Home Before Dark (15 page)

The cold black eye of the camera faltered a little, and that surprised Dusty. In her handling of the equipment, Jessie Ryder appeared to have the confidence of long experience. He pictured her snapping away with cool professional ease at politicians, small-town heroes and victims of industrial accidents. Yet her wavering aim with the fat, expensive-looking lens betrayed a set of nerves too close to the surface.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “Your last statement startled me.”

Even now, nearly two years after it happened, Dusty felt Karen's presence as though it were yesterday. She was wry and funny and unfailingly honest, and he had a feeling she'd be intrigued by all of this. “That's why it's going in your magazine,” he said.

Color misted her cheeks, and he realized he was intrigued as well, by a woman who seemed so worldly yet blushed so easily. For the first time in two years, he felt something he hadn't expected to feel ever again—that rare and powerful beat of attraction for a pretty woman. For that alone, he felt like thanking her. It was his first indication since Karen's
death that not only was he alive, but he damned well wanted to stay that way. The awakening he'd felt when he'd first met her was no aberration. As the minutes passed, his certainty intensified. Why else would he sit here and bare his soul and his life without falling apart?

Maybe the heat was getting to him. But maybe it was her. Then he sensed LaBorde watching him watch Jessie. Down boy, he told himself. They were here for a grim business, and he'd agreed to go along with it.

“Whenever you're ready.” LaBorde sounded unexpectedly compassionate.

He shifted his thoughts to the painful past and turned his focus to the small box on the table. Would the recorder capture the terror of Karen's ordeal, the sense of loss that lay over his soul, every minute of every day, since then?

“Karen and I had everything to live for, and every reason to expect a long and happy life,” he said. “She was young and strong, a pilot in her own right, but she grounded herself when we found out she was pregnant. In her sixth month of pregnancy, she still walked three miles a day.” He could picture his vibrant young wife, soft blond hair gleaming in a sun that beamed with the unique intensity of summer in northern Alaska, walking amid the boreal forests of birch and spruce, or the Jurassic-sized flowers of their garden. The foxglove and hollyhock grew fast and huge, blossoming with fierce abandon, before the early winter killed them.

On the day everything had changed, the late-summer sun was as intense as her smile, the breeze as sharp-edged as a scalpel. She came in from her walk looking fresh and happy, the tip of her nose pink from the chill air. He remembered the way she pressed her hand to his chest, right over his heart, and leaned forward to kiss him, as she had a thousand times before. Did she seem a little breathless? Unsteady? Had he been too distracted to notice?

He had been going over some long-range business plans. They would be moving to the city before winter took hold. The summer station had its rustic charms and brutal challenges, but caution overruled adventure when it came to the birth of their first child. In busy, urban Fairbanks, they had taken a sublet on a temporary apartment close to North Star Hospital, where the baby would be born, and they intended to stay until the spring before flying home. A simple, workable plan. In a million years, he never dreamed so much could go wrong, so quickly.

That day, a subtle note in her tone pierced through his absorption in whatever business documents or flying data drifted across the computer screen.

After she kissed him, her mood shifted. “I don't feel so good. I have a headache.”

“You want to lie down? I'll bring you some of that herbal tea—”

“I don't want to be a scaredy-cat about this, but it's not a regular headache. Something's wrong. I have to go to the doctor. Now.”

The urgency in her soft tone had seized him. Something was wrong.

He swiveled in his chair, stood to hold her. “Is it the baby?”

“No.” She hesitated, looking uncharacteristically helpless and confused as she whispered, “It's me.”

Going to the doctor was not a matter of driving down the road to a strip center clinic. He flipped on the radio and the laptop, alerted the two-man ground crew at the airstrip. To get her to the doctor, he would have to fly for forty-five minutes. They left the house unlocked, chopped tomatoes lying on the counter next to Karen's grocery list written in purple ink. While he sped to the runway, she called her doctor on the mobile phone. He could hear her struggling to be calm and clear as she described her symptoms:
sharp headache…the pain
is strange, hard to describe…no contractions, but this headache….
In her taut, pale face, he could see terror mingling with confusion. Why was this happening?

