nothing more than to climb into the plane to fly away. But he was resolved now, and ready to get back to the investigation. He’d lost over a week chasing the Falling Woman and had nothing to show for it. As he clomped down a metal staircase toward the remains of Pointer 795, a forklift’s horn beeped. The sound reminded him of diligence, of the hard work ahead, but also of certainty, of linearity. Enough is enough, he thought. The forklift lowered a pallet of debris to the floor.

  “I’m reviewing specs on the thermal fuses,” Ellsworth was saying to Ulrich as Radford approached. For the past two nights, Ellsworth had slept in the hangar. What the man lacked in social graces he made up for in dedication.

  One thing Radford had already learned, eleven days into working his first major, was that no amount of talent or reputation mattered. The only thing that mattered was hard work. You put in your hours and you didn’t complain. Ass-in-chair time, Dickie Gray called it. The job demanded far more than it returned. And he was dug in now, committed to the outcome, but toward what end? Back in D.C., before this whole thing began, he thought a major investigation would change the stakes. He assumed there’d be teamwork, camaraderie, some sort of wonderful harmony of effort. But with each passing day, the truth came into clearer focus. This work was no different, only more complex, from the work he’d done on Yankee X-Ray. Dot the i’s, check the boxes. He realized now there was nothing heroic about this work, and he felt foolish for assuming there would be. They were little more than specialized bureaucrats, engineers with bad table manners and short tempers, and all of them together with one hell of a puzzle to piece together. The most interesting personality on the team was Ellsworth, and Radford could barely breathe the same air with him.

  “Charlie, I can’t accept your report,” Ulrich said, turning to Radford. “I’m not running that upstairs. We need something conclusive. This doesn’t even give me a name.”

  “A reporter called my home yesterday,” Radford said. “My wife answered. This whole goddamn thing has become a circus. I have to get back to the investigation. I’ve already wasted enough time on this.”

  Ellsworth, tattooed forearms folded across his chest, a mocking grin on his face, stood there watching Radford suffer.

  “You see that?” Ulrich said, turning and pointing toward the press tent just on the other side of the security fence. “You answer to me. I answer to them. They tell the public, and the public calls their congressmen. Shit doesn’t roll downhill, Charlie. It rolls through a complicated maze of politicians, businessmen, bureaucrats, and lawyers. And then it rolls downhill.”

  Was he trying to be funny? With his thin nose, his wire-rimmed glasses, his skinny tie and rolled-up shirtsleeves, he looked more like a high school guidance counselor than an accident investigator. Was this the picture of success? Was that what Radford wanted to be one day? Was Gordon Ulrich the end of the line?

  “When I head over there in ten minutes, what do you think they’re going to ask me about?”

  “I turned in my report,” Radford said.

  “That’s not a report,” Ulrich said. “That’s an apology for a report. She’s gone? She disappeared?”

  “Look,” Radford says. “I don’t know what you want from me. The woman left the hospital. We have no idea who she is or where she went. And we especially don’t know if she has any part in our investigation. I have work to do. I have interviews to conduct, lab reports to chase down. I was supposed to meet with the widows of the two pilots—instead, I ran to the hospital to talk about ghosts.”

  “We’re all overworked,” Ulrich said. “Everyone here is maxed out. Twice a day I stand out there making a fool of myself.”

  Outside, the cargo plane taxied by. The low rumble of the plane’s four turboprops filled the hangar and shut off conversation. The three men stood waiting for the plane to pass.

  The plane’s round fuselage crawled past the hangar door, its nosewheel tracking a precise line. Lights blinked on the wings. In so many ways, flying had betrayed Radford, had broken his heart, but he was still intrigued by it. The mythology. The science. The codes. He still read Saint-Exupéry and Tom Wolfe, still loved watching planes in flight. No one at the agency ever talked about flying. Their work was so grim and grounded. If these people had private dreams, they’d all been stashed away. At times, Radford felt asinine clinging to his love of flying. Most days, he didn’t dwell on the past, didn’t wonder if this was the work he was meant to do. But then, like a love-struck fool, he would be flooded by the dream all over again. Fate had dealt him a different hand of cards, and it nearly broke him, but he’d landed on his feet. The problem was that it just wasn’t what he wanted. No, this will never be enough, he thought.

