“Why more? Because you don’t expect it?”

“No. Because there are no obstacles for a man to climb into a cockpit and learn to fly, except his own natural skill and courage. A woman who flies must battle not only the objections of certain backward elements of society but often the dictates of her own upbringing.”

“Why, Mr. Morrow. Are you a feminist?”

“Of course I am. As every right-thinking man should be, in this modern age.” He smiled at her, a remarkable display of white, square-toothed dentistry. “It’s good business, after all.”

Mrs. Rofrano laughed. “Everything’s business to you, George.”

“It’s what makes the world go round. All a man needs to do is give the public what it wants, Sophie, and what the public wants now is novelty. It wants new heroes to worship. And if you ask my opinion, it’s the age of the woman, right now.” He stabbed his finger into the tablecloth. “The great story of our times isn’t this Volstead business, it’s the emancipation of the female sex.”

“Do you really think so?” Irene said. “Do you really think the female sex is emancipated?”

“I think a woman can do whatever she wants to do, these days, whatever she dares to do. She can vote. Why, she can run for office herself. She can walk into a speakeasy and order herself a cocktail, if she doesn’t mind breaking the law. She can show off her pretty ankles and drive a car and get a college degree and a job. She can race cars and fly airplanes.”

“Hear, hear,” said Mrs. Rofrano cheerfully.

Morrow lifted his empty glass, clinked it against Mrs. Rofrano’s glass, and rose from his chair. “If you really wish to fly, Miss Foster,” he said, straightening his cuffs and his tie, smoothing back his hair, “I hope most sincerely that you lay aside any reservations, any objections from friends and family, and simply do it. Now, if you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, I’m afraid I was supposed to be in Pasadena an hour ago.”

When he was gone—and this took some time, because George Morrow never left a room without shaking a least half of the hands inside it—Mrs. Rofrano slid back into her original seat and said, “Well? Are you going to follow his advice?”

Irene’s coffee was cold. Her sandwich was nothing but crumbs. She looked down the table to Sam Mallory, who had long since returned his attention to the man sitting beside him. Sandy had finished her cream and found her way into his lap, one paw outstretched across his waist like a lover, and he stroked her small calico head with one hand and smoked a cigarette from the other. The glass of whiskey stood empty in front of him. The collar of his flight suit was unbuttoned.

“I don’t know,” Irene said. “Flying costs money.”

“Most pilots I know don’t let that stand in their way. They find the money, one way or another. They find a way to get in the air, whatever it costs them.”

When Irene was nine years old, just before her mother got sick, she went with her parents to the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. She saw the Tower of Jewels and the Palace of Fine Arts and all the other glittering exhibits, but what she loved best was the wooden roller coaster in the Joy Zone. The speed and the noise, the way it whipped you about. She made her father pay for ride after ride. When she got home, she set about building one in the backyard. It started on top of the treehouse her father had built, about twenty feet high in a eucalyptus tree. She nailed together wooden boards and fitted the rails to her red wagon. She still remembered the way it felt when she climbed into the wagon at the top of the track for the first time, staring down the curve to the ground. It was like the way you felt on your surfboard when a giant wave began to swell up beneath you, lifting you upward into the break, and you knew you were about to experience the ride of your life or else possibly break your neck, one or the other, no telling which.

“Yes,” she said to Mrs. Rofrano. “I guess I know what you mean.”

Hanalei, Hawai’i

October 1947

My suitcase is already packed when I wake to brilliant sunshine. I packed it at three o’clock in the morning, after tossing in bed for hours, because I figured I might as well do something useful if I wasn’t going to sleep. And it worked! When I climbed back into bed my nerves went still, as if the act of packing had flipped some switch inside me from on to off.

How my head aches. How stiff and sore the length of my body. I long for coffee, but that means going downstairs to face the desk clerk, so instead I wash and dress. It turns out the hour is only just past six o’clock, so I have plenty of time to make the boat to Oahu. I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at my reflection in the mirror. I’m wearing a white shirt and navy slacks, and a cardigan sweater knotted around my shoulders in case of draft. Underneath the collar of my shirt, the necklace lies against my skin. I guess I’ll have to face Leo again, on the boat, but I figure he’ll be busy at the wheel. When we arrive, I can slip away in the bustle, and Leo will go to visit his uncle at the hospital in Honolulu, on the other side of the island, and that will be that.

Now here’s a funny thing. To think I was knocking bits with Irene Lindquist’s own stepson! What a gas. What a way life has of connecting you by invisible threads with other human beings. On the other hand, how could I have guessed they were related? Leo’s mother was a local girl, he explained last night as he buttoned his shirt, a native Hawaiian with whom Olle fell in love when he first arrived in Hanalei as a healthy young globe-trotting whippersnapper a quarter-century earlier. Leo was born seven and a half months after they married, or something like that. I didn’t dare ask Leo how she died; at such a moment, it hardly seemed tactful. Anyway, he was already halfway out the door, rushing off to the Lindquist house to get the full story from his father and Irene, who had returned from Oahu once the doctors had stabilized Uncle Kaiko.

Uncle Kaiko. Of all the dumb luck in the world.

I rise from the bed and unlatch the suitcase. Buried between the shirts and the underwear, the small leather-bound diary has the electricity of an artifact. I smooth my fingers over the top and sides to remind myself that it’s real, that Sam Mallory’s fingers rested here, too, that he lived and breathed and requires some kind of justice.

The clock says a quarter to seven. Time to go.

I close the suitcase and lift it from the luggage stand. Pick up the matching leather satchel that holds my portable darkroom equipment, my notebooks, my hairbrush, my jar of Pond’s cream.

The door creaks when I open it. The stairs creak too. I suppose they send some warning of my approach, because Irene Lindquist is already on her feet when I reach the foyer.

“Good,” she says. “You’ve already packed.”

Lindquist has left her beat-up yellow truck at home today. Instead she’s driving a fast little ragtop Buick, cherry-red, creating such a monumental draft that I can’t hear a thing, and half the time I can’t even see through my hair that blows every which way. We roar past the harbor. I catch a glimpse of the passenger ferry, two or three customers lined up at the gangplank, though not Leo in his sharp navy uniform, the one I tore off him yesterday evening. He’s probably in the deckhouse.

The car curves up the bay and around the point, past Lumahai Beach of yesterday morning, until we come to a sprawling white house overlooking the ocean, surrounded by porches and flowering shrubs and a few clusters of mature palms.

“Nice place,” I say, when she shuts off the engine.

“We call it Coolibah. You’ll be staying in the guest cottage.”

“Oh, I will, will I?”

“Not that I don’t trust you, Miss Everett,” she says dryly, “but this was the deal, remember? If we’re going to be sharing secrets, I’m going to keep you where I can see you.”

“Are we going to be sharing secrets?”

She opens the car door and removes her sunglasses. “Probably. Now collect your things and follow me.”

It occurs to me, as I follow this legendary woman down the lawn to a cottage, that I have somehow lost the upper hand in this match and that perhaps I never had it at all. The cottage is tiny, and a fresh coat of white paint can’t quite disguise its ramshackle character. Irene tells me, as she opens the door, that this was the original building on the property, when she bought it from some fellow who had thought to make a fortune in pineapples, and discovered too late that he had a brown thumb.