Her Last Flight(7)
At first glance, the beach appears empty. The waves hurtle in from the northwest, golden-pink in the rising sun, but nobody rides them. On the other hand, Hanalei Bay swoops down in a magnificent arc, and there’s plenty more beach to explore. If I were a surfer, I might know where to go looking for this woman, who has surfed all her life. Where the best waves form, according to the laws of physics and geography. But I don’t surf and never have. I’ve got my instincts, that’s all, my instincts and a Rand McNally map, and it seems to me that the beach to the right ends in some kind of river mouth, while the beach to the left winds all the way around to a cliff called Makahoa Point, if I’m interpreting Rand McNally correctly, which I am. Maps and I, we get along pretty well.
To the left it is.
The sand is soft and cool, like powder. I remove my shoes—a pair of ragged espadrilles I acquired in Spain—and enjoy the way this unfamiliar substance pools around my feet. The dawn grows bright behind me. Ahead, the beach turns northward and narrows as it approaches the cliffs at the tip of Makahoa Point. Thus far, no Lindquist. Nobody at all. I might be the only person left alive after some great epidemic. Of course, it’s also possible that Lindquist has had some advance notice of my arrival, and chooses not to expose herself to discovery. You ask a few questions in a tiny, no-account burg like this one, where everybody’s knee-deep in each other’s beeswax, and it doesn’t take long for word to get around. And believe me, I understand the impulse to run for cover at the first sign of predators. I’m camera-shy myself. Would a million times rather stand on the taking side of the lens than the giving, and I don’t have half as much to hide as this Irene Lindquist. If indeed she’s the woman I’m searching for.
I reach the end of the beach without encountering anybody, but according to McNally there’s another beach to the left, on the other side of Makahoa Point. Lumahai Beach, it’s called, which is a rather lovely name, I think, and somewhere I’d like to surf for that reason alone, if I liked to surf at all. It hints of the moon, of the mysterious.
I replace my shoes on my feet and begin the climb up the rocks, across the neck of the point, thick with trees, palms and that kind of thing. I don’t know much about flora, to be perfectly honest; you won’t find a single artful landscape among my published photographs. Just people and buildings and machines and the odd animal, when the subject is willing and the occasion requires it. So don’t ask me what species of tree I’m passing, what kind of branch I’m pushing aside as I step into a patch of cleared earth off the coastal highway. A dilapidated yellow Ford sits to one side. The tire prints appear fresh. A footpath leads westish, behind a piece of wood shaped like an arrow that says beach.
I follow this track downward through the trees until it opens up to a pristine ocean beach, deserted except for a pile of clothes near the edge of the sand, and a person in a long, dark bathing suit hurtling down the barrel of a perfect bow wave.
As I expected, this person is a woman, and when she trudges to shore she doesn’t look all that surprised to see me there. Her hair is short and prematurely silver above a tanned, lined, scarred, firm, freckled face that might be any age from thirty-five to sixty. I think it’s strange that she doesn’t take any trouble to disguise herself. Why hasn’t she been discovered here before? Is it the gray hair, or the scars, or the fact that you don’t expect her? You never do find what you’re not looking for, even the woman at the center of one of the world’s great mysteries, who was once the most fascinating, the most photographed female on earth.
She’s tall, maybe five foot eleven, topping me by two or three inches. She carries the surfboard under her arm like it’s made of balsa wood. She plants it in the sand and slicks back her wet hair and waits for me to introduce myself. I find I’m not nearly as nervous as I expected. Nothing more than a flutter of excitement, even though I can plainly see it’s her, it is the mysterious She, that I’ve found her at last. There’s no mistaking that height, those cheekbones, those sharp, hooded eyes that have regarded me from a thousand photographs, although I never realized they were quite so blue.
“Mrs. Lindquist?” I ask.
“How can I help you?” she replies patiently.
“My name is Janey Everett. I’m a photojournalist. I was wondering if I might have a word with you?”
She stares at the top of my head for several seconds. I don’t think I need to tell you how disconcerting that is. She brushes a little sand from her board and says, “A photographer, is it? I can’t imagine why. I never give permission for photographs. You’ll find a dozen surfers more willing. And more attractive.”
“Oh, I’m not at all interested in photographing you. I don’t wish to disturb your privacy. If you want to go on hiding from the world, that’s fine by me.”
Lindquist lifts both eyebrows in a way that might slay some ordinary person. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you? I’m amazed. You can’t tell me that nobody’s ever remarked on your astonishing resemblance to the famed aviatrix Irene Foster.”
At the words Irene Foster, Lindquist flinches. It’s a tiny gesture, but my eyes are trained to notice these things, the tinier the better. Poker players call them tells, I believe. I hoard them like treasure, because they represent the truth, they represent a subject’s instant, unguarded opinion of things. And this flinch of Lindquist’s tells me everything I need to know.