Why doesn’t the monitor give some view of where the baby is—where I really am? Jonah wondered.
All the other monitors had shown what actually happened to the missing kids themselves. Was this monitor different because Jonah hadn’t been returned to his native time yet? Or was it just because Jonah had asked JB to show Charles Lindbergh so they could see him meet with Gary and Hodge?
Keeping one eye on the screen, Jonah went back to the keyboard. But he couldn’t figure out how to change the scene.
On the screen Lindbergh and Condon were driving away. They were discussing whether or not they really should wait six hours before looking at the directions for where to find the baby.
“I gave my word, but you didn’t give yours,” Condon argued. This sounded like the way kids at school would reason. Jonah had to do a double take to make sure that Condon hadn’t been suddenly turned into a thirteen-year-old too.
But Condon and Lindbergh are dealing with a stolen baby, Jonah thought. How can they wait? How can they not rush to look for the child—for me!—as quickly as they can?
Jonah saw Lindbergh pull his car back over to the curb and rip open the envelope. The short letter inside said:
The boy is on Boad Nelly. It is a small Boad 28 feet long. Two person are on the Boad. The are innosent. you will find the Boad between Horseneck Beach and gay Head near Elizabeth Island.
“He’s on a boat near Martha’s Vineyard!” Lindbergh explained. “It’s by where Anne and I had our honeymoon!”
Then Jonah watched as Lindbergh flew three other men over the water near the Elizabeth Islands. Every time they spotted a boat that might fit the description of Nelly, Lindbergh swooped down low and close. Coast Guard cutters spread across the water as well, searching, searching, searching . . .
Jonah held his breath.
Will they find me? Or will they find where I’m supposed to be? What will happen then? he wondered.
Jonah lost track of how much time Lindbergh and the others spent searching. But he saw Lindbergh in a dark car at night after a long day of searching—had it been the second full day of searching? The third?
Lindbergh was dropping off his fellow searchers in New York before he himself drove on to his home in New Jersey. It seemed at first that Lindbergh was not going to say a word. But then Lindbergh looked the others directly in the face.
“We were double-crossed,” he said. “The kidnappers never meant to tell us where to find the boy.”
Everyone stopped looking at the Elizabeth Islands.
Jonah slumped against the rock wall of the cave.
How do Charles and Anne Lindbergh survive this? he wondered. Do they survive? Do they dare to keep holding on to hope?
He didn’t want to think about how the Lindberghs had hundreds and thousands of people helping them look for their son: the entire New Jersey state police, the Coast Guard, every single person who read a newspaper or listened to a radio report. And they still couldn’t find the boy.
As far as Jonah knew, he and kid JB and kid Angela were the only ones looking for Katherine. And what had any of them accomplished?
This is the best thing I can do for Katherine, Jonah told himself. When I see Lindbergh meeting with Gary and Hodge, then I’ll know how to help.
Painful as it was, Jonah went back to watching the Lindberghs.
Another man had shown up, claiming to have a connection to a gang of kidnappers. Charles Lindbergh went sailing with that man to meet the gang near Cape May, New Jersey.
“And you trust this man?” Jonah yelled, as if Lindbergh could actually hear him. “You really think he’s going to lead you to your son?”
But what else could Lindbergh do?
Lindbergh and the other man sailed and sailed and sailed, going around in circles for hours on end. Even Jonah was starting to feel dizzy.
Then suddenly the scene shifted. Two men Jonah had never seen before were sitting in the cab of a truck, moving along a small, muddy road.
“Who are these people?” Jonah muttered. “What happened to the Lindberghs?”
While Jonah watched, the man on the passenger side squirmed in his seat.
“Would you mind pulling over?” the man asked. “I’m not going to make it to the next town.”
Does he mean he has to pee? Jonah wondered. Didn’t his parents ever tell him he should always go before he goes?
