Into Thin Air Read online

  Now it was Mark’s turn to laugh. “Yes,” he said. “And I expect it to be brilliant, Detective Drew.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m afraid we’re both going to have to mull things over for a while,” Nancy told him. “What I’d like to do is go downtown. I want you to show me where you thought you saw Johnson.”

  “No problem,” Mark said eagerly.

  Twenty minutes later they were in the shopping district. Mark led her to the street where he had taken the blurry instant photograph.

  “I don’t really see what we’re going to find out,” he said. “I saw him almost a week ago.”

  “You never know,” Nancy replied in a tone that was deliberately mysterious. She grinned and added, “Seriously, it will help me get a feel for what happened that day.”

  Mark came to a stop on the sidewalk and pointed in different directions. “Here’s the jewelry store, there’s the camera shop. That means I was here and he was over there.”

  Mark stood Nancy in one spot and flung himself ahead of some shoppers to demonstrate Johnson’s position.

  “Okay,” Nancy noted. “Then where did he go?”

  “I told you. He bolted,” Mark said. He pointed up the street. “That way.”

  “And you went after him?”

  “Right. Until he dashed across the railroad tracks and the train came.”

  “Let’s do it,” Nancy suggested. “Exactly what Johnson did.”

  “Sure.” Mark sprang into action. Together, they dodged a slow-moving group of shoppers and sped toward the railroad tracks.

  When they got to the tracks, Mark stopped. “The train came, and that was it. I was stuck here, where we are now. The whole thing didn’t take more than two minutes.” He looked at her. “So?”

  “Hmmm,” Nancy murmured, deep in thought. Then she looked up at Mark. “How fast was the train coming?”

  Mark shrugged. “Fast. It looked as if he had to jump to clear it.”

  Nancy backed up and took a running start. As she reached the open railroad barrier, she imagined an enormous train engine hurtling toward her, and she leaped across the tracks.

  As she did, her sunglasses bounced off her face. She kept going until she was clear of the tracks on the other side. Mark approached, walking at a more leisurely pace.

  “That was it,” he called. “Exactly.”

  Nancy pondered what they had just done, glancing all around them. The street ran into a residential neighborhood of seedy tenement buildings. The man could have gone down any street, into any building. She hated to tell Mark, but it seemed as if their efforts had been useless.

  “What now?” Mark asked, waiting for more instructions from Nancy.

  “Now I’m going to get my sunglasses,” she said. “They fell off when I jumped across the tracks.”

  Mark followed her back to where she had dropped her sunglasses. They lay on the gravel bed near the metal rail.

  “The guy I chased was wearing sunglasses, too,” Mark said, bending down to retrieve her glasses for her.

  At the moment that he spoke, Nancy spotted something glinting underneath the rail, not far from where she had jumped. She knelt and dug her hands into the gravel.

  She came up with a pair of mangled sunglasses, smashed and missing their stems. They looked as if they had been run over by a train.

  “Are these them?” Nancy said, dropping them into Mark’s outstretched hand.

  Mark looked stunned.

  “Nancy, you’re a genius. You found Johnson’s glasses!”

  Chapter

  Eight

  LOOK, I’LL SHOW YOU,” Mark said eagerly. He dug the photo out of his jacket pocket and showed it to Nancy, holding the ruined glasses beside it. They looked like the ones worn by the man in the photo.

  “Johnson’s glasses,” Mark repeated, gloating a little.

  Nancy pursed her lips. “They may be the same glasses,” she said, “but there’s still no proof that the man you saw was Johnson.”

  “I told you, he bolted when I saw him!” Mark insisted. “That’s got to prove something!”

  “It could be that when you started staring at him, he got scared,” she said. “I’m not trying to cut you down, Mark, but we have to go over all the angles.” She thought for a minute. “Now, we do know Johnson wore glasses. He had them on in his corporate portrait.”

  Mark held up the sunglasses and peered through what remained of the lenses. “These do look like corrective lenses. You know, if we could get an optician to tell us what strength these lenses are, and then if we found out what Johnson’s prescription was . . .”

