Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  He nods to the box, which I’ve laid on the sofa table. “What’s that?”

  “Some photographs she wanted me to have.”

  A frown drifts across his face. “Have you seen them?”

  “Not yet. I thought they might require a little fortification.” I jiggle the glass. “Say, you look as if you could use a little fortification yourself. Can I pour you another?”

  We end up side by side on the sofa, drinking a pair of doubles at six o’clock in the morning, as we stare at the cardboard box of photographs Irene gave me. Now, another thing I should have mentioned earlier. For all its grace and homelike comfort, Coolibah is curiously sparse of photographs. Believe me, I notice these things. Most people will have far too many photos cramming the walls and shelves and every available surface; it’s the curse of the modern home, in my opinion. All those framed images lined up in rows, like soldiers, and not one of them in twenty shows any regard for form or light or subject or composition, even by accident; they’re just jumbles of anonymous, blurred, badly lit, badly dressed people or—worse yet!—that deadly plague, the landscape. A photograph should be a thing of beauty, in my opinion, and if it’s just there to recall a family reunion or show off some delightful holiday you took to San Diego or remember how Aunt Mildred looked at her high school graduation, why, stick the old thing in an album so it doesn’t steal the limelight from something worth looking at.

  So it’s not as if I don’t approve the paucity of photographs in the Lindquist household. It’s just odd. And I have the feeling the solution to this mystery lies before me, except I’m unwilling to lift the lid that conceals it. I feel as if I have spent the past month approaching a precipice, step by step, and now there’s nowhere left to go, the edge lies before me—much as it did on Ki’ilau, as Lindquist described the events in Spain to me in calm, precise, terrible words like the dripping of rain into a barrel. And I cannot take that last step, because where will I go? Right over the edge into nothing.

  “Did she seem upset to you?” asks Olle.

  “Does she ever seem upset? That’s not her style, and you know it.”

  “I know. But you understand me. Is she going to be okay?”

  “She’s survived worse. It’s just a cat.”

  “It’s not just a cat. You know that.” He drinks. I pull out my cigarettes and offer him one, and he’s grateful. He lights me up first, then himself, and then he adds, “You loved that cat.”

  “Says you. Now, listen up. There’s something you need to understand. You know her dad was a drunk, right?”

  “She’s mentioned it.”

  “So when your parent is a drunk, you learn certain things. You learn to hide what you’re feeling. You learn that most people can’t be trusted. You learn that if you love somebody, that person is probably going to hurt you, and there’s nothing you can do about it but try not to love people if you can possibly help it.”

  Olle reaches for an ashtray.

  I continue. “Of course, some do the opposite. You go around falling in love with every last person you meet, hoping someone will take you in like some kind of stray animal and keep you fed and watered and warm. All depends on the person. But I’d say your wife is among the first tribe.”

  “Takes one to know one?”

  “You bet.”

  Olle finishes the bourbon and heads for the bottle. He refills himself, tops me up a little, and sets the bottle down on the sofa table next to the cardboard box. He settles himself back down beside me—he’s a big man, solid Scandinavian frame—and says, “She won’t stop grieving him. I don’t think she ever will.”

  “Can you blame her?”

  “I fell in love with her the first time I saw her. I never thought she . . . I never in a hundred years thought I stood a chance with her. The day she married me, I was the happiest man alive. Of course, I knew I couldn’t compare to him, but I thought I could make her happy. I could be something else to her. She needed someone dependable, a reliable husband after what she went through. I thought I was that man. I thought I could accept being the second place in her heart, as long as I had some place there at all. As long as she was sleeping next to me at night, I thought I could win her over.”

  “It was a nice thought.”

  “She never talks about him. I wish she would. I’d know she was getting over him. Well, if you ask me, that fellow was no hero. Always taking risks, doing just what he wanted, never caring about anybody but himself. If you ask me—”

  “Careful,” I say.

  He turns to me and scrunches his eyebrows together, and I realize he doesn’t know. Lindquist hasn’t told him the truth.

