Ava shrugged, a little embarrassed. “I suppose,” she said. She took a step back from Pollux and gestured at the biplane, her hands still holding the oilcan and the oily rag. “I mean, just think—how does this heavy chunk of metal carry you up into the sky, much less keep you up there?”
“That’s easy,” Louis replied. “It’s physics.” He began to explain the laws of aerodynamics in all seriousness, but Ava only laughed.
“Why, thank you, Professor,” she replied, teasing him. “I happen to know all that.” It was true . . . or mostly true. Ava had read up on the laws of physics as they concerned airplanes—although Louis seemed far more interested and enraptured with the nitty-gritty of the science than she was.
They had been on the road all together for a few weeks now, and over the course of that time Ava had gotten to know a bit more about what made Louis Thorn tick. He was a funny conundrum of opposing qualities. First, there were the physical quirks. Louis was tall and well built, but not necessarily athletic. He was good-looking and clean-cut—folks often used the words “all-American” to describe him—and Ava got the impression that girls liked him. But she also got the impression that he was the less-confident sibling to an extremely self-assured older brother. There was a careful deliberation about the way he moved that translated into an awkward tempo of hesitation. She’d especially noticed it on the day of Louis’s and Harry’s first wing-walking attempts: Louis was the one you expected to be the better wing-walker, and yet . . . even from far away, you could plainly observe the way his brain second-guessed his every move.
Then there were Louis’s hobbies and interests. His tone and expression turned very serious when he talked about science, about physics and mechanics—or, alternately, whenever he talked about his other true love: comic books and their characters, particularly a new character people were supposedly crazy about, called Superman. While these two passions—science and comics—went together perfectly in Louis’s mind, Ava was quick to point out how one debunked the other. She had never seen Louis more frustrated than when she insisted that the very premise of Superman—the world’s strongest man, who flies around in a cape without the help of an airplane—was hardly a scientifically sound conceit. Ava teased him but stopped short when she saw a vein in his temple throbbing, and realized he might blow a gasket in all earnestness. It was rather endearing, actually.
But when he wasn’t explaining aerodynamics or talking comic books, Louis was quite different: rather relaxed and open. He had a friendly way with people and found it difficult to get cross with folks or carry a grudge—which was why, perhaps, it struck Ava as strange that Louis acted so funny around Harry, and vice versa. It almost seemed like Louis had to concentrate all his energies on hating Harry, or else he’d forget to do it.
“Speaking of unnatural,” Ava said now, changing the subject slightly, “I don’t think there’s anything more unnatural than how you act around Harry.”
She left the remark dangling, to let Louis absorb it and perhaps return some sentiment of his own accord. But Louis was merely silent.
“It seems as though maybe you actually like him,” Ava observed, trying to nudge Louis along. “Or, at least, like you don’t hate him as much as you let on.”
Louis shrugged. “It’s not . . . There’s . . .” He hesitated, as though searching for the right words. “It’s just that there’s a lot of history between our families.”
Ava had been trying to tease out this story bit by bit. She tried to get more of it now.
“You said it was about land.”
Louis nodded.
“My father always told us the same story about the Yamadas, over and over . . . He said my grandfather was tricked out of his land.”
“And so that’s what you believe—that Harry’s family stole your family’s land?”
Louis shrugged.
“Sure. They’re my kin. Wouldn’t you believe them?”
Ava thought about this. “I don’t know,” she said, pondering aloud now. “It’s still just . . . one side of the story . . . and it’s not like you or Harry were even alive to witness what really happened.”
“Are you calling my father a liar?”
Ava knew Louis’s father was dead. Her instincts told her to tread lightly.
“I guess I was just saying . . . maybe Harry’s been told a story, too, and it’s a different story . . .”
Louis didn’t answer, and Ava fell into an apologetic silence. She went on cleaning the biplane’s engine. She could sense Louis beside her but lost in thought, his eyes absently watching her hands.
“We used to be friends, you know,” Louis said finally. His voice was a flat murmur, as though he were only remembering this fact himself.
She’d suspected something like this was possible. Nonetheless, she looked at Louis with genuine surprise.
