The German Army is at the gates of Paris.
There is nothing for you to do but surrender.

—Message bomb dropped by German airships in 1914

MONDAY AND TUESDAY, the police found nothing suspicious or helpful at the farm. Wednesday evening, four inches of lake-effect snow fell in Chicago, stacking up on even the finest of tree branches, windowsills, windshield wipers. Giant evergreens just strewn with blinking multicolored lights wore a gentle white frost, and in Lincoln Park, where Margaret and her husband Terry lived, their red brick townhouse stood out against the white sidewalks and plowed blacktop street, even in the dark. There was that hush, too, in which the whole city goes quiet under snow. Up in Wilmette, where John lived, it was notably heavier—they got six inches, prompting schools to close and his grandchildren to toddle out onto his wide lawn and pitch dramatically backward into their first snow angels.

On Thursday, Margaret must’ve called Lori, her secretary, six times from a deposition out in Naperville—John checked in there, too, since they figured it easier to give the police one point person to call, and it was Margaret—but still, there was nothing.

On Friday, Margaret and John decided it was time to go over to Iowa and have a look around the house. Susan, John’s wife, and Terry would stay back. Just the siblings, one shy of his fifty-eighth birthday and the other of her fifty-fourth. They planned to leave first thing Saturday morning. Friday evening Terry, also a lawyer, was home before Margaret was, and he helped her put a new set of styrofoam covers over the rosebushes, weighing them down with bricks, as her mother had suggested. The frost had been visiting her garden for a few weeks now, but she’d gotten by with bedsheets. She was skeptical of the styrofoam, as it seemed like the featherweight, turretlike covers would catch the slightest breath of wind. Yet her parents’ farm in Cedar Bluff was a far windier place and if they worked there, then her own tiny rose garden plot just off the patio behind their townhouse should be fine. They moved quickly in the cold early December dark, still in their overcoats and suits, Margaret praying that her already arthritic thumbs and knees wouldn’t be set off, and Terry not complaining—couldn’t he do this the next morning?—although he might have if circumstances had been different, and afterward they went to the small place around the corner for soup and sandwiches and the Bulls’ game.

Margaret set the alarm even though she knew she’d be awake before dawn, listening to traffic increase from about five-thirty on, newspaper and milk and food delivery trucks, and buses, mostly empty but for night shift workers coming home for the dawn, swishing up and down the avenue. At six-thirty, Margaret climbed out of bed and into the shower, her hair covered so she wouldn’t have to dry it, while Terry trudged downstairs and made a pot of coffee, set out a thermos. He had offered to go to Cedar Bluff—would’ve liked to, even, but it made sense that Margaret and John would go alone. At seven, John arrived, alert and chatting about an NPR special on Jefferson Davis that he knew Terry, a Civil War buff, would like. John said he had some muffins, so Margaret finished her juice, took her Premarin, kissed Terry on the cheek, and left.

In the passenger seat of her brother’s Mercedes, she turned the radio down just barely, as it was such a lot of noise for a quiet, still morning. John looked bothered for a moment, then relented. Once they were on Lake Shore Drive and not stopping and starting any longer, she opened the thermos and poured them both coffee, to which milk was already added. She asked him about the conference where he’d spoken the previous day about a new sinus surgery, and he said simply, “I’d give it a B-plus, all things considered.” She noticed that the hair in his sideburns was shifting from a slate or flinty gray to white silver and she thought of asking his thoughts on retirement, or at least scaling back in a few years. Her sister-in-law had recently complained, before all this with her parents disappearing, that John still worked sixty- or seventy-hour weeks most weeks. Margaret had initially found this shocking, until she added up her own workload and found it to be in the same ballpark. And so she was truly interested in what John would say. When she thought of retirement, she could only think of Florida and golf—both of which depressed her greatly. Margaret was the sort of person who rarely prayed about anything, except a quick and painless death before infirmity took any kind of hold, preferably at the exact moment Terry suffered a similar demise. John, she recalled, had sent his wife into tears when she brought up retirement a year or two back. So Margaret was perfectly content keeping her mouth sealed on the matter now.

