Chasing Mercury Read online

  The characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialog in this novel are either the products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2017 by Kimberly Cooper Griffin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission or additional detail, contact the author at the address below.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition 2017

  Edited by Jamie May

  Cover design by Erin Dameron-Hill at EDHGraphics

  Interior design/layout by Matthew LaFleur

  Night River Press

  Denver, CO 80209

  NightRiverPress.com

  Chasing Mercury

  ISBN-10: 0-9972190-6-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9972190-6-7

  Visit the author’s website at http://kimberlycoopergriffin.com

  to order additional copies.

  Chasing Mercury is dedicated to sweet Annilee,

  a gentle light that went out way too soon.

  Also by Kimberly Cooper Griffin

  Life in High Def

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Chasing Mercury owes its life to my writing group; Lake McCleary, Carrie Repking, and Beth Escott Newcomer. You endured many a rewrite and tedious reading of this tome but it is far richer for your suffering.

  Thank you, my Michelle Dunkley, faithful beta reader, precious friend. I get so much more from your reviews than you think I do. I live for the shoulder-dance, eyes-searching-the-heavens combo you do when you really like something. Seriously. I live for that! How are you still single?

  Jamie May, you did it again, making me sound coherent, where once there was a string of words loosely resembling a story.

  Summer Cooper Griffin, there is nothing I don’t acknowledge you for. You are the center of my universe and always will be. Thank you for loving me.

  Part 1

  Nora

  THE BOEING 737 ROSE TO SKIM the fluffy white clouds that had been slate-gray and impenetrable from the storm-splattered windows of the airport terminal below. After a two-hour flight delay out of Anchorage, where rain had been falling in a steady deluge all morning, the ride had pitched and thumped for several minutes during the steep ascent before smoothing out. The chimes sounded to signal they were at cruising altitude and Nora Kavendash opened and shut her jaw, trying to pop her ears. Tired and uncomfortable, she pushed her shoulder-length brown hair away from her face, loosened her seatbelt, and leaned her seat back. The two additional degrees of incline hardly gave relief to her travel weary body, but she closed her eyes, counting the minutes before the jet would touch down in Juneau. Her estimation, considering they were fifteen minutes into the flight and all the deplaning rigmarole once they landed, placed her back home in just over two hours. Back to her bed. Back to blessed, uninterrupted sleep. She tried to relax her shoulders, rolled her head from side to side, and settled in.

  Red darkness painted the insides of her eyelids and a twitch began to flutter under her left eye. She pinched the tender skin hoping to relieve the spasm, but it didn’t help. She was exhausted. The tired she felt was beyond the kind of tired that a nap in an airplane could touch—even if she could manage to nod off. She’d never been able to sleep on a plane. She opened her eyes and it felt like sand scoured her eyeballs. Unfiltered sunshine spilled into the aircraft through the open windows at the end of her row. The headache she’d been fighting for the last two days flared. From her aisle seat, Nora glanced over the two passengers separating her from the window. The young woman in the window seat had earphones on, concentrating intently on the video game she was playing. Nora contemplated reaching across the woman who was sleeping between them to ask her to slide the shade closed, but realized it was one window among several and it wasn’t really worth the trouble. She sighed and leaned forward. Holding her nose, she closed her lips and pushed air into her sinuses. With a merciful pop, the pressure eased, and with it, some of the headache and a little of the crankiness she’d stored up over the last few days.

  Nora sighed and relaxed but was impeded when she tried to sit back in her seat. A glance over her shoulder found that the middle-aged woman beside her was leaning halfway into her space. Gentle snores shook the loose skin of the woman’s neck. Nora let out an exasperated breath. She’d once traveled regularly like this. How had she once dealt with the lack of personal space in the slowly shrinking seats and overcrowded flights? Humans weren’t equipped for such close quarters. She gazed longingly up at first class, just two rows ahead of her. But there had been no first class seats available when the flight from Mexico into Seattle had been late and she’d needed to rebook the last two legs of her trip back to Juneau.

  God, she needed this trip to be over. Nora summoned a little patience from her rapidly dwindling supply, and with a gentle nudge, she repositioned the woman back into her own seat, gently draping the airline blanket over the woman’s lap. A cloud of faintly familiar perfume remained in the woman’s wake. Agitated and unable to sleep, Nora moved her five-foot-ten frame like a contortionist to pull her backpack slightly toward her from under the seat in front of her. She slipped an e-reader out of the front pocket.

  Reading device in hand and pocket zipped closed, she slid the bag back under the seat in front of her. The pack barely fit and she had to use her foot to push it. There was no room in the overheads on the sold out flight. The attendant had offered to check the bag when she boarded, but Nora hadn’t dared let it out of her sight. Not with Aunt Mace’s last chance tucked inside.

