She and Lambert would have to shout if they wanted to converse. Fortunately, she had no great desire to communicate with him, even if he were in a condition to speak. She cast a quick sidelong glance his way. At least he didn’t appear to have actually been sick, but the way he was curled around his inner workings reminded her of Alec on the Atlantic crossing.
Looking forward through the glass pane separating the cabin from the cockpit, she saw Alec leaning sideways to peer around the edge of the windscreen, binoculars in hand. As she watched, he straightened, pushed up his goggles, undid his safety belt, and to her utter horror stood up.
If her determined pursuit of Wilbur Pitt led to her husband performing such risky stunts, Daisy wanted nothing more to do with it. She banged on the glass.
“Alec! Sit down!”
He and Dipper either didn’t hear or ignored her. Alec scanned the skies, shading his eyes with his hand, while the aeroplane droned steadily onward. Suddenly he stopped, stiff as a pointer scenting prey. He raised the glasses. For a long moment he stared, then sat down with a sharp nod. Pointing, he said—or rather, shouted—something to Dipper, which Daisy couldn’t hear but assumed to be on the lines of “That’s him!”
Dipper altered course slightly. The chase was on.
Now Daisy had the leisure to contemplate what she had wrought. Her recognition of Pitt as the man on the stairs in the Flatiron Building had brought them to this fragile craft sailing through emptiness, high above Mother Earth. How certain was she of her identification? What if she was wrong?
She tried to picture the pale, frightened face of the man who had run from the scene of Carmody’s death. It was vague in her memory, eclipsed by Pitt’s face as she had last seen it at the Brooklyn station yard. Had she imagined the likeness? The face beneath the bowler hat had been nondescript, as she told Gilligan and Rosenblatt. So was Pitt’s,but for his distant resemblance to his cousin.
Daisy acknowledged reluctantly that she just might be mistaken.
What was worse, even if she was right, she had no proof that Pitt had shot his cousin. Of course hehadbehaved suspiciously, galloping off down those stairs, playing least in sight, then doing his utmost to evade her and Alec and Lambert. But suppose he had fled in fear of his life, perhaps because of a family feud as posited by Mr. Thorwald?
Still, though maybe he had not shot Carmody, he had most certainly pirated the air mail aeroplane. A dozen or more witnesses could swear to that. He was a criminal.
A horrid thought struck Daisy: what if her relentless pursuit had driven a previously innocent Pitt to the desperate step of kidnapping a federal employee? If he had recognized her and Lambert from the Flatiron Building, he could reasonably believe that they had killed his cousin and were now after his blood.
At that moment, had she been able to communicate with Alec, she would have called off the chase and let the poor man try to escape the forces of the law without her interference.
The force of the American law she had brought with her, in the shape of Lambert, cowered at her side, in no state to arrest anyone. His eyes were still determinedly shut and his hands once again covered his ears, the threat of sickness apparently past. The thrill of flight was not for him.
In fact, the thrill of flight was definitely wearing off for Daisy. The take-off had been exciting, but for what seemed like hours she had been stuck in this cramped, vibrating, fearfully noisy box. She couldn’t even see much because thecelluloid blurred the distant view. In spite of numerous draughts (less than a handsbreadth is a draught, more than a handsbreath is fresh air, her nanny had always said when flinging up the sash in midwinter), the air was growing stuffy.
The man who had helped her into the cabin had shown her how to open the side window. Daisy followed his instructions.
The air blasting in was more gale than draught, cold but exhilarating. It roused Lambert from his unhappy apathy, but after one glance at the open window he shuddered and returned to contemplation of his misery. It made Daisy’s eyes water. She pulled on and buckled the helmet she’d been lent, and fastened the goggles over her eyes. Now she could see out.
They were floating over rugged, wooded hills, not far above the treetops. Daisy saw a hawk hovering below, intent on its next meal, oblivious of the aeroplane passing overhead. She saw the aeroplane’s shadow moving across the landscape—a hillside of tree stumps and a logging camp where tiny figures looked up and waved; a valley of scattered farms with small, irregular fields, in one of them a man and a horse ploughing; a village with a motorcar and three horse buggies in its single unpaved street; a curve of railway line with a train of coal wagons puffing along.
Gervaise would have liked to see that, Daisy thought. Her brother’s clockwork train had been a favourite toy, back in nursery days.
This was fun! No wonder Alec had given in so easily to Dipper’s persuasion, in spite of not being at all keen on following Pitt. She had never thought before that he might actually miss flying. She had always pictured him dodgingGerman shells and fleeing German fighters in his single-seater observer aeroplane.
Turning to Lambert, she shouted, “This is fun! Do open your window and have a look. There’s a spiffing view.”
He opened his eyes just long enough to give her a look of terrified entreaty before huddling still lower in his seat.
Daisy returned to the view, but soon her cheeks and nose began to grow numb with cold. Wishing she had borrowed a muffler, she closed and fastened the window. In front of her, Dipper and Alec were shouting to each other, inaudible as far as she was concerned. For want of anything better to do, she speculated on the reason for Sir Roland Amboyne’s nickname. Alec’s obviously had something to do with his surname: Fletcher, a maker of arrows; but Dipper was obscure.
The flight became a test of endurance. As the chill penetrated Daisy’s flying suit, her bottom grew numb and her limbs cramped from immobility. A meal provided a brief respite from boredom when she saw Alec and Dipper eating sandwiches and sharing a flask and remembered the stores in the cabin. Lambert refused to eat but drank some coffee—fortified with spirits, as Daisy discovered when she took a swig from the same Thermos.
How long could this go on? Surely soon they must run low on petrol and descend to refuel. Or had Dipper been prepared for a transatlantic flight when they diverted him?
Daisy knew from the sun that they were heading westward. Pitt came from somewhere in the West, somewhere with mountains and forests, in which he could disappear. If he was used to mountains, she thought with a momentary excitement, that might explain how he managed to run down flight after flight of stairs. Another scrap of evidence.
She couldn’t remember the name of the place he came from. Miss Cabot’s many guesses swirled in her head. It began with anO—or ended with anO. San Francisco? Leora, back at Hazelhurst Field, had told Daisy the post office plane was bound for San Francisco, officially.
No longer, Daisy was sure. Gilligan had referred to Pitt’s home as a little “hick” town, which San Francisco definitely was not, from all she had heard. Gilligan had mentioned the name of the town. What on earth was it? Beginning with anOor ending with anO?
Daisy tried to re-create the scene when Pitt’s provenance had been discussed. The town’s name was on the tip of her tongue when she realized they were heading downward.
She gasped as the aeroplane suddenly plunged, pressing her back in the seat and leaving her stomach behind. She had just time to realize that the still roaring engines had not failed—so Dipper was presumably doing this on purpose—when they pulled out of the dive.
