Levine said nothing, not wanting to remind her that she was the one who had flown a bit top-heavy to Havana and was one drink short of being paralyzed.
“Where’s Bert Acosta?” she said, throwing up her arm. “He’ll fly me!”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Levine ventured. “He just lost his pilot’s license for flying under a bridge in Connecticut in some publicity stunt for spark plugs.”
Mabel pursed her lips and thought for a moment, but came up dry.
“There’s got to be somebody!” she said. “There must be one pilot out there who is brave enough to fly with me!”
“I’m sure there’s someone willing to cash your check,” Levine said tiredly, and thought to himself silently: We just have to find the right putz who couldn’t have anything to do with her before they’re already in the air.
* * *
When Mabel opened her front door, her anger was replaced by rage that had evolved, dropped, and rolled over into a ball of bitterness and anguish bigger than she had ever known, including the moment when she read that the Colombian coffee king had died.
The reporter noted that she was “in some perturbation” when she informed him of the inconceivable depravity that had been committed against her hours before.
“I can’t understand it,” she said adamantly. “Wilmer was down here only a couple of days ago and I asked him when he was coming back to fly the Queen of the air. He said in just a few days, and that he would be back here today for sure.
“And now,” she continued, her voice cracking, “he has gone and taken off with that other woman and I was sure he would fly with me. I depended on him.”
It was too much for Miss Boll. Her wavering voice broke into sobs as she wept into the telephone receiver. “And the very day he was supposed to come back, he flies to Boston! I don’t understand it. I am so upset. I am so upset!”
There was nothing left for Mabel to say. She couldn’t fix the fact that Stultz was gone; she could only strike out against it. She hung up the phone knowing that she had done the best she could, then smeared mascara across her face as she attempted to dry her tears, and decided to find a pilot by nightfall.
* * *
Captain Oliver “Boots” LeBoutillier was an extraordinarily handsome man, which did not play into Mabel’s favor. A foot taller than anyone else at Curtiss Field, he was used to ladies flirting with him, so Mabel’s looks and charms did nothing to sway him into taking on the flight; it was only her check that made it appealing to him.
He was a Canadian RAF flying ace in the Great War with ten aerial victories; he had sparked the running dogfight in which Manfred von Richthofen—the Red Baron—was eventually killed. After the war, LeBoutillier became a barnstormer, skywriter, and flight instructor, giving Andy Earhart her first lesson in a twin-engine plane.
“Amelia,” LeBoutillier corrected Mabel.
“Sure,” she replied.
He brought along with him Captain Arthur Argles, an expert mechanic, also formerly RAF. Frankly, Mabel was beyond caring about credentials at that point; she just needed a pair of hands to get her into the air accompanied by at least two eyes.
She was sure that was all she needed.
* * *
Knocking on Mrs. Earl’s front door, Emilie was instantly relieved to see a soft, middle-aged woman and not a professional medium who might charge Emilie a fee.
Over several hours and many cups of tea, Mrs. Earl discussed the messages with Emilie, who corroborated the information. She found Mrs. Earl to be a kind woman who, like Emilie, was grieving for someone she loved dearly. Mrs. Earl only wanted to aid in the suffering of someone who had lost a loved one and was grieving deeply; she wished the same for herself.
Emilie was caught. She didn’t want to become involved in the overactive imagination of a well-meaning woman; after all, there was a possibility that Ray could still be alive and stuck in the tundra of Newfoundland. In contrast, if Ray was indeed dead and was attempting to communicate, she had a responsibility to remain engaged and find out as much as possible. When Mrs. Earl asked if she wanted her to pursue further contact, Emilie answered honestly and said that she didn’t know. She had no convictions about an afterlife either way and never had. Nevertheless, the responsibility was tugging at her from her entire being. If it was Ray—if it was Ray—she had to listen.
Mrs. Earl, who was a member of the London Spiritualist Alliance, had been involved with a women’s study group headed by Eileen Garrett, the most famous and renowned medium in Europe. Mrs. Earl had sat privately with Garrett and received messages from her deceased son, and urged Emilie to do the same should she want to. Emilie flinched at the word “deceased.” Her reaction to it was still fury.
