Her Last Flight(110)
I thanked Hawley and asked if I could buy him a drink, and after some hesitation he agreed. Lest you think I had any immoral intentions, let me assure you I weighed about ninety-seven pounds at the time, was sick as a dog and wan as a phantom, and fully expected to vomit up those whiskey sours as soon as I returned to the dank, shabby, gloomy garret upstairs that disgraced the name of hotel rooms everywhere. All I craved was some crumb of information about Velázquez and his last days. Hawley spoke for an hour; I won’t bore you with everything he said. Just that Velázquez had turned especially devout in his final weeks, had gone to confession almost daily, which made me glad because I did not want Velázquez to suffer long in purgatory because of me.
Anyway, you’re not interested in all that, are you? You want to know what the letter said. Here it is. You might as well read the whole damned thing.
My dear Janey,
For some time I have reproached myself for withholding from you certain facts regarding the fate of your father. I told you I had made a promise to him. This was true, but I have come to believe that he would not hold me to this vow if he knew that his precious daughter would one day come in search of him.
Yet you generously allowed me to keep my secrets, and when I reflect on the greatness of your spirit, I am once more overcome by this love I confessed to you only once, but which I felt with all my soul from the very earliest moment of our friendship. You will say in your brisk American voice that I am a sentimental idiot, but it is my honor and privilege to be a sentimental idiot on this subject, and to be grateful to God that He has granted me this final joy when I had thought all joy impossible. It is the last remaining desire of my heart to reunite with you after the war is finished, so that I may explain all this from my own lips, but if God wills that we shall not meet again on earth, I pray this letter will find you instead.
You will find the wreckage of Samuel Mallory’s airplane in the shelter of a grand massif in the Bardenas Reales, in the province of Navarre, in the northeast part of Spain. Inside this wreckage you will find a human body, which you should treat with the reverence due to all God’s creatures, and the diary that belonged to Mr. Mallory, which will shed some light, I suspect, on the events that led to this catastrophe. To all this I can only recommend that you use your immense cleverness to gather all these hints into a map that will guide you to what you seek, because I cannot commit to paper any further confidence, or even reveal to you how this knowledge came to me.
May you discover happiness, my beloved, and may a merciful God forever bless you.
Velázquez
I think about this letter, and the particular phrase Inside this wreckage you will find a human body, which you should treat with the reverence due to all God’s creatures, as I pedal my bicycle furiously through the wind and rain down the highway into town. It’s funny how you can assume all along that a sentence means one thing, because of your own particular assumptions, when really it can mean something entirely different if you examine it from a fresh perspective.
When I reach the pier, the ferry is still tied securely to its mooring, and the sign on the gate reads closed for weather. But nearby, a fellow’s bustling about a smaller, nimbler boat, preparing it to launch. I call out and the man turns, and right away I see from Leo’s face that he’s heard about the reporters gathered at the airfield, and not only has he heard the news but he’s holding me responsible.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I yell.
Leo turns away and ducks into the deckhouse. I climb off the bicycle and jump over the railing.
“Don’t you dare ignore me! I need to find her right now!”
“You don’t have the right!”
“I have every right! You lied to me! About your father and Irene!”
He flinches at that. “Because I had to! Irene told me to. And it turns out we were right. Now beat it.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Ki’ilau!”
“In this weather?”
“Yes, in this weather!” He reaches for the rope that secures the boat to the piling. “Irene took off from the airfield almost an hour ago.”
“And how the hell do you know she went to Ki’ilau?”
He doesn’t answer that, just unwinds the rope and prepares to cast off, and a terrible feeling takes hold of me, fear and also anger. A clatter of metal sounds behind me, and Sophie Rofrano’s urgent voice. She leaps off a bicycle and runs up the dock to the railing.
“Leo! What’s happened?”
“Sophie! Jesus. Thank God.”
“What’s wrong? Where’s Irene?”
“She’s flown to Ki’ilau,” Leo says. “And she’s taken the kids with her.”
The kids.
To be clear, I don’t give a damn about Irene Lindquist at the present moment, clinging to the railing of Leo’s boat as we tear across the water. I don’t care whether she cracks up in this tempest or does not, whether she lives or does not. My anger toward Irene has returned at full force, so thick and bubbling it may blow at any second.
But the kids.
About a quarter mile out, the squall starts to die away, but the sea remains rough. Nobody speaks. Leo’s busy keeping the ship on the right side of the ocean’s surface. As for Sophie, she’s as keen as I am. Her delicate profile points into the wind. Her teeth are bared. You get the idea she relishes this struggle, man against nature, and who would have thought that petite, elegant Sophie Rofrano was a fighter? But Sophie was the one who wrangled me aboard, Sophie was the one who took Leo by the shoulders and insisted that Janey Everett was friend, not foe.