  A broad smile spread across Nancy’s face. “You are a detective,” she said, nodding her head.

  Mark returned her smile. He pocketed the glasses. “I’ll check it out.”

  “If they do turn out to be a match, we still have to figure out how Johnson survived a fiery helicopter explosion,” Nancy pointed out.

  “Why don’t we go out to the airport and talk to people there?” Mark suggested. He gestured back to the railroad tracks. “Who knows? Something else might turn up that’s been overlooked.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Nancy said. She glanced at her wristwatch. “It’s almost noon. Let’s drive out to the airfield. Maybe Bess and George can join us.”

  “Whatever you say,” Mark replied, giving her a happy little bow as she stepped in front of him.

  Nancy and Mark found George and Bess at the Marvins’ house. They all piled into Nancy’s car, and twenty minutes later they arrived at the airport. The helicopter service was headquartered in a large hangar that served as a maintenance depot and storage area also. Five helicopters, in various stages of repair, were parked inside.

  The manager, “Mac” MacIlvaney, was working behind a desk in a cluttered office at the rear of the hangar. MacIlvaney was a retired marine officer, tall and broad-shouldered, with short-clipped salt-and-pepper hair. Since Carson Drew occasionally used the helicopter service for business trips to nearby cities, Nancy had met him before.

  “Hello!” Nancy said, knocking lightly on the door frame before entering the office with her friends.

  “Why, if it isn’t Nancy Drew!” MacIlvaney exclaimed. “What brings you out here? Need a helicopter?”

  “Sort of,” Nancy told him. “Actually, I’d like to talk to you for a minute if I could.”

  “Me?” Mac looked surprised, but gave Nancy a little smile. “What’d I do to rate a visit from three beautiful women?” He winked at Mark.

  Nancy introduced her friends to MacIlvaney.

  “Seriously, Mac,” she continued, “I need to pick your brain. Remember the Anderson Industries case?”

  Mac threw his arms into the air in a gesture of hopelessness. “How can I forget? I lost one of my best choppers that night.”

  “How did it happen, Mac? Tell me everything you remember.”

  MacIlvaney gave her an odd look. “You aren’t nosing around on a case, are you? Your father tells me you have a habit of getting involved in some pretty strange situations.”

  Nancy gulped. She could never be sure if her reputation was going to work for or against her. Sometimes people didn’t want to get involved in mysterious goings-on, even if they were nothing more than innocent bystanders.

  “Well, I guess you could say I was checking into some loose ends involving the case,” Nancy said carefully. “I have read all the newspaper accounts, but the facts are always better from the horse’s mouth.”

  “I know how proud your dad is of you, so it would be a pleasure to help Carson Drew’s daughter.” MacIlvaney slammed his account books shut and pushed his chair back from the desk to give her his undivided attention.

  “I had the chopper out on the runway, ready to fuel up that night,” he began. “I was going to Chicago. I went into the office to make a quick call. The next thing I know was that my chopper was hovering over the landing pad, and police cars were swarming all over the runways.
Johnson must have known how to fly a chopper because it isn’t something you pick up by looking at the instrument panel.”

  “He was a naval pilot,” Mark volunteered. “I found that out when I was checking him out at Crabtree.”

  Nancy nodded. She remembered reading it in his bio in the corporate report, too.

  “Yeah, well, that explains that part of it,” Mac murmured. “So there I was, standing on the landing pad, watching my best helicopter fly off without me, and a herd of police cars chasing down the runways after it. Next thing I know, it’s about a mile away, coming down low over Hoffner’s farm out beyond the airport limits. Then suddenly it blows up.”

  He reached toward a basket filled with papers on one side of his desk and flicked a pile of forms. “Since then, it’s been one insurance form after another,” he finished sadly. Then he shook his head.

  “You know,” he added, “what I still don’t understand is why the helicopter blew up like that.”

  “What do you mean?” Nancy asked, puzzled. “According to the news reports, when the police fired at it they hit the fuel tank.”

