Revealed

  “Babies go poo-poo,” Katherine said, and giggled. “They go blech, after they drink their bottles.”

  When Katherine was four, she’d been really good at making burping noises. Jonah had forgotten how funny that always sounded coming from the mouth of such a dainty little girl.

  “Does Jordan laugh at your burping noises too?” he asked, and he couldn’t keep the jealousy out of his voice.

  “Everybody laughs at my burping noises!” Katherine said, chortling. She threw herself gleefully backward, tumbling out of Jonah’s arms. He barely managed to catch her hand. But she curled her fingers trustingly around his thumb.

  “When we get home, can I have ice cream?” Katherine asked. “Can we get Mommy and Daddy to let us stay up late and watch TV? Will you and Jordan play Clue Junior or Pretty Pretty Princess with me? Please? Please?”

  You and Jordan, Jonah thought.

  This was proof. Proof that what JB had told him was true.

  Katherine kept blabbing on and on—now she was asking if he thought Mommy would draw a picture of a fancy dress for her to color. Jonah decided it was fine to interrupt. It wasn’t like Katherine had ever been the type of kid who’d stop talking long enough to give somebody else a chance.

  “Do Jordan and I play games with you a lot?” Jonah asked.

  Katherine tilted her head sideways again, obviously thinking deeply.

  “Not both of you at once, I guess,” she said, sounding as solemn as a judge. She leaned in close and whispered conspiratorially. “Sometimes I think Mommy and Daddy make one of you play with me so I don’t get my feelings hurt. They make you take turns.”

  This actually makes sense, Jonah thought. Because she wouldn’t have any memories of Jordan and me both playing with her at the same time.

  Jonah didn’t think he spent too long pondering this. But the next time he glanced toward Katherine, she looked about eight—maybe nine. Her hair flowed halfway down her back. She leaned against Jonah’s side, and the top of her head came almost up to Jonah’s shoulder.

  “You know you’re the only one I travel through time with,” she said. “You know Jordan always stays home. Don’t you feel sorry that he doesn’t get to have adventures like us?”

  No, Jonah thought. But for Katherine’s sake he only shrugged.

  Bright lights appeared ahead of them, and Jonah braced himself for the zooming sensation that always came at the end of a time-travel trip right before he reached his destination. He tightened his grip on Katherine’s hand.

  “It’s going to feel like time is tearing us apart,” he warned her.

  “I know,” Katherine said sarcastically, and Jonah took that as a sign that she was her right age again. This was the almost-twelve-year-old obnoxious kid sister who’d been on practically every single one of his time-travel trips with him.

  The sister he’d missed so intensely ever since Charles Lindbergh had stolen her away.

  “Welcome back,” Jonah whispered.

  He wasn’t sure Katherine heard him, because the zooming, tearing-apart sensation hit at that exact moment. For a while Jonah couldn’t think at all. He felt like every atom of his being was yanked to bits and reassembled. Maybe he’d be the same person when it was all over; maybe he wouldn’t.

  He opened his eyes to find the world swimming in and out of focus. He was back in his family’s living room, sitting in his father’s favorite recliner. He turned his head and saw that Katherine was sprawled on the floor beside the chair—in the exact same spot where Charles Lindbergh had grabbed her and taken her away.

  The slant of sunlight coming in through the window made him think that it was still morning. He squinted at the clock on the mantel, and the hands and numbers came into focus: It was eight fifteen. Probably the exact moment that Jonah had left the twenty-first century the last time, after he’d said good-bye to Angela and his parents and gone back to 1932. He’d just been standing by the time cave then, not sitting in his own living room.

  Even in his timesick, blurry-eyed, confused state, Jonah remembered a warning JB had given him right before he’d left 1932: As time fits itself back together, probably lots of things are going to seem jagged and off-kilter at first. To you and Jordan most of all, because you’ll be the only ones who don’t have memories from all the merged branches of the twenty-first century. Each of you will only remember your own branch, while everyone else will remember all three.

  “Ooooh,” Katherine moaned beside him. “I feel awful. I hate timesickness. Hate it, hate it, hate it.”