Dusty was an experienced pipeline pilot. For five years, he'd ferried oilmen, boomers, company executives and millionaires along the jagged cold spine of Alaska, over a white wasteland as beautiful as it was treacherous. He had delivered lifesaving serum to native Inupiats, evacuated men who'd fallen down holes or roughnecks who'd had their noses smashed in barroom brawls. Two years earlier, he'd even flown a woman in labor and her scared young husband to the hospital. They'd counted together through the contractions and laughed nervously between them, debating whether to name the baby Del Rey for the city of his conception or Macon for the parents' hometown. The woman had been even younger than her husband, but she'd never once said, “Something's wrong.”

Those two words had changed Dusty's world, his entire future, and on some level he'd known that, even as he zipped on his flight jacket and helped Karen into hers. He wasn't sure whether or not he imagined it, but she felt very fragile to him at that moment, her arm almost birdlike as he guided her hand into the sleeve of the jacket.

His ground crew was the best in the state and they were at their best the day Karen left the Alaskan wilderness for the last time. Even then, some bitter unacknowledged part of him understood that she would not be back. It was written across her pain-pulled face; it lurked deep in her eyes.

He flew as fast as the state-of-the-art Pilatus turboprop would allow, not caring about drag or fuel conservation of all things. Karen sat virtually unmoving, strapped into her seat, eyes shut, sweat beading on her upper lip.

In the other passenger seat rode Nadine Edison, a bush schoolteacher whose unimpeachable qualification was that she
was Karen's best friend. She'd been keeping Karen company and adding to the excitement of planning for the baby. She talked constantly, reassuring Karen all through the flight. She told Karen how much she was loved, how perfect the baby was going to be, what a proud, honorary aunt she would be.

Dusty paused in dictating his narrative to the tape recorder, a gurgle and cry from Amber bringing him back to the present. “The only thing Karen's best friend hadn't told her was how much money she was going to get for selling the story to the tabloids.”

He glanced at his daughter, who resembled a giant pink carnation in her lacy dress. Arnufo had bought it at the Mercado del Sol down in San Antonio. It was hard to imagine Amber being old enough to read this stuff one day, but he knew that time would come.

“So you trusted Nadine Edison.”

“Karen did. I didn't have much of an opinion of her either way.”

“All right. So take us back to that day. Your wife was quiet during the flight.”

He nodded. The brackish, polluted sky over the city had never looked more welcome, the homely block of the Northward Building more beautiful. But, even before Karen passed out, he felt a premonition of how wrong things were going. “I told her I loved her. I told her that a bunch of times.” He stared down at his hands, flexed and unflexed his fingers. “I reckon that's what you say when you're losing hope, when there's nothing more to do, nothing more to say.

“She told me three things before we landed.” He remembered seeing the brightly lit cluster of emergency vehicles waiting on the tarmac. These people knew him and Karen; they were friends. Everyone at the airpark wanted to do his part.

“There's a recording of our last conversation.” If the situation had been different he might have laughed at Blair LaBorde's expression. “The flight data recorder got it all. And yes, I'll let you listen to it, and yes, I'll give you a transcript. I'm not ashamed of anything I said.”

“What were the three things?” asked Blair.

“She told me she loved me and the baby. She told me to save the baby, no matter what.” He paused, took a deep swig of his Coke. “And she told me she thought she was going to die.”

 

Dusty stared off into the distance, memories melding with the present moment in a way that was almost surreal. Across the water, the Benning place looked busy as usual—kids running all over, folks coming and going. In his mind, the last moments with Karen crystallized for him and then shattered.

He shot a glance at Jessie Ryder. She had walked into his life uninvited, and yet she seemed to belong here. She was turning his grief into a public spectacle, but at the same time, she was making a record of it for Amber. One day, his daughter would be old enough to see the images Jessie was making today, to read the words he was speaking.

