Christmas at Timberwoods - Fern Michaels [64]
“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