We met the next afternoon at the same kitchen table, Lenora with a second stack of photocopies I recognized from the packet Nella had given me, a timeline assembled from radio logs and the Federal Air Crimes Office's own chronology, printed in the flat courier type agencies use when they want a document to look like it isn't arguing with anyone. "I want to go through the end of it properly," I said, "and I want you to stop me the moment I say something you didn't personally see."
"You'll be stopping a lot," she said, not unkindly, and slid the timeline toward herself with one finger, reading down it the way a woman reads a column of numbers she already half knows by heart. The log placed the jump sometime after eight that night, before the aircraft reached Red Mesa. "I know when the aft door opened," she said. "I felt the pressure change in my ears before anyone told me what it meant. I heard the stairway mechanism, but I did not see him leave or land."
I asked her the only question I'd actually driven out there to ask, because it was the one the film answered with absolute confidence and she had always answered with none. Did she know where he came down. Did she know if he'd survived it.
"No," she said, flat and immediate, the kind of no that has been given so many times it no longer needs decoration. "I know the pilots brought that aircraft down safely at Red Mesa, because I was on it, and I felt the wheels touch, and I have never in my life been more grateful for a runway. His landing and fate aren't part of my memory. Later accounts don't change what I witnessed. I won't borrow their certainty and call it memory."
I wrote that down nearly word for word, because it was the sentence I most needed and the one I was least likely to improve by paraphrasing. I asked if I could use it exactly as she'd said it, nothing added, no documentary narrator laid in afterward to resolve what she'd deliberately left open. She read my notes over my shoulder, correcting one word, agreeing to the rest, and told me I could use it anywhere, with anyone, as long as nobody tried to make her timeline do work her memory hadn't done.
I'd come to Alder Reach's reading room four years ago half hoping that somewhere in a drawer of county donations there'd be a letter, a map, a confession, something that would finally let someone say with authority what had happened to the man in the dark over that stretch of country. Driving back from Lenora's that evening, I understood I wasn't going to get that, not from her, not from the packet, not probably ever. What I had instead was a woman willing to swear, under her own name, to the precise edge of what she knew, and to stop there without flinching. It wasn't the ending I'd wanted. It was, I was starting to think, the only honest one available.