Cape Disappointment (18 page)

I'd had an elderly uncle who committed suicide a year after his wife died, and now for the first time I was beginning to understand his frame of mind. I had never thought it possible for a human being to feel this bad and still be alive. I was lonely but I didn't want to be around people. I was sad but I didn't want to be jollied along. The one person I pined for was dead. Over the course of the past days my mind had run through the gamut of methods to kill yourself. Poison was icky, jumping was scary, and I didn't like sharp instruments. For philosophical reasons, I was not going to use a gun. All the really smart ways to die eluded me. But then, I wasn't going to kill myself; I only wanted to mull it over. I was like an impoverished kid test-driving sports cars— all bluff.

I must have dozed through the movie, because I woke to a dark screen. Minutes later, Snake came back into the room with a stack of freshly printed photos he tossed onto the coffee table. Apparently he'd downloaded everything in my camera, which I'd placed on the coffee table a week ago, and run it through our printer in the spare bedroom. “You okay?” Snake asked.

“Just ducky.”

“Thought you might want to look through those.”

“Why don't you just strangle me with one of Kathy's stockings?”

“I just thought …”

“Okay. Sure. Thanks.”

He started the movie again while I surprised myself by pulling the stack of still-warm photos into my lap. Kathy had taken snapshots of me while I was driving between Seattle and Olympia in the rain. Later, she'd taken some of us unpacking at the little motel we liked to stay at, and then I'd playfully snapped a couple of her as she started to get undressed, my efforts interrupted when she confiscated the camera, which was about the time we ended up tussling on the bed. I didn't see the camera again until the next morning when she carried it down to the beach to click her standard string of ocean shots as we walked, the nothing foreground made worse by the nothing background, a hodgepodge of blue-gray water and gray-blue sky. If she'd lived, she would have thrown all those shots out, saying, “I thought they were going to turn out better.”

There were even two shots of me jumping in front of the camera as
she tried to take pictures of the ocean. One garbled picture as I picked her up and ran down the beach with her slung over my shoulder while she screamed bloody murder. There was one snapshot of her in the car after we arrived at the landing strip. “So I can have something to remember you by when I'm old and lonely,” I said as I took it. It was the last photograph anybody ever took of her, and at the time I thought it a grand joke. I stared at it for a long while. Kathy had been gazing out through the windshield wistfully, a perfect profile shot of a perfect face. I'd like to think the look in her glistening eyes indicated she was sorry to be leaving me, but it was probably in anticipation of the flight.

The penultimate photos were taken by the old man I'd given my camera to in front of the Cape Disappointment lighthouse: myself in the foreground, the lighthouse behind, and in the distance a speck of an airplane carrying my beloved. I'd meant it as a gag, but now it was evidence. There were two such pictures of me and the plane, one blurry and useless, plus a third shot of what must have been the old man's knee he'd probably snapped when he was passing the camera back to me. What I hadn't expected were the last two shots, photos of the plane plummeting out of the sky. I had no memory of taking them, but the old man had already given the camera back by then, so I must have.

In the first shot the plane had already accomplished about a third of its descent. There was no other plane in the photo and no debris in the sky, just the falling plane, which appeared to be intact. In the second, the turboprop had hit the water and was creating a white spout in the ocean, the tail and part of a wing above the surface, everything else under. It was hard to tell if the wing was already broken at that point.

I'd captured the instant of Kathy's death, of all eleven deaths. I knew the other families had a right to know about it, even if they couldn't stand to view it, though I dreaded the newspaper editors getting their hands on it. “Snake?”

“Yeah?”

“You look at these?”

“You talking about the plane going into the drink? Hell of a shot.”

“They know what caused the crash?”

“Nope.”

“You heard any theories?”

“There's a rumor circulating that one of the pilots may have committed suicide. Decided to take a bunch of people with him and get some headlines. That one keeps cropping up.”

“You think there's any basis to it?”

“I wouldn't know. They haven't found a note or anything, but they're still looking. Then there's the hypothesis that they ran into a localized electrical storm and it disabled their instrumentation. Some people think there may have been another plane. They've launched a search for any other aircraft in the area that may have sustained damage.”

“If there was another aircraft, why didn't the other pilot report it?”

“Could be they didn't realize what they hit.”

“I didn't see another plane, and none shows up in these pictures.”

Snake hadn't taken his eyes off the movie. “You know you're going to have to hand them over to the authorities.”

“Think there's any way to keep them from the media?”

“I doubt it. I was thinking maybe you should sell them.”

“You've got your head up your ass if you think I'm going to sell Rupert Murdoch photos of my wife's plane at the moment of her death.”

“Yeah. Right. Sorry. The thing is, they'll probably get leaked anyway.”

Getting off the sofa was like dragging myself out of a hole. Once on my feet, I scooped up the newspaper clippings Snake had brought and carried them into the kitchen. It took a while to organize them and a while longer to organize my thoughts. It seemed as if it had been months since I'd done anything purposeful. I'd dragged myself to the funerals, but I'd done that in a partial fugue state, believing I had no choice, believing the best way to pay tribute to the dead was to honor the survivors.

Sitting at the kitchen table, I prepared to think about the specifics of an event I'd been avoiding all week. I'd replayed the plane falling out of the sky maybe forty thousand times, but I hadn't put any constructive thought into why or how it happened. Nine and a half days had elapsed since the crash, and on each of those days I'd pulled further from reality.