“Back when we were kids,” Louis explained. “Since our families’ acreage put us right next to each other, we played together out in the little grove of trees at the property line.”
Ava smiled, interested. She wanted to picture it. “What would you two get up to?”
Louis looked off into the distance and gave a cross between a grunt and a chuckle. “I remember I’d show him all my comic books; we’d read and I’d explain about The Shadow, and he’d show me all his magic tricks . . . He was nuts about Blackstone and the Great Lafayette, and his favorite, Harry Houdini. Taught me a couple of card tricks once, and a bit with a coin . . .” Louis hesitated, lost in memory. “I always thought it was funny that so many magicians are named Harry, and that was Harry’s name, too.” He paused again. “Of course, that’s not Harry’s real name. He’s got a Jap name, too. Haruto, I think.”
Haruto Yamada, Ava repeated in her head. Another interesting fact she hadn’t known. She recalled Harry’s gift—that pretty gilded volume of Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors—and blushed. She poked her head in closer to the plane’s engine so Louis wouldn’t see.
“Sounds like the two of you got along pretty well once,” she said, trying to keep the conversation about Louis and Harry.
“I guess we didn’t know any better.” He paused. “Or maybe I did. My brother Guy saw that Harry and I were playing together, and he used to warn me all the time that it wasn’t right—that if I kept on, I’d likely catch a hiding from our father.”
“And did you?”
“Catch a hiding?” Louis shook his head. “No. My father never caught on that I was spending time with our Jap neighbors.”
“Then . . . what changed?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when I first met you both, it didn’t seem like you and Harry were exactly chummy. So what happened?”
“Oh.” Louis nodded. “Yeah. We were friends—sort of—but then, I suppose, one day I stopped speaking to him.”
“But why?”
Louis looked at the ground. “It was around the time my father died.” He shook his head, uncomfortable. “Seemed disrespectful . . . if I were to keep on talking to any of the Yamadas—at least, that’s what my brother Guy was awful keen on pointing out. After our father died, he promised he’d give me that hiding himself if I kept on bein’ social with Harry.”
“So after your brother said that, you just stopped talking to Harry?”
Louis nodded.
“Did Harry ever complain or ask you why?” Ava ventured.
Louis shrugged. “School was the only time we saw each other after that. He tried to talk to me a couple of times in the schoolyard, but I avoided him. And then, once we was in high school . . . well, it didn’t matter much. I was bound to drop out anyway.” Louis lowered his eyes as though ashamed. “I was needed on the ranch.”
Ava was sympathetic. She’d had to leave school, too, and wanted to tell him she understood. But before she could find the right words, Louis was looking at her with a funn
y expression on his face.
“Boy,” he said, “you sure do ask an awful lot of questions about Harry all the time!”
Ava startled.
“Do I?” she asked.
Louis shrugged and laughed.
“It sure seems like it to me.”
Ava waved a hand. “I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. You and Harry are the most excitement this outfit has seen in years. Only natural to be curious about the two of you—both of you.”
Louis smiled and nodded, and Ava continued to point out various engine parts, giving their names and showing Louis those spots where grime was especially likely to build up. Louis had no reason to doubt any of it. He watched Ava as she talked, noticing how green her eyes looked when they caught the amber glare of the late-afternoon sun.
18
Newcastle, California * September 17, 1943
I reckon I’m under obligation to keep you informed,” Sheriff Whitcomb says, by way of greeting. He gives a disdainful grunt for good measure.
Agent Bonner comes in from the bright sunshine and pulls the door shut behind him. The same hospital-green walls greet him. The fan whirs with an exhausted, overworked air, as though aggrieved by the dent it is unable to make in the oppressive heat.
“Keep me informed of what?” Bonner asks.
“Plenty of that biplane’s parts burned up in the crash, but the local firemen collected all the ones that didn’t. The fire chief telephoned this morning. He’s no expert, but there’s a part he thinks is likely the fuel line, and it looks to him like someone cut it.”
Bonner freezes, his brow furrowed.
