fisherman’s boat, and I turned with my upper lip peeled back over my teeth in what must have been one frightening demented smile, because Amy drew back from me in alarm.
Then she moved close to me, looking at the front of me. “He cut you! He hurt you!”
“I cut myself shaving worse than this.” Gulping for air but getting mostly rain, unrelenting goddamn rain, I looked out into the restless waters and saw nothing but waves and dark sky; then lightning illuminated those waters, seemingly to the horizon, and showed me nothing new—no rescue craft. Had Johnson double-crossed me, at Miller’s behest?
“Either we’re early,” I said, “or they’re late.”
“Or they’re not coming!”
Out of breath, panting, I said, “That nice chiefy of yours is probably calling out the guard. We have to get out of here. Got any ideas?”
Breathing hard, too, she nodded. Thunder exploded as her arm thrust past me and I followed her pointing finger to the nearby, unguarded seaplane dock. The two flying boats floated there, tied at the ramp.
Right out in the open.
“Can you fly one of those things?” I asked.
She tossed her head; moisture beads flew. She was smiling, proud. “I’m Amelia Earhart,” she reminded me.
“Oh yeah,” I said.
And we ran, leaving the body of Lord Jesus behind, with no resurrection in the plans, ran across the cement, feet splashing, kids playing in the rain, and climbed a ridiculous little waist-high chain-link fence and scooted down the ramp. I untied the moorings, and she was already wading out into where the planes bobbed in the rough water. Then I was doing the same, climbing up onto the pontoon on my rider’s side, as she climbed on her pontoon to get access to the cockpit.
That was when the shots started flying.
The police station was only a few short minutes’ walk from the waterfront, even in the rain, and the chief’s reinforcements were streaking toward us, getting their white uniforms wet, bullets zinging and careening off the flying boat’s green fuselage.
The sound of a motor—and it wasn’t the flying boat’s, she wasn’t in that cockpit yet—drew my attention back out to the water, despite the bullets I was ducking. A glowing light seemed to be coming around Maniagawa Island—a lantern! A kerosene lantern in Hayden’s hand, the skipper riding the motor….
“Forget the plane!” I yelled, looking across at her—her eyes were wild. “Swim for the boat!”
She hesitated, as if hating to miss the opportunity to fly once again, then a bullet whanged into the metal near her head and she swallowed and nodded, and dove in; so did I. I swam with my nine-millimeter clenched in my fist, but I swam.
We swam toward the launch as it moved over the bumpy waters toward us, and bullets made kisses around us in the waters. And then somebody, Hayden, was hauling me into the boat, and I gulped air, air with rain in it but air, and looked toward the water, looking to reach down for Amy, and she was swimming toward us when the bullets caught her, danced across the back of her leather jacket.
And then she seemed to slump forward into the water, and soon the jacket was all we could see of her, several boat lengths away, sort of puffing up, its weathered brown leather blossoming red, hanging there as if it were a floating flower; then it, too, disappeared, sucked down under.
Gone.
I was halfway out of the boat when the kid hauled me back in, yelling, “It’s too late! Too late for her!” Bullets were flying all around us, and we were moving away from where Amy and her jacket had been, away from the little white figures on the jetty who were shooting at us, jabbering at us almost comically, tiny insignificant jumping-up- and-down figures that got lost first in the rain, then in the darkness, until they were gone, just a bizarre bad memory, a coda to an escape that almost happened.
Johnson’s voice said, “How is he?”
Hayden’s voice said, “Nasty cut.”
That was the last voice I heard, except I thought I heard Amy’s voice, one last time, saying the last thing I heard her say, so proudly, right before she ran toward that seaplane, a final plane she never flew.
“I’m Amelia Earhart,” she said.
Rain on my face.
Darkness.
20
Late in June 1940, Captain Irving Johnson reported to Elmer Dimity of the Amelia Earhart Foundation as follows: “It is my opinion that the search be considered finished and that everything humanly possible has been done to find any trace of Miss Earhart.”
Nevertheless, Elmer and Margot did not give up on their plans and a ship the Foundation had commissioned was waiting in the Honolulu harbor on December 7, 1941. The Foundation’s Pacific expedition, interrupted by World War II, was never resumed, although successful businessman Dimity—and the Foundation—continued on for many years, extolling Amelia Earhart and researching her disappearance.
Captain Johnson was working at Pearl Harbor in the War Plans Office when the Japanese attacked; the
After the war, Johnson—looking for a new sailing ship—was alerted by his old first mate of a German brigantine seized by the British and held in England; called the
