The Last Flight by Julie Clark
“The Last Flight” by Julie Clark is the story of two strong women, Claire and Eva. Claire is in her husband Rory’s home office and counting the hours until she leaves— forever. It’s two A.M. and she’s looking for the password for his computer. In the marble countered bathroom she hides the note with his password in her travel toothbrush holder. Bruce, her husband’s assistant, tells her the plans have changed. She’s to fly to Puerto Rico and Rory will go to Detroit. All her cash is in a package mailed to her in Detroit and Rory will get it. That is a disaster for then he’ll know the truth.
Eva is also in line at the airport and hears the desperation in Claire’s voice on the phone. She invents a story about her husband’s death and gets closer to Claire. They’re already through security so no one will question them. They exchange the contents of their bags and Claire tells Eva to use her credit card and her pin number. This is Claire’s only chance to disappear. Eva puts on Claire’s pink sweater and decides not to go to Puerto Rico but to get out of line and fly to Brooklyn, to dye her hair and become invisible.
As Claire leaves the airport she sees a TV anchor-woman talking about a plane crash. It’s the flight to Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, Dex appears at her shoulder and Eva wonders what he’s doing there. They schedule a meeting for later to talk to a new client. She’s worked with Dex for twelve years and trusts him. At Eva’s apartment, Claire turns on the TV.
She sees on the news the scene of the crash of the plane to Puerto Rico and her own image in the background. Rory is talking about her to the anchor-woman, telling how he’d kissed her goodbye that morning. It’s all a lie and she realizes why she’s left him. Her life was filled with lies.
Six months earlier we find Eva in the kitchen making amphetamines into a simple pill, using a clean lab as her professor taught her. She wraps the pills like a gift and presents it to Dex who waits at a park table. Her mother had been an addict and never cared much for her daughter. Dex had saved her by making her his chemist. She’d made thousands of dollars, yet still works at a hamburger joint to keep the IRS off her. Berkeley students need the pills to pass exams to stay awake to study.
Claire walks around the campus and buys a coffee and a croissant. Her father had fled when she was four and she thinks about her years at Vassar. Now she reads about the crash and imagines her things floating in the water or at the bottom of the ocean. Will they recover everyone’s belongings? But she’s survived, she reminds herself.
Back at Eva’s, she cuts her hair really short and dyes it so she’s unrecognizable. We learn that Rory had a former heartbreak with a woman Maggie Moretti, but we don’t get the details. She, too, had been young and had lost her parents early. She’d met Rory at a Broadway show and he’d asked for her number. He’d told her he wanted to help others and to
make the world better with his family’s money.
When Claire sees the pink sweater on Eva at the airport she recalls it was Rory’s aunt Mary who gave her that sweater, It’s not right for winter in New York. Aunt Mary tells her not to cross Rory or she’ll go the way of Maggie Moretti, who says the Cook family is shiny on the outside but dangerous underneath. Rory is defined by his mother and her philanthropy. Claire goes through Eva’s papers and finds nothing showing a long happy marriage as she’d said.
It appears that someone named Fish runs the drug business and Dex teaches her about making and distributing. Claire sees on Rory’s e-mail that she wasn’t in her assigned seat on the plane. Eva had hung tickets with Claire, we recall. The author Clarke ramps up the suspense. What will Rory do when he gets this message? With the headcount, Eva had to have gotten on that flight. Eva at the football stadium for a meeting with Dex activates her recorder when Dex joins her. Eva had always done things with her neighbor Liz and they went to the Giants baseball game together and had their photo taken at a kiosk as a souvenir. Fish wants Eva back at making drugs but Eva makes a different choice. She’ll be ready for Castro whom she thinks is a government agent the next time he comes to her door.
She is hired to serve at a party on Saturday night to earn extra money under the table. A couple argues at the party and Eva sees cell phones pointing at them, recording the scene. That night the recorded film is on video and someone thinks a woman in the background is Rory’s dead wife. At a parking lot in Santa Cruz, she pulls into a space next to Agent Castro and he tells her his agency has been tracking Fish for months. She wants witness protection. She realizes Castro has been reading all her messages and she throws the pills into the trash. Claire gets a text from Danielle, Rory’s assistant, who says she knows Claire didn’t get on that plane.
Castro shows Eva a photo of her and Fish, but it’s really Dex, she knows now the truth and e-mails the anchorwoman from TV asking for an interview to tell her the truth. Danielle says she’ll back her up, she means to help Claire. The anchor-woman sends a car to bring her to the station to tell her story. Will this save her? Agent Castro comes to her door, wanting to ask her about Eva James. Author Clark lets us know that Liz’s daughter is Danielle, using more twists and turns than a roller-coaster.
At the TV studio relief floods through Claire and she remembers the abuse she suffered from Rory and the stress and terror of the last ten years. Then the media releases information about the death of Maggie Moretti at Rory’s house at the bottom of a staircase.
What happens to Rory? Is he indicted for this murder? What happens to Claire and to Eva the two strong women who wanted to change their lives? Find out in this hard-to-putdown novel on the new fiction shelf of your local library.