But then I went through the property records on the Morrow house in Burbank and discovered that it had been sold to Mr. and Mrs. Octavian Rofrano in the early fall of 1937. I’d written a letter, polite as could be, explaining that I was a journalist writing a follow-up piece on the whole affair, the tenth anniversary of the disappearance looming and all that, and perhaps she could answer a few questions for me. She’d refused, of course, but I have my methods of persuasion, and without getting into any of the details, let’s just say we met for coffee a week or two later at a diner near what had once been Rofrano’s Airfield, that icon of the golden age of California aviation. The old place was now getting paved over to become part of somebody’s studio lot, having been sold to the government in 1942 for the use of the U.S. Air Force, and this diner was all that remained of the era.

As you might imagine, she wasn’t much help. Those innocent blue eyes, my goodness. She sipped her coffee with cream and sugar and pecked away at an apricot Danish, and she kept checking her watch because her youngest was due home from school any minute. “Irene met Clara just after she was born,” she told me, “which was only a few months before she left for that round-the-world derby, and I’m so grateful she had the chance to hold my baby girl in her arms. We were all such good friends.”

That was nice, I said. But what about the flight? Why did Morrow sell his house to you after he called off the search in June? Did he say anything about Irene? Any clue about what might have happened to her?

“Oh, we didn’t meet George at all,” she said. “It was all done through an agent. He was just broken-hearted. He’d poured his fortune into Irene’s career, you see, and now he’d lost everything. We bought the house so that he would have something to live on. But we never heard a word from him directly. I always thought he just couldn’t go on without her.”

Interesting, I said. And you don’t have any idea where he went? Where he might be living now? Any chance I might be able to get in touch with him?

Sophie fixed me with those big, appealing eyes and flat-out lied through her teeth. “I haven’t the faintest idea, I’m afraid,” she said firmly. “I sometimes wonder if he’s even alive anymore.”