Broken Wings

  “I want to tell you what I know about the crash,” Addison said finally. “Because I think you have a right to know. Has anyone told you how it happened?”

  Jason’s hand froze in midair just before launching another rock. “No,” he said.

  “Do you want to know? Because I’ll only tell you if it’s something you want…or need…to know.”

  Jason turned his hand and let the rocks slip to the ground, one at a time. A slow nod was Addison’s answer.

  Addison thought for a moment, choosing his words with painstaking care. “According to the tape and all the other information we have, nothing went wrong during flight,” he began quietly. “It was on the final approach into Shreveport that something happened.”

  Addison picked up one of the rocks that Jason had dropped and rolled it in his palm, considering how to say what Jason most needed to hear, without taking the easy way out and lying. “Jason, do you know what a glide path is?”

  “Yeah,” Jason whispered. “I think so.”

  Addison wasn’t convinced, so he explained to make sure, using hand gestures to illustrate what seemed vague. “It’s the angle of about two and a half degrees from the runway, one that the plane has to line up with on its approach. There’s also the localizer, which lines you up with the runway. After you’ve centered up the localizer and are aligned with the runway, the glide path bar comes down on the instruments, and when it reaches the center, you’re on the glide path. If the bar goes up a little, you pull the nose up a little…if the bar goes down a little, you push the nose forward a little. Staying on that path helps you make a smooth landing.” Addison fingered the rock in his hand and pushed out the breath constricting his words. “Well, your dad got a little below the glide path.”

  Jason didn’t say anything. He sat frozen, staring into the dirt beneath his feet.

  “Sometimes things go wrong that distract a pilot,” Addison continued, his voice blending with hushed night sounds. “Maybe he was thinking about getting home or was tired or maybe something important was on his mind. All we know is that the plane slipped below the glide path, and he didn’t get it pulled up in time.”

  “That’s not how it happened,” Jason refuted, each word uttered with great emphasis. “Dad wouldn’t have gotten distracted. He wouldn’t have done it.”

  Addison set his gentle hand on the back of Jason’s neck, trying to make the truth into less of a monster. “Jason, your dad was one of the best pilots I’ve ever profiled. He had an excellent record. People had the utmost faith in his ability. I know that he didn’t let it fall on purpose.”

  “My dad didn’t kill all those people.” Tears burst from Jason’s eyes, and even the dim hues of moonlight caught them rolling down his cheeks.

  Addison stroked Jason’s neck, not sure what to do to comfort the child. “Jason, we’re not talking about him holding a gun to someone’s head or snapping or doing anything malicious. It just happened. Even if the report says pilot error caused the crash, it doesn’t mean that your father was any less of a pilot, or any less of a man.”

  “He didn’t do it,” Jason repeated. “You’ve got it all wrong. You need to look harder. You’ll find something else. Something else went wrong.”

  “I’ve looked through everything, Jason. I’ve done everything I can to get to the truth.”

  “But it’s not fair!” Jason shouted, launching himself off the deck and turning furiously back to Addison. “It’s not fair!” He rubbed his fist across his face. “You aren’t looking hard enough!”

  The sting of rare tears ached in Addison’s eyes, and he tried to swallow the emotion in his throat. “Jason, I’ve tried to be fair. And I’ll keep trying. I wish I could tell you something else, but I thought you deserved to hear the truth…to try to understand.”

  “Well, I can’t understand,” Jason cried, wiping away his tears with his sleeve. “Can you?”

  Helplessly, Addison shook his head. “No, I can’t. And I wish to God that it wasn’t my job to report it. But would it make it any easier if there were something else? If I found that the crash was out of his hands? That he had nothing to do with it? Would it really make any difference in the way you feel?”

  An eternity passed between them as Jason wept against the post, his back turned to Addison while he pondered the question. Finally, he turned around, his sobbing gasps racking his small shoulders. “No, it wouldn’t make a difference,” Jason choked. “He’d still be gone. It still wouldn’t bring my dad back. But it would make them shut up about it. All those people saying—”

  A tear dropped onto Addison’s cheek, and he tilted his head and arched his brows, grasping for some words of comfort to offer the boy. With only instincts to guide him, he opened his arms, and Jason came to him, clinging as he wept his heart out.

