Without giving Niki time to do anything but put her other foot down on the floor beside the busted one, she called out, “Come in!”
The knob turned, and the door cracked open slowly, revealing an ordinary-looking gent in the regional uniform of casual clothes topped off with a puffy vest. He was in his mid-forties, Leda guessed. Average build. Clean-cut, with dark hair and light eyes. Something about his posture suggested military or law enforcement, unless he just had a full-time stick up his ass.
“Hello!” Leda said brightly. “Welcome to Foley’s Far-Fetched Flights of Fancy. I’m Leda Foley. How can I help you?”
Her guest froze, one hand still on the doorknob. “I… um. Hello.”
“Please, come in and have a seat. What can I do for you today?” She waved at the pair of mid-century office chairs she’d found at the Fremont Fair for ten bucks apiece the year before. They were positioned across from her desk, looking reasonably official.
The man peered around the small office, taking in the framed travel posters, the struggling succulents, the blue curtains that were patterned with little yellow pineapples, the coffee cup that read I’D RATHER BE TRAVELING THE WORLD full of mismatched pens… and the random brunette in a cast who was sitting on a love seat against the wall.
He cleared his throat and said, “Hello, Ms. Foley. We’ve never exactly met—but we’ve spoken on the phone and exchanged a few emails. I’m Grady Merritt, from the other day?” The question mark at the end said either he wasn’t sure how long it’d been since they’d spoken, or he wasn’t sure what he was doing there.
Leda’s stomach sank. It didn’t know what else to do.
Because holy shit, it was the guy from Orlando International.
She tried to stay chipper. “Mr. Merritt! I’m so glad to see you made it home safely.”
“Yeah, well. You had something to do with that, didn’t you?” He closed the door and took a seat in one of the Knoll knockoffs. “I was hoping we could talk about… about what happened on Tuesday.”
Leda and Niki exchanged the briefest, most panicked glance. “Absolutely, we can talk about Tuesday. Oh, I’m sorry—I almost forgot.” She stalled by gesturing at Niki, who clearly would’ve rather been left out of the conversation. “This is my friend and associate, Niki Nelson.”
He bobbed his head at her and said, “Nice to meet you.”
“She helps around the office when she’s not busy at her own job, you know how it goes. Since she broke her foot, she’s been keeping me company here.” Leda was rambling. She knew she was rambling. She still couldn’t stop herself. “I really appreciate it, to be honest. This little business is my first time working alone, and I’m not sure I care for it much. Maybe one day I’ll just hire Niki outright, or get myself an assistant if she gets the cast removed and wants to go back to bartending. There’s probably more money in bartending, come to think of it.”
He glanced at Niki again, like he was sizing her up. “Okay,” he said. “I guess this isn’t a particularly… private conversation. Just a weird one.”
Niki laughed, and Leda forced herself to smile. This was her nightmare scenario, wasn’t it? The man had shown up at her office, probably to accuse her of witchcraft or something. He could call the local news, go viral on Twitter, and get articles written about the nut with the travel agency who kept him off an exploding plane. She’d be laughed out of Puget Sound.
She took a deep breath through her nostrils, past the rigid smile. “All right, hit me! What exactly would you like to talk about?”
He took a deep breath, too.
Then he got right to the point. “The plane crash, Tuesday morning.”
“Oh, yes, that terrible accident. Some kind of mechanical failure, I heard? It’s a wonder more people weren’t killed, instead of just a handful. Not that a handful of people dying isn’t a tragedy!” she added quickly. “Only that it could’ve been so much worse, and I’m so glad that it wasn’t. Also, I’m glad you weren’t on board. What a lucky coincidence that was, am I right?”
“Yeah, five people didn’t make it out, but everybody else was safe. Even the only dog on the flight got out okay.”
“Dogs are awesome! Do you have any?” she asked, on the off chance it might derail the whole thing and they could sit around sharing pictures of their pets. Brutus was a very attractive fish. She had a number of piscine portraits in her phone, just waiting to be shown to random semi-strangers.
“One.”
“What kind?”
“Yellow mutt,” he said with a crisp note of finality that said he was finished with this particular line of conversation.
“Not me. My apartment’s barely big enough for me and a fish. I do have a fish…” she tried one last time.
“Fish are great. Not dying in a plane crash is even better, and that’s why I’m here.”
Leda swallowed. “Right.”
“Here’s the thing,” he said, gesturing. His fingers were long and slender, and they moved like he was accustomed to holding things when he talked. A pen, or a notebook, maybe. “I’ve played that day over and over in my head. One thing stands out above everything else that happened.”
“What’s that?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“You. I don’t know how, but you knew about the crash. You knew it all along, and that’s why you changed my flight.”
“Mr. Merritt!” Leda exclaimed. “I certainly did not know about—”
He stopped her right there. “Yeah, you did. Maybe you didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but when you went on about having a bad feeling and not having any concrete reason for changing the flight for me… you knew something bad was on the horizon.”
Leda had a bit of experience protesting this sort of accusation. It was familiar turf, and it almost made her more comfortable with the conversation, now that it’d arrived. Leda slid into “nuh-uh mode.”
“Sir, I assure you I had no idea. More likely, as I was clicking around on the internet I saw something, somewhere, out of the corner of my eye about the big truck that jackknifed on the interstate in Orlando and my subconscious filled in the blanks. People do that kind of thing all the time, and they call it intuition. I’ve been booking travel for many years,” she exaggerated wildly, considering it’d been only a month or two, “and after a while you… you get a feel for it.”
He shook his head and locked his hands together, letting them sit atop his thighs. “Nope. That’s not what happened. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was. You weren’t working on intuition—you were too confident for that. You changed a customer’s approved reservations against his will, and you’re not an idiot. It could’ve cost you business in the future, and you’re too meticulous for that.”
“Meticulous?” Niki was incredulous. “She’s a one-woman crapshoot.”
“Not when I talked to her on the phone, after the lab put me in touch with her.” Then, to Leda, he added, “When I first called to set up the trip, you asked all the right questions.” He kept Leda’s eyes fixed with his own. “You steered me away from layovers that were too short, and made sure that I had a seat near the front of the plane to shave a few seconds off my connection. You were the picture of professionalism. You were not the kind of woman to throw caution to the wind and drop a grenade into a guy’s travel plans.”