The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star Page 14

  “My, my. That’s quite a welcoming committee,” Charlie remarked dryly, getting out his camera equipment.

  “Well, she’s a celebrity,” Lizzy said, although she couldn’t help suspecting that it wasn’t Miss Dare’s fame or his official duties that had brought Roger Kilgore here. If that anonymous letter writer was telling the truth . . . But the photograph and the checks proved that, didn’t they? She lowered her voice. “When you talked to Miss Dare on the phone, did she say anything more about the sabotage? Or about a threat?”

  Charlie shook his head. “I’ll ask her about that later, when—”

  But before he could finish, there was an excited cry from the group, and the children began to dance up and down.

  “There she is!” Jed Snow shouted. He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and pointed toward the trees at the southern end of the field. “There’s her plane, Sam. The Texas Star is coming in!”

  As Lizzy and Charlie joined the group, the air was filled with the roar of an airplane engine, and a moment later, there it was, a small white biplane with a red, white, and blue star on the side, surrounded by the words Lily Dare’s Dare Devils. The plane got bigger and bigger the closer it came until, no more than thirty feet above the ground, it raced the length of the field from south to north, its engine so loud that Lizzy had to put both hands over her ears. She saw Miss Dare in the open cockpit, wearing her white helmet and trademark red scarf, which streamed behind her like a bloody ribbon.

  The airplane reached the northern end of the field, cleared the trees, then waggled its wings and began to climb sharply, up and up and up, hundreds of feet into the sky, where it was silhouetted against the angry storm clouds. Lizzy watched, openmouthed, as Miss Dare climbed past the vertical, the nose of the airplane falling back and over. A moment later, the Texas Star turned belly up. Miss Dare was flying upside down.

  The Boss took his cigar out of his mouth. “My gawd a-mighty,” he blurted out in his gravelly voice. “Just like they do it in the movies.”

  “The fastest woman in the world,” Roger Kilgore said. He sounded almost reverent.

  “What’s she doing, Daddy?” Sarah whispered fearfully. “Why is she upside down?”

  “She’s looping the loop, Sarah,” Jed Snow replied.

  “She’s doing an inside loop!” young Sam Snow shouted, hopping from one foot to the other. “An inside loop!”

  “Is she going to crash?” Anxious, Sarah reached for her father’s hand. “Daddy, is she going to crash?”

  “Not a chance,” Roger Kilgore put in. There was a note of pride in his voice. “You are watching the number one female stunt pilot in the country. In the world, by damn. She’s done this maneuver a thousand times.”

  Lizzy watched, her heart in her mouth, as Miss Dare flew the Jenny upside down for what seemed an endless stretch of time, then pulled the nose down into a steep vertical dive, down and down and down until it seemed that she was aimed straight as an arrow at the earth.

  The men gasped. Sarah turned and buried her eyes in her father’s sleeve. “She’s going to crash!” she cried. “She’ll be dead!”

  But she didn’t crash. At the very last moment, Miss Dare pulled up from her dive, leveled out at the southern end of the field and brought the plane to a perfect landing as a great shout went up. While Lizzy had been keeping her eyes on the skies, a cheering, noisy crowd of fifteen or twenty men and boys had materialized as if out of nowhere—actually, they had run over from the fairgrounds, where they were working.

  As the plane taxied up and Miss Dare climbed out, they stampeded onto the airstrip and she was surrounded. There was so much commotion, it looked like Charles Lindbergh had just dropped down out of the sky, and that the crowd had mistaken Miss Dare for Lucky Lindy and the Mystery Ship Texas Star for the Spirit of St. Louis.

  But that was not the case, for a chant went up as Miss Dare climbed out of her plane. “Lily Dare! Lily Dare!” some people cried, pushing forward, while others chanted “Texas Star! Texas Star!” A lesser woman might have been frightened, but the aviatrix was handling her adoring public with confident aplomb. Dressed in a sleek leather jacket and white jodhpurs, white helmet, and red scarf, she stripped off her gloves, signed a few autographs, allowed several snapshots, then made her way toward the small group waiting in front of the shed, the crowd parting to let her pass.