As the city unraveled sixty miles on, central and western Illinois looked charmed in the overcast Saturday morning half-light that muted whole fields and pastures, towns, and the large patches of forest, creeks, and rivers that came between. The landscape felt concentrated and intricate, a place you drove through, not over. At the far edge of the state, the Mississippi was thick and murky. From the bridge, they could see a few casino boats pushing up the river, no matter the hour. They both knew the names of the boats from the billboards that had begun inside the city limits and continued for the next hundred and twenty miles: Mistress Luck or Mississippi Belle or Lady Jackpot. Because gambling was illegal in both Illinois and Iowa, the tables and slot machines did not open until the boats pulled away from the docks, out into the no-man’s-land that was the river. For three hours then, a boat would push upstream and float down, up and back down, as if pacing.

Margaret went to the Mistress Luck with her father several birthdays ago. Her mother said she’d heard the boats were filthy and refused to go but her father was intrigued, had been since they started up ten years ago. When he asked Margaret if he could take her to the boat for her forty-eighth birthday, she agreed. He sent her a bouquet of stargazer lilies at work, her favorite, and kissed her on the lips with a loud smack and a pat on the bottom like she was a kid when they met in the parking lot. They partook of the all-you-can-eat prime rib dinner at fifteen dollars a head and she had lemon meringue pie, with a slightly chemical meringue, for dessert, no candle. He was a surprisingly good craps player—he knew all the hand signals and played with the quiet confidence of a real gambler. He said he learned in France, Monte Carlo, when he was one-fifth his present age, in the Army just after World War I. “Craps doesn’t change much,” he said. “And you don’t lose any talent for it, if you have it in the first place.” Margaret tried to imagine him on the Riviera, with his straightforward, quiet, gentle face and his casual country-boy posture. He won $185 in the first half hour.

BOTH JOHN AND MARGARET thought it unlikely that their parents would drive off the edge of the quarry a bit beyond the farm, even if they could get to it, although boulders and an old abandoned refrigerator meant they could not. It wasn’t their style. But the young deputy thought it would be a good idea, so on Thursday a couple of state police had come up with thick diving suits and an underwater light and nets. They found some new stuff—a golf cart and two motorbikes—but no bodies. No real gravel had come from the place for probably twenty years. When they dragged the pit once before, in the early seventies when a young kid had, in fact, died there, divers found a 1945 Studebaker, with a rusted cubic zirconia tiara in the glove compartment, or so the story went. The police never figured out where the car or the tiara came from, and the kid was a fifteen-year-old boy who got drunk and went swimming alone.

The Friebergs, who lived just to the northwest of their parents and who’d never had particularly good taste or manners, went out to spectate the quarry dredging on Thursday with some coffee and donuts, according to Officer Sargent. John imagined they took folding lawn chairs and probably their yellow and black Hawkeye football wool blanket, too. They were the same age as the senior Guttersons, both over eighty years old, and still they carried on like that. Mrs. Frieberg called John at his office in Evanston afterward—Margaret would shut her down; she was quicker and blunter than John. Mrs. Frieberg told him that the sheriff said he knew they’d never find anything. “He said your parents were too reasonable for such a thing,” Mrs. Frieberg reported. “He said that if your parents wanted to kill themselves, they’d likely do it in an airplane. He said that seemed a more fitting way for Henry Gutterson to go down.”

They did not yet know that one of the elderly Guttersons had, in fact, been flying again after all these years. And it wasn’t Henry, the old Air Mail pilot, one of the first of his kind, when airplane wings were made of linen treated with gasoline stretched over wood skeletons, resembling maple seed wings. Angry and sad as he was when the FAA took his license away in 1976 because his blood pressure and his vision got too bad, it was Ruth last month climbing in behind the controls, alone. She took off from the Iowa City airport on October 13, flew a perfect twenty-mile triangle, out to Kalona, over to Lone Tree, and back, kissing the earth on landing as if she herself were the plane. This was what the flight instructor at the airport said anyway. “Oh, she could never get her license, no, and probably if the FAA got wind of it, I’d be in trouble for letting her go up alone at all. But she was so good, so competent in her lessons, and she begged to go up, just once.” When he saw the news report that Henry and Ruth had been missing since the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the instructor had called John and explained. “I wasn’t even going to call the police and tell them what I knew,” he said, “except I was afraid they’d figure it out from canceled checks, and then, well, it would look suspicious if I hadn’t called. Right?”