“That was the last thing she said—ever,” he continued.

The flight data recorder had picked up his strained and frantic, “Karen. Karen. God, she passed out. Goddamn it, do something,” he said to Nadine. She'd stayed on the radio with the ground, where an ambulance would be waiting.

Karen had lost all color and life, yet somehow he kept flying while his whole world disintegrated at eighteen thousand feet. During the frantic transport from touchdown to hospital, panic and denial screamed through him. Yet his heart began to ache with things he knew were true, even before the doctors rendered their verdict. A massive cerebral aneurysm had
burst, the trauma team declared her brain dead. All that remained was to decide when to pull the plug. He heard what they were saying, saw the flat brain waves on the monitor, but he couldn't accept it. That was his heart, his wife, his future, lying on the gurney.

He glanced at Jessie Ryder again. She sat perfectly still, riveted. She hadn't taken a single picture. The only movement was the river of tears coursing down her face. When their eyes met, she made a visible attempt to steel herself: straightening up in her chair, gripping the arms, swallowing with visible effort.

“What's with you?” he asked, surprised.

“I don't know your story,” she explained. “I've never heard it.” When Amber laughed, she looked in the direction of the baby, then turned back to Dusty. “She's the reason you agreed to do this, isn't she?”

Her swift comprehension gratified him. What a strange time, he thought, to feel this way. The currents between them were almost tangible, a thick tension in the air. “I owe it to her to get the truth out there. I guess I'll never figure out why the public's fascinated by the crude and brutal facts of the case.”

“People read about a stranger's tragedy in hopes of avoiding their own,” Blair said. “Maybe it's a talisman against their own suffering. Believe me, it's a lot easier to deal with someone else's tragedy than it is to deal with your own.”

Dusty figured he only imagined the shadowy grief that flickered over Jessie as Blair spoke. Suddenly he wondered if the wreck was even worse than she'd let on. Yet she seemed totally focused on him. Not in the newshound way of Blair LaBorde, but in the way of a listener around a campfire, equal parts sympathy, horror and partisan interest. He ought to be used to that by now, but in Jessie Ryder, the concern had a
different quality. She made him want to stop, explain, take out his heart and sift through the ashes of it, to see if any life spark could be revived.

He finished his Coke and addressed the digital recorder again—a neutral device that cushioned his emotions. “There comes a time during pregnancy when the baby becomes real,” he said. “Do you believe that?”

Blair shrugged. “I've never been pregnant.”

He glanced at Jessie. She opened her mouth, closed it. Her cheeks turned red, but she said nothing.

“One of the duty nurses at North Star told me this. She claimed there's a moment during gestation when everything becomes real. That day hadn't happened for me yet,” he told her. “We planned to do all the shopping and preparation for the baby in the autumn while living in the city, waiting for the big day to arrive. So we hadn't really done anything about…well, anything.” Still he didn't want to say it. They had barely discussed names, announcements, and it had never occurred to them to discuss arrangements in case the unthinkable happened.

“Then when Karen—” He stopped, regrouped. “I was sitting at the side of her bed. I'd just had about the hundredth meeting with the hundredth set of doctors and counselors and what have you. They told me she was gone.” Although the hours of anguish seemed fused together, he vividly remembered his sleeping-beauty wife, the way her hand felt and the smell of her hair. He tried to convince himself that she had gone away somewhere, never to return. But she was still so…present.

“The organ donation counselor said that when the brain dies, everything else wants to shut down, so they had to get a decision quickly. They made a big deal about how healthy she was, the fact that she was known to be a generous person,
that she'd signed an organ donor card—hell, didn't we all? And they were right. She had. I had no problem agreeing to it. She would have made the same decision for me.”

He took a deep, rib-stabbing breath. “The trouble was, she wasn't really dead…yet. That's when it came to me. Here they are telling me she's a life-support system for a heart, lungs, kidneys, corneas, skin, you name it—and nobody mentioned the other life she was supporting.”