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Authors: Carola Dunn

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BOOK: The Case of the Murdered Muckraker
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They were floating over rugged, wooded hills, not far above the treetops. Daisy saw a hawk hovering below, intent on its next meal, oblivious of the aeroplane passing overhead. She saw the aeroplane's shadow moving across the landscape—a hillside of tree stumps and a logging camp where tiny figures looked up and waved; a valley of scattered farms with small, irregular fields, in one of them a man and a horse ploughing; a village with a motorcar and three horse buggies in its single unpaved street; a curve of railway line with a train of coal wagons puffing along.
Gervaise would have liked to see that, Daisy thought. Her brother's clockwork train had been a favourite toy, back in nursery days.
This was fun! No wonder Alec had given in so easily to Dipper's persuasion, in spite of not being at all keen on following Pitt. She had never thought before that he might actually miss flying. She had always pictured him dodging
German shells and fleeing German fighters in his single-seater observer aeroplane.
Turning to Lambert, she shouted, “This is fun! Do open your window and have a look. There's a spiffing view.”
He opened his eyes just long enough to give her a look of terrified entreaty before huddling still lower in his seat.
Daisy returned to the view, but soon her cheeks and nose began to grow numb with cold. Wishing she had borrowed a muffler, she closed and fastened the window. In front of her, Dipper and Alec were shouting to each other, inaudible as far as she was concerned. For want of anything better to do, she speculated on the reason for Sir Roland Amboyne's nickname. Alec's obviously had something to do with his surname: Fletcher, a maker of arrows; but Dipper was obscure.
The flight became a test of endurance. As the chill penetrated Daisy's flying suit, her bottom grew numb and her limbs cramped from immobility. A meal provided a brief respite from boredom when she saw Alec and Dipper eating sandwiches and sharing a flask and remembered the stores in the cabin. Lambert refused to eat but drank some coffee—fortified with spirits, as Daisy discovered when she took a swig from the same Thermos.
How long could this go on? Surely soon they must run low on petrol and descend to refuel. Or had Dipper been prepared for a transatlantic flight when they diverted him?
Daisy knew from the sun that they were heading westward. Pitt came from somewhere in the West, somewhere with mountains and forests, in which he could disappear. If he was used to mountains, she thought with a momentary excitement, that might explain how he managed to run down flight after flight of stairs. Another scrap of evidence.
She couldn't remember the name of the place he came from. Miss Cabot's many guesses swirled in her head. It began with an
O
—or ended with an
O
. San Francisco? Leora, back at Hazelhurst Field, had told Daisy the post office plane was bound for San Francisco, officially.
No longer, Daisy was sure. Gilligan had referred to Pitt's home as a little “hick” town, which San Francisco definitely was not, from all she had heard. Gilligan had mentioned the name of the town. What on earth was it? Beginning with an
O
or ending with an
O
?
Daisy tried to re-create the scene when Pitt's provenance had been discussed. The town's name was on the tip of her tongue when she realized they were heading downward.
She gasped as the aeroplane suddenly plunged, pressing her back in the seat and leaving her stomach behind. She had just time to realize that the still roaring engines had not failed—so Dipper was presumably doing this on purpose—when they pulled out of the dive.
As the aeroplane levelled off, she peered out of her window. Just a few feet below her was the post office aeroplane, on the ground beside a shed with a wind sleeve on a flagpole. Flashing by, she thought she saw two men by the shed, and a horse and cart, and Pitt standing in the aeroplane's rear compartment, his gun trained on the pilot, who was climbing into the cockpit.
Dipper pulled back the stick and they ascended again, circling in that dizzying, wing-tilted way. Then the engines muted to a rumble and they glided down towards the field.
“I think we're landing,” Daisy said to Lambert. “At last!”
He opened his eyes and glanced out of his window. “That's when most crashes happen,” he croaked, gripping the edge of his seat.
