The Flight Attendant(15)

These weekends were free of alcohol because Rosemary didn’t drink and didn’t want to see her sister drink. That’s how different they were.

It spoke volumes about what Rosemary really thought of her that the children had never been alone with Cassie in her apartment. She had offered to babysit them at least half a dozen times so Rosemary and Dennis could enjoy a night out alone. See a musical, perhaps, that wasn’t Disney. Enjoy a restaurant where the ladies’ and men’s rooms didn’t have signs marked “Witches” and “Warlocks.” But her sister had always passed. Said she and Dennis wanted family time with the kids. In truth, Cassie knew, Rosemary didn’t trust her at night. It was when their father often (but not always) got into trouble, and it was when Cassie seemed to inflict the most hurt—on herself and on others.

And so she didn’t text her sister. There was really no point. She didn’t once reach for her phone as it charged on the nightstand. She was afraid that the urge to Google Alex Sokolov would be irresistible, and now that she knew his body had been found and the investigation had begun, she wanted to secrete herself inside a news void. She was afraid that anything she might learn would only make her feel worse. Either it would frighten her, a noose drawing tight, or it would exacerbate her guilt for telling no one that she’d found him dead and then just left the body behind. That night she only got out of bed when she needed water or had to go to the bathroom.



* * *



? ?

She awoke, the air dense with the distant remnants of a dream. The room was silent except for the thrum of the cool, forced air, and the details of the dream were all but gone. Her father was in it, that she knew, and so was hunting camp. But that was it.

She rubbed her eyes. Two seasons she had gone hunting with him and one of his few friends, even though it had meant missing dance class. The camp was in the Cumberland Mountains and it belonged to that friend, a carpenter who had a daughter roughly her age. She had come, too. The girl’s name was Karly and she went to a different school. The camp was actually a trailer with plumbing that no longer worked, and so the carpenter had built an outhouse. A composting, eco-friendly outhouse. Those two November weekends, a year apart, had been at once unbelievably wholesome and unbelievably squalid. The fathers had viewed themselves as progressive and enlightened: they were bringing their daughters to deer camp. They’d sent them to hunter safety courses and then refined what the instructors had taught them about firearms. But the men had drunk and passed out each night, and then each day the four of them had walked forever in the cold of the woods. It didn’t snow either year, thank God, but that also meant there hadn’t been any tracks.

The second year she’d wounded a deer instead of killing it instantly, which left her sobbing with remorse. Inevitably it had died, but it had died slowly and in excruciating pain. She’d been such a mess that her father hadn’t been able to leave her and track down the animal to finish it off.

And Karly? Karly just wanted to drink with her father and with Cassie’s dad those weekends, even though the grown-ups wouldn’t let her because the girls were still in middle school. She went on and on about how much she loved the foam and fizz of canned beer, and how popping the top turned her on. Whispered to Cassie that it got her hot.

When Cassie finally climbed from the hotel bed, reflexively she rubbed her right shoulder where the rifle’s kickback that day in the woods had bruised her soul far worse than her skin. She hadn’t touched a gun ever since.



* * *



? ?

It was somewhere over the eastern Atlantic, after she had brought the woman in 6G another glass of Riesling and Jada had brought the fellow in 3A a scotch, that the other flight attendant verbalized the truth that, along with so many others, had kept Cassie staring at the pinpricks of light in her hotel room the night before—the radio, the clock, the smoke alarm. The two of them were catching their breath together in the front galley of the Airbus.

“Since he was an American and he was on our flight, do you think they’re going to want to talk to us?” Jada asked. Cassie didn’t have to ask who he was. “And who do you think they will be?”

Cassie rubbed Purell roughly onto her hands. She had contemplated this, too, in the small hours of the morning. She had settled on the FBI, but only because she was pretty sure that the CIA didn’t investigate crime. She presumed the FBI must have some sort of arrangement with foreign police forces: maybe in this case, because Alex had been a U.S. citizen, they would ask the questions for the police in Dubai. But maybe not. She knew that Dubai did so much business with the West that it was very likely they had a pretty damn impressive police force. She also suspected that most U.S. embassies had some sort of FBI presence, an officer or two. Just in case. God, if only Alex had been as Russian as his cologne or his taste in literature. She guessed in that case that the questioning would have been cursory—if at all. Why would Americans even investigate a dead Russian in Dubai? They wouldn’t. It would be none of their business.

In the end, however, by the time she had climbed from the hotel bed and showered, she had convinced herself that even the State Department would be involved. Alex’s family would be lobbying the media for justice. People—powerful people—would be paying attention. The idea made her sick. Somewhere Miranda was sharing her story.

“I think it will be the FBI,” she told Jada finally. “If it’s anyone…”