“I met my friend Stella for dinner,” Wini said. “She works for the Post Office. The airmail deliveries for the Innsmouth airfield disappeared twice last month. And there’s rumors of more planes disappearing earlier this year.”
“Didn’t you say a lot of flyers go down on these runs. Especially if it’s late at night?” I asked. I’d offered to ring down to the desk for coffee or tea, as the flask had left with Tom, but Wini just asked for a glass of water. I filled a glass from what was left of our jug.
“Yes,” said Wini, “but these pilots didn’t disappear. Just their planes. The pilots were found but nowhere near the airfield.” She’d settled into the chair that Tom had occupied. She picked up the glass of water, started to sip, then put it back down again, clearly distracted. Her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her leather coat, and I heard the distinct sound of jingling as she fidgeted with the objects inside – keys, coins, that silver cigarette case, and presumably her switchblade.
“Where were the pilots found?” I asked, wondering if these incidents were similar to Jim’s reappearance a few months ago. He’d simply been found wandering down a road with no indication of how he had gotten there. “Did the pilots all turn up in the same place?”
“Not really,” said Wini. “All were found near Innsmouth but in different spots. Down along the shore. Near the old sea caves. Along the cliff road. Always near the ocean. One pilot was found on the beach, sleeping away.”
“Odd place to take a nap,” I said.
“Very odd!” Wini agreed. “Everyone claimed they had no memory of how they got there or what happened to their planes. Which have not been found yet.”
“But why do you think that someone is after your plane?” I asked.
“Stella drove me back to the airfield after dinner,” Wini said. “We were sitting in her truck, just gossiping, when we spotted a man coming out of the barn where I stored the Jenny. He didn’t notice us, or if he did, he must have assumed we were fetching the mail.”
I must have looked puzzled because Wini explained, “We were sitting in Stella’s postal truck. The Post Office workers come and go from the airfield at all hours, says Stella, dropping off the sacks and picking up the mail for the area. Farmers want their Sears catalogs and packages!”
I nodded. Sears sold everything from dresses to plows, and everyone needed something that could be found in those catalog pages. I had moved to Chicago to get away from small town life and ordering the Sunday hat from Sears, but I still remembered the thrill of turning the catalog pages and dreaming about all the things shown there.
“So what did the man do?” I asked, watching Wini fidget, sure she wasn’t telling me everything. Something about the incident truly rattled her, but I suspected it would take a little coaxing to get the whole story. “Why do you think he was after your plane?”
Wini sprang out of her chair and began pacing back and forth. “There were three planes on the ground at that airfield. The only one that he spent any time around was my Jenny. Then the man got in a Tin Lizzie and drove away. We followed him back to Arkham.”
“Where is he now?” I asked.
Wini shrugged and wandered back to the chair. She sat down, dangling her hands between her knees. “I lost him somewhere around this hotel. Stella had to head home. She starts work early. But I wanted to see you.”
“Why? What can I do?” I said.
“You’re the Flapper Detective,” Wini replied, but I had a feeling she wanted to say more.
“I play a detective,” I said. “I am an actress. I pretend to be a detective.”
“But you’re here to investigate a disappearance. You said so.”
Now it was my turn to fidget in my chair. “I’m looking for someone as I told you,” I admitted, “but I’m not prepared to stop all the crime in Arkham.”
“Well, after I left Stella, I kept looking around for the big guy. I finally spotted him heading into the alley behind the hotel,” Wini said. I knew she was talking about the alley where I’d saved Tom from Nova Malone’s men. “He met with a smaller man and argued with him.”
“I know those two,” I said. Arkham was hopping these days, it seemed, but what was everyone looking for? Tom? The grimoire? Something else? And why had Wini sought me out?
Wini did not look surprised at my statement. “I hid at the end of the alley, trying to hear what they were saying, but this man in a Homburg came sliding out the back door of the hotel. The big man grabbed him and started yelling about a book.”
“The man in the Homburg was Tom,” I said. “I’ll tell you about him in a minute. But what happened next?”
