“Oh, that little mystery? Nothing some careful research and a few well-placed friends couldn’t solve. I’m afraid I can’t reveal my sources, however.”

He raises a finger and wags it at me. “You. Are a dangerous woman.”

“They are the best kind, you know. You should try one sometime.”

Olle stands up. “I am taking you back to town in the automobile,” he says, “and you are going to get on board the next boat back to Oahu, is that clear? You’re going back where you came from, and you are not saying a word about any of this.”

“Are you giving me an order, Olle? Because I don’t take orders, not from four-star generals and not from you.”

“Who the devil are you?” he asks, incredulous.

“I am Persistence, Olle. I am Curiosity.” I glance to the cat and back again. “I am Heartbreak. I am Survival. I am Recklessness and Perseverance. You can’t win.”

He swears. I shrug.

The bell tinkles again. A pair of men walk in, pilots by the look of them, talking some shop. They spot me right away and the conversation dies.

“Morning, Olle,” one of them says. “Passenger?”

I stand up and hold out my hand. “Janey Everett. I’m new in town.”

“She was just leaving,” says Olle.

“Isn’t he a gas? Really, I’m an old friend of Mrs. Lindquist. We go way back. Can either of you two tell me—”

But I am interrupted, just then, by the howl of an engine, the scream of air. The men all look up and tilt their ears to the sky, and then some kind of signal passes among them, I don’t know what, secret pilot communication, and they all go thundering out the door, bell a-jingle, and I have no choice but to thunder after them, toward some terrible emergency, some fate that has turned in an instant.

Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

March 1928: California

So there it was, Irene’s future turning on the malfunction of a single spark plug. You could say it was luck, or you could judge the hand of fate at work, or God, or whatever you believed in. The airfield turned out to be in Burbank, half an hour away on the other side of the Hollywood Hills, but Irene didn’t mind. She sat next to Sam Mallory in his yellow Nash while the sun rose to her right and the hills rolled all around, briefly green after a spell of spring rain. Above them, the sky was untainted blue, a thing Irene took for granted. Soon she would learn that most skies were not so blue; that in most places, the daytime temperature didn’t hover blissfully around seventy-six dry, placid degrees Fahrenheit for much of the year. For now, all Irene knew was the coast of California.