Dash first hears about Elsie MacGill

When I first started writing The Secret Keeper, Gus had not yet enlisted. He and Dash worked together on cars. This was my original introduction of Elsie MacGill, who you know about from the final version of The Secret Keeper. I loved writing about Dash and Gus together. In fact, for a long time I imagined him with Dash, not Dot. They had great communication between them, and until I met Jack, I thought Gus might be the only one able to capture her heart. 

 

 

Dash stuck her head back under the hood, looking around, then felt Gus tap her back.

“What?”

He was gazing over her head and toward the road. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“Who is it?” she whispered, feeling her energy drop. She’d been complaining about being hungry for the past hour. If this was another customer, her stomach would have to wait.

“No idea,” he murmured.

She peeked out as he stepped around the car toward the visitor. A well-dressed man in a neat grey suit walked up the drive toward them, his narrow moustache a black line over his mouth. When he glanced beyond Gus and realized that beneath the coveralls and layers of grime Dash was actually female, he quickly removed his grey fedora with its spotless black ribbon.

Gus headed toward him, wiping his hands on the cloth hanging from his trouser waistband in an attempt to clean them, at least a little. Dash stayed behind, watching.

“Can I help you?” Gus asked again.

The other man held out a hand, and she imagined Gus’s grimace as he showed him the grease the cloth had missed.

“Ah. I see,” the visitor said, withdrawing his hand. “I’m Eric Gregory. I have a bit of a predicament with my automobile, and when I saw you here working, well frankly, I thought you were a mirage. Do you have a minute to spare?”

“What’s the trouble?”

He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder. “It’s parked down there, at the end of the block. It started making a sound … like a popping noise? And then it just died.”

Gus looked back at Dash. He knew she was hungry, but on days like this they alternated customers, and it was her turn. She lifted her shoulder, giving in. Hopefully she wouldn’t be too late for supper.

“Sure,” Gus said as she caught up to him. “Miss Wilson will take a look. I have to finish another car for a customer inside.”

Mr. Gregory’s surprise registered briefly then vanished. “Well, that’s great. Thank you very much, Miss Wilson.”

“I’m happy to help.” She walked beside him, spotting the trouble right away. The sleeping Ford stood forlornly on the side of the road, bellowing steam.

“Looks like it’s overheated.” She pulled a rag from her coverall and tossed it over the radiator cap. Careful to avoid the searing heat, she peered under the hood but couldn’t see any obvious leaks in either the hoses or the radiator. She gave the covered cap a quarter turn counter-clockwise to release a bit of steam pressure, then she turned it farther to open it up.

“We need to fill this up with water for now. Hang on. I’ll get a bucket,” she said, running back to the garage then back to the hot car, hands full. He stood back watching as she poured water through the open cap. “You’ll need to get it to a real gas station to see what caused this, unless you want to leave it here until tomorrow. We don’t have any way to look underneath today. I didn’t see any leaks, so it could be your thermostat, but they could tell you better than I.”

“If my sister was here, she’d give me an earful,” Eric Gregory said, looking sheepish.

“Your sister? Why? Are you late for something?”

“Oh, no.” He held out a hand toward where she was working. “It’s just that she would have known what to do with this mess, and I’m sure she’d tell me it was my fault somehow.”

“Your sister knows engines?” In her life, Dash hadn’t heard of any other women interested in mechanics, and she had proudly accepted that she was somewhat of an anomaly. The idea that there might be someone out there like her was intriguing.

“Oh yes. My half-sister, Elsie MacGill. She would have fixed this in a jiffy. Have you heard of her? She’s quite remarkable.”

“Why would I have heard of her? Did she do something special?”

His admiration shone in his smile. “’What hasn’t she done’ is the better question. Let’s see. Well, Elsie graduated as an electrical engineer ten years ago from the University of Toronto, then she moved to Michigan to do something with automobiles—you’ll have to pardon me, but I can never keep up with everything she says. Anyway, she started with cars, then decided to concentrate on airplanes—”

“Airplanes?”

“Yes! Fascinating, isn’t it?”

That was putting it mildly. “Please go on.”

“She got her masters in aeronautical engineering, my dear Elsie. She is actually the first female aeronautical engineer in the world.”

Dash’s jaw dropped. “Your sister.”

He nodded, pleased by her reaction. “She went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after that, but she’s back in Canada now. She was the assistant aeronautical engineer at Fairchild Aircraft for a while, which was remarkable, since most businesses couldn’t afford to hire anyone during the Depression. Elsie worked on aircraft design there. Sometimes she test flew the planes, monitoring their performance. She loves to fly.”

Of all the words he’d just thrown out there, this was the one Dash understood best. All she had ever wanted to do was fly. Her uncle had been a crop duster, and one day, years before, the family had gone out to visit him, and he’d granted Dash’s fondest wish: he took her into the sky in his old biplane. And when she was ten, on a beautiful day in September, he’d taken her to the Ford National Reliability Air Tour, and she’d watched the amazing American pilot, Nancy Hopkins, the one woman among the field of nineteen, and that was it for Dash. Some girls loved horses; she dreamed of flying. One day, she would be just like Nancy Hopkins, she swore. The next morning, and most mornings after that, she woke up and begged her parents to drive her back to the farm and the plane. Sometimes her uncle even let her steer. When that happened, she’d extend her arms like wings as they buzzed over farmers’ fields, sprinkling long clouds of tiny white crystals—lead arsenate, he told her—over the plants to rid them of pests.

“You said ‘was’. Is she still there?”

“She had to take some time away.” Regret settled over his lean features. “She became ill with polio.”

Why a stranger getting polio should bother her so much, she had no idea. But the very thought of this marvelous woman suffering felt like a punch to her gut.

“Did she … I mean, is she all right?”

“Oh yes. She uses a cane, but overall, she is back to her energetic self, other than the fact that she is no longer able to fly. In fact, she took a new job last year, this time as chief aeronautical engineer at Canadian Car & Foundry, up north in Fort William.” A wide smile spread across his face. “And she wrote to me the other day to say that the Engineering Institute of Canada recently approved her application for membership. My dear little sister has become the first woman member of that association. I must say, I never thought that would happen, and to think I’d told her not to bother. I should have known better. Elsie is never wrong about anything.”

“That is truly amazing.”

“It is. We’re very proud of her.”

“I have always wanted to fly,” she said with a sigh.

Mr. Gregory tilted his head, regarding her. “Is that right? Well, Elsie has proven that one should never say never. We cannot know what is ahead of us. I wish you all sorts of luck on that.”

“I’m afraid I’ll need a lot more than luck. Please don’t hesitate to mention my name to your sister if the situation arises,” she joked.

“I will indeed.” He handed her a wad of dollar bills, which she tucked into her pocket without counting. “Thank you so much for being a lifeline for me today. I very much appreciate it.”

On the way back to Gus’s garage, she couldn’t get Elsie’s story out of her head, so she subjected Gus to every word and thought. He was patient, listening to her go on and on about how wonderful it was without interrupting even once. Gus was always patient. He was the very picture of a gentle giant, Gus.