Crash Into You Read online

  The twist of Seth’s key in the lock jumpstarted her out of the fugue. She put the money back, covered the box, and quickly ran out of the office, down the hall, into the bedroom. The front door opened and Seth called out for her. From the doorway of the bedroom where she was trying to calm her racing her heart and get her breath under control, she noticed the postage stamp still in her hand. She slipped it into the pocket of her shorts. Pasting a pleasant smile on her face, she stepped out of the bedroom and hurried down the stairs to greet Seth, the way he liked.

  “Where you been?” He seemed to be in a good mood, relatively speaking. Even so, she loathed the sight of him. She’d begun to despise him years ago, but that money had unleashed something inside her. She suddenly saw all the possibilities of the world, all the things he’d kept from her. He was now an obstacle that must be overcome, a barrier to her real life and happiness.

  “Bathroom,” she answered. “I have a terrible headache. I’m going to take a hot bath.”

  “I just got home,” he groused. He started taking off his gun from his hip, checked it, then tossed it carelessly onto the sofa.

  She rubbed her temples in exaggerated pain. “I know, but I really feel bad. I’m going to soak. You don’t mind, do you?” She offered a pathetic smile.

  “Whatever.”

  She walked into the bathroom and locked the door, thankful for the privacy. The bathroom was one of the few places Seth didn’t go ballistic at the sight of a closed door. As long as it didn’t stay closed for too long.

  With shaking hands, she undressed. A glimpse at herself in the mirror revealed a pale face with splotchy red cheeks. She did look ill, like she was suffering from a headache. Her world had suddenly cracked and the first whiff of fresh opportunity was teasing her. Such a thing tended to play havoc on the appearance, she supposed.

  Turning away from the reflection, she climbed into the tub and began to mull her options.

  That money in the box in the box dangled before her like a passkey to freedom. Seth controlled the household finances, so she had very limited access to cash – one reason she’d not been able to escape before now. Or, rather, it was one reason she’d allowed herself to remain a prisoner in her own home. It was her own choice to put herself in this position, she reminded herself sternly. Her actions led her here, to this prison. It was vital to take responsibility for her role in this fiasco. If she didn’t, she would forever be a victim.

  Over the years, Kimberly, had offered to send cash, plane tickets, and other resources. Aimee refused the help every time it was offered. Shame and the belief that she had to leave on her own terms always prevented her from accepting Kimberly’s lifeline, no matter how tempting it was.

  Over the last month or so, Seth began acting very strange. His mood swings were wilder than usual. Some days he’d show flickers of the person he had been in the beginning. Charming, polite. Other days, he was angry, obsessively monitoring her so closely she could barely breathe. Life was becoming unbearable, until the night he came home and said they should think about getting married and having a kid.

  That had been the jumpstart she needed to start planning her escape. No way was she going to legally tie herself to him – or, more importantly, subject an innocent child to this madness. She’d begun to reconsider Kimberly’s offer, her own pride be damned. Then she found the box of mysterious money.

  She would have to move fast because she didn’t know what that money was for. Surely Seth wouldn’t leave it in the house indefinitely. She had to construct a plan for her future, and she had to do it tonight.

  The next morning after Seth went to work, Aimee called her sister and told her she was leaving Seth. Kimberly’s gleeful shriek forced her to pull the phone away to preserve her eardrums.

  “Can I come to Portland?” She asked when Kimberly quieted down.

  “Oh shut up,” Kimberly replied, and Aimee cracked a smile. “It’s about damn time. Yes, come, absolutely.”

  “I need your help,” she said. “I need you to call an airline, make a reservation for me. When he discovers I’m missing, the first thing he’s going to do is check my phone and I don’t want him to see any airlines listed.”

  “Correction: the first thing he’s going to do is call me, demanding to know where you are.”

  “Deny, deny, deny. Say you have no idea what’s going on.”

  Kimberly was quiet for a moment, maybe coming to the same realization that Aimee was: that it was absurd to need subterfuge to operate in your normal life. Escape was necessary.

