I started to breathe a little faster. "Are you threatening me?"
He stepped around me, opened the door, and let the bag room noise come in. Then he leaned down and whispered in my ear. "Think about what happened to the girl who was here before you." I stared straight ahead, fixing my gaze on the letter opener he'd left on top of the desk. "You're all alone out here, just like she was, more alone than you think. I wouldn't want you to get depressed and kill yourself." I turned to look at his face, but he was already through the door and gone. I would never smell grapefruit again without that awful feeling of my heart dropping into the pit of my stomach.
Molly was at her desk fanning herself and looking as if she might pass out.
"Is someone working on fixing the heat?"
"This happens every year," she said breathlessly.
"So I hear. Why don't you go out and get some fans? Charge it to the company."
"It's the middle of winter in Boston. Where am I going to find fans?"
"How should I know, Molly? Just do something."
I went into my office and slammed the door. I went back to my desk and straight to my briefcase, where I found the fax from Ellen's house, the one asking for a meeting at the same time, same place. I smoothed it flat on the desk and wrote directly on the page, "Saturday, 7:00 PM, Ciao Bella on Newbury Street." It was the only restaurant in town that I knew. I signed my name, went out to the machine, and punched in the number to Sir Speedy in Nahant. My finger froze over the Enter button, giving me one last chance to appreciate what I was doing. I had no idea who had sent this message, and it was just my own instinct saying that it was friend, not foe. But I needed more people on my side, and if this was someone Ellen had trusted, maybe I could trust him or her, too.
I punched the button, the machine whirred to life, and the message was gone.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Friday afternoon was the worst possible day to cancel a flight. We'd taken two mechanicals back-to-back and cancelled them both. I'd spent the past several hours at the ticket counter helping to rebook a couple hundred inconvenienced passengers. Rebooking is a technical term. It means presenting hostile travelers with a list of terrible alternatives and asking them to choose one. It usually takes a while.
I was almost past Dan's office door before I realized he was in there sitting at his desk, tie loosened and sleeves rolled up. He'd changed his shirt since breakfast yesterday morning, but his eyes were still bleary. He was using one hand to prop up his head and the other to turn the pages of something that had his complete attention.
"If I'd known you were here, I would have invited you up to the ticket counter to take part in our latest disaster."
He responded without looking up. "I just got in. I've been up at Ellen's house all day."
"Which means you've been up for two straight days."
"Here, before I forget…" He dug into his pocket and came out with Ellen's house key. "I also went to the post office and got her mail forwarded to the airport."
"Good plan." I sat down and peeled off my shoes. "Did you find anything? Answering machine tapes, perhaps? Or a fish?"
He gave his head a weary shake. "I've searched every square inch of that place. Whatever she was hiding, I don't think it's in the house, unless it's behind a secret panel or something. With that old place, who knows? But I did find out one thing." He lowered his voice to the point that it was almost just a rumble. "I talked to the old guy, the landlord, and he said the alarm went off again the other night. The police came, but no one was there. You know what that means." He didn't need a response from me. "Someone tried to go in who didn't have the new security code."
"Didn't that make you nervous, being up there by yourself and knowing that?"
He looked at me, and I knew there was no point in pursuing the subject.
The item he'd been studying so intently was a wall calendar. "Are you planning your next vacation?"
"This is Molly's calendar from last year. My buddy over at United got me the list of Ellen's destinations from their frequent flyer desk. Altogether she took fifteen trips, and thirteen of them she could have flown on us. The two we don't fly are to Pittsburgh and Charleston. She got miles for every trip, so you were right. She bought tickets like a real passenger."
I turned the calendar so that I could see the dates. "Did you tell Molly? Because she didn't believe me."
"Yeah. Neither one of us can."
The calendar was from an insurance company, the kind they give out free every year. It had pictures of Massachusetts tourist attractions through the seasons. We were looking at November and Bunker Hill in the snow. Dan had penciled in the three-digit city codes for Ellen's destinations throughout the year. Most corresponded with an ELS, Molly's designation for Ellen, and an explanation of a dentist appointment or an off-site meeting or a personal day off. For some, she must have flown out that night and come back the next morning, because there was nothing on the calendar. No time lost.
"Any pattern or interesting sequence?" I asked.
"Nothing jumps out at me, but I'm working on it. My next step is to call the GMs in those stations."
"If she was sneaking around, flying under cover of another airline, it's not likely she'd check in with colleagues while she was there."
"I know, but I don't know what else to do."
"Is there any connection to the Beechcraft angle?"
"I thought of that," he said. "If there is, I can't figure what it is, other than the fact that we fly them out of here. Big deal."
"You said she had questions about the Beeches. What kind?"
"Like I said, a lot of questions about the cargo compartments, how much weight they can take, position of the fuel tanks, that kind of stuff. That's why I made the connection to drugs."
"But we don't think it was drugs, right? So what was it?"
He shrugged.
"Why don't you try to find another copy of that Nor'easter procedures manual?" I said. "If we looked through it ourselves, maybe we can figure out what she was doing with it."
We stared at each other. We were glum. Stumped and glum. Finally, I reached for the calendar and pulled it into my lap. "When was her first secret trip?"
He checked his list. "A little over a year ago. Not too long after she got here."
I leafed backward through the months, reading the various notations Molly had made and charting the station's recent history in reverse. Besides Ellen's travel days, there were employee birthdays and company anniversaries, retirement luncheons, and the annual Christmas party. September of last year had an entry in red with big arrows pointing to it. It was always an event when Bill Scanlon passed through your station.
"You believe Ellen started her investigation a few weeks ago, right?"
"A little longer, sometime before Christmas."
"If her first trip was over a year ago, then it's hard to relate the travel to the investigation. In fact…" I flipped a few pages as the idea settled into my brain. I flipped a few more and I knew I was right. "What these look like to me are secret rendezvous, especially those overnighters."
"What, like she was meeting someone?"
"Someone she didn't want anyone to know she was meeting."
"Why?"
"What do you mean, why? Why does a woman usually have a secret rendezvous?"
"You mean like she was having an affair? No way."
I knew I was right. It felt right, but I had to figure out a way to convince Dan without telling him that my conjecture was based on my own personal experience traveling through the shadow land of whispered conversations, furtive plans, and hidden destinations. "Dan, we've already established this woman's ability to keep secrets. I think it's very possible that she was hooking up with someone in these cities."
His pained expression, lips pursed and eyebrows drawn together, was one I was coming to recognize, because he displayed it every time we found out something about Ellen he didn't know or like. He began to roll down his sleeves and button his cuffs. Something under his desk rattled when he bumped it with his foot. He kicked it impatiently and then again before he looked under the desk.