Death Through the Looking Glass (2 page)

Bea needed a new battery for her hearing aid, but he decided not to comment. “We'll have to try it out.”

“I thought you would, but first look at this.” She ran her fingers along the small control panel.

“A built-in propane lever.”

“No more cricks in the neck from having to use the lever over your head.”

He shook his head. “I always thought you hated my balloon.”

“I do, but as long as you persist in your madness, you may as well go in style.”

He turned to the others, who stood smiling in the background. “I'm going up; let's inflate.”

Out of long-practiced habit, Bea and Kim began to spread the balloon envelope as Lyon started the portable air compressor and directed its flow into the bag.

“I need a turkey.”

Kim and Bea shook their heads simultaneously and continued studiously to unfold the envelope.

“I'll be chaser,” Rocco offered.

“I'll help if you'll tell me what the turkey does,” Damon said.

Lyon spread the balloon bag's opening and beckoned to Damon. “You go inside and extend your arms as wide as you can. That helps the thing fill faster.”

Damon shrugged and stepped inside the balloon. “I've never even seen one of these things before.”

“Ah, I'd suggest you step back a little further.”

“He's obviously never seen one, or he wouldn't volunteer to be the turkey,” Rocco said.

“What's that?” Damon asked from inside the balloon.

“Never mind.”

Compressor air began to riffle the sides of the balloon and fill it out. Lyon picked up the heavy propane burner, adjusted the feed and lit the pilot light. He held the burner across his body, braced his feet, and pointed the nozzle through the balloon opening.

“Hold it wide, Damon,” he said and pulled the propane-release lever. As the burner lit with a roar, a jagged three-foot flame jutted into the balloon.

“My God! You've singed my eyebrows.”

“Get back a little further and hold it wide.” Lyon pulled the lever again for a three-second whoosh of flame.

“I was his turkey once,” Rocco said. “Never again.”

“Do you have to do it this way?” they heard Damon yell over the burner's roar.

“No, but it's faster.”

The burner's intense flame heated the air inside the balloon, which quickly began to fill and take shape. In minutes the fifty-foot-long envelope rounded into circular form and rose upright. Lyon attached the guy wires sewn into the balloon's surface to their brackets on the basket, then mounted the propane burner on its gondola brace, immediately beneath the balloon opening. At periodic intervals he gave short bursts of propane, until warm air had filled the balloon to its full size.

The inflated balloon revealed the large Wobbly face painted on its surface. The twenty-five-foot-high monster grinned out over the group.

“How did you get it from our barn?” Lyon asked as he made final adjustments to the basket attachments.

“Rocco brought it down last night.”

As the basket began to bob from the ground, Lyon climbed aboard. “There's room for two. Anyone for a ride?”

They looked at him in sober speculation.

“You're not conning me again,” Damon said.

“Why does that sign on the side say ‘experimental'?” Robin asked.

“The Federal Aviation people require it. It's not a certified aircraft.”

Robin's eyes slowly traveled the length of the large sphere dominating the yard. “I think I'll go for a swim,” she said and ran toward the beach.

“No takers?” Heads shook as they declined. “Then I hope you'll excuse me for a while.”

“Can we stop you?” Bea asked.

Lyon began his preflight checks and, as always, marveled at the simplicity of the device. He pulled on the lines that were sewn into the nylon envelope, coverging down toward the balloon's opening or appendix. He checked the appendix, where the lines were attached to the load ring, which supported the basket and the propane burner immediately over his head. His periodic firing of the burner would heat the air within the envelope and cause the vehicle to become buoyant. The craft's rate of ascent or descent would be controlled by the amount of propane burned and by the release of hot air from the bag through the panel, a portion of the envelope that opened and closed at his tug on a line. For an emergency descent, Lyon could pull the red cord of the ripping panel, a portion of the bag that, torn away, would spill large amounts of hot air into the atmosphere.

The gondola held a large propane tank and a few instruments: propane gauge, temperature gauge, compass, altimeter, and a variometer. The final piece of equipment was a CB radio.

