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CHAPTER 1
The padded mailer was nine by twelve inches, barely adequate to hold its chunky contents. ALEX SHANAHAN was written across the front in blue ink, but the rest of my address was in black, as if the sender had filled it in at a later date. I stared at the handwriting for a long time because I knew I'd seen it before. I couldn't place it.
According to the postmark, the envelope had been mailed two weeks earlier from East Boston, Massachusetts. For a good portion of that time it had been sitting at the post office with postage due, which explained why it had taken almost two weeks to get from one end of town to the other. The idea of calling the police crossed my mind. Logan Airport was in East Boston, and anything mailed to me from Logan Airport should have been checked by the bomb squad. I decided against it. I hadn't worked there in a long time, and besides, whatever was in the package had the stiff outline and solid feel of a heavy book, not an incendiary device.
I went looking for a kitchen knife to use as a letter opener, forgetting that everything from my kitchen, indeed my entire apartment, was wrapped, packed, and stacked neatly against the wall in cardboard boxes. I found my keys and used one to slit open the end of the mystery package.
Whatever was in there was wedged in tightly, and I couldn't get a firm grip anyway because the contents came complete with a greasy film that rubbed off on my fingers. I picked up the envelope and studied the problem. The only way I was getting it out was by performing surgery. Using the key again, I made rough incisions along two of the three remaining edges and created a flap, which, when I folded it back, provided a clear view of what was inside.
It was a stack of pages, torn and smudged, attached to a single thick cover that was smeared with the black grease and soot that had come off on my fingers. From the orientation of the pages, it appeared to be the back cover. That meant I had to flip it over if I had any hope of figuring out what I had.
There was no point in risking my security deposit two days before I moved out, so I found a section of the day's newspaper to spread across the countertop. I used the Money & Investing section of the Wall Street Journal — superfluous to someone who is completely broke. Using the envelope like a hot pad, I lifted the damaged book and nudged it over until it flipped onto the newspaper. I was right. The front cover was a victim of whatever trauma had befallen this book. The pages had drip-dried into stiff waves of pulp, some sticking together, and whatever had soaked them had bled the ink. most of the pages were gone forever, but then there were some that displayed entries that were remarkably legible. The first one I could read was a captain's report of a seat in coach that wouldn't recline. Beside it was the mechanic's entry — the date he'd fixed the seat and his signature.
I knew what this was.
The second was a write-up on a fuel indicator light that refused to go off, and the one after that on a landing gear problem, each duly noted by the cockpit crew, and each duly repaired by the maintenance team on the ground.
Someone had sent me an aircraft logbook, or the remains of one, the kind I used to see routinely in the cockpits of Majestic airplanes when I worked at Logan. No front cover meant no logo or aircraft number, so I couldn't tell which airline it belonged to, but I knew what all airline people knew — logbooks are never supposed to be separated from their ships. The information they carry on their pages is irreplaceable. It's the entire history of an aircraft, recorded event by event by the pilots who have flown it and the mechanics who have fixed it.
Logbooks are as unique to an aircraft as fingerprints, as much a part of the plane as the flaps or the wings or the seats. Standing alone in an empty apartment staring at this one, I had to admit to feeling a chilly whisper of airline superstition. A logbook without an aircraft is like a wallet without a person. You just know the separation is not intentional. To know that an airplane was flying around without its logbook, to see the book in this condition, felt like bad luck.
When I picked up the envelope and turned it over, a wad of tissue paper dislodged from one corner and dropped to the counter. It was stained black on one side where it had been flattened under the weight of the logbook. But it wasn't completely flat, and something had to be inside to make tissue paper thud. After I'd unpeeled a few of the layers, I began to feel it, a nodule in the center that had some weight to it. I pulled back the last of the tissue to reveal a sight that was at least as stunning as it was bewildering.
It was a diamond ring, but in the same way the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a painting. It was thick and heavy — a complex latticework of gold studded with what must have been fifteen small diamonds. In the middle of the setting was a massive oval diamond that rested like a dazzling egg atop an intricate diamond-encrusted bird's nest.
I spread one of the tissue paper sheets flat on the counter. BURDINES was printed in light brown ink and repeated over and over in diagonal rows across the sheet. I knew Burdines. I remembered it from a trip my family had made to Miami when I was a kid. We'd arrived in the middle of a cold snap dressed for the beach. My mother had marched us all over to the nearest department store — Burdines — for sweat suits and heavy socks.
The ring felt heavy in my hand. There was no way this piece came from Burdines, or any other department store. It felt old and unique, as if it had been custom designed for the hand of a woman who was much loved and treasured, and I had the sense that it was real, even though it made no sense that it would be real. No one sends something that valuable via U.S. mail in a wad of tissue paper.