I skimmed the headlines and the photo captions. The local interest stories and general background pieces I placed to my right. The national
press pieces I cached an arm's length away in the center of the table. Anything with Kathy's name highlighted— somebody, presumably Snake, had used a yellow grease pen to color her name wherever it appeared— I placed in front. The conspiracy articles from the Internet, of which there were a surprising number, I pushed off to my left. It was just like Snake to give me a collection of clippings that included headlines like
WAS SHEFFIELD ASSASSINATED? DID THE CIA KILL JANE? WHY IS THE WHITEL HOUSE TERRIFIED OF AN INVESTIGATION? COULD A FOREIGN GOVERNMENT HAVE BEEN INVOLVED?
Snake was almost as bad as his brother when it came to getting snookered by conspiracy theories.

The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
had done a feature article on Kathy, quoting half a dozen people from the courthouse. They'd called me requesting a comment for the article, but I never called back. Even Bert Slezak had been quoted. “Ms. Birchfield was more than my attorney. She was my friend. She was the best person I ever knew.”

“Nice piece on your bride,” Snake said from the other room.

“They call her effervescent.”

“She was that, my man. And a lot more.”

A defense attorney who'd been in the business thirty years was quoted as saying, “Birchfield had the capability to become one of the best trial attorneys ever. You could see that right away. She was smart, methodical, knew the law, and cared about clients.” Another attorney from our building at First and Yesler said, “You could tell she was headed for bigger things.” Kalpesh Gupta said, “I wouldn't have been surprised if, at some point, she'd entered politics. Everybody loved her. She was like a sister to so many people.”

One of the notices was clipped out of
The Seattle Times
and announced the service Kathy's sister and mother had planned for the previous day. I hadn't been looking forward to it, and the actuality proved even worse than I'd imagined. Except for the day the plane went down, it had been the single worst day of my life. To my mind, holding a ser vice for Kathy was tantamount to giving up, although when I thought it through, I had no idea what exactly I would be giving up that I hadn't already lost.

I found article after article recounting the crash. The most complete article was from
The New York Times,
and along with interviews
from eyewitnesses— mostly old gummers from the tour bus at Cape Disappointment— it sported statements from a Coast Guard spokes person, a quote from the man who'd been manning the lighthouse, and liberal quotes from the special agent-in-charge of the Seattle FBI office. “We're investigating this and will continue to investigate until we determine the cause of the crash,” said Winston Seagram. “No stone will be left unturned. As far as we can tell at this point, this was a regrettable accident. We will, however, continue to look into it along with the FAA and the NTSB team.”

A statement from the head of the National Transportation Safety Board investigating team, Timothy Hoagland, who reportedly flew to Washington State from the District of Columbia the morning after the crash, said simply, “We're focusing on the possibility that there was some freezing weather at the eight-thousand-foot level. They dropped to four thousand feet just prior to the crash, and we're trying to figure out why. There's a possibility they dropped down because they were icing up. Any number of small planes have gone down over the years because of icing problems. It can come on suddenly at this time of year.”

A long article from
The Oregonian
explained how a typical plane crash was investigated, complete with a photo layout of the Cape Disappointment Coast Guard Station and a hangar at Boeing Field in Seattle where they were collecting recovered pieces of the Beechcraft King Air. Judging from the photos, they had most of the large pieces assembled into the shape of an airplane. The plane was not required to carry a cockpit voice recorder, and one had not been installed.

The New York Times
had done a series of small pieces on the crash and then two days ago printed a feature article laying out the information investigators had gleaned so far. I studied the section about the airplane. “Beechcraft King Air,” I said aloud.

“One of the most reliable aircraft in the world,” Snake barked from the other room. “Tons of ‘em out there and only two fatal crashes in the last ten years.”

The Beechcraft King Air had been in continuous production in one form or another since it was introduced in 1964. The King Air came out in a number of different models, and the cabin configurations could be switched to suit the customer. Behind the cockpit, there were
seven small passenger windows. The aircraft Kathy and Sheffield and the others had flown in contained seats for twelve passengers. The plane could be piloted by one person, but Northwest Apple Flight, which owned and operated the aircraft, preferred two pilots for groups and high-profile passengers like the senator. The plane had a range of just over 2,000 miles, a service ceiling of 32,800 feet, and a maximum speed of 289 knots. According to the story, Northwest Apple Flight had serviced the plane two weeks before the crash.

Both pilots were experienced, knowledgeable, and considered “top hands.” One had worked for Northwest Apple for fourteen years, while the other had been an air force pilot for ten years prior to coming to Northwest three years ago. The day before the flight both pilots had completed a long trip down the East Coast and back up the West Coast with a rock band and the night before the crash had flown to Portland, where they stayed with the married sister of one of the pilots. After dinner and several hands of poker with the sister, her husband, and friends, both pilots slept overnight at the sister's house. According to the family, neither had imbibed alcohol, though there were Internet rumors to the contrary.

When I dropped Kathy off at the airfield I'd spoken to Freddy Mitz, the pilot who'd flown for the air force, and he'd appeared neither drunk nor hungover. But I'd only been with him a minute. Mitz was forty-two and had a grown son from a previous marriage. He lived in the Seattle area with his second wife, who acted in local theatrical productions when she wasn't working as a substitute schoolteacher. After his time in the air force, Mitz worked in a real estate firm for several years before returning to his first love, flying.

Charles Hilditch, forty-nine, had flown for Northwest Apple since its founding. Before joining Apple he learned to fly at Central Washington University and then collected most of his early hours ferrying Microsoft millionaires around the country on business junkets. When he wasn't flying, Hilditch liked to golf and take long, solitary motorcycle trips. One anonymous source claimed there were rumors that his marriage was breaking up and that he'd been despondent.

The article that surprised me concerned Bert Slezak.

The title of the article was “On the Bizarre Side.”