Miranda Chase

Chapter 6

Miranda Chase always enjoyed a daily walk to monitor her island. Spieden was one of the last of the San Juan Islands before the Haro Strait that divided Washington State from Canada. It had been her family’s since before she was born and hers since her parents’ deaths when she was thirteen.

Two-point-eight miles long and half-a-mile wide, it was her domain. Her kingdom. And her happy “subjects” were sufficiently exotic that walking among them always made her feel normal, or more normal than she knew she was. Spotted Asian sika deer, big-horned mouflon sheep, a hundred transplanted bird species—all left over from the island’s brief period as a stocked game hunting park. It had been more like a shooting gallery, and she was glad that it was forty years gone. Good riddance.

For the last twenty-five years, she’d been the island’s queen and sole occupant. Other than her National Transportation Safety Board’s air-crash investigation team, visitors were rare as well.

Yesterday, the team’s five other members had flown up to the island for a spring picnic. And though they’d stayed up late by the campfire, she’d woken with the sunrise and gone for her walk.

The island was divided in half the long way. To the west was a long strip of meadowlands. To the east, an equally narrow strip of cool conifer forest. In between, along the narrow crest, was her house, airplane hangar, and grass runway.

The perimeter trail ran six miles around it all and let her check in with her subjects. No throne room where they must come to vow allegiance. Instead they greeted her as she walked among them. Some special few had names, and often came to her looking for treats of an apple or a sugar cube, but most of them lived their own happy lives. Her favorites were the jesters—the myriad nameless Black-capped Chickadees who always perched on her fingertips whenever she dug a handful of black oil sunflower seeds out of her pocket.

Today, of course, none of them would come to greet her. She wasn’t alone this morning.

As she’d left the house, Holly had asked if she could join in. And since her return from nearly dying in a plane crash, wherever Holly went, Mike was sure to be close behind.

Miranda liked them both, but would miss the company of her loyal subjects. They were so much less complicated than people. And usually happier.

The three of them had walked the first mile in silence. Was it companionable? Awkward? Were they waiting for her as hostess to speak first?

She did her best to set all that aside. She knew it was just her autism springing to the fore. Knowing that she couldn’t easily read social situations made her worry about them much more than was justified. Worse, the more she worried about them, the more her fears of not fitting in, because she was on the autism spectrum, rose. And that acted like a heterodyne in a negative feedback loop without an overload regulator. Where was a good capacitor for her thoughts when she needed one? If only—

“This is such a beautiful place, Miranda.” Mike spoke up. “Thanks so much for letting us come up here as often as you do.”

“You’re welcome.” Miranda latched onto the rote phrase to dial down her own inner whirlwind.

“It’s not half bad,” Holly agreed. Her Australian accent was thick enough for Miranda to know that she was teasing. When her accent cleared, that’s when she was dead serious.

“Not half bad at all,” Miranda matched her and received a smile, meaning she’d read it right.

A few of the lambs popped their heads up out of the grass. The adults were tall enough to have seen them coming, but the newborns were hidden even in the lower grasses of spring. The herd favored the north end of the island where the growth was particularly lush.

The lambs watched the human intruders for several seconds before letting out sharp, panicked bleats. As soon as the adults answered, the offspring bounded to their sides. The mothers knew her and went back to eating.

“How long until they stop needing their moms?” Mike nodded back toward the lambs as they arced over the northern tip of the island and entered the cool woods.

“They’ll stay close for two or three months. Then they’re off on their own.”

“So Jeremy must be a late bloomer.”

Miranda looked to Holly, but her accent was gone. “What’s he supposed to bloom into?”

Holly looked…uncomfortable? She was suddenly very interested in the surrounding trees, which was something Miranda knew she did herself to avoid having to look directly at others. She looked around herself but couldn’t imagine what here would make a former Special Operations Forces soldier uncomfortable.

“Holly?”

It was Mike who answered. “We’ve been talking about it a bit between ourselves. It’s time for you to let Jeremy run an investigation.”

“But he’s not an investigator-in-charge.”

Holly took her arm and brought her to a stop. “No, but if he’s ever going measure up—”

“He’s five-foot-eight; that’s four inches taller than I am.”

Holly smiled, then started again without explaining her smile, “If he’s ever going to be an IIC, he needs to fail a few times.”

“Fail? Why would he fail?”

“Because he’s not ready.”

Miranda couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Jeremy Trahn knew almost as much about aircraft as she did. His analyses were so detailed that she was often hard pressed to find suggestions for improvements. He—

“Can you just trust me that he isn’t ready?”

She looked most of the way up to Holly’s face. Finally stopped at her lips. Holly was six inches taller than her own five-four, so it was a comfortable angle—and she didn’t have to try the difficult challenge of looking at her eyes.

Believe that Jeremy Trahn could be anything less than excellent?

She shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Holly. But he’s nearly as good as I am. And you are always telling me I’m the best.”

“No, Miranda. Everyone, from the President of your United States of America on down, tells you that you’re the best—because it’s true. But think back to the day we met. What was happening the moment before I arrived?”