  The cargo plane turned left, the deepening rumble of its turboprops spooling up. He felt something raw and unformed growing inside him. His whole life, he’d followed the straight path, but where had it taken him? He’d walked into the hangar this morning with new resolve, ready to put the Falling Woman behind him. But while he watched the cargo plane, something broke in him. The plane accelerated down the runway. He didn’t even consider what he was saying before he said it.

  “Take me off the working group,” Radford said. “Put Lucy Masterson in charge of the bodies and put me on the Falling Woman full-time.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Ellsworth said.

  Ulrich’s expression crinkled, but then he seemed to grasp what Radford was saying.

  “You can tell the press you’ve put on a full-time investigator,” Radford said. “Say you are taking the story seriously.”

  “Give me a break,” Ellsworth said. “We’re turning this into the goddamn X-Files now?”

  But Ulrich shook his head and held up his hand.

  “It will only cost a few hundred man-hours,” he said. “But it will shut everybody up.”

  And the risk, Radford thought, as well as the potential reward, will all fall on someone else’s shoulders. On mine.

  “This is ridiculous,” Ellsworth said. His face was flushed with anger. “I’m sleeping in the hangar, counting fuses, and he’s getting off the pile?”

  “No,” Ulrich said. “Charlie, this is good. The public hearing is in ten days. I need a name. I need an answer. Figure out what happened. Don’t screw me, or I’ll reassign you to the goddamn highway investigations unit.”

  “I need full discretion,” Radford said. “I don’t know what the hell I’m looking for yet.”

  Ulrich placed his hand on Radford’s shoulder and forced a smile.

  “Get me something I can use,” he said. “Give me a plan of attack. Where you take it from there, that’s up to you.”

  Ulrich’s phone rang and he answered, crossing the hangar and leaving Radford alone with Ellsworth.

  “You slick motherfucker,” Ellsworth said. “You can’t hack it on the pile, so you slip out by chasing a goddamn ghost. What’s your master plan? Write a book about the woman?”

  “I’m nowhere,” Radford said. “I have no leads. No clue what I’m looking for. I just shot myself in the kneecap.”

  “You’re a hack,” Ellsworth said. “You’re not cut out for this work.”

  In spite of Ellsworth’s ire, Radford felt that for the first time since he’d joined the agency, he’d stood up for himself. He realized what he needed and he went after it. He’d be on his own now. He’d get no help from the other investigators. He worried that Lucy might never speak to him again. But he’d acted. Decisively.

  All he needed now was a plan.

  Ellsworth shook his head and walked away. In the distance, the cargo plane’s engines droned off into silence.

  24

  Tuesday morning, before her first shift at the restaurant, Erin stood, unlocked the desk drawer, and removed the phone Adam had left. He was so certain she’d crack, come to her senses, and give in. She tucked the phone into her pocket and pedaled out toward a small pond not far from the cabin.

  Starting the job
felt significant, a step toward permanence. Was she really doing it? Was she really going to walk away from her life?

  The morning air warmed her skin. Shadows and light danced over the road. A wooden dock jutted out into the lake’s silver water. A rope swung idly from a pine tree. Finches chirped along the shore. Adam would be coming back. She was confident of that. He’d keep trying to convince her to go home. And of course, it was an option. Maybe even an inevitability. She could explain to Doug. Tell her diligent husband how she’d needed time to sort out what had happened. He would understand, and the parts he couldn’t understand, he’d simply file those away.

  She turned on the phone. The world was close. She dialed the first numbers. A few more, and she could press send and the signal would bounce. Doug would answer. The enormity of that simple round button. She closed her eyes, listened to the sounds around her, and pressed down on the next number. She imagined her bed, billowing spinnakers on the river, the view from the upstairs office. She wondered if Doug was still raising the flag every morning, her grandfather’s forty-eight-star flag. Doug loved that silly old flag, almost as if he’d fought in the Battle of Leyte Gulf himself. Or was Doug grieving her death now? Had he cried? No. She knew better, knew he was orchestrating the events that gathered around her death: insurance claims, memorial services, goddamn honey-glazed hams for the mourners. What of the girls? Did Claire, so much like her father, throw herself into her studies? Would Tory drink to mask her grief? She’d never loved anything or anyone more than she loved the girls. Even then, even as she took those tentative first steps to erase herself, her own logic baffled.