Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest
2.
Detective Grady Merritt of the Seattle PD stood by the window at gate thirty-six, staring at the giant marshmallow roast at the end of the runway. The fire was bright, but the smoke was dark as it billowed across the tarmac. Visibility was low and sketchy for the wailing emergency vehicles, the scrambling luggage carts, the men and women in vests with neon orange guide cones in hand, the security personnel, and everybody else who had some reason to be running back and forth outside the safe, smoke-free confines of the terminal.
He watched as sooty ex-passengers careened down the emergency chutes. Some tumbled like dolls. Some were carried. One guy clutched a pet carrier, checking its contents repeatedly.
A twinge of concern for the mystery pet penetrated Grady’s stunned, baffled fugue. His own dog was home with his daughter, and he would’ve never fit inside that little carrier. Note to self, he thought, never fly with Cairo in the cargo hold.
The dog’s name was Molly’s fault. She was the one who claimed the yellow mutt they’d found in a Target parking lot. At the time, Molly was thirteen years old and the pup was maybe six months of gangly, dirty, lost, adorable puppy. It was love at first sight. Now she was a senior in high school, and the dog was four. They were both at home in Seattle, in the north end neighborhood of Ballard.
Safe.
Waiting for him to come home.
On cue, his phone began to ring, and Molly’s junior-class picture appeared, demanding a response.
“Oh shit.” He fumbled for his phone. “Hey, baby,” he told her, before she could get a word in edgewise. “I was just about to call you.”
“Dad!” she shrieked. “I saw the news! From the airport! The plane blew up! Dad, it’s all over the news!”
“Yeah.” He struggled to sound cool and unharmed. Unrattled, even. Thank God she wasn’t standing right there in front of him. He’d never pull off the bluff that way. With his best and most practiced calm, responsible, authoritative law-enforcement voice, he said, “Honey, I missed the flight. I made it to the airport just in time to see it explode without me.”
Just this once, Molly was not trying to sound cool. She was chattering on the razor’s edge of hysteria. “You weren’t on board? You didn’t even get inside it? You didn’t escape down the big yellow slide? I’m watching it on the news, Dad. I was looking for you, but I didn’t see you come down the slide—you didn’t come down the slide. Where are you? What happened? Are you dead? Oh God, please tell me you’re not dead.”
Before she could cram in another question, he said, “This is not a recording, and I am not dead. I swear to God, I missed all the action. I don’t even smell like smoke, all right? Anyway, it only just now happened. How did you even hear about it so fast?”
“A friend of mine got a news alert on her phone. She said there was a plane crash in Orlando, and you were flying back from Orlando today… and then I got my phone out to check your schedule, and…”
She was about to start crying. He could hear it in her voice. “I know, I know. But don’t worry, okay? I never made it to the plane, and hey—I can see the whole thing from here. A bunch of people survived. Maybe everybody.”
“Everybody?”
“Don’t quote me on that, but I’m watching them take people away. There are ambulances and everything. I’ve seen plenty of people coughing, and a few limping, but I haven’t seen any bodies yet.”
“They’re probably still inside the plane! Dead people don’t get to ride on the big yellow slide, Dad!”
Jesus, sometimes he wished she wasn’t quite so smart. “Like I said, I see a bunch of people who are definitely alive. Don’t panic, all right? Stay cool, and I’ll be home as soon as I can. Listen, I’m already booked on another flight, connecting out of Atlanta later this afternoon.”
“Atlanta?”
“Apparently, if you die and go to hell in the South, you have to stop in Atlanta first.”
She laughed, short and too loud. “Who’d you steal that joke from?”
“The travel agent. And the point is, I’m safe. I will do my absolute best to be home tonight. It’ll probably be late. I might not get in until after midnight, I don’t know. But I will get home. I’ll forward you my new flight info when we get off the phone, and if anything changes—if my outbound flight is canceled because of the crash, or anything like that—I’ll call you immediately.”
“Immediately?”
