The Lost Choice

  “No, my boy,” Frohman smiled, “I shall be fine right here. Thank you though. After all,‘why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure that life gives us.’” Seeing the odd look on his friend’s face, the theatrical producer added, “Peter Pan!” as if Vanderbilt should have recognized the quote.

  At 2:14, the electricity, including all generators, failed completely, plunging the interior of the ship into total darkness. The steel-caged elevators stopped as well, most between floors and packed with screaming passengers who could not see or escape. Only four minutes had passed since the torpedo had detonated, but the catastrophe was well underway.

  Many of the men trapped in crew elevators had been specifically trained in the operation of the complicated lowering of the lifeboats. Their inability to free themselves ensured the deaths of many, in addition to their own.

  As Vanderbilt left Charles Frohman, he saw men attempting to board a lifeboat and being held away by a crew member with an ax.“Not yet!” the sailor screamed.“Not yet!”

  Alfred sidestepped neatly to avoid the terror-stricken mob of running people and ducked into the dark hallway near his suite. He ran squarely into Dr.Tate and Ronald, his valet, who were being pushed from behind by the steward, young William Hughs. Each of them held an armload of life jackets.

  Quickly, they helped one another into the jackets and tied them tightly.“I need to get to the suite,”Vanderbilt said. “I’m sorry, sir,” Ronald replied.“The explosions were on this side and must have damaged the balance of the walls. The doors are jammed.”

  “We even took an ax to them,” Hughs added.“No use.”

  “I insisted we try the ax, sir,” Ronald said. “I knew you would want the photograph of the boys.” Giving his boss a knowing look, the valet added,“And I thought you might want the purple box.”

  Vanderbilt blinked, then said softly, “Very well, then.” Taking some life jackets into his own arms, he turned and led them out into the chaos of the deck.

  By 2:17, Chief Purser McCubbin was beginning to ignore the danger in which the ship’s condition placed them all. He had become more concerned with the immediate safety of several of the Lusitania’s more prominent passengers—for he thought he might kill them himself! More than a dozen people crowded around him, demanding that he proceed without delay to his office—where the ship’s safe was located—and retrieve their valuables. Speaking to a woman who wore a life jacket over her fur coat, McCubbin said, “Madam! If we make port, you may claim your jewelry at that time. If we do not make port, it won’t really matter that much, will it?”

  About half the people Vanderbilt passed had their life jackets on incorrectly. With their heads through armholes or backwards and upside down, passengers seemed incapable of properly fastening a life jacket, and many, unable to get to their cabins, did not have the jackets at all. Fights broke out among some of the more desperate. One officer, having told a woman, “Get your own life jacket! It’s every man for himself,” was beaten badly by her husband, who took the man at his word . . . and took the officer’s life jacket as well.

  Vanderbilt, Ronald,Tate, and William had begun to help with life jackets when the first of several rumors inexplicably swept the Lusitania at 2:18. “The ship has been saved!” people reassured each other. “Pumps are now discharging the water she has taken on and soon the electricity will be restored.” Passengers and crew alike actually stopped, straightened, and began to smile and shake hands, congratulating themselves and laughing nervously about the stories they would have to tell when they got home. But Vanderbilt looked to the front of the ship and, seeing her bow almost underwater, knew it was not true. Within the space of seconds, so did everyone else, and the pandemonium that had been oddly halted by a brief, civil interlude, continued. Calmly, Alfred picked up another life jacket and looked for someone on whom to place it.

  During that brief period of false hope, many of the passengers saw the periscope of the U-20. Schwieger had moved close to the ship, intending to observe her final moments. He recorded in his diary: Clean bow shot. Torpedo hit starboard side right behind the bridge. An unusually strong explosion took place.

  As Schwieger maneuvered around the stricken ship, Voegele regained consciousness and left the control room. He was later court-martialed for his actions that day and spent three years in prison for his offense.

