Crossing the Horizon

by Laurie Notaro

  For good measure and just for a bit of fun, Levine twirled Mabel around once before removing her blindfold and displaying the glory in front of her.

  She gasped; the plane was painted a brilliant, shiny red like a ruby with silver detailing. It looked ferocious and brave, all she wanted in the vessel that would deliver her to the majesty and exaltation that awaited her.

  “It’s magnifi—” she started, walked to the side of the aircraft, and then stopped.

  Her smile quickly curled downward and her forehead furrowed.

  “What the hell,” she said slowly as she raised her arm to point, “is that?”

  “Ha, ha,” Levine said, happily slapping the side of his leg as he walked over beside her. “I knew you’d love it!”

  Mabel looked at Levine in disbelief, then back to the side of the plane and back to Charlie. She felt the urge to make a fist.

  “You are an idiot,” she hissed. “You are the shortest idiot on the face of the earth! You are a bigger idiot than a baby!”

  Levine looked shocked, puzzled, and surprised, all at the same time.

  “What?” he said, shrugging.

  “Queen of the . . .” she said after a moment. “Hair? Queen of the Hair, Charlie?”

  “Nah!” he replied, a little angrily. “What are you talking about? It’s Queen of the Air! Just like we said!”

  “A-I-R!” Mabel shouted, waving her arms around at the air. “Not ‘H’! Not ‘hair’! I am not the Queen of the Hair! What does that even mean?”

  “ ‘Air,’ ” Levine countered, sticking his hands straight in his pockets like two rocks. “H-A-I-R. AIR. The ‘H’ is silent!”

  “The ‘H’ is silent because there’s no ‘H’!” Mabel screamed as she began to stomp in angry circles. “There is no ‘H’! There is no ‘H’!”

  Then she stood still for a moment, shot her hands straight down at her sides, and let out a scream that Levine felt in his own throat.

  “I told him,” John Carisi, who had been hiding in the back of the hangar for just this moment, said to his assistant as Levine ran after a screeching Mabel. “I told him it don’t have an ‘H.’ ”

  * * *

  Emilie had the letter from Beatrice Earl for a week before she showed it to anybody. Initially, she was horrified to read it. A flare went up inside her that ignited every bit of anger that Emilie had suppressed. Here was an unknown woman saying that Ray was dead and that he was talking to her. The cruelty was implausible. Emilie wanted nothing more than to confront Beatrice Earl or whoever she was and unload everything she felt right on top of her. Spiritualism was a bunch of rot, and to use such nonsense to toy with a widow was unforgivable. She was freshly alone, and it was maniacal for anyone to poke her in the rawest moment of grief, most likely to try to get money from her. Well, good luck.

  It took days for her anger to simmer. She didn’t want to believe that people were so degenerate, that anyone would pull such a prank, and she calmed herself by saying that it was a letter from an unwell person trying to do good. Still, no matter the circumstance, she ignored it and refused to put herself forward as a victim of anyone’s con.

  A thought, however, snuck in, having more to do with hope and the ache of wanting her husband to return to her. As the days passed with no word, she let herself wonder if there could be an open channel somewhere, like a telephone line, that only needed the right dial to be heard. If this was Ray, was she refusing a chance to talk to him?

  She shook it off and reprimanded herself for buying into the fraud, even for a second.

  * * *

  The Mackay family had kept very quiet. Clear that no hope could possibly be outlasting for the life of Elsie, they shuttered their openness to the press and became recluses. As a trustee of Elsie’s bank accounts, Lord Inchcape had them frozen, including a check to Captain Hinchliffe for six weeks’ back pay that was due to Emilie. She had written to Lord Inchcape once more but received no response. She was getting more desperate. A week later, when a letter came for Emilie, she noted immediately that the return address did not state “Inchcape” but “Doyle,” although she knew no one by that name. She hoped it would be some sort of word of the belated pay or, even better, the insurance policy.

  “Dear Mrs. Hinchliffe,” the letter began cordially in a light and almost airy script:

  May I express my deep sympathy in your grief.

