5

The moment they had touched down at Charles de Gaulle and were taxiing to their gate, Cassie checked her phone for news from Dubai. She found none. It was possible—though unlikely, she believed—that Alex’s body had not yet been discovered. It was nearly eight thirty at night in the United Emirates. If his corpse (dear God, what a horrible word) were still in the bed where she had left it, that would mean that the Royal Phoenician housekeeping team had respected the “Do Not Disturb” sign through cleaning and turn-down service. Whoever delivered the complimentary fresh fruit and maamoul cookies late that afternoon had seen the sign and returned to the hotel kitchen. It meant that neither Miranda nor some other business associate had gone looking for him or questioned—at least with any resolve—his peculiar and unexplained absence.

In the end, she concluded that by now the macerating remains of Alex Sokolov had most definitely been found. Had to have been. In her mind, as she thanked the passengers as they disembarked, she saw a forensics team scouring the room, that body in the bed gone but the sheets a Rorschach of red.

Normally she would have viewed the scheduling gods as having been kind to her, because the airline was only required to give them ten hours of rest. But they had had twenty-one hours in Dubai, and they were going to have nearly fifteen here in France. Now, however, the duration only ratcheted up her anxiety. She wanted to be back in the United States. She wanted to be back in her apartment on Twenty-Seventh Street in Manhattan. She wanted to know that she would have access to American lawyers, if it ever came to that.

This crew—the thirteen of them—had one last leg together, the return to JFK tomorrow morning, and then they would scatter. Their paths might cross again in different combinations, especially she and Megan and Shane because they enjoyed each other’s company and occasionally worked their schedules so they could fly together, but this particular chemical arrangement of pilots and flight attendants would never be duplicated. The airline had nearly twelve hundred flight attendants based in New York, all of them bidding monthly on the routes and the cabins, and somehow she and Megan and Shane had all gotten Paris—though, in this sequence, the price had come with Dubai. Two nights ago, on the way east, the three of them had catnapped in the morning and then spent a lovely afternoon and evening at a bistro and then a nightclub with hipsters half their age near the Bastille. The overnight then had been a lot longer than this one. Cassie had drunk that evening, but not to excess, and she hadn’t separated from her friends.

It dawned on her that she shouldn’t return to Dubai, at least not in the foreseeable future. Probably ever. It wasn’t on her schedule next month, and she sure as hell wouldn’t bid on it for September.

“I don’t think anyone’s going into the city this time,” Megan was saying, as they emerged from the jet bridge into the concourse. Tonight the airline had them at an airport hotel because it just took too long to get in and out of Paris and the overnight was much shorter. “But there’s a pretty nice restaurant near the hotel we can walk to. Brasserie something. Anyway, some of us are meeting in the lobby at seven. Do you want to join us?”

“No. I think I’m going to rest,” she said.

“I think that makes sense,” Megan agreed. “Be a slam-clicker for a change. Get some sleep.”

They passed a Hermès boutique, and she recalled the leopard-print scarf that she had seen in a store last night at the Royal Phoenician. She thought of her neck; she thought of his. Alex’s.

“Treat yourself. Order something light from room service. Eat dessert first,” Megan went on.

“Yeah, I think that’s the plan.”

“God, you have no idea how nice it is as a mother of two hormonally insane teenagers sometimes just to have an evening alone in a hotel room. I might not go out, either. I might just Skype Vaughn and call it a night,” she said.

Cassie nodded politely. She’d met Megan’s husband a couple of times. He seemed nice enough. She remembered mostly the jokes he had made about being a consultant:

You really only need to get two things to be a consultant: Fired. And business cards.

You want to know the definition of a consultant? A guy who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.

But since the family had moved to Virginia he had worked a lot for defense department contractors, so Cassie presumed he was far more competent than his self-deprecation suggested. And his jokes certainly had been no worse than those of the first officer she was flying with that week. At that moment, Stewart was regaling the captain with yet another story that was, invariably, a little stale.

“Say hi to him for me,” she told Megan.

“I will. And you get some rest.”

Cassie nodded. She knew she would be tempted to order a glass of wine, but she was also confident that she would be able to resist: she reminded herself that she tended to binge-drink (and, yes, to binge-sex), but she wasn’t really a drunk like her father. Sure, that was the motto of unredeemed alcoholics everywhere: I’m not really a drunk. But she wasn’t. She went nights all the time without drinking. Hadn’t she vowed only hours earlier that she’d never drink again? She had.