  Meanwhile, on board the Lusitania, the lifeboats were filled to overflowing or totally empty, depending upon their location. With the vessel listing hard to starboard, the port side lifeboats swung into the ship, practically resting on the promenade deck itself. The starboard boats, however, swung away from the ship, exposing a gap of almost six feet between the promenade railing and the boats. In effect, though there was a sufficient number of lifeboats on board, a large number of them on the port side could not be lowered, while on the starboard, they could not be reached.

  It was approximately 2:20 when the ship momentarily leveled, allowing the first lifeboat to be lowered. It was so overloaded that the crew manning the ropes on one end released their hold faster than intended, outdistancing the crew on the other end. The lifeboat, aiming for a controlled, horizontal descent, now hung by one end, vertically, spilling its passengers into the water from forty feet in the air. Other crews, hurrying to lower boats while they could, made mistakes that bound boats permanently to the ship with tangled lines or crashed them into splinters against its side.

  The crew and passengers, in some cases,were also pitted against each other. One seaman, struggling to steady a wildly swinging lifeboat, suddenly found a pistol pointed to his head, wielded by a man who demanded that he “let go the rope and help him in the boat!”The sailor tried to explain that, with the help of a block and tackle, his rope was the only thing holding the lifeboat off the deck and away from the tilting wall of the promenade deck. The crazed passenger would hear no excuse. He cocked the handgun and, threatening to shoot, howled at the crewman, “Let go the rope!” So the crewman did, and quickly jumped out of the way as the lifeboat, weighing almost seven thousand pounds, crashed down to the deck, into the wall, and directly on top of the man with the gun.

  Lifeboats on the port side, one after another, dumped their passengers into the cold ocean below. Many, despite their life jackets, were already dying. The fifty-two-degree water added to the shock and quickly numbed extremities, making it difficult to escape pieces of the Lusitania herself that had begun detaching and raining down on those who were fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough) to still be floating. It was later determined that of all the port side lifeboats, only one had been successfully launched and gotten safely away from the ship.

  On the starboard side, after the perfect launch of a boat filled with women and children, crew members watched in horror as another lifeboat, fully loaded, came loose from its ropes and fell unencumbered, landing squarely on top of the first, crushing most of the people in it and scattering the rest to the sea.

  Baby buggies, often with children inside, careened wildly around the tilting deck. Many of the mothers, after determining their inability to make the leap from ship to lifeboat, began throwing their babies across the gap. Some were successful; others were not. In any case, dozens of women began pushing their children into the hands of total strangers, hoping that anyone else might be better equipped to protect the child.

  Charlotte Pye, the young wife of a doctor from Connecticut, had been separated from her husband. Running from lifeboat to lifeboat with her three-year-old, Marjorie, she was repeatedly denied boarding. “Full! We are full!” the terrified passengers would cry as they approached. Continually knocked off her feet by the advancing list of the mortally wounded ship, she never let go of her daughter, though by the number of children she noticed wandering the decks alone, it was evident that many others had already done so.

  Thrown to the deck again, Charlotte felt herself being hauled up by the arm. She recognized the man who helped her to a sheltered alcove as the millionaire,Alfred Vanderbi
lt. “Don’t cry,” he said. “It’s quite all right.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she sobbed.“We have no life jackets, I don’t know where my husband is, and this ship is going to sink.”

  “I believe you are correct, madam, and it won’t be long now, by the looks of things.” He called for Ronald, who was helping an elderly couple with their life jackets. Finishing that task, he ran to Vanderbilt immediately.

  “Any more life jackets?” he asked the valet, who shook his head no, causing Charlotte to begin crying again. “There, now,”Vanderbilt said, as he untied his own life jacket,“didn’t I tell you everything would be all right?” He tied the mother and her baby into the jacket and pointed them toward a higher deck.

  As the woman hurried away, Ronald appeared shaken for the first time. He began fumbling with the ties of his own life jacket. “Sir, I absolutely insist that you—”

  He was interrupted by Tate and William, the steward,who ran up with the news that they had found a storage trunk filled with life jackets just down the deck. “Thank God,” Ronald muttered, as he followed the others to the stash.