  Nora’s thoughts drifted to the last four miserable days of travelling and interminable waits between flights. The trip from Juneau, Alaska, to Mexico City and back had been a success as far as getting her hands on the drugs her aunt so desperately needed, but the delays that had occurred on almost every leg of her round trip journey had drawn it out to almost twice as long as she had originally scheduled. No opportunity for real sleep had left her on the brink of delirium. Weather delays, a schedule change, and a bizarre gang shooting at the Benito Juarez International Airport had extended her trip. The resulting fatigue she felt in the deepest core of her bones as she sat in the cramped airplane was beyond anything she had ever experienced. It weighed her limbs down, affected her mood, altered her sense of reality. She had tried to nod off on the hard plastic seats of a darkened terminal gate in Mexico when the airport had been locked down for several hours, but the shooting, along with the constant worry that she’d miss her next flight, kept her from drifting off. The huge cockroach that had ambled over her sock-clad foot at the security checkpoint hadn’t helped, either. Sitting in her business class seat now, just a couple of hours away from home, she recalled the past four days, and wondered if she had somehow hallucinated the whole experience.

  Flight attendants in first class now moved through the front of the cabin, attending to those lucky passengers who basked in an additional six inches of soft leather seat and eight inches of coveted legroom. Glasses were re-filled and pillows offered.

  Nora watched a woman a few rows up from her offer to hold a baby for a harried young mother who was struggling with a bag of baby toys. The little girl bounced on the woman’s knee with giggles that were almost contagious. Although Nora could only see the woman from behind, she remembered an easy smile and brilliant green eyes from when Nora had passed her seat during the boarding process. From her seat in business cl
ass, Nora observed the woman playing with the baby until an attendant pulled closed the light green fabric with the subtle design of leaves, separating first class from the rest of the passengers. Nora realized she had relaxed a little when the woman in the seat next to her settled against her shoulder and snored into the softness of Nora’s favorite flannel shirt. She gently repositioned the woman back into her own seat without waking her, tucking the scratchy wool blanket between them.

  Several minutes later, Nora’s eyelids were sliding closed above the blurry screen in her hands when a hard jolt accompanied by a high pitched mechanical whine made her eyes snap open. She dropped her reader into her lap to grab the hand rest. Just as quickly, the disconcerting noise stopped and there was a moment of eerie quiet. Nora wondered if they had lost the engines, since the loud rumble that had nearly lulled her to sleep during their ascent was gone. But before she had a chance to get too worked up, the pilot’s velvet voice came over the airplane’s announcement system.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve run into a little mechanical difficulty with one of our engines.” A low mumble filled the cabin before the captain continued: “But don’t be concerned, this aircraft is equipped with two engines, and the other is working normally. While one engine is more than capable of getting us to where we want to go, we’re going to return to Anchorage just to be safe. Sorry for the inconvenience. We should be back on the ground in approximately thirty-five minutes, where the airline will assist you with adjusting your travel plans. Please remain in your seats with seatbelts fastened for the remainder of the trip. Flight attendants, please cease beverage service and stow the carts. Ladies and gentlemen, once again, on behalf of North Star Airlines, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.”

  The pilot’s voice was calm and reassuring, and Nora pictured the beautiful woman with mocha skin and sparkling brown eyes who had stood in the cockpit doorway, just behind the flight attendant. They had greeted each of the passengers boarding the airplane. At the time, Nora had added the presence of a female commercial airline pilot to the very short mental list of good things she had encountered on her trip. Now, listening to the pilot, she was comforted to hear the calm voice. She wondered if learning to speak that way was part of their training. The rest of the cabin must have felt the reassurance too, because the mumbling din quieted, and she could finally make out the gentle hum of the other engine droning away in the background, doing its important job.

  The plane began to bank in a wide turn and Nora sighed. Four days of constant travel seemed like a nightmare now. The thought of spending more time in an airport—even one devoid of gang wars and cockroaches—made her shoulders droop. The siren’s song of her feather bed became a discordant wail.

  “Holy Christopher, patron saint of all travelers, pray for us all,” muttered the woman next to Nora. Now wide awake, though her eyes were tightly squeezed closed, the woman’s lips moved against a small gold medallion she held in her hand. She kissed it and tucked it and its chain back into her blouse. Nora watched as the woman crossed herself several times before she proceeded to rock in her seat, wringing her hands and whispering quietly.

  Nora picked up her reader and hoped the woman wouldn’t start talking to her or ask her to pray with her.

  Consistent with her luck throughout the trip, the woman plucked at her sleeve. “That was scary. My heart is still racing. The pilot seems to know what’s she’s talking about, though, doesn’t she?”

  Nora was tired and uncomfortable, but too polite to ignore her, so she smiled and nodded. She guessed the woman was in her late fifties, and from the way she intently searched Nora’s face, she was trying to figure out how anxious she should be. Nora felt an inordinate amount of pressure over the scrutiny and resented the imposed responsibility to reassure the woman that everything would be okay.

  The jolt had startled her, but she’d been in far dicier situations and she felt safer in the air than she did in her car. Many of the missions she had flown in Search and Rescue while serving in the Air National Guard had been done in inclement weather. One time, just flying for business, she had exited an airplane via an inflatable slide when something inside of the cabin began to smoke during an otherwise smooth landing. Flying was little more than a complicated car ride for her. They had one good engine. She was aware of the regulated maintenance schedules for commercial airlines. The pilot and flight attendants were calm. Her heart rate had already returned to normal.

