Nanowrimo 2016 - Prologue, part 6
Prologue, part 1
Prologue, part 5
An Dannsa Sìth
Ro-ràdh : roinn a sia : Cuideachd (Help)
Senator Buckminster had his own helicopter.
His own personal helicopter. As in, belonging to him. Not rented. Not goverment issue.
Jace didn't know why that surprised him as much as it did. He knew Buck's family was rich, the lodge would have shown him that if nothing else. And he knew there was a helipad in the lodge complex because Buck had shown it to him during the initial tour of the place. But somehow, he hadn't made the mental connection between 'helipad' and 'existence of a helicopter'. Perhaps because he never considered any private person owning one.
Of course, as Senator Buck's dad wasn't exactly a private person and he supposed someone that rich had a lot of business interests that needed immediate attention, but even so the idea boggled his mind and he couldn't believe it, even when he was sitting in the thing itself, buckled in, wearing the noise-muffling head-phones, holding the package Margery had over-nighted to him tight in his arms, he couldn't quite quite wrap his mind around it.
Senator Buckminster had his own private helicopter.
The Senator took care of everything. From the clothes on Jace's back; expensive, high quality prep-wear, the sort of things Buck and his frat brothers always wore. Jace felt like a fraud in them but the package from home didn't arrive until just before he was discharged and he wasn't about to walk out in just a hospital johnny. Although someone did find him a pair of scrub pants so he could attend a service in the hospital chapel.
To Jace's discharge from the hospital itself. The doctor in charge of Jace's case didn't want to let him go. He said something about having Jace examined by a specialist, a psychologist, in fact, and talked a lot about the effects of physical trauma on the brain and mental confusion and he hinted at the possibility of a psychotic break. Senator Buckminster was a rock through it all, listening without agreeing to anything and assuring the man that he fully intended to have Jace seen by an expert. He wouldn't say who, though. Not even to Jace.
Jace didn't even know where they were headed, except west. Westerly, anyway. Inland. Couldn't exactly go east, nothing but ocean out that way. They might have veered north or south, for all he knew, but for the main part, the position of the sun told him they were heading mostly west.
Probably back to Westbow County, given Inspector Nettle's farewell comment about seeing them there. Jace was surprised, in fact, that neither of the two detectives was with them in the helicopter. Sergeant Carson was still convinced Jace was guilty of some crime and the inspector didn't seem inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt either. It didn't seem likely that they were just letting him go without keeping some sort of tabs on him, but he wasn't complaining.
The thing about helicopter rides, a thing Jace quickly discovered and that he would never have suspected, is they're boring.
Yeah, there's the initial rush of mind-freezing terror when it first takes off, the ground falling away and all around an expanse of sky and falling. For Jace, at least. The Senator just opened his briefcase and took out a thick document and a marking pen, starting annotating it just as calmly as if he were sitting behind a desk in some office. Total routine to him. Not even worth noticing.
The body can sustain a state of utter terror for only so long before the mind habituates to the situation and starts looking for some distraction. He couldn't talk to the Senator. Not only because ... well ... Senator! But also because the man was so obviously concentrating on work. Jace would have felt back interrupting him for nothing of importance. And then there was the little issue of the noise of the rotors and motor and the headphones blocking it out. He wouldn't be heard.
At first it was interesting enough watching the ground, but once they reached a certain height above the ground there was a marked degree of sameness to the everything down below that Jace couldn't follow where they were or what he was seeing.
Finally, he opened the package.
A thick looseleaf binder lay on top. When Jace opened it at random, he found it full of articles, reports, some carefully cut out and mounted on sheets of plain computer paper; others printed off the internet. Organized chronologically, the print articles hand-labeled with the name of the publication and the date, the reporters by-line underlined for ease.
Jace was impressed with the speed with which Margery had pulled the file together, at least until he came across the letter from Susie, claiming ownership and informing him that she wanted it back. Made sense. Susie was going through a stage where she wanted to be a reporter. She was on the staff of her school's newspaper and well on her way to making editor even though she claimed she preferred writing. She'd make a good editor, Jace thought privately; she was bossy and know-it-all, already telling everybody what to do and how to do it. Flipping through, he found some of the articles were from her school paper, with the by-line 'by Susie Walker'.
After tucking Susie's letter into the box for safe-keeping and folding the flaps down to seal it closed, Jace re-opened the binder again, at the beginning, and began to read.
The initial accident reports. Accounts of the search, from the initial optimism of finding them quickly through warnings of worsening weather conditions on the mountain, accompanied by information dumps on how the body deals with exposure and statistics of survival, to articles on cadaver dogs.
