Next to her stand two children, aged about four or five. A boy and girl with bright blond hair and uncertain smiles. Doris and Wesley.

“Miss Janey?”

I jump so hard, I nearly drop the photograph. The others scatter to the floor around me, black-and-white images of people I recognize, faces I know, small, tender kaleidoscopes of family life. I bend to gather them back up.

“Lani! You startled me.”

She glances to Olle’s snoring figure on the sofa. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Janey, but . . . my goodness, are you all right?”

“I’m perfectly fine, Janey, thank you. I was just looking at this wonderful picture of Mr. and Mrs. Lindquist on their wedding day.”

“It was a beautiful day,” says Lani.

“A year or two ago now, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, Miss Janey. About a year ago last September. I’m awfully sorry, but what should I tell Mrs. Rofrano?”

I stare at her, without a single shred of comprehension. “Mrs. Rofrano? Here?”

“She’s a friend of Mrs. Lindquist. That’s what I came to tell you. She’s waiting on the lanai.”

I met Sophie Rofrano only once, while I was in Los Angeles trying to pick up the trail of the lost pilots. At the time, I thought if I could only find the reclusive George Morrow, I could squeeze the necessary details from him. The trouble was, nobody could tell me where he lived, nobody had seen or spoken to him in years. It was all false starts and somebody’s friend’s wife’s cousin spotting him at her horse trainer’s guest cottage in Rancho Cucamonga, or not. That kind of thing.

And the worst of it was that I couldn’t reveal what I knew, for fear of word getting around that I had found Samuel Mallory, or rather I had found his remains and the remains of his airplane. That I suspected Irene Foster had not only survived her famous disappearance in 1937 but that she and her husband had left Mallory to die in the Spanish badlands while they flew off to start a new life together.