Lyon pulled the lever for a five-second burn and felt the basket lift from the ground. All was in order, so he signaled to Bea to cast off the mooring line.

After another short burn the balloon began a rapid and noiseless ascent. The clear morning was nearly windless, and the progress was straight up, with little drift. At chimney height Lyon looked down at the dispersing group on the ground. Damon was walking slowly toward the boat house, Bea has gone into the main house, while Robin was a flash of arms twenty yards offshore. Kim had spread a blanket on the sand and lay face down in the warmth.

“You'll never get sunburned this time of the morning,” Lyon heard Rocco yell at the basking Kim.

“I don't burn,” the black woman retorted with a snort. Kim had been Bea Wentworth's administrative assistant for several years when she was in the state Senate, and now, after his wife's election to the office of secretary of the state, Kim had been appointed deputy secretary. Kim had accepted the appointment with protest, bemoaning the fact that somehow it wasn't quite in keeping with her activist positions to handle corporate registrations for the state of Connecticut.

Rocco walked toward the pickup truck which would act as balloon chase vehicle. He squeezed his two-hundred-eighty-pound frame into the driver's seat and, from years of habit as Murphysville's chief of police, flipped on the truck's CB radio.

The balloon rose silently as it separated itself from the world below. Spotting clouds at fifteen hundred feet that were scudding in an easterly direction toward the water, Lyon leveled at six hundred feet by minute burns of propane. He found himself drifting slightly toward the west along the coastline, at a speed of four knots.

He felt a nostalgic twinge as he passed over the beach house. They had surprised him with a ceremony for a day he had intended to let pass without ceremony. They were the ones he felt closest to: his wife; Rocco, his oldest friend, who had served with him in Korea; Damon Snow, a business acquaintance at first, now becoming a friend; and Robin. The Wentworths had welcomed Lyon's illustrator's daughter when she had arrived for her visit, as if she were a partial and temporary replacement for the daughter they had lost so long ago.

His thoughts of Robin were unsettling. He had the vague fear that her lingering looks and mild flirtations had taken on a different character than that of surrogate daughter. He smiled; the thoughts of the long-limbed young girl were a sure sign of his approaching middle age.

Lyon leaned on the edge of the gondola to watch the slowly passing panorama. Over the water, to the east, the sun balanced on the horizon and cast red streaks across the sound. Looking due south he could see Orient Point, Long Island; below him were passing the cottages along the shore of Lantern City.

He flipped on the CB radio. “Rocco, I can bring her down at the Lantern City football field in half an hour.”

“I'll be there.”

“Thank you.” He flipped off the radio and placed it back on its mountings and let himself become immersed in the feeling of freedom as he merged with the sky.

The distant pitched whine of a low-flying aircraft destroyed the mood, and he turned to glare toward the offending buzz as occupants of a sailboat might at a power launch. The plane approached from the east, directly out of the sun, and he could catch only fleeting glimpses of it as it banked.

There was only one person in the state who flew such a garishly painted Piper. Tom Giles, long-ago classmate and Hartford attorney, had often passed the Wobbly II in his early-morning flights. Occasionally, when they came across each other at parties given by mutual friends, they would argue the respective merits of their craft.

Tom had come to the party after all. As Lyon watched, the small plane changed to a southeasterly heading. He thought it amusing that Tom still found it necessary to satisfy some inner need by flamboyant displays of his flying, as if adult life had never been quite fulfilling, never so successful as the triumphs of his younger years.

Those early weeks at Greenfield Preparatory had been painful for Lyon. The first day had begun badly. Warned by an alumnus that white bucks were “in,” Lyon had arrived for the first day's classes wearing a pair of his father's white medical shoes. The situation had deteriorated from there, and he quickly discovered that his status as a “Townie” was somewhere between a Typhoid Mary and a Russian spy, and on some days he wasn't quite sure of the exact order.

They caught him in the third week. He had rounded a corner in the locker room and inadvertently stumbled on several of his classmates smoking. In his naïveté he had undoubtedly looked shocked at this abuse of the rules. Four of them had jumped him.

