by Anne Stuart
To Stuart Todd (1971-1990),
beloved nephew,
who's flying with the angels now.
First Published October 1990
Electronic Edition Copyright 2015 by Anne Stuart
http://anne-stuart.com
E-book and Cover Formatted by Jessica Lewis
http://authorslifesaver.com
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
All Rights reserved.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
About Anne Stuart
Chapter One
Angela Hogan tipped back in her squeaky office chair, propped her open-toed spectator pumps on the littered desk and surveyed her options. She lit a cigarette, taking in a deep drag, and stared out past the open door to the cavernous airplane hangar beyond. Hogan's Air Freight Service looked efficient, prosperous, the planes shiny, well cared for as they waited their turn to soar out into the bright Illinois sky just outside of Chicago.
And that was the problem, Angela thought. They shouldn't be sitting idle on such a wonderful day. They should be out earning her a dubious living. It was Saturday, a perfect late-spring day in 1937, a day made for flying lessons if nothing else. Only Sparks had been out that day, testing the small Lockheed Vega, checking its paces, and he'd taken no paying customer with him. She didn't know where he was now, but it didn't matter. There were no cash customers on such a perfect flying day.
Her other pilot, Robert Bellamy, was probably sleeping off a hangover. And she was all gussied up to do what she hated most. To charm money from what was left of her mother's family, just enough to keep things in the black for another month.
If she had her choice, she'd be wearing trousers and a tailored shirt instead of her sister Constance's version of a Vionnet day dress. She'd be wearing lace-up brogues instead of these idiotic shoes. Her chestnut hair would be tied back from her angular face, instead of sweeping around it in a seductive pageboy. She'd look like what she was, a pilot, a girl who cared about nothing but flying, her business and her beautiful half-sister, not necessarily in that order. Instead she looked like what she was born, a young woman from the heart of Chicago society, the product of a misalliance between one of 1909's top debutantes and her Irish chauffeur.
Angela's grandmother, the indomitable Harriette Lindsey Maynard, was powerful enough that young Julia's fall from grace was quickly glossed over, particularly since it was preceded by a hasty marriage and followed by Frank Hogan discovering airplanes and becoming scarce indeed. Divorce was out of the question for a Maynard, but frail Julia died young, leaving Frank free to follow his passion for flying, not to mention his passion for a certain blond waitress in Evanston. It didn't leave him free to take his young daughter with him, but by the time Angela was eighteen, her overwhelming grandmother had died, the crash had taken the bulk of the Maynard family fortune and everyone was too concerned with their own financial disaster to spare a thought for one young lady.
She'd had two splendid years away from designer dresses and white gloves and pearls. Away from debutante parties and speakeasies and pressure to make a good marriage. She spent those two years living in a rooming house in east Evanston with her father for the first time, learning to fly.
It hadn't taken her long to realize that was what she'd been born to do. From the moment she'd sat in the cockpit of her father's spiffy little Avro Avian, she felt as if she'd come home. She'd earned her pilot's license in record time, chafing at every delay, and from then on she'd spent every available moment in the sky.
When she wasn't obsessed with flying, she'd been devoted to her little half-sister, Connie, and even managed to enjoy her stepmother Goldie's company. She'd been too absorbed in her own life to realize exactly what Frank was doing during his flights to Canada and back. Exactly what he was carrying and what he was skimming off the top.
His employers, however, had no such problem. They knew Frank was selling a goodly portion of the Canadian whiskey they brought in to a few customers of his own, and they had no qualms about making their displeasure known. Al Capone wasn't famed for his forbearance, and when Angela had just turned twenty-one years old, the rooming house exploded in a ball of fire, killing Frank and Goldie and old Mrs. McCarthy, their landlady.
Angela had been flying at the time; Connie had been in school. In the morning they'd been a happy, if somewhat motley family. By the afternoon they were two orphans with no home, no money, nothing but an old airplane hangar on a private airfield, two slightly battered planes and the uncertain fear that gangland recrimination might not end there.
Angela's tears had dried the moment she understood the situation. The police made it very clear—Frank Hogan's feckless ways had gotten them into this mess, endangering his children, killing his wife and another innocent woman. Therefore he wasn't worth mourning. What mattered now was for Angela to make some sort of life for herself and her teenage sister.
She'd managed to section off a part of the cavernous hangar and to beg and borrow enough furniture to provide a makeshift home for Connie while she waited to see whether mob honor had been satisfied or if one morning the entire airplane hangar was going to explode.
Her small, post-crash inheritance lasted them exactly fourteen months, long enough for Connie, now calling herself Constance, to graduate from high school, long enough for Angela to win a few air races, earn a little bit of money giving lessons, carrying freight.
But Angela couldn't earn enough, not at first. People were reluctant to hire a woman, a young one at that. They were frightened enough of airplanes, not to mention the utter panic of entrusting their lives to a female not much past twenty-one. So Angela had made her first trip back into Chicago, to her Great-uncle Richard, who'd always had a fondness for her.