Everyone, “A one-star general was threatening to shoot me and appeared to be sincere in that declaration.”

“What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t shown up?”

Miranda thought back to the crashed C-130 Hercules cargo plane deep in the top-secret area of Groom Lake, Nevada. The heat had been oppressive and the general had been so angry that the g*n barrel had actually been shaking less than a meter from her face.

Holly had done…something. Something she’d never understood. Standing barehanded, she’d threatened the general with severe bodily harm and, curiously, an immense amount of paperwork if he shot either of them. She’d somehow made it okay. At least okay enough to have him put away his sidearm rather than shooting her.

Mike had been there too. He’d taken the general aside and had even convinced him to cooperate—at least briefly.

Miranda never understood people, but she knew that, as her Human Factors expert, Mike understood them better than anyone she’d ever met.

“Mike?” Holly was a warrior, but he was the human factors specialist. He’d understand how skilled Jeremy was. “I can’t believe that Jeremy would fail if he’s put in charge of an investigation.”

“He’d fail spectacularly!” Mike laughed aloud, eliciting more bleats from the lambs.

She hadn’t meant it as a joke. They resumed their walk to get well clear of the herd.

“Told ya, mate,” Holly’s Australian heritage sounded more clearly. She too thought this was funny.

“But…why? He understands aircraft and crash-investigation methodologies very, very well.”

“And, Miranda,” Mike spoke more gently, “he’s as clueless about people as you are.”

“But…” Miranda actually looked up at his face for a moment, but he was serious. “But he’s not an ASD like me.”

“No. No autism, but he’s an uber-nerd with as much understanding of people as… I can’t think of a good analogy. Unlike you, he has the ability, but zero skill. In that, he’s actually less skilled than you because you struggle so hard to learn it.”

“That makes no sense. He has all of the skills needed to examine a crash.”

“Because, gal-pal mine,” Holly’s Strine accent grew broader—a sure sign that she was very amused (an easily mapped correlative curve of accent thickness and humor), “because we don’t want some general shooting him in the arse.”

She never thought about that aspect of an investigation. Then she looked up at Holly and Mike. And…they were the reason that she didn’t have to think about such things.

Holly might be her structural specialist, but she understood people’s motivations—at least those who wanted to attack her. Mike’s skills in human psychology let him keep everyone calm as well as digging out answers that people would prefer to keep hidden. She was safer for having both of them present at site investigations.

was But there was one more thing.

“Why should I let him fail? We have a responsibility to investigate and solve every crash.”

“We’ll all be his safety net,” Mike nodded to indicate the three of them. “He’ll find the answer, because he is that good. But we need to open his eyes about the necessary skills to run a team: interpersonal skills, delegation skills, and project management to name a few.”

“What about me?”

“Well, Miranda, you should play the slightly dumb assistant. Don’t do anything unless he directly asks you to.”

“No, I mean shouldn’t I learn to run a team as well.”

Mike opened his mouth, then closed it again, squinting at the ground.

Miranda pulled out her personal notebook and checked the emoticon page Mike had given her. Not angry—his cheeks weren’t flushed. Maybe—

Holly pointed at “puzzled,” which seemed to fit.

“Thank you,” she tucked away her notebook.

“Miranda,” Holly took both her shoulders and faced her directly.

Miranda shifted her focus to Holly’s left ear just showing from under her long blonde hair.

“You do great!”

“But you said that General Harrington—”

“You make us want to work with you. I can’t begin to tell you how rare a gift that is. We take care of managing strangers because you don’t have any skill at doing that.”

wantMiranda huffed out a breath. “Well, why didn’t you say that’s what you meant? I knew that.”

Holly laughed. “All of us do, except Jeremy. He thinks that you and he can run a team just fine on your own. He needs to learn that isn’t true.”

Miranda understood now.

She turned away and pulled out a handful of sunflower seeds, cupping them in her hand. In moments, the birds she’d heard singing their question at her came to eat. They took turns perching on her upcurved fingertips long enough to grab a seed and go.

When she was alone, they’d often sit and eat several before spooking. But not with Holly and Mike so close by. Even briefly, their tiny claws gave such happy little squeezes on her fingertips as they dipped for seeds that she could do this for hours.

She supposed that being a team leader was a skill that Jeremy should learn.

was It was hard to imagine that they shared an incompetence, but with the others’ insistence, she was forced to believe them.

Maybe she’d watch and take notes, then she could try it herself.

One of the bravest of the airborne subjects took the mad risk of remaining perched with its tiny claws clamped about one of her fingers while it ate one seed. As it reached for another, her phone began to sound like a jet engine spinning up.

The chickadee didn’t waste an instant, even to look panicked—it was simply gone so fast that it might as well have evaporated. She tossed the remaining seeds widely around her, hoping that the spooked bird would get at least his second seed.

Then she answered the phone. “This is Miranda Chase. This is actually her, not a recording of her.”

At Jill’s laugh of greeting, she knew there was a crash.