Not quite five minutes later they were nearing the exit beside the security queues and the escalator down to the strip of exterior sidewalk where they would wait for the hotel shuttle, when Jada stopped and handed Megan her phone. The entire crew stopped with her, a herd of gazelle on alert.

“Recognize him?” Jada asked.

Megan enlarged the photo with her index finger and thumb. “Oh, my God,” she murmured softly, a little stunned. “Wow. He was on the flight with us from Paris to Dubai.”

“Yup.”

Megan gave the phone to Cassie, but didn’t say a word.

For a long moment she stared at the photo, and it was one of those experiences where she was both reacting to it viscerally and reacting to it with the awareness of a performer because she knew that Megan was watching her. There he was. Last night’s lover. The story about him was on a site they all visited on occasion that helped international travelers keep up with international crime, a sort of tabloid version of the State Department’s travel advisory website. It was brief and to the point: there had been a rather grisly murder at the Royal Phoenician in Dubai. The victim, a hedge fund manager from the United States named Alex Sokolov, had had his throat slashed in his hotel room. He had been found midafternoon when he had missed a meeting he had been expected to attend. Finally hotel security had ignored the “Do Not Disturb” sign and entered the suite. There were no other names in the story, so there was no mention of a woman named Miranda.

“I am so sorry,” Cassie said, hoping that her shock that the body now was news would be construed by Megan and the crew as shock that the body existed at all—that the poor guy had been murdered. She scrolled down a little further and learned that the authorities had no serious suspects. A travel and tourism official was insisting that this was an isolated incident and visitors needn’t be alarmed, but a police captain seemed to dispute that by arguing that they had not ruled out burglary as a motive.

Megan took the phone and gave it back to Jada, and she in turn handed it to Stewart and the captain to share. It was interesting to all of them that a passenger on their plane had been murdered. Then Megan leaned in close to Cassie and whispered, “Swear to me you know nothing about this.”

“Of course not. Why would I?” She hoped that she sounded offended.

“Okay. It’s just that you two were talking a lot on the flight to Dubai. And then you seemed so off your game and so freaking weird when we were on our way to the airport this morning. And then you were crying when we took off.”

She shook her head. “Oh, I guess I’m sad that the young man is dead. He seemed like a nice enough guy. But the last time I saw him was when he got off the plane yesterday afternoon.”

The herd started to move and she started to move with it. A part of her feared that each lie was going to bury her deeper. But she also told herself that it was far too late to start telling the truth.

« «

Cassie lay on her side in her hotel room bed in the dark, naked but for the white terrycloth robe she had found in the closet. She listened to the sounds of the footsteps and the rolling suitcases along the corridor, flinching whenever she heard a door slam or a lock click shut. She tried once more to recall missing details from the night before, but they were lost. She tried to recall every word she had said to Miranda. But so much of the conversation existed in the murk that shrouded the events and the men and the bars and the beds from so many nights over so many years.

At one point she considered texting her sister in Kentucky. Asking a few harmless questions about her nephew or niece. About her brother-in-law.

She and her sister rarely spoke of their father and mother, because invariably they wound up fighting whenever they did. There was just so much anger and just so much hurt, and they had responded to their parents in ways as different and unique as snowflakes. They were not close anymore and probably never would be close again, but Rosemary needed Cassie to be at least on the periphery of her family’s life to feed her own longing for normalcy. Occasionally, Rosemary and her husband, Dennis, and their two kids would fly in from Kentucky and stay at an inexpensive hotel in Westchester for the weekend, and then take the train or drive a rental car into the city on Saturday and Sunday. Rosemary was an accountant in Lexington. Dennis worked at the military base in Richmond. Sometimes on these family visits to the city Cassie would be granted a brief audience alone with either her nephew or niece. She would be allowed to bring Jessica to the American Girl Store or Tim to the Metropolitan Museum. A few times she had even gotten to take the children to lunch, just the three of them, and she had brought them to restaurants they had adored—the sort of places where there were young waiters and waitresses singing show tunes or the dining room was designed to replicate a haunted house. Cassie cherished those hours: she couldn’t imagine she was ever going to have children of her own, a reality that some solitary nights would leave her feeling bereft of the son or daughter she’d never hold. Usually, however, when her sister’s family came to New York, she would see the kids and their parents together. The five of them would go to the top of the Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty. Yankee Stadium when the Royals were in town, so together they could root against the Evil Empire.

