_The Disappearance_
Promptly at three o’clock Vicki entered the airport terminal building.
From a pay phone she put in a call for Mr. Quayle’s office upstairs.
He had asked her to report anything to him that didn’t “feel” right
to her. Her meeting with Mr. Tytell yesterday certainly qualified as
not “feeling right.” She had tried to call him yesterday but had been
unable to reach him.
But, once again, the FBI man wasn’t in his office. His secretary
thought he’d be back shortly.
Vicki went to the reservations desk to look at the passenger list for
Flight 17. There was his name, all right. Amos Tytell. So the old man
had made it! Before this day was over, Vicki thought to herself, she
ought to have the answers to a lot of troubling questions!
She looked around. The old man was nowhere in sight.
“Has Mr. Tytell checked in?” she asked the clerk at the desk.
The girl looked down her list.
“Why, yes. He was in over an hour ago to validate his ticket.” She
looked at her watch. “About one-thirty.”
Then he must be somewhere around, Vicki knew. Possibly in the snack bar.
She had plenty of time, so she sauntered toward the restaurant. There
was no sign of the old man at the counter or any of the tables, but
Captain March was sitting on one of the stools, hastily gulping a cup
of coffee.
“Vic,” he said, “you’re just in time to do me a favor. I can’t find my
best pair of pigskin gloves, and I think I may have lost them somewhere
in the terminal. I have to rush to weather briefing, so be a good girl
and see if they might be at _Lost-and-Found_. You’ll know them by the
Abercrombie label.”
Vicki walked across the big waiting room, casting her glance around
for Mr. Tytell, but he was nowhere to be seen. At the _Lost-and-Found_
desk, the boy in charge grinned when she asked about the captain’s
gloves.
“These were turned in Thursday,” he said, reaching under the counter
and coming up with a new pair of pigskin gloves. “These the ones?”
As she took the gloves, Vicki’s eye caught sight of an object lying on
the lower shelf behind the boy.
“What’s that?” she asked sharply, pointing. “That--that violin case?”
The boy turned and picked it up.
“One of the porters found this old fiddle about an hour ago. Is it
yours, miss?”
Vicki looked at the worn leather case, with the frayed handle that
exposed the metal of the clasp. It was Mr. Tytell’s, no doubt of that.
But now it bore fresh scratches and there was a dent in the side as if
someone had stepped on it.
“Where was it found?” Vicki’s voice took on a strident note as a dark
wave of dread swept over her.
“Outside somewhere. The porter didn’t say just where.”
Vicki turned and ran up the stairs to Mr. Quayle’s office on the second
floor. When she burst through the door, the secretary looked up and
shook her head.
“He hasn’t come back yet, Miss Barr. And I really don’t know when he’ll
be in. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“May I leave him a note?”
“Certainly. You’ll find paper on that desk over there.”
Vicki hastily scribbled a message, telling the FBI investigator
about her meeting with Amos Tytell yesterday; his checking in at the
reservations desk; and her finding of the battered violin case that
appeared to show marks of a struggle.
She folded the note and gave it to the secretary. Then she went down
the stairs with a heavy heart.
Twenty minutes later, when the passengers boarded her plane, she looked
in vain for Mr. Tytell among them. But when the last of them had come
aboard, and the ground crew had secured the door and wheeled away the
loading ramp, he was still absent.
Since finding the violin case in _Lost-and-Found_, Vicki had had an
awful feeling that he would not board the plane.