Sally was wearing slacks, which she seldom did on weekdays, but her bronze curls and careful makeup were unchanging. Sally hadn’t altered much in the years we’d been on-again, off-again friends. She’d had a wonderful but brief episode of gourmet cooking, tried marriage the same way, and now was back to Chick-Kwik, burgers, and the single life, without gaining a pound or wrinkling a crease. The only thing that made Sally look her age (which I estimated to be fifty-one) was her son, Perry.
I watched while Sally went down a mental checklist, giving a tiny nod as she reviewed each point on a list only she could see. Then she slid behind the wheel and said, “Coming?”
Soon we were flying down the interstate, for Sally believed the speed limit was just a guideline. This belief accounted for Sally’s knowing every highway patrolman in the area by his first name. But today, we weren’t stopped, and we arrived at the Starry Night Airport having exchanged only a modicum of gossip.
We had left the interstate just five minutes east of Lawrenceton and had taken a state highway north a couple of miles, passing the usual seven million pine trees. Sally turned onto a road that scarcely deserved the name. It had been paved at one time, but that had been long ago. This alleged road terminated at the romantically named Starry Night Airport.
It was evident that Starry Night was a marginal business. Rendered invisible from the highway by a strip of pines and a ridge, the little airport had been carved out of the woods a long time ago. There were two runways, and even to my ignorant eyes it was apparent they were suitable only for small planes. Very small planes. The parking lot was small and graveled, delineated by landscape timbers. A concrete sidewalk led to the office, a little building about half the size of the ground floor of my house. This green-painted cement-block building had windows running nearly all the way around. Though the windows were curtained, the curtains were all wide open.
If you didn’t turn off the sidewalk to enter the office, you continued past to the hangars. There were two. From the office, only the first few feet of the interior of each hangar would be visible. While both hangars were in use—I thought I could detect at least three tiny planes in the first, and two larger ones in the second—I couldn’t see any people at all. Nothing moved.
I surveyed the grounds again. “Now, wait a minute,” I said. Sally, who hadn’t moved at all, looked at me with a little smile. “You’re wondering how the murderer got Jack’s body to the plane?” she said.
I nodded. It would be brazen to carry the body to the plane past the open windows of the office, no matter how deserted the place seemed to be.
“Look,” she said, pointing out her window at a narrow gravel road, just wide enough for one vehicle, leading out of the parking lot and running up the ridge that rose behind the hangars.
“What about tracks?” I asked.
“No rain here for three weeks before Jack’s body was dropped,” she said. “The ground on either side of the gravel was rock-hard, so if there were tracks, they wouldn’t amount to much. Now that we’ve had rain, it would be a different story.”
Instead of hopping out and going to the office, as I expected, Sally turned to me and said, “Now, here’s the reason I brought you along.”
I felt a warning bell go off in the “better sense” area of my brain.
“Let’s hear it,” I said, the caution in my voice making Sally purse her lips in exasperation.
“Well, Dan Edgar, the kid who wrote the story on the attack on Shelby, was too lazy to get out of bed this morning to help me, and the other reporters are all gone or sick this weekend.”
“So naturally you thought of me.” I raised one eyebrow, but possibly this effective expression was invisible behind my big glasses.
“Yes,” said Sally without a trace of irony. “Actually, I did. You’re small, you’re quick, and if your husband’s out of pocket, you’re bored.”
“Well,” I said blankly, for want of something better.
“Anyway, this won’t take long. Do you want to be the sneaker or the diversion?”
“How much trouble can I get into?”
“Oh, hardly any. I’ll take responsibility.”
I tried raising the eyebrow again.
“Oh, okay, maybe yelled-at trouble, not jail trouble.”
I opted for the sneaker. I figured I already had so much trouble, a little more wouldn’t make any difference.