  “Men,”Vanderbilt said as he saw the life jackets, “bring me all the kiddies you can find!”

  Ronald shoved a jacket into Alfred’s hand before running off. “Sir . . . I beg you,” he said, looking him straight in the eye.

  “Go, Ronald,” was his reply.

  The Lusitania rolled from a starboard list to her port side at 2:24, dragging the two remaining port lifeboats underwater. They had still been attached to the ship and filled with people.

  Alfred was hurriedly fastening children into life jackets. Then, two at a time, one under each arm, he would run the children to the rail and hand them to anyone he could find who was also in a life jacket and composed enough to care for the child. Again and again, as fast as he could,Vanderbilt fought his way through the escalating chaos until there were no more children left to help. And he had run out of children at the same time he ran out of life jackets. The last jacket was tied to him.

  Helen Smith, age six, was behind a deck chair, holding tightly to an overturned potted plant when Ronald found her at 2:25. Sobbing and cold, she told him her name and begged him to “find Daddy and Mama.” Gently, he picked her up and carried her to Vanderbilt.“Sir, this is Helen. She has lost her parents.”

  “Now then, sweetheart,” he said soothingly as he quickly removed his life jacket and fastened it onto the little girl. “I’m sure your parents are in a boat looking for you right now. Won’t they be excited to see you float by?!”

  He picked her up and carried her to a gentleman standing beside the rail. The water was over the man’s shoes and he appeared ready to enter the water. “Excuse me,” Vanderbilt said. “This is Helen. She needs a friend with whom to float while she waits on her mother and father. Do you mind?”The man took her in his arms, managing a smile for the child.“Thank you,” Vanderbilt said and turned back toward Ronald who stood beside the empty life jacket trunk. It was 2:26.

  “Have we lost William?” Ronald asked as Vanderbilt approached.

  “I put him aboard a lifeboat,”Vanderbilt answered.“Had to make him go. He’s sixteen. Tate’s gone. Swept over, but in a jacket.” Ronald nodded. For a brief moment, both men stood side by side, almost at attention, detached somehow, completely calm, watching a nightmare unfold in front of them, yet saying nothing.

  Suddenly,Vanderbilt laughed ruefully. “All the houses I owned around the world . . . most of them had swimming pools. Curious, isn’t it, considering this . . . that I never learned to swim?”

  “Sir, two times, you gave your own life jacket away. I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do, Ronald. You understand quite well. You aren’t wearing a life jacket either. We made a choice, you and I. I have lived my life in luxury—sometimes in selfish luxury. But my children will be proud of me today. Our children will be proud of us.

  “We changed the world’s course in the past few minutes. We used our time to send children back to the living. They will now make a difference because of you. Their deeds will be a part of your legacy. The world has just now been set onto a better path, Ronald. And that path will echo through generations because of your actions today.”

  The valet reached over to shake Vanderbilt’s hand but embraced him instead.“Thank you, sir.”

  “Thank you, my friend. It has been an honor and a pleasure. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a trip to take.” Vanderbilt smiled and began to walk away.

  Suddenly, a thought struck him and Ronald called out. “Sir!”Vanderbilt turned. “Sir, we saved them . . . like the words on the medallion said.”

  Vanderbilt considered the idea briefly, then broke into a broad grin.“So we did,” he said.“So we did.”

  As the men parted, each perhaps sensing a need to spend their last moments alone, the great ship groaned. It was the last cry of a dying beast, no longer able to muster the strength to fight. She rotated slowly until she lay on her starboard side. Then, bow first, as if anxious to flee the screams and prayers of the frantic surface, she slipped quickly into the quiet depths. The Lusitania disappeared at 2:28.

  SIXTEEN

  DENVER, COLORADO—NOVEMBER

  DORRY WAS IN TRAFFIC WHEN HER CELL PHONE rang. She saw on the caller ID that it was Mark and touched the button to connect.

  He spoke immediately. “We found them. I’m at the station.”

  “Found what?”

