Read Christmas At Timberwoods Online
Authors: Fern Michaels
Christmas At Timberwoods (16 page)
Charlie! She wanted Charlie! She wanted to know that when she left here she could go to him and that he would be waiting for her with open arms and no questions. But now she didn’t even know that, because he wasn’t home or he wasn’t answering the phone.
Amy heard her pathetic cry and was through the swinging doors in a flash, rushing to her side and wrapping her arms protectively around Angela.
“You stop it right now! Right this instant! Come on, honey, you come with me. We’re going to have chocolate cake and milk, and you clods can sit here and drink. You aren’t getting any of my cake.”
“Chocolate?” Harold asked longingly.
“Devil’s food,” Amy said tartly as she led Angela into the sweetly fragrant kitchen.
As soon as the swinging doors closed, Noel turned to the others, giving them a serious look.
“Hey, you believe her, don’t you?” Eric stared at Noel, a peculiar expression on his face. “Going on faith? From the look of you, you believe.”
“I wouldn’t call it belief exactly. More like instinct,” Noel replied.
Eric lifted a hand. “Now, hold on. I’m willing to believe she sees these things, but I draw the line at that. She may be just highly sensitive, though, or cursed with a wild imagination. I mean, claiming to foretell death and disasters—”
Noel’s calm gaze stopped Eric cold. “I want to know. Do you believe her?”
For a long moment Eric stared at the floor, unable to face Noel. Then his gaze went to Lex, who was looking at him, waiting for his answer. And Harold, who groaned and rubbed his face with short, stubby fingers.
“I guess I have my answer,” Noel said. “It seems I’m not the only one who believes her. Christ. I don’t want to. I don’t want to think she’s right. About the plane, about Timberwoods, anything.”
“Timberwoods!” Harold exclaimed. “She wasn’t right about the mall. Nothing happened today. The letter said seventy-two hours. That’s passed and nothing’s happened.”
Eric and Lex looked at one another and nodded. Harold was right. They could all take it easy. There wasn’t any plane tumbling to earth. There wasn’t any danger to Timberwoods.
Then Noel’s voice cut through them like a knife. “The bomb threat said seventy-two hours. Angela didn’t. She said the height of the Christmas season.”
His words were spoken with precise emphasis, so no one missed the point. Eric felt a spread of gooseflesh on his back. “All right, Dayton, what are we gonna do?”
“What time is it?” Noel snapped.
“Ten-fifteen,” Lex volunteered. “If it happens, let’s hope it happens after midnight. Wait a minute—think about the letter-numbers combination she saw. Don’t pilots have to file a flight plan? That very important detail would help us to identify the plane.”
Noel had the phone in his hand and was dialing as Lex finished speaking. He asked his questions, waited, then hung up.
Lex held his breath while Eric paced the room. Harold clenched and unclenched his moist hands.
At 11:10 the phone shrilled and Noel, in his haste, managed to bump his shins on the coffee table. They had been waiting for a call from an FAA contact in the agency’s liaison office, part of a team who assisted state and local police departments across the country.
“Hello, Dayton here,” he answered. “Is that the best you could do? Of course, I understand . . . All right, then, I’ll do that.”
Slowly he hung up the receiver. “They’re still trying to trace the plane. She might have the numbers wrong—you know how it is with visions,” he added wryly. “Not having a point of departure or arrival adds a degree of difficulty.”
“What did he tell you to do?” Eric asked.
“What?”
“You said you’d do something. What?”
“Oh. Yeah. He said to start calling around to check out private airstrips, airfreight companies, anything we can. There’s thousands of small planes and other aircraft in US skies—they don’t have up-to-the-minute information on every single one.”
“For all Angela’s told us, it could be in Oshkosh.” Eric blew out a frustrated breath.
“Let’s assume it’s within a two-hundred-mile radius of here.” Lex took a smartphone out of his pocket and started looking with a directory app on its screen, and Eric opened his laptop, clicking and saving information to an open document.
Harold looked over Eric’s shoulder at the information on the laptop. Eric dug in his pocket and handed him his cell. “Forget yours again? Here. Stay off the landline, please—Amy might need to make a call. This is my work phone.”
Harold dialed the number of the first airstrip and handed the cell to Eric, who identified himself by name, badge number, department, and locale. Speaking in his most authoritative voice, he asked to speak to air control, requesting notification if a small plane with the numbers P-654RT had asked for permission to land.
They repeated the process about a dozen times.
“Who knew there were that many private airstrips out there?” Noel said wearily.
“We have to call them all.”
It took a while. Then all the three men could do was wait.
“We believe that girl. Look at us. We really believe her.” Lex ran his fingers through his hair. “What are we going to do?”
“I wish to hell I knew. We’ll have to find some way to close the mall, that’s all there is to it. If anyone’s got any suggestions, I’d like to hear them,” Eric said, propping his feet on the coffee table and stretching his hands behind his head.
“Not me,” Lex mumbled. Noel was scribbling in his notebook and didn’t bother to answer. Harold fidgeted in his chair, his round eyes pools of concern.
“Our hands are tied. They’re not going to let us close the mall, and you know it. If this plane crashes—and one will, I can feel it in my bones—the girl was right. We can only hope she was wrong about Timberwoods.” Lex’s voice was dry and tight. He heaved a sigh and rubbed his eyes.
“Can we declare martial law to shut it down?” Harold asked.
“We’re police, not army,” Eric said.
“We could always throw Dolph Richards in the clink,” Harold muttered.
“Where he would be safe, unfortunately,” Eric pointed out. “And don’t forget the three hundred and forty-one shop owners who’d go with him,” he added. “All we can do is sit and wait.”
It was 12:21 in the morning when the phone rang. Eric answered it. “Yes, I’m Detective Summers of the Woodridge Police. I inquired about the plane.”