  And then what did she do? She walked straight up to Roger Kilgore, put both hands on his lapels, and kissed him on the cheek. In a low, sultry voice she murmured, “Roger, my dear, it’s oh, so good to see you again,” as if the two of them were utterly alone.

  Roger might look like Clark Gable, but he didn’t act like Gable. Suddenly red-faced, he took a clumsy step backward, grasped Miss Dare’s hands and pushed them away.

  “On b-b-behalf of the Lions of Darling,” he stuttered, “w-w-welcome to our little town.”

  “Yes, welcome to Darling,” Sarah Snow cried, rushing up to her with the lilies. “These are for you, Miss Dare. And I’m so glad you didn’t crash!”

  “Why, thank you, my dear,” Miss Dare said, smiling. She took the flowers. “Lilies—how very sweet of you. And no, I never crash. It’s bad for business.” She smiled at Sam, who squirmed and blushed to the roots of his hair. “And what a swell sign, young man. I am honored.”

  Then came the introduction to Mr. Tombull, who clutched his straw hat to his stomach and gazed soulfully at her, stumbling all over his short welcoming speech. The Boss was clearly and totally smitten. And Roger, too, Lizzy thought. The flush had ebbed from Roger’s face and he was quite pale. But although he was standing well back from Miss Dare, he watched her hungrily, as if he couldn’t get enough of looking at her. As if, Lizzy thought, he wanted to reach out and pull her to him and never let her go.

  Then Miss Dare saw Charlie and turned eagerly toward him. “And here’s my old friend Charlie Dickens,” she cried, blowing him a kiss. “Hey, Charlie, it’s swell to see you!” She pulled off her leather flying helmet and shook out her very dark hair. She stepped close to Roger, smiling and posing prettily. “Be a peach and take our picture, won’t you, Charlie? I would just love to have a photo of Roger and me together.”

  Roger went even redder. He grabbed Jed Snow’s sleeve and pulled him forward. “Come ’ere, Jed,” he urged. “You have to be in the photo, too.” He raised his voice. “Mr. Tombull, over here, sir. Charlie Dickens is gettin’ some pictures for the paper and we want you in it.” As Amos Tombull joined them, Roger stepped aside, so that Jed Snow and the Boss were on either side of Miss Dare and he was on the outside of the group. To Charlie, he said, “Hurry up, Dickens. It’s fixin’ to rain.”

  The rain held off long enough to take the photos and push the airplane into the shed and close the doors. As the first few drops began to spatter down, Jed Snow took Miss Dare’s arm in a solicitous gesture. “The kids and I will drive you into town, Miss Dare.”

  “Oh, but I’m planning to ride with Roger,” Miss Dare objected, pulling away. “After all, he’s the one who arranged for the Dare Devils to come to Darling.”

  Lizzy thought that Roger looked as if he were torn in two. “Sorry,” he said numbly. “I have to get back to the dealership. Mildred—my . . . my wife—is expecting you, at our house.”

  “Your wife.” Miss Dare laughed lightly. “Of course. But do let’s plan to get together. We have a great deal to catch up on, you know.” With that equivocal remark (or at least it seemed so to Lizzy), she turned back to Jed Snow. “I have a bag in the back of the plane. Could you get it, Mr. Snow?”

  But when Jed returned with the bag, there was another change of plans. Charlie had taken charge, introducing Lizzy and suggesting that Miss Dare ride back to town with the two of them. They would go to the newspaper office where Charlie would conduct the prearranged interview and take a few more photos. And then he would take her to get some lunch and show her around
Darling before he drove her to the Kilgores’.

  Miss Dare agreed to that, then leaned close and said to Charlie, in a low voice, “You said you’d get somebody to hang out here and keep an eye on the plane until Rex and the rest of the team show up. Have you—”

  “All taken care of,” Charlie said, and Lizzy saw him signal to Zipper Haydon, who was standing at the back of the crowd. Zipper was in his seventies and had a crippled foot, but he was known to be a reliable watchman. He stepped forward, clutching his brown felt hat in one hand. “Zipper will be on watch for the rest of today.”

  Miss Dare nodded and turned back to Roger. “I’m looking forward to meeting your wife. I want to thank her for inviting me to stay at your house.” She smiled broadly. “And for the party, of course.”