  “It hurts,” Addison whispered. “I know how it hurts. I lost my own wife in a crash. It’s like somebody ripped out your heart and there’s this great big hole there, empty…But your mom told me your dad was a Christian, Jason. And we don’t have to grieve as non-Christians do, because we’ll see them again. To God, it’s only a few minutes until we’re with them again. But it still hurts, and no one can understand unless they’ve been there. I’ve been there, Jason. I’ve hurt like you hurt.”

  He held the boy as Jason sobbed out great chunks of his misery, soaking Addison’s shirt, never letting go of his neck until the agony was spent.

  That night, Addison lay on his bedcovers, staring at the ceiling, feeling more alone than he’d felt in the last four years. The feeling was so similar to the one he’d experienced during the days after he’d first learned of Amanda’s crash. Then, he couldn’t believe that she wasn’t going to walk in through the front door. The loneliness had been suffocating, painting his life in dead, gray colors.

  Erin, his heart called in the night. Why did you have to set me up? Why couldn’t you have trusted me to do the right thing?

  He threw a wrist over his eyes and thought of the red welts around Jason’s eyes when he’d cried himself dry tonight. Then he thought of Erin’s angry, guarded eyes yesterday after he’d warned her of the conclusions in his report. Usually, her eyes shone like rays of sunlight into his empty heart. But they had been cold today, and Addison Lowe had caught enough of that chill to last a lifetime.

  We were a fairy tale, Addison thought. My fairy tale. But fairy tales, like life, shouldn’t always be played out. Their relationship simply wasn’t meant to be. They were two opposing forces, neither willing to give in.

  Maybe some men were only meant to know love once in a lifetime, he thought with a heartrending sigh. Maybe he’d already had his share.

  So now why did he see Erin, instead of Amanda, when he closed his eyes? And why had her pain penetrated his professional numbness and become his own pain?

  And why had he let an angry, frightened pilot and a troubled child make him feel like a heel for doing his job?

  Why had the crash even happened?

  Why had he ever met Erin…?

  Chapter Eighteen

  The scent of just-brewed coffee drifted up from the pot and filled the Hammon kitchen the following Monday. Erin leaned on the bar, watching Maureen pour. Her fragile hands shook, and some of the coffee sloshed onto the counter. The trembling was all too familiar to Erin. “Are you all right, Maureen?” she asked.

  “Fine,” she said. “It’s just a little spill.”

  Erin studied the woman’s pale face as she wiped up the liquid. She was pounds thinner than she’d been before the crash, and she hadn’t had a lot of weight to lose. The smudges of weariness under her eyes provided a stark contrast to the whiteness of her cheeks. She looked old and tired enough to sleep for a year.

  Erin let her finish fixing the cups, then took hers before Maureen could spill it again.

  “So,” Maureen asked, feigning higher spirits than Erin believed she really felt. “How long have you got?”

  “About an hour,” Erin said. “It’s strange
having a set lunch hour when I’ve been so used to a pilot’s schedule. How does the saying go? You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”

  The potent cliché hung in the air, and Erin was instantly sorry she’d said it. They’d all lost…and Maureen’s loss was much deeper than her own.

  “You know, I’ve been meaning to call you since Saturday,” Maureen said, taking a seat across from Erin. “But I can’t seem to keep my mind on anything.”

  “Call me?” Erin asked, bringing the cup to her lips. “What for?”

  “About last weekend,” Maureen said. “About Addison Lowe.”

  Erin almost choked on her coffee. “Addison? You met him?”

  Maureen nodded. “He was here.”

  The torment in Maureen’s expression made Erin want to die. “Oh, Maureen, I’m so sorry.”

  “Why?” she asked, meeting Erin’s eyes directly. “He couldn’t have been kinder, despite the things he had to ask.”

