One report from 7 years ago described the identification and repair of a fuel system anomaly in a commuter aircraft that had been approved for a 60 passenger flight the following morning. The anomaly was found at 11:30 at night. The report listed the discovery time as 6:45 a.m. After the fix was already complete. The manager's name was in large font at the top.
Caleb's appeared once in the attached technical log in a line that read, "Repair performed by C. Rowan, Certified Hydraulics and Fuel Systems." Sloan thought about 60 people. She thought about 6:45 a.m. And 11:30 p.m.
And the difference between those two times. She closed the file and looked out her office window at the tarmac below where a ground crew was moving equipment around a parked aircraft in the particular choreography of early afternoon operations. She watched them for a while. She noticed in a way she hadn't quite before that she didn't know most of their names. She picked up her phone and called her assistant.
I need Caleb Rowan's personal contact information, she said. Home address if we have it. Miss Whitmore, he's been terminated. We may not be authorized to find it, she said. Well, she drove herself, which she rarely did.
She didn't tell anyone where she was going. The address was a residential street on the west side of the city. Modest houses on modest lots. A few older trees that had dropped their leaves weeks ago and left the branches bare against the early evening sky. The kind of neighborhood where people had lived for a long time and knew which driveways to avoid in winter because they iced up badly.
She parked in front of the house and sat in the car longer than she intended. She had prepared on the drive over what she was going to say. A version of herself that was controlled and strategic had drafted the opening. She would acknowledge the error. She would reference the report.
She would offer to reinstate him at a higher grade with a salary adjustment. It was clean. It was professional. It was the way she handled problems. She got out of the car.
The truck was in the driveway, the same one she'd registered in his employee file under vehicle information for parking permits. She could hear faintly something metallic. She walked up the driveway and around to where the truck's hood was raised, and Caleb Rowan was underneath it with a socket wrench and a work light clamped to the engine compartment. At the edge of the driveway, on an overturned plastic crate that served as a makeshift chair, a small girl was doing homework. She had her father's dark coloring and a pair of braids that sat slightly uneven on either side of her head.