The Race

Josephine’s machine came down to earth at a steeper angle and a much higher rate of speed. It was traveling so swiftly that it seemed that she had somehow lost control of it and was falling out of the sky.

7

CONVERSATIONS CEASED.

Men put down tools and stared.

The yellow aeroplane was mere yards from smashing into the grass when Josephine hauled back on a lever that raised small flaps on the back of her wings and the elevator on her tailpiece. The airship leveled out, slowed, bounced on the grass, and rolled to a gentle stop.

There was a long moment of stu

And when a slight figure dressed head to toe in white climbed out of her compartment behind the wing, a roar of approval thundered from spectators in the grandstand. She waved to the crowd and flashed a gleaming smile.

“Well done!” said Isaac Bell. “Preston Whiteway may be an idiot in his personal affairs, but he can spot a wi

He strode to the yellow machine, pulling ahead of the long-legged Archie. A burly detective dressed as a mechanician blocked his way. “Where you going, mister?”

“I am Van Dorn Chief Investigator Isaac Bell.”

The man stepped back, though he still eyed him carefully. “Sorry, I didn’t know you, Mr. Bell. Tom LaGuardia, Saint Louis office. I just got shifted here. I saw you talking to Mr. Abbott. I should have assumed you were on the level.”

“You did the right thing. Never assume when your client’s life is at risk. If you stop the wrong person, you can always apologize. If you don’t stop the right person, you can’t apologize to a dead client.”

Archie caught up. “Good job, Tom. I’ll vouch for him.”

Bell was already heading for Josephine. She had climbed onto a crosspiece that co

Bell said, “Those hinged appendages on the back of your wings appear to give you extraordinary control.”

She looked down at him with lively eyes. Hazel, Bell noticed, a warm green color in the sunlight, edging toward a cooler gray. “They’re called alettoni. That’s Italian. It means ‘little wings.’”

“Did they slow your airship’s descent by enlarging the wing’s surface?”

Returning her attention to the carburetor, she answered, “They deflect more air.”

“Do alettoni work better than warping?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she said. “They don’t always do what I want them to. Sometimes they act as a brake and slow me down instead of keeping me level.”

“Can they be adjusted?”

“The man who invented them is dead. So now we have to figure it out without his help.” She made a final adjustment, sheathed her screwdriver in a back pocket, jumped to the ground, and offered her gloved hand. “I’m Josephine, by the way. Who are you?”

“Sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Isaac Bell. I’m Van Dorn’s chief investigator.”

“My brave protectors,” she said with a frank and open smile.

She was tiny, Bell thought. Barely an inch over five feet tall, with a pretty upturned nose. Her direct gaze was older than her years, though she had a young woman’s voice, thin and girlish. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Bell. I hope ‘chief investigator’ doesn’t mean Archie’s been fired?”

“Not at all. Archie is in charge of your personal safety. My job is to intercept your husband before he gets close enough to harm you.”

Her eyes darkened, and she looked fearful. “You’ll never catch him, you know.”

“Why not?”

“He’s too sly. He thinks like a wild animal.”

Bell smiled to put her at ease, for he saw that she was really afraid of Frost. “We’ll do what we have to to deal with him. I wonder whether you might give me any clues to his behavior. Anything that would help me run him to ground.”

“I can only tell you things about him that won’t help. I’m afraid I don’t know anything that will.”

“Then tell me what won’t help.”

“Harry is completely unpredictable. I never knew what to expect. He’ll change his mind in a flash.” As she spoke her eyes glinted toward the field where Joe Mudd’s red tractor biplane was taking to the air again, and Bell realized that she was assessing the competition as coolly as he would an outlaw in a knife fight.

“Can you tell me about friends he would call on?”

“I never saw him with a friend. I don’t know if he ever had any. He kept to himself. Completely to himself.”

“I encountered some Chicago men at your camp yesterday. I had the impression they were living there.”

“They’re just bodyguards. Harry kept them around for protection, but he never had anything to do with them.”

“Protection from what?”

She made a face. “His ‘enemies.’”

“Who were they?”

“I asked him. Once. He started screaming and hollering. I thought he would kill me. I never asked again. They’re in his head, I think. I mean, he was in the nuthouse once.”

Bell gently changed the subject. “Did he ever take friends when he went big-game hunting? Did he shoot with a party?”

“He hired guides and bearers. But otherwise he was alone.”

“Did you go with him?”

“I was busy flying.”

“Did that disappoint him?”

“No. He knew I was flying before we married.” Her eyes tracked a Blériot swooping past at sixty miles an hour.

“Before? May I ask how you got started in flying?”

A high-spirited grin lighted her open face. “I ran away from home – stuffed my hair under a cap and pretended to be a boy.” It wouldn’t be hard, thought Bell. She didn’t look like she weighed over a hundred pounds.

“I found a job in a bicycle factory in Schenectady. The owner was building flying machines on the weekend, and I helped him with the motors. I knew all about them from fixing my dad’s farm machinery. One Monday, instead of going to work, I snuck out to the field and flew the machine.”

“Without lessons?”

“Who was there to teach me? There weren’t any schools back then. Most of us learned on our own.”

“How old were you?”

“Seventeen.”

“And you just climbed on the machine and flew it?”

“Why not? I could see how it worked. I mean, all it is, really, is the aeroplane goes up by pushing the air down.”

“So with no formal training,” Bell smiled, “you proved both Bernoulli’s theorem and the existence of the Venturi effect.”

“What?”

“I only mean that you taught yourself how to shape the wings to create the vacuum over the wing which makes it rise.”

“No,” she laughed. “No, Mr. Bell. Venturi and all that is too complicated. My friend Marco Celere was always rattling on about Bernoulli. But the fact of the matter is, the flying machine goes up by pushing the air down. Warping the wings is just a way to deflect the air away from where you want to go – up, down, around. Air is wonderful, Mr. Bell. Air is strong, much stronger than you think. A good flying machine like this one-” She laid an affectionate hand on its fabric flank. “Marco’s best – makes the air hold you up.”

Bell absorbed this with a certain amount of amazement. He liked young people and routinely took apprentice detectives under his wing, but he could not recall speaking with any twenty-year-old who sounded more clear and more certain than did this dairy farmer’s daughter from the wilds of the North Country.

“I’ve never heard it put so simply.”

But she had shed no light so far on her husband’s habits. When he queried her further, he developed the impression that she had known little about Harry Frost before she married him, and all she had learned since was to fear him. He noticed that her eyes kept darting to the other airships rolling about the infield and climbing into the sky. Whatever confusion or youthful ignorance had led Josephine into marriage with a man like Harry Frost, the vulnerable, naive girl on the ground became a confident woman in the air.