Mistress (5 page)

I wake up with a nasty hangover in a mediocre hotel room. I need more sleep, but the gong banging in my head won’t allow it, and anyway, I need to get back to DC. I need to learn more about Jonathan Liu.

The two attendants at the desk at Wisconsin Aviation give me a friendly glance and a wave on my way through to the tarmac. They don’t ask for any kind of identification, even though I’ve never flown from here before this trip. The rules for general aviation just aren’t the same as those for commercial flight. No metal detectors here. As long as I have the pilot “look,” nobody asks any questions. And I’m not even wearing my aviators.

I know what you’re thinking—a Leo DiCaprio mind-scroll, right? Sorry, too tired.

I rush through the preflight check, eager to be rid of Madison, of Diana’s family, of the lady in black, of Diana’s diminutive drunk of a little brother, with his furtive reference to the most powerful Chinese lobbyist on the Hill.

Chocks up, preflight checklist complete, tower cleared for takeoff. I never go to the big airports. Nearly all airports are public, and they can’t refuse to let small aircraft land or take off, but they can leave a tiny plane like mine on the tarmac until I’m roasted or rusted through. Dane County Regional gets me off the ground in an hour.

Flaps up and trim set for takeoff, I release the brakes and open the throttle to full. About fifteen hundred feet down the runway, I hit sixty-five miles per hour and the wheels are bouncing before we’re airborne, climbing at full power.

The ground falls away beneath me. Funny how the fire escape at Diana’s makes me shake with fear, but throttling up to eighty knots and hurtling through space, supported by faith in the invisible power of lift, is no problem.

I reach altitude and check the GPS, banking east and settling into the flight plan, which will take me to Mansfield, Ohio, for a quick refueling stop before the last leg home.

The engine suddenly brings my mind back to the moment. It sputters. Coughs. I change the fuel mixture to rich, adding more fuel to the mix of fuel and air, and turn on the carburetor heat. The temperature at the airport was ninety degrees when I took off. There can’t be ice in the carburetor. Can there?

The engine roars for a moment. Then there is a horrible clatter, like the time we were sitting in the café on G Street, Diana, and a city bus making a right turn tore the side mirrors off two parked cars, and you laughed at the crowd that gathered.

And then, more horrifying than any noise, there is silence. I hear the wind rushing past and nothing more.

“The Sound of Silence” is a nice song, and a nice thought, too, in moments of contemplation or serenity. But it’s not a nice sound when you’re nine thousand feet off the ground in a single-engine Cessna.

Easy, Ben. You know what to do.

Airspeed at eighty miles per hour. Switch fuel tanks. Mixture to full rich. Carb heat on—check. Primer in and locked. Ignition to left, then right, then…start.

I said,
Start
.

Nothing. Not even a click.

That engine is not going to start.

I try again, just to be sure.

My heartbeat kicks into my throat. There are no atheists in Skyhawks that lack engine power. She’s a sturdy aircraft, but she’s no glider. Watertown is too far. There’s no way I can coast all the way there.

This plane is going down.

Breathe in, Ben. Fly the plane.

Look around.

Wind out of the north. I need to find a field. This plane doesn’t need a runway, remember? That crazy kid from flight school landed his on the eighteenth green. Oh, how I’d love to be playing golf right now.

Just find someplace flat, Ben.

I bank left, into the wind. At least my instruments are still working. For now.

Seat belt and harness tight. I can do this. Just like power-off landings during training. Except without the pesky runway.

I see a long stretch of two-lane highway, and I’m sorely tempted. No, Ben. Power lines. They’d tangle you up like a fly in a spiderweb.

The most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen appears in front of me—a level pasture, dead ahead. Never have I been so happy to see a bunch of cows.

I can make it. I prepare for landing: Airspeed down to sixty-five knots. Fuel shutoff valve on. As if that mattered. But an engine fire on landing would complicate things.

Focus, Ben. This can still have a happy ending.