“Then I heard gunshots and you shouting,” said Wini, glancing at the Homburg that I’d put back on a side table. “What are you mixed up in?”
“I truly don’t know,” I confessed to Wini. “I am here to find out what happened to my friend Jim.” I wasn’t quite ready to explain all my theories about Max. Because how could I tell Wini I saw a man fall through a mirror and disappear? Even for Arkham, that sounded crazy.
Except Wini understood Arkham, maybe better than I did. All I had to go on was what I had learned over the past three years, from a distance. Darrell’s photographs and stories in the newspaper, Christine’s letters, and Jeany’s reluctant retellings of what she had seen during the final days of filming.
Wini sighed. “I trust you,” she said. “But my plane is my livelihood. It’s hard enough scrabbling from town to town. If anything goes wrong, we could lose everything. I want the women’s air derby to be on the up-and-up. All the pilots deserve that.”
“I’m no villain,” I told her. “I promise you I’m not mixed up with anything criminal. I want to find out how my friend Max disappeared. Jim was with him. They were both in the Fitzmaurice house on the final day of our filming. A fire broke out and one man died. But nobody ever found any other bodies. Then Jim came back to Arkham. So maybe Max is out there, too.”
“So maybe you are a detective,” said Wini.
“Stranger things have happened to me,” I responded. “And tomorrow looks to be a busy day.”
I explained to Wini that I planned to check the Fitzmaurice house where the fire had happened, visit my friend Christine at the hospital, and try to find out more about the grimoire from Tom. Thinking about all that, I giggled. It was late. Perhaps I’d mixed my earlier cocktail a little too strong, I decided, startled by my own laughter.
Wini looked up at me. “Now what?”
“I suppose I will need a vacation to recover from my vacation in Arkham,” I said.
Wini grinned. “It will be late tomorrow before my crew needs me,” she said. “I’ll help you. And you can help me figure out what happened to those pilots who disappeared and then reappeared without their planes. I don’t want to suffer the same fate.”
“Very well,” I said. “Do you want me to arrange a taxi back to the airfield or are you willing to sleep in a real bed? I could call down to the desk and arrange for another room.”
Wini shook her head. “I’d better return to my plane. I’d rather stay there tonight.”
I nodded. “Can you come back here by lunch tomorrow? I’d like you to meet Tom Sweets, the man with the Homburg hat and a strange story.”
“Tom Sweets? Is that a real name?”
“He says it is Thomas Alfred Sweets the Fourth.”
She snorted. “That’s too horrible to be a false name.”
“I thought the same.”
With assurances that she would be safe enough at the airfield and that she didn’t need any help finding a taxi, Wini left.
I puttered about the room, unpacking my scorched carpet bag and sighing a bit over its condition. That bag had been on many adventures with me, but this might be its last, I thought. An honorable retirement to the attic after this trip, I decided. I was fairly sure my house had an attic. I would have to ask Farnsworth.
The next morning, I was awake and working on some contracts that I’d brought with me when there was a sharp rap on the door. This time I did not fling it open, rather I called through it. “Who is there?”
“Your breakfast, Miss Baxter,” said a familiar voice.
“Irving,” I said, opening the door with some pleasure. “Shouldn’t you be off work by now?”
“Last duty of my shift,” he said, wheeling in the cart laden with breakfast elegantly hidden under a silver dome, a pot of coffee smelling delicious, and even a small red rose in a crystal vase.
“Very nice,” I said, waving my hand at the chair near the window. “And delightful to see you, too. Can you do me a favor?”
“Certainly, Miss Baxter,” said Irving, unrolling the napkin swaddling the silverware and then snapping out the same napkin to lay across my lap. The young man served with a definite panache. “What can I do?”
I nodded at the Homburg hat still sitting on the side table next to me. “Can you return that to Mr Sweets without anyone knowing where you found it?”
“Absolutely,” said Irving. “He’s on the second floor. I’ll stop on my way back to the kitchens.”