Speculation and theories abounded, including one that they'd been forced off the road and abducted by aliens. That was from an internet blog and the author cited something about the condition of the wreck and of Buck's phone as evidence.
At some point coverage morphed into a police investigation. Maybe it always was, that wasn't clear. Now Buck's phone was produced as evidence of a crime; it had been thrown away so rescuers couldn't track him by the GPS. The inability to locate Jace's phone pointed the finger of suspicion at him, especially when it was revealed that there was evidence of a fight.
A fight? Jace wondered what they were talking about. But no, there it was. Police spokesperson claimed that Jace had attacked Buck after they'd exited the car. Speculation was that he had overpowered the taller, heavier, muscular athlete; had confiscated the phone and thrown it away so Buck couldn't call for help then forced him to walk up the mountain to the road.
How any rational, reasoning person could think that was beyond Jace. There were loads of pictures of both of them, apart and separate. Anyone could see that Buck outclassed Jace in the physical sense. No way Jace could take him down.
Except that he had, Jace remembered with a sinking sensation of dismay. When one of the trees holding the car in place had broken, when the vehicle began its final fall, Jace had tackled Buck to save him. To keep him from being caught up and heading down to the base of the mountain with it.
That had to be the so-called 'evidence of a fight' that they talked about.
All trails ended at the road. The presumption was that a car of accomplices were waiting, that it was a kidnapping scheme.
It was known that Buck was driving the SUV, but much was made when Jace's prints were found on the wheel, leading people to conclude that he'd forced the SUV off the road, though they admitted that having it fall so far probably wasn't in the plan. And there was a feeding frenzy when forensic evidence reported high levels of cocaine and MDMA present in body fluids 'left at the scene'. The fact that it was Buck's samples who showed the presence of illicit drugs was glossed over and then overwritten when tests on samples of blood identified as belonging to Jace came back positive for THC and alcohol, even though both were well below legal limits.
Interviews with Buck's friends didn't help. They painted a picture of a surly outsider, resenting Buck and them for their wealth and social position, drinking heavily, acting erratically. They implied that he was the source of the drugs found at the lodge, that they had bought it from him.
The few investigative reporters who uncovered drug arrests on the part of some of the interviewees made little impact; the trope was just too attractive to pass up - class warfare, the angry underling striking out in murderous rage against his better.
All in all, it looked bad for Jace although as time passed and there was no activity on his card or any of Buck's, and no ransom demand, opinion began to shift; the tone of the articles began to speak of him as a victim as well. That wasn't as exciting a story and with nothing to feed it, the articles petered out.
Until Jace reappeared. That ignited a whole new storm of interest. At first, the reports were sympathetic. His battered condition, his abandonment on the side of the highway, the state he was in; articles presented him as a fellow victim, speculated that both he and Buck had been kidnapped and he'd either escaped while the kidnappers were moving them or they'd deliberately forced him out of a moving car in the hopes that he'd be hit and killed.
Then an 'unofficial police source', which Jace read as 'Sergeant Carson', reveled that Jace was still considered a 'person of interest' in the case, that he was refusing to cooperate with the police and would give no account of his whereabouts for the past six weeks and furthermore had presented a complete fairytale to explain what had happened at New Years. Public opinion began to shift, especially after Mrs. Buckminster gave an exclusive interview.
She said she had always considered Jace to be a bad influence on her son, she called him Charlie, a name he hated. That he, Jace, was creepy, stalking Buck obsessively, inserting himself into Buck's life; jealous of his popularity and success. She implied that Jace wanted to replace Buck, to take over his life, that he resented any attention that the Senator gave to Buck. And then she claimed that Jace had invited himself to the lodge, Buck agreeing out of some soft-hearted nostalgia for his school-days past when they'd both been boys together.
It was a complete hatchet job and the last article in the binder, dated two days ago, before she and the Senator came to visit him in the hospital.
Jace closed the scrapbook gently, suppressing the urge to throw it out the door, to tear out the pages one by one and shred them into tiny pieces of paper, scattered out the helicopter like confetti raining down on the floats of the Rose Bowl Parade.
Which he'd missed this year. Along with six weeks of his life. And maybe the rest of his life as well, thanks to Mrs. Bloody Buckminster.
He replaced the binder in the box, folded it shut again and then settled back in his seat, closing his eyes. Hoping for sleep, for oblivion. For a little while at least. He wanted some time off from thinking about it all. A little time out, a break. Was that really too much to ask for?
Apparently it was.
The Senator tapped him on the knee, got his attention and pointed to the ground outside the doors. It seemed that they were landing.