“Pitt's down there. I can't see quite what Alec and Sir Roland hope to do. It's the same situation as back at Hazelhurst Field.”
“Except that we're in the air this time and we're all going to die.”
“No, we're not,” Daisy said crossly. “Sir Roland came through the War without crashing and … Oh!”
The engines bellowed as the aeroplane's nose pulled up sharply. Looking out, Daisy saw Pitt's aeroplane taxiing across the field right where they had been about to land.
Whatever his reasons, he was obviously absolutely desperate to escape.
D
ipper circled the field again, giving Daisy an excellent view of the post office aeroplane taking off. She expected that they would follow, but instead they came in to a gentle landing, bumped across the grass, and came to a halt near the shed.
Alec folded back the cabin's roof. “We have to refuel,” he said. “That crazy stunt was Dipper's attempt to frighten Pitt into staying on the ground. There are clouds ahead he's going to disappear into. I'm afraid we'll probably lose him.”
“No, we shan't,” said Daisy, standing stiffly and taking Alec's hand to help her down. She saw Dipper striding over to the shed, from which two farmers were cautiously emerging. “I'm pretty sure I know where he's going. The name of the place is on the tip of my tongue.”
“I'm not going any farther.” Lambert's adamant tone left no room for argument. He jumped down beside Daisy, colour beginning to return to his cheeks, and felt in his pocket. “Here, you can have my identification papers if they're any good to you. I quit. I'm going to find me a train station
and catch a train home and go into Dad's insurance business.”
Alec regarded him with sardonically raised eyebrows. “I shan't stop you. But before you quit, you can send a couple of telegrams for me at the Bureau's expense.” He took out the notebook he was never without.
“At the Bureau's expense?” said Daisy. “Darling, send one to Miss Genevieve, will you? Ask her to pass on the news to Kevin. And one to Mr. Thorwald and Pascoli, at the Flatiron Building. They'll all want to know what's going on.”
Leaving them, Daisy went to join Dipper.
“What ho,” he greeted her. “This is one of the air mail service's emergency landing fields. Arrow was right as usual: we're in Ohio.”
“Oregon!” Daisy exclaimed, her memory jogged by the plethora of
O
's. “That's where Pitt's going. It's in the West somewhere.”
Dipper laughed. “That's the direction he's heading. I was wondering how we're going to find him again, but if you know his destination, we can't miss him. These admirable gentlemen have petrol for us,” he added as the two men, farmers by the look of them, each carried two large petrol cans from the shed. “Jolly good show, fellows.”
They took the fuel to the biplane. Dipper and the older farmer started pouring petrol into the tank.
The younger man, returning for more cans, said shyly to Daisy, “You're British, ain't you, ma'am? I was over there.”
“In the War?”
“Yes, ma‘am. You know that song, ‘How you gonna keep them down on the farm, now that they've seen Paree'?
That's me. Only it was Lunnon for me. I mean, Paree's gay, like they say, but heck, they don't even try to speak English. At least you guys try.”
“We do our best,” Daisy said solemnly.
Alec came over. He nodded to the ex-doughboy and said, “Have you got a telephone?”
“No, sir. Ain't none for twenty miles.”
Alec glanced at the horse and cart. “Too bad. Daisy, Lambert's agreed to escort you back to New York, or Washington if you prefer. I'll join you there as soon as this business is wrapped up.”
“Then you're going on? I was sure you'd be ready to give up.”
He came as close as she had ever seen to a blush. “I suppose Lambert's put me on my mettle,” he conceded ruefully. “And Dipper's still keen as mustard. We'll be off as soon as the tanks are full.”
“So will I,” said Daisy. “Darling, you really can't abandon me with
Lambert
for an escort, dressed like this, here in the middle of nowhere!”
“The middle of nowhere, ain't that the truth!” The young man sighed. “I guess I better go help Pa and your pilot. You gotta get going if you're gonna catch that screwball that was waving his gun around all this gasoline.”