“Yes. Immediately.” His eyes were damp. He wiped them with the back of his hand. “Now I should go check in at my new gate. You can go ahead and get back to work, and don’t worry. I’m safe, you’re safe, we’re all safe.”
“I already clocked out.”
“What?”
“I told them my dad was in a plane crash and I had to leave. I’m on the bus, headed home.”
“You heard that my plane blew up, so you left work and caught a bus, and then tried calling my phone?”
“In my defense,” she told him, “I saw the bus coming, right when I threw my apron down on the counter. I started crying, and my boss Krista started crying, too, and she sent me home. I mean, by then I was running out the door, so it was either cut me loose for the day or fire me.”
“She’s a good manager. You owe her a pickup shift, or something.”
Molly laughed again, still wound up tight and a little sniffly, but calming down the longer he kept her on the phone. “I’ll cover for part of her honeymoon. Dad?”
“Yes, baby?”
“I’m super glad you’re not super dead.”
“Me too,” he agreed. “Go home, take a hot bath, watch some Netflix, whatever. Order some food. There’s extra petty cash in my closet.”
“In the shoebox on the top shelf?”
They both were quiet for a few seconds.
Then he said, “Yes. There should be cash in there, if you need it. If you left any.”
“I only took a few bucks, just one time! I had to tip a pizza guy.”
“Right.” He was flashing her the unibrow of deepest suspicion, even though she couldn’t see it. “What were you doing in my closet?”
She didn’t answer right away. “You remember when we had that junior-senior prom last year, and I got the Betsey Johnson dress, and you said it looked like one that Mom used to wear? Well, if Mom had a dress like mine, she probably had shoes that looked good with it, right? I wear about the same size she did.”
His throat was almost too tight to squeeze out a single word, but he managed. “Right.”
“That box in the closet was made for ladies’ shoes, so I opened it. I wasn’t looking to steal anything. You said you put some of her things in storage, but I didn’t want to bother you about it.” She sniffed hard and coughed to cover the sound.
“It wouldn’t… you never bother me. You can ask me anything you want, whenever you want. About your mother or anything else.”
“It seemed too hard.” Whether she meant it was hard for him or hard for her, she didn’t say. Candice Merritt had been gone for almost four years. Sometimes it felt like a long time ago. Sometimes it didn’t.
Great. Now they were both crying.
“Hey,” he said, trying to say something else and not knowing how to begin it. He tried again. “Hey, I know I had a close call today. I’m so sorry I didn’t call you the moment the plane caught fire. I should have. I screwed that up, and I’m really sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. I bet there was a lot of stuff going on.”
“Yeah,” he said with the world’s grimmest laugh. “It was just so sudden, you know? I’d been stuck in traffic, and I knew I was cutting it close, so I was running to the gate as fast as I could. But I got here just in time to watch the plane leave and I was so mad about it.”
It was her turn to laugh. She did it with a snort, followed by the loud honking of a world-class nose-blow. “That traffic saved your life, Dad.”
“Either the traffic or the travel agent.” Now that he’d said it out loud, he turned the thought over in his head.
“The one with better dad jokes than you?” Molly asked.
“Yeah, her. She changed my flight, before I got here. I don’t know why,” he added before she could ask.
“Hell of a coincidence.”
Or something else, but he couldn’t say what. “Hell of a coincidence,” he echoed. He heard the bus creak to a stop and the doors squeal open. If that wasn’t Molly’s stop, it’d be coming up soon. They didn’t live far from the Starbucks where she worked, and if the weather wasn’t too bad, she usually walked. “I’ll text you when I hear something, okay? I love you, and I’ll see you soon, and… and… just help yourself to whatever’s in the shoebox and go buy something trashy and delicious. Call me if you need anything, or even if… if you just want to talk.”
“I will. All of those things, I will. I love you, too, Dad. Please be careful.”
“I always am.”
Then he hung up, feeling somewhat less shaken but no less eager to get home.
He thought about what’s-her-name. Foley. The travel agent who’d had “a very strong feeling.” A very strong feeling… what did that even mean?