* * *
—
Sometime after dessert, when everyone had adjourned to the living room for one more drink and to listen to Redwood play the piano, I’d gone to the bathroom. When I came out, a figure was waiting in the dark hall. Adelaide.
She moved closer, holding out her phone. “I don’t mean to lurk, but would you give me your number? I might have something more for you about Marian, but I didn’t want the whole gang to know.” Her voice was low, unhurried.
I didn’t ask why. I tapped my number into her phone. Then we walked back toward the crazy cascading sound of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” saying nothing, locked in a conspiracy I didn’t understand.
An Incomplete History of the Graves Family
1936–1939
A German immigrant named Bruno Hauptmann is convicted of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby and executed. Charles and Anne Lindbergh, hounded beyond endurance by the press, flee to England with their second son. Someone in the American embassy cooks up the bright idea that Lindbergh should pay a friendly visit to the German Air Ministry, casually gather intelligence on the new Luftwaffe. He tours fields and factories and the air-research institute, Adlershof. He lunches at Hermann G?ring’s gilded and bejeweled house, attends the opening ceremonies of the Berlin Olympics.
Hitler, Lindbergh concludes, might be a bit of a fanatic, but sometimes you need a fanatic to get things done. （Lindbergh is a fan of getting things done.） The German people seem to be bubbling over with vigor; the Luftwaffe would woefully outmatch anything America could cobble together. No, the way German Jews have been stripped of their citizenship isn’t ideal, but Nazism is certainly preferable to Communism, isn’t it. Two sides to every coin.
In 1936, Marian is no longer Jane Smith, because Barclay is in prison. She reads about it in the newspaper. He could still send someone to find her, she supposes, but she has had enough of hiding, of vanishment. “My name is actually Marian Graves,” she tells people in Alaska who have known her for more than two years, and they have less trouble making the switch than they might have because she seems like a different person now, will look you in the eye, appears capable of interest, of pleasure, unlike the gloomy and taciturn Jane Smith.
With the money she’s socked away, she buys her own plane, a high-wing Bellanca, and goes into business for herself. For a while, she flies out of Nome, lives in a ramshackle cabin near the airfield. Muskoxen wander past her outhouse, ancient-seeming creatures, haloed by their own frozen breath, their thick coats swinging around their ankles like monks’ robes.
The price of gold has gone up, and she flies geologists to the fields, brings engineers to build the dredges and men to work them. With the seasons, she flies cannery workers and miners in and out. She flies to the reindeer herders, passing low over the swirling brown galaxies of their animals.
People pay her in gold dust, in pelts, in firewood, in oil, in whiskey. Plenty often they try not to pay her at all.
Plenty often she goes north over the Brooks Range, up where trees don’t bother trying to grow. In Barrow, at the Territory’s northernmost tip, seal and polar bear skins dry on stretchers outside the houses, and staked dogs howl at her plane. Once, out of curiosity, she flies beyond the whale-rib gateway that marks the extent of the coast and out over the loose northern jigsaw of spring ice that the planet wears like a skullcap, flies far enough north to see where the jigsaw begins to fuse into one immense ice quilt, ridged high where the currents have forced the pieces together.
A dizzy feeling to being so far north.
Barclay hadn’t assembled an army of lawyers when the feds came for him but pled guilty to their charge of tax evasion, took a sentence of seven years. He paid a fine to the government, but the ranch is safe, as it had long been in Kate’s name. Other assets—his speakeasies and roadhouses turned legitimate businesses after the repeal of Prohibition, his hotels, his shares in mining and construction companies, the Kalispell cottage, the Missoula house, the Stearman biplane, which had eventually been found where Marian had abandoned it—all this technically belongs to Sadler. Even Barclay’s bank accounts are in the names of companies registered to Sadler.
Marian flies under green auroras. She flies under the midnight sun.
The Bellanca gets wrecked and patched so many times it’s a jumbled mass of spare parts flying in formation, as Alaskans say. Better hope the termites keep holding hands, they say. Still it flies well enough until a storm blows it away across a frozen lake and crashes it to bits against rocks on the other side. She gets another one with a bigger engine.