Red, White and Dead Part 14

"I'm working on it," I said, not wanting to get into anything when he was in front of my mom. "I'll keep you posted."

"Let me say hi!" I heard Spence say. Then he was on the phone. "Izzy, you must, and I mean you must go to Obika. It's a great restaurant."

"That sounds j.a.panese."

"No, no, it's a mozzarella bar. And it is heaven." Spence rattled on about making reservations, and recommended about thirty other restaurants. "Your mother wants to talk to you, but I'll think of some other places."

Then my mother was back on the phone. "I can't believe you just picked up and went to Italy. What made you decide to go?"

Two men trying to rough me up in a b.u.t.terfly room. "I just decided to take advantage of my time off." And I'm hoping to find out about Dad.

"Well, I think it's wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. Have you called Elena?"

"I saw her today."

"Fantastic. How is she?"

I told her that Elena looked well. I explained about the gallery and her job. I didn't mention that Elena had all but given me the b.u.m's rush out of there. "There's something I meant to ask her today, and I forgot-why was Dad taking helicopter lessons? I mean, his job didn't require it, right?"

"No, it was just a hobby. Something he wanted to learn."

"Had he always had that desire? I mean, had he talked about it a lot?"

"Not really. He'd gotten his pilot's license in college. He kept it current but didn't use it that often. Then one day he started talking about flying helicopters, and your father was very determined when he wanted something. Within days, he was taking lessons."

"How long after that did he die?"

"A couple months." She sighed. "Time goes so fast. And then he was gone."

20.

A bout the fifty-third time I called Bozeman, Montana, the phone was answered. By that point, I was back in my dorm room, jet lag catching up with me, getting ready for bed. As the phone rang at the other end, I was barely paying attention. Somewhere along the way, I'd stopped believing that anyone would ever answer, and yet, my finger kept hitting the redial b.u.t.ton.

"Ohman here," a brisk but friendly male voice said.

"Mr. Ohman? R. J. Ohman?"

"You got him."

"This is Isabel McNeil." If there was any recognition of my name, he said nothing. "I'm calling from Italy," I said. "I wondered if I could ask you a few questions about my father."

"Who's that?"

"Christopher McNeil."

Still nothing.

"He died in a helicopter accident twenty-some years ago. I think you might have been his flight instructor."

"Ah, h.e.l.l, sure. You're Chris McNeil's kid?" He tsked. "That still bothers me."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, helicopters are more dangerous than planes, but you don't expect to lose a student. I trained him well. I train everybody well."

"Was he a good student?"

"h.e.l.l, yeah. Always came prepared. Took it very seriously. But there were concerns about the R22s back in those days."

"What's an R22?"

"The chopper. Could be kind of a swirly bird. d.a.m.n near lost one myself."

"So there were problems with it?"

"Well, the lawyers told me not to say this-they were afraid we'd get sued, I guess-but I was never very good at holding my tongue." He grunted. "But anyway, yeah. The R22s used to have problems because they would start oscillating and student pilots would sometimes overcorrect. That would make it worse and the blades would flex and slice the tail rotor right off."

"What happens then?"

"Once that tail rotor comes off, it's a quick trip to the undertaker. You go into auto rotation. And then you're going down."

I winced. If he had died, what must my dad have gone through? Had he been scared? "Do you think it was excruciating for him?" My voice came out soft.

"Honey, he probably never knew what happened. I'd guess he didn't even have time to think about the fall, and when you hit that water, you have nothing more to worry about anyhow. He didn't suffer."

"Did you inspect the helicopter before he took off?"

"Yep. Nothing wrong that I saw. We both did the preflight inspection."

"What does that entail?"

"A long checklist. We pilots do almost everything from checklists. I always tell my students, you might think you're pretty smart, but a checklist has a h.e.l.l of a lot more intelligence."

"And what did you find during the inspection?"

"Everything looked good to me. To your dad, too. This was one of your dad's solo flights, so he spent a lot of time around the chopper before he left."

"Is it typical for students like him to fly over bodies of water like Lake Erie?"

"Well, in order to get their certification, they have to complete a number of solo cross-country flights. Up to him to chart his course. And I checked it with him. Also, the helicopter was equipped with pontoons so he could practice water landings if he wanted."

"Did he file a flight plan?" I thought of some of my Internet research, which mentioned flight plans.

"Yep. And didn't look like he was off course."

I sat down on the dorm bed, pus.h.i.+ng a toe back and forth across the black-and-white patterned linoleum floor. "Mr. Ohman, you worked with the FBI, is that right?"

I thought he'd hesitate, maybe be secretive, but he answered with a quick, "Yep. Civilian contractor with them for over thirty years."

"I know my father did consulting for the federal government. What I don't understand is why he would need helicopter training."

"Didn't need it from what I knew. Just wanted it. And at that time, if you worked with the Feds, they encouraged all kinds of skill-set enhancements. I was told your dad simply wanted to learn how to fly a helicopter. He was already a pilot. My job was to go around the country and train federal employees how to fly better or fly different aircraft."

"He worked for a city police department and consulted for the Feds."

"Well, he had something more than consulting to do with the Feds if they hired me."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"Was he a good pilot?"