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…”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever been that close to a person who was murdered.”

“Me, either,” she said, though she thought of her father and briefly her mind dissected the distinctions between manslaughter and murder.

Abruptly Jada looked over Cassie’s shoulder, her gaze intense and her dark eyes widening. Cassie felt a sharp spike of fear and turned around, convinced this was it, it was over, an air marshal was about to arrest her, just as Jada pushed past. And there she saw the other flight attendant helping a young mother with a toddler in her arms, lifting up the diaper bag that was twisting upside down on the woman’s shoulder, the diapers and wipes and the sippy cup in the shape of a bunny all about to tumble onto the floor of the aircraft right in front of the starboard-side first-class bathroom. The mom thanked her, rolling her eyes at the nearness of the disaster, and the two of them laughed. Jada was asking the little boy’s name as Cassie leaned against the wall with the trolleys and the trash bin, at once relieved and appalled. She wondered: was this sort of adrenal overreaction going to be the norm for the rest of her life?

« «

As she was wrapping her shoulder harness around her in the jump seat in the front of the plane, as the Long Island coastline and beaches were racing below them, she thought of the three words she hoped never to say aloud or hear on an aircraft: brace for impact. That was the signal they were about to crash-land or auger in. Those four syllables? They were the cry of the raven. Imminent collision with the ground, best case a belly flop and worst case a head-on, nose-first crash that would cause the aircraft to break apart and explode, the bodies—the pieces of the bodies that were recognizable—small, charred briquettes.

The words came to her because the captain had informed the crew somewhere over New Brunswick that they were going to be met at the gate at JFK by the authorities. He didn’t say why and whether by “authorities” he meant airport or TSA officials or some other law enforcement group, and no one on the crew was going to ask him. But they all had their suspicions. Some guessed there was a possible terrorist on board, someone high on the watch list, and the passenger would be arrested the moment they landed, but Cassie had flown long enough to know this wasn’t the case: if the captain had been told there might be a terrorist on the plane, he would have informed the crew so they could keep an eye on him every single moment they were in the air. Instead, as they had prepared the cabins for arrival, Megan and Jada and Shane had speculated aloud that it had something to do with the dead American in Dubai. What else could it possibly be, Megan had asked? He’d been with them on the flight from Paris to the Middle East.

Cassie considered asking Megan to cover for her: not necessarily lie, but simply not volunteer the information that Cassandra Bowden had returned to the crew’s Dubai hotel in the morning barely twenty minutes before they had to leave for the airport. Cassie knew it would be easier to simply tell investigators that she had spent the night alone in her own room at the airline’s hotel than have to make up a man to account for her absence. But asking that of Megan would only implicate her further in the other woman’s eyes: it would convince Megan that she had indeed been with Alex the night he had died and very possibly had killed him. Already Cassie had felt her friend watching her as they had walked up the aisles, the two of them checking to be sure the passengers were belted in and their seatbacks were upright.

And so she focused right now on concocting two possible stories. If she had the sense from the questioning that Miranda had not yet come forward, she would share with the authorities another hotel and another man, molding him in her mind like a golem. She would keep it simple. Give them a name and admit that she was sure the fellow had made it up because she was sure he was married. She was going to say he was some sort of consultant and she thought he was South African. The hotel would be the Armani because it was big and it was in the opposite direction from the Royal Phoenician, and the floor with his room had been somewhere in the middle. Could have been on the sixth and it could have been on the eighth. She would confess sheepishly that she had been drinking, and she couldn’t remember very much. Surely there was a single man in a room on one of those floors who spoke English with an accent she could say later (if necessary) she must have mistaken for South African. But otherwise she would say almost nothing. That was what mattered. It would be much easier to keep her story straight if the details were few.

But what if Miranda had now told the Dubai police that she had met a flight attendant named Cassie the night before, and they had already informed the FBI in America? That would demand a very different lie, one that was more dangerous but in some ways a much easier one to pull off. That lie was simply this: Alex Sokolov had been alive when she had left his hotel suite.

Maybe, as a matter of fact, she should say that no matter what, because at some point Miranda would talk to the police, and Cassie knew that her stories should be consistent. So, yes, this was the tale. This was what had happened. This was the lie.

In the meantime, she would brace for impact. It was, she knew, inevitable.