“Of course not. If I know my client, she’ll be at the International wondering why my Cessna isn’t up in the pattern with all the intercontinental jobs. I ought to land there so she can pay the fee.”

“You’ll be going to Phillips,” she said. “I’ll send the telegram, if you want.”

“Good. Make the call to the airport, too. Tell the line boys I’ll be ready to go at three o’clock. She left the souvenir book at the desk at the hotel, which was good of her. Pick it up when you get a chance. I’m going in to get things squared away with Mike.”

Chapter Ten

CHAPTER TEN

At five thousand feet he trimmed off, adjusted the carburetor heat, and throttled down to ninety miles an hour. There was a tail wind that let the plane slip along without struggling. Under him, flat as glass in the sunshine, the river rolled swiftly rearward. Instinctively he waggled the tail and looked back. Clear. It was clear ahead, too. A flotilla of cumulus was anchored harmlessly in the east. On that side of the river the railroad track stretched as straight as a cable, and two miles down, a freight train moved toward him. He opened his collar. If Norma had wanted, he could have shown her how to fly. He had taught Karen and Stephanie and Mike and Warren Johnson, but he never tired; he loved flying, and it had taken him years to become accustomed to that development in his personality; it was part of him now and he enjoyed it. He had learned to fly; he had made it a happy thing; he wanted to share it.

Perhaps Karen had been more right than he had thought in her suggestion about MacIver and Betty Kaminsky not wanting to remember. By the time MacIver had met Norma he could have told the lie so many times that he had begun to believe it himself. There was a myth that Leland let Karen believe because it helped her—he had begun to believe it, too, a little, because it flattered him. MacIver’s story would have flattered him, too, measured against the truth. MacIver had been slick, but he had not used the lie in a malicious way. At lunch yesterday Norma had said that she had told her college boyfriend that there had been only one lover before him. In all three instances—if the suggestion about MacIver was right—the truth would have been a burden to the people who would have had to bear it. Leland had to think of the night in the car with Norma when MacIver had been so emotional: remembering that, the suggestion had a certain validity.