Chapter 5 - The Push
Veronica did not have time to scream.
One moment she was laughing, veil streaming in the wind, ocean glittering far below; the next, the world tilted violently, the helicopter's frame vanishing upward and away from her as she plummeted through empty air, the roar of the rotors fading into a strange, terrible silence broken only by the shriek of wind rushing past her ears.
Her mind, in the strange way that minds sometimes work in moments of unimaginable crisis, did not immediately process terror. It processed disbelief. Alex. Alex had pushed her. The man she had just married, the man who had held her hand through a hospital stay, the man who had wept during his vows only hours earlier — he had placed both hands against her back and shoved her out of a helicopter three thousand feet above the open ocean.
The betrayal was so absolute, so complete, that for one suspended, weightless moment, it eclipsed even her fear of the fall itself.
Then instinct took over.
Veronica had spent two summers in her thirties sailing competitively with Richard along the New England coast, and though decades had passed, some fragment of that training surfaced now, screaming through the panic. She forced her limbs to spread, fighting the tumbling spin of her body, forcing herself into something resembling the position she remembered skydivers using — arms and legs extended, chest angled toward the earth, slowing the wild, disorienting rotation just enough to see the ocean rushing up to meet her.
She had perhaps thirty seconds. She used every one of them.
Her wedding gown, heavy and waterlogged even before she hit the surface, billowed around her like a parachute of sorts, slowing her descent by some small, merciful fraction. Her veil tore free entirely, spiraling away into the wind. She sucked in the deepest breath her lungs could hold, forced her body as straight and narrow as she could manage, and braced for impact.
The ocean did not feel like water when she hit it. It felt like concrete.
The impact drove the breath from her lungs entirely, darkness exploding across her vision, cold flooding every inch of her body in an instant so total it felt almost like fire. For several long seconds, Veronica was not entirely certain whether she was alive or dead, conscious or unconscious, sinking or floating. Her ears rang with a high, piercing whine. Salt water flooded her mouth and nose. Her right shoulder screamed with a pain so sharp she nearly blacked out from it alone — later, doctors would confirm it had dislocated on impact.
But some deep, stubborn part of her — the same part that had built an empire from nothing, that had survived her husband's death and rebuilt her life alone, that had clawed her way to the top of industries that chewed up and discarded far tougher people than her — refused to simply let the ocean take her.
She kicked. Weakly, clumsily, one arm nearly useless at her side, but she kicked, forcing herself up toward the wavering light above the surface until, gasping and choking, her head finally broke free into the open air.
She was alive.
She had no idea, in that moment, how that was possible. She only knew that the pain in her shoulder was excruciating, that the cold was already beginning to numb her limbs in a way that some distant, clinical part of her mind recognized as dangerous, and that somewhere above her, growing smaller and smaller against the darkening sky, the helicopter carrying her husband was flying steadily away, without turning back, without even circling once to search for her.
He wasn't coming back. He had never intended to.
Above her, inside the cabin, Alex Turner settled back into his seat, breathing hard, adrenaline still coursing through his body, an expression somewhere between horror and grim satisfaction crossing his face. Curtis Boyle, hands white-knuckled on the controls, did not look back either. He had been paid — and threatened — not to.
"Keep flying," Alex said quietly. "Same route we planned. Land, refuel, and by the time anyone realizes anything is wrong, we'll be back in Chicago."
Curtis said nothing. His jaw was clenched so tightly it ached, but the memory of his gambling debts — and the far less subtle threats Alex had made regarding his teenage daughter should he fail to cooperate fully — kept his hands steady on the controls and his eyes fixed straight ahead.
Neither man looked back at the ocean.
Neither man saw the small, distant fishing trawler nearly four miles to the south — the Constance Marie, out of Portland, Maine, running a late-season lobstering route far from its usual grounds due to a mechanical problem that had forced it off course hours earlier — whose captain, an old, weathered fisherman named Walter Grady, happened to glance up through his binoculars at exactly the wrong — or, depending on how one chooses to see it, exactly the right — moment, and saw something falling from the sky that was very clearly not a bird.
"Sweet Jesus," Walter muttered, snatching up his radio. "Deckhand! Get up here! I think — I think someone just fell out of that helicopter!"
By the time the Constance Marie reached the spot roughly twenty minutes later, cutting through swelling waves at a speed the old boat's engine had not been pushed to in years, Veronica Hail Turner had been treading water, fighting hypothermia and shock and unimaginable pain, for nearly half an hour.
She was barely conscious when Walter's deckhand, a broad-shouldered young man named Miguel, finally hauled her aboard, wrapping her immediately in every blanket and dry jacket the boat possessed, screaming into the radio for the Coast Guard.
"Ma'am — ma'am, can you hear me? Stay with me, stay awake — what's your name? Can you tell me your name?"
Through chattering teeth, through lips gone blue with cold, through a body wracked with pain and shock and the raw, unbearable weight of betrayal, Veronica Hail Turner forced out the only words that mattered.
"My husband," she whispered. "My husband did this. Alex Turner. He pushed me. You have to — you have to stop him. Before he — before he tells everyone I'm dead."
Miguel stared down at her, stunned into silence, then keyed his radio with trembling hands.
May you like
"Coast Guard, this is the Constance Marie. We need immediate medical evacuation. And — and I think you're going to want to notify the police, too. This wasn't an accident."
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