The Race Read online

  Josephine heard the shot, louder than the motor and drive chains clattering behind her.

  HARRY FROST HAD A WEIRD FEELING he had missed the Italian.

  He was a seasoned big-game hunter. Since retiring rich, he had shot elk and bighorn sheep in Montana, lion in South Africa, and elephants in Rhodesia, and he could have sworn the bullet had gone high. But there was his wife’s swarthy boyfriend squirming on the edge of the cliff, hit but not dead.

  Frost levered a fresh .45-70 shell into his Marlin 1895 and found him in the scope. He hated the sight of Marco Celere—oily black hair brilliantined slick to his skull, high forehead like a vaudeville Julius Caesar, thick eyebrows, deep-set dark eyes, waxed mustache curled at the tips like pigs’ tails—and he was taking great pleasure in smoothly squeezing the trigger when suddenly a strange noise clattered in his head. It sounded like the threshing machine at the farm at the Matawan Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where his enemies had locked him up for shooting his chauffeur at the country club.

  The bughouse had been worse than the most monstrous orphanage in his memory. Powerful politicians and high-priced lawyers claimed credit for springing him. But it was only right to let him out. The chauffeur had been romancing his first wife.

  Unbelievably, it was happening again with his new bride. He could see it written on their faces every time Josephine hit him up for more dough to pay for Marco’s inventions. Now she was begging him to buy the Italian’s latest flying machine back from his creditors so she could win the Atlantic–Pacific Cross-Country Air Race and claim the fifty-thousand-dollar Whiteway Cup.

  Wouldn’t that be swell? Winning the biggest air race in the world would make his aviatrix wife and her inventor boyfriend famous. Preston Whiteway—the snoot-in-the-air, born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth San Francisco newspaper publisher who was sponsoring the race—would make them stars, and sell fifty million newspapers in the process. The chump husband would be famous, too—a famously cuckolded, fat old rich husband—the laughingstock of all who despised him.

  Rich he was, one of the richest men in America, every damned dollar earned himself. But Harry Frost wasn’t old yet. A little over forty wasn’t that old. And anyone who said he was more fat than muscle hadn’t seen him kill a horse with a single punch—a trick he had performed famously in his youth and lately had made a birthday ritual.

  Unlike the treachery with the chauffeur, this time they wouldn’t catch him. No more flying off the handle. He had planned this one down to the last detail. Savoring revenge, going about it like a business, he had resurrected his formidable talents for management and deception to lure the unsuspecting Celere on a bear hunt. Bears couldn’t talk. There’d be no witnesses deep in the North Country woods.

  Convinced he had shot higher than he meant to, Frost aimed low and fired again.

  JOSEPHINE SAW CELERE whiplashed from the cliff by the force of the bullet.

  “Marco!”

  THE CLATTER IN HARRY FROST’S SKULL GREW LOUD. Still peering down the barrel of his rifle at the wonderful empty space where Marco Celere had been, he suddenly realized that the noise was not a memory of the Matawan farm but real as the 405-grain lead bullet that had just blown the bride thief into the gorge. He looked up. Josephine was flying over him in her damned biplane. She had seen him shoot her aeroplane inventor.

  Frost had three cartridges left in his magazine.

  He raised the rifle.

  But he didn’t want to kill her. She’d stay with him now that Marco was out of the way. But she saw him kill Marco. They would lock him back in the bughouse. Second time around he’d never get out. That wouldn’t be fair. He wasn’t the betrayer. She was.

  Frost whipped the rifle skyward and fired twice.

  He misjudged her speed. At least one shot passed behind her. With only a single bullet left, he gathered his wits, settled his nerves, and led the biplane like a pheasant.

  Bull’s-eye!

  He had scored a hit, for sure. Her flying machine lurched into a wide, clumsy turn. He waited for it to fall. But it kept turning, wobbling back in the direction of the camp. It was too high to hit with a pistol, but Frost jerked one from his belt anyway. Bracing the barrel on his powerful forearm, he fired until it was empty. Eyes bugging with rage, he flicked a snub-nosed derringer out of his sleeve. He emptied its two shots futilely in her direction and pawed at his hunting knife, to cut her heart out when she smashed into the trees.

