Chapter 28 #2
“Listen up, Warden,” he said hastily. “I want you to sell everything. Everything. The stocks, the bonds, the investments. Sell it all. I also want you to sell the house, the cars, the furniture, everything I own. Full liquidation. Immediately.”
His solicitor sounded stunned. “What’s happening? I know there’s been some instability in the stock market, but do you have more information to share?”
“Just sell everything. Right now. I want all my holdings—in gold—by Friday. I’ll give you an additional two percent on top of your usual fee if you get it all done by the end of this week.”
The attorney cleared his throat. “It so happens someone reached out to me this morning about buying a house in your neighborhood.”
“Get it done! I’ll call you from New York and tell you where to send the gold.”
He ended the call. A soft sound came from the doorway, and he looked up to see his wife standing there, her handbag on the floor where it had slipped from her fingers.
“My dear.” He plastered a bright smile on his face. “I’m so happy you’re home.”
“Are you?” Her voice trembled. “I just heard you say you are going to New York. Are you leaving me because we can’t have children?”
“We are going to New York,” he declared. “I’m taking you on a grand tour of Europe. We’re going to forget all about what we don’t have and celebrate what we do have. Pack some clothing. We leave in one hour.”
“How long will we be gone? You want to just leave? It’s so sudden. I’m . . . I’m not sure about this.”
“Come with me, Opal. It’s 1929! Let’s get out and see the world. America will be here when we come back. Maybe we’ll bring home some children.”
“But my father won’t pass the family estate on to anyone but a blood relation.”
“If we stay in Europe long enough, your father will be none the wiser,” he replied.
Opal’s eyes lit up. “That’s a wonderful idea! The priest told me just yesterday that God has a plan for me!”
“One hour.” Horace pointed toward the stairs. “And don’t worry if you forget to pack something. We’ll buy a replacement in Europe.”
His wife’s face brightened.
He watched her hurry up the steps, and his heart hammered as he pondered what Lazovsky might do to her as well.
He picked up the phone and secured passage for two on the SS Bremen.
Then he yelled up the stairs for Opal to bring all her jewelry.
Meanwhile, he grabbed all the cash in the house, emptied his safe, and stuffed it all into a valise, not bothering to pack anything else.
He could buy clothing and necessities in New York.
Right now, he just wanted to get himself and Opal out of Cleveland before Lazovsky caught up with them.
In exactly one hour, he loaded his wife and her bags into the car and instructed his driver to head for the train station.
He didn’t look back.
RACE DAY 5, MIDLAND, TEXAS
Pancho was delighted when she heard the next morning that Dr. Ayers had left the race and boarded a train from Midland, Texas, to home, wherever that was.
She was relieved to see him go, and so were the other women.
With the addition of tight security and the loss of Ayers, the race took on a new lightness of being.
The women may have been still grieving Marvel’s loss, but at least they saw a clear way now to finish the race and honor her memory.
“Aw, c’mon, Pancho,” Amelia argued with her. “Fly with me the rest of the way. I’ve got plenty of room in the Vega.”
“Absolutely not,” she insisted. “The extra weight will slow you down, and this is still a race. Now that Ayers is gone, there’s an open seat in the officials’ plane, and Pullman has offered it to me. I’ll still travel the whole route with you gals and be there to greet you in Cleveland.”
Amelia looked disappointed, but subsided.
Funny, but none of the women seemed to care much about winning the race any longer. They’d all grown so close during the trials, tribulations, and tragedy that the derby felt more like an extended family vacation than a cutthroat race for fame and a large sum of money.
She was just glad she would get to keep her promise to Marvel and make it to Cleveland. The next morning was bittersweet as she watched the other women take off one by one. Not because she wanted to win but because she wanted to fly.
“Quick, everybody in,” the pilot for the race officials called, hustling them into their big, powerful plane.
She piled in with the others and buckled her seat belt.
This plane had a much larger engine than the ones allowed in the women’s planes, which meant it could pass some or all of the women en route to their next destination and be on the ground to deal with various race responsibilities along the way.
The plane roared down the runway and up into the sky.
While she still did get a tiny thrill when taking off, it wasn’t nearly as much fun being a passenger as being the pilot.
She stared wistfully out the window as their plane quickly caught up with and passed Louise Thaden’s Travel Air.
She was the current race leader and as such had been last to take off that morning.
Pullman gradually relaxed the death grip he had on his armrests. His eyes opened as they leveled off to cruise to the next stop, and he smiled wryly at her.
“You’re doing great,” she told him.
He grunted noncommittally. A few minutes later, he asked her, “How are you holding up? I know this is hard for you.”
She shrugged. “I’ll survive. And I’m keeping my promise to Marvel.”
He seemed to sense her sadness, for he made a painfully obvious attempt to distract her by asking, “How’d you get the nickname Pancho anyway?”
She let him distract her and answered, grinning, “When I was seventeen, I ran away again from the all-girls boarding school my parents made me attend.”
“Again?” he echoed.
“Don’t ask,” she retorted. “Anyway, there was a boy. He and I decided to run away to Mexico and find ourselves a nice beach to lie on. But we didn’t have enough money to get there.
He got the bright idea that I should pose as a boy, and he and I would sign on to work as crew on a cargo ship bound for Mexico. ”
“You’re kidding,” Pullman declared.
“Nope. We got hired onto a cargo ship and sailed from California. But it didn’t take too long after we got into international waters to figure out the boat wasn’t carrying produce. It was running guns.”
She had everyone on the plane’s undivided attention now.
She continued, “The first time the ship got close enough to land for us to make a run for it, we jumped overboard and swam ashore to a tiny Mexican village. We had enough money between us to buy a horse and a burro, and we rode them through the jungle to the nearest town that had a telephone. We called my grandfather, and he wired us money to buy train tickets and come home.”
“Yes, but how did you get the nickname?” Pullman insisted.
“I’m getting to that part. When we were riding through the jungle—the boy all tall and lanky on the horse in front and me all squat and short on the burro behind him—he turned to me and said he felt like Don Quixote.
I asked who I reminded him of, expecting him to name some romantic heroine.
But instead he said that if he was Don Quixote, that made me Pancho. ”
Pullman frowned, and she smiled. “That was my exact reaction, too. I asked him if he meant Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s sidekick, and the boy said yes. But for the rest of the trip back to the States, he kept calling me Pancho. And the name just stuck.”
“Gunrunners and tequila smugglers?” Pullman mused. “You do have a talent for getting into trouble.”
She grinned. “I swear, I don’t go looking for it. It finds me.”
“Let’s hope no more trouble finds you between here and Cleveland,” he murmured.
“From your mouth to God’s ears,” she agreed fervently.