TWENTY-SIX

IN THE HILLS

Blood Hill, near Newcomb, New York. July 5, 1937.

IT WAS PLEASANT AMONG THE TREES, ESPECIALLY IN THE birch grove by the stream. The cabin had been built close to seventy years before by miners who wanted to get through tough winters. When the sun beat down, it got hot inside fast, and after her two experiences of extreme heat in the previous twelve months Roxy found that she preferred it cool. For the first two weeks, she’d spent a lot of time with her burned feet and her burned hands in the water, sometimes following the stream down a ways to the small pool it made deeper in the woods, to immerse herself. Lately, though, since her skin had healed and her ankle was mended, she’d noticed that, conversely, she liked to move even less. Just lie in the clearing, watch the leaves dance against the bluest of skies, listen for the voices in the water as it gurgled through the banks. Sometimes she brought a book; her dad had left a lot of old ones in the cabin—Tom Sawyer, some Dickens, some O. Henry. But her concentration wasn’t great. She’d found that though her body had healed fast enough, her soul was not so swift.

Jocco. She thought about him a lot during the day, and dreamed of him each night. Sometimes the dreams were lovely: cool memories of hot nights, making love where they had and in places they’d never been. Mostly, though, it was the later Jocco who came, the one with the Gestapo prison and its memories in his eyes; the fanatic who only had his cause left, and his hatred. And then she’d wake and remember the story he’d told her in Africa. About his friend Reinhardt, who he couldn’t shoot when he’d had to leave him behind. Who the Italians had then tortured before they killed him. It wasn’t the same, her killing of Jocco. Yet, in a way it was. She couldn’t leave him behind. She had to stop him, and he’d been tortured enough.

In other dreams, she blamed him; confused the disaster with his actions, what he’d wanted to do. For a while she’d believed it was his fault, that the bomb had gone off even without his ignition cap. Then she’d made her first trip into Newcomb for supplies and, in a diner, found a pair of week-old newspapers. One was the Washington Post and had the headline “Preliminary Investigation on Disaster Only Reveals Doubt.”

Back at the cabin, she’d read the article obsessively. Sabotage was ruled completely out; the randomness of storms was in. Soon she knew the stats by heart, along with the names of all the living and the dead. Of the sixty-one crewmen, twenty-two had died. Of the thirty-six passengers, thirteen had perished. People thought it a miracle of sorts, considering the speed and intensity of the conflagration. She wondered if the dead thought it a miracle, in whatever afterlife they dwelled. The Gestapo officers, Schreiber and Kloff. The Mexican father and his daughter. Captain Lehmann, going down with his ship. Of the others, most she hadn’t known. She was pretty certain of one thing, though: that Sydney Aloysius Munroe, in whichever Circle of Hell he resided, was not grateful for the miracle of the survivors.

There was one other name she recognized. It was on one of the lists—but it really leaped at her from the front page of the second paper she’d found, a sensationalist rag called the New York Bugle. Under the headline “How I Survived Hindenburg Hell!” was the byline “Willie Schmidt—Ace Undercover Reporter.” Willie, with his fluent German, was on board to investigate Nazis and their American pals, especially the millionaire Sydney Munroe. “I saved half a dozen dames myself!” he wrote, and described in detail his heroic actions during the disaster.

But he lamented one he couldn’t save:

I used to cover the flying races. So I spotted her in Frankfurt straightaway despite her disguise—Roxy Loewen, who’d fled America back in ’29. I was making nice, getting close, and was going to find out what her story was. Until the bigger story took over. A shame she died, though. She was one good-looking broad.

There was a photo of her beside her plane Asteria 1, at some airfield. Smiling away. She didn’t recognize herself.

So it’s official, she thought, laying the paper down again after a third read. I’m dead. Has to be true if the Bugle says so. And how do I feel about that?

Confused, she had to admit. Pretty damn confused.

It was unusual being dead but not. She wasn’t quite sure how she was going to handle it. And she was going to have to, sooner rather than later. Louise Thaden had taken a collection of the other Ninety-Nines. The gals had been generous. Forty bucks was a princely sum, but it wasn’t going to last forever. Not with cigarettes now twenty cents a pack, and whisky nearing two bucks a quart. She supposed she could economize, and delay the inevitable. But after her year, and figuring all the ways she could have died during it, she’d concluded that life was way too tenuous to smoke cheap cigarettes and drink bad Scotch.

