And I have no time to comprehend the meaning of all this, not a single second to do more than read this headline and stare at the familiar image, Mallory’s airplane plunged in the earth in the shadow of a monumental desert massif, because Lani sweeps past, sets down the coffee tray with a crash that startles me, and says there’s a telephone call for me inside, from the airfield.

“Who is it? Kaiko?”

“A Mr. William Cushing,” she says, “from the Associated Press. He says it’s urgent.”

I pick up the telephone in the library, where Olle still lies snoring on the sofa, though I cup my hand over the receiver so he stays that way. The call is collect, the kind of cheap trick I usually wouldn’t stand for, but Bill Cushing and I go way back, even before the war, when we were both covering the Kentucky Derby for the AP. I was the photographer, he was the writer. As I recall, Gallahadion won the race at odds of thirty-six to one. I soon learned we had a great deal in common—me and Bill, I mean, not the horse—from our love of fine Kentucky bourbon to our love for strapping young men. Bill’s a fellow you can trust, for the most part, and he has a talent for spotting trouble, which is why his voice, tunneling through the telephone wires, jumps straight on my already jangled nerves.

“Janey, you gorgeous creature! You’ll never guess where I am.”

“What the devil’s going on, Bill? Some kind of double cross? Because I swear—”

“Double cross? Hell, it’s the opposite. I’ve been fending them off. You’ve been scooped, my dear. Like ice cream in July.”

“Scooped? What in blazes?”

“A story ran a couple of days ago—did you get my cable?—ran in the LA Times, about George Morrow’s body being found in an airplane wreck in Spain, and some schmuck casts his eye over the photo spread and swears he saw a woman he’s convinced is Irene Foster, flying some tourist plane in Hawai’i. I’m standing here in this dump of an airfield cafeteria with a half dozen reporters, waiting for the weather to clear—”

“The weather to clear? For what?”

Even as I’m speaking, something catches my attention on the lamp table before me, the pile of scattered photographs I left there on my way out to the lanai. Bill’s voice drones in my ear at a high, nervy pitch.

“Darling, don’t you know? Our mystery woman left half an hour ago, just before we landed from Honolulu. She’s in the air right now, headed to some island—that’s what this fellow Kookoo says—”

“Kaiko?” I lift a photograph from the pile.