He swore softly at the information he was getting from the other end of the line. Another minute and he hung up the receiver.
“A Piper Cub crashed into the Apex Theatre on North Washington at thirteen minutes after twelve. The pilot complained of chest pains at eleven fifty-nine. Let’s go.”
While the others were putting their coats on, Eric went into the kitchen. “Angela,” he said softly, “a plane crashed into a movie theater. Last show had just let out. The place was empty.”
She recoiled in silent horror. He laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. Amy will take care of you.” He looked to his wife.
“Of course I’m going to take care of her. What kind of mother do you think I would be if I couldn’t take care of this child? Do whatever you have to do and don’t worry about us.”
“In my gut I thought the kid was making all this up,” Eric mumbled on the way out. “It didn’t seem possible. I still don’t believe it. I won’t believe it till I see the little girl and the numbers on the plane. Maybe Angela once flew with the pilot or something—hell, who knows? But nothing about her surprises me by now. What I don’t get is how nonchalant she can be. When I walked into the kitchen she was asking my wife to explain how you grow herbs, as though she really wanted to know.”
“She probably did want to know. That’s why people ask questions,” Noel said shortly as he reached his station wagon out of the dark driveway. “I wish I had some answers for you.”
Both cars careened down the road, heading north to the outskirts of Woodridge. The silent passengers stayed that way until Noel pointed through the windshield. “Fire trucks.” Even as they watched, the black wintry sky grew bright with red flames.
Minutes later they maneuvered through the melee. Their passengers scrambled out when they parked and all the men ran over to the perimeter of the crowd of firemen and police. Eric flashed his badge at one of the firemen. “How’d you get here so fast?” he asked. “We only got the call minutes ago.”
“Fire station’s just down the road. We were having our annual Christmas party, so most of the guys were already on hand. Helluva way to end it.”
Eric nodded. “Looks like you’re getting things under control.”
The plane had lost a wing and its engines were ablaze. A rescue team, assisted by a rush of water from the hoses, was trying to make its way to the cockpit and survivors. The firemen worked with precision, carrying stretchers and hosing down the parking lot. Though the area was garishly lit by the flames, and by spotlights on the hook and ladder truck, Eric couldn’t see the numbers on the side of the plane.
Moments later two stretchers were hurried to the waiting ambulances, both bodies covered. They were dead.
“Did you get the baby out?” Eric demanded of one of the rescue workers.
“What baby? There wasn’t any baby aboard that plane. Just the pilot and passenger.”
“There had to be a baby,” Eric snapped. “A little girl.” He stopped short of describing her.
“Look, buddy, there ain’t no baby. The way I hear it, the pilot radioed in to the control tower and reported chest pains. He said there was one, repeat one, passenger aboard. And there he is.” The fireman lifted his eyes to the stretcher bearing an adult, the body covered to give death its dignity.
Summers spotted someone he knew—Detective Sergeant McGivern. Rushing over, he grabbed the burly man’s arm. “Who was the passenger?”
“Get out of here, Summers. You’re not on this. And you’re sure as hell asking a lot of questions. Now get out of my hair!” McGivern turned back to one of the uniformed officers, ordering him to take the names and addresses of any eyewitnesses.
Eric went back to his colleagues, who were watching the frenzied proceedings in amazement. “They’re dead. The pilot and the passenger. It had to be the right plane. But no little girl, thank God,” he heard himself say. “Angela was wrong.” He realized for the first time how relieved he was. If Angela had been wrong about the little girl, she could be wrong about other things, too.
“There’s just one thing I want to do before we call it a night. I want to go down to the hospital and find out the identity of those poor guys they pulled out of that wreckage.”
“Barely identifiable,” the morgue attendant said clinically. “But we managed. Take a look if you want.” He pulled back the sheet.
“Is there any way we can find out which is the pilot and which is the passenger?” Noel asked with authority.
“Sure thing. This one here, the shorter guy, was the pilot. Ephraim Evans was his name, and this man was Dr. William Maxwell. There was a lady and gentleman here a few minutes ago and she identified the doctor. She knew the name of the pilot but had never met him. Seems she heard the broadcast on the radio shortly after it happened. She’s been here waiting in the hospital for Maxwell to arrive. Said he was a specialist in childhood cancer from Lahey Clinic in Boston. He was supposed to do a bone marrow transplant on her little girl tomorrow—actually, today,” he said, glancing at his watch.
Summers tensed. “Where are these people? The ones who identified the doctor.”
“Upstairs on the surgery floor, unless they went home,” the attendant said, pulling up the sheet.
Eric led the way from the basement to the lobby and scanned the nearly empty room. A woman, her head bent, was crying into her hands while a tall, heavyset man stood awkwardly beside her, patting her shoulder.
“I’m with the Woodridge Police,” Eric said, quickly opening his badge holder as he tapped the man on the arm. “I wonder if you would mind stepping over here for a moment. It’s about the plane crash.”
“Of course,” the man said, looking relieved. He introduced himself. “What can I help you with?”
Andretti. Eric made a mental note of the last name and got to the point. “They told me in the morgue that you identified Dr. Maxwell.”
“Yes, I did. My wife and I were sitting here waiting for his plane to get in. He was called in on my daughter’s case this morning. She’s too sick to be moved to Boston.”
“What do you mean?” Eric asked sharply.
“Without Dr. Maxwell, there may be no hope. She’ll die,” he said huskily.
“There are always other specialists, other doctors—”
“Let me explain. She needs a bone marrow transplant. Maria has high-risk lymphoblastic leukemia and it didn’t go into remission with chemo. My wife and I aren’t a match and neither are our other kids. So it has to be an unrelated donor transplant and it has to be done quickly.”
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