The afternoon was warm but not sweltering, ceiling fans churning the air like big propellers; those flies that flypaper strips hadn’t shot down were dive-bombing the handful of customers in the place, which included me and Mantz, on one side of a booth, and young Robert Myers on the other.
I had bought the Myers kid a “snail,” which was his word for a cinnamon roll, and a glass of milk; he was wolfing them down, whether out of hunger or in competition with the flies, I couldn’t tell you.
He was a tall, bony kid with dark alert eyes, a strong nose and chin, and a shock of unruly blond hair in need of a barber; like a lot of kids in their early teens, his body approached manhood while his features still had a softness to them, as if not yet fully formed. He wore a crew-neck T-shirt with dark blue neck and sleeve trim, and his denim trousers were sailor-style denims—judging by how high they rode over his black speedsters, this was at least his second summer in them.
“Amelia never heard a snail called a snail before, either,” he said, chomping on the roll; his voice hadn’t changed yet. “I call her Amelia ’cause she said to. She always called me Robert, ’cause she knew I didn’t like Bobby, since it’s what my sister calls me when she gets mad.”
Mantz and I traded grins.
“Well, then, I’ll call you Robert, too,” I said, “if that’s okay. And you call me Nate.”
“All right, Nate. I can’t tell you how glad I am that somebody’s come to talk to me about all this. I about been bouncing off the walls, worryin’.”
“Why?”
He gulped some milk. “Jeez, I don’t even know where to start.”
“In the detective business,” I said, knowing he would be impressed by that, “we like to keep it tidy, orderly.”
He dabbed off his milk mustache with a paper napkin. “Start at the beginning, you mean.”
“Yeah. How did you happen to meet Amelia?”
He shrugged, nodded out toward the airfield, where a two-engine job was taxiing. “I been hangin’ around the airport since I was a kid.”
“That long?”
“Oh yeah, I can spend hours just watching the airplanes and ground crews, and there’s all sort of famous fliers around. I talked to Jimmy Doolittle and Howard Hughes and Bobbi Trout. Something interesting’s always goin’ on out here, parachute jumps, air races, powder puff derbies…that’s when I first met Amelia. But I didn’t really get to know her till fairly recent—when she was gettin’ ready for the world flight. The first time she tried it, I mean, early this year. It was almost like she went out of her way to pay attention to me and be friendly and all—since she’s a big-time celebrity, you might think I’m spreadin’ it on thick, but I’m not: she treated me like a little brother.”
Mantz chimed in, “Robert’s not exaggerating. Amelia took a liking to the lad.”
“Like, when she’d buy me a snail, she’d have it heated up for me…. Said it was better warm, and was she right! I just wasn’t used to the finer things of life.”
Mantz and I traded smiles again.
“She had such pretty hands,” the boy said, looking through me. “Dainty and delicate, though her fingers were awful long…. She’d sit and drink her cocoa….” He swallowed. I think he was holding back tears; I knew the feeling.
Then he went on: “You know, it’s four miles from my house, to here, and when she’d come along in that fancy Cord car of hers, she’d pick me up…. Sometimes her mother was with her, and she was a nice lady, too.”
“You want another glass of milk, Robert?” I asked.
“Sure!”
I called over to Mom behind the counter for one, and got fresh Cokes for Mantz and me, too.
“Mr. Mantz may not realize it,” Robert said, “but this airport was real different, once prep for the flight got started. No more races, no more air shows, everything kind of shut down except for preppin’ the world flight. And lots of strange people around.”
“Strange, how?”
He nibbled at his snail. “Men in suits. They looked like businessmen. And sometimes military people…. A General Westover came around, everybody seemed real impressed.”
They should. Westover was the head of the U.S. Army Air Forces.
The kid was saying, “Mr. Putnam would go in the office hangar and talk to them…usually without Amelia. It was almost like the hangar office was off limits to her, and I heard her complain about it, too—‘What is he doing? Who are these people? What are they talkin’ about?’”
I turned to Mantz. “You saw this kind of thing, too?”
Mantz nodded. “But I wasn’t involved on the Oakland end, much. Noonan and the new mechanic, Bo McKneely, were handling things.”
“The security guard at night,” Robert said, waving a fly off his snail, “he was a Navy reservist.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. “Were you out here at night, much?”
“No, but my sister had a crush on that Navy guard and was always bothering me about talkin’ to him for her. He’d show up kind of late in the afternoon….”
“If security was tight, Robert, what were they doing letting you hang around?”
“On the first try, before she crashed her plane in Hawaii, things weren’t so tight. Reporters were takin’ pictures and doing stories about Amelia…. As for me, I’m kind of a mascot around here, I guess…as long as I don’t get in
