I reach the end of the beach without encountering anybody, but according to McNally there’s another beach to the left, on the other side of Makahoa Point. Lumahai Beach, it’s called, which is a rather lovely name, I think, and somewhere I’d like to surf for that reason alone, if I liked to surf at all. It hints of the moon, of the mysterious.

I replace my shoes on my feet and begin the climb up the rocks, across the neck of the point, thick with trees, palms and that kind of thing. I don’t know much about flora, to be perfectly honest; you won’t find a single artful landscape among my published photographs. Just people and buildings and machines and the odd animal, when the subject is willing and the occasion requires it. So don’t ask me what species of tree I’m passing, what kind of branch I’m pushing aside as I step into a patch of cleared earth off the coastal highway. A dilapidated yellow Ford sits to one side. The tire prints appear fresh. A footpath leads westish, behind a piece of wood shaped like an arrow that says beach.

I follow this track downward through the trees until it opens up to a pristine ocean beach, deserted except for a pile of clothes near the edge of the sand, and a person in a long, dark bathing suit hurtling down the barrel of a perfect bow wave.

As I expected, this person is a woman, and when she trudges to shore she doesn’t look all that surprised to see me there. Her hair is short and prematurely silver above a tanned, lined, scarred, firm, freckled face that might be any age from thirty-five to sixty. I think it’s strange that she doesn’t take any trouble to disguise herself. Why hasn’t she been discovered here before? Is it the gray hair, or the scars, or the fact that you don’t expect her? You never do find what you’re not looking for, even the woman at the center of one of the world’s great mysteries, who was once the most fascinating, the most photographed female on earth.

She’s tall, maybe five foot eleven, topping me by two or three inches. She carries the surfboard under her arm like it’s made of balsa wood. She plants it in the sand and slicks back her wet hair and waits for me to introduce myself. I find I’m not nearly as nervous as I expected. Nothing more than a flutter of excitement, even though I can plainly see it’s her, it is the mysterious She, that I’ve found her at last. There’s no mistaking that height, those cheekbones, those sharp, hooded eyes that have regarded me from a thousand photographs, although I never realized they were quite so blue.

“Mrs. Lindquist?” I ask.

“How can I help you?” she replies patiently.

“My name is Janey Everett. I’m a photojournalist. I was wondering if I might have a word with you?”

She stares at the top of my head for several seconds. I don’t think I need to tell you how disconcerting that is. She brushes a little sand from her board and says, “A photographer, is it? I can’t imagine why. I never give permission for photographs. You’ll find a dozen surfers more willing. And more attractive.”

“Oh, I’m not at all interested in photographing you. I don’t wish to disturb your privacy. If you want to go on hiding from the world, that’s fine by me.”

Lindquist lifts both eyebrows in a way that might slay some ordinary person. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you? I’m amazed. You can’t tell me that nobody’s ever remarked on your astonishing resemblance to the famed aviatrix Irene Foster.”

At the words Irene Foster, Lindquist flinches. It’s a tiny gesture, but my eyes are trained to notice these things, the tinier the better. Poker players call them tells, I believe. I hoard them like treasure, because they represent the truth, they represent a subject’s instant, unguarded opinion of things. And this flinch of Lindquist’s tells me everything I need to know.

She is no more a Lindquist than I am.

Now, listen up. There was a time, which many of you may recall, when you couldn’t walk into a drugstore or listen to the radio or pick up a newspaper without encountering the name Irene Foster. I myself grew from girl to woman in that particular decade, when Foster was held up as a shining example of American womanhood and what she was capable of in this brave new age of ours, the age of flappers and aviation.

In those days, we had no idea what fate awaited her. Foster was invincible. Pilots around her might crash, might fall short of their destinations, might die of terrible injuries or disappear into the ocean, but you could believe in Irene Foster. Her keen, smiling face adorned books and periodicals, museum exhibits and newsreels, advertisements for everything from toothpaste to cigarettes. It got so that you almost felt sick of her, from time to time, and just when she started to fade from view, just when the public began to tire, ever so slightly, she would accomplish some astonishing new feat, break some impossible record, and you fell in love with her all over again.