  “Okay, I’ll make your reservation. Call you right back.”

  That evening, with cash packed into suitcases, a backpack, and her purse, Aimee boarded a plane at Dulles International. Because the bulk of the money was in suitcases that were checked, it was never scanned. A couple thousand was stuffed in her purse, and the backpack at her feet was crammed full of cash. She hadn’t bothered to count it, reasoning that she could do that once she was in Portland.

  Too dazed by her escape to think much about the Rose City, she risked a glance out the airplane window over the wing. It was deep night and the earth was black, without definition. They were somewhere over the Rocky Mountains, a cityless, lightless expanse of peaks and plains. Black sky and black earth dissolved into each other like chemical compounds.

  Zooming through the socket of night, she began to relax. It appeared she’d made a clean getaway. At least for now. Seth would no doubt come after her, but she would have a few days to ready herself for the confrontation.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the crackle of the PA system and a female flight attendant saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are experiencing mechanical problems. Please fasten your seatbelts, fold your tray tables and bring your seat is in a full upright position. The pilots are going to attempt to land at the Gallant, Montana airport.”

  Others in the cabin began to mumble to their neighbors.

  Aimee craned her neck, searching the flight attendant’s face for some clue to how bad this was. She looked busy but not terrified. It was a mask. They had been trained not to alarm the passengers. Two others huddled at the rear of the plane looked a little more nervous; they were speaking in hushed tones and their eyes betrayed anxiety.

  The man seated beside her smiled reassuringly. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “I hope so,” Aimee replied.

  She’d spent the whole flight trying to soothe herself, breathe through the fear of flying and now … mechanical problems?!

  The cabin was perfectly silent, tense, waiting for something to happen. But when the aircraft maintained its smooth glide, she slowly she began to relax. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. It seemed okay. The plane was still flying exactly as it was before. No weird noises or sputtering engines. She unclenched her fingers from the armrest and placed her hands in her lap. Aimee shut her eyes and began to draw in long, deep breaths, forcing her muscles to unclench. Relax. Relax. Think of a beautiful, dewy meadow resplendent with wildflowers…

  A violent shudder rocked through the aircraft, knocking Aimee’s head against the window so hard she cried out. The plane pitched violently from left to right. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling as luggage broke from the overhead storage and tumbled into the aisle. At the same time, the lights whooshed off, and the cabin was plunged into darkness equivalent to the sky outside. Hysteria zoomed through the aircraft.

  The clipped, businesslike voice of a pilot came over the PA. “Flight attendants prepare for emergency landing.”

  Oh God.

  “Please remember what we said as the plane departed Dulles Airport,” a young flight attendant was saying over the screaming engines as she held on to two seats, trying to make her way up the aisle to the jump seats. “Brace yourselves. Keep your head between your knees.” Her voice was rising with breathless panic.

  The airplane was no longer in control. It was teetering from side to side in a nauseating gyration that roiled Aimee’s belly and produced a cold, cloyi
ng sweat over her whole body. Reflexively, grasping for comfort, her fingers gripped the older man’s hand on the middle of the seat between them. He smiled compassionately at her and squeezed her hand.

  They both bent over to brace themselves in the position the flight attendant had demonstrated.

  “The closest door is five rows ahead of us,” the man said to her. “Count the seatbacks, and go up five rows. There are doors on both the left and right side of the plane.”

  Aimee was too scared to answer, but she was thankful for the information.

  Passengers were crying; some were screaming. Aimee squeezed shut her eyes, and joined the others in a silent collective prayer that the plane would be okay, they’d land, they’d be scared, it was okay to be scared, but it wouldn’t be bad…. Nobody was going to die, for God’s sake. Not on this quiet, mundane nighttime flight to Portland.

  The turbulence intensified. The rocking was making passengers sick; she could hear them retching. Someone in the back was openly screaming.

  The plane seemed to be falling at an angle, and through the window, she barely glimpsed the mountain peaks. They seemed too close.