Eileen Garrett was well respected and ran in a high echelon of social and intellectual circles; she counted as dear friends H. G. Wells, James Joyce—whom she often discussed theories of the unconscious with over tea at the Hotel Café Royal—Katherine Mansfield, William Butler Yeats, and Aldous Huxley. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
It was Garrett’s no-nonsense approach to her abilities that appealed the most to Conan Doyle, so it was her name that immediately came to mind with a sensitive case such as Captain Hinchliffe’s. He had asked Mrs. Earl if she would sit with Garrett to see if anything from Hinchliffe would come through. As the session began, Garrett seemed to be communicating with him, too, and cited that Emilie was not English and that the Hinchliffes had two daughters, one of them a baby. Impressed with the results, Conan Doyle felt that only repetitive and further results that included many more details would have to come forward if the case was to hold up as spiritual communication.
It was then that he drafted a letter to Mrs. Hinchliffe about Mrs. Earl, and hoped stringently that she would reply.
* * *
When Emilie returned home after tea with Mrs. Earl, Gordon and Ro Sinclair, who had been staying with her, scoffed when she told them she had agreed to seek out Eileen Garrett and see what transpired there.
“These are new days for you, and I loathe to see you upset further than you already have every right to be,” Gordon ventured carefully. “It’s an impossible time, and perhaps dealing with the things at hand is the most urgent matter at the moment.”
Emilie nodded in agreement. “What I have learned from Mrs. Earl seemed quite possible,” she replied, knowing that Gordon only had her best interests at heart. “And I shall be convinced if my husband tells me something that only he knows, or communicates something which is now unknown to myself.”
She attended the sitting as an anonymous friend of Mrs. Earl. Eileen Garrett welcomed them into a room, and just as meeting Mrs. Earl comforted her, Emilie felt the same way about Eileen. She was quite fashionably dressed—no Gypsy rags tied around her head or an abundance of chiming bracelets—and she seemed cultured and pleasant.
Emilie sat down by the fireplace with the other two women. She took out her shorthand pad and a pencil and placed it on her knee.
Eileen Garrett sat back in a tall armchair, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Emilie was slightly jittery: Would the medium speak in tongues? Would items fly about? Would Ray appear? She doubted she was ready for any of that. Instead, Eileen breathed deeply for several minutes, and after a long silence she leaned toward Emilie and spoke.
“You are a newcomer,” Eileen said in a deep voice. “You have not been here before. There are two or three people around you. One of them is a lady, around sixty-two or sixty-five. A small figure. She is Elise or Elizabeth.”
Emilie began writing her notes in shorthand. Her grandmother, a very slight woman, was Elizabeth; she had died in her midsixties.
Emilie said nothing, and continued her note-taking.
“Then here comes someone dear to you. A very young man. He went out suddenly. He was very vivacious and full of life. He passed on due to strong congestion of the heart and lungs, but he was in a state of unconsciousness. He shows me portraits. He mentions the name Joan, litt
le Joan. He was full of strength, full of speed. Perhaps cars or planes. He passed after having flown in an airplane. He says it was no one’s fault. He was thirty-three.”
Emilie made sure not to show any expression on her face and kept writing. All of the information was true, but all had been in the newspapers since Ray’s disappearance.
“He talks of a little baby. He mentions the name Joan again. He had a portrait of Joan when he crashed. He mentions the names Herman and Wilhelm. He has seen them both here.”
Herman Hess, a close friend of Ray’s, was killed in a crash in 1925; Wilhelm Kepner, another close friend, was killed in another flying accident in 1926.
Still, Emilie did not raise her head and focused only on her shorthand.
“He seems so anxious,” the voice went on. “He started early in the morning, and was very excited. At two o’clock was the last sight of land. At midnight, the gale became terrible, and he got into sleet and rain. The aeroplane would not live in the gale and I was buffeted about terribly. I hovered near water. At three a.m. abandoned hope. Terror never. But anguish. Knew every half hour it might be the end. I never lost course. I knew exactly where I was.”
