“No, miss. Why don’t you ask at the Pines Motel? You can ’phone from here.”
Vicki telephoned. The motel had no record, no recall of the two women. She went to the Placerville restaurants, garage, police office, and asked. No news.
Vicki flew on to the next town, Auburn. She talked with friendly tradesmen and local people at a roadside stand heaped with cherries, almonds, grapes, walnuts, and apples. No one, not even the motel keeper or the gas-station owner, had seen the woman and the girl Vicki described. Neither had Auburn’s police officers.
In the next town, Marysville, Vicki inquired again, with no results. In each village--a few of them were almost ghost towns of gold-rush fame--she got the same story. No one had seen the two women. By midafternoon Vicki felt badly discouraged.
Vicki thought it over. So far she had tried only the villages. The minister and the painter had mentioned the possibility that Mrs. Heath might rent a house in the Sierra foothills. “A house off by itself in the hills--that’s the next thing to look for and ask about.”
Vicki took the Cessna up again, thinking hard about the best way to locate such a house. She had been aloft fifteen minutes when she decided it would be a wise precaution to replenish her gas supply. The air chart showed a small airport off to the northeast. Vicki hoped she could buy gas there. She turned, reduced speed, and watched for an airport.
Just off the highway, she spotted a meadow with airstrips mowed in the grass. Three or four planes and cars were parked outside a barn, which must be the hangar.
She circled low over the meadow twice, to let the people below know she wanted to land. Two men in coveralls came out of the hangar. They motioned to her how to come down, pointing to the windsock atop the barn. Vicki waggled the plane wings in reply, flew into their air pattern, and coasted in for a landing. By this time, three other men wearing coveralls had come out to watch her. They gave Vicki friendly smiles as she stepped out of the plane.
“Hello, anything we can do for you?” one asked her. They were all young men, deeply tanned, with sun squint lines around their eyes, and immediately interested in Vicki’s Cessna 150.