The Game of Love and Death (3 page)

E
THAN
’
S
father sat at the desk in the study of his Seattle mansion, sucking an unlit pipe. A New York City newspaper lay open before him. He scowled at it, folded it, and shoved it aside. Outside, a sparrow landed on the windowsill and peered in.

“Ethan!”

No reply.

“Ethan!”

Mrs. Thorne stepped into the room and issued an eloquent sigh. “Ethan’s teaching Annabel how to play croquet,” she said. “Henry’s in the carriage house.”

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “That boy and that infernal thing. It’s at best a waste of time. At worst, it will ruin —”

“Oh, Bernard,” she said, putting her hands flat on his desk and planting a kiss on his shining forehead. “There’s no harm in it. Not considering the world’s real menaces.”

“It’s a piece of —”

“Bernard.”

Mrs. Thorne walked to the bookcase beside the desk. She made a small adjustment to an arrangement of framed photographs, angling one of a smirking, black-haired, black-eyed girl so that it faced the room directly.

“Get Ethan for me,” Bernard said, lighting his pipe. “Henry —”

“Henry’s just as interested in the newspaper,” she said.

“Henry’s interested in
music
.” He said the word as if it were a curse. “And he’s not —”

“He’s just as much your son as Ethan is. Honestly, after all these years. His father was your closest friend. He was the best man at our wedding.”

“Fetch Ethan,” he said.

“Please?” She tilted her head, looking amused at her husband’s foul mood.

“Get Ethan now, dammit,
please
,” he said. “Tell him I have an assignment for him.”

Sunlight burst through the carriage house windows, illuminating the edges of Henry’s sheet music. It made him squint, but he kept playing. He pulled his bow along the lowest of his bass strings, digging blood-stirring notes from their depths. He was working on Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations for the school orchestra, and as he moved his way through the song, he filled in the rest of the parts from memory: the singing violins and violas, the keening cellos, the trumpets, and the thumping percussion.

He’d been obsessed with the piece since Mr. Sokoloff had handed out the music a few weeks earlier. It wasn’t the best thing he’d ever played. Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Mozart … there was a long list of more thrilling composers. But it was the first thing he’d played that was
more
than music — it was a code of sorts. A riddle. A mystery to solve.

He felt sure a secret lay beneath the melodies that linked one movement to the next. There was the obvious place to start: Each movement was dedicated to people identified on the sheet music only by their initials. But that hardly deserved the title of “Enigma.” Anyone who knew the composer could solve it in an instant. There had to be something more. And so, over the last several days, Henry had worked the mystery over in his mind.

Curious, he’d gone to the newspaper archives to find an interview with Elgar, and what he read puzzled him. The man had compared the song to a drama where “the chief character is never on stage.” Henry couldn’t think of any example of such a play. Even in
Hamlet
, the ghost appears. Henry paused. Outside, a wind kicked up, rustling the spring-bright leaves. He caught a whiff of new grass.

He picked up his bow again, pouring himself into the music. He let it speak for him, ignoring the perspiration that rose from his forehead, gathering and traveling in a bead that carved a slow path down his cheek. He even ignored the fly circling his head like an airplane looking for a place to land. There was so much he wanted to say with the notes.

Henry played until there was a knock on the door. The rhythm of it, from a song called “On the 5:15,” was Ethan’s code. Henry was supposed to return two taps if it was okay for Ethan to enter, but Ethan never waited for that and Henry didn’t want to stop anyway. The door creaked open and the fly spiraled outside.

“Sounds fine.” Ethan stood in the rectangle of afternoon light that polished the carriage house floor. His shadow reached for Henry’s feet.

Henry finished the movement. He would have liked to be alone a little while longer, but if anyone were going to interrupt him, Ethan would be his first choice. He certainly preferred him to little Annabel or either of Ethan’s parents, who’d made it clear that they found his love of music decidedly unwise in uncertain financial times, a waste of time, a distraction from what was important, namely his education and his future. That’s why he’d been consigned to the carriage house in the first place: They’d told him they didn’t want to give him the idea that they approved, although they’d certainly tolerate it at a distance provided he met his obligations with school.

The last note came, low and long. Henry let it hang in the air a moment. After the sound faded, he lifted his head and caught Ethan staring at him in a puzzling way.

“What’s that look for?” Henry said. “I happen to like this piece.”

Ethan shrugged. He leaned against a worktable that ran the width of the room and was covered with sawdust, lanterns that needed oil, and the odd bent nail. A window behind his head framed it perfectly, casting a halo of light around his blond curls. It was no wonder girls were always batting their eyelashes and whispering to each other whenever Ethan walked into a room. He looked like he belonged in a Hollywood picture.

“The tune — it was great,” he said. “You’re getting all right on that thing.”

Henry laughed. “Thanks for that ringing endorsement of my
tune
.”

“I don’t want your head to swell or anything is all. You know you’re good.” Ethan pushed himself up so he was sitting on the table. “So, we have an assignment.”

“We do?” Henry said. It was common knowledge that Ethan was heir to the
Inquirer
, and that Henry was … well, he was a charity case.

“Yes, my father said it’s fine if you go along.”

Henry tried not to bristle. It wasn’t Ethan’s fault how his father always set them on different levels.

Ethan grinned. “It’s a good assignment too. About airplanes.”

Ethan guided the Cadillac toward the airfield with the fingertips of his left hand while he draped his right over the front seat, near where Henry sat. They’d driven from the Thorne mansion on Capitol Hill and were crossing a green drawbridge that arched over the Montlake Cut, offering views of mountains on either side of the lake.

