"I know your reputation for a fact, senator," Kessler said uncomfortably, "but a stewardess with a ski accident. Oh! Oh, yes. But not recent. That was Miss Sosnak, but it was almost a year before. The newspaper accounts got garbled. Both she and the other stewardess, Miss Prentiss, were ski enthusiasts. They were thinking about spending the weekend at Stowe after they got to New York, even though they had both broken ankles previously. Their friends in San Francisco were joking with them about it before they left. They gave Miss Sosnak a doll with a cast on its leg as a gag. The doll was found in the wreckage. Apparently Miss Sosnak had given it to the little girl who was killed on the flight, Barbara Patterson, who actually had a cast on her leg at the time. She had fallen and hurt herself a few days before."
A buzzer on Senator Brogan's desk hummed two short discreet hums. Brogan made no attempt to answer it. He stood and came around the desk, putting his hand on Kessler's shoulder. "Don't get up just yet," he said. "My secretary buzzes me every fifteen minutes in case I want to show my constituents how busy I am. If there's anyone waiting, let them wait. There's just a little bit more I'd like to say." He sat in the wide embrasure of the window and leaned forward on a crossed knee. He looked the picture of negligence but he was obviously pausing to choose his words with care. Kessler shifted his chair to face him.
"I won't mince words," Brogan said, "because I think we understand each other. We always have. Thanks to your splendid investigation, and my only little efforts perhaps, we know more about the circumstances of this crash than any other in aviation history. I had exactly your feeling that the answer ought to be there. But I don't see it and you don't see it. We know absolutely everything but one thing. We don't know what caused it. And we're never going to know that. I really think you are doing the aviation industry, yes and the country itself, a real injury by going on. I won't say what I think you're doing to yourself because it will sound like a sentimental appeal and you've known me too long not to know I'm pretty hard-headed."
"The investigation is over," Kessler said sullenly.
"Yes, I know, officially, but you've just told me you're going on with it personally."
"It's one last remote chance."
"Well, tell me this, Bob, if this last remote chance doesn't work out, will you call it quits and not start in on another last remote chance? Will you and Margaret get on up to that place of yours in Maine and take a good long vacation?"
Kessler smiled wryly. "Margaret has ideas of her own along that line. She's followed through on this with me all the way but she came down to Washington to meet me today and she says she's going to drag me off when I'm through here."
Brogan smiled his famous smile. "Good girl, Margaret. If she's here and has a leash on you, I know I don't have anything to worry about. There's nothing I admire more than a woman who has a mind and uses it. I'll tell you something else," he said, standing and permitting Kessler to rise this time. "I was truly sorry about Eileen Bennett's death on this plane, but Eileen was getting along like me. Sarah Pollitt's was the really tragic case, to have accomplished so much so young and with that fearful handicap! From childhood, too, wasn't it?"