Emilie sensed the last part of the message was coming directly from Ray. The voice had changed, varying in staccato tempo and tone between what seemed like a narrator—perhaps the spirit who was being channeled through Eileen? Emilie thought—and Ray himself as Garrett spoke in one voice, then another. Was she opening the door to Ray? Emilie thought. Was it her husband? She purged the thought and focused on her notes.
“He came to death quickly, a few miles from land. Approximately one or two. At three a.m. he gave up hope completely. His companion was frightened. Then the machine was waterlogged.”
Emilie forced herself to keep writing, though she was becoming more shocked. The voice changed.
“Have you seen Brancker? Brancker told you not to hope anymore. I curse myself that I did not listen to Brancker. Everyone said the weather was bad.”
Sir Sefton Brancker, a close confidant of Ray’s, was the air vice marshal and the director of civil aviation in Britain. Passionate about developing commercial aviation, he had talked about it at great length with Hinchliffe. He was concerned about Emilie’s financial state, and doubted that any funds would be forthcoming from Lord Inchcape. As a result, he’d organized a fund through the RAF and civil air associations to help the Hinchliffe family and tried to help further by putting pressure on Lord Inchcape through his friends at the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Mirror, and the Evening Standard.
This message sent chills down Emilie’s spine. No one, aside from herself, Gordon, and Ro, had known about her conversations with Sir Sefton. Eileen Garrett took an extended breath and held out her hand toward Emilie.
“You knew I wanted to do it,” she said in this different voice, much quieter than the first. “I was coming to the end of my flying. I could not have flown very much longer. My eyesight was my life. I was drowned twenty minutes after I left the wreck.”
Emilie’s hand froze. She could not transcribe that. She would not transcribe that. She looked slowly up at Eileen Garrett, whose outstretched arm fell back to her side.
“Your husband says that you knew he wanted to do it,” the deeper voice said, returning, the pace more frantic. “He did it to provide for you. He also felt he was losing his nerve. Now or never was the moment. He took his courage in both hands.”
The voice then changed in pitch and pace, became higher and more fast-paced.
“Oh, God. It was awful. From one until three o’clock. He had forgotten everything but his wife and children. His last human effort was to swim to land. I cannot say his name but I will spell it: EFFILHCNIH. I see it in a glass.”
In an abrupt rush, Emilie felt her pulse pounding in her ears. She was taken by a wave of static that enveloped all of her: her fingers, her neck, her scalp, all prickled with it, drowning out all sound but the beating of her heart. Her hands were numb. Emilie tried to breathe, tried to steady herself. When Eileen Garrett opened her eyes, Emilie closed her notebook. She felt her knees tremble as she stood up, thanked Mrs. Garrett with a handshake, and then left, holding on to the arm of Mrs. Earl.
* * *
The Queen of Diamonds, clad in a suitable overseas ensemble, was exceedingly nervous. In a wool serge dress and a heavy, fur-collared coat, she donned her helmet and stood beside LeBoutillier and Argles as the photographers clicked away in the early hours of the summer morning. Then she pranced over to the front of the plane, took out her compact and powdered her nose, cooed, “My sweetheart!” and then, unfortunately, powdered the plane’s nose as well. LeBoutillier rolled his eyes.
With enough fuel on board, the plane could easily land in Rome or Vienna; it would depend on which was closest after flying the Great Circle route across the Atlantic, mimicking Lindbergh’s path. Vienna was Mabel’s choice; she still had a bad taste in her mouth about Hinchliffe and Levine taking off to see Mussolini without her.
The gathering at the hangar at Roosevelt Field was a who’s who of Broadway notables, all of Mabel’s friends, enemies, and people who wanted to say they were there. Even Peggy Hopkins Joyce made a cameo should disaster strike and diamonds from Mabel’s body scatter across the field. It was clear that the well-wishers had not risen for the occasion but migrated out to Long Island at the tail end of a spirited night.
Mabel did her fair share of waving, blowing kisses, and making sure she was in the frame of every camera. Unable to stand it any longer, Levine led her to the plane, put a hand firmly on her derriere, and pushed her into the cabin like a large sack of grain.
