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roller-skating rink, which was run by Yuan Chen. All were struggling to stay afloat after the Crash.
    But one concession agent made a particular impression on Eddie.
    Directly across the midway was a root-beer stand whose red, white, and blue awnings one day unfolded like a flower opening to the sun. It was run by two women agents—one a shapely blonde about Eddie’s age. She had a sweet face with delicate features; he found himself stealing glances at her whenever he could. When she was at work, her wavy blonde hair would periodically get in her eyes and she would blow air out of the corner of her mouth to clear her vision. Somehow Eddie found this very fetching.
    “Who’s the blonde across the way?” he asked Lew.
    “Adele something-or-other,” Lew said indifferently. “She and Lois work for Norval Jennings.”
    It wasn’t long before Eddie decided he needed a bathroom break and moseyed across the midway, pausing in front of the root-beer stand. He waited until the girl came up to the cash register at the front of the stand, opening the cash drawer to dust it out. Eddie stepped up, smiled, and said, “Hi.”
    She looked up. Her eyes were gray—not blue, not violet, but the lightest, most beautiful shade of pearl gray. They stole away Eddie’s breath.
    “Hi.” So perfunctory, she made it sound like less than one syllable.
    “I’m Eddie.”
    “I’m busy.”
    She clanged shut the cash drawer and turned away.
    Eddie’s smile sank to somewhere below his knees. He skulked off to the men’s room, and when he returned to the candy stand he concentrated on his work, doing his best to put the girl out of his mind.
    But she was hard to miss, and every time he looked across the midway he saw her working her stand, her blonde hair getting in her eyes—which Eddie now knew, maddeningly, were as lucid as pearls.

 
    2
    Fort Lee, New Jersey, 1930
    T HAT MORNING, A DELE— still in her bathrobe, hair unwashed, utterly bereft of makeup—had answered the doorbell to find a tall, handsome man, impeccably dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit, standing on the doorstep. He was a dead ringer for Greta Garbo’s onetime heartthrob John Gilbert, but Adele, suddenly conscious of an unruly lock of hair in her eyes, feared she looked less like Garbo than Harpo.
    “Does a Mr. Franklin Worth live here, ma’am?” he asked.
    And he called her ma’am. Could the day get any worse?
    She blew the hair out of her eyes and replied, “Yes. He’s my father.”
    He flashed a badge at her. “Special Agent Crais. I’m with the United States Secret Service. May I come in?”
    Holy Toledo—a real, honest-to-God G-man. “Yes, of course, come in.”
    Her mother, Marie, appeared just as the agent was showing Adele a letter addressed to President Herbert Hoover. “Have you seen this before?”
    Adele immediately recognized her father’s handwriting. Her stomach began to coil. “No,” she said. “He wrote this to the President ?”
    “Just the latest in a series, I’m afraid,” the agent informed her.
    Unbeknownst to Adele or Marie, Franklin had apparently been mailing belligerent letters to President Hoover for months. Hoover had served as national conservator during the Great War; Franklin’s screeds accused him of killing the East Coast’s film industry by withholding coal needed to heat studios. Since Hoover was currently being blamed for all the ills in the country up to and including acne and cloudy days, the White House didn’t pay much attention until Franklin’s letters became overtly threatening.
    Marie was mortified beyond words, but when Adele introduced the agent to Franklin, her father appeared surprised.
    “I never wrote this,” he said as he examined the letter. Grudgingly he conceded, “I thought I’d only— thought about writing it.”
    “So when you tell the President you would like to, quote, remove his liver with a pair of garden shears, unquote,” the agent said, “you’re saying that wasn’t your