A Penny for Your Thoughts

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “I know.”

  “The stupid kid,” he said, going to sit on the edge of the bed. He was quiet for a moment, then he spoke again. “She was fat and homely all her life. Then when she came here…she finally decided to do something about it. Lose some weight. Get in shape. It was a lot of hard work, and it took a long time, but she did it. Look at her now. She is a beauty.”

  “I know.”

  “She was easy pickings,” he said miserably. “Ripe to fall for the first smooth talker that looked her way.”

  “You know who that smooth talker was, don’t you?”

  Nick’s eyes met mine.

  “Please, do not tell me it was Alan,” he said. “Because if he hurt my sister, I swear to you, I will go down to that hospital and finish him off myself.”

  Forty-Seven

  It didn’t take long for me to get to Valley Forge. There was a visitor’s center near the entrance, and I thought about stopping for directions. But then I looked at the photo of Angelina, and I decided it might be quicker just to find the monument by myself.

  Following the road, I steered past the first few buildings and soon found myself driving through gorgeous rolling hills, dotted here and there with antiquated little military huts. There were a few people about, most of them jogging or biking on the roadside trail. I was going to stop and ask one of them for directions when I came around a bend and saw what I had been looking for: Up ahead in the distance loomed a huge monument, looking not unlike the French Arc de Triomphe. A big arch-like monument, as Nick had called it.

  I found a parking place near the arch and got out of the car. Walking across a cobblestone street, I spotted a familiar figure in the distance. Angelina was there, sitting by herself on a bench that faced the monument.

  I slowed as I reached her, noting that she was dressed in a pretty flowered dress with a white sweater, her hair pulled back in a headband, her face streaked with mascara. In her lap she clutched a small brown vinyl purse.

  “Angelina?” I said, coming to a stop in front of her. She glanced up at me and her eyes widened. Then she rose from the bench and began walking away.

  “Are you alright?” I asked.

  She didn’t reply.

  “Angelina!” I said, grabbing her elbow. “What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”

  “Go away,” she said, in torment. She stumbled a bit on the cobblestones in her heels, righted herself, and kept going.

  “Do you have Carlos with you?” I demanded. This seemed to get her attention, and she slowed just a bit.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Carlos is missing. He hasn’t been seen since this morning. Do you know where he is?”

  She stopped walking and looked at me.

  “No, I haven’t seen him since his mother and I watched him go to the bus.”

  “He never got on the bus, Angelina. We think he may have skipped the bus and hidden in Judith’s car in order to spy on her and Alan.”

  Surprise turned to anger as Angelina cursed in Italian, her eyes squeezing into two angry slits.

  “Maybe you had better get in my car,” I said. “I’ll take you home.”

  “No!” she said. “I can never go back there!”

  “Because of Alan and Judith?”

  “Because of myself. Because of what I have done.”

  She burst into tears. I took her arm and led her back to the bench where she sobbed uncontrollably. The few tourists who had been wandering around nearby steered away from our general direction. As Angelina cried, I thought about my hunch, knowing it had been pretty much on track: Alan had arranged to meet both of his women at their “special place.” Then, while they waited, he had stolen the money and tried to make his getaway alone.

  “Where I come from,” Angelina said finally, when she had gotten hold of herself, “we have a term for a man who can lead a woman on. We have a term for a man who tells pretty lies and turns a woman’s head and make her do things she would not ordinarily do. The term is truffatore. Con man.”

  “Alan Bennet.”

  She didn’t reply but merely nodded.

  “I know the two of you were involved,” I said. “What has he done, Angelina? Did he hurt you?”

  She shook her head and burst into new tears.

  “He broke my heart,” she said. “He made me believe things that were not true.”

  I thought of Judith cooling her heels in a rural coffee shop.

  “He stood you up today, didn’t he?” I said gently. “He was supposed to meet up with you here, but he didn’t show.”

  “He was going to pick me up this morning between nine and noon. We were going to run away together.”

  “Where?”

  “To city hall, to get married. Then we were going to drive to Florida for our honeymoon.”

  I sat back, stunned. I could see why Alan had wanted Judith out of town for the morning—so that he could be free to rob her company. But why Angelina? Why leave her sitting in the middle of a national park all day?

  “Where are your suitcases?” I asked suddenly.

  “Alan came and got my suitcases yesterday when no one was home. That way when I left this morning, even if someone had spotted me, they wouldn’t have realized I was leaving for good.”

  “Why all the secrecy, Angelina?”

  She shrugged.

  “My brother did not trust Alan. He would not have wanted me to see him.”

  “But Nick couldn’t stop you. You’re old enough now to choose your own boyfriends.”

  “There is Judith, as well,” Angelina said, shaking her head. “She has had a crush on Alan since he first came to work for her. He said if she knew he was involved with me, it would cause problems for him at work. So we kept our relationship a secret.”

  I thought about Alan, marveling at the fact that he had managed to keep two women, both living in the same house, each unaware that he was having an affair with the other. Amazing.

