The witching hour
Chapter 11
Somewhere over the Atlantic—Late Tuesday Night
The woman in blue jolted upright, fingers digging into her husband’s sleeve.
“What was that noise?”
Her husband’s jaw clenched with each new complaint. Fletcher, sitting across the aisle and a little back, caught the reaction and felt a brief, reluctant sympathy. In the three hours since they’d left Dublin, the man’s wife had listed at least twelve ways they were going to die, from faulty maintenance and cut corners, to a drunk pilot or a bomb on board. She’d even suggested some poor bird flinging itself into the jet engine at thirty-five thousand feet.
“Nothing. I promise you, it was nothing. Go to sleep. We’ll be in Raleigh soon.”
Fletcher stretched his legs into the deep footwell and glanced around the cabin. It still jarred him, finding himself in business class in a seat wide enough for two. At check-in he had assumed there had been a mistake, then remembered who had booked the ticket. Win Apperson, he suspected, only used “coach” when talking about carriages and horses.
He knew he should feel grateful, but gratitude tasted too close to charity on his tongue. Taking something like this instinctually rubbed him raw, even knowing how easily Win could afford it. He only hoped he would have some chance to repay his old friend’s generosity, the quicker the better.
He eased open the Sheila Pim novel on his lap, the same question nudging him: why he had said yes to this trip? His thumb traced the book’s spine as he let the pages riffle past. Leah used to laugh at his ridiculous love for these silly little mysteries.
He tapped the Pim’s cover. She had sacrificed so much to get this to him. Weeks of precious time. Maybe even months. He didn’t really have a feel for how much such an act might have drained her.
Why, Leah? What was in North Carolina?
But no answer came. He didn’t know if this trip would lead to answers, or if it was just some wild goose chase concocted by his mind and the tiniest fraction of hope.
He set the book across his knee and fished in his coat for the folded itinerary riding with his passport. Leave Dublin a little after dinnertime. Nine hours in the air to Raleigh, putting him down right at the witching hour. Then an hour’s Uber ride to Ravina Springs.
He half-smiled. That timing had Leah’s fingerprints all over it. The witching hour, when the line between the living and the dead thinned to a thread, would be exactly when she’d send him in.
But was it a warning, or her mischievous humor that was setting the timeline? Was this her way of laughing at him from another realm?
He slid the paper back into his pocket and tucked the Pim book away with more care than it needed. From his other pocket he drew a tattered paperback he had grabbed from an airport vendor, about the Scots-Irish migration to North Carolina.
Another oddity, he thought. It had stood out among the romances and action novels stuffed around it in no particular order. The cover had jumped out at him at once as he wasted time waiting for his flight to be called.
Inside were a handful of pages sketching out the state’s mountains, coast, and vast tobacco fields. Then chapter after chapter about Ulster Scots migrations.
He traced the lines with his forefinger, lips moving soundlessly. Back in the seventeenth century, Scottish families had come into Cavan and the other Ulster counties, settling land left open after the O’Neill and O’Donnell flight. The same names appeared again a century later, packing up for Carolina to slip the choke of Penal laws that had bent their necks, laws that favored Anglicans, squeezed Scottish Protestants, and ground down the Irish Catholics already there.
Leah’s people had stood somewhere in that tangle. He knew that much from winter evenings over family papers, remembered how her voice changed when she spoke of those Scottish settlers in Cavan.
Was it crazy of him to think this was the right thread to follow? Why would his dead wife send him across an ocean to track some long-flung relation, as if a stranger in North Carolina might hold the key to her accident and death?
Still, in Garda work he had seen cases crack open on less than this. A half-remembered face. A receipt in a pocket. A number dialed once. The thinnest lead was still a lead, and this was all he had.
He shut the paperback and turned his head toward the oval window. The plane rode high over a country of clouds. White ranges rolled and broke beneath them, opening now and then to the vast blackness below. He watched until the shapes blurred into one steady movement.
His seat slid back a notch with a soft click. He let his eyes close.
Sound grew large and small around him. The woman in blue started up again across the aisle, her fears spilling out in sharp little bursts, her husband answering in worn patterns that said this was not their first flight together. Farther back, the engine hum settled into a low constant thrum. A drinks cart rattled and shivered over the seams in the aisle. Air hissed gently through unseen vents, a steady exhale.
Fletcher let the noises wash through him, not quite listening, and waited for the moment the wheels would meet American ground. He wouldn’t sleep. It was against his nature to let his guard down among strangers.
He was wrong.
Sleep took him, not all at once, but in small slips. The tight coil in his chest loosened. His breathing settled. The thoughts he had been herding like skittish sheep blurred into banks of puffy white clouds and drifted away.