  There was a clattering noise from overhead, as if someone had knocked over something in Jonah’s room. And then there were footsteps—rushing through the upstairs hallway, maybe, then coming down the stairs.

  “Katherine?” a voice called. “Did you get sick too? Did Mom have to pick you up at school and bring you home? Mom, I still get to watch whatever I want on TV, don’t I? I get dibs on the big TV! I was sick first!”

  It was Jonah’s voice exactly, except different. Dimly Jonah remembered something his sixth-grade science teacher had said about how you never really heard your own voice as it truly was, because you always heard it conducted through the bones of your head.

  A boy barreled into the living room and jerked to a stop. Jonah guessed that he was standing in the exact spot where Jonah had been when he’d first spotted Charles Lindbergh. This boy had Jonah’s face. He was Jonah’s exact same height, he had the same light-brown hair, and he had a deep dimple in his chin like Jonah’s, just a little off center. But—Jonah reached up and fingered his own chin—his dimple and the other boy’s were off center on opposite sides.

  Mirror image, Jonah thought dazedly. Sometimes identical twins are mirror images of each other.

  Also, Jonah was pretty sure that he’d never looked as disheveled and awkward as this boy. And childish. Somehow this boy looked exactly the same as Jonah, but so much younger.

  “Who—who are you?” the boy stammered, gaping at Jonah.

  Katherine snorted.

  “Jordan, Jonah—the two of you have got to stop acting like the other one doesn’t exist!” she said, sounding as bossy as ever. “You’re exactly alike! You’re practically the same person! That’s why you’re not getting along!”

  So that’s how it’s going to be, Jonah thought. That’s how time—and Katherine—are going to work this out.

  Confusion swam in the other boy’s eyes.

  Maybe this really is a total surprise for him? Jonah thought, and he almost felt sorry for the other boy.

  Almost.

  Before any of them could say anything else, Jonah heard a car zooming into the driveway and braking abruptly. A second later the front door banged open, and Mom and Dad raced into the room with Angela close behind them.

  All three of them still looked like thirteen-year-olds.

  “I thought—I thought you were going to change back,” Jonah stammered.

  “We couldn’t wait,” kid Mom said. “We had to make sure all three of you were safe first. Oh, Jonah . . . , Jordan . . . , Katherine . . .”

  “We were so afraid we’d lose all three of you forever,” kid Dad wailed, right behind her.

  “All three of you,” flowed off both their tongues so easily, as if they really had had three kids ever since Katherine’s birth.

  Mom and Dad plowed into Jordan, standing in the doorway of the living room. They drew him forward and pulled Katherine up from the floor and Jonah up from the chair. And then all five members of the Skidmore family were engulfed in a huge group hug, with Mom and Dad sobbing with relief and Katherine chattering away about who-knew-what and Jordan still gazing around in bafflement. For his part, Jonah stretched his right arm out so he could clutch Mom and Dad and Katherine close. But Jordan was standing on Jonah’s left, so Jonah kept his left arm pressed down to his side, carefully not touching the stranger.

  Angela stood a few feet back from the whole reunited Skidmore clan. She raised an eyebrow at Jonah, and Jonah thought,
She knows. She was so involved with all the time travel that she remembers everything. She understands how weird this is for me. But then Angela jerked her head up and narrowed her eyes a bit, and Jonah could tell she was trying to say, You still need to hug your brother. It’s even weirder for him. So you need to make the first move.

  Jonah thought about everything he’d had to cope with because of time travel. Confusion and hunger and fear and danger and near-death experiences. Way too much fish in the 1600s. Being kidnapped and being tricked. Needing to be rescued again and again, and needing to rescue others even as he was constantly terrified that he’d show up at the wrong time or do the wrong thing or follow the wrong plan.

  And—oh, yeah—he still did have bullet-wound scars.

  But I survived all that, he thought. I can survive this, too. How could it be any worse?