I checked inside the band for an inscription. The absence of one felt like karmic permission to do what I had been dying to do since I'd unwrapped it. I slipped it on my own finger. There was no wedding band to remove first, and no pesky engagement ring to get in the way. Jewelry wasn't something I bought for myself, so the coast was clear for it to slide right on. It was too baroque for my taste, and so big. I didn't know how anyone could wear it without feeing a constant, unsettling imbalance, or without consistently smacking it into things. Wearing it gave me the same queasy sense of dislocation I had felt about the book — it belonged somewhere else.
I slipped the ring off and went back to the logbook. Toward the back was a place where the pages were less clumped together, almost as if there was a bookmark. I flipped to the place. There was a bookmark, a single piece of white paper folded in half and stuck in between two soiled, damaged pages. My fingers were still black, so I went to the sink and washed my hands. Then I pulled up a dish pack to sit on and opened the note. When I read it, I felt myself growing cold from the inside out, starting with the marrow in my bones. A single line was written across the pristine page. This time I recognized the handwriting, but even if I hadn't, the note was signed.
I'll call you. John
The logbook and the diamond ring had been sent to me by a dead man.
CHAPTER 2
The house was silent. Most houses are in the middle of the day. But the stillness in the McTavish home went beyond the quiet respite between the morning hours when a family disperses, and the evening hours when they drift back together again. There was a towering void in this house, a desperate emptiness made more achingly obvious by the raft of family photos that filled the walls and the shelves. I had felt it the week before when I'd been there for the wake, and I felt it now as I watched Mae stare at the diamond ring her husband — her late husband — had sent me, holding it close to her face with a hand that trembled in short, subtle bursts.
"It can't be real," she said. "This isn't real." Her voice was solid, but her rhythms seemed speeded up and her speech pattern on fast-forward. She was talking about the ring, but she could just as easily have been talking about the sudden and horrible turn her life had just taken. "Is it real?"
"I took it to a jewelry store this morning," I said. "It's worth almost twenty-five thousand dollars."
"No. No, there's no way. This wasn't his. Where would John get something like this?"
"I was hoping you could tell me. You've never seen it before?" She shook her head and handed the ring back. I set it back in the tissue paper nest on the low coffee table at our knees. Next to it was the lump of a logbook that had proved at least as baffling to her. She started picking at the nubby upholstery of her durable plaid couch, as if there were something encrusted there she had to remove. "The police are saying it was drug related."
"Drug related?"
With an abruptness that startled me, she stood up and, as if I wasn't even there, resumed the task I had obviously interrupted by knocking on her door. With brittle efficiency, she moved about the small den gathering her children's toys from the floor. A plastic dump truck, odd-shaped wooden puzzle pieces, two Barbie dolls — one without any Barbie clothes. She scooped them all up with a jerky, kinetic intensity that made my own springs tighten.
"I thought it was a mugging, Mae."
"Nothing was stolen from him."
"Okay, but where do they get drugs?"
"They said he was in Florida trying to pull off some kind of a drug buy. Can you believe that? My John, Saint John the Pure, in on a dope deal. If they knew him, they could never think that."
I had to agree. If anyone had asked me — which they hadn't — to list all possible motives for John's murder, no matter how long that list, drugs would have been at the bottom. His contempt for drug dealers and drug abusers was well known. He had actually turned in one of his union brothers at the airport for smuggling dope, an act of conscience that had not endeared him to the other union brothers. Even the ones that had no use for drugs had less tolerance for rats.
"Is that it? It's not a mugging so it must be drugs?"
"I think they have more they're not telling us. And he also called here early Tuesday morning and told Terry to lock all the doors and not to let us out of his sight until he got home on Tuesday."
"John did?" I didn't know if I was having trouble following her because she was moving and talking so fast, or because it was such astonishing information. As far as I had known, John's death had been a tragic and random murder in a city known for that sort of thing. "Did he tell him why he was so worried?"
"He said he would explain when he got back. The police say that's all part of the drug thing. That the people he was supposedly involved with have been known to threaten families."
She stood in the middle of the room. With all the toys put away, she looked anxious and panicky, desperate for something to do with her hands. Then a bright thought seemed to break through. "I'll make coffee." She took off, straightening the rug and scooping the remote control from the floor as she left the room.