His gift had enabled her to become the first woman to fly nonstop from Chicago to Denver, not to mention pay their overdue bills and keep Constance in nail polish. The newspaper coverage, calling Angela the newest darling of the air, brought in more business, enough to keep them going awhile longer.
It had gone on like that, Angela thought, for far too long, each time finding another relative with an interest in air travel and a not completely decimated income. She'd hoped she'd been past all that. For a while it seemed as if a happy ending was hers when Hal Ramsey had flown into her life.
He'd been everything she'd ever wanted. One of the world's great pilots, he'd made her puny little records seem laughable. He'd forgotten more about flying than she would ever know, and he'd taken Hogan Air Freight in hand and brought in more business than they could handle. They'd bought two more planes, hired Thomas Crowley, better known as Sparks, as a third pilot, and become practically solvent. And Hal, dear man, had loved her, wanted to marry her and never pushed her further than she was ready to go.
She wished he had pushed her. Maybe now she'd have something to show for those years beside
s a mountain of debts, a mechanic who didn't know a twin-engine from a biplane, one pilot whose eyesight wasn't all that it should be and another who was an out and out drunk and a thief.
But she kept postponing things, and two weeks before the wedding Hal had died trying to break the record flight from Newfoundland to Havana, Cuba. And breaking her heart at the same time.
So she was back to begging money from her family. She had enough to make ends meet, particularly since she was about to fire both Bellamy and the half-baked mechanic he'd recommended. Constance had taken a job at the local Woolworths, though all her money seemed to be eaten up by the local movie house and her inexhaustible lust for cosmetics, but even with the planes idle far too much of the time, the money still managed to stretch far enough, at least for now.
Not, however, to pay the expenses of a record-breaking flight from Newfoundland to Havana. And that was exactly what Angela intended to do.
She knew just how to approach her Cousin Clement. He was a decent businessman—he had to be, in the dark days of the Depression, in order to keep any of his money. He was looking ahead toward the darkening clouds of warfare that hung over Europe and thinking of the future. And he knew as well as she did that the future of warfare, and the world, was in the air.
The one drawback was that Clement considered her merely ornamental. If she'd been a boy, all the money left to the far-flung Maynard family would have been at her command. As a female, she had to work doubly hard to prove her abilities. Thank heavens for her idol and inspiration, Amelia Earhart. The more publicity Amelia, or AE as she preferred to be known, got, the better Angela's own position was. And with AE's upcoming round-the-world flight, Clement would want to get on the bandwagon in some way or other. Angela had every intention of helping him do just that.
If only Sparks wasn't lying to her about his eyesight. If only she had another pilot she could count on. If only she wasn't fighting tooth and nail for every single contract with her biggest competitor, Transamerica Freight. Not that Charlie Olker had ever actually flown across America. That beer-bellied old creep had probably forgotten how to fly, probably forgotten everything but how to steal business from her. He used his past as a pilot in the Great War to good advantage. Everyone loved a hero, and even some of those who knew she was a better pilot still wanted to help out a veteran, even if it meant paying Olker's inflated prices and risking his badly-maintained planes.
He hadn't had a crash yet, but that time would come, and Angela didn't know whether she'd be glad or sorry. No pilot ever wished a crash on another one, but Olker's sheer, blind luck drove her crazy.
Damn, she didn't want to face Clement. She wanted to yank off the silver charm bracelet her mother had left her, dump her high heels on the cement floor and go flying. She wanted to be free, soaring high above life and its petty problems. She didn't want to have to charm and weasel money out of someone, and she most definitely didn't want to have to do what she was about to do.
She heard the slight shuffle of Bellamy's footsteps and mentally braced herself, taking a final drag off her Lucky Strike and leaning forward to stub it out in the pink ashtray Constance had given her for her birthday.
"Got another one of those?" Robert Bellamy lounged in the doorway, his self-assured smile fixed on his handsome face.
"No," she said, meeting his gaze with a stern one of her own. In the two years he'd worked for her, Bellamy still hadn't realized that she was immune to his somewhat shopworn charm. He was a very handsome man, she had to grant him that, and not much older than she was. Someone had once made the great mistake of telling him he looked like Robert Taylor, and he made a determined effort to present his pretty profile whenever the opportunity arose. His fondness for liquor had started during Prohibition, but unlike most of the heavy drinkers of that era, legalizing it only made it easier, not less enticing. The signs of debauchery hadn't set in, apart from a faint puffiness around his eyes, but he didn't have long to wait.
"What'd you want to see me about, boss?" he asked, his ingratiating smile never wavering.
She wished she had another cigarette, but she didn't dare light one, afraid he'd notice that her hands were trembling. Up in the air she was completely fearless—down here she was feeling cowed and miserable.
Not that she'd ever show it. "Robert," she said, clearly and distinctly. "You're fired."
He blinked, then straightened. "What did you say?"
