CHAPTER 8-3
710 Words
Marisol Gonzales’s pink two-bedroom house was in the middle of a clean lower-middle-class block in Portland’s Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood. She and her husband sat on a small sofa in their living room when the investigators walked up to the front door. The door itself was open, but a screen door covered the entrance. When the two investigators knocked, the fiftysomething olive-skinned woman with a thick braid over her left shoulder stood up and shuffled to the door.
“You must be the crash investigators,” she said, pushing open the door. “I’m Marisol, and this is my husband, Miquel.” She pointed to the wiry, dark-skinned man on the worn flower-print couch. He nodded once and looked down at his hands.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Special Agent Ethan Suter, and this is Detective Daniel Bohannon. We are working on the investigation of Flight 559, trying to figure out what caused the accident. Would you mind answering a few questions for us?”
She nodded and pointed to a pair of tattered gray high-backed armchairs across from the couch. “Of course.”
“Mrs. Gonzales, as your flight was boarding and taking off, did you notice anything unusual? Was anyone acting strangely or out of place?” Suter asked.
“Not when we were boarding. That was normal,” she said. “After the flight took off, there were strange lights inside the plane.”
“You mean in the panels above your head?”
“No, there was a blue light. It flashed off and on, like a strobe. It was very strange. It started after takeoff.”
“Where did this light come from?”
“I’m not sure. It was hard to tell. There was a commotion in the aisle behind me, but, after people got scared, it was hard to tell anything. There was a lot of crying and yelling, people moving around. It was difficult to see what was happening,” she said. She turned to look at her husband and said, “If you are so bored, why don’t you go out back and sweep off the porch?”
Miquel opened his mouth to speak, but she interrupted.
“No, it is not woman’s work.”
He tried again.
“I will not stop.”
“You need to stop arguing with me when I haven’t said anything,” he said and walked out of the room.
“He hates it that I know his mind,” she said to the investigators.
“You know his mind?” Suter asked.
“I know his thoughts,” she said. “We are bonded.”
Suter looked to the detective to see if he understood the woman.
Bohannon shrugged.
“Anyway, back to the flight. You saw this flashing light, and there was a commotion. Were they related? Did they come from the same part of the plane?”
“It was impossible to tell. There was so much noise, and we were scared to death.”
“I understand. Was there anything about this light that made you think it might have caused the accident?”
“I don’t know. Once the plane started falling, I couldn’t think straight. We were going down so fast that I could not breathe. I think, at one point, I fainted. I could not take a breath, we were going down so rapidly.”
Bohannon’s phone rang. He excused himself and walked out the front door. Once outside he stepped down off the small porch onto the pebble sidewalk that ran to the street. He took several steps away from the house and tapped an icon on his phone.
“Please tell me that you have something better for me to do,” he said, noticing his lieutenant’s name on the screen.
“You’re a little green to be having an attitude already.” There was no humor in his voice.
“Sorry. This isn’t what I envisioned my first day would be like.”
“You mean you didn’t envision this is what your first month would be like. They’ve requested you for four weeks. They’re even reimbursing the city for your time, so we’re leasing you out.”
“But—”
“No buts. You’re working with the Feds. That’s got to have some educational value to a new detective,” he said. “There’ll still be plenty of crimes for you to bust when you get back. Email me a weekly report so I know you’re not slacking off.” He hung up.
Bohannon stared back at the little house flanked by rhododendrons and a patchy lawn, in no hurry to go back inside. An eighteen-inch faded blue-and-white Virgin Mary statue stood near the right corner of the house, next to a worn dirt path leading to the back of the house. Brush hanging over the neighbor’s fence obscured the view.
Someone hissed at him from the foliage.
He leaned over to get a better look down the path.
A hand reached out and pulled away a branch. Miquel held a finger to his lips and beckoned the detective to follow.
*
- Writer