  I wonder if you received a letter from a Mrs. Earl. She has had what looks like a true message from your husband, sending his love and assurance that all was well with him. I have every reason to believe Mrs. Earl to be trustworthy and the fact that the message contained the correct address of the solicitor, known to your husband and not Mrs. Earl, is surely notable.

  A second medium corroborated the message. The medium remarked that you were not English and had a baby and she thought another child. I should be interested to know if that is correct. If not, it does not affect the message from the first medium. I am acting on what appears to be your husband’s request in bringing the matter before you. According to the message the plane was driven far south. I allude to it in a guarded way in my notes in the Sunday Express next week.

  Please let me have a line.

  Yours faithfully,

  A. Conan Doyle

  The letter slipped from Emilie’s fingers and fluttered to the floor.

  She read the letter again. And again. She got up for a moment to fetch a neighbor to have her read it, but sat back down and read the letter yet again.

  A. Conan Doyle. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes. Author, physician, and, apparently, spiritualist.

  Then she went to the desk and began to write a note to Beatrice Earl.

  * * *

  Mabel opted to leave her gold sweater at home.

  With Stultz on one side and Levine on the other, Mibs raised her arms to request silence from the crowd at Curtiss Field, which, frankly, was not all that impressive. Not as small as the crowd in Cuba, but for an announcement like this, she expected better.

  “Hello, all,” she said in her charming voice, her red lips curled up perfectly into a wide, vivid smile. Once the quiet was sufficient, Mabel raised her voice to a booming volume and said grandly, “May I introduce you to . . . the Queen of the Air!”

  She began clapping herself, nudging Stultz and Levine to do the same as the crew towed the plane out into the brilliant sunshine. Reporters lifted their heads to get a view of the ruby-red aircraft, but their wonder turned to puzzlement when a conspicuous blemish appeared on the tail end of the fuselage. They exchanged glances and snickered: the name of the plane was distorted, pronouncing Queen of the air with a noticeable gap, filled in with a shade of red, right before the lowercase a.

  Levine, of course, beamed. He had found a solution that fixed the problem, but also did it on a budget, as he instructed Carisi to solve it as he saw fit. And a can of paint was what he saw.

  Mabel ignored the blemish as best she could; after all, she had her plane, she had her pilot, she had her window. The time was hers, regardless of the fact that the reporters were now calling the plane the Queen of the (silent pause) air.

  “We will begin our journey as soon as possible,” she boasted. “We are eager to get under way and show the world what we can do!”

  Stultz nodded dutifully in agreement, his hands behind his back, a check for twenty-five thousand dollars drawn from Mibs’ account folded and waiting in his wallet. Mabel noticed that he rather smelled of booze, which was fine in the afternoon, but in the morning?

  “Once the final preparations are complete, off we go!” Mabel shouted, throwing her hands in the (silent pause) air.

  Then she waited for Charlie to speak, and moved over so he could be front and center. But he only stood there, smiling vaguely, looking dead ahead. She wasn’t going to let Stultz do any talking; by the smell of it, he just might try to order another drink.

  After the reporters had wandered off, Mabel marched over to Levine and took his ar
m. Stultz had disappeared, she was sure, into a dark hangar somewhere with a bottle.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked him, grabbing his arm. “It’s a press conference! You didn’t confer one bit!”

  “You know, Mabel,” Charlie said as he looked at her, his brow furrowed, making his tiny eyes almost disappear, “you got everything you wanted. You’re going to fly over the ocean. That’s what you wanted, right? You got it all. But me? I’m done. All right?”

  Mabel squeezed his arm harder.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not going,” he said flatly, then shrugged. “Not going.”

  “Of course you’re going!” she cried. “We’re in this together—we’re a team, you and me. That’s the way it’s always been!”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said. “The Queen and the idiot? The Queen and her jester with a bump on his head and blood in his eyes? The Queen and her clown with the smashed-up Rolls? Nah. No more. I’m done, Mabel. No more for me.”

  “You’re crazy!” she shouted. “This is just about to happen—this is just about to be real, Charlie. Can’t you see that?”