  “I waited all day for him,” Angelina said. “I thought maybe he got held up at work or something. But then I finally realized he was not coming. He only used me. Nick was right. He said I do not have enough experience with men, that I never learned how to separate the good from the bad.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t sure what else I could say. I was puzzled at Alan’s true motivation. He obviously used people to get what he wanted. But what could he possibly have gotten from Angelina that was worth anything?

  My heart skipped a beat as I instantly answered my own question: the shirt! The shirt belonging to Thomas Jefferson. At first Alan must have planned to have Monty Redburn steal it; that’s why he wanted him working in the house. But then Redburn screwed up, so Alan turned to Angelina. He romanced her into thinking they were going to elope; then he got her to steal the shirt and pack it with her own things. He picked up her suitcases yesterday; he probably took out the shirt and discarded everything else. I remembered when Carlos and I had startled Angelina in Wendell’s study, the night before. She had probably gone in there to take it then.

  “You won’t go back to the Smythes because of the shirt?”

  She looked at me sharply, panic in her eyes.

  “They know it was me? They know I took it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why, Angelina? Why would a nice girl like you steal from the family that has been so good to you?”

  She cried softly, shaking her head.

  “It wasn’t any big deal,” she said. “Alan loved Mr. Smythe so much, he just wanted something to remember him by.”

  “So he had you steal a million-dollar shirt?”

  “No, it was only worth about a hundred dollars. Alan told me which one to take; he said it was the least valuable part of the collection. He said that if we took it, he would always have something precious to remember his dear friend Wendell by.”

  I sat quietly and looked around, wondering if all women were suckers or just those unfortunate enough to have come up against the charms of
a hunk like Alan Bennet. Poor Angelina, finally slim and desirable after years of being overweight and unwanted; she hadn’t stood a chance against a smooth operator like him. What would she do when she realized the item she had stolen was priceless, that the entire reason Alan had romanced her was to get at that shirt?

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know. But it’s better she hear it from me, I thought, than from some stranger or on the news. I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

  “Well, Angelina,” I said finally, gazing out across the gorgeous wooded vista in front of us. “A lot’s been going on today. I think there are a few things you need to know.”

  Forty-Eight

  I recapped the day’s events to Angelina as she listened, stunned, beside me. Halfway through my explanation, I convinced her to get into my car. I wanted to go back to the Pike Ridge airport; there was a chance, albeit a slim one, that Carlos had climbed from Judith’s car into Alan’s while they were parked at the apartment complex. If so, then Carlos could have hidden in the back of Alan’s car all the way to the airport.

  We headed there now, and by the time I was finished with my story, we were pulling into the airport parking lot. As we came to a stop, I spoke sternly.

  “I know you’re upset,” I said. “But the priority for us right now is to find Carlos. There’s a chance he’s hiding around here somewhere. You need to put all of this stuff with Alan out of your mind and concentrate on the task at hand. Understood?”

  “Of course.”

  We got out of the car and looked around, surprised to see several news vans in the parking lot. The police cars, however, had all left.

  Angelina and I walked around to the front of the main building, nearly walking into one newscaster’s on-air report. She was standing facing the camera with the runway in the distance behind her.

  “…but fortunately for Smythe Incorporated, the airplane’s engine difficulties forced a delay in takeoff, giving the police time to reach the airport and apprehend the suspect…”

  Angelina and I stepped into the office, making our way through the chaos of reporters and eyewitnesses. I listened to the conversations around us, trying to gather as much information as possible about what I had missed here after I left. Apparently, it had come out that Alan Bennet had hired the pilot to take him to Burlington, Vermont. From there, it was now being assumed, he had been planning to rent a car and drive to Canada, then fly from Montreal to the Caribbean. The money he transferred out of the bank in Philadelphia this morning had gone to a bank in the Cayman Islands, where officials were cooperating with local authorities to secure its return.

  I looked around at the room. Probably it was usually a sleepy little airport hangout. The people that were being interviewed were predominately men in baseball caps and grease-stained overalls. The walls were lined with torn pieces of fabric, names and dates written in black marker across them. I was looking at those when a man spoke, standing next to me.

  “That’s for solo flights,” he said. I turned to see a friendly-looking fellow with stark white hair and a toothpick in his mouth.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Them shirts. When you make your first solo flight, as soon as you land, your buddies tear off your shirttail, write your name and the date on it, and stick it up on the wall. That’s mine, there, from back in ’72. Martin Van Buren.”

  “Martin—”

  He held up two hands to cut me off.

  “I know, just like the president. I’ve been fighting jokes my whole life. But it tickles my wife. She likes folks to call her the First Lady.”

  “Nice to meet you, Martin,” I said. “My name is Callie; this is Angelina.”

  “How ’do?” he said, tipping an imaginary hat at us. “You ladies reporters?”

  “No,” I answered. “We’re friends of the Smythe family. We’re looking for the boy, Carlos. The one who’s missing.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “them cops was out there earlier, looking around for him. They thought maybe they’d find his body in the woods around the field or something. But as far as I know, nobody turned up nothing. Not one sign that he was even here. I think now they’re searching elsewhere.”

