then, and she began to weep in hoarse racking sobs that hurt Laurel's heart. She held the girl, because it was the only thing she could think of to do, and soon she was crying herself. They cried together for nearly five minutes, and then Dinah began to calm again. Laurel looked over at the slim young boy, whose name was either Albert or Alvin, she could not remember which, and saw that his eyes were also wet. He caught her looking and glanced hastily down at his hands.
Dinah fetched one final gasping sob and then just lay with her head pillowed against Laurel's breast. "I guess crying won't help, huh?"
"No, I guess not," Laurel agreed. "Why don't you try going to sleep, Dinah?"
Dinah sighed - a watery, unhappy sound. "I don't think I can. I was asleep."
Tell me about it, Laurel thought. And Flight 29 continued east at 36,000 feet, flying at over five hundred miles an hour above the dark midsection of America.
Chapter 3
The Deductive Method. Accidents and Statistics. Speculative Possibilities. Pressure in the Trenches. Bethany's Problem. The Descent Begins.
1
"That little girl said something interesting an hour or so ago," Robert Jenkins said suddenly.
The little girl in question had gone to sleep again in the meantime, despite her doubts about her ability to do so. Albert Kaussner had also been nodding, perchance to return once more to those mythic streets of Tombstone. He had taken his violin case down from the overhead compartment and was holding it across his lap.
"Huh!" he said, and straightened up.
"I'm sorry," Jenkins said. "Were you dozing?"
"Nope," Albert said. "Wide awake." He turned two large, bloodshot orbs on Jenkins to prove this. A darkish shadow lay under each. Jenkins thought he looked a little like a raccoon which has been startled while raiding garbage cans. "What did she say?"
"She told Miss Stevenson she didn't think she could get back to sleep because she had been sleeping. Earlier."
Albert gazed at Dinah for a moment. "Well, she's out now," he said.
"I see she is, but that is not the point, dear boy. Not the point at all."
Albert considered telling Mr Jenkins that Ace Kaussner, the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi and the only Texan to survive the Battle of the Alamo, did not much cotton to being called dear boy, and decided to let it pass... at least for the time being. "Then what is the point?"
"I was also asleep. Corked off even before the captain - our original captain, I mean - turned off the NO SMOKING light. I've always been that way. Trains, busses, planes - I drift off like a baby the minute they turn on the motors. What about you, dear boy?"
"What about me what?"
"Were you asleep? You were, weren't you?"
"Well, yeah."
"We were all asleep. The people who disappeared were all awake."
Albert thought about this. "Well... maybe."
"Nonsense," Jenkins said almost jovially. "I write mysteries for a living. Deduction is my bread and butter, you might say. Don't you think that if someone had been awake when all those people were eliminated, that person would have screamed bloody murder, waking the rest of us?"
"I guess so," Albert agreed thoughtfully. "Except maybe for that guy all the way in the back. I don't think an air-raid siren would wake that guy up."
"All right; your exception is duly noted. But no one screamed, did they? And no one has offered to tell the rest of us what happened. So I deduce that only waking passengers were subtracted. Along with the flight crew, of course."
"Yeah. Maybe so."
"You look troubled, dear boy. Your expression says that, despite its charms, the idea does not scan perfectly for you. May I ask why not? Have I missed something?" Jenkins's expression said he didn't believe that was possible, but that his mother had raised him to be polite.
"I don't know," Albert said honestly. "How many of us are there? Eleven?"
"Yes. Counting the fellow in the back - the one who is comatose - we number eleven."
"If you're right, shouldn't there be more of us?"
"Why?"
But Albert fell silent, struck by a sudden, vivid image from his childhood. He had been raised in a theological twilight zone by parents who were not Orthodox but who were not agnostics, either. He and his brothers had grown up observing most of the dietary traditions (or laws, or whatever they were), they had had their Bar Mitzvalis, and they had been raised