  Levine nodded. “I see it all,” he said. “It was already real for me. I don’t want to go again. You—you are like I was. You don’t know. You don’t know what it was like to wait for news, the news you don’t wanna hear. And then it’s the news you do hear. You didn’t lose nobody with those bad flights but I—I can’t do it again to my family. I won’t. Even if Grace is long gone, I don’t need to put nobody through that again.”

  “You are talking nonsense,” Mabel snapped. “She is never coming back to you.”

  “You’re not listening,” Levine replied. “It don’t matter if she does or don’t. You can have the best plane in the world, the best pilot—look at Ray—the best pilot on this friggin’ earth and the guy don’t make it. He don’t make it. I still don’t believe it.”

  Levine jerked his arm loose with one solid motion and started to walk away, then stopped and turned around.

  “And you wanna know the real dig, Mabel?” he asked. “Do you? I made it. I’m the guy who made it. And I ain’t no different for it. I’m the same guy. I am the same Levine. Nothin’ changes there.”

  She looked at him as he glared back at her.

  “Nothin’,” he said, then turned and left her.

  * * *

  On the precipice of his immeasurable fame as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle walked away from his life as a literary figure and into one where the criticism was even greater than that of disgruntled readers. He had dabbled in spiritualism, even joined the Society for Psychical Research thirty-five years before, but not until his son, Kingsley—who had been killed in the Great War—contacted him during a séance did he decide to leave all else behind and focus solely on the paranormal.

  His very sanity was questioned, leaving the world and his readers puzzled and irritated that he had abandoned such an iconic role. He was mocked in conversations, he was ridiculed in the newspaper, and he severed a deep friendship with Harry Houdini when Doyle insisted that Houdini’s deceased mother had communicated during a séance led by Lady Doyle, and his friend staunchly disagreed.

  Still, Doyle held to his beliefs, and when he received a letter from Beatrice Earl almost identical to the one she sent Emilie Hinchliffe, he was interested immediately.

  Two weeks after the Endeavour dropped into the ocean, Mrs. Earl was experimenting with her Ouija board, hoping to hear from her son who was recently deceased. A grieving mother, she often made a habit of playing around on the board, but it was little more than a game. If something got through, she’d be pleased. If not, she wasn’t disappointed necessarily; it was just something she hoped might happen.

  But on the night of March 31, Beatrice Earl did receive a message, stated very clearly in all letters, no spaces.

  CANYOUHELPAMANWHOHASDROWNED

  It was not from her son.

  “Who are you?” she asked aloud.

  IWASDROWNEDWITHELSIEMACKAY

  “What happened?” Mrs. Earl queried.

  FOGSTORMWINDSWENTDOWNFROMGREATHEIGHT

  “What do you need from me?”

  MESSAGETOMYWIFEIWANTTOSPEAKWITHHER

  The planchette paused.

  AMINGREATDISTRESS

  There was no one in Britain, let alone a good portion of the world, who did not know of the Endeavour’s disappearance, including Beatrice Earl. She knew who the pilots were. She could not bring herself to try to contact Emilie Hinchliffe, and decided to leave the issue alone. It was none of her business. She was here to talk to her son, and that was that. The next time she brought out the board, however, she barely had touched her fingers to the planchette when another message came through immediately.

  HINCHLIFFETELLMYWIFEIWANTTOSPEAKTOHER

  Mrs. Earl took a deep breath and felt a wave of pity engulf her.

  “Where shall I find her?” she asked.

  PURLEYIFLETTERDOESNOTREACH

  She was trying to keep up as fast as she could while making out the message.

  APPLYDRUMMONDSHIGHSTREETCROYDON

  “Drummonds, High Street, Croydon?” Mrs. Earl repeated. “A solicitor?”

  PLEASEFINDOUTWHATISAYISCORRECT

  The communication stopped; the planchette was still. She did not understand what had happened. How was she supposed to explain it to Hinchliffe’s widow? She felt uncomfortable trying to figure out how to compose a note of that nature.

  She went back to the board the next day, and again the message came like a hair trigger.