Which, naturally, made her disappearance all the more shocking. There she flew, me hearties, poised for victory in the first-ever Round the World Air Derby, one final leg to go, one last hop from Egypt to Morocco, a journey of two thousand miles that was surely child’s play to Irene Foster, who crossed the Atlantic for breakfast, almost. She was two days ahead of her nearest competitor—a man, of course, whose name nobody remembers—and the whole world gathered its breath to cheer her landing in Casablanca. Maybe you were one of them, standing by your radio to hear the news, to settle some bet with your pal about her final time. Whether she would break the current circumnavigation record by hours or minutes. Maybe you waited and waited as those minutes came and went, as the bulletin never arrived, as one by one the reports trickled through that Foster had not arrived in Casablanca at all.

She hadn’t landed anywhere.

Maybe you were one of those who then trawled the airwaves with your amateur radio, searching for some faint signal that might be Irene Foster’s distress call. Maybe you pored over maps of the northern Sahara, of the southern Mediterranean, for some likely site for an emergency landing by a pilot known for her resourcefulness in crisis. Maybe you bought the early edition every morning for weeks and read all the updates, all the editorials, all the messages of hope and determination from those pilots tasked with searching for her across the endless dunes of sand.

Maybe you finally gave up hope and turned to some new sensation for your daily dram of fevered excitement. Maybe you forgot all about Irene Foster and her doomed flight, except when some newspaper printed a wistful memorial on the anniversary of her disappearance, or when some new theory emerged to explain her fate, each one more crackpot than the last.

Maybe you figured she was gone forever, and you’d never know what became of her.

Well, I didn’t.

And now I’ve found her for you. All along, she was living in obscurity on some beach on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, surfing in the morning and flying unsuspecting passengers from island to island during the day.

Still, she’s not going to admit all that to some stranger, by God!

She lifts her board from the sand. “If you’ll excuse me, Miss Everett. You’re wasting my time and your own.”

I wait until she’s stalked past me before I reply. I do have some regard for stagecraft; you might say it’s my stock in trade. I can do with pictures what most can only dream of doing with words, and it all comes down to how you place your subject, and where, and exactly when you click your shutter.

“Am I?” I call after her. “What if I told you I’ve just come from Spain, and the wreckage of Sam Mallory’s airplane?”

She stops, but she doesn’t turn.

“Poor Sam.” I shake my head. “He never did get his due. Overshadowed by his own pupil. But if there hadn’t been a Mallory, there wouldn’t have been a Foster. Isn’t that right?”

Over her shoulder, she says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You keep saying that. You don’t know nothing, do you? Well, that’s fine. Then you won’t care about the diary we found among his remains. You wouldn’t know anything about that, either, I guess?”

Now she turns. Her face is like stone. “His remains?”

“I admit, there’s not much left to a fellow’s body after ten years exposed to the Spanish desert. But his poor skeleton still wore its clothes, and underneath it all I found this.”

I remove the small leather volume from my pocketbook and hold it up against the sky.

The funny thing is, she doesn’t stare at the diary, the object you’d imagine she cares about. Instead she stares at me, no expression at all. Her brow might be furrowed, or those might be the lines etched there by time and sun and worry. She’s taking my measure, that’s all. She’s working out what to say to me, and how much, and whether I’m telling the truth. She is calculating the risk, and isn’t that what Irene Foster has always done best?

Behind me, a wave crashes noisily into the surf. Lindquist turns her face to the east, squints at the risen sun, and says, “Come with me.”

In the cafeteria of the Hanalei airfield, an ancient calico cat lies in a square of sunshine from the window, all but dead. Lindquist stops to stroke its side, and it twitches an ear in thanks.