BELL GOT BUSY ON THE QUESTIONS he had to answer to capture Harry Frost before he hurt Josephine. Waiting for the train to Albany, he wired Grady Forrer, Van Dorn’s research man in New York, for a report on what Harry Frost had been up to since he retired at the young age of thirty-five and asked him to scour the newspapers for a wedding announcement that might shed light on how Frost had met and married Josephine.

As his train was approaching, he fired off a telegram to Archie Abbott at Belmont Park, where the competitors were gathering in the mile-and-a-half racetrack’s infield, instructing him to ask Josephine when and how she first met Marco Celere.

Archie’s reply was waiting at the Albany station.

Josephine met Celere last year in San Francisco, when she and her husband went to California for an aviation meet. Marco Celere had recently immigrated there from Italy.

Who, exactly, was the flying-machine inventor?

Bell wired James Dashwood, a hardworking young Van Dorn detective in the San Francisco office, to investigate Marco Celere’s activities there.

Were the aviatrix and her instructor lovers? Or was Frost jealous for no reason? It was a difficult question. Constable Hodge had reported that Frost and his wife did not socialize in North River. No one in the town knew them as a couple. And Marco Celere was an outsider who lived at the Frosts’ secluded camp while working on his aeroplane. Bell would have to pose the delicate question to Josephine himself.

The Interboro Rapid Transit subway whisked Bell from Grand Central Terminal to the basement entrance of the Hotel Knickerbocker, where the Van Dorn Detective Agency maintained New York offices. He found Grady Forrer in the subterranean bar off the downstairs lobby. Research had failed to find any newspaper announcement about Frost’s wedding, but Forrer had managed to turn up some gossip. Josephine was an Adirondack dairy farmer’s daughter—a local North River girl who had grown up a few short miles from Frost’s lavish camp—information that the closemouthed Constable Hodge had not volunteered.

Bell went upstairs to the office and telephoned him long-distance.

“Joe Josephs’s girl,” John Hodge answered. “Heck of a tomboy, but pretty as a picture—and about as independent as I’ve ever seen. A good kid, though. Sweet-natured.”

“Do you know how she and Frost met?”

“Not the sort of thing I’d busy my head about.”