The road winding down from the hill towns into the broad Connecticut Valley was smooth and quiet, the air so still that Daphne heard animals calling and crying in the agricultural halls before she reached the fairground. From an aproned woman she bought a sandwich and then inspected the sheep (especially nice were the Romney ewes), the rabbits, the dairy cows and the draft oxen. Later she walked through the tables of jams and the pickles and pies; still later she admired the roses and the dahlias. Half an hour before the air show’s start, she found a seat in the stands beside the improvised runway and settled herself with her broad-brimmed hat and a cushion. The men who made up most of the crowd made room for her as politely as if she were old. Three planes bumped along the field, took off together, flew side by side and then parted and circled high above. A man climbed up on the left-hand plane’s upper wing while a second plane drew terrifyingly close. Before Daphne could be sure what was happening, the wing walker swung himself by a rope from his plane to the other, which peeled away as the third plane, as if applauding, made a long, slow backflip, nose over tail over nose.

An inside loop, Daphne learned, when the aircraft pulled away and she had a second to consult her program. The pilots were nearly invisible, their helmeted and goggled heads identical dots at this distance—but the person who’d done the loop was apparently Caroline. The planes came back over the field, two flying side by side but now with a wing walker on each machine. The walkers faced each other and danced in unison on their respective wings, then dropped at the same time to dangle by their knees from bars below the struts. Daphne turned from them to concentrate instead on the shapely patterns Caroline carved through the sky behind them. A barrel roll, an outside loop; then a complicated shape, part loop and part roll, that the program identified as an Immelmann turn—how was it the engine didn’t stall, the plane didn’t fall from the sky? She had no idea when she stood up, or why she was craning her neck as if to get closer to the maneuvers. By the time the show concluded, she was exhausted.

Daphne waited until the crowd had cleared before walking over to the hangar and introducing herself to Caroline. Beneath her helmet Caroline’s hair was cropped, her face marked by an unusual set of scars. Her sharp eyes, deeply set and shadowed, scanned Daphne’s features repeatedly, but she was sufficiently well mannered to act as if she remembered her aunt’s favorite friend.