Jonah snorted, mostly with disgust at himself for making such a lame joke. But after days of watching the tense, worried Lindberghs and the tense, worried cops, it was almost peaceful to watch people whose biggest concern seemed to be finding a place to pee.
The truck stopped; the man tramped far out into the woods. Jonah guessed he was trying to find a place he wouldn’t be seen from the road—not that there appeared to be any other traffic nearby.
Jonah could see only the man’s back. The man seemed to freeze in place. Had time stopped? Had the monitor malfunctioned? No, now the man was turning back around, shouting back to his friend still in the truck.
“Uh, Orville?” the man said, and now his voice was tense and worried too. “I think this is a dead body. It’s a . . . it’s a baby.”
The camera zoomed close, seeming to accompany the second man—Orville?—as he rushed to his friend’s side. Now both men stood over a small body lying facedown in the dirt. The first man picked up a stick to shove away a layer of dead leaves, revealing a cluster of golden curls.
“It’s got to be the Lindbergh baby, don’t you think?” the first man said.
Watching, Jonah felt his knees give way. He sank down to the rock floor.
“I’m dead?” he mumbled. “I’m dead?”
How could that be?
TWENTY-TWO
A fake corpse, Jonah told himself. Duh. Use your brain.
He knew that his friends Gavin and Daniella—and their sister Maria and a family friend, Leonid—had been able to escape from 1918 only because fake remains were left behind in their place. Their fake skeletons were realistic enough to fool twentieth-century science and twenty-first-century science. By the time science would become advanced enough to detect the forgery, it wouldn’t matter if everyone knew that those four kids had survived.
So how is this any different? Jonah wondered.
It felt different.
Just because that’s the fake version of your dead body they’re poking at? Jonah told himself. Just because you know now that that was supposed to happen to you in original time?
It was impossible to get an upset stomach in a time hollow, but Jonah started retching anyway.
Stop it, Jonah told himself. None of this really did happen to you. You were rescued. You were saved. You’re still alive. Even in 1932 you’re still alive.
Didn’t he have proof of this? If Jonah-as-the-Lindbergh-baby really had vanished from 1932, wouldn’t Jonah himself instantly be zapped back to that moment?
Jonah knew that was how things worked. And he was still in the time cave. He was still able to watch 1932 on the monitor without being sucked into it.
Jonah went back over to his sleeping kid parents in the car.
“I’m still alive,” he told them. “Maybe JB or Angela managed to fake my body, and they just couldn’t get the word to me that everything’s okay. Maybe I won’t ever have to go back to my past. Maybe they’re just quietly in the background taking care of everything, and any minute now they’ll show up here, with everything fixed. And with Katherine. Maybe they’ll have rescued Katherine already, and I won’t have to. And then they’ll make you two the right age again, and everything will be fine.”
In their sleep, kid Dad still looked goofy and kid Mom still looked fierce. Jonah reached in and gave both of them hugs. They were both so small now. Diminished. But they were still his parents.
“You know I think I’m lying, don’t you?” he asked them. “You know I don’t really believe that any of this is going to be easy?”
Kid Mom’s fierce expression seemed to be saying,
If you don’t believe it’s going to be easy, why are you over here talking to us instead of doing everything you can to get Katherine back and rescue JB and Angela and fix time and us? Why aren’t you doing what you know you should?
Kid Dad’s expression seemed to say, I love you, Jonah. I know you’ll do your very best.
How could it hurt so much just to look at his own parents?
Jonah went back to watching the Lindberghs on the monitor—watching his other parents—and this hurt too. Anne and Charles had both been told now that their child’s dead body had been found. They’d been told that their little boy had been dead since the very first night. For seventy-two days they’d been searching and hoping, and every government agency available in 1932 had been searching and hoping, and the whole time the child had been dead.
That’s a fake dead body they’re talking about, Jonah thought hollowly. It’s not really me. And there’s no connection with Katherine—her kidnapping is not the same situation. She’s still alive. Somewhere in time. Somewhere I’m going to be able to find her.
But Jonah saw how completely the hope died in Anne Lindbergh’s face—how completely it died even as she maintained, “I never really thought he was still alive. From that first night I knew he was dead.”
Charles Lindbergh set his jaw and said very little. He didn’t cry, not even when he went to identify the body. Jonah didn’t know how he could stand it. Even knowing the body was fake, Jonah was still horrified to see how much a body could decompose in seventy-two days of lying in the dirt. Which was worse—the parts of the fake corpse that were gone, or the parts that were still recognizable, like the golden curls?
Jonah had to turn away when Charles Lindbergh began examining the fake corpse’s face. It was still possible to see the dimple in the chin. Without thinking, Jonah lifted his hand and fingered his own chin—fingered his own dimple.
What I see on the screen isn’t real, Jonah told himself. That corpse isn’t real, isn’t real, isn’t real, isn’t real . . .
It didn’t matter. Jonah still had to walk away.
“You understand, don’t you?” he asked his parents. “You wouldn’t be able to look either, would you? You wouldn’t be as cold and heartless as Charles Lindbergh.”
Even kid Mom’s fierce expression looked less fierce now. How could she look so lost and afraid when she wasn’t even awake?
Jonah was almost certain the corpse he’d seen on the screen wasn’t real, but the people he loved really were that fragile. Even the strongest, most determined people he’d met or seen or heard about in history were still just flesh and blood, bones and skin.
And this is why people believe in God, isn’t it? Jonah wondered. Because we can tell there’s something bigger out there that we’re part of. Because we can tell that there’s something more to all of us, and more to all of our lives.
And then it felt like Jonah was talking to God, not to his parents: Please help me figure out what to do. Please help this all work out.
He went back to watching the monitor.
Somehow he’d missed a huge chunk of time. It was summer now on the screen, maybe even August. Charles Lindbergh was climbing back into an airplane, flying high over the water again. Jonah caught a glimpse of one of Lindbergh’s maps, which seemed to match the coastline he was leaving behind—Lindbergh was flying out over the Atlantic Ocean once again. When he was far past the last sight of land, he pulled the window back so the wind flowed directly onto his face. He lifted a small urn toward the open window and uncorked it. And then he shook fine dark powder out into the wind.
Ashes, Jonah thought. They had the fake body cremated. Lindbergh thinks he’s spreading his son’s ashes over the ocean.
Lindbergh held his head out the window, watching until every last ash disappeared into the waves below.
And then Lindbergh began to howl.
“Nooooo,” he wailed, the sound so painful and intense that Jonah actually put his hands over his ears. He could still hear Lindbergh anyway.
“This was supposed to bring me peace?” Lindbergh screamed. “This doesn’t bring me peace! I refuse to accept it!”
He pulled out one of the maps and flipped it over and began to write, the paper braced against his own knee.
The camera angle spun, as if Jonah himself were whirling around the cockpit, spinning into position over the paper Lindbergh was writing on. Now Jonah could see what the man was writing. He could see what his original father was writing:
I will not accept it. I cannot. I will find a way to turn time back around.
I will get my son back.
I will make it so we never lost him.
TWENTY-THREE
Time travel, Jonah thought numbly. He’s talking about time travel.
Wasn’t that what Lindbergh meant?
But he’s in 1932, Jonah reminded himself.
As far as Jonah could tell, they didn’t even have computers yet in 1932. Jonah had seen video games that were more sophisticated than the airplane Lindbergh was flying right now. No—even when Jonah’s father was a kid, there’d been video games that were more sophisticated that Lindbergh’s airplane.
It’s not like Charles Lindbergh is going to invent time travel right then and there, Jonah told himself scornfully.
On the screen Lindbergh was swooping and rolling his plane, as if his refusal to make peace with his son’s death had unleashed an odd, frantic playfulness.
He’s not going to succeed, Jonah thought. He felt small and mean. How could Jonah be so cruel as to want Lindbergh to fail?
Because if he succeeds, that ruins my life, Jonah thought.
Lindbergh had turned back toward shore again, flying the same route he’d been over before, only in the opposite direction. The playfulness was gone; his flying seemed methodical and precise.
When he landed, Lindbergh waved away the others at the airfield who were ready to help him.
“I just want to sit in my plane for a while and be alone,” he called to them. “Keep the press away, all right? Don’t let any reporters near.”
For a long time Lindbergh just sat in the plane, staring out the window at nothing. Then he ripped a fresh sheet of paper out of his flight logbook and began to write. It wasn’t until Lindbergh finished and placed the letter on his pilot’s seat that Jonah saw what Lindbergh had written:
To Whom It May Concern:
I have a mechanical mind. I understand engines and gears, how one gear turns another. The gear of my fame turned the gear of my son’s kidnapping. And then that turned the gear of my son’s death.
How do you un-turn a gear? How do you roll back time? How do you bring the dead back to life?
I have been changing my focus in recent years, from exploring the air to exploring the inner workings of life. I thought finding the secrets of immortality would be man’s ultimate achievement—perhaps my ultimate achievement.
I aimed too low. Or, rather, I have reason now to see where even that lofty goal will never be enough. Surely someday man will learn how to undo time, how to rewind and repair his worst mistakes. When he does, how will this ultimate tool be used?
And how can I lure the possessor of that marvel back to my time to assist me? Why would he want to?
This is my answer. I address you, the time traveler of the future: You can look and see what I have accomplished thus far in my life. You can see my determination, my single-mindedness. You can see what I want, and how hard I am willing to work for you, what willingness I would bring to helping you in almost any way. For myself. For my wife. For my son.
You have my bounden word: I would make it completely worth your while to come to me. To hire me.
All I want in exchange is my son back.
Sincerely,
Charles Lindbergh
Lindbergh left this letter on his seat barely long enough for Jonah to finish reading it. And then Lindbergh picked up the letter, lit it on fire, and stomped it down into ash on the ground.
He understands things about time travel that I took ages to figure out, Jonah realized. He understands that there is no reason to leave the letter in place for a long time. As long as it exists at one point in time, a curious traveler from another time will be able to see it.
And Jonah guessed that by destroying the note, Lindbergh was making sure that nothing would leak to any newspaper or radio reporter about how he had gone crazy with grief and was writing letters to nonexistent time travelers, asking for help.
But he is acting crazy with grief, isn’t he? Jonah wondered. How could he think that any time traveler would want anything from him?
Sure, Charles Lindbergh had proved himself brave enough to fly across the Atlantic Ocean all by himself in essentially a tin can covered in cloth. But what could he do for any time traveler? Time travelers had Elucidators. They had all the marvels of the future. They didn’t need Charles Lindbergh.
Lindbergh was looking around the runways stretching ahead of him. The airfield seemed deserted now. Other planes had been flying in and out earlier, but they were all either abandoned or aloft now. It was getting late in the day. Lindbergh began strolling toward the airfield office, a small space off to the side of a cavernous hangar. Jonah could see two shadows in the windows of the office. Lindbergh evidently saw them too: He picked up his pace.
Did he have some appointment to meet friends there? Jonah wondered. Who is it?
“Strangers,” Lindbergh whispered to himself. “And I know I would have seen anybody the guard let in through the gate. . . .”
Lindbergh was beaming. He looked more hopeful than he’d looked even on the most optimistic day of searching for his son. Jonah had never seen Lindbergh look this happy to see anyone.
Lindbergh reached the door of the office and yanked it open. He stood in the doorway, his tall frame and broad shoulders blocking Jonah’s view of the people inside. And then Lindbergh stepped across the threshold and to the side. In the moment before the door slammed behind him, Jonah saw just enough to understand.
Jonah had not been the only one who’d seen Charles Lindbergh’s letter. The letter had worked exactly the way Lindbergh had wanted it to: It had indeed summoned time travelers to 1932.
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