  The clatter grew fainter and fainter and fainter, and Harry Frost could do nothing but watch helplessly as his treacherous wife disappeared beyond the tree line and escaped his righteous wrath.

  At least he had blown her lover into the gorge.

  He lumbered across the meadow, hoping for a glimpse of Celere’s body smashed on the river rocks. But halfway to the rim of the cliff, he stopped dead, poleaxed by a horrible realization. He had to run before they locked him back in the bughouse.

  JOSEPHINE FOUGHT WITH ALL HER SKILL to guide her machine safely to the ground.

  Harry had hit it twice. One bullet had nicked the two-gallon gasoline tank behind her. The second was worse. It had jammed the link between her control lever and the wire that twisted the shape of her wings. Unable to warp them to bank the machine into a turn, she was dependent entirely on its rudder. But trying to turn without banking was like flying a glider before the Wright brothers invented wing warping—god-awful awkward and likely to slide her sideways into a deadly flat spin.

  Lips tight, she worked the rudder like a surgeon’s scalpel, taking measured slices of the wind. Her mother, a frantic woman unable to cope with the simplest task, used to accuse her of having “ice water in her veins.” But wasn’t ice water handy on a crippled flying machine, Mother? Slowly, she brought the biplane back on course.

  When the wind gusted from behind, she smelled gasoline. She looked for the source and saw it dripping from the fuel tank. Harry’s bullet had punctured it.

  Which would happen first? she wondered coolly. Would the gasoline all leak out and stop her motor before she could alight on Harry’s lawn? Or would sparks from the engine and chains ignite the gasoline? Fire was deadly on a flying machine. The varnish of nitrate fabric dope that stiffened and sealed the cotton canvas covering her wings was as flammable as flash powder.

  The only field nearer was the meadow. But if she alighted there, Harry would kill her. She had no choice. She had to land the machine at the camp, if she had enough gasoline to reach it.

  “Come on, Elsie. Take us home.”

  The forest inched slowly beneath her. Updrafts buffeted her wings and rolled the airship. Unable to warp them to counteract, she tried to keep the machine on an even keel using her elevators and rudder.

  At last she saw the lake beside Harry’s camp.

  Just as she got close enough to see the main house and the dairy barns, her motor sputtered on the last fumes of gasoline. The propellers stopped turning. The pusher biplane went silent but for the wind whispering through the wire stays.

  She had to volplane—to glide—all the way to the lawn.

  But the propellers, which had been pushing her, were dragging in the air. They held her back, reducing her speed. In moments she would be gliding too slowly to stay aloft.

  She reached behind her and jerked the cable that opened the engine’s compression valve so the pistons would move freely and allow the propellers to spin. The difference was immediate. The aeroplane felt lighter, more like a glider.

  Now she could see the dairy pasture. Speckled with cows and crisscrossed with fences, it offered no room to come down safely. There was the house, an elaborate log mansion, and behind it the sloping lawn of mowed grass from which she had earlier taken to the air. But first she had to clear the house, and she was dropping fast. She threaded a path between the tall chimneys, skimmed the roof, and then coaxed the rudder to turn into the wind, taking great care not to slide into a spin.

  Eight feet above the grass, she saw that she was moving too fast.
Air squeezed between the wings and the ground had the effect of holding her up. The biplane was refusing to stop flying. Ahead loomed a wall of trees.

  The gasoline that had soaked into the varnished canvas ignited in a sheet of orange flame.

  Trailing fire, unable to slant her wings sharply to slow enough to touch her wheels to the grass, Josephine reached back and jerked the compression cable. Closing the valve locked the eight-foot propellers. They grabbed the air like two fists, and her wheels and skids banged hard on the grass.

  The burning biplane slid for fifty yards. As it slowed, the fire spread, scattering flame. When she felt it singe the back of her helmet, Josephine jumped. She hit the ground and threw herself flat to let the machine roll past, then she sprang to her feet and ran for her life as flames engulfed it.

  Harry’s butler came running. He was trailed by the gardener, the cook, and Harry’s bodyguards.

  “Mrs. Frost! Are you all right?”

  Josephine’s eyes locked on the pillar of flame and smoke. Marco’s beautiful machine was burning like a funeral pyre. Poor Marco. The steadiness that had gotten her through the ordeal was dissolving, and she felt her lips quiver. The fire looked like it was underwater. She realized that she was shaking and crying, and that tears were filling her eyes. She couldn’t tell if she was crying for Marco or herself.

