Which, naturally, made her disappearance all the more shocking. There she flew, me hearties, poised for victory in the first-ever Round the World Air Derby, one final leg to go, one last hop from Egypt to Morocco, a journey of two thousand miles that was surely child’s play to Irene Foster, who crossed the Atlantic for breakfast, almost. She was two days ahead of her nearest competitor—a man, of course, whose name nobody remembers—and the whole world gathered its breath to cheer her landing in Casablanca. Maybe you were one of them, standing by your radio to hear the news, to settle some bet with your pal about her final time. Whether she would break the current circumnavigation record by hours or minutes. Maybe you waited and waited as those minutes came and went, as the bulletin never arrived, as one by one the reports trickled through that Foster had not arrived in Casablanca at all.

She hadn’t landed anywhere.

Maybe you were one of those who then trawled the airwaves with your amateur radio, searching for some faint signal that might be Irene Foster’s distress call. Maybe you pored over maps of the northern Sahara, of the southern Mediterranean, for some likely site for an emergency landing by a pilot known for her resourcefulness in crisis. Maybe you bought the early edition every morning for weeks and read all the updates, all the editorials, all the messages of hope and determination from those pilots tasked with searching for her across the endless dunes of sand.

Maybe you finally gave up hope and turned to some new sensation for your daily dram of fevered excitement. Maybe you forgot all about Irene Foster and her doomed flight, except when some newspaper printed a wistful memorial on the anniversary of her disappearance, or when some new theory emerged to explain her fate, each one more crackpot than the last.

Maybe you figured she was gone forever, and you’d never know what became of her.

Well, I didn’t.

And now I’ve found her for you. All along, she was living in obscurity on some beach on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, surfing in the morning and flying unsuspecting passengers from island to island during the day.

Still, she’s not going to admit all that to some stranger, by God!

She lifts her board from the sand. “If you’ll excuse me, Miss Everett. You’re wasting my time and your own.”

I wait until she’s stalked past me before I reply. I do have some regard for stagecraft; you might say it’s my stock in trade. I can do with pictures what most can only dream of doing with words, and it all comes down to how you place your subject, and where, and exactly when you click your shutter.