“Okay,” Sally said. “Now, here’s what you have to do. When I was out here doing the story on Jack Burns, of course I asked the owner, an older guy named Stanford Foley, how it was possible for Jack and someone else to get in a plane without him even seeing it. He said it just couldn’t happen, that he was here the whole time. The police can’t make heads or tails of that, and I can’t either.”
“Your story said Jack had rented the plane himself.”
“Yes, I said that, but I was counting on Foley too much. It turns out, Jack had reserved that time and that plane, but I don’t think Foley saw him at all. I think Jack was brought here dead—he certainly wasn’t killed in the plane, the cops tell me—and loaded into that plane by his killer. Jack’s car was parked at the police station and nothing was wrong with it, so he didn’t come here on his own and he wasn’t killed in his own car.”
“So, what do you want me to do?”
“While I go in there and talk to Foley, I want you to sneak in that hangar and get in a plane. Actually, the plane that you saw that day, the one that transported the body, may be back here. It’s one Mr. Foley keeps to rent out to whoever wants it. Jack had actually flown it several times.”
Getting in a plane didn’t sound too hard.
“According to your theory, the killer had Jack’s body in the car and drove close to the hangar,” I said, feeling sure there was more to come.
“Well, right. Actually, that’s what I want you to do, get the body to the plane. Just to prove it can be done without Mr. Foley knowing anything at all. I want you to drive my car to the back of the first hangar—that’s the one the plane Jack reserved was in—and drag the bag in my trunk down to the hangar. I want you to load that bag in a plane and get in yourself. You don’t know how to fly a plane, do you? It would be great if you could actually take off without him knowing.”
“You should have asked Perry, he’s taking lessons,” I reminded her, and she grimaced as if she’d bitten a lemon.
“Perry wouldn’t do it, he’d just think of something else he had to do urgently,” Sally said. “I don’t know if Perry’s so much learning how to fly a plane as learning how to fly Jenny Tankersley.”
I wasn’t going to touch
that
one.
“So, just get the bag out of the trunk, down the hill, and into the plane,” Sally prompted.
This sounded trickier and trickier. “How heavy a bag?” I asked, stalling for time.
“Oh. Pretty heavy—after all, it’s supposed to be a body.”
“What if someone comes?”
“We’ll just—tell them what we’re doing!”
Sally seemed to think that would take care of everything. I was far from sure that was the case.
“Okay,” I said, hearing the doubt dripping from my voice.
“Good,” Sally said happily, gathering her purse and notepad. “I’ll meet you back here. You have ten minutes, okay? And the object is not to let Foley see you. Or anybody else.”
Sally had made it sound like a kind of game, maybe a macabre version of hide-and-seek. But as soon as I began the experiment, it felt all too real. While Sally entered the office and hopefully began an intense conversation with Stanford Foley, I drove her old Toyota out of the parking lot and up the little graveled trail. The car lurched as I navigated it through the ruts, and my stomach began to match its motion.
I was up behind the first hangar in no time. I parked and got out, Sally’s enormous bunch of keys hanging from my hand. No one ran out of the hangar or the office to demand an accounting of what I was doing. If I looked hard I could see Sally’s head through one of the back windows of the office.
Time for phase two. I unlocked the trunk and stared at its contents with dismay. When Sally had said “bag” I’d thought of a garbage bag filled with laundry or yard rakings. What Sally had wedged in her trunk was an actual punching bag that she’d appropriated from someone’s garage. The chain it had dangled from was still attached to three rings on the top of the bag, coming together to link on one large ring.
“Son of a
bitch
,” I said from the bottom of my heart. That certainly didn’t mean anything in the context of my predicament, but it really made me feel better. “Okay,” I said, trying to bolster my courage and muscle power. “Okay, here we go.” And muttering further encouraging things and heaving with all my might, I got the punching bag out of the trunk.
If the chains hadn’t been attached, Sally’s little experiment would have ended right then and there. The only other way I could get the bag, which I estimated to weigh seventy pounds, down the slope would be to roll it. That would work with the bag, though the trip downhill might be rather uncontrollable, but with Jack’s body it would not have done at all.