  I shrug. “You’re not an impartial observer, that’s all.”

  “No, I guess I’m not. I hate the son of a gun and always will. All I have in this world is what he left behind.” He rises to his feet and sets down the empty glass. “I better see about the kids now.”

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good—”

  But he’s already lurching through the door, and I think it just figures, Lindquist would find another fellow who likes his liquor.

  I spend some time staring at the box, finishing my cigarette. I have no further taste for bourbon, for some reason. From upstairs comes the creak of floorboards and the murmur of voices, as Olle wakes the children. He’s a good father. I’ve seen him with Doris and Wesley, and he loves his kids, no doubt about that, plays games and offers hugs and all those things. Life is not divided neatly into good people and bad people, good parents and bad parents. We are all of us human and scarred with sin. We make mistakes, some small and some terrible.

  But he has drunk two double glasses of fine Kentucky bourbon before breakfast.

  I stub out the cigarette and rise. The box can wait.

  By the time I’ve got the ankle-biters dressed and fed and delivered safely to the schoolhouse gate, I’m so weary my eyes are crossing. I should go to bed. Instead I pour myself some of Lani’s good, strong coffee, light myself another cigarette, and return to the cardboard box in Olle’s library. Except Olle is already there, asleep on the sofa, and the pictures lie scattered around him.

  I pick them up, one by one, and the funny thing is I don’t look at them. I don’t believe I want to know what’s trapped inside these photographs. But I stack them neatly on my lap, and on the very top—I can’t help noticing this—there sits a wedding photograph.

  Now, it’s possible I arranged it on purpose, as I picked them up; that I subconsciously sorted these photographs, without really looking, and crowned the whole stack with this one, to be examined first. Weddings are always the most interesting of human events to capture on film, after all. All those people gathered together to witness the union of two people who belong to them, and who will now belong to each other. How do you tell the story of all those individual stories, how do you weave it all together in a single frame?

  This one was taken outdoors, probably on the lawn somewhere. In fact, I can’t quite say how I know it’s a wedding, because the bride’s not wearing white, but I do. Her plain, modest dress that might be pale blue or yellow (I have the feeling it’s not pink), and her hat is small and elegant. She’s holding a small bouquet of tropical flowers in one hand, and her other arm is looped over the elbow of her groom, in his neat suit of what must be linen, judging by its rumpled texture. It’s Irene and Olle, of course. Their wedding day, the happiest day of Olle’s life. But they’re not alone.

  I lift the photograph and bring it close.

  Next to her stand two children, aged about four or five. A boy and girl with bright blond hair and uncertain smiles. Doris and Wesley.

  “Miss Janey?”

  I jump so hard, I nearly drop the photograph. The others scatter to the floor around me, black-and-white images of people I recognize, faces I know, small, tender kaleidoscopes of family life. I bend to gather them back up.

  “Lani! You startled me.”

  She glances to Olle’s snoring figure on the sofa. �
��I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Janey, but . . . my goodness, are you all right?”

  “I’m perfectly fine, Janey, thank you. I was just looking at this wonderful picture of Mr. and Mrs. Lindquist on their wedding day.”

  “It was a beautiful day,” says Lani.

  “A year or two ago now, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, Miss Janey. About a year ago last September. I’m awfully sorry, but what should I tell Mrs. Rofrano?”

  I stare at her, without a single shred of comprehension. “Mrs. Rofrano? Here?”

  “She’s a friend of Mrs. Lindquist. That’s what I came to tell you. She’s waiting on the lanai.”

  I met Sophie Rofrano only once, while I was in Los Angeles trying to pick up the trail of the lost pilots. At the time, I thought if I could only find the reclusive George Morrow, I could squeeze the necessary details from him. The trouble was, nobody could tell me where he lived, nobody had seen or spoken to him in years. It was all false starts and somebody’s friend’s wife’s cousin spotting him at her horse trainer’s guest cottage in Rancho Cucamonga, or not. That kind of thing.

