Her Last Flight(107)
This one was taken outdoors, probably on the lawn somewhere. In fact, I can’t quite say how I know it’s a wedding, because the bride’s not wearing white, but I do. Her plain, modest dress that might be pale blue or yellow (I have the feeling it’s not pink), and her hat is small and elegant. She’s holding a small bouquet of tropical flowers in one hand, and her other arm is looped over the elbow of her groom, in his neat suit of what must be linen, judging by its rumpled texture. It’s Irene and Olle, of course. Their wedding day, the happiest day of Olle’s life. But they’re not alone.
I lift the photograph and bring it close.
Next to her stand two children, aged about four or five. A boy and girl with bright blond hair and uncertain smiles. Doris and Wesley.
“Miss Janey?”
I jump so hard, I nearly drop the photograph. The others scatter to the floor around me, black-and-white images of people I recognize, faces I know, small, tender kaleidoscopes of family life. I bend to gather them back up.
“Lani! You startled me.”
She glances to Olle’s snoring figure on the sofa. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Janey, but . . . my goodness, are you all right?”
“I’m perfectly fine, Janey, thank you. I was just looking at this wonderful picture of Mr. and Mrs. Lindquist on their wedding day.”
“It was a beautiful day,” says Lani.
“A year or two ago now, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Miss Janey. About a year ago last September. I’m awfully sorry, but what should I tell Mrs. Rofrano?”
I stare at her, without a single shred of comprehension. “Mrs. Rofrano? Here?”
“She’s a friend of Mrs. Lindquist. That’s what I came to tell you. She’s waiting on the lanai.”
I met Sophie Rofrano only once, while I was in Los Angeles trying to pick up the trail of the lost pilots. At the time, I thought if I could only find the reclusive George Morrow, I could squeeze the necessary details from him. The trouble was, nobody could tell me where he lived, nobody had seen or spoken to him in years. It was all false starts and somebody’s friend’s wife’s cousin spotting him at her horse trainer’s guest cottage in Rancho Cucamonga, or not. That kind of thing.
And the worst of it was that I couldn’t reveal what I knew, for fear of word getting around that I had found Samuel Mallory, or rather I had found his remains and the remains of his airplane. That I suspected Irene Foster had not only survived her famous disappearance in 1937 but that she and her husband had left Mallory to die in the Spanish badlands while they flew off to start a new life together.
But then I went through the property records on the Morrow house in Burbank and discovered that it had been sold to Mr. and Mrs. Octavian Rofrano in the early fall of 1937. I’d written a letter, polite as could be, explaining that I was a journalist writing a follow-up piece on the whole affair, the tenth anniversary of the disappearance looming and all that, and perhaps she could answer a few questions for me. She’d refused, of course, but I have my methods of persuasion, and without getting into any of the details, let’s just say we met for coffee a week or two later at a diner near what had once been Rofrano’s Airfield, that icon of the golden age of California aviation. The old place was now getting paved over to become part of somebody’s studio lot, having been sold to the government in 1942 for the use of the U.S. Air Force, and this diner was all that remained of the era.
As you might imagine, she wasn’t much help. Those innocent blue eyes, my goodness. She sipped her coffee with cream and sugar and pecked away at an apricot Danish, and she kept checking her watch because her youngest was due home from school any minute. “Irene met Clara just after she was born,” she told me, “which was only a few months before she left for that round-the-world derby, and I’m so grateful she had the chance to hold my baby girl in her arms. We were all such good friends.”
That was nice, I said. But what about the flight? Why did Morrow sell his house to you after he called off the search in June? Did he say anything about Irene? Any clue about what might have happened to her?
“Oh, we didn’t meet George at all,” she said. “It was all done through an agent. He was just broken-hearted. He’d poured his fortune into Irene’s career, you see, and now he’d lost everything. We bought the house so that he would have something to live on. But we never heard a word from him directly. I always thought he just couldn’t go on without her.”
Interesting, I said. And you don’t have any idea where he went? Where he might be living now? Any chance I might be able to get in touch with him?
Sophie fixed me with those big, appealing eyes and flat-out lied through her teeth. “I haven’t the faintest idea, I’m afraid,” she said firmly. “I sometimes wonder if he’s even alive anymore.”
Outside, the weather’s taken a turn, and the first thing I notice is not Sophie Rofrano but the rain that lashes against the railing of the lanai and the wind that bends the palms. Then a woman turns away from contemplation of the wild weather and startles at the sight of me. She’s wearing a pair of slacks the color of mustard and a white shirt, hair tied back by a patterned scarf, pocketbook tucked under her arm along with a newspaper. I consider what’s contained beneath that scarf, the knowledge behind those eyes. I ask her what the devil she’s doing here. She tells me she’s here to see Mrs. Lindquist.