Alec was going to argue with Daisy, but Dipper called him for a consultation. While they had their heads together over a map, Daisy managed to climb into her seat and strap herself in. Loath though she was to return to the torture chamber a moment sooner than necessary, she wasn't about to give them a chance to leave without her.
Lambert, standing disconsolate by the shed, waved to her but made no move to come anywhere near the aeroplane.
Daisy waved back, wondering whether she would ever see him again. She would have liked to say good-bye properly, to thank him for his efforts to protect her from the foe, however chimerical. He obviously was not going to budge, though, and nor was she. She hoped he'd get home safely.
At last, Alec climbed into the cockpit and stood looking down at her, shaking his head. “Daisy, there's nasty weather ahead, we can't tell how nasty. It could be dangerous.”
“I'll call it quits if you call it quits.”
He threw an exasperated glance at Lambert, and another at Dipper, but his exasperation was mostly for himself. “I can't, love.”
“Then I shan't. You really can't expect me to face your mother with the news that I deserted you in the middle of America and you've disappeared.”
“It does sound rather difficult.”
“Much more difficult than disappearing with you, darling.”
“I don't anticipate disappearing.”
“Well, then,” said Daisy, “that's that, isn't it? Besides, without me you don't know where to go.”
“Dipper said you told him Oregon.”
“Yes, but that's a state. I know I've heard the name of his home town, if I could only think of it.” She frowned. “There's some connection in my mind with Miss Genevieve. I can't quite pin it down. Unless it's just that she was there when I heard it.”
“Great Scott, Daisy, if we don't know his destination, this whole mad jaunt is pointless! I'm not flying clear across the country only to humour you and Dipper.”
“I'll remember,” Daisy said determinedly. “Anyway, with any luck you'll see him when we take off, so that we can follow again.”
This time, as Alec was flying the aeroplane, it was Dipper who stood up in the cockpit to peer around the windshield. To Daisy's relief, he spotted their quarry.
It wasn't very long, though, before he stood up again. This time he balanced there, scanning the sky ahead, for what seemed an age. When he sat down, he was shaking his head. Alec shrugged. They shouted back and forth a bit, then Daisy felt the aeroplane gradually ascending.
She soon saw why. They were sailing above a blanket of cotton wool clouds. Wisps floated about them, insubstantial as dreams, but the mass below was quite solid enough to hide Pitt's biplane, whether he was forcing his unwilling pilot to fly through it or under it. Daisy imagined the poor man's quandary as he weighed the probability of Pitt shooting him if he disobeyed, against the dangers of flying blind through what she guessed must be a pea-soup fog.
If the pilot died, Pitt would also die, of course. Did he not fear death? If not, what was he fleeing? Not someone who had killed his cousin and might kill him. Which suggested that he had in fact been responsible for Carmody's death, intentionally or not.
Was he afraid of imprisonment? Daisy wondered if that fate might seem worse than death to someone used to roaming the forests and mountains. Or perhaps he was not so much running
away
as running
to
—to those forests and mountains which he had, according to Miss Genevieve, described in Proustian detail in his book.
With a sigh, she decided she'd never understand the motivation
of someone whose background was so utterly dif ferent from her own, especially as she had never even talked to him.
She ought, however, to be able to remember the name of the Oregon town he and Carmody came from. What was the connection with Miss Genevieve? She worried away at the riddle but was eventually driven to the conclusion that the direct approach would never work. Perhaps, as with an acrostic, the answer would suddenly come to her when she was thinking of something else.
Outside the window, occasional rifts in the clouds showed a rain-drenched countryside below, but no sign of the post office aeroplane. With nothing to hold her attention, and slightly more room to stretch her legs since Lambert's departure, in spite of noise, cold, and vibration, Daisy drowsed off.
What roused her was a change in the note of the engines. The cloud tops were tinged with pink and the sun was a bloodred globe dead ahead. Then the aeroplane plunged into the clouds.