“They've gone,” were the first words Tom Giles had spoken to him. “Get up off the floor.”

Lyon looked up, brushed away the residue of a bloody nose, and saw Tom sitting on the radiator, with one knee pulled up under his chin. “I'll cream them,” Lyon had mumbled in youthful bravado.

“You and what army? Come on, man, you've got to get with it. Townies have a choice. You can run home from class every day, become the class clown, or be a jock.”

“I'm lousy at basketball.”

“Football?” Tom looked reflectively at Lyon as he got to his feet. He appraised Lyon's recently acquired six feet of height and his slight build. “Forget football. How about baseball?”

“Never played.”

“Oh, Jesus. Come on, Went. You've got to do something. Everybody does something.”

“I have a great butterfly collection.”

Giles closed his eyes. “Sorry I asked. You mention butterflies to anybody else at Greenfield and they'll break your back and flush you.”

“I've never been great at sports. We traveled a lot, and my skills are …”

Giles snapped his fingers. “Lacrosse. We've got a great lacrosse team at Greenfield.”

“I've never even seen it played.”

“That's the great part. No one else has either, until they come here. You ever seen guys playing sandlot lacrosse, playing lacrosse in their backyards?”

“Well, no.” Lyon thought a moment. “Then everybody starts off even. Who do I see about it?”

“Me. I'm JV captain.”

Lyon's memories of the beginnings of their relationship immediately faded when he saw a plume of black smoke curling back from the front of Tom's craft. He tensed. His hands gripped the edge of the basket as he fixed his attention on the plane's plight. The smoke continued to roll as the plane went into a dive.

As the aircraft neared the water, its angle of descent seemed to increase, and yet it flew under control as the power dive continued. Why didn't Tom pull the nose up, cut the power—any number of things that might save him from destruction?

He would hit the water in moments.

The balloon was directly over the restaurant near the town pier. Lyon glanced quickly at his compass and reached for the CB radio. He switched to channel 9, the emergency channel.

“This is an emergency from Wobbly Two over Lantern City. There is a light plane in distress. Does anyone read me?” He flipped to receive.

“I read you, Wobbly Two. This is Red Ball on the Conn Pike. I am proceeding south. What do you need?”

Lyon switched to transmit. “Thank you, Red Ball. Get word to the Coast Guard.” As he watched, the plane hit the water and immediately disappeared. “Get word to the Coast Guard that a small aircraft has gone down in the sound. A heading of 170 from the restaurant at the Lantern City town pier.”

“I got you; 170 from the pier. I'm near the State Police barracks, and I'll have them talk to you. Out.”

Lyon switched the radio over to channel 24, where Rocco would be monitoring. “Rocco. Rocco. Do you hear me? Do you read me?”

“I'm talking, mister,” a high-pitched and astringent voice said in anger.

“This is an emergency.”

“Use the emergency channel.”

“I'm in the pickup going toward the football field.” Rocco's voice overrode the woman's.

Lyon looked down from the balloon. “I'm over the Lantern City town beach. Get over here fast.”

“I can see you. Be right there.”

Lyon flipped back to the emergency channel with one hand while the other pulled the red rope of the ripping panel. “Sergeant Raskin here. Who wants the Coast Guard?”

“A plane has gone down at a bearing of 170 from the town pier. I estimate about six thousand yards out.”

The open panel spilled gusts of hot air from the envelope of the balloon, and Lyon had to replace the radio and attend to the rapid descent of the balloon. He flipped the propane burner for very short burns and looked down at the onrushing beach.

The balloon's rate of descent was alarming, and he could only hope he would hit the slim sandy beach rather than the water, that he would not fall onto some of the large rocks spotted along the shore.

Rocco pulled the pickup truck into the adjacent parking lot as the balloon landed with a heavy bounce on the beach.

Lyon was thrown against the side of the basket, then flipped over the edge to land unharmed in the sand. He rolled over and onto his feet and ran at full speed toward the truck. Rocco had the door open and the pickup rolling as Lyon threw himself into the cab and gasped for breath.