“No,” she said. “They don’t want to see me, they want to touch the machine. I saw it happen in California last year. They wrote their names on the wings and poked pencils in the fabric.”
“Their parents are coming, too.”
“The parents were worse. They were tearing off parts for souvenirs.”
“I’ll block,” said Bell.
He sent the Rolls-Royce roadster and the Thomas to try to intercept the parade on the road, a temporary solution, at best, as the excited townspeople would simply stream around the autos. He ran his Eagle on the ground to the head of the field to further distract them.
Small boys, who had run ahead of the parade, jumped the ditch that separated the road from the hayfield. Bell saw there would be no stopping the children, who had no concept of the danger of whirling propellers before they got in her way.
Just when it seemed they would block her path, everyone looked up.
Bell heard the unmistakably authoritative roar of a six-cylinder Curtiss. Baronet Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s bright blue headless pusher, which Bell had last seen floating in New York Harbor, sailed overhead, making a beeline for Albany.
“That man,” said Andy, “has nine lives.”
Josephine dropped the wrench and jumped aboard her Celere.
The boys stopped running and stood stock-still, staring at the sky. Two yellow monoplanes on the ground had seemed the epitome of excitement. But the sight of a flying machine actually in the air was more remarkable, and less likely than July Fourth at Christmas.
“Spin her over!” Josephine shouted.
Her Antoinette howled. The wing runners turned her around into the wind, and she raced across the cut hay and into the sky. Isaac Bell was right behind her, one step ahead of the welcoming committee.
BELL FOUND ALBANY’S ALTAMONT Fairground buzzing with rumors of sabotage. The mechanicians tending the machines in the racecourse infield were debating whether the wings of Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless Curtiss Pusher had been deliberately weakened. Bell went looking for the Englishman. He found him and his wife, Abby, at a party in a yellow tent that had been pitched beside Preston Whiteway’s private railroad car.
The newspaper publisher intercepted Bell and whispered urgently, “I don’t like these rumors. Strange as it may seem, they suggest the presence of a second lunatic, someone other than Harry Frost. I want you to investigate whether there is a murderer among us, or if Frost is lashing out at everyone.”
“I’ve already started,” said Bell.
“I want constant reports, Bell. Constant reports.”
Bell glanced around for something to distract Whiteway. “Who is that handsome Frenchman talking to Josephine?”
“Frenchman? Which Frenchman?”
“The dashing one.”
Whiteway plowed through his guests to plant himself proprietorially next to Josephine and glower at the Blériot driver, Renee Chevalier, who had gotten her to smile despite her poor showing.
Bell joined Eddison-Sydney-Martin, congratulated him on his survival, and asked how his headless pusher had come to fall in the harbor.
“One of my chaps claims he found a hole drilled clean through the strut that snapped, causing the wing to collapse.”
“Sabotage?”
“Rubbish.”
“Why do you say rubbish?”
“I say it was a knothole in a timber selected poorly by the builder, though they’ll never admit to it.”
“Could I see it?”
“I’m afraid it floated off while she was extricated from the water. We lost several pieces plucking her onto the barge.”
Bell located the mechanician working on the blue pusher, an American from the Curtiss Company, who scoffed at the knot explanation.
“If it wasn’t a knot,” Bell asked, “could someone have accidentally drilled a hole and covered it over to hide the mistake?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No flying-machine maker would take the chance. They’d own up to their mistake and replace the part even if it came out of their own pocket. Look, Mr. Bell, say a house carpenter mistakenly bores a hole in a board. He can plug it up, caulk it, paint it over, and no one’s the wiser. But a flying-machine strut is a whole ’nother story. We all know that if something breaks up there, down she goes.”
“Down she went,” said Bell.
“Could have been murder. The Englishman’s darned lucky they fished him out of the drink in one piece.”
“Why do you suppose he insists it was a knothole?”
“The baronet is a babe in the woods. He can’t imagine anyone doing him harm to win the race, just like he can’t imagine a birdman wanting to win it to collect the fifty thousand bucks. He’s always saying ‘the winning is prize enough,’ at least when he’s not saying ‘the race is the prize.’ Drives the boys nuts. He’s, like, above it all, if you know what I mean, having a title and a rich wife. But the thing is, it’s not fair to Mr. Curtiss. Glenn Hammond Curtiss would never let a patch job leave the factory.”
“Was the pusher left unattended the night before the race started?”
“Along with all the others at Belmont Park. Your ‘aviatrix’ was the only one who had guards, but that’s ’cause of the husband, I hear.”
“So if neither a knothole nor a mistakenly drilled hole would ever get out of the Curtiss factory, how do you think that hole got in that broken strut?”
“Sabotage,” said the mechanician. “Like everyone says. Bore a hole where we wouldn’t see it. Where fabric lapped over it or a fitting concealed it. It happened to his Farman, too, didn’t it? And look what happened to the Platov engine. Those were sabotage, right?”
“They were sabotage,” Bell agreed.
“Excepting I don’t see what none of them smashes had to do with Josephine’s crazy husband. Do you, Mr. Bell?”
Bell pressed two dollars into the mechanician’s hand. “Here, buy the boys a drink.”
“Not ’til we reach San Francisco. We’re sleeping stone-cold sober under our pusher from now on. One man awake all night.”
Bell put his mind to the unsettling thought that of three acts of sabotage, only one could be connected to Harry Frost. Three acts of sabotage since the racers gathered at Belmont Park. Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin twice a victim, Platov and poor Judd the mechanician the third.
Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s first smash had been so clearly a distraction engineered by Harry Frost to kill Josephine.
But how could he blame the second attack on Eddison-Sydney-Martin on Harry Frost? What would Frost get out of Eddison-Sydney-Martin smashing? Just as he had wondered back at Belmont, what would Harry Frost get out of Dmitri Platov’s engine jumping the track and killing a mechanician? Was Frost attacking the entire race instead of concentrating on killing his wife? That didn’t make sense at this stage. Frost was too single-minded to spread himself thin. He would concentrate on killing his wife first, a crime which, if successful, would have the collateral effect of besmirching Preston Whiteway’s race as well.
But to what purpose had Platov’s engine been destroyed by a saboteur not employed by Frost? And to what purpose had the headless pusher been made to smash?
To eliminate a potentially strong competitor, seemed the likeliest answer.
Who would gain? Three possibilities hovered in Bell’s mind, two likely, one odd but not entirely unlikely. The saboteur could be a competitor – one of the birdmen – eliminating his strongest rivals. Or the saboteur could be a gambler trying to throw the race by getting rid of front-runners. Or, oddly, it could be the race sponsor himself trying to generate publicity.
The likeliest was a competitor trying to gain an edge by eliminating his strongest rivals. Fifty thousand dollars was a huge prize, more money than a workingman would earn in a lifetime.