“I’m afraid it floated off while she was extricated from the water. We lost several pieces plucking her onto the barge.”

Bell located the mechanician working on the blue pusher, an American from the Curtiss Company, who scoffed at the knot explanation.

“If it wasn’t a knot,” Bell asked, “could someone have accidentally drilled a hole and covered it over to hide the mistake?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“No flying-machine maker would take the chance. They’d own up to their mistake and replace the part even if it came out of their own pocket. Look, Mr. Bell, say a house carpenter mistakenly bores a hole in a board. He can plug it up, caulk it, paint it over, and no one’s the wiser. But a flying-machine strut is a whole ’nother story. We all know that if something breaks up there, down she goes.”

“Down she went,” said Bell.

“Could have been murder. The Englishman’s darned lucky they fished him out of the drink in one piece.”

“Why do you suppose he insists it was a knothole?”

“The baronet is a babe in the woods. He can’t imagine anyone doing him harm to win the race, just like he can’t imagine a birdman wanting to win it to collect the fifty thousand bucks. He’s always saying ‘the winning is prize enough,’ at least when he’s not saying ‘the race is the prize.’ Drives the boys nuts. He’s, like, above it all, if you know what I mean, having a title and a rich wife. But the thing is, it’s not fair to Mr. Curtiss. Glenn Hammond Curtiss would never let a patch job leave the factory.”

“Was the pusher left unattended the night before the race started?”

“Along with all the others at Belmont Park. Your ‘aviatrix’ was the only one who had guards, but that’s ’cause of the husband, I hear.”

“So if neither a knothole nor a mistakenly drilled hole would ever get out of the Curtiss factory, how do you think that hole got in that broken strut?”

“Sabotage,” said the mechanician. “Like everyone says. Bore a hole where we wouldn’t see it. Where fabric lapped over it or a fitting concealed it. It happened to his Farman, too, didn’t it? And look what happened to the Platov engine. Those were sabotage, right?”

“They were sabotage,” Bell agreed.

“Excepting I don’t see what none of them smashes had to do with Josephine’s crazy husband. Do you, Mr. Bell?”

Bell pressed two dollars into the mechanician’s hand. “Here, buy the boys a drink.”

“Not ’til we reach San Francisco. We’re sleeping stone-cold sober under our pusher from now on. One man awake all night.”