ON VICKI’S RETURN FLIGHT from Norfolk to New York, a pleasant crowd of people filled the sunny cabin. Those pillars of strength, Captain Tom Jordan and Co-pilot Dean, were up in front in the pilots’ cabin.
Vicki went about her duties on the gently rocking plane, and felt warmly satisfied to be back at work in the sky.
She tilted a chair back for a passenger, helped a man read an air map, brought a blanket for a woman who had been ill. Then Vicki looked again at the young girl in Seat 8.
She was about nineteen, poised, quiet, nicely dressed. But her face held such woe that Vicki’s curiosity had been aroused. More than curiosity—concern. Joan Purnell, the manifest said. The only other thing Vicki knew about her was that she was traveling alone.
Her very light-blonde eyebrows made her app
