Both Ends of the Night Read online

  Marcia Muller

  Both Ends of the Night

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  In memory of Collin Wilcox,

  who urged me to take to the skies,

  and for Peggy Bakker,

  who kept me up there

  Many thanks to:

  The folks at Petaluma Municipal Airport and Aeroventure, who made an inquisitive writer and fledgling pilot feel welcome;

  Bonnie and Mike Fredrick and Tiffany Knight, my Arkansas connections;

  Victoria and Ted Brouillette, in Minnesota;

  Bob Gardner, CFI, whose gift of Say Again, Please made radio communication explicable;

  Melissa Ward, extraordinary researcher;

  And Bill, who never for a moment doubted that I could learn to land a Cessna 7232S.

  Night means the time between the end of evening civil twilight and the beginning of morning civil twilight, as published in the American Air Almanac, converted to local time.

  —Part I.I, Federal Aviation Regulations

  But there’s so much more that the regulations can’t tell you…

  Three Years Ago

  “Well, how about that, McCone? You’ve lost your engine. Now what’re you gonna do?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the engine, Matty. You pulled back on power, that’s all.”

  “I’m the instructor. If I say you’ve got no engine, you’ve got no engine. You have an emergency landing place picked out?”

  “… No.”

  “Better find one.”

  “There. Right there. That pasture. Brownish green. Cows to the east side.”

  “So take me there. Where’re you gonna put it down in relation to those cows?”

  “As far away as possible.”

  “Why?”

  “Ranchers don’t like you landing on their stock.”

  “Right. What’s the other reason?”

  “… I don’t know.”

  “Well, suppose you’d borrowed that tail-dragger of your boyfriend’s. Nice little cloth-covered Citabria, nice big price tag. You land near those cows, take your time calling for help, and you’re likely to be missing a wing when you get back.”

  “Why?”

  “Cows just love to munch on airplane fabric.”

  “God, Ripinsky’d kill me!”

  “Maim you, anyway. Full power now, and take me home. You get the point of this exercise, don’t you?”

  “Yes: Always have an emergency landing place in mind.”

  “I can’t emphasize it enough: Emergencies can happen. They will happen. Always planning for the emergency can save your life.”

  PART ONE

  November 22–23

  One

  Landing at Los Alegres Municipal Airport felt like coming home.

  I angled in on the forty-five toward mid-field, turned downwind, and pressed the button on my headset. “Los Alegres traffic, Cessna four-four-two-five-Whiskey, downwind for landing, two-niner.”

  The 150 I’d rented at Oakland was identical to the plane I’d trained in. Los Alegres was where I’d learned the ABC’s of flying. And somewhere below, watching with a critical eye, was my former flight instructor, Matty Wildress. I’d sooner exit without a parachute than make a clumsy landing in front of her.

  I pulled on the carburetor heat, slowed the aircraft down, and added a notch of flaps. As I turned onto base I could hear Matty issuing orders: “Keep that airspeed under control. Look for other traffic. Look! Another notch of flaps now. Turn for final.” She’d always claimed that her words echoed in students’ minds years after they earned their licenses, and I was living proof of that.

  On final now. Focused. I was used to flying Hy’s tail-dragger rather than a tricycle type of plane like this, and the technique of touching down was somewhat different.

  Please, I told myself, don’t hit the tail skid. You’ll never hear the end of it.

  “Keep it straight,” Matty’s voice commanded in my mind. “Straight! Level off. Eyes on the far end of the runway now. The far end. Hold it off. Keep holding. Keep…”

  I held the Cessna in a nose-up attitude as it settled. Then the wheels touched and I was rolling along the runway. Soft and smooth and straight.

  You’d better be watching, Matty.

  I spotted her as I turned off and taxied toward the visitors’ parking: tall and slender, leaning against the counter at the fuel pumps, long brown hair blowing in the breeze. While I maneuvered between the tie-down chains, she walked toward me, hands thrust into the pockets of her loose blue jacket. By the time I stepped down, she was hooking the chain to the tail section.

  “Nice landing, McCone,” she called. “At least one of my students turned into a good pilot.”

  I grabbed the right chain and attached it to the ring on the strut. “I thought all your students turned out splendidly.”

  “Some better than others.” She secured the right chain, then motioned toward the stucco building that housed the fixed-base operator—aircraft rentals, maintenance, and the flight school—and the Seven Niner Diner, so named because the field was seventy-nine feet above mean sea level. “Let’s get a bite to eat.”

  Now that I moved closer to Matty, I was startled by what I saw. Her tanned skin held a sallow tint, and her gray eyes were deeply shadowed; fine lines etched by forty-some years of hearty laughter pulled taut, as if she were in pain. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, but this was too profound a change for even that length of time. Something wrong here, very wrong.

