“The fictions. The lies we tell to other people, the lies we tell to ourselves. The stories we make of our lives, the heroes we fashion of our own clay. The myths of our own creation. Those are the real stuffing of a person, in my opinion. What makes each one of us different from the other fellow.”

“My goodness,” she says. “Aren’t you a surprise.”

“Oh, I’m full of surprises, believe me. Anyway, if you ask me, a biography should read like a novel, not an encyclopedia entry. All those facts get in the way of the truth. We ought to be able to see the world through our subject’s eyes, to live life as our subject lived it. To feel the ticktock of his pulse in our own veins. That’s truth. That’s what I want to do.”

I finish the coffee and hold out the empty cup to her, and I’ll be damned if Irene Foster Lindquist doesn’t just take the cup and head for the percolator and pour me another. Irene Foster! Like some cafeteria waitress. She presents the scarred side of her face to me, like the dark side of the moon. Nobody’s ever seen those scars before. She didn’t have them when she was flying around the world the last time, that’s for sure. I’ve seen the photos of those days, believe me.

She hands me back the coffee cup. I drink it neat.

“So let me get this straight,” she says. “You decide to write a biography of Sam Mallory. You go off looking for the wreckage of his final flight—”

“No, no, no. It’s a little more complicated than that. It’s more of a love story.”

“A love story? You and Sam?”

“Don’t be jealous. It’s a love from afar. A love across the years, between adoring me and unknowing him.”

“I’ll say. You’re—what, twenty-eight?”

“Give or take.”

“Well, Sam would be a lot older. If he were still alive.”

“Oh, but you have to understand what a crush I had on him! I was just a teenager when he dropped off the face of the earth. I thought he was just the most. I thought he had it all over that stuffed shirt Lindbergh. All those death-defying stunts he did. Those glamorous women on his arm, a different one every week. So daring, so handsome. You might say I was fixated.”

“And you didn’t grow out of it?”