The Race

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 Bleriot 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.

“Having taught yourself, did you then learn a lot more from your friend Marco?”

Josephine sighed. “I could not understand his Italian, and he spoke very little English and was always working on the machines.” She brightened. “But he did teach me one thing. It took me quite a while to understand what he was trying to say in English. But I finally pried it out of him. He said, ‘A good flying machine has to fly – it wants to fly.’ Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Is it true?” asked Isaac Bell.

“Absolutely.” She laid a firm hand on the machine again. “So if you will excuse me, Mr. Bell, if you have no more questions, I hope that this one wants to fly. But it is going to take a while to find out for sure.”

“Do you miss Marco Celere?”

Her eyes did not fill, as Archie had reported, but Josephine did admit that she missed the inventor very much. “He was kind and gentle. Not at all like my husband. I miss him very much.”

“Then it must be a comfort to be flying his latest machine.”

“Thanks to Mr. Whiteway’s kindness and generosity. He bought it from Marco’s creditors, you know.” She glanced sidelong at Bell. “It puts me deep in his debt.”

“I imagine you’ll more than pay it back by making a strong pull for the Whiteway Cup.”

“I have to make more than a strong pull. I have to win the Whiteway Cup. I have no money of my own. I was completely dependent on Harry, and now I’m dependent on Mr. Whiteway.”

“I’m sure he will be grateful if you win the race.”

“Not if, Mr. Bell.” Her gaze fixed on the sky where a parchment-colored Bleriot was rising, and when she looked back at Bell her eyes had turned opaque. “I will win, Mr. Bell. But not to make him grateful. I will win because I will do my best, and because Marco built the best flying machine in the race.”

Later, when Isaac spoke with Archie, he told his friend, “If I were a betting man, I’d lay money on her.”

“You are a betting man!” Archie reminded him.

“So I am.”