Unlike Irene’s Ford, the Nash was only a few years old and had an electric ignition, a three-speed transmission, a dry clutch, a brake pedal. Why, compared to the old Tin Lizzie, it practically drove itself. It stopped on command, it unleashed what seemed like a vast amount of power whenever Mr. Mallory pressed his foot on the gas pedal. They rolled the windows down and the wind scattered her hair every which way. Irene didn’t mind. She never took much care of her hair anyway.

At one point, winding north through Laurel Canyon, Irene stroked around Sandy’s ears and asked Mr. Mallory how he got the scar on his nose.

He fingered across the ridge and back again. “Crackup last summer.”

“Crackup? You mean a car accident?”

“No, an airplane. We call ’em crackups, it sounds better.” Mr. Mallory was smoking a cigarette, which he held in the hand nearest the window. He took a quick drag and said, “I guess you might have heard about that one.”

“Only me and the whole world. Aren’t you just a little crazy, going back up in an airplane after an accident like that?”

“Sure, I’m crazy. We’re all crazy, us pilots.” He stubbed out his cigarette against the side of the car. “But it’s freedom up there, Miss Foster. You and the blue sky. It’s the future, it’s the whole damned universe, right there before you, wide open and beautiful to take your breath away. It’s worth a broken nose or two. It’s worth whatever price God asks of you.”

Of course Irene had heard of Sam Mallory. By the spring of 1928, everyone in California had heard of him. In fact, if you lived anywhere in the world and possessed a radio or a newspaper subscription, you had probably—like Irene—spent a certain portion of the past August attached to both, desperate to discover whether Sam Mallory was somehow miraculously alive on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, or heroically dead on the bottom of same.

Irene’s father did not own a radio. He claimed it was because he opposed such modern contraptions on principle, but really it was because he couldn’t afford one. Irene remembered listening to the radio in the drugstore instead. Of course, the place was packed that first morning, cheek by jowl with eager listeners. The press had been talking up the Dole Derby for weeks. It was the Pacific’s answer to Lindbergh mania, a contest sponsored by the Dole Pineapple Company, in which pilots from around the country took off from San Francisco Bay one fine summer morning and raced each other all the way to Honolulu, Hawai’i. First prize, twenty-five thousand dollars. Second prize, ten thousand dollars. As it turned out, there was no need for a third prize, because only two airplanes taking off that day actually made it to paradise, or at least the earthly kind.