One
Cole Henderson propped himself against a workbench in Aviation 58’s hangar at the Juneau, Alaska, airport and gazed at the front page of the Daily Bureau. He realized news of the Atlanta plane crash deaths should make him feel something. After all, Samuel Henderson had been his biological father. But he had no idea what he was supposed to feel.
A nearby door in the big building opened, letting in a swirl of frigid air and blowing snow. At ten o’clock in the morning, it was still dark outside this far north.
His business partner, Luca Dodd, strode in, crossing the concrete floor alongside the sixty-passenger Komodor airplane that was down for maintenance.
“You looking at it?” Luca asked.
“I’m looking at it,” said Cole.
Luca tugged off his leather gloves and removed his wool hat. “What do you think?”
“I don’t think anything.” Cole folded the paper and tossed it on the bench behind him. “What’s to think? The guy’s dead.”
A drill buzzed on the far side of the hangar, and the air compressor started up, clattering in the background as two maintenance engineers worked on the engine of the Komodor.
“He was your father,” Luca pointed out.
“I never met him. And he never even knew I existed.”
“Still...”
Cole shrugged. His mother Lauren’s marriage to billionaire Samuel Henderson, whose family owned Atlanta-based Coast Eagle Airlines, had been short-lived and heartbreaking for her. She’d never hidden Cole’s heritage from him, but she’d certainly warned him about the Henderson family.
“Eight dead,” said Luca, spinning the paper so the headline was right side up.
“Sounds like it all went to hell in the final seconds.” As a pilot, Cole empathized with in-air emergencies. He knew the pilots would have been fighting to safely land the airplane until the very end.
“Early speculation is a combination of icing and wind shear. That’s freakishly rare for Atlanta.”
“We all know how bad that can go.”
“An Alaskan pilot might have helped,” said Luca.
Cole didn’t argue that point. Pilots in Alaska had more experience than most in icy conditions.
He glanced over his shoulder at the headline once again. On a human level, he felt enormous sympathy for those who’d lost their lives, and his heart went out to their friends and family who had to go on without them. But for him personally, Samuel Henderson was nothing but a stranger who’d devastated his mother’s life thirty-two years ago.
By contrast, when his mother, Lauren, had passed away from cancer last year, Cole had mourned her deeply. He still missed her.
“They put up a picture of the baby on the website,” said Luca.
The article had mentioned that Samuel and his beautiful young wife, Coco, had a nine-month-old son, who, luckily, hadn’t accompanied them on the trip. But Samuel’s aging mother and several company executives had been on board when the family jet had crashed into the Atlanta runway.