The Roswell Conspiracy (7 page)

Jess turned into the drive of a small bungalow with an expansive view of the lake and the Remarkables range behind it.

They got out and Fay took Grant’s arm. “I bet you’re as hungry as I am. Come help me make lunch.”

“Happy to,” Grant said, and they went into the house, leaving Jess and Tyler alone outside.

“Nice place,” Tyler said.

“It does the job. I’m not here much so I don’t need a lot of space.” She turned to him and gave him a serious look. “I was sorry to hear about your wife’s passing.”

Tyler did the head bob he always used to acknowledge that kind of sentiment. He’d gotten accustomed to it over the years, and everyone seemed to understand what the gesture meant.

“And I’m sorry about your parents.” After an awkward silence, he said, “Jess, what’s going on here?”

“With my grandmother?”

He nodded.

“She’s told me her story so many times, I’d come to think of it as a myth. Now I don’t know what to think.”

“What story?”

“She’ll have to tell you. She’s much better at it.”

“I’ll be interested to hear it. Then Grant and I will have to be on our way. Given what happened today, we thought it would be prudent to head back to Seattle tomorrow.”

“That’s why I asked Nana to take Grant inside. I want to hire you.”

Tyler was taken aback. “I wasn’t going to charge Fay for the consult.”

“No, I want to hire you to find out why someone tried to kill her. She’s the only family I have left in the world, and I owe it to her. Especially now that she has nowhere else to go.”

Tyler hesitated, so Jess went on. “If you’re worried about the price, I can afford whatever you charge.”

“It’s not that. It’s just … I mean, Roswell?”

“I know it sounds crazy, but you have to admit there must be something to these artifacts she has if someone wanted them badly enough to chase you down the Shotover River for them.”

Tyler looked out over the water, then back at Jess. “I can’t make any promises. I need to hear what Fay has to say.”

Jess smiled. “Oh, and by the way …” With both hands she pulled Tyler’s head down and planted a kiss on him. For a second he was a college junior again, and his stomach did a flip as he lost himself in the moment.

Jess stepped back and said, “That’s for saving Nana’s life this morning.” She walked into the house, leaving Tyler to wonder what just happened.

EIGHT

Jess was pleased with herself. Not because she had kissed Tyler. Ever since she’d seen him this morning, she’d had the overwhelming urge to do that. What she was proud of was that she had the willpower to go no further.

Tyler had aged well. He used to be as lanky as dried linguini, but obviously he’d filled out during his Army years. Though the sun had weathered him a bit, the lines on his face and long jagged scar on his neck added a rugged dimension to his tousled hair, strong jaw limned with a two-day stubble, and alert blue eyes. Now she recalled why he was the one she’d approached in history class. At first he hadn’t gotten the hint, so she’d maneuvered herself into getting invited to a party he was attending.

She smiled at the memories and opened the front door of her house. Jess turned to Tyler and said, “Well, aren’t you coming?”

Tyler recovered from his flabbergasted reaction and nodded, walking in her direction.

She found Fay and Grant making ham-and-cheese sandwiches in the kitchen.

“I think we all need a drink,” she said, and grabbed four bottles of Newcastle from the fridge. She popped the top on hers and took a long draught.

Tyler came in, spotted the beers, and drained half a bottle without a word.

“We haven’t been properly introduced,” Jess said to Grant. “My name is Jess McBride. Only Nana calls me Jessica.”

“Grant Westfield,” he said, wiping some mustard on a paper towel before shaking her hand.

“You work for Gordian Engineering, too?”

“Electrical engineer. Tyler recruited me into the firm. We did stints together in both Iraq and Afghanistan when I served in his combat engineering company as his first sergeant.”

“Then he abandoned us to join the Rangers,” Tyler said.

“
His
company?” Jess asked.

“Tyler was captain of the unit. And I didn’t abandon him. He left to start Gordian.”

“Why do you look familiar?” Fay said to Grant.

“You might remember Grant as the guy who gave up his pro wrestling career to join up,” Tyler said.

Jess didn’t follow sports much except during the Olympics. She looked at Fay, who shook her head.

