She rubbed her eyes. Two seasons she had gone hunting with him and one of his few friends, even though it had meant missing dance class. The camp was in the Cumberland Mountains and it belonged to that friend, a carpenter who had a daughter roughly her age. She had come, too. The girl’s name was Karly and she went to a different school. The camp was actually a trailer with plumbing that no longer worked, and so the carpenter had built an outhouse. A composting, eco-friendly outhouse. Those two November weekends, a year apart, had been at once unbelievably wholesome and unbelievably squalid. The fathers had viewed themselves as progressive and enlightened: they were bringing their daughters to deer camp. They’d sent them to hunter safety courses and then refined what the instructors had taught them about firearms. But the men had drunk and passed out each night, and then each day the four of them had walked forever in the cold of the woods. It didn’t snow either year, thank God, but that also meant there hadn’t been any tracks.
The second year she’d wounded a deer instead of killing it instantly, which left her sobbing with remorse. Inevitably it had died, but it had died slowly and in excruciating pain. She’d been such a mess that her father hadn’t been able to leave her and track down the animal to finish it off.
And Karly? Karly just wanted to drink with her father and with Cassie’s dad those weekends, even though the grown-ups wouldn’t let her because the girls were still in middle school. She went on and on about how much she loved the foam and fizz of canned beer, and how popping the top turned her on. Whispered to Cassie that it got her hot.
When Cassie finally climbed from the hotel bed, reflexively she rubbed her right shoulder where the rifle’s kickback that day in the woods had bruised her soul far worse than her skin. She hadn’t touched a gun ever since.
* * *
? ?
It was somewhere over the eastern Atlantic, after she had brought the woman in 6G another glass of Riesling and Jada had brought the fellow in 3A a scotch, that the other flight attendant verbalized the truth that, along with so many others, had kept Cassie staring at the pinpricks of light in her hotel room the night before—the radio, the clock, the smoke alarm. The two of them were catching their breath together in the front galley of the Airbus.
“Since he was an American and he was on our flight, do you think they’re going to want to talk to us?” Jada asked. Cassie didn’t have to ask who he was. “And who do you think they will be?”
Cassie rubbed Purell roughly onto her hands. She had contemplated this, too, in the small hours of the morning. She had settled on the FBI, but only because she was pretty sure that the CIA didn’t investigate crime. She presumed the FBI must have some sort of arrangement with foreign police forces: maybe in this case, because Alex had been a U.S. citizen, they would ask the questions for the police in Dubai. But maybe not. She knew that Dubai did so much business with the West that it was very likely they had a pretty damn impressive police force. She also suspected that most U.S. embassies had some sort of FBI presence, an officer or two. Just in case. God, if only Alex had been as Russian as his cologne or his taste in literature. She guessed in that case that the questioning would have been cursory—if at all. Why would Americans even investigate a dead Russian in Dubai? They wouldn’t. It would be none of their business.
In the end, however, by the time she had climbed from the hotel bed and showered, she had convinced herself that even the State Department would be involved. Alex’s family would be lobbying the media for justice. People—powerful people—would be paying attention. The idea made her sick. Somewhere Miranda was sharing her story.
“I think it will be the FBI,” she told Jada finally. “If it’s anyone…”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever been that close to a person who was murdered.”
“Me, either,” she said, though she thought of her father and briefly her mind dissected the distinctions between manslaughter and murder.
Abruptly Jada looked over Cassie’s shoulder, her gaze intense and her dark eyes widening. Cassie felt a sharp spike of fear and turned around, convinced this was it, it was over, an air marshal was about to arrest her, just as Jada pushed past. And there she saw the other flight attendant helping a young mother with a toddler in her arms, lifting up the diaper bag that was twisting upside down on the woman’s shoulder, the diapers and wipes and the sippy cup in the shape of a bunny all about to tumble onto the floor of the aircraft right in front of the starboard-side first-class bathroom. The mom thanked her, rolling her eyes at the nearness of the disaster, and the two of them laughed. Jada was asking the little boy’s name as Cassie leaned against the wall with the trolleys and the trash bin, at once relieved and appalled. She wondered: was this sort of adrenal overreaction going to be the norm for the rest of her life?
* * *
? ?
As she was wrapping her shoulder harness around her in the jump seat in the front of the plane, as the Long Island coastline and beaches were racing below them, she thought of the three words she hoped never to say aloud or hear on an aircraft: brace for impact. That was the signal they were about to crash-land or auger in. Those four syllables? They were the cry of the raven. Imminent collision with the ground, best case a belly flop and worst case a head-on, nose-first crash that would cause the aircraft to break apart and explode, the bodies—the pieces of the bodies that were recognizable—small, charred briquettes.
The words came to her because the captain had informed the crew somewhere over New Brunswick that they were going to be met at the gate at JFK by the authorities. He didn’t say why and whether by “authorities” he meant airport or TSA officials or some other law enforcement group, and no one on the crew was going to ask him. But they all had their suspicions. Some guessed there was a possible terrorist on board, someone high on the watch list, and the passenger would be arrested the moment they landed, but Cassie had flown long enough to know this wasn’t the case: if the captain had been told there might be a terrorist on the plane, he would have informed the crew so they could keep an eye on him every single moment they were in the air. Instead, as they had prepared the cabins for arrival, Megan and Jada and Shane had speculated aloud that it had something to do with the dead American in Dubai. What else could it possibly be, Megan had asked? He’d been with them on the flight from Paris to the Middle East.
Cassie considered asking Megan to cover for her: not necessarily lie, but simply not volunteer the information that Cassandra Bowden had returned to the crew’s Dubai hotel in the morning barely twenty minutes before they had to leave for the airport. Cassie knew it would be easier to simply tell investigators that she had spent the night alone in her own room at the airline’s hotel than have to make up a man to account for her absence. But asking that of Megan would only implicate her further in the other woman’s eyes: it would convince Megan that she had indeed been with Alex the night he had died and very possibly had killed him. Already Cassie had felt her friend watching her as they had walked up the aisles, the two of them checking to be sure the passengers were belted in and their seatbacks were upright.
And so she focused right now on concocting two possible stories. If she had the sense from the questioning that Miranda had not yet come forward, she would share with the authorities another hotel and another man, molding him in her mind like a golem. She would keep it simple. Give them a name and admit that she was sure the fellow had made it up because she was sure he was married. She was going to say he was some sort of consultant and she thought he was South African. The hotel would be the Armani because it was big and it was in the opposite direction from the Royal Phoenician, and the floor with his room had been somewhere in the middle. Could have been on the sixth and it could have been on the eighth. She would confess sheepishly that she had been drinking, and she couldn’t remember very much. Surely there was a single man in a room on one of those floors who spoke English with an accent she could say later (if necessary) she must have mistaken for South African. But otherwise she would say almost nothing. That was what mattered. It would be much easier to keep her story straight if the details were few.