The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star (15 page)

As Lizzy listened from the backseat to the conversation between Charlie and Miss Dare as they drove into town, it was clear that the two had once been friends—although she couldn’t quite tell whether Charlie continued to harbor a romantic yearning for the woman. It almost seemed from his tone that he was angry at her. As for Miss Dare, she was so flirtatious with everybody that it was impossible to tell what her true feelings were toward Charlie.

When they got to the
Dispatch
office, Miss Dare slipped into the back room to change into street clothes. When she came out, she was wearing a lipstick-red silk crepe blouse that clung to her shapely curves and a pair of light-colored linen slacks, with red high heels. The words
Lily Dare’s Dare Devils
was embroidered in white on the breast pocket of the blouse. She had combed her dark hair, renewed her lipstick and rouge, and added a dramatic blue eye shadow and mascara.

The woman was elegant and undeniably sexy, and Lizzy felt a sudden rush of sympathy for Mildred Kilgore, who—despite her expensive clothes—was plump and plain. Roger would probably mind his p’s and q’s this weekend, not wanting to be found out. But poor Mildred would forever afterward be plagued by the memory of Miss Dare’s physical attraction, which was likely enhanced in most men’s eyes by the dangerous work she did as a stunt pilot.

And now that Lizzy had met her, the idea that Miss Dare might have had an off-screen love affair with Douglas Fairbanks didn’t strike her as at all far-fetched. By this time, she was deeply curious about this person. Who
was
Lily Dare, really?

Feeling that she had already been forgotten and that she might learn more if she didn’t call attention to herself, Lizzy pulled a chair into a corner of the newspaper office and sat down to listen. On the other side of the plate-glass front window, the rain pounded down in a tropical torrent, while inside, it was hot and steamy. Charlie had taken off his seersucker jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and turned on the small black electric fan, aiming it toward his desk. He opened the lower right-hand drawer and took out a bottle and two glasses.

Lizzy smiled a little. The bottle contained Mickey LeDoux’s corn whiskey, manufactured in a still hidden on Shiner’s Knob, in the wooded hills to the west of Darling and retailed by Archie Mann, Mickey’s second cousin, from a secret shelf behind the horse harness and saddles in the back room at Mann’s Mercantile. The stuff packed a wallop. Was Charlie aiming to get Miss Dare a little drunk?

“This place smells like the inside of an airplane hangar,” Miss Dare said, wrinkling her nose.

“Printers ink and the gasoline I use to clean the press,” Charlie replied. “Gets into the blood.” He lifted the bottle. “Join me in a little drink before lunch? It’s no sippin’ whiskey, but it’ll do the trick.”

Miss Dare seated herself across from Charlie, where she could get the breeze from the fan, and accepted the glass, which she tossed off with a quick swallow and a shudder. “That’s the real thing,” she said. From her bag, she took out a small brown cigar and an elegant gold lighter, and lit it, stretching her legs and sitting back with a sigh.

Lizzy blinked. It was considered risqué for women to smoke cigarettes, and Verna was the only one of her friends who dared to do it in public. But a
cigar
! Lizzy had never before seen such a thing.

“Still fond of those little Cubans, I see,” Charlie said. He added wryly, “Nothing but the best for Lily Dare.”

Miss Dare made a face. “Too true,” she said in her low, sexy voice. “I may be dead broke but I still have one or two expensive habits.”

“But you’re flying a Jenny.” Charlie gave her a sideways glance. “Not a real crackerjack of a plane, is it?”

“It’ll do for these gigs in the boonies,” Miss Dare replied shortly. “Another few months, I’ll have the money for something better. I’ve got my eye on another Travel Air. Walter Beech is saving one for me, out there in Wichita.”

Listening, Lizzy thought of Roger Kilgore’s nine hundred dollars and wondered what other sources of money Miss Dare was tapping to finance another plane. Were there other men, like Roger, who were eager to help her out?