  She’d called me out of the blue the day before, claiming it was time for the flight review that the FAA requires every two years of all pilots. Why not fly up to Los Alegres for it the next afternoon? she suggested. The barely concealed note of urgency in her voice struck me as strange, particularly since my review wasn’t due till next March, and it wasn’t like Matty to get her dates mixed up. But when I told her that and tried to put her off, the disappointed silence that followed made me mentally shift appointments and agree to meet her at the airport for lunch. Now I was glad I had.

  She caught me studying her and looked away, walking quickly toward the gate where a sign jokingly welcomed arrivals to Los Alegres International. “There’s old Max,” she said, pointing toward the small terminal building. “He’s still hanging in there.”

  Max, the airport manager’s yellow Lab, lay on the patch of lawn. He heard his name, looked up, and yawned at us. The dog purportedly had been on his last legs for years, but to tell the truth, he looked a hell of a lot better today than Matty. I called out, “Hey, Max,” and followed her across the parking lot.

  “Matty—”

  She must have sensed the question that was coming, because she interrupted me and began chattering in a quick voice that was underscored by nervousness. “Listen, McCone, I meant it when I said some of my students turn out better than others. Take this hotdog I soloed last month; I never should’ve gotten out of the plane. The other day he’s here shooting landings. A bunch of us are hanging around by the gas pumps, and Mark—you remember Mark?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, just as the guy crosses the threshold, Mark goes, ‘Now, there’s an accident wa
iting to happen.’ And bam! Before anybody can say anything, the hotdog’s put it into a ground loop.”

  “He get hurt?”

  “Bruised some, especially his pride, but you want to see one screwed-up prop and nosewheel, check out the 152 in the hangar.” She shrugged. “Can’t say as I didn’t try to drum it into his thick head: Just because you’re on the ground—”

  “Doesn’t mean that you can stop flying the plane.”

  “I taught you well.”

  “Damn right you did.”

  We climbed the steps to the diner and made our way among the plastic tables and chairs on the deck overlooking the field. A lunchtime crowd of pilots, mechanics, and workers from the nearby office park were gathered there, and many called out greetings to Matty. She stopped to speak to one woman, waving for me to go on and get us a table.

  A popular individual, Matty, and also something of a local celebrity in this small town forty-some miles north of San Francisco. Besides being the flight school’s best and only female instructor, she was an aerobatic pilot of national reputation, and if all went according to her own fine-tuned plan, by this time next year she’d be the new U.S. Aerobatic Champion.

  My association with Matty went back over three years, to shortly after my fifth ride in the Citabria belonging to my lover, Hy Ripinsky. Far above the Sierra Nevada he’d put the tiny plane into a precision spin, and then and there I’d decided to become a pilot myself. But Hy, who has his instructor’s rating and occasionally takes on students at Tufa Tower Field near his ranch in Mono County, refused to teach me. I was, he claimed, stubborn and often disinclined to accept criticism—particularly from him. Before I was able to remind him of his own stubborness and disinclination to accept criticism, though, he offered to put me in touch with an old buddy of his who owed him a favor and would give me lessons at below the going rate.

  I was surprised when the buddy turned out to be an attractive, willowy woman with thick brown hair that fell nearly to her waist. Initially I wondered, almost to the point of obsessing, about the nature of their long friendship, but after my first lesson I put my questions aside. Why, I reasoned, let what might or might not have happened between them cloud what promised to be a great student-teacher relationship? And even though I still wondered from time to time—wondered now, as I watched her talking animatedly, her slender hands describing loops and rolls in the air—I never regretted the decision. Matty had a magical way of transferring her skill to her students; under conditions unnerving to a novice, she was calm and supportive; her enthusiasm for even the most mundane aspects of flying—and there are many—was infectious. She’d made me the pilot I was today.

  The student pilot–instructor relationship is a special one, fostered by a classroom situation that is far less than ideal. Several years before I met Matty, I’d had a few lessons from a naval aviator I dated; more recently I’d been flying with Hy. But as I belted myself into the left seat of that Cessna for the first time, I became acutely aware that I was placing my life in the hands of a stranger.

  Over the course of the long hours we spent together in the cockpit, I learned a great deal about myself—and about Matty. Both of us were reserved women. We didn’t speak of personal matters, we didn’t trade in emotions. Even when a strong crosswind reduced me to a mass of Jell-O on landing, I stifled my gasps and concentrated on putting the plane into a sideslip. Even when my fear of relinquishing the controls in a tricky situation tried her patience, she didn’t lose her temper. We were, I later realized, keeping each other at an arm’s length in a space that was barely an arm’s length to begin with.

  Still, at such close quarters, the person beneath one’s skin communicates in ways more subtle than words. By the time I’d earned my license, Matty and I could reach each other in a single glance.

  And today I was reading her easily. She might be doing her damnedest to distract me from her nervousness and haggard appearance, but no amount of bright chatter could mask the obvious distress signals.

  Now she left the woman she’d been talking with and came over to our table. As she sat down and put aside the menu, which hadn’t changed in years, she said, “Former student of mine. She wants to take up aerobatics. More power to her.”