  Erin listened, dumbfounded, as Maureen described the visit to her. The portrait Maureen painted of Addison as a kind and sensitive man shouldn’t fit into her idea of him after the fight they’d had last Saturday…yet strangely, somehow, it did.

  “It was the first time Jason cried since the crash,” Maureen said. “And Addison was there for him.”

  “But didn’t he break down because of Addison?” Erin argued. “I mean, if he’d never come up with this pilot error business in the first place, Jason wouldn’t have been so upset. And to sit there and tell a child so blatantly, so cruelly, that his father made a mistake…”

  Maureen took Erin’s hand. “He needed to have it explained to him,” she said quietly. “God knows, I couldn’t do it. I don’t understand it myself. Addison was the only one who ever tried to make Jason understand.”

  “But he’s just a little boy! That’s so cruel.”

  “He didn’t just drop the facts in his lap and leave, Erin. Addison followed it up with the kind of masculine tenderness that Jason misses so much.”

  Erin’s gaze fell to her cup as the images whirled through her mind. Addison confronting Maureen. Addison talking to Jason. Addison comforting the distraught boy.

  The telephone rang, startling her out of her reverie, and she waited for Maureen to answer it. Maureen’s spine stiffened, and her hands began trembling more as they smoothed back her hair. She looked distracted.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” Erin asked.

  Maureen shook her head quickly. “I can’t,” she said. “Would…would you do it for me?”

  Confused, Erin picked up on the fourth ring, noting the fear in Maureen’s face as she did. “Hello?”

  “He murdered my daughter,” a voice said. “Murdered her. Because of his lousy addiction to whatever he was on, my little girl is dead.”

  Erin’s eyes flashed protectively to Maureen. Was this what she’d been experiencing day and night? “Who is this?” Erin asked helplessly.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the voice answered. “I just hope your husband rots in hell for what he did.”

  Erin felt her face turning a pallid shade of white, like Maureen’s, as she hung up the phone.

  “It was one of them, wasn’t it?” Maureen asked, her tears beginning to trickle over her lashes.

  “You mean there are more?”

  Maureen took her cup to the sink and dropped it with a crash. “All hours, day and night. They all say the same things. I’ve thought of getting an unlisted number, but then I’d feel so cut off from friends and family, and I don’t have the energy to call them all with the new number.”

  “I knew there were some phone calls, but I had no idea…” Erin’s voice broke off, distraught, and she pulled the crying woman into her arms. “I’m so sorry, Maureen,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut. “So sorry.”

  The two women held each other and wept for a patch of time before anger dulled the grief in Erin’s heart. “If we could just get Addison to change his report. If they would just quit saying it was pilot error.”

  Maureen pulled herself together as much as she was able and stepped back, holding Erin at arm’s length. “You listen to me,” she said. “Addison Lowe may not say what we want him to in his report. And we may have to defend Mick against the cruel people out there who use his information against us. But he’s a good man, Erin, and he’s doing the best he can.”

  The words drifted into the dark void in Erin’s heart, the part she’d tried to keep empty of anything but anger where Addison was concerned. The need to believe Maureen burned through the icy walls, and the warmth she suddenly encountered there left her confused and more miserable than she’d ever been in her life.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Addison looked like he’d spent the night in a combat zone of some Schwarzenegger movie. And he felt like he’d been dragged by the bumper of an army jeep. Standing weary and haggard before the men who’d been working on his team since the crash, he tried to straighten his slumped posture and look authoritative. But he and insomnia did not do good things for each other.

  “We’ve got to start over,” he told them in his no-nonsense voice, beginning to pace like a sergeant before a unit of new recruits.

  “Start over?” one of his investigative engineers asked, astounded. “What do you mean, start over?”

  “With the wreckage,” Addison clarified, as if the men didn’t know. “Man, it’s hot in here!”