It wasn't like a pea-souper after all, more of a ragged mist streaming past the windows. Daisy held her breath, half expecting to run into a hillside, or a tall building, or even the tail of Pitt's aeroplane. She did not have to hold it long. The cloud layer was not thick, and when they emerged beneath, it was not raining.
Rosy sunlight slanting through a gap to the west revealed to Daisy's astonished gaze flat farmland divided neatly into squares like a chessboard, as far as the eye could see.
Alice Through the Looking Glass?
Curiouser and curiouser, thought Daisy.
They flew on below the clouds, which grew sparser and
fell behind. Then Daisy saw Dipper point ahead and consult a map. He and Alec exchanged a few of those infuriating shouts which she couldn't hear. The aeroplane tilted as they turned northward. Now the pattern of squares was broken up by a great river, whose course they followed, cutting across its meanders.
The sun had set by now and the light was fading fast. Daisy wasn't at all sure she wanted to experience a night landing, especially at a field unfamiliar to both pilots. If they actually found an airfield. What on earth had possessed her to insist on chasing Pitt?
Because she had been convinced that he had killed his cousin, and that Rosenblatt and Gilligan were incapable of catching him, she reminded herself. And once begun, the excitement of the chase was added to reluctance to admit she might be wrong and refusal to give up as long as anyone else continued.
It was not quite dark when the engines throttled back and the aeroplane began to descend. The lights of a town appeared below. Wherever it was that they were going, they had apparently arrived. They circled above the town, while Dipper consulted his map with the aid of an electric torch. He pointed at the ground, and he and Alec exchanged shouts. Down they went again.
The landing was decidedly bumpy, not to say bouncy. Daisy was just grateful to be down in one piece, especially when she realized Alec had landed by the light of a row of paraffin lanterns hung on a fence.
The field was very like their last stop, but with no friendly farmers at hand. Whoever lit the lamps had already left.
“Sioux City, we think,” said Dipper ruefully, helping
Daisy to the ground. “We were aiming for Omaha. Should have turned south when we struck the Missouri River, dash it, as Arrow said. Still, no bones broken, what?”
“Sioux City!” Daisy exclaimed. “As in ‘Little Indian, Sioux or Crow'? We're in the Wild West, then. It can't be much farther to Oregon.”
“Awf'ly sorry to disappoint you, Mrs. Fletcher, but we're not even halfway across the country, as near as I can reckon it. The maps I've got only go as far as a hundred and five degrees west.”
“This is crazy,” said Alec, stretching wearily. “I don't suppose you've remembered yet, Daisy, where in Oregon Pitt comes from?”
“No, I'm afraid not, darling. Actually, I fell asleep while trying to think of the name of the town. But I
will
remember, I promise.”
He groaned. “I suppose it's no good walking into the town. The telegraph office will be closed, and anyway Washington will be shut down for the weekend. If only I knew what was going on, whether there's a general alert out, whether the federal authorities have found out where Pitt's from and where he's going.”
“I can't see Lambert getting close enough to tell them. So it would take cooperation from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” Daisy pointed out. “Most unlikely.”
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?” queried Dipper, intrigued.
“It's a long story,” said Daisy.
“We've got time. We can't take off again until the early hours of the morning unless we want to land at an unknown field in the dark.”
“Always assuming there's fuel in that shed,” Alec said gloomily.
“If there isn't, darling, we're stymied, which ought to please you. Let's go and see.”
There was fuel. In the last of the twilight, Alec and Dipper refueled the aeroplane. Daisy scavenged the last of the food supplies from inside and, by the light of the torch, arranged a meagre picnic within the petrol-smelling shelter of the shed. The men brought in a couple of the paraffin lanterns, which made things more cheerful and perhaps slightly warmer, though adding to the overall effluvium.
They sat down cross-legged—much easier in aviator's gear than a skirt, Daisy noted—to curling sandwiches and lukewarm coffee.
BOOK: The Case of the Murdered Muckraker
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