“So will I,” said Daisy. “Darling, you really can’t abandon me withLambertfor an escort, dressed like this, here in the middle of nowhere!”
“The middle of nowhere, ain’t that the truth!” The young man sighed. “I guess I better go help Pa and your pilot. You gotta get going if you’re gonna catch that screwball that was waving his gun around all this gasoline.”
Alec was going to argue with Daisy, but Dipper called him for a consultation. While they had their heads together over a map, Daisy managed to climb into her seat and strap herself in. Loath though she was to return to the torture chamber a moment sooner than necessary, she wasn’t about to give them a chance to leave without her.
Lambert, standing disconsolate by the shed, waved to her but made no move to come anywhere near the aeroplane.Daisy waved back, wondering whether she would ever see him again. She would have liked to say good-bye properly, to thank him for his efforts to protect her from the foe, however chimerical. He obviously was not going to budge, though, and nor was she. She hoped he’d get home safely.
At last, Alec climbed into the cockpit and stood looking down at her, shaking his head. “Daisy, there’s nasty weather ahead, we can’t tell how nasty. It could be dangerous.”
“I’ll call it quits if you call it quits.”
He threw an exasperated glance at Lambert, and another at Dipper, but his exasperation was mostly for himself. “I can’t, love.”
“Then I shan’t. You really can’t expect me to face your mother with the news that I deserted you in the middle of America and you’ve disappeared.”
“It does sound rather difficult.”
“Much more difficult than disappearing with you, darling.”
“I don’t anticipate disappearing.”
“Well, then,” said Daisy, “that’s that, isn’t it? Besides, without me you don’t know where to go.”
“Dipper said you told him Oregon.”
“Yes, but that’s a state. I know I’ve heard the name of his home town, if I could only think of it.” She frowned. “There’s some connection in my mind with Miss Genevieve. I can’t quite pin it down. Unless it’s just that she was there when I heard it.”
“Great Scott, Daisy, if we don’t know his destination, this whole mad jaunt is pointless! I’m not flying clear across the country only to humour you and Dipper.”
“I’ll remember,” Daisy said determinedly. “Anyway, with any luck you’ll see him when we take off, so that we can follow again.”
This time, as Alec was flying the aeroplane, it was Dipper who stood up in the cockpit to peer around the windshield. To Daisy’s relief, he spotted their quarry.
It wasn’t very long, though, before he stood up again. This time he balanced there, scanning the sky ahead, for what seemed an age. When he sat down, he was shaking his head. Alec shrugged. They shouted back and forth a bit, then Daisy felt the aeroplane gradually ascending.
She soon saw why. They were sailing above a blanket of cotton wool clouds. Wisps floated about them, insubstantial as dreams, but the mass below was quite solid enough to hide Pitt’s biplane, whether he was forcing his unwilling pilot to fly through it or under it. Daisy imagined the poor man’s quandary as he weighed the probability of Pitt shooting him if he disobeyed, against the dangers of flying blind through what she guessed must be a pea-soup fog.
If the pilot died, Pitt would also die, of course. Did he not fear death? If not, what was he fleeing? Not someone who had killed his cousin and might kill him. Which suggested that he had in fact been responsible for Carmody’s death, intentionally or not.
Was he afraid of imprisonment? Daisy wondered if that fate might seem worse than death to someone used to roaming the forests and mountains. Or perhaps he was not so much runningawayas runningto—to those forests and mountains which he had, according to Miss Genevieve, described in Proustian detail in his book.
With a sigh, she decided she’d never understand the motivationof someone whose background was so utterly dif ferent from her own, especially as she had never even talked to him.
She ought, however, to be able to remember the name of the Oregon town he and Carmody came from. What was the connection with Miss Genevieve? She worried away at the riddle but was eventually driven to the conclusion that the direct approach would never work. Perhaps, as with an acrostic, the answer would suddenly come to her when she was thinking of something else.
Outside the window, occasional rifts in the clouds showed a rain-drenched countryside below, but no sign of the post office aeroplane. With nothing to hold her attention, and slightly more room to stretch her legs since Lambert’s departure, in spite of noise, cold, and vibration, Daisy drowsed off.
What roused her was a change in the note of the engines. The cloud tops were tinged with pink and the sun was a bloodred globe dead ahead. Then the aeroplane plunged into the clouds.
It wasn’t like a pea-souper after all, more of a ragged mist streaming past the windows. Daisy held her breath, half expecting to run into a hillside, or a tall building, or even the tail of Pitt’s aeroplane. She did not have to hold it long. The cloud layer was not thick, and when they emerged beneath, it was not raining.
Rosy sunlight slanting through a gap to the west revealed to Daisy’s astonished gaze flat farmland divided neatly into squares like a chessboard, as far as the eye could see.Alice Through the Looking Glass?Curiouser and curiouser, thought Daisy.
They flew on below the clouds, which grew sparser andfell behind. Then Daisy saw Dipper point ahead and consult a map. He and Alec exchanged a few of those infuriating shouts which she couldn’t hear. The aeroplane tilted as they turned northward. Now the pattern of squares was broken up by a great river, whose course they followed, cutting across its meanders.
The sun had set by now and the light was fading fast. Daisy wasn’t at all sure she wanted to experience a night landing, especially at a field unfamiliar to both pilots. If they actually found an airfield. What on earth had possessed her to insist on chasing Pitt?
Because she had been convinced that he had killed his cousin, and that Rosenblatt and Gilligan were incapable of catching him, she reminded herself. And once begun, the excitement of the chase was added to reluctance to admit she might be wrong and refusal to give up as long as anyone else continued.
