Halloween
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN a routine flight.
Pittsburgh to Chicago was about as simple an itinerary as Clear-Blue Airlines ever flew. In the LearJet 60, travel time would be under an hour. The weather was perfect, the sky like something out of a kid’s Crayola artwork display. Blue as a robin’s egg, with a few puffy white clouds to set the scene and not a drop of moisture in the air. Crisp, not cold, it was about the most beautiful autumn day they’d had this year.
The guys in the tower were cheerful, the Lear impeccably maintained and a joy to handle. Amanda Bauer’s mood was good, especially since it was one of her favorite holidays. Halloween.
She should have known something was going to screw it up.
“What do you mean Mrs. Rush canceled?” she asked, frowning as she held the cell phone tightly to her ear. Standing in the shadow of the jet on the tarmac, she edged in beside the fold-down steps. She covered her other ear with her hand to drown out the noises of nearby aircraft. “Are you sure? She’s been talking about this trip for ages.”
“Sorry, kiddo, you’re going to have to do without your senior sisters meeting this month,” said Ginny Tate, the backbone of Clear-Blue. The middle-aged woman did everything from scheduling appointments, to bookkeeping, to ordering parts, to maintaining the company Web site. Ginny was just as good at arguing with airport honchos who wanted to obsess over every flight plan as she was at making sure Uncle Frank, who had founded the airline, took his cholesterol medication every day.
In short, Ginny was the one who kept the business running so all Amanda and Uncle Frank—now 60-40 partners in the airline—had to do was fly.
Which was just fine with them.
“Mrs. Rush said one of her friends has the flu and she doesn’t want to go away in case she comes down with it, too.”
“Oh, that bites,” Amanda muttered, really regretting the news. Because she had been looking forward to seeing the group of zany older women again. Mrs. Rush, an elderly widow and heir to a steel fortune, was one of her regular clients.
The wealthy woman and her “gal pals,” who ranged in age from fifty to eighty, took girls-weekend trips every couple of months. They always requested Amanda as their pilot, having almost adopted her into the group. She’d flown them to Vegas for some gambling. To Reno for some gambling. To the Caribbean for some gambling. With a few spa destinations thrown in between.
Amanda had no idea what the group had planned for Halloween in Chicago, but she was sure it would have been entertaining.
“She asked me to tell you she’s sorry, and says if she has to, she’ll invent a trip in a few weeks so you two can catch up.”
“You do realize she’s not kidding.”
“I know,” said Ginny. “Money doesn’t stand a chance in her wallet, does it? The hundred-dollar bills have springs attached—she puts them in and they start trying to bounce right out.”
Pretty accurate. Since losing her husband, the woman had made it her mission to go through as much of his fortune as possible. Mr. Rush hadn’t lived long enough to enjoy the full fruits of his labors, so in his memory, his widow was going to pluck every plum and wring every bit of juice she could out of the rest of her life. No regrets, that was her M.O.
Mrs. Rush was about as different from the people Amanda had grown up with as a person could be. Her own family back in Stubing, Ohio, epitomized the small-town, hard-work, wholesome, nose-to-the-grindston-’til-the-day-you-die mentality.
They had never quite known what to make of her.
Amanda had started rebelling by first grade, when she’d led a student revolt against lima beans in school lunches. Things had only gone downhill from there. By the time she hit seventh grade, her parents were looking into boarding schools … which they couldn’t possibly afford. And when she graduated high school with a disciplinary record matched only by a guy who’d ended up in prison, they’d pretty much given up on her for good.
She couldn’t say why she’d gone out of her way to find trouble. Maybe it was because trouble was such a bad word in her house. The forbidden path was always so much more exciting than the straight-and-narrow one.
There was only one member of the Bauer clan who was at all like her: Uncle Frank. His motto was Live ’til your fuel tank is in the red and then keep on going. You can rest during your long dirt nap when you finally slide off the runway of life.
Live to the extreme, take chances, go places, don’t wait for anything you want, go out and find it or make it happen. And never let anyone tie you down.
These were all lessons Amanda had taken to heart when growing up, hearing tales of her wild uncle Frank, her father’s brother, of whom everyone else in the family had so disapproved. They especially disliked that he seemed to have his own personal parking space in front of the nearest wedding chapel. He’d walked down the aisle four times.
Unfortunately, he’d also walked down the aisle of a divorce courtroom just as often.
He might not be lucky in love, but he was as loyal an uncle as had ever been born. Amanda had shown up on his Chicago doorstep three days after her high school graduation and never looked back. Nor had her parents ever hinted they wanted her to.
He’d welcomed her, adjusted his playboy lifestyle for her—though he needn’t have. Her father might hate his brother’s wild ways, but Amanda didn’t give a damn who he slept with.
From day one, he had assumed a somewhat-parental role and harassed her into going to college. He’d made sure she went home for obligatory visits to see the folks. But he’d also shown her the world. Opened her eyes so wide, she hadn’t wanted to close them even to sleep in those early days.
He’d given her the sky … and he’d given her wings to explore it by teaching her to fly. Eventually, he’d taken her in as a partner in his small regional charter airline and together they’d tripled its size and quadrupled its revenues.
Their success had come at a cost, of course. Neither of them had much of a social life. Even ladies’ man Uncle Frank had been pretty much all-work-and-no-play since they’d expanded their territory up and down the east coast two years ago.
As for Amanda, aside from having a vivid fantasy life, when she wasn’t in flight, she was as boring as a single twenty-nine-year-old could be. Evidence of that was her disappointment at not getting to spend a day with a group of old ladies who bitched about everything from their lazy kids to the hair growing out of their husbands’ ears. Well, except Mrs. Rush, who sharply reminded her friends to be thankful for their husbands’ ear hair while they still had husbandly ear hair to be thankful for.
“Well, so much for a fun Halloween,” she said with a sigh.
“Honey, if sitting in a plane listening to a bunch of rich old ladies kvetch about their latest collagen injections is the only thing you’ve got to look forward to …”
“I know, I know.” It did sound pathetic. And one of these days, she really needed to do something about that. Get working on a real social life again, rather than throwing herself into her job fourteen hours a day, and spending the other ten thinking about all the things she would do if she had the time.
Picturing
