“Why do you care?”
She gazed up at me like a worried child. “What are you going to tell him, Nathan?”
“How about, I’m convinced his wife isn’t having an affair with Paul Mantz because she’s having one with me?”
She frowned and laughed. “You’re terrible.”
“He’s terrible. If you believe he’s the kind of man who would send threatening letters to his own wife, if you find his business practices disgusting, if anything tender you might once have felt for him has gone completely cold, then you have a responsibility to yourself to dump the son of a bitch, pronto.”
“Quite a speech.”
“Thank you.”
She twirled circles in my chest hair with a forefinger. “So. Are you suggesting I dump him and move to Chicago? We could raise little Hellers. I could take in laundry, a little sewing…”
“No,” I said, not appreciating her sarcasm; like most sarcastic people, I only appreciated my own. “I’m looking for something in a wife a little less interesting than a woman who flies six thousand pounds of fuel and aircraft over the Gulf of Mexico in her spare time.”
“Really?”
“You don’t need G. P. anymore. You’re more famous than Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. You hang around with the President and Eleanor, for Christ’s sake. You’re at a stage where you can attract all kinds of backing and sponsorship without the help of that slick operator.”
She leaned on an elbow, her expression solemn. “I don’t approve of everything G. P. does…”
“No kidding.”
“But he put me where I am, and he knows how to keep me there. He doesn’t push me around, Nathan, I can handle him; there are going to be some changes made about how he goes about things—”
“But not a change in management.”
“No. I’m going to stick with G. P.”
“Even if he sent those notes?”
“Even then.” She smiled a little. “But someday…who knows?”
I snorted a laugh. “Laundry and little Hellers?”
“Who can say? I only have a few good years in the air left in me, a few good flights…and then it is my firm intention to leave G. P. Putnam behind and find myself a tropical island. Maybe it’ll be a tropical island in Illinois.”
I slipped an arm around her, gathered her close. “Why don’t you quit now? Or at least after this Mexico City flight…”
She shook her head, no, and though her eyes looked right at me, they were distant. “I need to go out on something bigger, Nathan. Something with wings so wide it’ll carry me to the end of my days…”
Did she know how arch that sounded?
“Jeez, what the hell’s left, Amy? I mean, no offense, but don’t you think the public’s interest in record-breaking flights has pretty much subsided? When you got airlines flying people coast to coast, like some Twentieth Century Limited of the sky, the bloom’s off the rose, my sweet, the novelty’s plumb wore off.”
Her eyes tightened. “It has to be something
“What are you thinking? What have you got cooked up under those Shirley Temple curls?”
Her expression turned pixieish. She tapped my nose with a fingertip. “What would you say to
“What?…An around-the-world flight, you mean?”
She withdrew from my arms and flopped onto her back and folded her arms across her bare breasts, and stared at the ceiling as if it were the sky, her eyes alive with a dream. “A female Phileas Fogg…in a plane. Wouldn’t that set ’em on their ears?”
I leaned on my elbow and studied her like a moron stumped by a trigonometry problem. “Didn’t Wiley Post do that already?”
“Wiley’s not a woman….” She frowned in thought. “Only I’ll need something better than the Vega to do it. A bigger plane, with two engines….”
“Does G. P. know about this latest scheme?”
“Of course. He’s all for it.”
It was probably his idea.
“Isn’t it a little dangerous?”
Her response was lilting: “The most dangerous yet.”
“Jesus. What if it kills you?”
“I think G. P. would grieve—after he got a ghostwritten book out of it.” She tossed a wry little smirk my way. “Then he’d find himself a new young wife and get on with his life.”
“What about you? So, do you want to die, Amy? Does dying in the drink sound like a fun adventure?”