Wherever it was, they had arrived.
Prologue, part 5
An Dannsa Sìth
Ro-ràdh : roinn a sia : Cuideachd (Help)
Senator Buckminster had his own helicopter.
His own personal helicopter. As in, belonging to him. Not rented. Not goverment issue.
Jace didn't know why that surprised him as much as it did. He knew Buck's family was rich, the lodge would have shown him that if nothing else. And he knew there was a helipad in the lodge complex because Buck had shown it to him during the initial tour of the place. But somehow, he hadn't made the mental connection between 'helipad' and 'existence of a helicopter'. Perhaps because he never considered any private person owning one.
Of course, as Senator Buck's dad wasn't exactly a private person and he supposed someone that rich had a lot of business interests that needed immediate attention, but even so the idea boggled his mind and he couldn't believe it, even when he was sitting in the thing itself, buckled in, wearing the noise-muffling head-phones, holding the package Margery had over-nighted to him tight in his arms, he couldn't quite quite wrap his mind around it.
Senator Buckminster had his own private helicopter.
The Senator took care of everything. From the clothes on Jace's back; expensive, high quality prep-wear, the sort of things Buck and his frat brothers always wore. Jace felt like a fraud in them but the package from home didn't arrive until just before he was discharged and he wasn't about to walk out in just a hospital johnny. Although someone did find him a pair of scrub pants so he could attend a service in the hospital chapel.
To Jace's discharge from the hospital itself. The doctor in charge of Jace's case didn't want to let him go. He said something about having Jace examined by a specialist, a psychologist, in fact, and talked a lot about the effects of physical trauma on the brain and mental confusion and he hinted at the possibility of a psychotic break. Senator Buckminster was a rock through it all, listening without agreeing to anything and assuring the man that he fully intended to have Jace seen by an expert. He wouldn't say who, though. Not even to Jace.
Jace didn't even know where they were headed, except west. Westerly, anyway. Inland. Couldn't exactly go east, nothing but ocean out that way. They might have veered north or south, for all he knew, but for the main part, the position of the sun told him they were heading mostly west.
Probably back to Westbow County, given Inspector Nettle's farewell comment about seeing them there. Jace was surprised, in fact, that neither of the two detectives was with them in the helicopter. Sergeant Carson was still convinced Jace was guilty of some crime and the inspector didn't seem inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt either. It didn't seem likely that they were just letting him go without keeping some sort of tabs on him, but he wasn't complaining.
The thing about helicopter rides, a thing Jace quickly discovered and that he would never have suspected, is they're boring.
Yeah, there's the initial rush of mind-freezing terror when it first takes off, the ground falling away and all around an expanse of sky and falling. For Jace, at least. The Senator just opened his briefcase and took out a thick document and a marking pen, starting annotating it just as calmly as if he were sitting behind a desk in some office. Total routine to him. Not even worth noticing.
The body can sustain a state of utter terror for only so long before the mind habituates to the situation and starts looking for some distraction. He couldn't talk to the Senator. Not only because ... well ... Senator! But also because the man was so obviously concentrating on work. Jace would have felt back interrupting him for nothing of importance. And then there was the little issue of the noise of the rotors and motor and the headphones blocking it out. He wouldn't be heard.
At first it was interesting enough watching the ground, but once they reached a certain height above the ground there was a marked degree of sameness to the everything down below that Jace couldn't follow where they were or what he was seeing.
Finally, he opened the package.
A thick looseleaf binder lay on top. When Jace opened it at random, he found it full of articles, reports, some carefully cut out and mounted on sheets of plain computer paper; others printed off the internet. Organized chronologically, the print articles hand-labeled with the name of the publication and the date, the reporters by-line underlined for ease.
Jace was impressed with the speed with which Margery had pulled the file together, at least until he came across the letter from Susie, claiming ownership and informing him that she wanted it back. Made sense. Susie was going through a stage where she wanted to be a reporter. She was on the staff of her school's newspaper and well on her way to making editor even though she claimed she preferred writing. She'd make a good editor, Jace thought privately; she was bossy and know-it-all, already telling everybody what to do and how to do it. Flipping through, he found some of the articles were from her school paper, with the by-line 'by Susie Walker'.
After tucking Susie's letter into the box for safe-keeping and folding the flaps down to seal it closed, Jace re-opened the binder again, at the beginning, and began to read.
The initial accident reports. Accounts of the search, from the initial optimism of finding them quickly through warnings of worsening weather conditions on the mountain, accompanied by information dumps on how the body deals with exposure and statistics of survival, to articles on cadaver dogs.
