“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?”