  “You going to teach her?”

  “No, I’m not the best of instructors in that area. Fellow who taught me—you’ve met him, Jim Powell—is. I’m sending her to him.” She regarded me for a moment, her eyes unreadable behind her sunglasses. “You ever think of taking it up?”

  “Aerobatics? Uh-uh. Oh, I fool around sometimes—way up high, and under Ripinsky’s supervision. But to be any good you’ve got to work hard at it; right now working hard at keeping my agency functioning is about all I can handle.”

  “Well, maybe someday you will. I’d like to see how you’d do. Of course, you always did hate stalls, so I’m not sure how you could handle, say, a Falling Leaf.”

  I smiled faintly. If we were to take a short ride in the Cessna this afternoon, Matty would find out about stalls and me.

  She said, “So you’re still flying that tail-dragger of Ripinsky’s.”

  “Every chance I get.”

  “How come you don’t have it today?”

  “He’s got it up at Tufa Tower, although he’s coming down to the city later this afternoon. I had to rent, and I picked a 150 for sentimental reasons.”

  “Picked it because it was the cheapest rate you could get, you mean. Although between the two of you, you and Hy can’t be doing badly; last time I fueled at Oakland, one of the linemen told me you guys had bought a cottage on the coast. Mendocino County, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh. But we didn’t really buy it; we paid a dollar to friends who had bad memories of the place.”

  “Nice deal. How is Ripinsky, anyway?”

  She really was determined to play this scene out as if everything were fine with her, but I knew that sooner or later she’d confide in me. Sooner, if I didn’t push, so I went along with her script. “He’s fine. You’ve heard about his latest crusade?”

  “The human-rights thing? Yeah. What got him started on that?”

  “Oh, a while back he found himself in a bad situation, where he was helped out by people who were in pretty marginal circumstances themselves. It got him going.”

  “Going from tree-hugger to caped crusader?”

  “Something like that.”

  She shook her head. “It’s pure Ripinsky, all right: tough as nails, with a bleeding heart the size of Texas.”

  I smiled at the comment. Matty was a hardline conservative; I was a mixed bag of viewpoints, both intellectual and emotional. Long ago we’d agreed not to discuss political issues.

  The waitress came over and we ordered our usual: big burger for Matty, calamari sandwich for me, iced tea for both of us. A yellow Citabria, like Hy’s except for the color, was on final; we watched as it did a touch-and-go. I twisted around so I could see it climb out, and when I turned back to Matty, she’d taken off her dark glasses and was studying me.

  Why? Out of habit, to assess my mood as she always had before lessons? To see if I’d changed in the time since she’d last seen me? No, neither. Something in her gaze tipped me off: she was trying to decide if she could trust me with her problem. And not because I was her friend but because I was a private investigator.

  “Why didn’t you just come out and ask?” I said. “Why’d you have to use the biennial as an excuse?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I reminded you that it’s not due till March. You’re in some kind of a bind, and you want to hire me. What is it?”

  “Oh, God, McCone, you know me too well.” She glanced around. “Let’s not talk here, huh? Too many people.”

  “Where, then? When?”

  “After we eat. You can take me up, check out our old haunts. I’ll tell you about it in the plane.”

  I lowered the Cessna’s nose to level flight attitude, let the speed accelerate, and throttled back to
cruise RPM. “Now,” I said to Matty.

  She didn’t respond.

  I set my course due west toward the area where I’d so often practiced, above the farmland that stretched between the town and the coastal ridgeline. Matty slumped passively in the narrow seat, head bowed, eyes shut behind her dark glasses. Not the Matty who had once sat beside me, issuing orders while on the alert for every possible danger.

  I checked for other traffic, then banked in a shallow turn. Relaxed pressure on the controls and let the plane fly itself. “Okay,” I said, “start at the beginning.”

  The silence spun out. It told me her problem was serious, and very personal. Matty wouldn’t equivocate this way about something to do with one of her students or the major-parts manufacturer that underwrote both her expenses for aerobatic competitions and her quarter-million-dollar customized plane.

  Finally she sighed deeply and opened her eyes. “Okay, here it is. You know that I’ve been living with somebody?”

  “You mentioned him in your note on my birthday card.”

  “Oh, right. Well, it’s been nearly eleven months now, since the week after New Year’s. His name’s John Seabrook, and he owns a Christmas-tree farm right over there.” She pointed toward the base of the hills, where there was a large tract of heavily forested land.

  I rolled out of the turn and began a medium-banked one in the opposite direction. “And?”

  “He’s disappeared.”

  “Since when?”

  “A week ago yesterday.”

  “You file a missing-persons report?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Shrug.

  “Why not, Matty?”

  “… You’d have to know John to understand. He’s got a real thing about his privacy, and he doesn’t talk about his past.”

  “At all?”

  “No.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t file a report.”

  “Oh, shit!” She bit her lower lip and looked out the side window.