Kennedy Stern Christian Suspense Complete Box Set (Books 1-9)

Turbulence-2-2

The seats filled up as quickly as could be expected with a hundred or more passengers with bulky luggage and winter coats banging into the seatbacks and each other. Kennedy took in a deep breath, thankful for Willow’s air purifier, which looked like some kind of strange techno-amulet. Even if the benefits were all placebos, she was happy for something to give her a small edge against the germs blowing rampant around the cabin.

The two older Mennonite children carried small backpacks, and as if on some unspoken cue, they each took out a book in nearly perfect unison. Kennedy watched with curiosity. She didn’t have any siblings, never knew what it was like to share a room or share her toys, what it was like to have someone to play with or pester as the mood struck. She hadn’t considered herself lonely as a child, but at times like these she felt a certain heaviness in her chest as she wondered what life might have been like if her parents had decided to have more than one kid.

A row behind the older children, the mother began to read a Dr. Seuss book to the two youngest kids. Kennedy had a hard time pinpointing why she found that so strange. Was she so accustomed to picturing women in denim skirts and headscarves as strict and stoic that it was odd to think of them picking something as frivolous as Horton Hatches an Egg? The mother laughed, a clear, joyful sound that forced Kennedy to study her face more closely. She was young, much younger than Kennedy had guessed when the family boarded the plane. Clear skin, shining blue eyes. Kennedy couldn’t help but thinking of Scrooge’s niece in A Christmas Carol with her little dimpled smile that Dickens lauded so eloquently.

A minute later, the wife frowned and stopped reading. What was wrong? Her daughter tugged on her sleeve, and she absently handed the girl the book before she adjusted her head covering and shifted in her seat. She stared at her two children, as if she were about to speak. She reached her hand out until she nearly brushed her husband’s arm but withdrew it a second later.

Kennedy followed her gaze to the front of the plane, at two men with turbans and long beards who were boarding together. One was significantly older, but they both wore loose-fitting pants with long cotton robes instead of an American-style shirt. The noise in the cabin diminished, as two dozen whispered conversations stopped at once. Kennedy glanced around, trying to guess what was wrong. The Mennonite mother clenched her husband’s shoulder. Willow must have noticed it, too. She nudged Kennedy.

“You’d think with those long beards they’d be instant friends, wouldn’t you?” Mischief danced in her eyes.

The husband turned to look at his wife. Kennedy couldn’t hear their words, but the worry on both their faces was unmistakable. Meanwhile, the younger man with the turban nearly dropped a heavy briefcase he tried to heft into the overhead compartment.

“Oh, great,” mumbled the Seahawks fan in front of Kennedy. “Stinking Arabs.” He looked around as if trying to find a sympathetic ear. “Why they gotta put them so close to the cockpit?”

Willow smacked him on the back of his head. He turned around with an expletive, which she answered with a mini lecture about the myriad pitfalls and injustices of racial profiling. Kennedy wasn’t paying attention. She was still watching the Mennonite couple, studying the way the color had all but drained from the wife’s face.

“I can’t say what it is,” she told her husband. “I just have this feeling something is about to go wrong.”

He looked at the newly boarded passengers. “Because of them?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t say. I just know that something is wrong here. It’s not safe.” She clenched his arm with white knuckles. “Please, I can’t ... We have to ...” She bit her lip.

The husband frowned and let out a heavy sigh. “You’re absolutely certain?”

She nodded faintly. “I think so.”

“It’s probably just nerves. It’s been a hard week for all of us.” There was a hopefulness in his voice but resignation in his eyes.

She sucked in her breath. “This is different. Please.” She drew her son closer to her and lowered her voice. “For the children.”

“All right.” He unbuckled his seatbelt and signaled one of the flight attendants. “I’m so sorry to cause a problem,” he told her when she arrived in the aisle, “but you need to get my family off this plane. Immediately.”

CHAPTER 3T minus 2 hours 12 minutes

Kennedy watched while the flight attendant escorted the family down the aisle toward the exit. She had never seen anything like that happen before and couldn’t stop an uneasy feeling from sloshing around in her gut, the same foreboding Scrooge must have experienced at the London Stock Exchange when he listened to the businessmen joke about their colleague’s lonesome death. She was glad her roommate was giving BO Dude an Academy Award-worthy lecture against racism, or else Willow probably would have shoved her sermon down Kennedy’s throat instead.

Getting a family of six off the plane took a quarter of an hour at least before the captain made his first address to the passengers. It was the typical stuff Kennedy had learned to tune out after a decade of international travel, but he included a brief comment about the Mennonites.

“Of course, safety is our first priority on this flight. We had a family choose to deboard the plane a few minutes ago, and I’d like to thank our flight attendant Tracy in the back for making that transition as smooth as possible. I want you to know we have a commitment to each passenger’s personal well-being, and if there’s anything we can do to make your time with us more comfortable, please don’t hesitate to ask your nearest flight attendant.”

After that, it was more of the usual drivel about seat covers, floatation devices, and oxygen masks.

Willow leaned back in her seat with a huff. “Some people are stubborn jerks.”

“Didn’t go too well?” Kennedy wondered why Willow wasted her breath on the smelly Seahawks fan but didn’t bother saying so.

“I just don’t get it. Are we still living in the fifties or something?” Willow crossed her arms. “I assumed the human race would have evolved a little bit farther by now.” She rolled her eyes. “Can’t even get on an airplane wearing foreign clothes without having racist bigots assume you’re a terrorist.”

