Cape Disappointment (28 page)

“We're having meetings for the next couple of days. In fact, I'm in one now. So much has changed around here, as I'm sure you can
imagine. Drop by tomorrow, though. Any time. We'll make room for you.”

“I'll be there.”

I closed the connection, and after Snake and I policed the plastic tabletop, we went out to the car. Back on the highway, Snake said, “Thomas? When we were passing through Enumclaw the first time? You chased somebody into the bookstore.” After it became obvious I wasn't going to reply, he turned and looked out the side window for the rest of the trip. I appreciated his presence and I wanted him to stay, but I didn't need stooges in the peanut gallery thinking I'd gone bonkers, at least not if they were going to remind me of it.

It was after one o'clock when we got back to my house. The dog hadn't returned. I put out another bowl of food, hoping the racoons wouldn't raid it before nightfall, and then went inside, where I was greeted by a pair of Kathy's shoes on the closed-in portion of the back porch under the shelf where we kept the extra flowerpots. They were her gardening clogs and still had dirt on them. There was something insufferably sad about their toe-in placement, about the fact that she had been the last to handle them, about the fact that I didn't know what to do with them and probably never would. There was nothing lonelier than the shoes of a dead person, nothing quite so personal, so concrete, and useless.

Snake clomped through the house and threw himself onto the living room sofa, where he began thumbing through one of his brother's magazines.

Trying to get over the minor hurdle of Kathy's shoes in the same way that I had been forced to get over a hundred other little reminders of her every day, I sat at the computer and discovered that Bert had already sent me two dozen website addresses for study. I read for a while and then wandered around the house aimlessly mulling over a new— to me— and less virtuous view of the universe and the United States in particular than I was used to imagining. In the other room Snake was snoring. Eventually I found myself slipping into my winter cycling tights and a weatherproof jacket and heading to the garage, where I pumped up the tires on my winter bike, a single-speed converted track bike with a fixed gear.

It was chilly in the afternoon gloom, but the Doppler on the Internet
hadn't detected any rain showers, so I rode up the hill to Seventeenth, then took it south through the fraternities and sororities, weaving through the University of Washington, and exiting campus near the Montlake Cut. I rode through the arboretum, then down to Lake Washington and along the lake to Seward Park and back. Claire Mitz's place was just on the other side of the water. Because of the chill, I saw only five or six other serious riders. The trip took an hour, a short ride for me, but when I got back I was spent. I'd been unable to think of anything but Kathy. Somehow the exercise loosened me up, and unexpectedly I started crying, consumed by how much I missed her and would continue to miss her, by how unfair her death was, by the anger welling up inside me over the possibility she and the others may have been murdered as part of a political plot.

As unlikely and even irrational as Bert's theory of the plane crash was, he had left me with a host of questions to mull over. Had the FBI been alerted
before
the crash, and if so, by whom? Was Timothy Hoagland's real job to whitewash the murders and make them appear accidental? If so, did Hoagland know what actually happened or was he simply following orders? Was anybody else on the NTSB investigation team involved, and if not, how was that possible? And last but most important, who would murder eleven people just to achieve what would be a hollow and likely temporary political advantage?

Back home, I took a shower and then, shoeless and sockless, sat down once more at the computer in the hallway. Minutes dissolved into hours, and before I knew it, the sky outside was dark and Snake was stomping around in the kitchen banging pots and pans and chopping carrots and potatoes on my cutting board.

“New Mexico lizard goulash,” he said when he caught my eye. “Gonna make you feel like a right new man.”

It would take weeks to thoroughly examine every topic Bert had brought up, but in the space of a few hours, I managed to touch on most of them. I wanted to see, in each case, whether he was alone in his conclusions, or if there were others who believed what he did. I wanted to fact-check. I wanted to inspect his reasoning for fallacious arguments. Although I already knew that a sizeable contingent in this country believed the 9/11 report was a cover-up, I was surprised at the strength and depth of their support around the world, hundreds, if not
tens of thousands of doubters, many of them experts in their fields, bestselling books written in Germany and France on the topic.

If our government was conspiring to cover up the true dimensions, bungling of, or the real reasons for 9/11, I could believe almost anything. In fact, belief that the events of 9/11 were covered up was a springboard for buying into all kinds of horrors involving our government's dark side, which was probably the reason most people refused to even entertain the possibility of anything but the official story.

The event Bert wanted me to read about that most correlated with our plane crash off the Washington coast was Paul Wellstone's death. When I looked up the Wellstone plane disaster in 2002, I found plenty of chatter on the Net, much of it critical of the official investigation, which had, indeed, included Timothy Hoagland. On a lark I Googled Hoagland's name, then spent two hours sorting through one inconsequential and inappropriate webpage after another until I stumbled upon a ten-year-old item in
The Charlotte Observer:

Bert didn't tell me he'd worked closely enough with Timothy Hoagland that they would have been together in the same vehicle ten years ago in North Carolina. And when Hoagland spoke of Bert's arrest at Cape Disappointment, he gave no indication he knew Bert from the past. Did the two have a current connection they both had a reason to keep hidden?

At dinner Snake interrupted my brooding and said, “You realize there's nothing worse than losing someone you love and knowing there was no reason for it. The most painful thing in the world is a senseless death. Human beings don't do well with senseless stuff. They want a cause for everything that happens, and better yet, they want to be able
to blame someone. You know that's the only reason you're giving Bert's conspiracy bullshit any consideration. You want to think Kathy didn't die for nothing.”