  To Lizzy, the words seemed to have a significant emphasis—perhaps even a sinister one. Roger seemed to think so, too, for he seemed to flinch. Was he afraid that Miss Dare might tell Mildred about their relationship—and about the money he had given her? Lizzy looked quickly around to see if anybody else had noticed his reaction. But if they had, it wasn’t apparent.

  Amos Tombull put on his most ingratiating smile. “We are all lookin’ forward to havin’ the chance to get to know you, Miss Dare,” he said cordially. “We are so honored to have you in our little town.”

  “Why, thank you, sir,” Miss Dare said with a flirtatious smile. “I am just so delighted to be here in Darling. We’re going to have a great show on Saturday.”

  And at that moment, there was a flash of lightning, a clap of thunder so loud that it seemed to rattle Lizzy’s bones, and the skies opened. The rain began to pour down in a deluge and all discussion was halted as everyone scrambled for the cars.

  ELEVEN

  Who Is Lily Dare?

  As Lizzy listened from the backseat to the conversation between Charlie and Miss Dare as they drove into town, it was clear that the two had once been friends—although she couldn’t quite tell whether Charlie continued to harbor a romantic yearning for the woman. It almost seemed from his tone that he was angry at her. As for Miss Dare, she was so flirtatious with everybody that it was impossible to tell what her true feelings were toward Charlie.

  When they got to the Dispatch office, Miss Dare slipped into the back room to change into street clothes. When she came out, she was wearing a lipstick-red silk crepe blouse that clung to her shapely curves and a pair of light-colored linen slacks, with red high heels. The words Lily Dare’s Dare Devils was embroidered in white on the breast pocket of the blouse. She had combed her dark hair, renewed her lipstick and rouge, and added a dramatic blue eye shadow and mascara.

  The woman was elegant and undeniably sexy, and Lizzy felt a sudden rush of sympathy for Mildred Kilgore, who—despite her expensive clothes—was plump and plain. Roger would probably mind his p’s and q’s this weekend, not wanting to be found out. But poor Mildred would forever afterward be plagued by the memory of Miss Dare’s physical attraction, which was likely enhanced in most men’s eyes by the dangerous work she did as a stunt pilot.

  And now that Lizzy had met her, the idea that Miss Dare might have had an off-screen love affair with Douglas Fairbanks didn’t strike her as at all far-fetched. By this time, she was deeply curious about this person. Who was Lily Dare, really?

  Feeling that she had already been forgotten and that she might learn more if she didn’t call attention to herself, Lizzy pulled a chair into a corner of the newspaper office and sat down to listen. On the other side of the plate-glass front window, the rain pounded down in a tropical torrent, while inside, it was hot and steamy. Charlie had taken off his seersucker jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and turned on the small black electric fan, aiming it toward his desk. He opened the lower right-hand drawer and took out a bottle and two glasses.

  Lizzy smiled a little. The bottle contained Mickey LeDoux’s corn whiskey, manufactured in a still hidden on Shiner’s Knob, in the wooded hills to the west of Darling and retailed by Archie Mann, Mickey’s second cousin, from a secret shelf behind the horse harness and saddles in the back room at Mann’s Mercantile. The stuff packed a wallop. Was Charlie aiming to get Miss Dare a little drunk?

  “This place smells like the inside of an airplane hangar,” Miss Dare said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Printers ink and the gasoline I use to clean the press,” Charlie replied. “Gets into the blood.” He lifted the bottle. “Join me in a little drink before lunch? It’s no sippin’ whiskey, but it’ll do the trick.”

  Miss Dare seated herself across from Charlie, where she could get the breeze from the fan, and accepted the glass, which she tossed off with a quick swallow and a shudder. “That’s the real thing,” she said. From her bag, she took out a small brown cigar and an elegant gold lighter, and lit it, stretching her legs and sitting back with a sigh.

  Lizzy blinked. It was considered risqué for women to smoke cigarettes, and Verna was the only one of her friends who dared to do it in public. But a cigar! Lizzy had never before seen such a thing.

  “Still fond of those little Cubans, I see,” Charlie said. He added wryly, “Nothing but the best for Lily Dare.”

  Miss Dare made a face. “Too true,” she said in her low, sexy voice. “I may be dead broke but I still have one or two expensive habits.”

  “But you’re flying a Jenny.” Charlie gave her a sideways glance. “Not a real crackerjack of a plane, is it?”

  “It’ll do for these gigs in the boonies,” Miss Dare replied shortly. “Another few months, I’ll have the money for something better. I’ve got my eye on another Travel Air. Walter Beech is saving one for me, out there in Wichita.”

  Listening, Lizzy thought of Roger Kilgore’s nine hundred dollars and wondered what other sources of money Miss Dare was tapping to finance another plane. Were there other men, like Roger, who were eager to help her out?

  Charlie opened his reporter’s notebook and picked up his pencil. “Well, Jenny or not, that was quite a show you put on at the airfield this morning. You impressed the natives.”

  “I wanted to give them a little taste of what they’ll see over the weekend,” she replied, slipping into what sounded to Lizzy like a practiced pitch, one she had developed for newspaper interviews. “Rex and I will do much more of that, of course, including a mock dogfight just like the one I flew in Howard Hughes’ film Hell’s Angels.”

  “Dogfight,” Charlie said, writing fast. “That’s good.” He looked up. “Oh, before I forget—there’s a special showing of Hell’s Angels here in Darling tonight. It would be great if you would attend.” He looked up, adding carelessly. “Roger’s not available, so I’ll take you.”

  Poor Fannie, Lizzy thought. Everyone would see Charlie with Miss Dare and wonder (as she was doing right now) how Fannie felt about it.

  Miss Dare nodded and went on with her spiel, rattling off the number of airplanes they were flying (three, sometimes four), the number of people on the team (six, including herself), the number of shows they’d put on in the past month (eight), and the big crowds they’d entertained (thousands!). When she was finished, she peered across the desk at Charlie’s notebook. “Did I go too fast, hon? You got all that?”

  “Got it,” Charlie said. “Sounds exciting.”

  Miss Dare made a face. “Yeah. Exciting. Thrilling. A chill a minute. But it’s a helluva lotta work, I’ll tell you, Charlie. The airplanes and crew have to be ferried from one town to another, whether the sky’s lit up with lightning or the ground is blanked out with fog. And then there’s the daily stuff that’s got to be done to keep the planes in the air—repairing engines, grinding valves, replacing broken struts, mending fabric tears—all of it on a shoestring. If we don’t get a good crowd, we come up short, when what we need is to bring in enough to buy fuel.” She shook her head grimly. “It’s a hard life, hand to mouth sometimes. But that’s off the record. Nobody wants to know the real
story. All they want is the thrills and chills.” Her voice hardened. “All they want is to see somebody die.”

  Lizzy shivered. Hand to mouth? See somebody die? Her notion of Lily Dare was changing. She might envy the Texas Star her beauty, her glamour, but she didn’t envy that kind of life.

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “The world is like that.” There was a silence. The rain beat on the window. Not far away, the thunder rumbled, low. “Was it the Jenny that was sabotaged?” he asked at last.

  Miss Dare puffed her cigar. She nodded, cautiously.

  “What happened?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know if I ought to . . .”

  “Off the record.” Charlie put down his pencil and closed the notebook. “We go back a long way, Lily.” He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “Odd as it may seem, considering our history, I’m worried about you. I’d hate to see anything happen to you—while you’re here in Darling, anyway. Bad publicity for our little town.”

  Miss Dare chuckled throatily. “Charlie, sweetie, every time I get into an airplane, something’s likely to happen to me. I could lose a wing, snap a strut, make a bad mistake.” She paused. “But maybe you had something else in mind.” Another pause. In a lower voice, she asked, “Something like a . . . threat, maybe?”

  It didn’t sound like a casual question, and Lizzy thought of the anonymous letters. The one she had read certainly seemed threatening—but was it a threat?

  “None that I’ve heard about,” Charlie said with a crooked grin. “But hey—I’m just a country reporter. What do I know?” His grin faded. “I’m not sure I’ll go out of my way to help after you leave, Lily. You’d better take it while you can get it.”