Fly the plane. Flaps down. Airspeed to sixty knots.

I tune the radio to 121.5 MHz. That’s one I never thought I would see on the dial—the international aeronautical emergency frequency.

I open the frequency, and with a voice so calm that it doesn’t sound like my own, I say the words that haunt a pilot’s dreams:

“MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY. Watertown tower, this is Skyhawk three-one-six-zero Foxtrot. Repeat: Skyhawk three-one-six-zero Foxtrot with total engine failure attempting a forced landing in a pasture. Last known position 43º6′46″ north, 88º42′13″ west, at fifteen hundred feet, heading twenty degrees. One person on board. I require immediate assistance.”

The radio silence compounds the silence of the engine as the seconds tick away. Don’t panic, Ben. Fly the plane.

The radio crackles to life. “Cessna three-one-six-zero Foxtrot, this is Watertown tower. I read you five by five. Assistance is en route.”

Okay, great. Now, if you could please get here in the next five seconds and toss me a parachute.

The ground hurtles up at me—too fast, too fast. Flaps full down. Nose up, tail down. The wings groan in protest. That’s strange—I didn’t really notice that sound when the engine was running. Slow it down. Float, Ben. Don’t hurtle. Slow it down…but don’t slow down too much or you’ll drop right out of the air altogether and real damage will be done.

Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes—

I unlatch the cabin doors and lock them open so that when the frame is twisted on impact I can still get out. The door bangs deafeningly against the frame, flapping open and shut in the gusts of wind. The noise is a relief after the silence. The quiet engine, like the silence of death, with the wind whistling past.

Did you hear the wind, Diana, as you fell to the pavement?

Dammit, Ben. Fly. The. Plane.

I wait until the very last moment and pull up hard, just before my wheels hit the soft earth. The back wheels collide with the ground, then the front wheel. Perfect. It would have been a shaky landing on a runway, but I feel a premature rush of pride anyway.

Immediately, pride disappearing into panic, I bounce back up, still moving too fast to stay on the ground. Keep her level, Ben. The plane falls back to the ground again with a great thud, and I can see the black and white of the resident cows running frantically from the horrible sound of my Skyhawk skidding through their pasture. I slam on the brakes with every last ounce of strength I have. Full up elevator.

Oh, God,
please stop please stop please stop
. The noise is excruciating. The plane shakes and shudders so hard that sound and sight and smell and taste and touch all blur together. I stand on the brakes completely, straining against the seat belt and harness.

I hear the sickening shriek of twisting metal, and I suddenly slam forward, smashing my head into the instrument panel. The plane tilts suddenly to the left and the ground is shockingly close to my window. As if in slow motion, the wingtip scratches through the earth and shreds, cracking with the force of the impact. I must have lost a wheel back there. I skid forever, my eyes covered with my blood, and then everything goes black.

“Hey, airman, you okay in there?”

I open my eyes, blink away the blood. I kick the door open and crawl out. My head throbs with every heartbeat.

My nose pricks up. I smell…kerosene. What the hell?

Kerosene?

I can see fuel dripping from the damaged wing.

I reach out and catch a few drops with my hand. Drops, like blood, forming a perfect sphere in free fall.

Murder can be made to look like suicide, and suicide can be made to look like murder.

Avgas, or aviation gasoline, should evaporate almost instantly. And 100LL—the kind of gas I use for this plane—is dyed blue. But the drops coming from the wing are not the right color. And they leave an oily residue on my hand.

This isn’t avgas. This is jet fuel.

One of the guys who rushed to help me says, helpfully, “Someone musta put jet fuel in your plane, son. Who’d do something dumb like that?”

I look at him and shrug.

It’s the right question. And it’s a question I intend to ask Jonathan Liu.