For a few moments there was only weight and warmth and the familiar sense of her.
Leah’s hair brushed his chest first, the light drag of it across his skin. Then the slow trail of her mouth, a line of heat down his sternum, lower over his ribs and stomach, until his whole body answered, waking hard under her touch. In the dream, he opened his eyes and watched her, the way her shoulders moved, the way her hair fell forward like a curtain. His fingers slid into it without thinking, cradling the base of her skull. He drew her back up to him, choosing the solid weight of her in his arms over the heat she was moving toward.
“I want to…” Her words blurred against his chest, breath warm and damp on his skin.
He kissed the crown of her head. “I know. I want you to. But stay here a bit.” His arms tightened around her as if strength alone could anchor her.
Her long leg hooked over his hip, the easy old tangle of them. The soft pull of it drew their bodies closer, her hips giving the faintest shift against his, more tease than demand, a rhythm she knew would undo him. Her slightly rounded belly rested against his flatter one, a small warm curve pressed to him. It stirred other memories: her laughing under him in the dark, his mouth tracing patterns over pale skin, circling her navel before following a secret path only he knew.
Strapped into the business class seat, Fletcher tried to turn, fingers twisting into the armrests. In the dream, his hand slid between their bodies and came to rest on that curve of stomach. Something about it tugged at him, a loose thread he couldn’t place. He groped for a question he meant to ask, something he had read, something that mattered. He had to remember.
Leah drew in a quick breath when his rough fingertips moved gently over her. Her hand swept across his back, up to his shoulder, his neck, pulling him closer. Her green eyes met his, full of wanting and the old fierce love that always undid him. For a heartbeat he thought he saw something else there, a small distance, a guardedness that did not belong, but he pushed it away.
Need burned through him, sudden and complete, but he reined himself to gentleness. He moved with her carefully, letting his body say what words had never been enough to convey.
She answered in that same language, meeting him beat for beat, breath for breath. When they peaked together, whispering endearments that tangled in the air, it felt as if the line between them had vanished, as if there were no edge where he ended and she began.
Then something shifted.
She grew lighter in his arms, as if the weight of her was lifting grain by grain. He tightened his hold, but his hands began to slip through her as if she were made of air. That new sadness in her eyes bloomed sudden understanding in his.
This was their last time. Their day had come.
“No.” The word tore out of him. “No, no, no. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.” Panic rose sharp and hot, beating against his ribs as she thinned in his arms.
Out loud into the airplane cabin Fletcher muttered, “Not yet! No. Not like this.” His hand involuntarily came to his chest as his subconscious did everything to stay Leah.
Across the aisle, the woman in blue had just stood to stretch her legs when her anxious gaze snagged on Fletcher.
“Henry! Oh my. He’s having a heart attack. Call the stewardess!”
Her husband barely turned, already bored by yet another ridiculous worry. But when he saw Fletcher’s pale, pinched features, his expression changed. He pressed the call button above his seat, clicking it over and again.
In the dream, Leah reached for his cheek. The touch barely registered, more like a draft moving across his skin than a caress.
He tried to memorize every line of her face, but she was already losing substance, as if he watched her through reflected glass. He focused all his abilities, trying to steady her, but it did no good. All he ever held dear was dissolving in front of his eyes.
All he ever wanted….
Some small part of his mind clicked, the part that never stopped even when the rest of him burned. It laid the pieces out: the question he had meant to ask, the soft curve of her belly under his hand, the guarded look in her eyes.
The attendant came up the aisle a moment later, her smile polite but thinning. When the woman in blue caught her by the sleeve, the attendant’s arm went briefly taut before she eased it free with a practiced little adjustment of her cuff.
“Ma’am, please.”
“That man there, he’s in trouble, I know he is.” the woman huffed out.
“Leah.” Fletcher’s voice scraped out of him, raw. “Our child. What is our child’s name?”
Leah’s mouth pulled with pain, the look of someone failing in the one kindness they had meant to offer. She had wanted to spare him this one thing, he understood that now.
“Sir?” The attendant’s voice came from far away. A light tap landed on the back of his wrist. “Sir, are you all right?”
“Alex.” The name came like leaves moving high in a spring wind, soft and frayed. “Our son’s name is Alex. I love you, James. I wish—”
“Sir!” The word cut in close and urgent. Fingers closed around his shoulder and shook once, hard.
He jolted awake, the cabin light slamming back into him as Leah disappeared and the attendant’s worried gaze slipped into her place, carrying off whatever she had meant to say.
She was gone. Leah was gone.
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Mood Music for Ch. 11
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