  Mac ran his hand over his crew cut and scratched the back of his head. “That’s a good explanation, Nancy, but remember I said I was about to refuel it? That chopper was just about bone-dry. If the police hadn’t shot it down, it wouldn’t have gone much more than a mile anyway—max. I can’t figure out how so little fuel could make such a big bang.”

  “Did you tell that to the police?” Nancy said, astonished at the sudden twist in the story of Johnson’s getaway.

  “Sure did,” Mac said, folding his arms across his chest. “What they do with the information is up to them. I guess as far as they were concerned, that fellow Johnson was dead and done with, and the money he stole was gone, too. You know, they found some of his clothes in the wreckage, and they were all bloodied up.”

  Nancy nodded her head slowly, thinking about Mac’s story and Johnson’s final moments. “Thanks for talking to us,” she said.

  “Anytime,” Mac replied with a grin. “You need anything else, just give me a call, hear?”

  A few moments later they were walking back to the car, each lost in his or her thoughts.

  “What do you make of all that, Nancy?” Bess finally asked, breaking the silence.

  “I’ve got to think about it,” Nancy said.

  George winked at Bess and Mark. “A great mind is at work,” she whispered loudly.

  “All I know is that helicopters don’t just explode by themselves,” Nancy said.

  “Let’s go back to my place,” Mark suggested. “We can talk it out there.”

  They piled into Nancy’s car and drove back to town. When they arrived at Mark’s apartment, Marie and Frances Bradford were out on their porch as usual. Everyone said hello before entering the door leading up to Mark’s apartment.

  As they filed upstairs, Bess shook her head. “This case is too hard for me. My brain feels fried. Do you have any soda in the fridge, Mark?”

  Mark, deep in thought, didn’t seem to hear. “We’ll nail Johnson yet,” he said, taking out his apartment key. When he tried to insert it in the lock, the door swung open.

  “That’s funny,” he said, walking inside. “I’m sure I locked that door.”

  Nancy stepped in right behind him. “I don’t know if funny is the right word for this,” she said.

  The room was a total shambles. Papers and clothes were scattered everywhere, and the lamps and table had been overturned.

  Mark’s apartment had been ransacked!

  Chapter

  Nine

  MARK, IT LOOKS LIKE you had some uninvited visitors,” Nancy said slowly. Her eyes moved from the upended desk to the bookshelves that had been emptied onto the floor.

  “You can say that again,” Mark murmured.

  “Did you have anything valuable?” Bess asked, stepping into the apartment in wide-eyed horror.

  “Valuable? Not really.” Mark glanced into the bedroom, which was in similar disarray. “A pair of gold cuff links and a CD player. I’m not very far along in the worldly goods department.”

  “Your CD player is still here,” George said, pointing. It was sitting undisturbed on a shelf near the window. “It doesn’t look like it was touched.”

  “The cuff links were in a little wooden box,” Mark said.

  “This one?” Nancy asked, holding up a small box that had been tossed on the floor near the bedroom door.

  “That’s it.” Mark took the box from Nancy, opened it, and pulled out a pair of cuff links. “Would you believe—they’re still here.”

  “What about the file on Johnson and Anderson Industries?” Nancy asked, surveying the pile of papers scattered around the overturned table.

  “I don’t see that,” he said. He riffled through the debris. “I need those papers!”

  Nancy took charge. The first thing to do was talk to the Bradford sisters. “Mark, continue checking to see what’s missing, but try not to disturb things too much until the police get here,” she ordered. “Bess, can you call the police? George, let’s go talk to the Bradford sisters. Maybe they heard something.”

  When they got downstairs, the porch was empty. “They aren’t out,” George said, puzzled. She walked around the other side of the porch to make sure.

  Nancy knocked on their door.

  A few moments later Marie Bradford opened the door. “Hello, girls,” she said pleasantly, removing her headphones. “Can I help you with something?”

  “I’m sorry to bring bad news,” Nancy began, “but someone broke into Mark’s apartment.”

  The older woman turned pale. “Are you sure? Frances!” she called in a trembling voice. “Come quickly! Nancy says someone broke into our tenant’s apartment!”