  Jonah let out a deep sigh. And then he lifted his left arm and wrapped it around his twin brother, bringing his whole family together.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Much more is known about the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr. than the disappearances and/or deaths of any of the other missing children featured in this series. It is possible to line up certain facts to make it sound like an open-and-shut case:

  Fact: On the night of March 1, 1932, the Lindberghs reported their twenty-month-old son missing. Charles Lindbergh showed police a ransom note found on the windowsill of his son’s room. Police also found indentations below the child’s second-story window that seemed to indicate that a ladder had been placed there. Soon after, they found a broken ladder a short distance from the house.

  Fact: Over the course of the next several weeks, the Lindberghs received twelve more ransom notes that police considered authentic. Through an intermediary named John Condon, they ended up paying a ransom of fifty thousand dollars to the alleged kidnapper on April 2, 1932, in exchange for that thirteenth ransom note, which was supposed to reveal where the little boy was. Before the ransom was delivered, the Internal Revenue Service insisted on recording the serial numbers on all the bills given to the kidnapper.

  Fact: Despite frantic searches by plane by Lindbergh himself and by boat by the Coast Guard, no one ever found a boat called Nelly where the alleged kidnapper said the boy was being kept.

  Fact: On May 12, 1932, a man who was making a bathroom stop in a remote area less than five miles from the Lindberghs’ house discovered the decomposed body of a young child. Some parts of the body were missing, presumably eaten by wild animals. But both Charles Lindbergh and the child’s nanny, Betty Gow, examined the body and stated that they were certain it belonged to Charles Lindbergh Jr. Details that matched included the golden curls, the dimpled chin, and the bits of clothing that remained. An autopsy determined that the child had died because of a fractured skull “due to external violence.” Based on the autopsy and the condition of the ladder, police theorized that the baby must have died the very night of the kidnapping after the ladder rung broke and the kidnapper dropped the baby.

  Fact: In September 1934, a bank teller in the Bronx and the manager of a nearby gas station were able to provide authorities with information linking one of the bills from the ransom money to a man named Bruno Hauptmann. When police searched Hauptmann’s home, they found more than a third of the ransom money hidden in his garage, with the serial numbers matching. The address and phone number for Condon, the Lindberghs’ intermediary, were found written in pencil in one of Hauptmann’s closets.

  Fact: At Hauptmann’s trial, eight experts testified that his writing and patterns of misspellings matched that of the ransom notes. A wood expert testified that the wood from the ladder matched wood in Hauptmann’s attic. Though Hauptmann testified that the ransom money in his garage had actually belonged to a friend, Hauptmann was convicted of murder. He was executed on April 3, 1936.

  What that listing of facts leaves out are the many questions that remain unanswered, which have led to an array of alternate theories ranging from the plausible to the thoroughly bizarre.

  At a time when it seemed as though the entire nation was looking for the kidnapped child, how could his body have lain in the woods so close by for two and a half months without someone finding it?

  How could that corpse found in the woods be the Lindbergh child when the little boy’s height was listed as twenty-nine inches on all the WANTED posters—and the autopsy report says the corpse was thirty-three and a half inches long?

  Why were Hauptmann’s fingerprints never found at the crime scene or on the ladder?

  How would Hauptmann have even known where the Lindberghs were that night? While their house in Hopewell, New Jersey, was under construction, they’d gotten into the habit of staying there only on the weekends, and living with Anne Lindbergh’s mother during the week. The only reason they were still in Hopewell on Tuesday, March 1, 1932, was because their son had a cold, and they didn’t want to make it worse by moving him from place to place. Did Hauptmann perhaps have an accomplice who worked for either the Lindberghs or their relatives and tipped him off?

  There was only one set of shutters in the Lindbergh child’s room that couldn’t be latched tightly. How would Hauptmann have known to place his ladder under that window?

  Charles and Anne Lindbergh—and three servants—were all in the home at the approximate time of the kidnapping. How could Hauptmann have picked up the child from his crib, carried him out the window, and maneuvered down onto a ladder two feet below without anyone hearing the child crying or some other noise?

  The Lindberghs had a dog. Why didn’t it bark at the intruder?