  “Yes. I’m sure everything is fine. We’ll just go back and get booked on another fl—”

  Another hard jolt shook the plane and Nora experienced a flash of guilt for trying to provide false assurances, but the feeling of the seatbelt going taut across her lap eclipsed it. An uncomfortable and disorienting sense of floating filled her belly and head. An incessant bell sounded throughout the cabin, signaling the flight attendants to immediately take their seats. She felt blindly for the woman’s hand beside her and wrapped it around the armrest and then placed hers over it, linking their fingers. Nora refused to look at her. She couldn’t bear to see her own fear reflected in the woman’s eyes. She heard what she thought was the beverage cart rattle loudly behind her and several cans of unopened soft drinks rolled down the center aisle a second later. A few overhead storage compartments opened, and startled voices murmured all around her, but otherwise, the cabin was strangely quiet.

  “Flight attendants, secure all items and return all passengers and yourselves to seats immediately.” The smooth voice of the pilot issued from the cabin speakers. There was no sound of panic in it, but the tone left nothing to question. They were in serious trouble. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven’t already done so, fasten your seatbelts and make sure they are tight across your lap. Stow all trays and loose items as best you can. Make sure seats are in the full upright position. If you cannot secure an item, please hold it secure in preparation for a forced landing. Place your feet flat on the floor beneath you, knees together. Lean forward, place the top of your head against the seat in front of you, and put your hands behind your head, lacing your fingers together. If the oxygen masks deploy, make sure you affix yours before helping others. Your seat cushion can be used as a floatation…”

  Obediently, Nora let go of the woman’s hand and assumed the position, but in defiance of other instructions, she quickly pulled the straps of her bag around her ankles. There was no way she was going to leave it behind if they had to evacuate when they landed. She didn’t have time to stow her e-reader, so she stuffed it down the front of her shirt and then laced her fingers behind her head as told. The woman beside her began to sing a song in a breathless and frightened voice, but in all of the commotion Nora couldn’t hear the words and she didn’t recognize the tune. A baby’s cries filled her ears. Her heart lodged in her throat. Nora thought of the baby in first class. She chanced a glance up the aisle. The curtain that had been pulled closed between first class and coach was swaying open and closed with the jerking movements of the aircraft. She couldn’t see the baby but a few inches of the blond woman’s body were visible. She appeared to be sitting up. Her arm was across the armrest, hand relaxed, dangling limply from the wrist. In the turbulent jostling movements of the plane, the woman’s hand fell from its perch and her head lolled slightly to the side so the woman was leaning into the aisle. Nora noticed the woman’s seatbelt was dangling, unfastened from her seat. She had time for disbelief when she realized the woman was asleep or unconscious.

  Nora had no time to react.

  The world became a blur of noise and disorienting motion. Everything happened at once, and it happened so fast, Nora didn’t have time to determine if she was up or down, moving forward or backward, alive or dead. She kept her hands intertwined behind her neck and squeezed her eyes shut. The top of her head banged against the back of the seat in front of her as she tried to remain tucked in the crash position. Objects fell from the overhead compartments and whisked past her. She didn’t dare look up. The woman beside her bounc
ed against her and Nora felt the woman’s arms reach out for her and slide away. Again, Nora didn’t dare look up. She felt everything at once and nothing at all. The circumstances were so foreign to anything Nora had ever experienced, she felt disconnected from what was happening around her. Her heart bashed inside of her chest, but she kept her eyes closed tightly and her head down as best she could. It seemed as if her world had constricted into the small tight ball she had coiled into, and there was nothing else.

  With a bone-crunching lurch, Nora was tossed back against her seat and she sensed she was hurtling through space. She tried to bend forward to resume the crash position, but the forward momentum of their trajectory plastered her to her chair. Time seemed to slow down even as everything else sped up, and a loud roar filled her head. She had no concept of how long the hellish descent took, and she lost track of how many times her sense of equilibrium flipped and spun. The fear encapsulating her seemed to be a black gel surrounding her, muting the sensations, silencing the noise, pressing her deep into the firm cushion of her seat.

  When the unreal commotion suddenly stopped, a deafening silence fell upon her, thick and heavy. Nora wondered if she were still alive.

  It was the slow realization of the thundering of her heartbeat in her ears and the shuddering sound of her breath that made her think she might not be dead. Her eyes, which were wide open, saw nothing. Her left hand clutched the armrest; the other had a claw-like grasp on the fabric of the seat cushion, even though she remembered having both hands behind her neck just moments before. Terror manifested itself in an inability to move and Nora struggled against it, yet she couldn’t seem to force herself into motion. A new fear that she might be paralyzed triggered a cold flash that moved through her. Maybe she was dead. Was this what death felt like?

  She had no idea how long she remained there, motionless, sightless, in the horror movie company of her own breathing, trying to decide if she were alive or dead. Or somewhere in between. It seemed like an eternity.