  She cried out.

  “Good luck,” the man said.

  Then the world went black.

  Kimberly Ashcroft lay curled up on the sofa in her living room under a warm chenille blanket. The landline phone was beside her, and her fingers gently rested on the casing, ready to pick it up as soon as it rang. Some inane sitcom was chattering from the television, but her red-rimmed, glassy eyes were not focused on the screen. She had tried to watch the news coverage of the crash, but couldn’t. Even without live pictures, the low, swoopy timbre in the newswoman’s voice snagged on some ragged edge of her brainpan and made her homicidally insane. Because there was no news. Just the constant bulletins that a plane had crashed at the mountainous border between Idaho and southern Montana. The newscasters made a point of saying it was very cold up there year-round, that it was “harsh, unforgiving territory.”

  Kimberly had listened with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, guilt creeping into her body like a virus. She’d made the reservation for Flight 134, using Aimee’s middle name, Lauren, and Smith as the last name. An evening flight, so that Aimee could leave the house when it was dark outside. The darkness would give her some cover to slip to her neighbor’s house. Bryan would then drive her to the airport.

  Now Aimee was dead on a mountaintop in Idaho. Another choking sob came to her throat. She would have to be strong, and not jump to conclusions, she told herself for the thousandth time. There was no telling if there were survivors or how many. People did walk away from plane crashes, as her husband had reminded her. We know nothing yet, he’d emphasized in an effort to soothe her.

  And it was true, because the airline wasn’t talking yet and the news people could only offer extraneous, irrelevant information, such as the stupid topography of the crash site, or the fact that it was thirty-four degrees.

  None of that chatter brought her a one step closer to any concrete information about Aimee. Having given up on the news, she poured her faith in United Airlines. She’d been waiting for hours to hear from the representative who took her inquiry. But there was only unending godforsaken silence – and a Friends re-run she’d seen a million times.

  “Still waiting?”

  The warm, rich voice of her husband startled her. She looked up at him in his pajamas and mussed bedhead. Her deep love for him reverberated through her, as if seeing him for the first time.

  “Nothing yet,” she said and tossed the phone on the coffee table. He tousled her hair and then padded off. She heard him knocking around in the kitchen and a few minutes later, returned with a platter of apple slices and cheese. “Have a snack. You’ll feel better.”

  She looked dubiously at him. Smoked gouda had no power to stunt the wild thoughts that her baby sister had perished in a horrible plane crash. But she found herself popping a wedge into her mouth anyway.

  Rob sat beside her, lifted her feet to his lap and then covered them with the blanket. He began to massage the soles, his thumbs slowly digging into the arch. A foot massage was one of her favorite things in the world, a fact that Rob knew well. She saw the gesture for what it was: an effort to comfort her. “You’re the best husband in the world.”

  He smiled gently at her.

  When the phone rang, the line had enough energy to explode the night. Infused with sudden adrenaline, Kimberly reached for it, sitting up. “Yes? Hello?”

  “Kim, it’s Seth.”

  Disappointment twisted through her so acute she could hardly breathe. She felt like she was holding a live, hissing snake. She handed the phone to Rob and stood up. Not able to sit still, she paced, and listened to Rob as he calmly handled the call.

  “Hey Seth. No. No, we were asleep. No, we haven’t heard from her.”

  Kimberly walked back to the sofa and held her hand out for the phone. Rob wordlessly gave it to her.

  “This is Kimberly. What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for Aimee.”

  “She isn’t here, and even if she was, I would not let her talk to you. You’re a controlling asshole and we don’t want anything to do with you.”

  He took in a sharp breath. He was not used to being confronted by anyone, particularly women. Kimberly felt a certain satisfaction provoking him when there was nothing he could do about it. Now that Aimee was on that mountaintop, she felt the years of compressed rage and frustration threatening to explode, quivering under the surface of her grief.

  “I know you talked to her today. What did you talk to her about?”

  “None of your business,” she hissed. “She doesn’t owe you an explanation of her every conversation.”

