The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

Miss Dare made a face. “Yeah. Exciting. Thrilling. A chill a minute. But it’s a helluva lotta work, I’ll tell you, Charlie. The airplanes and crew have to be ferried from one town to another, whether the sky’s lit up with lightning or the ground is blanked out with fog. And then there’s the daily stuff that’s got to be done to keep the planes in the air—repairing engines, grinding valves, replacing broken struts, mending fabric tears—all of it on a shoestring. If we don’t get a good crowd, we come up short, when what we need is to bring in enough to buy fuel.” She shook her head grimly. “It’s a hard life, hand to mouth sometimes. But that’s off the record. Nobody wants to know the real story. All they want is the thrills and chills.” Her voice hardened. “All they want is to see somebody die.”


Lizzy shivered. Hand to mouth? See somebody die? Her notion of Lily Dare was changing. She might envy the Texas Star her beauty, her glamour, but she didn’t envy that kind of life.

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “The world is like that.” There was a silence. The rain beat on the window. Not far away, the thunder rumbled, low. “Was it the Jenny that was sabotaged?” he asked at last.

Miss Dare puffed her cigar. She nodded, cautiously.

“What happened?”

She frowned. “I don’t know if I ought to . . .”

“Off the record.” Charlie put down his pencil and closed the notebook. “We go back a long way, Lily.” He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “Odd as it may seem, considering our history, I’m worried about you. I’d hate to see anything happen to you—while you’re here in Darling, anyway. Bad publicity for our little town.”

Miss Dare chuckled throatily. “Charlie, sweetie, every time I get into an airplane, something’s likely to happen to me. I could lose a wing, snap a strut, make a bad mistake.” She paused. “But maybe you had something else in mind.” Another pause. In a lower voice, she asked, “Something like a . . . threat, maybe?”

It didn’t sound like a casual question, and Lizzy thought of the anonymous letters. The one she had read certainly seemed threatening—but was it a threat?

“None that I’ve heard about,” Charlie said with a crooked grin. “But hey—I’m just a country reporter. What do I know?” His grin faded. “I’m not sure I’ll go out of my way to help after you leave, Lily. You’d better take it while you can get it.”

Miss Dare studied his face as if she suspected that he was making fun of her. She must have decided he wasn’t, for her voice softened and she said, “It’s nice to have somebody worry about me for a change, Charlie. Nobody else does.” Her tone became bitter. “Nobody cares, not really.”

That couldn’t be true, Lizzy thought. Roger cared. She remembered the photo Mildred had shown her—and then his clumsy step backward, his efforts to keep his distance. But perhaps he no longer cared, or cared as much. Perhaps he was afraid she would compromise him.

But Charlie was thinking of someone else. He pulled on his cigarette. “What about Rex Hart? Doesn’t he care? He may be ‘King of the Air’ but you’re the Texas Star, the act that everybody comes to see.” He chuckled cynically. “If anything happens to you, Hart’s out of luck, isn’t he?” He paused. “Or maybe it’s the other way around. If you crash, he’ll be the star of the show, won’t he? He—”

“That’s enough, Charlie,” Miss Dare said sharply. She turned her head away, but not before Lizzy saw the pain on her face and guessed that Charlie had hit close to the truth—and it hurt. “Let’s leave Rex out of it.”

“Why?” Charlie prodded. “Because you know he’s up to something and you want to handle it yourself?”

“Because I say so.” She laughed under her breath, a jagged, grating laugh. “Like I said, Charlie. Most people come to the shows for thrills. They’re hoping to see me crash. Or even better, to see Rex and me collide in midair while Angel is wingwalking and all three of us go down in flames. That would give you newspaper guys something sensational to write about, wouldn’t it?”

Charlie sat back in his chair. He took a deep breath, then went back to his question. “What happened to the Jenny?” His tone was more neutral now.

“Well, since you’ve asked so nicely.” Miss Dare put out her cigar in the ashtray on the desk. “It was tampered with. Twice. The first time, it was the old water-in-the-fuel-tank trick.”

“Where?” Charlie asked. “When?”

“In Tampa, where we did a show several weeks ago, from the airfield where Rex runs his flight school. I checked before I took off, of course, but something like that is pretty hard to catch. I was able to put the plane down in a plowed field. The wings were damaged but I walked away—which makes it a successful landing.” She gave a short, dry cough. “When I told the little girl at your airfield that I’ve never crashed, I lied. I’ve had my share of hard landings. But as long as I can walk away from it, I don’t consider it a crash. A crash is when you die.”