“No, I think it’s because you remind me of that man on the reality show. The handsome bald one. I can’t remember which one now. It’ll come to me. But you do look a little like my husband. He had your type of muscular build.”

Tyler knew Jess’s background, but Grant gave her a new once-over at this tidbit of info.

“My grandfather was full-blooded Maori,” Jess explained. “That’s why you’d think I was Nana’s adopted grandchild.”

“Nonsense,” Fay said. “She looks exactly like her mother, who looked just like me.”

“And it seems like she got her sense of adventure from you,” Tyler said.

“That’s why she’s so good at coming up with the company’s tour packages.”

“Like what?”

Jess ticked them off using her fingers. “We’ve got six bungee-jumping locations, skydiving tours, kayaking trips, heli-skiing, white-water rafting. Just about anything you can name. Except jet boats. And we’re working on that.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a budding empire,” Tyler said.

“It’s in full bloom,” Fay said. “Jess’s company made twenty million dollars last year.”

“Okay, Nana. They don’t need all of the details.”

“I’m just so proud of you, honey.”

“I know.”

Now it was Tyler giving her a new appraisal. “Well, we’ve gone through a lot to get to this point, Fay. What exactly is it that you wanted me to take a look at?”

Fay went to her satchel and removed a hunk of silver metal the size and shape of a Frisbee cut in half. One edge was a smooth curve while the other was jagged, as if it had been hacked apart with a rusty can opener. Jess had seen it a hundred times, but now the attack gave it greater significance.

Fay gave it to Tyler, who held it carefully so that he didn’t cut himself, weighing it with his hands. “Too strong to be aluminum. Feels like a titanium alloy. Or possibly magnesium. I’d have to take it back to a lab to make sure.”

“Can you tell me if it’s from a spaceship?” Fay asked him.

Jess noticed Tyler’s lip curl at the ridiculous question, but he inspected the object carefully before answering. “It definitely looks like it’s been involved in a crash of some kind.” He pointed at the tears in the metal. “You can see evidence of explosive impact here, along with some melting of the material. But this could be from an aircraft. I’ve seen thousands of pieces like it.”

“From sixty-five years ago?”

“Well, no. My expertise is on recent accidents. But I have seen wreckage from old World War II bombers. Maybe that’s what you found.”

“Oh, no. This is definitely from the Roswell crash.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I found it there.”

“Perhaps a plane crashed in the area.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, Fay,” Tyler said. “I’m having a hard time believing this came from a spaceship, but it’s not because of you. I’m just an inveterate skeptic. If this is from Roswell, why are you just investigating it now?”

“She’s been investigating it for the past five years,” Jess said. “Ever since my grandfather died.”

“I didn’t tell Henare—that was my husband—about my experience at Roswell until very late in life. I thought he would send me to a loony bin, so I told him about it only when he was dying. I was shocked when he said I should go on that quest, that he’d be with me every step of the way. Since then I’ve been trying to track down the origin of what I learned at Roswell. I was hoping you could point me in the right direction. All I want is an answer. I don’t care what it is, but I’d like to know before I end my days on this planet.”

Grant stopped cutting the sandwiches, and Tyler guzzled the rest of his beer. Though they hid it well, Jess saw the dubious look they exchanged.

“Fay,” Tyler said, tossing the bottle in the recycling bin, “I’m happy to take this piece of metal back to Gordian and test it every way we can. But I can tell you now that unless we find it’s made of some material that we’ve never seen before, the results will be inconclusive.”

“Did you show that to anyone else?” Grant asked. “The guys at your house today must have heard about it somehow.”

Fay gave them an embarrassed look. “Oh my goodness, I did talk about it, didn’t I? When you told me it would be three months before you could see me, I didn’t think it would hurt to go to Roswell for the annual UFO festival and see if I could get some information from the people there, although plenty of them are kooks.”

“Who did you talk to?” Tyler said.

“Lots of people. You could tell that ninety percent of them were just what I thought Henare would think of me: crackpots, all of them with wild tales that I knew were absolute hogwash, but there were also lecturers and authors there who’ve spent years researching the incident.”

“Did any of them seem to take a particular interest in your story?”

