The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

Charlie owned an old green Pontiac four-door sedan. He was in the habit of driving fast with the windows open, and the wind and the engine noise made it impossible for Lizzy to ask the questions that were going through her mind. By the time they got where they were going, her hair was blown every which way. She’d even had to take off her yellow straw hat and hold it on her lap to keep it from blowing away. As they drove, she saw that the dark clouds that had been piling up to the northwest now covered a third of the sky, and flickers of lightning danced from one towering thunderhead to another. It was going to rain.

Darling’s airfield was on the south side of town, past the Cypress Country Club and the Cypress County fairgrounds. It was a narrow, grassy strip about two hundred yards long with sycamore and pecan trees growing along the fence rows at either end. Off to one side stood a plywood shed, weathered gray by the sun and rain. It was roofed with corrugated sheet metal and large enough to house a couple of airplanes. The shed had been knocked together back in the mid twenties, when barnstormers came to town sometimes three or four times a summer. These days, though, there were fewer flying circuses, and since nobody in town owned an airplane, the airfield wasn’t maintained. The grass and weeds grew hip-high around the unpainted shed and across the airstrip.

But today, the strip had been mowed, a wind sock was hung from a tall pole, and a row of wooden bleachers had been erected along one side of the field so that Darling’s dignitaries could watch the show in comfort. The rest of the crowd would park their cars and trucks on both sides of the field and sit on the hoods and car roofs.

As Charlie drove up, Lizzy saw that the tall sliding doors on the shed were open and the building was empty. There were several cars parked around the back. Three men were standing in front, shading their eyes with their hands and looking southeastward, into the sky.

One of the men was Roger Kilgore, nattily dressed in a light tan summer suit with a red tie and brown and white shoes and looking very much like Clark Gable. Another was Amos Tombull, the county commissioner that everybody called Boss, in a Palm Beach suit with a vest that was buttoned tight across his bulging midriff, a flat-crown white straw hat on the back of his head. As usual, the Boss was smoking a large cigar. The third man was Darling’s mayor and the owner of the feed store, Jed Snow. Jed was wearing his usual work clothes, a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and wash pants. Young Sam Snow and his little sister Sarah were with their father. Sam was carrying a cardboard, hand-lettered sign: Welcome to the Fastest Woman in the World! Sarah, dressed in a starched pink cotton dress with ruffles around the hem, had a huge armful of lilies, almost more than she could carry.

“My, my. That’s quite a welcoming committee,” Charlie remarked dryly, getting out his camera equipment.

“Well, she’s a celebrity,” Lizzy said, although she couldn’t help suspecting that it wasn’t Miss Dare’s fame or his official duties that had brought Roger Kilgore here. If that anonymous letter writer was telling the truth . . . But the photograph and the checks proved that, didn’t they? She lowered her voice. “When you talked to Miss Dare on the phone, did she say anything more about the sabotage? Or about a threat?”

Charlie shook his head. “I’ll ask her about that later, when—”

But before he could finish, there was an excited cry from the group, and the children began to dance up and down.

“There she is!” Jed Snow shouted. He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and pointed toward the trees at the southern end of the field. “There’s her plane, Sam. The Texas Star is coming in!”

As Lizzy and Charlie joined the group, the air was filled with the roar of an airplane engine, and a moment later, there it was, a small white biplane with a red, white, and blue star on the side, surrounded by the words Lily Dare’s Dare Devils. The plane got bigger and bigger the closer it came until, no more than thirty feet above the ground, it raced the length of the field from south to north, its engine so loud that Lizzy had to put both hands over her ears. She saw Miss Dare in the open cockpit, wearing her white helmet and trademark red scarf, which streamed behind her like a bloody ribbon.

The airplane reached the northern end of the field, cleared the trees, then waggled its wings and began to climb sharply, up and up and up, hundreds of feet into the sky, where it was silhouetted against the angry storm clouds. Lizzy watched, openmouthed, as Miss Dare climbed past the vertical, the nose of the airplane falling back and over. A moment later, the Texas Star turned belly up. Miss Dare was flying upside down.