"Absolutely. Conscientious and thorough. I was surprised as h.e.l.l when we lost him."

I thought about the question that had been playing in my mind. I wasn't sure whether to ask it. If I did, and I was right about my hunch, would it signal something, start some chain of events?

But I've never been good at holding my tongue. "Is there any chance my father's death was faked so that he could enter the witness protection program?"

He actually laughed at me. It wasn't an unkind laugh exactly, more of a chuckle. "Why do you think your father was in the witness protection program?"

"Because his body disappeared and..." I figured I might as well say it. "I think I saw him recently."

He didn't laugh at that. "What do you mean?"

I told him what had happened in the stairwell. I told him I thought I had heard my father's voice. He listened, then said, "What did you say your first name was?"

"Isabel. Izzy."

"Well, Izzy, I'd never thought about that possibility before. Really hadn't. The fact of the matter is if he was entering a Fed protection program, they wouldn't have told me. But thinking about it now, seems like it's not a bad guess."

21.

I called Mayburn right away. It was nine o'clock Rome time, two in the afternoon in Chicago. "What do you know about the witness protection program?"

"Nothing, really," he said.

"Know anybody who does?"

"Well..." I heard him making a clicking sound with his tongue, as if he was ticking off the potentials in his head. "Hey," he said then, his voice a little excited, "I do know this journalist in town. Pulitzer prize winner, all that stuff. He wrote a bunch of articles and then eventually a book about this guy in the witness protection program who saw the murder of a senator. He hired me to dig up background on some of the people in the book."

"Think he'd talk to us?"

"What do you want to know?"

"If my dad was in the witness protection program. Or if it's a possibility."

More clicking of the tongue.

"What?" I said.

"I'm wondering if you should be leaving this whole thing alone."

"Like you're leaving Lucy alone?"

"Different situation."

I got up and walked to the window, looked down at the dimly lit path that wound through the stone busts. It struck me at that moment, looking at those statues, those torsos of the dead-was making them a way to try and keep the person alive? To remember them? Was that what I was doing here in Rome, figuratively creating a stone bust of my father as I pushed at what might be nothing?

"Will you call the journalist for me?" I asked Mayburn.

"I'll try him," he said. "You going to be around for a while?"

I looked around the dorm room. I should have been out in the midst of a Roman night. But as magic a city as Rome is, the thought of finding my father was more so.

"I'll be here," I said again, and hung up.

I lay back on the hard, thin dorm bed and finally thought about Theo. I take it back. It wasn't that I hadn't been thinking of him. I'd gotten a text from him, the day I left. You around? he'd written. It's the weekend, and the only place I want to be is with you.

Today, after he hadn't heard from me, he'd texted, How was your weekend? I missed you.

I hadn't answered either text. I wasn't ready to let go of my farewell with Sam, and if I texted with Theo it seemed like moving on. And as much as I knew I needed to do that eventually, I wanted to make sure I was thinking about the goodbye with Sam, feeling it and what it meant for us. It wasn't hard. Those few minutes in Sam's apartment were unrelenting. It wasn't so much the memory of Alyssa (although that thought tortured me when I let it) but rather the recollections of us-of his arms, our clinging to each other like the last survivors of a boat crash-that were making me sick. So sick that aside from my first big meal outside the Piazza Barberini, I'd eaten little. It was why I was fine to simply spend time in a dorm, searching around on the Internet for clues about my father, to spend my night in a tiny room wondering.

And now that I was waiting for Mayburn to call, now that I couldn't think of anything else to do, all I could really focus on was this big, hollow-as-h.e.l.l feeling and the memory of that moment with Sam, that moment that said, It's over. Truly, truly over.

I looked at my cell phone, thought about calling him, but then I realized that a message had come in sometime during my call with Mayburn.

"Izzy," I heard when I checked my voice mail. I knew that kind, soft voice. Lucy.

"I'm not sure where you are," she said, "and you probably won't recognize this number. I'm using my sister's cell phone. She's in town, visiting me. I don't feel like being alone with Michael, even though we're trying to patch things up. He swears he didn't tape my conversations or anything in the house, but he admitted he heard me talking to you, making plans to meet you at the nature museum. I guess he'd come back in the house and I didn't know he was there. He says he might have mentioned it to Dez. He can't remember." She laughed under her breath. "That sounds like such a bunch of c.r.a.p when I say it out loud, but I'm still back to wanting to be a hundred percent sure before I end things with him." A sigh. "Anyway, I wanted to see how you were. I've been afraid to call you because I feel like I made that whole thing happen at the museum. I shouldn't have involved you. I'm really sorry."

Holding the phone, I shook my head at it. It was me who had involved Lucy. I had only brought trouble into her world with the work I'd done with Mayburn. Because of me, her husband was awaiting trial on money laundering charges and a host of other things, and she was poised to be a single mom. On the other hand, Lucy had told me after Michael was arrested that she was relieved, because he had been a nightmare to live with, emotionally abusive to say the least, and when he was gone she felt she could breathe for the first time in her life.

I was staring at the phone, thinking, when it rang.

"Hey," Mayburn said. "He's around, and he'll talk to us."

"Who?"