“Thank you,” I said, slipping a tip with the Homburg to the efficient Irving. “Oh, Irving, do you have any copies of the Arkham Advertiser?”
“We have all the local newspapers and a selection of the New York and Boston newspapers in the lounge downstairs,” said Irving. “Several days’ worth.”
“Excellent,” I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee and thinking about bootleggers and books. “I’ll take a look when I come down.”
Nearly a month’s worth of newspapers were stacked in a room the hotel grandly labeled “The Library” with a small polished brass sign. They had that wilted look of most hotel newspapers. Too many people had idly flipped the pages while waiting for something else. Most of the stories I vaguely remembered from my readings of the newspaper at home. But then I had been mostly focused on unexplained disappearances and the occasional reappearance of someone, like what had happened with Jim. This time I looked more closely for mentions of rumrunning and airplanes. The earlier story that I had seen about a captured seaplane loaded with illicit cargo was there. And it was written by Darrell! But in the days that followed the story vanished from the front pages when no one had been arrested or charged.
The problem with the airmail pilots and their planes disappearing was not mentioned. It seemed nobody wanted to talk about missing planes. Or perhaps only a few people knew. There was a brief mention of the airfield near Innsmouth being expanded as well as night lights being installed by the mail service. In one issue, I found a letter to the editor from a farmer, asking if anyone had seen some lost sheep, blaming this on increased flights over his fields. The noisy contraptions, as he put it, were scaring all his animals and keeping his hardworking family from a decent night’s sleep. Then one night a pilot had landed in the middle of his fields, claiming to have lost his way to Innsmouth, and made “an almighty fuss” until the farmer had driven him “a considerable way” to the nearest phone.
I shook my head at this intrusion of modern life. But a nighttime landing of an airplane, the lost pilot struggling across a field of fierce animals (probably not sheep!), and then having her pound on the door of a seemingly abandoned farmhouse was a fetching scenario. It would certainly make a good opening for one of the Flapper Detective’s adventures, I thought. I pulled out a small notebook from my handbag and jotted a line or two. The question, of course, was the role of the pilot. Would it be the Detective herself, off to save another lost soul? Or would this be our introduction to the eventual murder victim or even the villain? This was why creating fictional mysteries was so intriguing.
But as to clues for solving my personal mysteries, I found very little of help and left the hotel to complete my other errands before lunch.
The train station was my first stop. With delight, I watched them roll my largest delivery from California down the ramp from the boxcar and onto the ground.
“Oh, baby, how I’ve missed you,” I crooned to my brilliant blue roadster, patting the hood. Farnsworth had arranged the car to be shipped before I had even left California.
“That’s a nice machine,” said a red-headed woman supervising the unloading of some crates. She looked vaguely familiar.
“Hello,” I said. “Do I know you?”
“Lonnie,” she said, holding out her hand to shake mine. “We met at your mansion. During that swell party you threw for our crew.”
“Of course,” I said, pumping her hand with enthusiasm. “You’re Wini’s mechanic.”
“That’s me,” she said. “The rest of the crew is heading to the airfield. But I needed to pick up these tools and a couple of spare parts.”
“Wini’s there and waiting for you,” I said.
“Oh, I know,” replied Lonnie. “I spoke to her this morning on the phone. Sounds like you had some adventures on your trip. Set fire to my darling even.”
“Just a little smoke, almost no flames,” I assured her. “The Jenny flew like a dream.”
Lonnie grinned. “Wini is the best. When we race in your air derby, we’re going to take the grand prize.”
“You sound certain of that,” I said.
“There’s many great pilots,” said Lonnie. “But Wini can outfly them all!”
“It will be exciting,” I said as I hopped into the roadster. Farnsworth had already made arrangements with the railroad for the rest of my luggage to be taken directly to the hotel. “Sure you don’t need a ride?”
“No,” said Lonnie, pointing at a battered old truck. “I must make some more stops on the way to the airfield for supplies. We have a performance on Saturday. Hope to see you there, Miss Baxter.”