As LeBoutillier and Argles took their seats up front, Mabel reclined on top of the gas tank for the five-hour flight to Harbour Grace.
Earhart and the crew of the Friendship, including the traitor Bill Stultz, had been in Trepassey, Newfoundland, southwest of Harbour Grace, waiting for the weather to oblige. Always waiting for the weather. Earhart had been flying as an amateur for years, held a pilot’s license, and was the first woman to be licensed by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. Few of her associates knew anything of her career as an aviator, but her position as director of Denison House in Boston and her social work background, education at Columbia University, and experience with the Canadian Red Cross was exactly what George Putnam and Amy Guest were looking for. She was strictly in charge of the logbook; she would never, in the course of the flight, act as a pilot or perform any pilot’s duties. She was simply a passenger. The physical resemblance to Charles Lindbergh himself was sure to label her as “Lady Lindy”; the marketing was nearly built in. Mabel Boll couldn’t come close to competing for the slot.
But now the two women were in a feverish fight for who would get across first, although neither would admit it. Waiting to rocket from Newfoundland, the Queen of the air was far more powerful, clocking an extra twenty to thirty miles an hour, while the Friendship, a seaplane that had to land on water—like Frances Grayson’s behemoth, Dawn—was significantly heavier and typically made several attempts before successfully taking off. On the morning of Mabel’s departure from Harbour Grace, the Friendship attempted eight unsuccessful takeoffs, unloading everything nonessential after every attempt—including changes of clothing, a thermos, a camera, and some tools—before Stultz gave up and decided to wait for better weather the following day.
The crew of the Queen of the air saw this as a phenomenal sign and, on a mechanical level, believed they had the superior machine and a better chance to make it across. Their takeoff from Roosevelt was flawless, an uneventful flight with good weather and beautiful, clear skies. In Harbour Grace, the Queen of the air was refueled for takeoff the next morning.
“They can’t even get that thing off of the bay,” Mabel told anyone who would listen. “If you can’t get that elephant off the water, you’re not going to make it across the Atlantic!”
LeBoutillier made no comment and set about getting the weather rep
orts for the next day. It was what Stultz was doing, also hoping to depart the next morning when the winds were calmer and conditions were much more in the Friendship’s favor.
* * *
Heavy rain. Dense fog. Barreling winds. Despite the glorious weather the Queen of the air encountered on the way up to Harbour Grace, the gloomy weather they had all feared swept in from the north, and at once the race for the Atlantic was stagnated in both camps. For days, the weather reports furnished by Doc Kimball read ominously. From his desk in Manhattan, he analyzed it all for the crew of the Friendship, who were financing the reports and graciously sharing them with the crew of the Queen of the air; he predicted bad weather after worse.
On the first day of clear weather, the crew of the Friendship discovered that fifty gallons of water had seeped into one of the pontoons, making takeoff impossible. Farther north, the crew of the Queen of the air rushed into the plane at daybreak and made a victorious ascent into the sky, leaving Earhart and the turncoat Stultz landbound and despondent. They could never catch up to Boll’s plane now, let alone overtake them. It took hours to pump the water out of the pontoon and fix the leak, by which time the Friendship’s crew was exhausted and running dry of any sort of hope at all.
In the air, however, the heavy fog of the Atlantic immediately descended on the Queen of the air, smothering it and wrapping around it so thickly that both LeBoutillier and Argles lost their way in the swirling obscurity. After flying for several hundred miles, they were forced to turn back. Mabel got off the plane, openly weeping.
For the press, the rivalry between the two women was nothing short of a windfall: reports shot back and forth of which crew was doing what, who was planning for a flight the next day, who had an oil leak that might give the edge to the other aviatrix. Both camps, stationed literally in the middle of nowhere—before the Friendship’s arrival, the biggest occurrence in Trepassey was seeing who got off the train from St. John’s every week—had nothing else to cover. Crowded into rooming houses, the reporters quickly exhausted any news of the flights when, every day, bad weather kept both crews on the ground, stalling any developments. And reporters, with nothing else to do, have a tendency to do anything to file copy by deadline. Any copy.
Crossing the Horizon Page 37
