To Slip the Bonds of Earth

Orville and Wilbur Wright depend on their sister, Katharine; she’s been running their household since she was 15. Katharine teaches languages at a Dayton, OH, high school and manages the bicycle shop whenever her brothers are in North Carolina testing their flying machine. When the brothers return after successful flights at Kitty Hawk, Katharine asks Orville to accompany her to a Christmas ball, where the quiet Orville is the butt of some cruel jokes. His jacket goes missing, and he’s frantic to recover it—all the flight plans were in his pocket. As they look for the jacket, the siblings stumble across the dead body of the man who bullied Orville earlier, and it appears that Orville’s screwdriver was used as a murder weapon. Neither tells the police about the missing jacket and flight plans, but Katharine knows that retrieving them means if she finds the plans, she’ll find a a killer.