“So this is the situation,” he said, looking at Henry out of the corner of his eye. “The
Inquirer
was scooped and Father’s spitting nails about it. There’s some airplane at Sand Point that’s supposed to be one of the fastest on the planet. A New York paper covered some modifications a mechanic made to the engine, and now our job is to show those East Coast boys they aren’t the only ones with ink in their veins.”

“Sounds straightforward,” Henry said.

“It’s straightforward all right. The beat reporter had his backside handed to him in his hat, and Father is using us cubs to heighten the humiliation. I feel lousy about it, actually. It’s not as though the poor sap missed a story about an airplane that could fly to the moon.”

“As if that would ever happen.” Nothing sounded more horrible; Henry far preferred to have his feet on the ground.

“You bring your notebook?” Ethan said.

“Of course.”

This was how they worked together. Ethan asked the questions, Henry wrote the answers. Then Ethan composed the story in his head and dictated it to Henry, who typed it so that it would be free of spelling and mechanical errors. It was their system, their secret.

Mr. Thorne thought his son had long ago won his battle with the written word, but Ethan continued to struggle. It wasn’t due to a lack of intelligence or effort. He was one of the brightest people Henry knew, quick to see patterns and connections between things, quick to form a rational argument. But through some accident of wiring, the letters on the page confounded him. Henry had been secretly reading and writing Ethan’s work long before he’d come to live with the family — since the day he’d found him crying behind the school, the backs of his hands bloody where he’d taken a lashing from a teacher who’d accused him of laziness.

Neither Henry nor Ethan was certain what would happen when Ethan took over the family business. A publisher who couldn’t read or write — it was unthinkable, unless they found a way to stick together. For now, they pretended that day was in the impossibly distant future, and that an answer would materialize when it was most needed.

“There she is.” Ethan pointed out a yellow biplane with a glass cockpit and thick rubber tires. He stopped the car a distance away and hopped out, running a hand through his hair. Henry followed, but he wasn’t looking at the plane. He was looking at the girl crouching on its upper wing. Something quickened inside him as he studied her, and he wasn’t sure whether the feeling was good or bad.

“Do you know her?” Henry said.

“What? Who?”

“The girl you were pointing at,” Henry said. Though he couldn’t imagine where he’d seen her before, he felt as if he knew her the way he knew the sound of a low D.

“What girl? Where? I was pointing to the plane, numskull.”

Of
course
Ethan was focused on the plane and the assignment. He never let himself get distracted by girls. Never. Henry tried not to, but without much luck. He was forever looking at them, forever looking for the one who’d make him feel as if he’d met his other half. He’d yearned for it his entire life, not that he could talk to anyone about it. And this girl … there was this …
quality
about her, something so alive. She walked from the tip of the upper wing to the middle, and then lowered herself to the bottom one as if it were nothing.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ethan said.

“Come again?”

“Henry, you can be such a dope.” Ethan gestured toward his own face.

Henry had no idea what Ethan was trying to communicate.

“She’s not a possibility, Henry. Stop dreaming of your wedding. You’d give my mother a conniption if she saw you gaping like a salmon.”

“I wasn’t. It’s just …” He’d noticed the color of her skin, of course. To his surprise, he did not care, even though he knew everyone else would.

“Well, at least close your mouth.”

Henry clamped his jaw shut, but Ethan was already walking toward a man in a navy-blue suit, his smile in place, his right hand extended. He dropped it immediately when he noticed what Henry had just observed: that the man in the suit had no right arm.

“I am Captain Girard,” the man said in French-accented English. His tone was light, as if he were used to such gaffes. “I regret I cannot shake your hand, but mine was lost to me in the war. I see you’ve noticed the real story, though. The one those boys from New York missed.”

“How’s that?” Ethan asked.

“That girl right there. She’s a fantastic pilot. The best of her kind in the state. Perhaps even better than Amelia Earhart. It is not just the plane that is fast; it is the skill and daring of the pilot, and here, she is unparalleled. It is because she understands the workings of the engine as if they were an extension of her mind.”

Henry pulled out his reporter’s notebook so he could take down what the captain said. Ethan, who did not have much of a poker face, was irritated. They were there for a story about a plane, not a girl. There wasn’t a teacup’s chance in a tornado that Mr. Thorne would let them write about a female pilot, especially one with skin the color of hers. But Henry didn’t care about that either. He wanted to hear everything the captain had to say about her.

“Her papa fought with me in the war, when our troops joined forces with American ones. He was a brave man. Very good with his hands. Without him, I would have lost more than my arm. And the thing is, I cannot get any of the journalists interested in her. The reason for this is obvious, you see. Flora has the brown skin, and here in America, you pay so very much heed to that. And so they spend all their ink on Miss Earhart, who is also a courageous woman and almost as fine a pilot. But they are missing out on something here, something almost magical.”

Henry wanted to volunteer to write the story himself, just so he could observe Flora at closer range, but the offer would get him into all sorts of hot water with Ethan, who worried endlessly that people would figure out Henry was helping him if the paper ever carried his solo byline, and who always changed the subject when Henry wanted to talk about girls.

“That is fascinating, of course,” Ethan said, sounding not at all fascinated. “What can you —”

“And so, she needs a sponsor,” Captain Girard said. “Someone to provide enough for a plane and a trip around the globe. I pay her what I can but the times, they are bad. Nobody works harder. She takes the night shift to support her
grand-mère
… I honestly don’t know when she sleeps.”

The captain tucked a cigarette between his lips, took a matchbook out of his pocket, and offered it to Henry. “Do you mind?” he said, shrugging apologetically at his empty right sleeve. “I forgot my Zippo in the office.”