Her Last Flight(8)
She is no more a Lindquist than I am.
Now, listen up. There was a time, which many of you may recall, when you couldn’t walk into a drugstore or listen to the radio or pick up a newspaper without encountering the name Irene Foster. I myself grew from girl to woman in that particular decade, when Foster was held up as a shining example of American womanhood and what she was capable of in this brave new age of ours, the age of flappers and aviation.
In those days, we had no idea what fate awaited her. Foster was invincible. Pilots around her might crash, might fall short of their destinations, might die of terrible injuries or disappear into the ocean, but you could believe in Irene Foster. Her keen, smiling face adorned books and periodicals, museum exhibits and newsreels, advertisements for everything from toothpaste to cigarettes. It got so that you almost felt sick of her, from time to time, and just when she started to fade from view, just when the public began to tire, ever so slightly, she would accomplish some astonishing new feat, break some impossible record, and you fell in love with her all over again.
Which, naturally, made her disappearance all the more shocking. There she flew, me hearties, poised for victory in the first-ever Round the World Air Derby, one final leg to go, one last hop from Egypt to Morocco, a journey of two thousand miles that was surely child’s play to Irene Foster, who crossed the Atlantic for breakfast, almost. She was two days ahead of her nearest competitor—a man, of course, whose name nobody remembers—and the whole world gathered its breath to cheer her landing in Casablanca. Maybe you were one of them, standing by your radio to hear the news, to settle some bet with your pal about her final time. Whether she would break the current circumnavigation record by hours or minutes. Maybe you waited and waited as those minutes came and went, as the bulletin never arrived, as one by one the reports trickled through that Foster had not arrived in Casablanca at all.
She hadn’t landed anywhere.
Maybe you were one of those who then trawled the airwaves with your amateur radio, searching for some faint signal that might be Irene Foster’s distress call. Maybe you pored over maps of the northern Sahara, of the southern Mediterranean, for some likely site for an emergency landing by a pilot known for her resourcefulness in crisis. Maybe you bought the early edition every morning for weeks and read all the updates, all the editorials, all the messages of hope and determination from those pilots tasked with searching for her across the endless dunes of sand.
Maybe you finally gave up hope and turned to some new sensation for your daily dram of fevered excitement. Maybe you forgot all about Irene Foster and her doomed flight, except when some newspaper printed a wistful memorial on the anniversary of her disappearance, or when some new theory emerged to explain her fate, each one more crackpot than the last.
Maybe you figured she was gone forever, and you’d never know what became of her.
Well, I didn’t.
And now I’ve found her for you. All along, she was living in obscurity on some beach on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, surfing in the morning and flying unsuspecting passengers from island to island during the day.
Still, she’s not going to admit all that to some stranger, by God!
She lifts her board from the sand. “If you’ll excuse me, Miss Everett. You’re wasting my time and your own.”
I wait until she’s stalked past me before I reply. I do have some regard for stagecraft; you might say it’s my stock in trade. I can do with pictures what most can only dream of doing with words, and it all comes down to how you place your subject, and where, and exactly when you click your shutter.
“Am I?” I call after her. “What if I told you I’ve just come from Spain, and the wreckage of Sam Mallory’s airplane?”
She stops, but she doesn’t turn.
“Poor Sam.” I shake my head. “He never did get his due. Overshadowed by his own pupil. But if there hadn’t been a Mallory, there wouldn’t have been a Foster. Isn’t that right?”
Over her shoulder, she says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You keep saying that. You don’t know nothing, do you? Well, that’s fine. Then you won’t care about the diary we found among his remains. You wouldn’t know anything about that, either, I guess?”
Now she turns. Her face is like stone. “His remains?”
“I admit, there’s not much left to a fellow’s body after ten years exposed to the Spanish desert. But his poor skeleton still wore its clothes, and underneath it all I found this.”
I remove the small leather volume from my pocketbook and hold it up against the sky.
The funny thing is, she doesn’t stare at the diary, the object you’d imagine she cares about. Instead she stares at me, no expression at all. Her brow might be furrowed, or those might be the lines etched there by time and sun and worry. She’s taking my measure, that’s all. She’s working out what to say to me, and how much, and whether I’m telling the truth. She is calculating the risk, and isn’t that what Irene Foster has always done best?
Behind me, a wave crashes noisily into the surf. Lindquist turns her face to the east, squints at the risen sun, and says, “Come with me.”
In the cafeteria of the Hanalei airfield, an ancient calico cat lies in a square of sunshine from the window, all but dead. Lindquist stops to stroke its side, and it twitches an ear in thanks.