So I grabbed the chains, for after all, Jack could have been grabbed under the arms, and I dragged the bag downhill, feeling toward the end that my arms were going to come out of their sockets. I was quite certain that Sally owed me in a major way.
Halfway down the hill I achieved some self-knowledge. I would never have done this if I’d been single, because of the embarrassment of possibly being seen and questioned. But now that I was married to Martin, I was not so concerned. He gave me the confidence to do what I wanted to do, though it might be incredibly stupid. Like pulling a punching bag down a hill behind a very obscure little airport in northeast Georgia.
Then my foot touched concrete, and I realized I’d made it to the hangar. There was an enormous door right in the middle of the wall and it was wide open. Mr. Foley was not a man to worry about security, despite what had happened the week before. Before I tried to get the bag in, I reconnoitered. The hangar, which felt cavernous, was full of shadows. The plane closest to the back door was green, but there were two little red-and-white ones, both with a Piper logo, either of which might have been the plane that dumped Jack Burns so unceremoniously into my yard. Though the concrete floor certainly had stains on it, the hangar was surprisingly neat, a credit to Mr. Foley. There were shelves on the side, a little room in the corner, and metal drums holding rags and things I couldn’t identify.
Well, the floor being clear was the main thing. I pulled the bag, which I was beginning to hate with all my might, across the smooth floor to the nearest of the red-and-white Pipers. It was unlocked, to my astonishment. I peered into the tiny cabin, feeling a little curious even though I knew I was supposed to be hurrying. I’d never seen the inside of a plane so small.
I hadn’t been able to figure out how one person could fly the plane and dump the body out at the same time, but now that I could see the cabin, it was obvious that it would be easy. The pilot could lean across the body, which would be propped into the passenger’s seat, open the passenger door, and give a good push, and the thing would be accomplished. It gave me the willies when I put Jack’s face on the passenger, pictured it actually taking place.
Suddenly the loneliness of the hangar felt threatening rather than reassuring. I wanted to get the hell out of there. What was a nice girl like me doing in a place like this? With a strength born of sheer exasperation, I hauled the bag to an upright position, squatted, embraced the bag, and lifted. I almost got it in the passenger’s seat, but my height was the problem. Jack’s assailant too must have had a terrible time unless he was at least a foot taller than me—lots of people were, of course.
I looked around desperately. There, some wooden pallets were stacked against the wall. I ran to get one, put the bag on it, stood on it myself, and with the extra height I managed to wrestle the bag into the plane. It was not sitting up neatly in the passenger’s seat; it leaned awkwardly over into the pilot’s side. But it was in the plane, as Sally had specified.
I returned the pallet, wiped the bag with a rag to remove my fingerprints (wondering all the while why I felt that was necessary), threw the rag back in the metal drum, and hightailed it out of the hangar.
I had to back down the track until I came to the point where it led down to the parking lot. There I was able to maneuver Sally’s car to face downhill. Once I had her car back in its original position, I looked at my watch. Ten minutes, most of which had been absorbed by extricating the bag from the trunk, and hoisting the bag into the plane.
It felt like double that. I closed my eyes, scrunched down in the passenger’s seat, and wondered if I could go to sleep. No, here came Sally accompanied by an older man who had a fine head of gray hair and an orange jumpsuit that looked quite good on him. An earphone set was around his neck, the little gray pads looking like buds on the ends of the metal arc. Wires led down to a tape player strapped to his waist, like the set Angel listened to so often while she did yardwork.
Sally was smiling and Stanford Foley was smiling, and I wondered if I was seeing the start of a Good Thing. The tall older man caught sight of me in the car, and said something to Sally, something on the order of “Why didn’t your friend come in?” because I could see the question on his face. Sally said something with a conspiratorial smile and he began laughing. I decided Sally’s debt had just escalated.