"You heard me. You're fired. You and that so-called mechanic you brought along. Effective immediately. Get your flight bag and get out."
Robert Bellamy could look very ugly indeed. For a moment his expression soured, and then he pulled himself together with all the aplomb of a practiced liar. "You want to tell me why?"
"Gladly." She gave in and lit another cigarette, figuring he was probably so hung over he wouldn't notice her hands trembling. "You're drunk half the time. You fly drunk, you don't maintain basic safety standards and you and Martin have been skimming money from some of the accounts. Martin has been reselling my fuel and pocketing the money. You've been helping him do it. I can't prove it, so I can't call the police as I'd love to do. But I'll take my chances if you don't get out of my sight within the next hour."
"Think you're pretty smart, don't you?" he snarled. "This is a sucker's proposition, lady. You're on a crash course with failure, and nothing Martin or I did will make any difference. It'll just come a little faster this way."
"I'm not going to fail," she said calmly. "Why don't you see if Charlie Olker will give you a job? You two seem to be his kind of employees."
Robert Bellamy grinned then, an ugly expression. "Doll," he said, "who do you think sent us here in the first place?"
*
Clement was just as glad to have her call and cancel, Angela thought wearily, alone in the darkened office. He knew as well as she did what she wanted from him, and Clement hadn't remained a wealthy man in a time when one-third of the nation was on the dole without being particularly loath to part with his money. There was a note of triumph in his voice when he told her he was heading out to California and wouldn't be back for a month.
All right, she'd thought. She could live with that. She hadn't survived as long as she had by negative thinking. She'd go ahead with her plans, assuming she'd be able to talk her tight-fisted cousin out of the money. As long as his wife didn't hear about it, she was pretty sure she could.
The radio was on in the background. Some in-house orchestra was playing Gershwin, something upbeat and jazzy. Constance probably hadn't returned home yet—she usually went out to the double feature on Saturday night, and there was a new Joan Crawford movie out. Angela never could understand Constance's fondness for Joan Crawford and noble suffering, but she'd accepted it. Katharine Hepburn was more her style, though heaven knows it seemed like years since she'd been to a movie.
She hadn't dared leave the hangar until she was certain Bellamy and his pal had left. She'd been so tense, so angry since her confrontation that she'd done nothing but sit in her chair and smoke, crumpling up the empty pack and starting in on another. Her throat was raw, her eyes stung and her nerves were shredded. And much as she needed it, she was in no mood for night flying.
What she needed to do was get out of these stupid clothes and find Sparks. Tell him what had happened, ask his opinion. Sparks was someone you could count on for a shoulder to cry on, for good advice, for a slap on the back or a hug when you needed it. Though chances are he'd want to go after Bellamy. He'd never liked the other pilot, had even warned her against him, but at the time she thought she'd had no choice in the matter.
He probably knew what she'd had to do. And he would never say I told you so, God bless him. If she knew him as well as she thought she did, and after five years she figured that she did, he'd be over at Tony's Bar and Grille, the best Italian restaurant and pilot's bar in the entire universe. She'd find him, weep into her beer a little bit and let him cheer her up. And between the two of them they'd figure out what thei
r next step was.
"You there, Angela?" Sparks’s rough Irish voice echoed through the hangar.
"In here," she called, switching on the goose necked desk lamp and pushing her hair out of her eyes. If it wasn't such an effective tool for charming money out of her cousins, she'd hack it all off. She had a hard enough time fitting it under a leather flight helmet, and even tying it back wasn't good enough.
Sparks loomed up in the darkness, his craggy face creased in a smile, his blue eyes sparkling beneath his bushy eyebrows. "Rough day, honey?"
"You bet. I fired those two bums."
"It's about time."
"They were on the take from Olker."
"I know."
"You knew?" she shrieked, finding a piece of string on the floor and wrapping it around her thick hair. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Would you have believed me?"
"I always believe you, Sparks," she said.
"Then why didn't you listen when I told you not to hire that trash?"
"Just because I believe you doesn't mean I listen to you," she said ruefully.
He shook his head, used to her by now. "Got any more of that coffee?"
Angela glanced over toward the aluminum pot still simmering on the beat-up hot plate. "Have you ever known me not to?" she countered, pulling herself out of the chair and stretching her cramped body. "I'll pour you a cup."
"Make it two. There's someone I want you to meet."
She stopped in the act of reaching for the chipped ceramic mugs. "Who?"
"A new pilot. You know as well as I do we can't keep this business going with just the two of us. You have to spend too much time drumming up business and dealing with the paper work as it is, and there's a limit to how much flying I can safely do. Let's face it, we need another man."
"We need another pilot," she corrected. "The question is, how are we going to pay for it?"
"I've got that all worked out. He's got a plane of his own, in the shop somewhere down in South America. He'll work for expenses and a percentage, and as soon as he can get his plane up here, he'll work part-time for storage. You can't say no to an offer like that."