“You will,” I promised. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I wish I could try that wing-walking again.” I meant it, too. I loved going up in the plane, and the stunt had been grand. I started to ponder how I could persuade Wini to add me to the show. I needed a holiday, and stunt flying would be an amazing vacation.
The next stop was the Fitzmaurice house. The place looked as grim as I remembered, a blackened shell of a place where Sydney’s last film had gone so disastrously wrong. The last place where I had seen Max. I drove past the house itself, having no wish to explore its fire-damaged remains. I still recalled the heat of the flames, the searing sting of the smoke in my lungs, and Max pushing me out the door before I collapsed.
I guided the roadster past the house and to the barn where Humbert, the caretaker, was waiting for me. The tallest man in Massachusetts, Jeany once called him. He was a giant, closer to seven feet than six, and rail thin as well. A kind man, he had been tolerant of the ruckus we’d caused during the filming.
“Those trunks are safe,” Humbert said to me, pointing to the pile casually stacked behind bales of hay kept for gardening and feeding the mule he still used to pull his old-fashioned lawn-mowing machine.
The pile looked like it had been there forever rather than just three years. A barn cat showed her kitten how to hunt mice over the tops of the trunks, leaving behind a trail of little cat footprints in the dust. Hiding in plain sight, I doubted any of the Hollywood suits still hunting for Sydney’s last script would bother to push aside hay bales or pry open locks that were already starting to rust with the exposure to New England’s winters.
Humbert pulled a scythe off the wall and began to sharpen it on a whetstone wheel that he kept near the entrance of the barn. Listening to it make that awful screech of steel against stone, I thought that would also discourage any prowler.
“What are you cutting down with that?” I asked.
“Weeds,” said Humbert, never one to waste words. “Spreading out back. Coming from the woods. Been a bad summer for weeds.”
He stood up and tested the edge of the scythe with a gnarled thumb. “Something has been bothering the crows, too.”
Humbert believed the crows were not altogether normal birds. So did my friend Jeany, who claimed I should keep a close eye on any that I saw flying around Arkham. But I saw none in the sky or nearby trees as I walked around the house with Humbert. We went across the lawn, kept trim by Humbert’s mowing machine, toward the fence that separated the house from the wooden copse beyond.
The woods were the last remnants of a primeval forest, according to Christine, fenced in and contained by the first families of French Hill. Despite the green canopy shading the path leading past the locked gate, this was a place where people didn’t picnic or let their children play amid the shadows of the trees. It was not a nice place.
After we reached the fence, Humbert began to swing his scythe to cut back long olive-green vines growing through the slats. I moved further away, closer to the gate that once allowed the family access to their wood. Turning back toward the house, I could see that the fire had not burned this side as devastatingly as the front. From where I stood, looking back into the sun at the kitchen door and the path leading across the lawn, I almost expected to see the door swing open and a member of our film crew start down the steps. Would it be Jim slouching toward the pair of broken wicker chairs that still sat in the center of the lawn to steal a smoke and a nap while he waited to learn what part he would play? Or Paul packing his pipe as he came out to join Jim? Or even Max, who actually never relaxed enough to slouch in a broken chair and watch the sunset? Not when sitting would have wrinkled the perfect line of his suit. No, if it was Max marching out the back door, he would have been jotting lists in his monogrammed notebook, a place to go, a thing to do, or a person to impress. Max had wanted to be a big man in Hollywood. He saw himself as the next mogul, dwelling in a mansion, and running a studio.
Odd that I ended up living Max’s dream.
Something curled around my ankles. Something damp and cold, clutching me with a painful pinch. Like a dead man’s hands reaching out of a grave to grasp my legs.
I shrieked and jumped away from the fence. Long tendrils of slimy green vine were wound around my leg, causing me to stumble. The vine pulled me back toward the woods. From the other side of the fence rose an insistent and awful buzzing, a chittering of insects, and suddenly I felt like dinner being dragged into a lion’s den.
Humbert loomed in front of me, swinging his scythe in a wide arc behind his shoulder, and then chopping down with the blade.