  And the worst of it was that I couldn’t reveal what I knew, for fear of word getting around that I had found Samuel Mallory, or rather I had found his remains and the remains of his airplane. That I suspected Irene Foster had not only survived her famous disappearance in 1937 but that she and her husband had left Mallory to die in the Spanish badlands while they flew off to start a new life together.

  But then I went through the property records on the Morrow house in Burbank and discovered that it had been sold to Mr. and Mrs. Octavian Rofrano in the early fall of 1937. I’d written a letter, polite as could be, explaining that I was a journalist writing a follow-up piece on the whole affair, the tenth anniversary of the disappearance looming and all that, and perhaps she could answer a few questions for me. She’d refused, of course, but I have my methods of persuasion, and without getting into any of the details, let’s just say we met for coffee a week or two later at a diner near what had once been Rofrano’s Airfield, that icon of the golden age of California aviation. The old place was now getting paved over to become part of somebody’s studio lot, having been sold to the government in 1942 for the use of the U.S. Air Force, and this diner was all that remained of the era.

  As you might imagine, she wasn’t much help. Those innocent blue eyes, my goodness. She sipped her coffee with cream and sugar and pecked away at an apricot Danish, and she kept checking her watch because her youngest was due home from school any minute. “Irene met Clara just after she was born,” she told me, “which was only a few months before she left for that round-the-world derby, and I’m so grateful she had the chance to hold my baby girl in her arms. We were all such good friends.”

  That was nice, I said. But what about the flight? Why did Morrow sell his house to you after he called off the search in June? Did he say anything about Irene? Any clue about what might have happened to her?

  “Oh, we didn’t meet George at all,” she said. “It was all done through an agent. He was just broken-hearted. He’d poured his fortune into Irene’s career, you see, and now he’d lost everything. We bought the house so that he would have something to live on. But we never heard a word from him directly. I always thought he just couldn’t go on without her.”

  Interesting, I said. And you don’t have any idea where he went? Where he might be living now? Any chance I might be able to get in touch with him?

  Sophie fixed me with those big, appealing eyes and flat-out lied through her teeth. “I haven’t the faintest idea, I’m afraid,” she said firmly. “I sometimes wonder if he’s even alive anymore.”

  Outside, the weather’s taken a turn, and the first thing I notice is not Sophie Rofrano but the rain that lashes against the railing of the lanai and the wind that bends the palms. Then a woman turns away from contemplation of the wild weather and startles at the sight of me. She’s wearing a pair of slacks the color of mustard and a white shirt, hair tied back by a patterned scarf, pocketbook tucked under her arm along with a newspaper. I consider what’s contained beneath that scarf, the knowledge behind those eyes. I ask her what the devil she’s doing here. She tells me she’s here to see Mrs. Lindquist.

  “I’m afraid you’ve missed her. She’s off to pick up a package on the other side of the island. But she ought to be back before long. Something to drink? Lani’s bringing more coffee.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You must have just come in off the morning boat.”

  “Actually, I flew,” she says, a little smug.

  “Did you, now? Must have been something important.”

  She regards me warily and taps the newspaper with her index finger. I draw the cigarette case from the pocket of my trousers and tilt it in her direction. She shakes her head. I take one for myself and light it. I hope she doesn’t notice the trembling in my fingers, owing to those photographs back there in the study, the images that slide across my imagination, over and over. The sensation of drawing close to some small, hot, irresistible flame that will likely incinerate me.

  “You might as well tell me,” I say, as carelessly as I’m able. “She’s already explained everything. Spilled the whole sack of beans.”

  “Has she? Everything?”

  “Oh, yes.” I hold up my left hand and cross the first two fingers. “We’re like that, Irene and me. As soon as she realized I was Sam Mallory’s daughter—”

  “What?”

  “Oh, yes. Don’t you remember little Pixie?” I spread my arms. “All grown up, as you see.”

  Sophie Rofrano drops into a chair and stares at me. Agape, I believe, is the word.