  Knowing his men wondered if he’d snapped at some point during the dismal weekend—and not caring much—he yanked off his jacket and tossed it over a gray folding chair. “We’re going to go back through every last piece of that plane…every nut, every bolt, every instrument…and we’re going to make absolutely sure that the crash happened the way we think it happened.”

  “But, Addison, we’ve already done that,” Hank ventured. “Nothing’s going to change just by going over it all again. And headquarters is waiting—”

  “Don’t tell me what headquarters wants!” Addison shouted belligerently, his voice echoing from the metal roof and reverberating off the walls. “This investigation is my responsibility. I call the shots! It’s all on my head!”

  “But, Addison,” another team member, Horace, protested. “I promised my girl I’d be back in D.C. in time for—”

  “You shouldn’t have made any promises!” he cut in, startling them all. “We’re staying here until the job is done. And anybody I see half doing it because he wants to get home can find alternate employment.”

  The men grew quiet. Except for the rumbling engines of the airliners outside, there was no sound in the hangar. Eyes were averted. Arms were crossed. Impatience ticked away like a time bomb.

  “So…are we going to just keep looking until we find the answers you want?” Hank asked. “The answers that’ll please your lady friend?”

  Addison turned his head around to face the man he’d worked with the longest. The one who’d been the most faithful. The most diligent. His anger subsided, for he knew the men had a right to question his motives, when they’d watched him run the gamut of his emotions, all over Erin. He hadn’t made his relationship with her a secret, after all. He shook his head slowly. “Just like you guys, I think we’ll find exactly the same conclusions that we have now. But we won’t have any doubts. And we’ll—I’ll—be able to live with my report.” His voice faltered, then he met the man’s eyes directly. “And to answer your question, no, I’m not waiting until Erin Russell approves of my findings. Chances are, she’ll be miserable with the results no matter what we come up with.”

  He clenched his hand into a fist at the sharp thought of her and felt his face reddening. “I just want to know that I didn’t make too many assumptions. That I didn’t stop just short of finding something important. We’re all too good at what we do for that.”

  The men nodded grudgingly, and the anger and defensiveness in their eyes faded a few degrees. He had gotten through to them and made himself sound less like a beast hanging on
the edge of sanity than an investigator determined to find the truth.

  “Hank, I want you to finish piecing together the elevator system while the others work elsewhere. How close are you to finishing it?”

  “Pretty close,” Hank said. “But I figured there was no point now that we’ve heard the tapes. If it’s clear the pilot was in error—”

  Addison cut him off. “I want to make sure that when the first officer told Hammon to pull up, there wasn’t some reason he couldn’t.”

  “That’s a long shot.”

  “Do it anyway,” Addison said. “And hurry.”

  Trouble was, he was pretty sure that the truth wouldn’t change. They couldn’t dissect the crash, any more than he could dissect his miserable heart. But he could give it a try.

  Erin tried to ignore the smell of airplane exhaust and gaseous fumes and the deafening sound of engines that made her heart vibrate as she stepped up to the hangar where the wreckage was stored during the investigation. She saw an open door on the corner of the metal structure, but stopped before she reached it and wrapped her arms around herself.

  After she’d left Maureen, Erin had spent the afternoon watching for Addison, waiting to see him in the lounge or the coffee shop, waiting to see his jade, aching eyes, waiting to tell him she’d been wrong. If Maureen could handle the conclusion of his report, surely she could, too. But the day had unfurled like an old piece of tape that was hopelessly stuck to its roll. It had taken all the coaxing and peeling and tearing she could manage just to get to the end. When she was finally off work for the day, she decided that she’d find Addison if she had to turn Shreveport upside down. So she had come to the most obvious place first. This hangar. The hangar that stored the final moments of Mick’s life. The proof that he wasn’t coming back.

  She wanted to see Addison, to tell him that she’d been wrong about him, that she appreciated what he’d done last weekend for Jason, that she’d like another chance, that she missed him, that she couldn’t explain the dull ache that had dogged her all week. But somehow, now that she was here, she was afraid to go inside. Afraid to face the end of Mick’s life in pieces of aircraft, all disassembled and tagged.