The last time Kate had visited Sam at camp was two years ago, and Beth had been with her. Sam had just been a camper then, but now she was a junior counselor. The sisters had driven north in Kate’s Porsche with the top down and the radio on. They’d traveled almost the whole way on back roads, through pine woods, past farms and wide-open meadows. Although they lived relatively near each other, they didn’t get enough time together—Kate’s flight schedule was intense, and Beth was so busy with Pete and Sam and running the gallery. The road trip had been just what they’d needed: nonstop stories and laughter.
Kate couldn’t stop feeling the need to talk to Beth. She wanted to tell her about Detective Reid, how he’d tried to be circumspect but had been so clumsy that Kate had no doubt he knew every detail about what had happened to them. Probably every cop in Connecticut did. Sometimes Kate could still feel the ropes around her wrists, forearms, chest, and ankles. She flexed her right hand now. She could still smell the blood, all her mother’s body fluids pooling around them. She and Beth almost never spoke about those hours at the gallery—they had locked the experience in a vault, just to stay sane and move on.
Camp Orion was in Down East Maine, on an island off Roque Bluffs. Kate had thought about driving today, but it was a seven-plus-hour drive, not counting the ferry ride. She needed to get to Sam right away. And the idea of retracing the route she’d driven with Beth, with the seat empty beside her, pierced her heart clear through.
She drove to the Groton-New London Airport, where early that morning she had landed the Citation X chartered by the Higginsons. She and Tallulah Granville, her best friend since childhood, co-owned a single-engine Piper Saratoga and kept it there. Lulu was a captain on Delta, active in the pilots’ union. Normally Kate would check with her to make sure she didn’t have plans to fly. Last week Lulu had been in Atlanta training on a new aircraft. Kate wasn’t sure where her schedule was taking her today. The idea of having to tell her about Beth right now, when she hadn’t yet seen Sam, was too excruciating to think about.
The Saratoga was high performance, an all-metal beauty with retractable landing gear and tapered wings. Kate removed the chocks from around the plane’s wheels and climbed into the cockpit. She ran through the preflight check, put her headphones on, and called the tower to request clearance for takeoff.
The airplane taxied down the runway, took off like a dream, banked over Long Island Sound with a view of three states—Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York—and began to climb into the clear blue sky.
Kate had caught a tailwind back from LA, landing less than five hours after taking off from hot Van Nuys Airport in the San Fernando Valley. Because there had been a second pilot in the cockpit, her max allowable hours today were nine instead of eight, and that would give her just about enough flying time to get to Maine and back. Rules were important in the air and everywhere. Her grandmother had taught her that.
Her grandmother had also taught Kate to fly. Mathilda Harkness, even at eighty-two, had been the best pilot Kate had ever flown with. She had served in the WASP in World War II, but she’d never earned her wings.
“We knew our stuff as well as any man,” she’d said on Kate’s fifth lesson in a chartered Cessna. Kate was seventeen. It was the summer she should have been getting ready to go to college—she’d gotten into Sarah Lawrence—but she had deferred attending. She couldn’t stop reliving those hours in the gallery’s basement. Missing her mother and facing her father’s legal troubles made the idea of going away to college unbearable. And Mathilda had insisted she and Beth get intense therapy for what she said was trauma—and Mathilda would have known. She’d been in the war.
“I am sure,” Kate had said to her grandmother, loudly enough to be heard over the noisy single engine, “you knew your stuff better than the guys.”
“You’re right,” Mathilda said. “We trained as hard as they did. Eleanor Roosevelt said we were ‘a weapon waiting to be used.’ Instead, they kept us off to the side, never sent us overseas. They expected us to come home from the war and take care of the men, have their children.”
“But you did have a kid,” Kate said. “Mom.”
“Yes,” Mathilda said. “But I did it without getting married, and I was damn glad she was a girl, because I wanted to raise someone strong and independent enough to know the idea this is a ‘man’s world’ is a bunch of bullshit.”
“Why did you join the WASPs?”
“I wanted to serve my country,” she said. “And live up to Jacqueline Cochran.”
“Who?”
“My idol,” Mathilda said. “Jackie finished first in the Bendix Race of 1938, beating every man. First woman to break the sound barrier, and even till this minute, she’s broken more altitude, speed, and distance records than anyone, including men. It was her idea to train women exactly like men in the air corps—the army way.”
“The way you’re tough on us,” Kate said.
“Girls have to be dauntless,” Mathilda said. “And twice as excellent. That’s what I taught your mother, and it was what she was teaching you and Beth. And what I still am teaching you.”
“Beth is already excellent,” Kate said. “She doesn’t need lessons in it.” And it was true. Despite that day and night in the basement, what Kate had come to think of as the basement hours, her sister made high honors. While Kate’s life was in shambles, her inability to start college filling her with shame, Beth stayed focused.
Still in high school, Beth had plans to attend Connecticut College, near enough to Black Hall so she could take over the gallery from the executor and start to run it as soon as possible. In the meantime, she wrote papers on the early American Impressionists—familiarizing herself with the family collection. Not only that, she volunteered at the Marsh View Nursing Home and the New London soup kitchen.
“Beth’s the kindest, most generous person I know,” Kate said. “Isn’t that excellence?”
“It is,” Mathilda said. “But who’s up in the plane with me?”
“Beth is more of an on-the-ground person,” Kate said. “Dad always said that about her. She’s feet on the ground, and I’m head in the clouds.”
“That monster,” Mathilda said. “Leave it to him to sum up his daughters in such simplistic terms. But if you want to speak in clichés . . .”
Kate cringed, sorry she’d mentioned her father.
“You have to have your head in the clouds to shoot for the stars,” Mathilda said. “Do you hear me, Katharine?”
“Yes,” Kate said. They were flying toward the southern tip of Block Island. Soon she would make the turn over Great Salt Pond and begin to angle down toward the airport.
“You don’t need to live a conventional life. You don’t need to do anything people say you should do. Shoot for the stars, just like you’re doing.”
Kate had banked left then, starting her descent for Block. That was over twenty-three years ago, and she banked left now, descending toward the Barred Owl Airport to pick up Sam. It was a short runway, but the Saratoga could handle it.
She thought about a conventional life—Mathilda would never know how much Kate had wished she could have one. Mathilda had chosen the path she wanted—despite family pressure, she had never married, even when she had had a child. Instead she had fallen in love with Ruth, and they had lived together at Cloudlands, the big house on Sachem Hill.