  Frances strode into the hallway behind her sister. “But that’s impossible. We’ve been right here all day!”

  “And you never heard anyone?” Nancy asked.

  “No one!” Marie insisted.

  Frances Bradford furrowed her brow and looked at her sister. “Wait, Marie—now that I think about it, I was out in the backyard for a while.” She turned to Nancy and George. “But Marie was here on the porch the whole time. Isn’t that right, Marie?”

  “The whole time,” Marie confirmed.

  “Were you listening to your portable stereo today?” Nancy asked Marie Bradford.

  Marie’s bright eyes widened and her hand moved to her mouth in dismay. “Why, yes, I was,” she murmured guiltily. “So I wouldn’t have heard anything happen, would I?” She looked at her sister as if she had just done something horrible.

  Frances patted Marie on the back. “That’s all right, dear. It’s not your fault.”

  George touched Nancy lightly on the arm. “Someone’s coming.”

  Nancy turned to see a young woman cutting across the lawn to the front walk.

  “It’s our niece, Linda,” Frances explained to George and Nancy. “She said she’d come by today if she got off work early.”

  Linda was a pretty blond girl of about twenty-two. She wore a crisp black-and-white suit and black high heels. Nancy recalled the conversation she had had with Linda when she called Crabtree. Now she would finally meet Mark’s ex-girlfriend face-to-face.

  “Hi, Aunt Marie! Hello, Aunt Frances!” Linda said, waving as she made her way up the steps to the porch.

  “Oh, Linda, thank goodness you’re here!” Marie said, stepping from the doorway and pushing past Nancy and George. “You won’t believe what just happened!”

  Marie proceeded to fill her niece in on the whole story, with Frances wringing her hands beside her.

  “Poor Mark,” Linda said with a sigh. “He just can’t seem to stay out of trouble. I wonder what it’s about this time.” She glanced curiously at Nancy and George.

  “Linda, dear, have you met our neighbor George? And this is her friend, Nancy Drew.” Frances made the introductions.

  Linda smiled pleasantly at the two girls.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said, extending her hand politely.

  Nancy said hello in a slightly deeper voice than normal. She didn’t want Linda to connect her with the person who’d called Crabtree for a reference about Mark.

  Just then, a police cruiser pulled up to the curb, and the two officers inside climbed out. “Oh, dear, we’d better show them upstairs,” Marie said.

  “I’ll go inside and make you some tea,” Linda offered quickly. “And, Aunt Marie, please don’t mention to Mark that I’m here.” Turning to Nancy and George, Linda said in a low voice, “Mark and I used to go together. I’m fond of him, of course, but I don’t want to give him the impression that I’m interested in seeing him again.”

  Nancy nodded politely, as if it were all news to her. “Uh, George, maybe we’d better help out upstairs,” she suggested. The police officers had gone up, following the Bradford sisters.

  Upstairs, Mark was pacing in his rooms. The Bradford sisters were clucking over the state of the apartment.

  “Nothing is missing,” Mark announced. “Nothing! I even found the Anderson files. They were right under the desk.”

  Nancy cautioned Mark to be quiet. It wouldn’t do anyone any good to tell the police about the case they were working on. Mark instantly stopped talking.

  The police began to search through the ransacked rooms. One told the two Bradford sisters that they could wait downstairs. He wrote Nancy’s, George’s, and Bess’s names in his notebook and told them they could go.

  “Mark, if you need anything, call me at home, okay?” said Nancy.

  “Okay, Nancy,” Mark said miserably. He came close to her and whispered, “I’d just like to know what they wanted!”

  Nancy patted him on the back. “We’ll talk later,” she said.

  They headed downstairs with the Bradford sisters. Stepping onto the porch, Nancy moved to avoid a small pile of potting soil that had been spilled from the planter.

  “Now, look at that,” Marie Bradford said, reaching for the broom that leaned against the wall of the house. “I spent all morning cleaning this porch. I don’t know how I missed that spot.” Vigorously, she swept up the dirt.