She nodded. She’d already told him. He needed her to go through it again. “I’m sorry, Grandy. It’s hard for me to talk about, because I feel as if I caused it. I wanted Mom to come up for some stupid company thing. I didn’t realize she and Rick were planning to surprise me by showing up together. He told me he had a test flight, but that was just a ruse. Instead, he flew down here and picked her up at Pier Thirty-Nine. They would have landed at the Archangel airstrip at around three that afternoon. But something went wrong during the flight.”

“Your Rick is an expert pilot.”

She folded her hands together and squeezed until it hurt. “He was. Oh, Grandy.” She remembered the fleeting thought she’d had that the female passenger in his plane had been someone he was cheating with. What a horrible thing to think about a man who was only trying to make her happy.

The memorial for Rick had taken place in Petaluma the day before. Natalie had dragged herself there, enduring a virtual gauntlet of headshaking and consoling friends and acquaintances. Every tribute and eulogy had attested to his expertise, his professionalism.

“If he was such an expert, then how could he have crashed?” Grandy wondered.

“The NTSB is still investigating,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t need to explain the details yet again.

She had culled through the preliminary reports, as if knowing exactly what had gone wrong would make the tragedy less cataclysmic. According to the report, the amphibious light sport aircraft was flying too low and—probably due to fog—mistakenly entered a canyon surrounded by steep terrain. Investigators postulated that the pilot thought he was in a different canyon that led to the larger, open portion of the lake. Right before the crash, a local man who was fishing in a boat spotted the plane about fifty feet over the water.

“As the plane swooped low, I waved to the pilot and he waved back,” the witness had said. “Everything seemed normal. I figured they were just buzzing over the lake or coming in to land on the water. A few seconds later, I heard the engines rev up and accelerate hard. Guess he was trying to turn.”

Once Rick realized there was no exit from the canyon, he attempted a 180-degree turn to escape. Based upon performance limits, the airplane would not have been able to climb past the steeply rising terrain.

The plane flew behind a point and then the man heard a loud crash. He sped in his boat to find the site. Approaching a cove, he spotted the wreckage and yelled out, but there was no response. He called 911.