Page 134 of Gone Before Goodbye

“But you ride motorcycles.”

“Which, you may have observed, stay on the ground for the entire ride.”

“I didn’t have you pegged as a nervous flyer, Marc.”

“It’s kind of sexy, right?”

“Would you settle for barely cute?”

“I would, yes.”

She shakes her head, and a sad smile, the only kind she had known for the past year now, comes to her face. The next time she and Marc flew:

“I looked it up, Mags. Why they use ‘taxi’ for aviation.”

“God, you’re a dork.”

“So in the early 1900s, two French aviation pioneers named Blériot and Farman started using the term ‘taxi’ to describe how primitive aircraft moved slowly across an airfield because it seemed similar to the way a taxi moves through city streets. Ergo ‘taxiing’ on a runway and whatnot. What do you think?”

“Barely cute. But also, okay, kind of sexy.”

The pang—that ever-present Missing Marc pang—strikes deep in her chest. This is how grief works, isn’t it? Grief doesn’t attack her on Marc’s birthday or their anniversary or any of that. Grief knows you are expecting it on those days. So Grief bides its time. It lulls you, makes you think it’s not such a threat anymore, and then when your defenses are down—when a plane simply starts down a runway, for example—boom, it attacks.

Marc.

When the plane’s Wi-Fi comes up, Maggie tries to read all she can on the death of Oleg Ragoravich. They don’t call it a murder yet. Just a dead body. They don’t even say foul play suspected or any of that. Like maybe Oleg was taking a swim and drowned.

Dubai just being Dubai, Maggie figures.

But some of the details bother Maggie. The articles note, forexample, that Ragoravich was “positively identified by close colleagues.” That seems an odd thing to mention. It’s not like the body was found after years underwater. Why mention that? The article also notes that “hundreds of guests recently saw the normally reclusive Oleg Ragoravich at an extravagant ball”—yep, they actually use the word “ball”—“he hosted at his private residence in Russia.”

Again: Why mention that?

The wording was odd. Something about it gnaws at the back of her brain.

She’d done a quick search on Oleg Ragoravich during her flight from Teterboro when she still wasn’t sure of his identity, and found very few photographs of him. At the time, she’d figured that was a normal, rich-guy privacy issue. The rich, especially those who have reason to stay in the shadows, often paid to have their online presence scrubbed or manipulated.

Which led to a host of related questions:

Why are there so few photographs of Oleg Ragoravich online?

Why would Oleg Ragoravich have wanted plastic surgery now?

Why would he have decided to throw a “ball” the night before his surgery?

Why had he stayed up in the hidden room at the top of the ballroom? How had Charles Lockwood put it?

“I’ve still never seen him in person. Not even at that crazy ball…”

Something isn’t adding up.

Her phone battery is low. She doesn’t know what brand of phone this is—it isn’t Apple and doesn’t seem to be Android. The better for Charles to bug her, she figures. Still, she signs on to her email and sends Sharon a short message. Porkchop, she assumes, has been keeping Sharon in the loop, so Maggie keeps the email short:

There are very few photographs of Oleg Ragoravich online. Maybe scrubbed? Can youuse internet archives or wayback machines to locate more?

Something is starting to click.

Maggie turns off the Wi-Fi for a bit, trying to preserve battery. Does that work or is that a myth? She doesn’t know. Every half hour she checks to see whether Sharon has written her back. Eventually, Sharon does: