Stolen Away

About a year ago, I was sitting in my little condo in Coral Springs; my wife—my second wife, but who’s counting—was out, playing bridge with some of the other old girls who live in this same complex we do. Occasionally I fish, but most days I either read or write or watch TV. That afternoon I was watching a videocassette of an old Hitchcock movie. Well, hell—I guess all Hitchcock movies are old, at this point. Like me.

Anyway, I answered the door and found a slender man in his mid-fifties standing there, looking shy and a little embarrassed. He wore a yellow sweater over a light blue Ban-Ion shirt; his slacks were white and so were his rubber-soled shoes—he looked like somebody on vacation.

Which he was, as it turned out.

“I’m sorry to drop by unannounced,” he said. For a man in his fifties, he had a youthful face; not that it wasn’t lined—but the nose, the eyes, the mouth, were boyish. “My wife and I are visiting her mom down here and…look, I’m Harlan Jensen.”

“Oh. Oh yeah.”

“I know you don’t want to see me, but we were in the area, and I knew you lived around here, and…”

“Come in, Mr. Jensen.”

“Thank you. Nice place you got here.”

“Thanks. Let’s sit here at the kitchen table.”

He sat and talked and told me his story; he had a lot of facts and rumors and suppositions to share. He was obviously quietly tortured by this quest of his.

“I found the daughter of the woman who approached me in the boatyard on my honeymoon,” he said. “The mother is dead, but the girl, the redhead, is alive and well. Her name is Mary.”

“How’d you find her?”

“Did you know that Edgar Cayce, the famous psychic, did a reading on the case?”

“No. Really.”

“Well, my wife and I followed his directions, and by doing a little interpretation, you know—phonetic sounds instead of literal readings—we found this building in New Haven, on Maltby Street, where I think I may have been kept.”

“Yeah?”

“I got the name of the tenant that had lived there in 1932, and it was a Margaret Kurtzel, and through the mother’s sister, managed to track the daughter down. She was in Middletown, Connecticut. She still is.”

“Really.”

He sighed. “She didn’t know much. Just that her mother was a nurse, back then, working for private individuals, not hospitals or anything. And that all her life, her mother had proclaimed Hauptmann’s innocence. She didn’t know if, in fact, her mother had cared for the Lindbergh child.”

“I see.”

“You know, I’ve been trying for years to get this thing settled. It’s driving me nuts. I used the Freedom of Information Act, to try to get the baby’s fingerprints, but they’re missing.”

“Hunh. There were plenty of ’em around, once.”

“Somebody at some point got rid of them. I’ve tried to approach Mrs. Lindbergh, but it’s no use. There are DNA tests, you know, that…”

“She and her husband decided many years ago that their boy was dead.”

He shook his head, wearily.

“What do you want from me, Mr. Jensen? I haven’t been a detective for a long time.”

“I just want to know what you know,” he said.

Shit. How could I tell this guy that if I’d just had the balls to go in the goddamn ladies’ room at LaSalle Street Station, back in ’32, his whole life might have been different? Whether he was Charles Lindbergh, Jr., or not, that was true.

He was looking at me carefully. “You know, I have a memory of a man who helped me. It may not be a memory—it doesn’t seem quite real.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Something a kid might think he remembered. It sounds silly. I seem to remember a gunfight in my bedroom. A man told me…a man told me to hide under my bed and not come out until he said, ‘Olly olly oxen free.’”

I felt my eyes getting damp.

He grinned at me; it was Slim’s grin. “Are you that man, Mr. Heller? Did you save my little ass?”

I didn’t say anything. I got up, went to the Mr. Coffee and got myself a cup. I asked him if he wanted any and he said sure—black.

“Let’s go in the living room,” I said, handing him his coffee, “and get comfy. It’s a long story.”

I OWE THEM ONE

Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and a few liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of my conflicting source material.