“Sure. I don’t know if they believed me, but a lot of people were interested.”

“Did you show anyone your artifacts?”

“No, but I did mention the piece of wreckage in an interview.”

“There’s even a video,” Jess said.

“What video?”

“I can show it to you after lunch,” Fay said.

“Do you know anything about the multicolored metal Foreman and Blaine were after?” Tyler asked.

Fay shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“You mentioned in the house that you had ‘artifacts’ plural. Is the second one another piece of wreckage?”

“Not wreckage really. But it’s from the crash.”

Fay pulled out her real treasure from the satchel, a battered piece of wood in a plastic sheath.

She handed it to Tyler, who peered at the engraving. His eyes lit up when he recognized the drawings etched into the smooth wood. Jess wasn’t surprised that he knew what they were.

“Where did you get this?” he said.

“At Roswell. The same day I picked up that piece of metal from the wreckage of the spaceship.”

“You found it in the wreckage?”

Fay looked at Jess, who nodded for her to continue.

“It was given to me,” Fay said. “By an alien who survived the crash for a short while.”

Grant, who had been taking a swig of beer, coughed as some of the liquid went down the wrong way.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Did you say alien?”

Tyler furrowed his brow at Jess, but she was glad to see that he didn’t immediately dismiss the statement. He obviously was willing to listen to more.

Jess picked up two of the plates and nodded for Grant to get the others.

“Let’s take our lunch into the dining room,” she said. “Nana has a tale to tell you.”

NINE

July 2, 1947

Fay galloped across the grassy plain atop her Appaloosa, Bandit, trying to outrun the approaching storm. With darkness falling, her father would soon come looking for her, and he’d tan her hide if he found out she’d gone riding without finishing her after-school chores. As she felt the hot wind in her face and watched Bandit’s silky mane toss from side to side, Fay thought it would be worth the risk.

In just a few days, he’d be yanking her from everything she’d ever known in her ten short years. She’d never even been out of New Mexico and now her father wanted to uproot the entire family so he could go run his cousin’s sheep ranch near someplace called Lake Wakatipu on the other side of the world. And the worst part was that they’d have to leave Bandit behind. She’d argued that it wasn’t fair, but nothing she could say would change his mind. The best she could do was spend as much time as she could with her beloved horse, so she’d taken him for long rides every evening whether her dad liked it or not.

But he’d be extra mad if she got stuck out in a thunderstorm. Flash floods could happen in the blink of an eye, and to get home she’d have to cross many arroyos on the Foster sheep ranch where the foreman, Mac Brazel, let her ride undisturbed.

The clouds rolled in, lightning piercing the sky every few minutes. She was still seven miles from the barn and safety. At this rate she’d be soaked by the time she got there, and there’d be no way she could hide what she’d been doing if she walked into the house drenched and covered with the smell of horse. Then her behind would get the belt for sure. She pressed her heels down and urged Bandit to go faster.

A new sound intruded over the pounding hooves. Faint at first, the hum grew steadily, coming from the west behind her. Too constant to be thunder, it sounded like an engine, but no one would be idiot enough to try to drive a truck through the uneven terrain.

Fay looked over her shoulder to see where it was coming from, but the plain was empty to the horizon. The sound grew louder still, and she realized that it wasn’t coming from behind her. It was overhead.

With White Sands Proving Ground only thirty miles away, she’d heard some of her friends talk about planes that sometimes flew high above the Army base. Two years ago, she’d even heard the faraway boom of something her father later called an atom bomb. That had gotten the kids talking when the news had been made public. To them, nothing was better than a government secret, unless it was a secret weapon that could destroy an entire city.

But the noise she heard now wasn’t a bomb, and it wasn’t the drone of aircraft propellers. This was more like the whine of a thousand trumpets blowing in unison. And it was heading straight toward her.

She pulled up sharply on the reins, and Bandit whinnied as he came to a stop. Fay looked up into the low-hanging clouds hoping to catch a glimpse of the noise’s source. Then, just like heavy seas parted by a ship’s prow, the clouds slid aside, and a flying object like nothing she’d ever seen screamed out of the sky.