Сьюзен Виггз - The Lost and Found Bookshop

One thing Natalie had never wondered about until now: After the explosion of tributes, then what? Who picked up the wilted flowers, the rain-soaked poems, the blurred photos, the jarred candles?

The waiting black car smelled of canned deodorizer. The driver helped her grandfather into the back seat. Traffic was heavy even on a Saturday morning, and the drive to the Flood Mansion crawled along through wispy snakes of fog, past trees twisted and shaped by the wind, and along the slanting rooflines of the city’s Victorian Painted Ladies. Ringing cable cars lurched past bustling cafés and shops. As they wended their way upward, they broke through the fog and entered another microclimate, a sky of eye-smarting clarity that illuminated the city’s most splendid panoramas.

This had been Blythe Harper’s city, this peninsula crowned by forty-three “official” hills and surrounded by water, a place she swore she’d never leave. Yet she had left it, never to return, and now Natalie and Andrew had to scramble through the dark maze of unexpected grief.

“She told me she would be back on Friday night,” said Grandy, his eyes once again misted with confusion.

“That was her plan,” Natalie acknowledged.

“What the devil happened?”

Her mouth went dry. She said nothing.

“Natty-girl,” he said, using her nickname, “I know I’m forgetful, but I deserve to hear the truth.”

She nodded. She’d already told him. He needed her to go through it again. “I’m sorry, Grandy. It’s hard for me to talk about, because I feel as if I caused it. I wanted Mom to come up for some stupid company thing. I didn’t realize she and Rick were planning to surprise me by showing up together. He told me he had a test flight, but that was just a ruse. Instead, he flew down here and picked her up at Pier Thirty-Nine. They would have landed at the Archangel airstrip at around three that afternoon. But something went wrong during the flight.”

“Your Rick is an expert pilot.”

She folded her hands together and squeezed until it hurt. “He was. Oh, Grandy.” She remembered the fleeting thought she’d had that the female passenger in his plane had been someone he was cheating with. What a horrible thing to think about a man who was only trying to make her happy.

The memorial for Rick had taken place in Petaluma the day before. Natalie had dragged herself there, enduring a virtual gauntlet of headshaking and consoling friends and acquaintances. Every tribute and eulogy had attested to his expertise, his professionalism.

“If he was such an expert, then how could he have crashed?” Grandy wondered.

“The NTSB is still investigating,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t need to explain the details yet again.

She had culled through the preliminary reports, as if knowing exactly what had gone wrong would make the tragedy less cataclysmic. According to the report, the amphibious light sport aircraft was flying too low and—probably due to fog—mistakenly entered a canyon surrounded by steep terrain. Investigators postulated that the pilot thought he was in a different canyon that led to the larger, open portion of the lake. Right before the crash, a local man who was fishing in a boat spotted the plane about fifty feet over the water.

“As the plane swooped low, I waved to the pilot and he waved back,” the witness had said. “Everything seemed normal. I figured they were just buzzing over the lake or coming in to land on the water. A few seconds later, I heard the engines rev up and accelerate hard. Guess he was trying to turn.”

Once Rick realized there was no exit from the canyon, he attempted a 180-degree turn to escape. Based upon performance limits, the airplane would not have been able to climb past the steeply rising terrain.

The plane flew behind a point and then the man heard a loud crash. He sped in his boat to find the site. Approaching a cove, he spotted the wreckage and yelled out, but there was no response. He called 911.

Officials from the sheriff’s office, the Federal Aviation Administration, and rescuers from Cal Fire and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation were led to the crash site. They speculated that the marine layer had caused Rick to mistake one canyon for another. By the time he figured out his orientation, there wasn’t enough space to pull up.

Natalie shuddered, haunted by the image. Over and over, she pictured those final seconds, imagining what her mother must have been feeling—the flash of realization, the panic, the terror. She told her grandfather what she’d learned but didn’t share the further details in the report. The blood. The motionless bodies found by the fisherman.

“They were both gone on impact,” she told Grandy.

He reached over and covered her hand with his. “I never met your Rick in person. I wish I had.”

He was never my Rick , thought Natalie. “At the memorial yesterday, his sister gave me something,” she blurted out.

“What’s that?”

She reached into her handbag. “This was zipped into a pocket of his flight vest.” She handed the small box to her grandfather.

“A diamond ring,” he said, taking it in a hand unsteady with tremors.

“Rick was going to surprise me with a marriage proposal,” Natalie said. “I assume he wanted my mom there when he asked me.”

“Yes, that was his plan,” Grandy said. “When we spoke on the phone—”

“You spoke with him?” Natalie felt nauseated.

“Indeed I did. He told me what he intended to do. He wasn’t exactly asking my permission, but he wanted me to know that he loved you. He wanted to make a life with you.”

Her throat clogged with inexpressible grief. Then she choked out, “He told you and Mom? You knew?” Surely not. Maybe this was one of Grandy’s episodes— delirium was the doctor’s term for it.

“Rick had a lovely plan,” Grandy continued. “He was going to ask you to marry him, and then fly you and your mother back to the city. He had a suite booked for the two of you at the Four Seasons on Nob Hill. It made me supremely happy to know such a fine young man wanted to marry you. I never dreamed it would go so wrong.” His hands shook as he straightened his tie. “Blythe never found anyone, and she always feared it would be the same for you. She believed Rick would be the one.”

Natalie put the ring away. “When I told her I was having doubts, she didn’t want to hear it. I don’t know what to do, Grandy. What should I do?”

He regarded her blankly. This was one of his lost moments. She was beginning to recognize the signs—the distant stare, the agitated hand movements, the impenetrable expression.

Realizing she was truly on her own with this, she gazed out the car window. While Rick had been plotting a surprise proposal and a romantic getaway, she had been contemplating the most civil, low-key way to break up with him. The very moment he’d been flying with her mother, a gorgeous engagement ring tucked into his vest, Natalie had been imagining life without him.

She kept expecting him to be the first to call it quits. Instead, he was buying a diamond ring, secretly plotting a marriage proposal and a whisk-you-away couple’s weekend. Marriage.

It would have been a surprise, all right. In the most terrible way. How could she have read the situation so wrong?

Attending his memorial had been painful and teeth-grittingly awkward. His family was made up of very nice people who had assumed Natalie, too, was very nice. She wasn’t nice. Couldn’t they see that? She felt especially not-nice when Mandy appeared at the service, her expressions of sympathy as hollow as Natalie’s heart.

His sister had handed her the ring box. “He loved you so much. He would have wanted you to have this.”