The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [97]
But then Kathryn thought about the baby who looked like Mattie, about Dierdre, who had a Molly doll.
“It wasn’t suicide,” she said. “That’s all I can tell you.” Robert would have known all along, Kathryn thought. He’d have been briefed before he ever came to the house. The union had suspected Jack and had asked Robert to keep an eye on her. Robert would have watched and waited for some sign that she knew about her husband’s activities, could name the other pilots. Robert had used her.
She no longer had any interest in her tea. The urgency to reach her destination had returned. She got up off her stool.
“Look, can we at least talk?” the reporter asked.
“I don’t think so,” Kathryn answered.
“Are you going out to Malin Head?”
Kathryn was silent.
“You won’t be able to get out to the site. Here.”
The blond removed a card from her wallet, turned it over, and wrote a name on it. She handed it to Kathryn. “When you get there, ask for Danny Moore,” she said. “He’ll take you out there. This is my card. When you’re done, if you change your mind, give me a call. I’m staying here. I’ll buy you dinner.”
Kathryn took the card and looked at it. “I hope you get to go home soon,” she said.
On her way out of the hotel, as she passed the lounge, Kathryn glanced in and saw a woman sitting in an armchair with a newspaper on her lap. The paper hadn’t been opened, and the woman wasn’t looking at the type. Kathryn thought the woman could not see anything at all in front of her, so vacant was her gaze. By a fireplace at the far end of the room, a man with a similar look stood with his hands in his pockets.
She recrossed the common and got into her car. She looked again at the card in her hand.
She already knew what she would do. She could not control what actions Robert Hart might eventually, or even immediately, take. But she could control what she herself would do. Indeed, she felt, in a quiet way, more in control of herself than she had been in years.
To reveal what she knew about the reasons for the plane’s explosion would mean that Mattie would discover Jack’s other family. And Mattie would never get over that. Of this, Kathryn was certain. She ripped the card into pieces and let them fall to the floor.
Knowing her destination was not far, Kathryn once again followed signs for Malin Head. She passed ruined cottages, no more than toppled stones, the thatched roofs long fallen in and rotted. She saw velvet grass bunched along a cliff — an emerald green even in the dead of winter. On ropes strung from pole to pole, clothes stiffened in the sun, the abstract art of wash on the line. Good drying weather, she thought.
As she rounded a corner, the horizon line of the North Atlantic surprised her. In the middle of that horizon line was a dark gray shape, a ship. A helicopter circled overhead. Brightly colored fishing boats hovered near the larger ship, like pups with a mother seal. The salvage boat, she thought.
This, then, was the place where the plane had gone down. She parked the car and got out, walking as far as she dared toward the edge of the cliff. Below her were three hundred vertical feet of rock and shale descending to the sea. From such a height, the water looked stationary, a scalloped border on a distant beach. The spray hit the rocks below in star-bursts. A red fishing boat was headed in toward shore. For as far as Kathryn could see, the water was a single color, gunmetal blue.
She doubted she had ever seen a more theatrical piece of coastline — raw and deadly, wild. It put a disaster in perspective, she thought, if anything could. There had probably been many disasters here.
She followed the fishing boat with her eyes until it disappeared behind the jutting peninsula that was Malin Head itself. Starting up the car again, she drove the narrow road, keeping the boat in sight when she could catch glimpses of it. It pulled into a small harbor formed by a long concrete pier. She stopped the