  “You’re pushing me, Kim.”

  “Leave us alone.”

  “I know she’s there. Put her on the phone.”

  “She isn’t here.”

  Wait.

  He thinks she’s here?

  He doesn’t know the plane has crashed.

  Was it possible he didn’t realize that Aimee was on that plane?

  “You’re lying,” Seth said flatly.

  Kimberly looked to Rob, her strategy in dealing with Seth changing by the second. If Seth thought Aimee wasn’t in Portland, he would start investigating, and possibly discover she had been on that plane. It was childish, maybe, but Kimberly could not bear the thought of Seth’s presence in the middle of memorial plans. Aimee wouldn’t want that either.

  “Look Seth,” Kimberly said sternly. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  Rob frowned.

  “Put her on the phone,” Seth demanded.

  “No,” Kimberly said and hung up. Placing the phone back on the coffee table, she said to Rob, “I hate that man.”

  Rob stood up and embraced her. His warm arms felt so good around her – like home. She rested her head against Rob’s broad chest as he gently fingered back her hair behind her ears.

  “You want to explain that to me?” he asked gently.

  She shook her head as tears began to fall again, wetting his pajama top.

  “Let’s go to bed,” he whispered and shut off the tv with the remote. “You need some rest.”

  She let Rob take her hand in his and lead her up the stairs to the bedroom.

  She slid into bed. “Make sure the ringer is on that phone,” she said.

  Rob double-checked. “It’s on. We’ll hear it if it rings.”

  Snuggling against the warm, familiar body of her husband, she shut her eyes. He was the only touchstone she had right now; everything else about her life had been rendered unrecognizable.

  Shutting her eyes, images of Aimee came back to her from when they were kids. Where Kimberly was tall and blonde, Aimee was petite and brunette. Old family photos showed two very different looking girls, but the differences ended there. They had been close their whole lives. When Kimberly moved from Salem to Portland for college, Aimee followed. The
y shared a house for a while before Kimberly married. Then Seth showed up. Almost immediately, he began intruding in subtle ways in the sisters’ relationship. He started whittling away the time Aimee was permitted to speak on the phone, telling Aimee that, as an adult, it was time to quit being so dependant on her sister.

  Kimberly was appalled, but knew that if she tried to convince headstrong Aimee that Seth was trying to isolate her, she’d think Kimberly was crazy.

  Aimee had been so caught up in Seth’s charm and the excitement of moving to Washington D.C., drunk on the newfound feelings of independence and crazy, mad infatuation. Kimberly figured that Aimee had the right to live her own life, and she wouldn’t interfere. But one day, she was certain, Aimee would become disillusioned with Seth and she wanted to be there for her sister when that happened.

  If her sweet baby sister were really gone, she wouldn’t know what she would do. Tears wet her cheeks in the darkness. Rob rubbed her back, trying to soothe her. It was going to be the longest night of her life.

  Four

  Guy Theriot was the first NTSB investigator at the scene of United 134, but based on the number of other rent-a-cars and vehicles with portable police lights popped on the roofs jammed along the tiny fire road on the crest of the mountain, he wasn’t the first government representative. FBI and FAA were already out in force, their dark silhouettes thrown against the silvery dawn sky. Overhead, news helicopters from some place big enough to afford them, Billings or Idaho Falls, circled like giant insects. The thwap of their rotors mixed with the occasional crackle of a police radio in the cold, still air.

  He smelled the crash before he saw it. Plumes of jet fuel wafted over the mountaintop. Post-crash fires were extremely common; it didn’t bode well for survivors.

  He walked past a cluster of FBI agents in their blue windbreakers and spotted some FAA guys already climbing through the wreckage, collecting evidence. The fuselage was broken in two pieces. The front half was mostly intact, but the back end was crushed into a billion pieces. Debris was spread over a large area; he could make out the glint of a turbine in the sunlight in the distance. One wing was partly intact, it’s internal wiring spilling out the broken end. Some of the blue seats were still in neat rows.