“How did she sound?”

“Tired and hopeful. Poor thing. It’s a nightmare – both of our nightmares – only I’m older and have loved you longer, and I don’t worry in that same way. Lillian admitted to me that since Archie returned to work after their honeymoon, she was afraid every day until he came home safe. Darling, are you taking such chances learning to fly because you’re worried about Archie? Or trying to make up for what happened to him?”

“I’ve always been keen to fly.”

“But are you keen to fly for the wrong reasons? Isaac, you know I never trouble you with worrying about your safety. But this seems unusually risky. What can you possibly do up in the air if Frost shoots at her?”

“Shoot back, and finish Harry Frost once and for all.”

“Who will fly the aeroplane while you’re busy shooting?”

“I can drive it with one hand. . Well, actually, to be perfectly honest,” he admitted with a rueful smile, “I will be able to drive with one hand soon. Today, I was hanging on tight with both.”

Marion extended her arms. “Can you demonstrate that?”

“WOULD YOU GIVE ME SOME ADVICE on that straightening-up-fast stunt just before you touch the ground?” Isaac Bell asked Josephine. The race was starting in three days, and he had scheduled a certification test to get an official pilot’s license from the Aero Club.

“Don’t!” Josephine grinned, “is the best advice I can give you. Practice blipping your magneto instead, and don’t try stunts your machine isn’t up to.”

“My alettoni are the same as yours.”

“No, they’re not,” she retorted, her grin fading.

“The wing bracing is the same.”

“Similar.”

“Just as strong.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” she said seriously.

The subject always turned her prickly, but Bell noticed that she no longer repeated her earlier assertion that Danielle’s father had worked for Marco Celere. It was almost as if she suspected that the opposite was true.

Gently he said, “Maybe you mean I’m not up to it.”

She smiled, as if grateful Bell had let her off the hook. “You will be. I’ve been watching you. You have the touch – that’s the important thing.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Bell. “I can’t fall too far behind you if I’m going to protect you.”

In fact, Bell had devised a defense in which he was only one element. Van Dorn riflemen would spell one another on the roof of the support car, easily climbing to their gun perch through a hatch in the roof. Two roadsters in a boxcar with a ramp would be ready to light out after her if for any reason Josephine strayed from the railroad tracks. And every day detectives would take their places in advance at the next scheduled stop.

A commotion broke out at the hangar door.

Bell glided in front of Josephine as he drew the Browning from his coat.

“Josephine! Josephine! Where is that woman?”

“Oh my God,” said Josephine. “It’s Preston Whiteway.”

“Josephine! Josephine!” Whiteway barreled in. “There you are! I bring good news! Great news!”

Bell holstered his weapon. The best news he could think of was that Van Dorns had arrested Harry Frost.

“My lawyers,” shouted Whiteway, “have persuaded the court to annul your marriage to Harry Frost on the grounds that the madman tried to kill you!”

“Annulled?”

“You are free. . Free!”

Isaac Bell observed the meeting between Josephine and Whiteway long enough to form an opinion of its nature, then slipped out the door.

“Cut!” he heard Marion Morgan order sharply. Her camera operator – hunched over a large machine on a strong tripod – stopped cranking as if a hawk had swooped down and seized his arm. It was well known among Miss Morgan’s operators that Mr. Bell did not want his picture taken.

“My darling, how wonderful to see you.” He thought she looked lovely in her working outfit, a shirtwaist and long skirt, with her hair gathered high to be out of her way when she looked through the camera lens.

She explained that she and her crew had been trailing Preston Whiteway all morning to shoot scenes for the title card that would read

The Race Sponsor’s Arrival!!!!

Bell took her into his arms. “What a treat. Can we have lunch?”

“No, I’ve got to shoot all of this.” She lowered her voice. “How did Josephine take the news?”

“I got the impression she was trying to dampen Whiteway’s excitement over the prospect of her being ‘Free! Free!’”

“I imagine that Preston’s working around to asking her to marry him.”

“The signs are all there,” Bell agreed. “He’s beaming like bonfire. He’s wearing a fine new suit of clothes. And he shines like he’s been barbered within an inch of his life.”

MARION HAD HER CREW IN PLACE, cranking their camera, when Preston Whiteway lured the New York press to Josephine’s big yellow tent in the infield with the promise of an important change in the race. Bell kept a close eye on the gathering, accompanied by Harry Warren, Van Dorn’s New York gang expert, who Bell had asked to take over the Belmont Park squad for the wounded Archie.

Bell saw that Whiteway had gotten his fondest wish: other newspapers could no longer ignore the Whiteway Cup. The aerial race was the biggest story in the country. But his rivals did not love him for it, and the questioning, two days before the race was to start, was openly hostile. Forty newspapermen were shouting questions, egged on by Van Dorn detective Scudder Smith, who had once been an actual newspaper reporter, or so he said.

“If that detective has imbibed as excessively as it appears,” Isaac Bell told Harry Warren, “suspend him for a week, and dock his pay for a month.”

“Scudder’s O.K.,” Harry assured him. “That’s just part of his disguise.”

“Disguised as what?”

“A drunken newspaper reporter.”

“He’s fooling me.”

“Can you deny, Mr. Whiteway,” a reporter from the Telegram howled aggrievedly, “that the extremely short hop from Belmont Park to Empire City Race Track in Yonkers is a ploy to charge more paying spectators from New York City?”

“Is it not true that you could fly from Belmont Park to Yonkers in a glider?” shouted the man from the Tribune.

“Ten miles, Mr. Whiteway?” asked the Times. “Could not the aviators simply walk?”

“Or ride bicycles?” chimed in Detective Smith.

Bell had to admire how cleverly Whiteway let his rivals’ reporters have their fun before he fired back with both barrels. In fact, he suspected Whiteway had probably planned the change all along to draw the other papers into his trap.

“It is my pleasure to fulfill your expectation of some new sensation by announcing a last-minute change in the course. The first leg to Empire City Race Track in Yonkers will entail the competitors flying a full eighteen miles west from Belmont Park to the Statue of Liberty. Upon arriving at America’s symbol of freedom, the aviators competing for the gold Whiteway Cup will circle the statue, for hundreds of thousands to see from riverbanks and spectator vessels, and then steer their machines another twenty-two miles north to Yonkers, for a grand total the first day of forty miles. These brave fliers will use the opportunity to ‘work the kinks out’ while crossing two bodies of water – the treacherous East River and the broad Upper Bay – then fly up the middle of the wide Hudson River to alight safely, God willing, in the infield of the Empire City Race Track, where an excellent aviation field is offered by the racing course. . Thank you, gentlemen. I am sure that your editors anxiously await your stories to put extras on the street ahead of the competition.”

He might have added that the Whiteway papers’ “EXTRA”s were already in the hands of every newsboy in the city. But he didn’t have to. The reporters were stampeding to the racetrack telephones, cursing that they had been hoodwinked and that the editors would take it out of their hides.