Charlie opened his reporter’s notebook and picked up his pencil. “Well, Jenny or not, that was quite a show you put on at the airfield this morning. You impressed the natives.”

“I wanted to give them a little taste of what they’ll see over the weekend,” she replied, slipping into what sounded to Lizzy like a practiced pitch, one she had developed for newspaper interviews. “Rex and I will do much more of that, of course, including a mock dogfight just like the one I flew in Howard Hughes’ film
Hell’s Angels
.”

“Dogfight,” Charlie said, writing fast. “That’s good.” He looked up. “Oh, before I forget—there’s a special showing of
Hell’s Angels
here in Darling tonight. It would be great if you would attend.” He looked up, adding carelessly. “Roger’s not available, so I’ll take you.”

Poor Fannie, Lizzy thought. Everyone would see Charlie with Miss Dare and wonder (as she was doing right now) how Fannie felt about it.

Miss Dare nodded and went on with her spiel, rattling off the number of airplanes they were flying (three, sometimes four), the number of people on the team (six, including herself), the number of shows they’d put on in the past month (eight), and the big crowds they’d entertained (thousands!). When she was finished, she peered across the desk at Charlie’s notebook. “Did I go too fast, hon? You got all that?”

“Got it,” Charlie said. “Sounds exciting.”

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.”

Outside the window, the lightning flashed like a flashbulb going off. Listening, Lizzy shivered. Miss Dare’s voice was flat and uninflected, without a hint of fear. Were the woman’s nerves really that steely? But she had probably been in many frightening situations during her flying career. She must have developed a certain indifference to danger, trusting to skill, or to luck, to get her through. Maybe she even courted danger, finding that it provided the excitement, the thrills and chills she needed to keep her going. And maybe she needed a big dose of excitement in her personal life, as well, so she took pleasure in risky relationships. Lizzy shivered again.

Charlie frowned. “You said the plane was tampered with twice. Once in Tampa—and once in Pensacola?”

“Yes,” Miss Dare said. “In retrospect, I’m glad that the Tampa thing happened. It wasn’t fatal, luckily, and I knew it wasn’t an accident. It put me on the alert. The second time—well, if I hadn’t checked the propeller, I would have been a goner for sure.” She tossed back the rest of her whiskey in a single swallow. “That would’ve been one crash I wouldn’t have walked away from.”

“The propeller?” Charlie picked up the bottle, offering a refill. Miss Dare shook her head to the offer, and Charlie helped himself.

“It’s wood, you know,” she replied. “Oak. The shank was partially sawn through. Back to front, a couple of inches outside the hub. Could’ve been done with a hacksaw blade.”

Charlie made a low, whistling noise through his teeth.

“Yeah, right.” Miss Dare looked glum. “If I had managed to get off the ground and the blade had snapped off in the air, the plane would have immediately become unflyable. The end of the Texas Star.” She laughed a low, throaty laugh, with no amusement. “A fitting end, some would say. Anyway, the attempt was really very clever. Devilish, you might say. It could have worked—if I hadn’t gotten lucky.”

Now, Lizzy thought, there was an undertone of something in her voice. Fear, was it, that she had almost been killed? Or excitement, at the near miss? She thought of the anonymous letter that Mildred had showed her.
A terrible person . . . she must be stopped
. She began to wish she had told Charlie about it. Maybe there was a connection between the sabotage and the letters.

“When did this happen?” Charlie asked.

“At some point after I parked the Jenny on Saturday, when the Pensacola show was over. I was planning to take a local photographer up on Sunday afternoon, to get some aerial photos for the local real estate barons. I spotted it then.” She smiled ruefully. “If it had worked, it would have been a two-fer, I’m afraid. Me and my passenger both.”

Charlie frowned. “The plane wasn’t locked up?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding.” Another laugh. “You know what those hangars are. They’re like the shed where I parked the plane this morning. Open to the public. Danny Murphy was supposed to be on watch, but he didn’t see it happen.”