Into Thin Air (6 page)

“Come on!” Mark urged them in a loud whisper. “Let's watch what they're doing.”

They walked to the top of the hill, where they were able to look down on the landfill. Its mass seemed to stretch to the horizon, where the glow of River Heights lit the sky. The van was silhouetted at the edge of the dump in the light from the moon. Mark motioned the girls to get down. Nancy crouched beside him.

“Look,” Mark whispered. “There's another car there. I thought I just saw someone get out.”

Nancy peered through the darkness. Mark was right. A heavyset man of medium height was waiting beside a late-model car.

The two husky men got out of the van and had a brief conversation with the man who had been waiting for them. Nancy wished she could get closer to hear what they were saying.

At last the two men opened the back door of the van. They lifted the desk out and pushed it over on its side. It fell to the ground.

“For the price they paid, they're sure treating
that desk roughly,” Nancy whispered. They watched the third man hand something to the two men from the van, who then got back inside. The van's engine roared to life. It backed up, and soon disappeared down the road toward the highway.

As soon as it was gone, the lone man at the landfill site turned on a flashlight and began examining the desk.

“Obviously he must be the buyer,” Nancy said. She wondered what had become of the dark-haired woman. Maybe she had merely been an overzealous antique hunter. She hadn't bothered to show up for the auction, that was certain.

“He's checking for hidden compartments!” Mark whispered.

Sure enough, the man was pulling apart the drawers and searching through them one at a time. After he scrutinized each one, he threw it aside and went back to his search.

“Can you believe this?” Mark asked Nancy.

The heavyset man went to the trunk of the car and emerged with an ax. Suddenly he began hacking the valuable antique to pieces. From time to time he would stop to search through the splinters of broken wood and smashed enamel. When he was finished, the desk was nothing but a pile of trash.

From her hillside hiding spot, Nancy watched him step back from his awful handiwork.
Then he returned the ax to the trunk and came back with a large can. He started pouring something on the remains of the Chinese desk.

“It's gasoline!” Mark cried. He began to get up. “Come on, we've got to stop him!”

But before he could get any further, a match flared. Instantly the pile of splintered wood was engulfed in a ball of fire!

E
VEN FROM A DISTANCE,
the glow of the blazing fire threw moving shadows across Nancy and her friends' startled faces.

Nancy grabbed Mark's arm and pulled him back. “If there was any evidence in that desk, it's gone now,” she whispered.

“The only thing left will be a pile of ashes,” George agreed.

“Oh, no,” Mark moaned. “Finally I get a lead, and there it goes—right up in flames. Well, that's the end of it. Now I guess I go back to flinging and delivering pizzas for the rest of my life.”

Nancy grabbed his shoulder. Despite the Chinese desk's fiery finish, she had learned a lot from the evening's adventure.

First and foremost, Mark Rubin—despite his goofy manner—really was onto something. She wasn't sure even Mark knew exactly what that something was. But people didn't secretly buy valuable desks at auctions, have them delivered to landfills, hack them to pieces, and set them on fire unless they were up to something—something quite illegal.

“You're not giving up, Mark,” Nancy said firmly. “Not as long as I'm around.”

Mark studied her. “Aren't our twelve hours almost up?” he asked. “Or are you saying you're going to stay on this with me?”

Nancy nodded slowly. “You got it, Mark. And you're wrong about the evidence going up in smoke. Whatever that guy was looking for in that desk, we all saw that he didn't find it. What I'd like to know now is who he was, what he wanted, and why.”

“He's leaving,” Bess called in an urgent whisper.

Nancy glanced back down at the landfill site, where the pile of splintered wood was fast turning into charred embers. The man who had set the fire had climbed back into his car and was starting onto the road that led back to the highway.

“We can follow him!” Mark said excitedly.

Nancy nodded. “Let's go!”

They raced for Nancy's car and piled in. Nancy headed back toward the main road with
her lights out. She navigated slowly in the darkness.

“Hurry,” Mark urged. “He'll get away!”

“I can't go any faster,” Nancy cautioned. “I don't want him to see us.”

They saw the red taillights of the car when they winked out and turned off the gravel side road onto the main road. Nancy followed at a considerable distance. The car approached the entrance to the highway, slowed, and turned left.

“He's heading back to Brewster,” Mark said under his breath.

Nancy stepped on the gas, and moments later, she turned onto the highway. She put her lights on. The car they were following was almost half a mile away, and traveling faster than the speed limit.

“Faster!” George cried from the back seat. “He's getting away.” Beside her, Bess was pale. Car chases really were one of her least favorite things in the world.

Nancy's eyes flicked down to the speedometer. The needle was rapidly approaching sixty, and still the car they were following was growing smaller in the distance. She accelerated until the Mustang was traveling just at sixty-five.

As they approached the Brewster town line, the other car slowed and Nancy began to gain on her quarry. A traffic light loomed ahead, at
an intersection with a gas station on each corner. It changed from green to amber. Both cars slowed, and the distance between them lessened.

“It's a Chevy,” said Mark. “Recent model.”

“Can you see the license plate?” George demanded, leaning forward from the back seat.

Mark was straining against the shoulder harness, with his face almost pressed up against the windshield. He shook his head. “Uh-uh. It looks like it's covered with mud or something.”

Nancy kept her eyes on the amber light, silently urging it to turn to red. It seemed to be taking forever. The Chevy was only a few hundred feet ahead and almost at the intersection.

“Don't look now,” Bess said from the back seat. “But there's a police car in the lot of that service station.”

The light was still amber, but the Chevy had braked to an almost complete stop. Nancy was relieved. She pressed harder on her brake pedal, and the Mustang slowed rapidly. She changed lanes, in order to pull up beside the Chevy to get a look at its driver.

Suddenly the driver of the Chevy hit the gas. The car zipped across the intersection just as the light changed from amber to red.

“No!” Mark almost shrieked. Anger distorted
his face. “Go for it, Nancy. Don't let them get away!”

Nancy bit her lip. The driver must have noticed her tailing him. Should she try to follow him?

“That police car is pulling out of the service station,” Bess warned. “Maybe they'll go after them for going through a red.”

“I can't go,” Nancy told Mark. “I'll just get a ticket if I do.” She kept a steady pressure on the brake pedal and the Mustang slowed to a complete stop at the red light.

Mark slumped back in his seat. The police car pulled up to the light beside Nancy. Inside, the two officers were chatting, apparently unaware of the interrupted car chase that had just taken place in front of their eyes.

“We were so close!” Mark said, shaking his fist in the direction of the disappearing tail-lights. “Now what?”

Nancy gave him a tired smile. “Now we go back to River Heights and get a good night's sleep. We've got a lot to do tomorrow.”

• • •

The next day at ten o'clock, Mark met Nancy at her house. Nancy had barely opened the door when the first breathless words tumbled out of his mouth.

“So what next?”

She motioned him to follow her to the
kitchen. Hannah Gruen, the Drews' housekeeper, was just putting away the breakfast dishes.

“I have some things to do in the garden,” said Hannah after Nancy had introduced Mark to her. “I'll leave you two alone to talk.”

After Hannah had left, Nancy got glasses out of the cupboard and set them on the counter. Mark sat on a stool. She poured them each a glass of juice.

“First,” she began, finally addressing Mark's question, “we go over everything that's happened. Then we decide on a plan of action.”

Nancy questioned Mark for more than an hour, going over all the details of the case from beginning to end. Although Mark mentioned a few minor details she hadn't heard before, Nancy felt stymied when they had finished.

Mark was staring at her expectantly.

Nancy laughed. “You think I'm just going to come out with the solution, don't you?”

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!”