“Well, I suppose ‘punctured’ is how the fire chief put it,” the sheriff adds. “It looked to be cut, but not through and through. Just a small vertical slice. Looked to be man-made.”
“Meaning . . . someone tampered with it on purpose?”
The sheriff holds up a hand and shakes his head.
“I figure that’s up to you to see about. But I’ll caution you . . . I wouldn’t go jumping to any conclusions,” Whitcomb says. He pauses and fixes Bonner with a meaningful stare. “And I certainly wouldn’t go pointing any fingers—not just yet.”
It is clear they are both talking about Louis Thorn without either of them needing to mention his name.
“Of course,” Bonner replies. “I only intend to follow procedure. I’d like to make some calls, see if I can find an airplane mechanic to come up here and verify what the fire chief is looking at.”
Sheriff Whitcomb grunts.
“I assume the F.B.I. will be footin’ the bill for that?”
Bonner’s jaw clenches, remembering Reed’s admonishments about the Bureau’s budget. He coughs and nods.
“Spoke with my boss about it this morning, as a matter of fact,” Bonner says.
Whitcomb grunts again. “Needless to say, until we all decide different, this information is just between us fellas,” he says, casting a meaningful look at Deputy Henderson.
“Of course,” Bonner repeats.
Henderson doesn’t speak. His eyes move between the two of them with a sheepish, vaguely guilty air.
Hat still in hand, Bonner glances around the room. “May I?” he asks, pointing to the receptionist’s desk, where he sat the day before to use the telephone.
Whitcomb frowns, but tips his head in a brief nod, giving permission.
“Irene gets into work ’round three,” he warns.
“Appreciate it,” Bonner says, and slides into the desk chair, preoccupied with the sheriff’s news about the fuel line. He’s already itching to talk to Louis Thorn about that. But Bonner knows he has to be patient, have an expert verify the sabotage, make sure no piece of the case has been overlooked, however small. He reaches into his attaché case, extracting a file folder. In it is every bit of information the F.B.I. possesses about the Yamada family.
Bonner flips open the manila folder and extracts the contents. He clears the desktop before him and begins to lay out each paper and photograph in a deliberate, meditative manner, like a mosaic artist laying tiles. He switches on a desk lamp and peers more closely into the constellation of documents as though he were trying to read tea leaves.
Bonner knows he must eliminate the Yamadas as suspects, even if the notion strikes him now as increasingly unlikely. If Harry Yamada and his father had a death wish, it was simple enough to crash an airplane without having to tamper with the fuel line. Why would they take such a useless additional step? Suicide is a question of will. Sabotage is the sort of action taken by someone with something to gain from hurting others.
Bonner’s mind circles back around to Louis Thorn, the man living in the Yamadas’ former home, the official owner of the former Yamada property. Bonner hadn’t expected any of this when he requested the case. He simply recognized the Thorn name and found himself curious. His curiosity was an idle sort, perhaps a touch narcissistic, but benign overall. It wasn’t until Deputy Henderson began telling him about the land dispute between the Thorns and the Yamadas that Bonner got the inkling that his grandmother really hadn’t ever told him very much, and that the situation was far more complicated than he had anticipated. He thought he’d get a passing look at Louis Thorn—at most, he might discover Thorn was hiding two escaped evacuees and turn a blind eye.
He never expected to meet Louis Thorn and suspect the young man of murder not more than ten minutes after shaking his hand.
Now Bonner doesn’t know what to think. In the wake of the crash, Louis didn’t appear shocked or saddened, so much as . . . distracted. The cut fuel line did not bode well, either. As far as Bonner can tell, the Thorns were poor and begrudged their neighbors’ prized piece of land—land they believed had once belonged to their own family long ago. So many questions swirled around the case, but most of them kept orbiting back to one big question in particular: Did Louis Thorn ever intend to give the Yamadas back their land? The Yamadas trusted him with it, but should they have?
Bonner knows the case is becoming an obsession; he can feel the fishhook sliding deeper and deeper under his skin. He knows, too, there comes a point in every obsession where a person stops caring that he’s obsessed, a point where a person wants the answers so badly, he doesn’t stop to contemplate whether or not he should be asking the questions. Plenty of people—Whitcomb not least of all—would rather Bonner leave well enough alone.
