He Sent His Helicopter for Her Dog, So I Signed the Papers novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Page Fred Kept

Lena walks out past her husband and the chief pilot waits on the street with the flight-log page that shows Camille ordering Guardian One to turn.

"Don't answer her again," I told Hayes, and I took the bag and left.

He caught up with me in the elevator.

He had grabbed his coat and nothing else, and he stood beside me with his jaw working while the floors counted down.

"I'm coming with you," he said.

"No."

"You can't carry that bag with those hands."

He was right, and it made me angrier than anything else he had said.

I let him take the strap.

He did not take the urn, and I noticed that he knew better than to ask.

The lobby was empty except for the night doorman and a cold draft from the revolving door.

Hayes stopped at the glass.

"There's a man out front," he said. "He's been standing there since I pulled up."

I looked through the glass.

Under the awning stood a heavy man in a faded flight jacket, with a gray crew cut and a canvas bag hanging from one shoulder.

I knew his walk before I knew his face.

"Fred," I said.

Fred Dunning had been the chief pilot at Grosvenor Aviation for nine years.

He had once driven forty minutes to bring me a charger when my phone died at an airfield.

He did not come in.

He waited for us on the sidewalk with his cap crushed in his hands.

"Mrs. Grosvenor," he said. "Mr. Grosvenor."

"Fred, what are you doing here at midnight?" Hayes asked.

"I read the comment, sir."

Hayes frowned. "What comment?"

"The one she left under Ms. Chilton's picture." Fred's eyes stayed on me. "About 4:09."

He unzipped the canvas bag with slow fingers and took out a single sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve.

"I wasn't supposed to keep this," he said. "The flight log pages get shredded after a week. I took the page for the fourteenth out of the binder on the fifth day."

He held it out to me.

My hands could not take it.

Hayes did, and he read it under the awning light.

I watched his face while he read.

The page was the Guardian One log, with a column of times down the left side.

At 3:48 the aircraft had lifted from the Malibu pad for a standby transfer.

At 4:06 a line in blue pen read: ORDER, C. CHILTON: DIVERT TO LATIGO RD RESIDENCE. PRIORITY, K9.

At 4:09 the aircraft had passed over Topanga Ridge at four hundred feet.

Under that, in Fred's own square capitals: PILOT OBJECTED. OVERRULED.

Hayes read it twice.

The second time his lips moved.

"K9," he said. "That's Duchess."

"Yes, sir."

"You flew over the ridge."

"Yes, sir."

"You saw a fire road."

"We saw a fire road, sir. We saw a car burning and a woman with something in her arms."

Fred turned his head and looked at me, and his face broke apart in front of me.

"I told her there were people down there," he said. "I told Ms. Chilton on the radio. I said, there's someone on the road, ma'am, a woman walking, and she's carrying someone. Ms. Chilton said that wasn't a Sentinel address."

"You turned," I said.

"I turned."

"You turned, and you left."

"Yes, ma'am."

Hayes made a sound I had never heard from him, low and cracked.

"Why didn't you call me?" he asked.

"I tried your cell, sir. It went to her."

"Then the radio. The dispatch channel."

"Her channel too. Everything goes through ops, sir. You built it that way."

Hayes lowered the page.

He looked at it, then at Fred, then at me, and he seemed to see for the first time how much of the building he had built around himself.

"I'm sorry," Fred told me. His voice was barely there. "I've been sorry for eleven days. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I wrote the whole night down in the margins and I kept the card out of the recorder, and then I read your comment and I thought, she's the only one who's asking."

"What card?" Hayes said.

Fred did not answer him.

He was still looking at me.

"Mrs. Grosvenor," he said. "Somebody called us on the emergency radio frequency at 4:08."

"I called the ops line," I said. "Thirty-eight times."

"Not the line. The radio. I had my headset on." He wet his lips. "It was a woman's voice, and she asked for Guardian One by name. I think it was you."

I had been carrying a handheld aviation radio in the ranch go-kit for two years.

Nobody had ever asked me why.

When the phone failed, I had pressed the key on it with my thumb and begged the sky.

"Ms. Chilton heard it too," Fred said. "She was on the same channel, ma'am. She was listening the whole time."

"What did she say?"

"She told me to hold course."

"And?"

"And then she said one more word," Fred said. "I've been trying to work out what it meant for eleven days."

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend