“I see,” she says. “What kind of trouble, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Ah, but we aren’t talking about me, remember? We’re talking about you and Mallory and what really happened in that space of time between Los Angeles and Sydney, Australia. Not what the newspapers reported. Not what the photographs showed, God knows. The truth.”

Lindquist crosses her arms and kicks a tuft of grass and stares out to sea. A gust of wind dares to tangle her famous hair, the hair that Mallory first cut for her on Howland Island.

“All right,” she says. “I’ll tell you the truth. I just don’t know if it will be enough for you.”

One last thing, the most important thing, though I’ve never told a soul until now. Remember that fellow at the law firm, the married lawyer who impregnated me? That was my stepfather.

Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

August 1928: Australia

Irene had some inkling what to expect when they touched down in Sydney, a little more than forty hours after their rescue from Howland. The captain’s briefing, the radiograms from Morrow, had all made clear the worldwide sensation their disappearance had caused, how everybody in America and around the globe had followed the story with utmost interest.

Still. When the crowd surged forward to encompass the Centauri, almost before it had come to a stop on the runway at Sydney Airport, Irene stared out the window in a state of shock. Nothing could prepare you for that, nobody could explain what it was like to sit in the focus of so much concentrated attention. In those days, when things like syndicated newspapers and radio and moving pictures were only just beginning to exert their power over the mass imagination, fame wasn’t yet something to be afraid of, something that could take over your life and habits and change your psychological composition. Only one man in the world really knew what celebrity meant, and that was Lindbergh. As Irene witnessed this evidence of fame, as she was made to understand what a crowd of fifty thousand people actually looked like, she didn’t feel any sense of elation or triumph. She felt the opposite. She felt dread. Her life was about to change; her daily existence, her sense of herself—Irene—had just been obliterated and replaced with something she didn’t recognize. There was nothing ahead but fog and darkness.

The first man through the hatch was George Morrow. Boy, was he beaming! Irene couldn’t understand a word he said, but she had the unsettling impression that he was a Broadway manager, and she was an actress who had performed her part perfectly, though she hadn’t even seen the script. First he kissed her hand and then he shook Sam’s hand. Then he noticed the cat, crouched behind Sam’s ankles.

“What the hell?” he said.

Sam picked up Sandy. “Stowaway.”

“I’ll be damned. That’s brilliant!” Morrow exclaimed. “Press’ll love it.”