Before I left the den, I took one last look at the gallery of photos — the living, loving chronicle of what had been this family's life in progress — and searched out John's face. In a few of the pictures, mostly the posed shots, he wore the serious expression I had known. Thick-necked and determined, he had always looked to me like an Irish laborer from the early nineteen hundreds who could have just as easily raised the steel towers for the Williamsburg Bridge as loaded cargo for Majestic Airlines.
But in most of the pictures, especially in the candid shots with his children, John was a different man. The weight of responsibility that had so often hardened his face was gone. The guarded expression he wore on the ramp was nowhere to be seen, and I saw in those photos, maybe for the first time, a man who was open and confident and comfortable in his role as husband, father, teacher, and protector. I saw the man he'd wanted his children to see.
I walked into the kitchen. The table was set with three Scooby-Doo placemats. They still had toast crumbs and jelly stuck on them.
Mae was moving purposefully from cabinet to counter and back to the cabinet again, where she stopped long enough to take down two cups. "How do you take your coffee?"
"I'll take tea, if you have it. How are your kids doing?"
"Kids are strong. I look at them and I wish I could be that strong. I'm jealous sometimes because there are three of them. They have each other."
"What about Terry? Is he helping you?"
"Terry is not doing well. He was just getting over the accident. This I don't think he'll ever get over. He needs to get help, and he won't. He worries me."
Just what she needed. Three small children to worry about and John's kid brother, too.
I dropped my backpack on one of the kitchen chairs. The non-Scooby end of the table was stacked high with papers and folders and files. One of the piles had slipped over, and the top few pages were in imminent danger of jelly stains. My intention had not been to riffle through Mae's private papers, but the one on top caught my attention. It was a photocopy of a Majestic nonrevenue pass coupon, the kind employees use when they travel. This one had the date and the destination filled in — March 5, flight 888, BOS to MIA. And it had John's signature. It was a copy of the coupon John had used to go on his doomed trip to Florida. The return trip information was blank.
Poking out beneath that was a receipt from a hotel in Miami called Harmony House Suites. It was also dated March 5. Then a pad of lined paper with a quarter of the pages wrapped over the top. The page left on top was filled with a task list. Some items were crossed out. Most weren't. The tasks still left to do included Thank you notes for funeral, copies of death certificate to insurance co.s, change beneficiaries. Everything related to the funeral was crossed off. There was a separate category titled MR. AND MRS. — REMOVE JOHN'S NAME. Underneath was listed bank accounts, parish directory, safety deposit box, retirement accounts. All the details and loose ends left over when one life that is inextricably entwined with so many others is abruptly ripped out by the roots. Toward the bottom was a shorter list. Rental car. Cell phone. Harmony House Suites.
I started to put the pad back on the pile when a couple of loose papers fell out.
One was a flight manifest for flight 887 from Miami to Boston for March 6, what I assumed would have been John's return flight home. It showed the names of all passengers on board, along with standbys and crew. John's name was there, but there was no seat assigned, which meant he had called reservations to put his name in the standby queue, but hadn't made the flight.
Mae was at the sink washing the cups we hadn't used yet. "Mae, John was listed on a flight to come home?"
"Flight 887 on Tuesday morning," she said. "He called Monday night and said he'd be home on Tuesday, but we didn't hear from him. At first I wasn't worried because those flights out of Miami are so full you can get stranded for days waiting for a seat and I was sure he was going to walk through the door any minute and when he didn't I thought ... I was sure he'd driven over to see if he could get one out of Fort Lauderdale. But he never called. Tuesday afternoon I was getting antsy. Tuesday night came and went and no John and I was really freaking out on Wednesday morning when still we hadn't heard and then Wednesday afternoon they called and told me he was dead."
The sound, sharp and sudden, cracked the quiet in the kitchen. Crockery against porcelain. It was loud and unexpected and made my heart shudder. I looked up to find Mae staring at me, and for a second I thought it was because I'd been prying, digging through her papers. But then I realized she was waiting for me to offer some adjustment, some correction to her recounting of events that would have changed the way it had all come out. When I couldn't, she turned back to the sink.
The cups hadn't broken. They rolled around and knocked against each other under the stream of running water. "He believed it was always on him to put things right," she said. "He shouldn't have even been down there. Some people just aren't worth the effort."
"Is that why he went down there? To put something right?"
"I am so angry with him." The muscles across her back tensed.
"I hate him for going down there. I hate that he left me here to raise these three babies all by myself." She dropped her head and reached up to touch her forehead with damp, shaking fingers. Her tears began to drop into the sink. "I hate him." I could barely hear her the last time she said it. She sounded as though she was afraid I would.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Parts Unknown"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Lynne Heitman.
Excerpted by permission of Diversion Publishing Corp..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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