  “Who,” Mark corrected. “We found the kids, the case I’ve been on . . . the ones I went to Memphis about? And they’re alive.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Dorry said. “What—where—I don’t know what to ask.”

  “I don’t have time now anyway. I just wanted to tell you the good news. I’ll give you the whole scoop when I get home. I might be later than I’d planned. Remember,Abby and Dylan are coming over tonight.”

  “I remember.” Dorry glanced at her watch.“Try not to be too late. Abby has left three messages on my cell—she’s so excited—they have more news about the relics.”

  “I’ll be there as fast as I can. The kids were found in Chicago, by the way, so there’s not much I have to do here until we get them home. I have their parents on the way there and Chicago PD is handling it on that end. So, I’ll see you a little later. I sure do love you.”

  “Love you too,” Dorry said, disconnecting the call. She was anxious to see Mark, but intended to call Michael immediately. As much as she missed him, Dorry was the tiniest bit sorry she’d agreed for him to stay an extra night with her parents.

  Three days before, she had been unexpectedly sent out of town on assignment. That was only two days after she and Mark had last met with Dylan and Abby. Arrangements for Michael were never a problem when she had to travel for the Post. Usually, he just remained with Mark, but the boy also loved visiting his grandparents and, this time, had begged everyone to let him stay “a lot of days” with Papaw and Nana. Of course, Dorry’s parents were delighted and insisted upon including an extra day to the three already scheduled.“This way,” her mother had winked,“when you return, you and Mark can have an evening alone.”

  That “evening alone” had been postponed when Abby had called everyone together. She had gotten immediate and, according to her, amazing results from her friend in Wisconsin.

  At seven o’clock on the dot, Dylan rang the doorbell. Dorry laughed as she welcomed them in. “I can set my watch by you two!”

  “By one of us anyway. We’ve been standing on your doorstep for an hour,” Abby exaggerated. They both wore their usual jeans and sweatshirts. Abby had a red backpack slung over one shoulder. “Dylan wouldn’t ring your bell until exactly seven . . . o’ . . . clock. He was looking at the second hand on his watch when he pushed the button.”

  Dylan put on his best holier-than-thou expression and announced,“Early is no more on time than late. On time is on time.”

  “You are so strange,”Abby said.

  “That’s why y
ou love me,” Dylan smirked and walked into the kitchen.“Hey, tacos again! We didn’t even eat the last time we were here. I was hoping you’d saved those tacos. They are the same ones, aren’t they?”

  “No, smart guy, they’re not,” Dorry said.

  “Well, I want ’em anyway.”

  “Help yourself.” Then she said to Abby,“You’re right, he is strange.”

  Mark wasn’t as late as he had feared and came in while everyone else was seated around the kitchen table, just starting to eat.“Take off your tie and tell us about the kids,” Dylan said.“Dorry filled us in. Congratulations.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” he said and gave Dorry a “hello” kiss. “Give me about five seconds to eat two or three tacos and we’ll talk. You guys hurry up and finish too.”

  After they had eaten, Dylan and Abby cleared the table while Dorry poured coffee. Mark began to talk.“Two children, a brother and sister. They were eight and ten when they disappeared from their front yard a year ago. Those ages are tough for us to determine what might have occurred—old enough that they could have run away and survived, yet young enough to be easily controlled or taken by someone—which is what happened.”

  “Who took them?” Dorry asked.

  “It was a couple, and they did it with a knife. That’s really all I know. They’re sorting it all out in Chicago. I do know this though”—Mark looked at Abby—“you helped get them back.”

  She looked shocked.“I helped! How did I help?”

  “The last time we all met,” Mark began, “you talked about the guy in Wisconsin . . .”

  “Perry,” she prompted.

  “Yeah. You talked about him doing an age regression on the relics.” She nodded. “After you guys left, that bothered me all night. Then it hit me:We needed to do an age progression on the kids—the opposite process. It’s not usually done until someone has been missing for years, but I went in the next day, argued my point with the captain, and did it.”