I said, “People speculate about a couple whom they don’t know. The thing to do is make them know us. We get acquainted with everybody from the driver of the rented automobile to the passengers on the plane. We’re husband and wife. We left Los Angeles to come east on our honeymoon. We’ve just got a wire that your mother had a spell with her heart, and we’re rushing back to be with her. It’s an interrupted honeymoon. People will sympathize with us, remember us in that capacity. If the police teletype starts clicking out a description of you as being wanted for murder, no one will ever connect that description with the poor little bride who is so worried about her mother.”
“When do we start?” she asked.
I said, “As soon as I telephone for an automobile,” and went back into the telephone booth.
Chapter Seventeen
At daylight Sunday morning we were skimming over Arizona. Gradually the desert had ceased to be a vague, gray sea beneath us and had acquired form, substance, and color. The higher buttes thrust their rim rocks up at the plane, catching the first vague suggestion of light. Down below, the deeper canyons and gulches were filled with shadows. The stars pinpointed themselves into a bluish green oblivion. As we sped westward the roar of the twin motors echoed from the jagged rim rocks around the buttes below. The east assumed a rosy glow. The tops of the cliffs were bathed in champagne. We sped over the desert as though trying to flee from the sun. Then abruptly the sun shot over the horizon, and the bright rays pounced upon us. The fainter colors of dawn gave place to dazzling bits of brilliance where sun splashed against the eastern edges of the cliffs, accentuating the dark shadows. The sun climbed higher. We could see the shadow of the plane scudding along below us. Then we were over the Colorado River, and into California. The roar of the motors faded to the peculiar whining sound which precedes a landing, and we were down in a little desert stopping place where the airport lunch counter gave us steaming hot coffee and bacon and eggs while the plane was refueling.
Once more we were off. Great snow-capped mountains appeared ahead, guarding the edge of the desert like gray-haired sentinels. The plane jumped and twisted like something alive in the narrow confines of a pass between two big mountains, and then, so abruptly that it seemed there was no appreciable period of transition, the desert fell behind, and we were skimming over a citrus country in which orange and lemon groves, laid out in checkerboard squares, marched by in an endless procession. The red roofs of white stucco houses showed in startling contrast to the vivid green of the citrus trees. Dozens of cities, constantly growing larger and crowding closer together as we neared Los Angeles, spoke of the prosperity of the country below.
Then they shrouded the plane. I looked across at Roberta. “Won’t be long now,” I told her.
She smiled somewhat wistfully. “I think it’s the best honeymoon trip I ever had,” she said.
Then, almost without warning, the plane was swooping down out of the sky, gliding toward a long cement runway. The wheels dipped smoothly to the earth, and we were in Los Angeles.
I said, “Okay. Here we are. We go to a hotel, and I’ll get in touch with my partner.”