Speculation and theories abounded, including one that they'd been forced off the road and abducted by aliens. That was from an internet blog and the author cited something about the condition of the wreck and of Buck's phone as evidence.
At some point coverage morphed into a police investigation. Maybe it always was, that wasn't clear. Now Buck's phone was produced as evidence of a crime; it had been thrown away so rescuers couldn't track him by the GPS. The inability to locate Jace's phone pointed the finger of suspicion at him, especially when it was revealed that there was evidence of a fight.
A fight? Jace wondered what they were talking about. But no, there it was. Police spokesperson claimed that Jace had attacked Buck after they'd exited the car. Speculation was that he had overpowered the taller, heavier, muscular athlete; had confiscated the phone and thrown it away so Buck couldn't call for help then forced him to walk up the mountain to the road.
How any rational, reasoning person could think that was beyond Jace. There were loads of pictures of both of them, apart and separate. Anyone could see that Buck outclassed Jace in the physical sense. No way Jace could take him down.
Except that he had, Jace remembered with a sinking sensation of dismay. When one of the trees holding the car in place had broken, when the vehicle began its final fall, Jace had tackled Buck to save him. To keep him from being caught up and heading down to the base of the mountain with it.
That had to be the so-called 'evidence of a fight' that they talked about.
All trails ended at the road. The presumption was that a car of accomplices were waiting, that it was a kidnapping scheme.
It was known that Buck was driving the SUV, but much was made when Jace's prints were found on the wheel, leading people to conclude that he'd forced the SUV off the road, though they admitted that having it fall so far probably wasn't in the plan. And there was a feeding frenzy when forensic evidence reported high levels of cocaine and MDMA present in body fluids 'left at the scene'. The fact that it was Buck's samples who showed the presence of illicit drugs was glossed over and then overwritten when tests on samples of blood identified as belonging to Jace came back positive for THC and alcohol, even though both were well below legal limits.
Interviews with Buck's friends didn't help. They painted a picture of a surly outsider, resenting Buck and them for their wealth and social position, drinking heavily, acting erratically. They implied that he was the source of the drugs found at the lodge, that they had bought it from him.
The few investigative reporters who uncovered drug arrests on the part of some of the interviewees made little impact; the trope was just too attractive to pass up - class warfare, the angry underling striking out in murderous rage against his better.
All in all, it looked bad for Jace although as time passed and there was no activity on his card or any of Buck's, and no ransom demand, opinion began to shift; the tone of the articles began to speak of him as a victim as well. That wasn't as exciting a story and with nothing to feed it, the articles petered out.
Until Jace reappeared. That ignited a whole new storm of interest. At first, the reports were sympathetic. His battered condition, his abandonment on the side of the highway, the state he was in; articles presented him as a fellow victim, speculated that both he and Buck had been kidnapped and he'd either escaped while the kidnappers were moving them or they'd deliberately forced him out of a moving car in the hopes that he'd be hit and killed.
Then an 'unofficial police source', which Jace read as 'Sergeant Carson', reveled that Jace was still considered a 'person of interest' in the case, that he was refusing to cooperate with the police and would give no account of his whereabouts for the past six weeks and furthermore had presented a complete fairytale to explain what had happened at New Years. Public opinion began to shift, especially after Mrs. Buckminster gave an exclusive interview.
She said she had always considered Jace to be a bad influence on her son, she called him Charlie, a name he hated. That he, Jace, was creepy, stalking Buck obsessively, inserting himself into Buck's life; jealous of his popularity and success. She implied that Jace wanted to replace Buck, to take over his life, that he resented any attention that the Senator gave to Buck. And then she claimed that Jace had invited himself to the lodge, Buck agreeing out of some soft-hearted nostalgia for his school-days past when they'd both been boys together.
It was a complete hatchet job and the last article in the binder, dated two days ago, before she and the Senator came to visit him in the hospital.
Jace closed the scrapbook gently, suppressing the urge to throw it out the door, to tear out the pages one by one and shred them into tiny pieces of paper, scattered out the helicopter like confetti raining down on the floats of the Rose Bowl Parade.
Which he'd missed this year. Along with six weeks of his life. And maybe the rest of his life as well, thanks to Mrs. Bloody Buckminster.
He replaced the binder in the box, folded it shut again and then settled back in his seat, closing his eyes. Hoping for sleep, for oblivion. For a little while at least. He wanted some time off from thinking about it all. A little time out, a break. Was that really too much to ask for?
Apparently it was.
The Senator tapped him on the knee, got his attention and pointed to the ground outside the doors. It seemed that they were landing.
Wherever it was, they had arrived.