  “Mrs. Frost!” the butler repeated. “Are you all right?”

  It was the closest by far she had ever come to getting killed in an aeroplane.

  She tried to pull her handkerchief from her sleeve. She couldn’t get it out. She had to take her glove off. When she did, she saw her skin was dead white, as if her blood had gone into hiding. Everything was different. She now knew what it felt like to be afraid.

  “Mrs. Frost?”

  They were all staring at her. Like she had cheated death or was standing among them like a ghost.

  “I’m O.K.”

  “May I do anything to help, Mrs. Frost?”

  Her brain was whirling. She had to do something. She pressed her handkerchief to her face. A thousand men and women had learned to fly since Wilbur Wright won the Michelin Cup in France, and until this moment Josephine Josephs Frost had never doubted that she could drive an aeroplane just as fast and as far as any of them. Now every time she climbed onto a flying machine she would have to be brave. Well, it still beat being stuck on the ground.

  She mopped her cheeks and blew her nose.

  “Yes,” she said. “Drive into town, please, and tell Constable Hodge that Mr. Frost just shot Mr. Celere.”

  The butler gasped, “What?”

  She glanced at him sharply. How surprised could he be that her violent husband had killed someone? Again.

  “Are you quite sure of that, Mrs. Frost?”

  “Am I quite sure?” she echoed. “Yes, I saw it happen with my own eyes.”

  The butler’s dubious expression was a chilling reminder that it was Harry who paid his salary, Harry who paid for everything, and Mrs. Frost was now a woman alone with no one to count on but herself.

  The bodyguards didn’t look surprised. Their long faces said, There goes our meal ticket. The butler, too, was already getting over it, asking as routinely as if she had just ordered a glass of iced tea, “Will there be anything else, Mrs. Frost?”

  “Please do what I asked,” she said in a voice with a slight tremor as she stared at the fire. “Tell the constable my husband killed Mr. Celere.”

  “Yes, madam,” he replied in a blank tone.

  Josephine turned her back on the fire. Her hazel eyes were wont to shift toward green or gray. She did not have to look in a mirror to know that right now they reflected a colorless fear. She was alone and she was vulnerable. With Marco Celere dead and her husband an insane killer, she had no one to turn to. Then the thought of Preston Whiteway flowed into her mind.

  Yes, that’s who would protect her.

  “One more thing,” she said to the butler as he started to walk away. “Send a telegram to Mr. Preston Whiteway at the San Francisco Inquirer. Say that I will visit him next week.”

  2

  “Hoopla!”

  ISAAC BELL, CHIEF INVESTIGATOR of the Van Dorn Detective Agency, thundered up San Francisco’s Market Street in a fire-engine red gasoline-powered Locomobile racer with its exhaust cutout wide open for maximum power. Bell was a tall man of thirty with a thick mustache that glowed as golden as his precisely groomed blond hair. He wore an immaculate white suit and a low-crowned white hat with a wide brim. His frame was whipcord lean.

  As he drove, his boots, well-kept and freshly polished, rarely touched the brake, an infamously ineffective Locomobile accessory. His long hands and fingers moved nimbly between throttle and shifter. His eyes, ordinarily a compelling violet shade of blue, were dark with concentration. A no-nonsense expression and a determined set of his jaw were tempered by a grin of pure pleasure as he raced the auto at breakneck speed, overtaking trolleys, trucks, horse carts, motorcycles, and slow automobiles.

  In the red-leather passenger seat to Bell’s left sat the boss, Joseph Van Dorn.

  The burly, red-whiskered founder of the nationwide detective agency was a brave man feared across the continent as the scourge of criminals. But he turned pale as Bell aimed the big machine at the dwindling space between a coal wagon and a Buick motortruck stacked to the rails with tins of kerosene and naphtha.

  “We’re actually on time,” Van Dorn remarked. “Even a little early.”

  Isaac Bell did not appear to hear him.

  With relief, Van Dorn saw their destination looming over its shorter neighbors: Preston Whiteway’s twelve-story San Francisco Inquirer building, headquarters of the flamboyant publisher’s newspaper empire.