  Although the crime scene was compromised—especially by modern standards—there was evidence of what police concluded were both a man’s and a woman’s footprints near where the ladder had been leaned against the house. Police assumed that the female footprint was from Anne Lindbergh walking around the house earlier in the day. But what if that smaller footprint was actually connected to the kidnapping as well?

  From the very beginning, questions like those led some investigators and other officials—and then journalists, authors, and a wide variety of conspiracy theorists—to suggest that Bruno Hauptmann was either innocent or, at the very least, not the only one responsible for the kidnapping and death of the child.

  One of the strangest theories that cropped up was that Charles and/or Anne Lindbergh themselves had killed the child—either accidentally or on purpose—and then concocted the whole kidnapping story to cover their own crime. Another theory blamed Anne’s sister for the child’s death; still another claimed that the child was kidnapped and killed by Japanese agents trying to divert worldwide attention from their invasion of China.

  Other theories maintained that the Lindbergh child actually survived the kidnapping and was secretly raised under a different identity. In the years after 1932, many people claimed to be the “real” Charles Lindbergh Jr. In Forward from Here, a collection of essays published in 2008, Reeve Lindbergh, Charles and Anne’s youngest daughter, said that more than fifty men had approached the family making such a claim at one time or another.

  It appears that no one in the family ever took any of those claims seriously.

  To this day the Lindbergh kidnapping consistently appears on lists of top “crimes of the century”—which is strange considering how many genocides and other horrific events occurred in the twentieth century. But the thought of the missing child tugged at the heartstrings of a country already battered by the Great Depression. And Lindbergh’s New York-to-Paris flight had turned him into one of the first mass-media celebrities. In 1932 many viewed Charles and Anne Lindbergh as practically American royalty, and the loss of their child was seen as everyone’s loss.

  Also, some aspects of law enforcement and the justice system were changed forever because of the Lindbergh case. Kidnapping became a federal crime in June 1932, after questions over who had jurisdiction across state lines slowed the Lindbergh investigation. And news coverage of Bruno Hauptmann’s trial
became such a circus that, soon after, the federal government and all but two states banned cameras and broadcasting from their courtrooms. Although many courtrooms have since become more open, the issue continues to be debated to this day.

  As a parent myself, I found it almost unbearably painful at times to read about the Lindberghs’ ordeal related to the kidnapping. But I was fascinated by details of other portions of Charles Lindbergh’s life.

  He had an unusual childhood, and some of the stories about him even before his famous flight make him sound like nearly as much of an American folk hero as Paul Bunyan. Supposedly his father taught Charles to swim by throwing him into the Mississippi River. Charles learned how to drive a car when he was eleven; when he was fourteen and already nearly six feet tall, he drove his mother from their home in Minnesota to Los Angeles. In California, a policeman cited him for driving without a license—but that didn’t stop his mother from letting him drive her all the way home afterward. The poor condition of American roads in 1916 meant that the return trip took forty days. Because Charles spent so much of his childhood traveling, it was almost a point of family pride that he never arrived anywhere in time for the start of a new school year.

  Missing so much school meant that he didn’t do particularly well. When he started college to study engineering at the University of Wisconsin (once again, proudly missing the first day of the term) the combination of his poor grades and his father’s financial troubles led him to drop out. He switched to learning to fly instead, and got experience wing walking, parachuting, and barnstorming across the country; flying for the army; and then, when air mail began, flying mail between St. Louis and Chicago. Being a pilot was still a very dangerous endeavor in the 1920s—in just ten months of flying the mail, he twice had to jump out and let the plane crash without him.

  When Lindbergh first heard about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Orteig Prize being offered for the first nonstop flight between New York City and Paris, he was probably the only person who thought of himself as a potential winner. Outside of his fellow postal pilots, he was virtually unknown in the aviation world. Until he was able to convince city leaders in St. Louis to back his attempt, he had no way of buying or building a plane for the flight. And he had the seemingly crazy idea that one person in a single-engine plane would be able to fly more than thirty hours over the ocean, when just about everyone kept telling him that it would take a team of aviators in a multiengine plane.