Gannon’s noon flight out of North Eleuthera was only an hour to Miami. But he had to wait two more hours for the connecting flight, so he didn’t get into Tampa until almost five.
At six, he was sitting at a bar in Tampa’s Airside C terminal when he saw his son coming through the crowd in front of the food court.
Gannon stood, smiling. Declan was fair-haired like he was but stood several inches taller at an impressive six foot three. He had actually filled out a little, too, Gannon noticed proudly as he came over. He was thicker at the shoulders, at the neck.
Gannon wasn’t a hugger, yet he found himself hugging his strapping son right there in the middle of the bright bustling concourse.
He held him for a second after, looking at him. His mother’s straight nose, her hazel eyes. Gannon smiled as he remembered him as a hyperactive kid, holding him on his knee for hours at family events so he wouldn’t take down the Christmas tree. It had been six months since he’d last seen him.
Then he thought about his wife, Annette, who had died when Declan was just a freshman in high school.
How proud would she be of this solid young man here? he thought. Just beside herself, he knew. Over the moon.
Especially about the tryout. How many times had he come home from work to see them in the backyard hitting Wiffle balls to each other. She had actually been the biggest baseball fan in their family.
“Look at you, huh?” Gannon said, finally letting him go. “You weren’t kidding about working out, were you? You’re a monster. You’re like hugging a soda machine.”
“Dad, I can’t begin to thank you for all of this,” his son said, looking out at the concourse. “I mean, look at us. We’re actually doing this!”
“No worries. You just rest that sweet arm,” Gannon said, patting it gently.
“Just you wait, Dad. You won’t believe your eyes. When do we leave here, by the way? At seven?”
“Yeah, a quarter after. It’s a Delta flight. Gate whatever it is over there,” Gannon said, pointing at a cluster of seats to the right. “We go to Atlanta first and should get in to Phoenix around midnight. I couldn’t get a direct flight.”
“No problem, Dad. Are you kidding me? Direct flight. I’d take a Megabus. I’d just about given up and then here we are right out of the blue.”
“Yep, it’s right out of the blue all right,” Gannon said, hiding a smile as he took another pull of his beer.
When Declan left to hit the head, Gannon saw that the gate was filling up with people, so he strolled over to check that their flight was still on time. Declan was already sitting at the bar with two more fresh beers by the time he arrived back.
“Hey, Dad, look,” he said, pointing at the TV above the bar. “They’re talking about your neck of the woods.”
Gannon looked up. A cable news channel was playing. On the screen was a petite blonde female reporter with the sparkling blue Caribbean behind her. Gannon’s eyes went wide as he read the caption beneath her.
Plane Crash in the Bahamas, it said along the bottom of the screen.
Gannon waved over the bartender.
“Could you turn that up, please?”
“What’s up? Did you hear about this?” Declan asked him.
“A little,” Gannon said, straining to listen.
“...fifteen nautical miles off the coast of the Bahamian island known as Little Abaco when the US Coast Guard out on long-range patrol out of Miami Beach came upon it.”
Golly tamale, here we go, Gannon thought, holding his breath as they showed footage of a coast guard cutter.
“The plane, a Cessna Denali seen here,” the reporter continued as they showed a stock photo of a prop plane, “is a seven-passenger single-engine turboprop with an impeccable service record and a range of eighteen hundred miles.”
Gannon’s mouth dropped open.
A Cessna what? A little turboprop? he thought. What the hell were they talking about? It was no prop plane. It was a jet. It was a huge corporate Gulfstream 550 jet.
Were they talking about another crash? he thought, completely confused.
“The plane belonged to this couple,” the reporter said as the screen changed to show a skinny curly-haired white guy and a pretty East Indian woman.
“Ben and Chandra Tholberg of Miami, Florida.”
Who the hell were they? Gannon thought, even more stunned.
There was no woman on the jet. It had been men. All men.
“The Tholbergs, who lived in Coral Gables, had a vacation house in Puerto Rico that they were returning from. Officials said Mr. Tholberg, an account executive at Century Bank and Trust in Coral Gables, had been an experienced pilot, so it will take some time before the mysterious cause of this tragic crash is known. Back to you, Brian.”
Gannon kept blinking up at the screen even after it cut back to the studio.
“What’s up, Dad? Did you know them or something?” Declan said.
Something, Gannon thought, his mind reeling.
“You okay, Dad?”
Gannon finally pulled his eyes off the screen and looked around at the airport bar. It had a tiki theme. There was straw on the wall behind the bottles and surfboards everywhere.
“No,” Gannon finally said, mustering a smile. “I mean, yes. I’m fine. It’s the, um, woman. She looked just like this girl I knew in high school. This aggravating Indian girl who used to sit behind me in math class.”
He quickly gulped at his beer. He thought about Sergeant Jeremy. What he had said to him about the FBI poking around, asking questions.
He had one himself.
Why would the US government completely lie about a plane crash? he thought, glancing back up at the TV.