But Bonner has his heart set on digging up more information. He thinks again of those mysterious cuts and bruises on Louis Thorn’s face, and looks across the room to where Deputy Henderson is bent over his own desk. Perhaps, Bonner decides, it’s time to have Henderson show him the way to Murphy’s Saloon and get that beer they discussed.
19
The Thorns * 1869—1930
It was Louis’s grandfather, Ennis Thorn, who originally came over from Ireland in 1869 and traversed the vast distance from one American coast to the other. Ennis was thirty-four at the time, and lines had already begun to etch themselves upon his face, especially around his gray, sun-strained eyes, which instantly sprouted two small fans of lines whenever he smiled or looked into the sun. The lines deepened with the years until they ran all the way down the sides of his cheeks, all the way to his hairline. By the time he made it west, the lines had begun to settle in for good, no matter what expression he wore.
Back in Dublin, Ennis left behind a wife, three children, and a sizable group of angry debtors. He loved his wife and, not having told her of his plans to leave for America, nearly changed his mind over breakfast that morning. It pained him to go but, once across the Atlantic, he never looked back. After disembarking in New York, Ennis made his way steadily west over the years, picking up work in the form of manual labor. In Ireland, the Thorn family trade had been blacksmithing, and Ennis had retained enough of the old skills to hire himself out. He smithed for passing wagon trains whenever he could, and when he c
ouldn’t, he hired himself out in other ways, moving from town to town, raising barns and baling hay, until he ran clean out of towns and went to work dynamiting tunnels and hauling rocks for the transcontinental railroad that was slowly inching its way across the nation. He drank and gambled at every opportunity without fail, and got himself run out of several Nevada mining camps for his trouble.
By the time Ennis reached California, he was feeling his age and then some. He had developed the perpetually sour stomach of an alcoholic bachelor and was finally ready to seek out the relief of a regular home. When he set eyes on the rolling foothills that lay at the bottom of the tall Sierra Nevada mountain range, he came to the conclusion that he might like to graze some cattle, perhaps have an apple orchard.
It was an opportune time for Ennis to make such a decision, as he happened to be flush with cash, having just won a very lucky hand of poker and taken a small fortune from a fellow Irishman who owned a silver mine in Virginia City, Nevada. The game had lasted late into the night and Ennis had gotten his compatriot good and drunk before relieving him of a large chunk of the man’s wealth.
Ennis then pushed onward to California, marveling at the manner in which the dry brown landscape of Nevada suddenly turned green only a few miles over the border. It wasn’t as green as Ireland, but it may as well have been; Ennis had been traveling through prairies and deserts and tall brown mountains so long, seeing any bit of green felt like drinking water. He was home, he decided. Having just turned forty—and not a tender forty but rather a salty, weather-beaten forty at that—he found himself weary of travel, ready to stay put for a time. He also subscribed to that particular dream countless newly rich men often have in common: that along with his wealth he had been transformed overnight into the variety of important man meant to leave behind a legacy. To this end, he purchased one hundred and fifty acres in the Sierra Nevada foothills and promptly sent word to the Irish communities back East that he was in need of a wife.
To his astonishment, a little mouse of a woman named Nessie Barrett was dispatched from Boston on the very next train. Like Ennis, she was also pale and freckled, with gray eyes and hair pale as straw. Later, all who met them remarked that Ennis and Nessie could easily be taken for kin: Besides the years that separated them, the main difference was in their expressions and temperaments; his was bold, hers was timid. She was a funny thing, that Nessie: petite and not quite beautiful, but attractive and feminine in her own way. Her pale hair struck a sharp contrast to her eyebrows, which grew thick and dark, making her tiny upturned nose and little mouth look even smaller than they were. But despite her fragile-looking exterior, she endured the trip west and arrived only slightly the worse for wear, and two short days after she stepped down from the third-class passenger car, Nessie Barrett became Nessie Thorn. This turn of events surprised everyone, most of all Ennis. He was eager for a wife, but even so, had planned to take longer with things.
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