Stolen Away

Paradise, in the off-season, was a hell of a place. From May to October the hamlet of Virginia Beach, a block wide and six miles long, swelled from around 1,500 inhabitants to 15,000 or more, as the concrete walkway above its endless white beach was jammed with tourists and summer residents. Right now those sidewalks were bare of anything but blowing sand, and most of the cottages that had begun popping up between the dunes were as empty as the rambling, shingled, many-balconied Victorian hotels that gave Virginia Beach the eerie atmosphere of a ghost town.

Colonel Breckinridge was behind the wheel, but I had done my share of the driving, as well. It was an eight-hour trip, even in Breckinridge’s fancy Dusenberg sedan—which I’d taken up to one hundred miles per hour, once, while Breckinridge was sleeping, just to see what it would do. It might’ve gone faster than that, if I’d have pushed it, but I backed off when the thing started to shake. Later I realized it was me, shaking. That Dusenberg was as smooth as sliding down a brass banister, and about as noisy.

When I wasn’t driving, I was sleeping; the few hours I might’ve slept the night before were spent tossing and turning. Colonel Lindbergh was going to line up a hotel room for me, but with the influx of reporters, that would take some doing, even for Lindy. In the meantime, they put me up in the house, on a cot.

Which was fine; but the spare bedrooms were all taken (Breckinridge and his wife Aida had moved in, as had Anne Lindbergh’s mother) and the cot provided me was in the nursery.

I sat staring in the half-light—the moon entering through the curtainless glass like another abductor—at the crib, the cedar chest, the windowsill, the festive wallpaper. Turning all of it over in my mind like evidence I was trying to make sense of. Feeling the presence of the child, his innocence haunting the nursery, like a tiny, nagging specter.

Also, my stomach had been churning. The Lindberghs had invited me to supper that night, and their cook—Elsie Whately, butler Oliver’s wife—had served rare roast beef with boiled potatoes and carrots and Yorkshire pudding. It looked delicious but the meat was tough and the rest of it flavorless. Only in America would the wealthy be saps enough to hire the English to cook for them. In conversation, at the dinner table, while I was attempting to eat my roast beef, Anne’s mother—noting how little her daughter was eating—had reminded her she was eating for two, now.

It seemed that Anne was again pregnant—three months along.

Before dawn, as if we were heading out on a fishing trip (which perhaps we were), Breckinridge collected me from the nursery and we took off in his fancy car, with its leather-and-wood interior and built-in backseat bar, just the two of us.

Now it was early afternoon in Virginia Beach, and Breckinridge turned right on Fourteenth Street, and then off onto a curving road. But for a nearby Catholic church, the house was isolated, a large, dark-green shingled affair on the bank of a small lake. The spacious lawn, with its wide-trimmed hedge and shrubs and trees, had begun turning green, as if spring had arrived here early. We parked in front and started up the curving flagstone walk, next to which a small wooden sign bore the neatly wood-burned words: Association for Research and Enlightenment.

Which was probably just another way of saying: step right up, suckers, right this way….

“We have every reason to believe this man Cayce is sincere,” Breckinridge had said in the car on the way down, “even if he is the crackpot I suspect he is.”

“Why do you figure him as sincere?”

“Well, for one thing he comes highly recommended from friends of the Lindbergh family. Tom Lanphier arranged this psychic reading for us.”

“Who the hell is Tom Lanphier?”

“Major Lanphier,” Breckinridge had said with mild indignation, “is a distinguished aviator, and Vice President with TAT.”

Well, at least he wasn’t a colonel. TAT, of course, was Transcontinental Air Transport, the so-called Lindbergh Line, for which Lindy was a highly paid technical consultant, having charted their coast-to-coast flight routes.

“The Major believes in Cayce, and feels the man can help us.”

“And what do you think, Colonel?”

“I think we’re wasting our time, just as you do. But I think it’s more likely that Cayce is a self-deluded fool than an outright charlatan.”

Breckinridge explained that Cayce, son of a Kentucky farmer, a sixth-grade dropout, was known as a seer and a healer—and was called the “Sleeping Prophet” because all of his readings were given in his sleep.

“Oh, brother,” I said.

“It’s self-hypnosis of some sort. He goes into a sort of trance; it’s claimed that Cayce can give detailed diagnoses of illnesses, assigning home remedies as well as medical ones, using highly technical terms he’s supposedly never heard of, when he’s not asleep.”