Kennedy didn’t know what to say. Chances were the two men in turbans were polite, respectable travelers who passed the same security screens as everyone else. But wasn’t there the slightest possibility ... She thought about how loosely their clothes fit. How many bombs or bomb pieces would fit strapped beneath ...

No, now she was the one racial profiling. There were ample security measures, the TSA, the no-fly list, enough safeguards in place that innocent citizens could travel in peace and safety.

Right?

Kennedy tried to recall the details from a news article her dad had sent her earlier that semester. Eleven men from Jordan boarded a plane and freaked the other passengers out by their bizarre behavior, passing items in bags throughout the flight, congregating in the aisles, spending five or ten minutes at a time in the bathroom one right after another. The journalist who broke the story, a woman who had been on board and witnessed the suspicious behavior firsthand, discovered that airlines were fined if they held more than two passengers of Middle Eastern decent for extra questioning on any particular flight. Even if the men had raised security flags in the pre-boarding process, the airlines couldn’t have taken any extra precautions against a group that large. There were folks who believed that what the journalist encountered was a dry run, a dress-rehearsal of sorts for putting together a bomb mid-flight, while some postulated that the men planned to take over the plane but experienced some kind of glitch in the air. Of course, others claimed the journalist was a paranoid, racist bigot who needed to shut her mouth instead of accusing innocent, peaceful travelers on unsubstantiated and somewhat vague grounds.

Kennedy knew plenty of Muslim students from Harvard, knew they weren’t the crazed extremists the media made them out to be. She would be incensed on their behalf if they were made to endure an onslaught of extra or humiliating security measures simply because of their race or religion. But common courtesy and political correctness had to end somewhere, didn’t they? At least when it came to protecting an airplane full of innocent civilians. Or was that the kind of reasoning that allowed cops like the one that abused her and her best friend last year to keep on wreaking their own kind of havoc on justice?

“Bunch of bigots,” Willow muttered, “holding up a full flight because a few of the passengers were born in the Middle East.”

Kennedy opened up her Gladys Aylward book. Maybe Willow was right. Maybe the Mennonites were racist jerks, xenophobic Americans scared of any traveler who looked even remotely different.

But Willow hadn’t heard their entire conversation, either. Hadn’t heard the fear in the woman’s voice. Not hatred. Not prejudice. Actual terror for her family’s safety. Had the family done the right thing? Mennonites were supposedly a fairly religious group, right? Did the woman have that gift of discernment Christians sometimes talked about, that ability to hear the Holy Spirit’s warnings more acutely than the average believer? If God told the woman the flight wasn’t safe, did that mean Kennedy and Willow were about to head into trouble? But if that was the case, why wouldn’t God have warned her, too? It didn’t seem fair.

Then again, if God told Kennedy to get off the plane, if the Holy Spirit impressed on her soul that she needed to leave, would she? And risk Willow thinking she was a xenophobic racist bigot?

Or would she fasten her seatbelt, sit tight, and try to convince herself everything would be fine?

Everything would be fine, wouldn’t it? Kennedy stared at the pages of her book, remembering the way God had protected Gladys Aylward and the orphans under her care so many years ago. He would take care of Kennedy that way, too.

Wouldn’t he?

CHAPTER 4T minus 1 hour 43 minutes

“Gladys Aylward? What a remarkable woman.”

Kennedy was startled by the interruption to her reading.

A white-haired woman with thin-rimmed spectacles and a blouse that might have been ordered from a 1970s Sears catalog smiled at her. “I’m sorry, the restroom up front was occupied, so I came back here and couldn’t help but notice your book. Are you enjoying the story?”

Kennedy didn’t feel up to chatting, but since the back lavatory was occupied as well, she didn’t think she had much choice. “Yeah. It’s pretty interesting.”

“They made a movie about her life. Did you know that?”

Kennedy shook her head.

“Well, it’s quite an old one. The actress who starred in it — oh, I wish I could remember her name just now, but that’s what happens when your brain gets as old as mine. Anyway, the story goes this woman became a Christian after playing the role. I assume then that you’re a born-again believer?”

That phrase always struck Kennedy as strange. A born-again believer, as if there were any other kind. “Yeah. I am.” No use getting into a theological debate on an airplane with an eighty-year-old grandmother.

A flight attendant tapped the woman on the shoulder. “Excuse me, can I squeeze past you, please?”

The old lady sat down in the Mennonite mother’s empty spot and glanced at the bathroom. “Looks like I might be here a while.” She smiled warmly. “My name is Lucy Jean, but I insist on being called Grandma Lucy.”

“I’m Kennedy,” she replied automatically, wondering how long the bathroom occupant would take.

“Kennedy. What a lovely name. You know, I still wish my parents had come up with something more creative than Lucy Jean. You don’t get much plainer than that.”

Kennedy was about to protest that it was an attractive name when Grandma Lucy asked, “Are you going to Detroit today?”

“No, I’m on my way to Seattle and then Anchorage to spend Christmas with my friend’s family.”

“How lovely. I have a granddaughter in Alaska.”

“Is that where you’re going?” Kennedy asked.

“No, I’m getting off in Seattle. Going home to Washington. I was just in Boston to see off my grandson. He’s on his way to ...” She stopped herself to finger Kennedy’s necklace from across the aisle. “What in the world is this? It looks New Age.”

All Kennedy wanted to do was get back to her reading, but she gave her best impression of a smile. “It’s an air purifier. You wear it around your neck, and it filters out germs and dust. My roommate got them for us for the flight.” She nodded toward Willow, who was watching some violent movie on her portable screen.