  “So if you’ve got something to say to Irene—”

  She pulls the newspaper from under her arm and holds it out. It’s a copy of the Los Angeles Times, dated two days ago, folded to page four. In the left-hand column, a black headline hovers above a blurred photograph of an airplane in the middle of the desert.

  The headline reads:

  MORROW MYSTERY SOLVED AT LAST

  Wreckage of Reclusive Publisher’s Aircraft Found in Spanish Desert

  Bones Discovered in Shallow Grave Nearby Belong to George Morrow, Husband of Vanished Aviatrix Irene Foster

  And I have no time to comprehend the meaning of all this, not a single second to do more than read this headline and stare at the familiar image, Mallory’s airplane plunged in the earth in the shadow of a monumental desert massif, because Lani sweeps past, sets down the coffee tray with a crash that startles me, and says there’s a telephone call for me inside, from the airfield.

  “Who is it? Kaiko?”

  “A Mr. William Cushing,” she says, “from the Associated Press. He says it’s urgent.”

  I pick up the telephone in the library, where Olle still lies snoring on the sofa, though I cup my hand over the receiver so he stays that way. The call is collect, the kind of cheap trick I usually wouldn’t stand for, but Bill Cushing and I go way back, even before the war, when we were both covering the Kentucky Derby for the AP. I was the photographer, he was the writer. As I recall, Gallahadion won the race at odds of thirty-six to one. I soon learned we had a great deal in common—me and Bill, I mean, not the horse—from our love of fine Kentucky bourbon to our love for strapping young men. Bill’s a fellow you can trust, for the most part, and he has a talent for spotting trouble, which is why his voice, tunneling through the telephone wires, jumps straight on my already jangled nerves.

  “Janey, you gorgeous creature! You’ll never guess where I am.”

  “What the devil’s going on, Bill? Some kind of double cross? Because I swear—”

  “Double cross? Hell, it’s the opposite. I’ve been fending them off. You’ve been scooped, my dear. Like ice cream in July.”

  “Scooped? What in blazes?”

  “A story ran a couple of days ago—did you get my cable?—ran in the LA Times, about George Morrow’s body being found in an airplane wreck in Spai
n, and some schmuck casts his eye over the photo spread and swears he saw a woman he’s convinced is Irene Foster, flying some tourist plane in Hawai’i. I’m standing here in this dump of an airfield cafeteria with a half dozen reporters, waiting for the weather to clear—”

  “The weather to clear? For what?”

  Even as I’m speaking, something catches my attention on the lamp table before me, the pile of scattered photographs I left there on my way out to the lanai. Bill’s voice drones in my ear at a high, nervy pitch.

  “Darling, don’t you know? Our mystery woman left half an hour ago, just before we landed from Honolulu. She’s in the air right now, headed to some island—that’s what this fellow Kookoo says—”

  “Kaiko?” I lift a photograph from the pile.

  “That’s it. He says she’s likely headed out to some island to the west. The boys pooled some dough, hired this Kookoo—Kaiko, whatever his name is—to fly us there once this goddamned squall—Janey, are you listening? You know I’m doing my best—”

  “Yes, of course,” I reply. And I am listening. I really am. But this emergency, this imminent invasion of curious newspapermen and, inevitably, the rest of the goddamned world, seems so distant to me, as faint and far away as Bill’s own voice.

  Because in front of me, between my fingers, I see a photograph of a blond, spindly girl dressed in her first school uniform, unmistakably Doris, and a bewildered towhead in short pants who is unmistakably Wesley.

  As for the proud man who holds the hands of these imps before the Hanalei school gate, he is unmistakably my father.

  Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

  May 1937: Spain

  Irene could see from George’s expression that the scene was terrible. She knew she had bled heavily; she still didn’t realize how badly Sam had been hurt too. So there was blood everywhere, like the remains of some brutal murder. Irene could smell the blood; it hung so thick and coppery in the confined air of the Potez, she had almost forgotten it was there.