The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [35]
Mattie was blowing on her hot chocolate when Kathryn walked back into the kitchen.
“I have to go,” Kathryn said. “There are some people at the house I need to talk to. From the airline.”
“OK,” Mattie said.
“I’ll call you,” Kathryn said, bending to kiss her daughter.
Kathryn stood, in her parka, at the bottom of the drive. She had her hands in her pockets, her collar up. A bright, hard, dry cold without wind had settled in for the day. Normally, this was her favorite kind of weather.
She saw the car in the distance, a gray shape moving rapidly along the road from town. Robert pulled up quickly, leaned over, and opened the door.
She sat facing him with her back pressed against the door handle. In the harsh sunlight, she could see the smallest details of Robert’s face: the faintly bluish outline where a beard might have grown if he hadn’t shaved, the white ghost of skin below his sideburns where the hair was cut shorter than an old tan line, the under-shadow of his jaw. He put the car in park and turned toward her, laying his arm, like a bridge, between the two front seats.
“What?” she asked.
“There are two investigators from the Safety Board who want to talk to you.”
“In my house?”
“Yes.”
“Do I have to answer their questions?”
He looked away, toward the stone house, and then back again. He scratched his upper lip with his thumbnail.
“Yes,” he said carefully. “If you’re well enough. You could always be not well enough, I suppose.”
She nodded slowly.
“I can’t protect you from the crash investigation itself. Or from legal proceedings.”
“Legal proceedings?”
“In the event...”
“I thought this was just a wild rumor.”
“It is. At the moment.”
“Why? What do you know? What is on the tape?”
He tapped the bottom of the steering wheel with the fingers of his free hand. A steady rhythm, thinking.
“A British technician with the British equivalent of our Safety Board who was in the room when the tape was first played called a woman he’s involved with who works at a BBC affiliate in Birmingham. He apparently made statements about the tape. I don’t know for certain what his motivation was in revealing this, or hers, but we can speculate. CNN is reporting what the BBC has reported. So at best, this is fourth hand.”
“But it might be true.” “It might be true.”
Kathryn shifted in her seat, swinging her knee up so that she was not so twisted in the waist. She crossed her arms over her chest.
Robert removed a sheet of shiny white paper from his shirt pocket. He handed her the fax.
“This is exactly how the bulletin was read over CNN,” he said.
The fax was hard to read. The square letters, some with wavery stems, swam before her. She tried to focus on a sentence, to begin from the top.
CNN has just learned that a source close to the investigation of Vision Flight 384 is reporting that the CVR — that’s the cockpit voice recorder — may, and we stress may, reveal an altercation between Captain Jack Lyons, an eleven-year veteran with Vision, and British flight engineer Trevor Sullivan just moments before the explosion of the T-900. According to as yet unconfirmed statements, a malfunctioning headset caused Sullivan to reach into Captain Jack Lyons’s flight bag fifty-eight minutes into the flight. The object that Sullivan then pulled out of the flight bag may, and again we stress may, have been the source of the explosion that ripped apart the T-900, sending one hundred and four passengers and crew to their deaths. In addition, the alleged source reports that the transcript of the last several seconds of Vision Flight 384 may indicate that a scuffle of some kind took place between Captain Lyons and Flight Engineer Sullivan, and that several expletives were uttered by Sullivan.
Daniel Gorzyk, a spokesperson for the Safety Board, was heated earlier today in his denial of these allegations, which he called maliciously false and irresponsible. This report, we repeat, comes from an as yet unnamed source who claims to have been present when the tape from the CVR was played. The CVR, as we
noted earlier, was located last night