The aftermath is like a dream, like I’m floating. After a couple of minutes on my feet, my legs buckle, ink blots flash and disappear before my eyes, and I collapse to the ground. The first responders ask me if I’m all right, and I’m thinking—I don’t know if I say this out loud, but I’m thinking—if I could survive a fall of nine thousand feet, I can probably survive a fall of six feet and one inch. An ambulance is there a few minutes later and they rush me off before the media arrives. They transport me to Watertown Regional Medical Center, or at least that’s what they tell me. I’m weaving in and out of consciousness, picking up a few words here and there,
blood volume
and
saline
and
cyanosis
. A nice paramedic who looks like Demi Moore, but blond, and with a different eye color—okay, maybe she doesn’t look totally like Demi—

“God must have been with you today, Benjamin,” she says.

“Was He the one…who put the jet fuel in…my plane?”

I’m leaving on a jet plane. Don’t know when I’ll be back again
. But I’m still here.
I’m still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I hate that song.
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
. A little better. But she didn’t love me. She would have, someday. Diana would have—

“My…mother loved me,” I say.

“Your mother loves you?” It seems like she’s trying to keep me talking. She looks kind of like Demi Moore.

“She…died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Was that just recently?”

“Plane crash,” I say. If you can’t have a little fun, what’s the point? Oscar Wilde reportedly said on his deathbed,
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go
. I don’t know if that’s true, but I like it.

“Oh, this one’s a real joker,” says the woman who doesn’t look like Demi Moore totally, but kind of. “Stay down, Benjamin. Lie flat.”

“I’m…fine.”

“You’re not fine. You’re concussed and hypersomething blah, blah, blah.”

And then there’s a light in my face, and they’re poking and prodding me in a bed and…and…

“…pain medication, Mr. Casper.”

“…someone you’d like us to call, Mr. Casper?”

“…reporters want to speak with you, Mr. Casper.”

“…with the National Transportation Safety Board, Mr. Casper.”

“…ask you a couple questions, Mr. Casper?”

“Casper the friendly ghost, Mr. Casper.”

“The friendliest ghost you know, Mr. Casper.”

Demi Moore in
Ghost
made every red-blooded male want to take up pottery. No, Mr. NTSB investigator, I have no idea how jet fuel got in my tank, and yes, I’m going through some tough times right now, but no, I’m not suicidal. If I were suicidal I wouldn’t have
landed
the fucking plane, and I don’t care what anyone says, I’ll take Demi Moore on her worst day, even in
G.I. Jane
.

“Morning, Benjamin.” A woman’s authoritative voice.

I open my eyes slowly, like a garage door lifting. “What time is it?”

“Oh-five hundred,” she says. A nurse, heavyset, with a warm face.

Five in the morning? I slept for almost eighteen hours. I touch my face. There’s a thick bandage on my forehead.

“What happened?” I ask.

“You don’t remember what happened?”

“I mean, am I hurt?”

“You suffered a concussion and you went into shock. But no broken bones, by some miracle. How do you feel?”

I shake myself fully awake and let reality reintroduce itself. But it doesn’t shake my hand. It goes straight for my balls.

Someone killed Diana and then tried to kill me.

“I have to go,” I say.

“Well, you
might
be ready for release. But I know the guys from the NTSB want to come back. You weren’t able to answer their questions last night.”

I wasn’t? I thought I told them all they needed to know about Demi Moore’s film career. They want to come back to talk about her time on
General Hospital
?

I shake my head. I can’t stay here. I’m a sitting duck if they’re looking for me. And after surviving a free fall from nine thousand feet, it would be a crying shame if someone just walked in and shot me.

“I’m leaving,” I say.

I take a cab to Watertown’s airport and charter a flight back to Potomac. I know, I know, but I figure my odds of crashing in a plane twice in forty-eight hours are fairly remote, and I’m way too stubborn to let my fear ground me. The guy who flies me is a young Asian guy who keeps asking what it’s like to crash-land a plane until I offer to show him. The whole time I’m thinking, if we crash and end up in some remote mountains and get to the point where we’re starving to death, like in
Alive,
I hope this guy doesn’t eat me.