  “Will you look at that!” Van Dorn shouted over the roar of the motor.

  An enormous yellow advertising banner draped the top floor proclaiming in yard-high letters that Whiteway’s newspapers were sponsoring the

  WHITEWAY ATLANTIC-TO-PACIFIC CROSS-COUNTRY AIR RACE

  The Whiteway Cup and $50,000

  To be awarded to the

  First Flier

  To Cross America in Fifty Days

  “It’s a magnificent challenge,” Bell shouted back without taking his eyes from the crowded street.

  Isaac Bell was fascinated by flying machines. He had been following their rapid development avidly, with the object of buying a top flier himself. There had been scores of improved aerial inventions in the past two years, each producing faster and stronger aeroplanes: the Wright Flyer III, the June Bug, the bamboo-framed Silver Dart, the enormous French Voisins and Antoinettes powered by V-8 racing-boat engines, Santos Dumont’s petite Demoiselle, the cross–English Channel Blériot, the rugged Curtiss Pusher, the Wright Signal Corps machine, the Farman III, and the Celere wire-braced monoplane.

  If anyone could actually navigate a flying machine all the way across the United States of America—a very big if—the Whiteway Cup would be won in equal parts by the nerve and skill of the airmen and by how ingeniously the inventors increased the power of their engines and improved systems of shaping their wings to make the airships turn more agilely and climb faster. The winner would have to average eighty miles a day, nearly two hours in the air, every day. Each day lost to wind, storm, fog, accidents, and repairs would increase dramatically those hours aloft.

  “Whiteway’s newspapers claim that the cup is made of solid gold,” Van Dorn laughed. “Say,” he joked, “maybe that’s what he wants to see us about—afraid some crook will steal it.”

  “Last year his papers claimed that Japan would sink the Great White Fleet,” Bell said drily. “Somehow they made it home safe to Hampton Roads. There’s Whiteway now!”

  The fair-haired publisher was steering a yellow Rolls-Royce roadster toward the only parking space left in front of his building.

  “Looks like Whiteway has it,” said Van Dorn.

  Bell pressed hard on his accelerator. The big red Locomobile surged ah
ead of the yellow Rolls-Royce. Bell stomped the anemic brakes, shifted down, and swerved on smoking tires into the parking space.

  “Hey!” Whiteway shook a fist. “That’s my space.” He was a big man, a former college football star running to fat. An arrogant cock to his head boasted that he was still handsome, deserved whatever he wanted, and was strong enough to insist on it.

  Isaac Bell bounded from his auto to extend a powerful hand with a friendly smile.

  “Oh, it’s you, Bell. That’s my space!”

  “Hello, Preston, it’s been a while. When I told Marion we’d be calling on you, she asked me to send her regards.”

  Whiteway’s scowl faded at the mention of Isaac Bell’s fiancée, Marion Morgan, a beautiful woman in the moving-picture line. Marion had worked with Whiteway, directing his Picture World scheme, which was enjoying great success exhibiting films of news events in vaudeville theaters and nickelodeons.

  “Tell Marion that I’m counting on her to shoot great movies of my air race.”

  “I’m sure she can’t wait. This is Joseph Van Dorn.”

  The newspaper magnate and the founder of the nation’s premier detective agency sized each other up while shaking hands. Van Dorn pointed skyward. “We were just admiring your banner. Ought to be quite an affair.”

  “That’s why I called for you. Come up to my office.”

  A detail of uniformed doormen were saluting as if an admiral had arrived in a dreadnought. Whiteway snapped his fingers. Two men ran to park the yellow Rolls-Royce.

  Whiteway received more salutes in the lobby.

  A gilded elevator cage carried them to the top floor, where a mob of editors and secretaries were gathered in the foyer with pencils and notepads at the ready. Whiteway barked orders, scattering some on urgent missions. Others raced after him, scribbling rapidly, as the publisher dictated the end of the afternoon edition’s editorial that he had started before lunch.

  “‘The Inquirer decries the deplorable state of American aviation. Europeans have staked a claim in the sky while we molder on the earth, left behind in the dust of innovation. But the Inquirer never merely decries, the Inquirer acts! We invite every red-blooded American aviator and aviatrix to carry our banner skyward in the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race to fly across America in fifty days!’ Print it!