Which left her with two choices: the resurrection of Roxy Loewen…or her real demise. Neither appealed. Though she wasn’t ruling either of them out just yet.

She stubbed out her smoke and put the butt into the pack. She had just one pack left. Sighing, she rose and headed up the deer trail toward the cabin to fetch it.

She was halfway there, when she heard the motor—a car coming up the rough dirt track from the road. She’d thought that eventually someone would spot her cooking-fire smoke, come to check on the “abandoned” cabin. Sheriff, probably. She didn’t see any point in hiding. So she sat down on the front stoop to wait.

It was no police cruiser, though, that rounded the bend and pulled up but a friend in her sleek Packard Coupe. “Louise,” said Roxy, standing. “I hope you brought some cigarettes.”

Louise Thaden got out. “Good to see you too, Roxy. I did.” She hefted a carton of Camels. “And this—” She shook a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Then her smile faded. “I also brought something else.” She lifted a copy of the New York Times from the seat beside her. “Yesterday’s,” she said. “But I stopped in a hotel on the way up for some food and heard an update on the radio.”

“Update on what?”

“You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what? Jeez, Louise, tell me, will ya?”

Her friend didn’t reply, just took a step nearer and held up the front page. Its headline read: “Amelia Earhart Still Missing: Rescue Planes and Boats Seek Shelter from Storm as Hopes Fade.”

Roxy swallowed. “You better come in,” she said.

Roxy had known some of it. Louise had filled her in on her one previous visit to the cabin. Roxy had thought of asking for another map, pinning down some blue thread. But she found she could picture it all pretty well in her head. The most recent news that Roxy had heard, on Louise’s last drop-in at the end of June, was that Amelia had made it as far as Singapore.

“Where’d she head after that?” she asked, refilling her friend’s glass.

“Bandung.”

“Where?”

“Java. On from there to Darwin, then New Guinea.” Louise sipped. “Then came what was always going to be the trickiest part. She was heading for Hawaii, but she needed one refuel on the way. She’d picked this dot in the Pacific—”

“Howland Island. Yeah, I remember. Wait a second.” Roxy rose, went to the bookshelves. There was an atlas up there. After blowing dust off it, she looked at the inscription in copperplate on the inside cover: “Richard Loewen. Aged eleven. Happy Birthday from your father and mother.” Her dad had received it when he was a boy, which meant it was fifty years old. Still. She flicked the atlas open to the South Pacific.

Louise peered. “It’s somewhere…here.” She tapped open water, near the drawing of a whale. “There’re actually lots of islands here, mostly uninhabited. We’re claiming some, the Japanese are claiming some—it’s a mess. But we’ve built a runway on Howland. That’s where she was heading.”

“Last contact?”

“There’d been some messages, but the communication systems were poor. We haven’t heard them all yet.” She sighed. “Some say there was a message when she was close. Garbled. Also, the weather was terrible. And the radio announcer when I stopped at that hotel? He announced the storm’s gotten so bad no search flights have taken off in twenty-four hours. Even the ships are making for port.” Her voice broke. “I’m scared, Roxy. She…she—”

“Hush, now.” Roxy got up, went to the window. A noise had drawn her, distant, small, but recognizable. She stared into the immensity of blue until she saw it, a black speck. Wings flashed in the sunlight. “Hey, Lou,” she called, “think that’s Amelia up there?”

“Kid—”

Roxy watched the speck until it had vanished, listened until all the sound was gone. The airplane seemed to take something from her with it, that numbness in her chest that had been there for months. Suddenly, the feeling lifted, dispersing in the high summer clouds. She turned back. “Two things I know, Louise,” she said, crossing to sit again before her friend. “First, that there is no chance in God’s blue heaven Amelia has crashed into the Pacific.”

“Glad you’re so sure. And the second?”

“The second is that I’m going to go find her. Which means you’re going to find me a plane.”

“Hey! That’s three things.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Roxy Loewen.