When I land at Potomac, my fear reawakens. I can’t go home. I make a snap decision and drive my Triumph ninety miles south to my lake cabin in Virginia. Anyone wishing to do me harm wouldn’t be expecting this move. Only problem is, I wasn’t, either, so I don’t have my keys. I have to break into my own cabin.

The place has log siding and a stone chimney and sits on four acres of waterfront property on Lake Anna. The land’s been in my father’s family for three generations, but the lake, in its current form, wasn’t created until the early ’70s as a cooling mechanism for Virginia Electric and Power’s nuclear reactors. My grandfather built the original log cabin on this land, but within a month of his death, in 1983, Father knocked it down and built a two-story, four-bedroom, two-bath structure. Father wasn’t exactly the sentimental type. He didn’t keep a single picture from his childhood and never talked about his parents. My grandfather worked in trade shows. I think that meant he brought shows in and took a commission from the convention center or something like that. He made millions and invested exceptionally well, ergo my trust fund. That’s all I know about Grandpa. Never met the guy and never heard a single intimate detail about him except from Aunt Grace at Father’s funeral, who said that Father hated his dad. So we Caspers are keeping a pretty consistent generational theme going.

I stop and gaze a moment at the serene lake, breathe in the clean air. Down by the water there is a long, L-shaped dock and boathouse. No boat, though. It’s stored in town and I’ve been too busy this summer to get it out. No matter. Just being here instills a sense of calm. This place is good for the soul.

Father was a closet drinker, which is a very difficult thing to be, because you’re not fooling anybody when you’re slurring your words and stumbling around like a toddler learning to walk. But he limited his boozing to the evening, so only Mom and I were granted front-row seats to the Marty Casper Show. In the thirty-four years he worked in the history department at American University, I’ll bet there wasn’t a soul there who had any clue that Professor Casper emptied a bottle of Scotch per night.

I circle the cabin, looking for the best point of entry for my break-in. I settle on the wraparound deck on the lake side of the cabin, which is almost entirely a wall of glass. The view of the lake is breathtaking. Others who live here, in the so-called mid-lake, who like to check out everyone else’s cabins as they motor up and down the water, call our cabin the house of glass.

I decide on a kitchen window because it’s a standard model that will be easy to replace. I pick up a rock, but it falls from my hand. I poise my hand in the air and watch it quiver. It’s the first time I recognize the tremble in my body. My legs begin to buckle again and I realize that I’ve underestimated the effects of what happened to me. I’m surprised I made it down here on the Triumph without killing myself. Mother would have said,
You didn’t have your thinking cap on
.

Mother wasn’t the warmest of people, either. She took a lot of pills and thought I didn’t know. Some days, she’d put me in front of the TV and lock herself in the bathroom for hours. One time, I walked over to the door to ask her what was going on and heard her sobbing and sniffling inside. I never made that mistake again. I just sat in front of the television, ready to turn up the volume when necessary to drown out her cries or her singing. She’d come out eventually, having mustered the courage to face the world, and would wrap her arms around me and hum softly to me while I watched whatever was on TV.

So maybe she wasn’t everyone’s idea of the ideal mommy, but she was still mine. And she didn’t deserve what happened to her.

Instead of a rock, I use my elbow to break through the glass of the kitchen window. It’s not an easy fit, but I slide through the window face-first into the kitchen sink, one of those old-fashioned farmer’s sinks of stainless steel.

I manage to fall to the floor without doing serious damage to myself. I won’t be giving any Olympic gymnast a run for his money, but I don’t break any bones. Maybe I’m like Bruce Willis in
Unbreakable
. Nothing can stop me—not a plane crash, not breaking into my own cabin, not even a giant schnauzer.

I let out a forty-eight-hour sigh. After all that, I’m home, in some sense of that word, safe and sound. But safe for how long?