The Dragon Mother Returns: Taking Back Everything That Belongs to My Daughter novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Maintenance

The flight to Geneva was the first time I'd been in the air since January.

I took a commercial flight, in a window seat, because the company jet felt like tempting something.

Matthias had the aisle, and most of his legs were in it.

Somewhere over the Atlantic the plane hit rough air and dropped.

My hand found the armrest. His hand found mine on top of it.

He didn't look up from his newspaper.

"This is nothing," he said. "This is a cow sneezing."

"I know."

"You are squeezing very hard for nothing."

"I know."

He turned the page with his other hand and left the first one where it was until we landed.

It was Sunday, May 10. Five days to Clan Day.

The Swiss police had taken three weeks to find the mechanic.

He'd quit the charter company in February, moved in with his sister in Lausanne and stopped answering his phone.

The inspector from Sion met us at the private hangars on the far side of Geneva airport.

She was small and fierce, about fifty, in a gray anorak, and she shook Matthias's hand.

"We have dug people out together," he told me. "Twice."

"Three times," she said. "You forget the German."

She looked at me for a long moment.

"You were dead in my file for eleven weeks," she said in careful English. "I don't like that. I like my files correct."

"So do I."

The hangar was cold and smelled of fuel.

There was one helicopter inside, white and red, nearly new, with its blades tied down.

"This is the newer one," the inspector said. "Grounded on the morning of January 9 for a fault in the tail rotor. So your pilot took the old machine."

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