  I nodded, thinking this was probably a waste of time. But still, it was worth a shot.

  “So who would we see about getting a look inside the hangar, and maybe inside some of those planes?” I asked.

  “You have to see the president,” he said looking around. “Oh! Martin Van Buren. I guess that’s me.”

  Laughing at his own joke, he led us past the commotion and out of the building, toward the hangar. He brought us inside, letting us look in closets and behind big machines and basically anywhere a small boy could be hiding. A large set of keys jangled from Martin’s belt loop, and whenever we came to a door that needed unlocking, he would release a sort of spring catch on the keychain, slide out the key, and unlock it for us. In that manner, we searched the entire hangar and all of the airplanes parked outside.

  “Where’s the plane Alan Bennet was trying to fly out on?” I asked. Martin brought us back inside the hangar and pointed toward the low-winged plane that was now parked in the service bay.

  We went over to it and climbed inside, but it was very small, without a place that even a child could tuck himself into and hide.

  “This here’s Roy Sullivan’s Piper Cherokee,” Martin said as we crawled around inside. “A nice little plane. Shame about the engine.”

  “What happened to it?” I asked.

  “It’s the darndest thing,” Martin said. “Roy pulled the plane up just fine, got ’er all loaded, and then they came inside to fill out the paperwork. When they got back out to the plane and tried to start ’er up again, it spit and sputtered and popped so bad, Roy couldn’t even get the dang thing going. He was just trying to adjust the torque on the spark plugs when the police drove up, and then, well, you know the rest. They arrested the passenger, and poor Roy was stuck with no fare and a broken-down plane.”

  “So is that what it was?” I asked, climbing down out the of plane, then turning to help Angelina down. “Bad spark plugs?”

  “Nah,” Martin said. “Roy thought so at first. But it turned out to be the gas tank. Darn thing was full of water.”

  I froze, my heart pounding. Water in the gas tank. Where had I heard that before?

  “The bus!” I said excitedly to Angelina. “Carlos’ bus, at the soccer tournament!”

  “What?”

  “The bus broke down because there was water in the gas tank! The kids had to spend an extra night in a motel.”

  “So?”

  “So,” I said, almost yelling, “if Carlos knew Alan was taking off in this plane—if he knew he needed to somehow stop him—then what would Carlos know to do? He put water in the gas tank! Carlos was here, Angelina! He sabotaged the plane!”

  Martin and Angelina both stared at me in surprise.

  “Where was the plane parked when Alan and the pilot went inside to do the paperwork?” I demanded. “Could Carlos have snuck over and poured some water into the tank while they were in there?”

  Martin hesitated, rubbing his chin.

  “This plane’s got two tanks, one on each wing, both of ’em mighty big. It would’ve taken five or six gallons each to mess her up that bad.”

  I tried to picture Carlos lugging gallon jugs of water across the tarmac. I realized that it didn’t make much sense.

  “Of course, there’s the hose,” Martin added. “He could’ve stuck the hose in each tank and let it run for a while. Probably would’ve been enough time. The passenger held things up for a good while, doing something on his computer, then making a call from the pay phone before he was ready to go.”

  I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and said a prayer of thanks.

  “Carlos was here,” I said softly, opening my eyes. “He’s still here somewhere. I just know it.”

  Martin and Angelina seemed to agree. We headed outside and looked out ac
ross the expanse of the runway. It was getting dark now with orange and purple streaks across the western sky. If Carlos were hiding around the perimeter in the woods, soon it would be too dark to find him.

  Martin ran off to the building to get flashlights and spread the word. Though I hated the thought of having the press involved, I knew they could be useful. I gave Angelina my phone and told her to call the police while I went over to the small crowd of reporters that was quickly streaming out from inside the building. I waited until they were all out there facing me before I held up a hand for silence. When things were quiet, I spoke.

  “We now have reason to believe that Carlos Smythe was here at this airport this afternoon when Alan Bennet was apprehended. The buildings have all been searched as well as all of the planes. Carlos is not there. That means he could be out in the woods or the surrounding area, and we’ve got to find him.”

  They all began shouting questions at once, but again I held up my hand for silence. With bright lights shining in my face, I was aware that I was probably being broadcast live on television, and I wondered if Marion was watching, if she knew that, finally, there was some hope of finding her grandson.

  “You reporters have lights,” I said. “Lights for your cameras, lights on your cars and vans. Mr. Van Buren, here, is going to divide the surrounding area into grids. We need each of you to spread out and start searching, at least until the police arrive and can take over. Hurry up, people. We may not have much time.”

  Everyone sprang into action at once. And though two of the television reporters chose to film and report on the action rather than become part of the search, everyone else was quite helpful, yelling Carlos’ name and taking their orders from Martin.

  Soon there were cars parked all around the edges of the airfield, lights shining out at the thick gray pines that marked the edge of the woods. I remained on the tarmac, standing at the center of things, trying to think, trying to decide where a scared 11-year-old spy would go to hide.

  Angelina handed me back the phone, and I used it to call the Smythes’ house. Marion answered on the first ring.