  HINCHLIFFEPLEASELETMYWIFEKNOWMRSEARLIIMPLOREYOU.

  “It is such a risk,” Mrs. Earl countered. “She won’t believe it, perhaps.”

  TAKETHERISKMYLIFEWASALLRISKS

  The planchette stopped for a moment, then started again.

  IMUSTSPEAKTOHER

  Mrs. Earl took her fingers off the planchette and, instead of pushing further, wrote a letter to Emilie Hinchliffe and then to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  * * *

  The rain had pummeled Curtiss Field to the point that it was slick and shiny with mud. It had only been raining since that afternoon, but the downpour was relentless and harsh.

  “If this keeps up,” Stultz told Mabel and Levine, who were both quite chilly with each other, “we won’t be able to take off until at least Wednesday.”

  It was Sunday.

  “Even if it doesn’t keep up,” he added, “that field needs to dry. It’s just a bog out there. We’d never get enough speed.”

  “But I told the reporters that we were going to leave any day now,” Mabel argued. “Possibly even tomorrow.”

  “Well,” Stultz said, walking away from her, “we’re not.”

  “What about Wednesday, Wilmer?” Mabel called after him. “Will you be here Wednesday, then? And can we go?”

  “Sure,” he replied, then shut the door of the hangar behind him.

  * * *

  Mabel made sure to ship her diamonds, the forty-three- and the fifty-three-carat, to Paris to await her arrival. She had booked passage for Marcelle on Thursday, so she wouldn’t have to go long without her maid, and was anxious to get back to France. Jenny and Rose Dolly, along with a gaggle of her other friends, promised to be there the moment she stepped off the Queen of the air onto the field at Le Bourget. It would be grand.

  On Wednesday morning, Levine, believing this his last obligation to the Queen and determined not to get on that plane, drove with her out to Curtiss Field to see her off.

  Upon arriving, she stretched one Mabel Boll leg out, alligator-skin heel first, followed by a coffee-colored linen suit and matching hat perched daintily on her head.

  She moved through the awaiting crowd, waving, blowing kisses, showing the world what a woman on the verge of greatness looked like. She was shocked that the Queen of the air was still in the hangar, but it was early yet and it was proving to be a glorious day. As
Stultz had predicted, the field had dried up and was solid again.

  John Carisi met Levine and Mabel in front of the plane, and motioned with a nod of his head to talk in private just as Mabel stopped and faced the reporters.

  “Everything is set!” she announced. “We’ll be towing the plane out now.”

  The reporters, looking puzzled, descended on her all at once.

  She barely heard any of them, except for one voice: “Who’s flying the plane?”

  “Wilmer Stultz is my pilot!” Mabel scoffed, annoyed that the question wasn’t about her.

  Suddenly the little crowd became very, very quiet and one brave soul, centered and somewhat safe in the middle, piped up and volunteered to fall on his sword.

  “So apparently you don’t know,” he said slowly, “that Stultz just took off from Boston this morning with Amelia Earhart for Trepassey, Newfoundland? He’s piloting the Friendship in a transatlantic attempt.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SPRING 1928

  Bob and Mabel Boll.

  Mabel Boll was a woman scorned.

  Stultz was a liar, a con, a drunk, and he had made a fool out of her.

  She found her twenty-five-thousand-dollar check to him on the pilot’s seat of the Queen of the air, so he wasn’t necessarily a thief if you didn’t count robbing a defenseless widow of her one and only dream. Not counting diamonds.

  She demanded that Levine whisk her away from Curtiss Field once she discovered the elaborate bamboozle that most likely involved Putnam, Guest, and that awful little boy Andy Earhart.

  And why? she shouted on the ride back home to Park Avenue.

  “Because I threaten them, that’s why!” Mabel shrieked as they crossed the Williamsburg Bridge. “Because I’m going to be the first woman over, that’s why! They think they’ve beaten Mabel Boll? Well, there is no beating Mabel Boll, and they are going to find out the hard way. Stultz can’t wake up without a bottle of gin in his mouth! Let’s see how far they get with that lush in the pilot’s seat!”