“Because I need it doesn't mean it isn't true.” “You should see yourself. You look like a mad scientist.” “You look pretty good yourself with that stack of jack-off magazines.” After dinner I went back to the computer and found more information on Hoagland. He was forty-seven, and astonishingly enough, I found a source saying he'd worked in the CIA for twenty years. His other credits included several years with the Department of Agriculture, the same as Bert Slezak. As had Bert, he'd spent time in Argentina and Brazil. According to an article I found in
The Washington Post,
he once owned his own company, which did contract work for the FBI. One article claimed he had a near-genius IQ and had whipped through all the course work at the FBI academy on the Marine Corps base at Quantico in record time.

When I looked up the NTSB report on the Carnahan airplane crash, I found that Bert was right about Hoagland's association with the investigation. He hadn't been the lead investigator, as Bert claimed, but he'd been on the team. He was also on the investigation team after Paul Wellstone's plane went down. I stayed at the computer for hours, printing out relevant material and adding it to my stash. When I needed to stretch, I walked out to the backyard to see if the dog had returned from his sabbatical, but he hadn't.

Just before going to bed I discovered an article by a prominent psychiatrist claiming people who were confronted with stories of massive government misbehavior tended in overwhelming numbers to line up in the camp they started in, that is, those who already had a mistrust of government institutions tended to readily believe stories of conspiracy and malfeasance, while those who routinely trusted government entities and believed most politicians had our best interests at heart tended to disbelieve stories of government corruption, even after being confronted with overwhelming evidence of same. For my part, I'd never been completely trusting of those in power. But then, neither had the founding fathers. That's what all the checks and balances were about.

THAT NIGHT I SLEPT TWELVE HOURS,
which was amazing in itself, and woke feeling refreshed for the first time in weeks. I felt calm. I picked up my cellphone and realized I'd received a call during the night. Instantly my calm vanished. It was from Kathy's number— Kathy's cellphone calling mine. I sat on the edge of the bed to let the cold morning air wake me and stared at the familiar number. Kathy's phone was at the bottom of the sea. There wasn't any way it would be operable, yet my cell had logged a call from her number. It was impossible to know what it meant. I would like to say I let the implications slowly rumble through my brain, but nothing passed through my mind except disbelief. No message had been left. God only knows what I thought would be on a voice message from Kathy's phone, as if she could carry it into the afterlife and some ethereal cell tower would connect us.

I was shaking.
Somebody
had called me from Kathy's phone. I could only wonder what might have happened if I'd answered. This was worse than anything that had happened since the accident, worse than going off half-cocked and chasing Kathy doubles. It flummoxed me to the point of paralysis. I sat on the edge of the bed for twenty-five minutes.

It was almost eleven o'clock when I padded into the kitchen, where Snake was reading the morning newspaper at the table. I handed him the phone and said, “What do you make of this?”

“Looks like Kathy's number.”

“Yeah.”

“Kathy called you?”

“Her phone did. I was asleep.”

“They got her phone.”

“Who? Who has her phone?”

“The recovery people at the Cape. They probably found it when they emptied out the fuselage. Why? You didn't think it was Kathy calling, did you?”

“I just …”

“You thought it was Kathy?”

“No.”

“You did. Jesus, Thomas. You've got to realize where you are with this. She's gone.”

“I know that!”

“Do you?”

Turning back to the paper, Snake gave me a look no sane person wants to be on the receiving end of. He tried to conceal it when he realized how I was reacting, but it was precisely the sort of overly sensitive, semifaked sympathetic grimace you might give to someone who'd just, through a complicated series of tragic misunderstandings, lost a kitten in a trash compactor.

“The phone went down with the plane,” I said. “I know because I was talking to her when it went down.”

“Isn't that what I said? They pulled up the plane.”

“That phone's been in eight hundred feet of water for more than a week. You think it would still work?”

“Apparently it does.”

“But what are the odds?”

“Call one of your techy friends and ask him. Or better yet, put your own phone in a bucket of water and see what happens. Maybe it was in an air pocket. It
is
kind of spooky. I'll grant you that. You
did
watch Kathy get on that plane, didn't you?”

“I left before it took off, but she was on the plane.”

“Jesus, I didn't realize you were talking to her. That must have been …”

“Don't say anything else.”

In the car Snake got on his own cellphone, calling the numbers
we'd collected for the FAA, the NTSB, and for Timothy Hoagland, but all he got were recorded messages. On each he left a synopsis detailing the middle-of-the-night phone call I'd received, then left our names but
his
number. I recognized it as a clever way of binding himself to me, because as long as we were expecting calls on
his
cell, I wasn't going to wander off. Snake, I could see, was determined to watch over me the way a dog owner watched over a Rottweiler he thought might be going bad. When we couldn't raise any official government response, he called a couple of friends in the electronics industry who told us what we'd already guessed: If Kathy's phone had been submerged hundreds of feet below the surface, the likelihood that it was still in working order was slim to none.

Beyond the south end of Lake Washington, Mount Rainier loomed in the distance. Sunshine glittered off the whitecaps on the lake. It should have been enough, in the middle of this cloud-drenched season, to brighten my mood, but it wasn't.