Mrs. Bryant said she would return the ring to the safe, and suggested they go downstairs.
Mr. Bryant and Mr. Dorn had finished their business, and Lucy had disappeared in order to powder her nose. It was five o’clock. Other guests were beginning to arrive. Although the Bryants urged her to stay, Vicki asked to be excused. She had experienced quite enough for one afternoon.
She returned to the apartment which she shared with several other Federal Airlines stewardesses. Jean Cox was at home, writing letters to her family. She said Charmion Wilson and Dot Crowley had just come in from their Texas run, and were asleep in the front bedroom. Tessa and Celia were working aloft somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard. The stewardesses’ housekeeper, Mrs. Duff, was out visiting friends.
Vicki was glad that the apartment, so often full of guests and parties, was quiet this Sunday. She wanted to be alone for a little while, to write down the names, dates, and addresses she had learned this afternoon at the Bryants’, and to plan her next steps.
It was the following Wednesday, March fourth, before Vicki’s scheduled New York-Chicago-San Francisco flight landed her in San Francisco again. She had fumed at the delay but now she had three days—Thursday, Friday, Saturday—off. “And I’m going to make good use of them!”
She wanted tremendously to fly at once to Pine Top, but it would be foolish to go unprepared, with spotty information. Her first step, obviously, must be to check on the statements she had heard Lucy and Mr. Dorn make on Sunday.
Vicki decided to make full use of the telephone. In her hotel room she collected paper, pencils, the telephone directory, her list of names and addresses, which Dorn and Lucy had mentioned in accounting for Lucy’s recent past. Then Vicki sat down at the telephone.
First she called up Jill Joseph, out in Sutro Heights. When Jill answered, Vicki could hear in the background a babble of children’s voices and dogs barking. She and Vicki exchanged hellos, and then Vicki asked:
“Have you heard from Lucy?”