John was surprised, not just at the boldness of her flying, but also because his mother had deferred most passion for flying to her husband, after a certain point anyway. Early on, flying seemed his mother’s greatest love; John was even envious sometimes, and she would seem to forget him, leaving him behind on Saturday mornings with his grandparents so she could go flying with Father, climbing into the plane right there in the cornfield, turning around only to wave dramatically from the cockpit. When they came home, it was his mother’s exploding, contagious happiness that made the whole house feel like a circus. She would describe what they’d seen—a riverboat with everyone waving handkerchiefs at them, the state fair in Des Moines, a huge barn on fire that you could see for thirty miles, and another plane—a big silver thing with three motors! And they’d all cook dinner together, John helping to mash potatoes, and sometimes they’d dance or sing until well past his bedtime. He could still remember the photographs of the time before he was born, of their wedding, his mother’s flushed cheeks in a lacy gown and his father’s proud grin and his dark suit, flowers pinned to both of them, and they stood in front of the tan Jenny, which had JUST MARRIED painted on the side and two interlocked hearts with an arrow through them. Mother looked like a beauty queen, except happier; Father looked like he had just won a sweepstakes; and the Jenny looked massive, her two wings framing the picture, the writing along her side as big as Mother’s torso. There were other pictures, too, with the de Havilland and the Argo and the Jenny, again, the Swallow with crop-dusting barrels attached to her belly, John being held in Mother’s arms sometimes before these planes; but none with Margaret.

As for her, Mother’s flying lessons felt spiteful. When John called to tell her, she immediately thought of being fourteen and her father wanting her to start going to Iowa City, learning to fly for real, not in his lap, and getting her license. “I figure it’s a good summer for that,” he had said. But Margaret balked and developed a sudden and all-consuming passion for 4-H, even though when raising a calf the previous year she’d been neither successful nor amused. But when faced with a whole summer at the airfield, away from her friends, plus her mother’s certain, smothering attention, like when Margaret wrote a report on Amelia Earhart and Mother insisted on driving the whole family to Earhart’s home in Atchison, Kansas, and then begged Margaret to take her own flight helmet and goggles to school as part of the report, even though no one else did such a thing; no, she couldn’t endure a whole summer like this, and so Margaret had seized upon the idea of foaling her grandparents’ only mare.

When she explained her plan to her parents, her father looked hurt but he kept his voice even. “You tell me when you’re ready,” he said. He was confounded, primarily, and Margaret hoped this would ease a little bit of the hurt. Her mother, on the other hand, was offended.

“You shouldn’t turn down an opportunity like this,” Ruth said, her voice going low and husky and dark with frustration and disbelief. She looked straight at Margaret and made her daughter meet her clear brown eyes, unblinking, unwavering, fierce. “Most boys would kill for such a chance and most girls would not even be allowed to dream of it. Do you want to simply be like everyone else? Do you want to become a farmer’s wife who never sees any of the rest of the world? How can you not want to learn to fly?”

There was no good answer to this question. Margaret couldn’t say, No, I have no interest in flying because clearly that wasn’t acceptable. She also couldn’t say, I’ll die before I let myself be a tedious Iowa farmer’s wife, because if that description did not partially fit her mother, then what did?

No, Mother’s lessons weren’t surprising in the least. They were just a good fifty years late, and their dangerousness, and the extent to which it seemed Mother was saying, See?, defiantly, like a child, made Margaret ache.

“I wish you had known her when she flew,” John said quietly to Margaret that day as they left the bridge over the river, riding up the hills of Iowa like waves climbing a shore, and the beach they met was a thick, unbroken spread of corn that made one feel held, nestled, and secure.

“Oh?” Margaret said, listening.

“The flying lessons would make sense to you.”

She nodded. “Well, they already make some kind of sense to me. All those scrapbooks about the aviators, and how defensive she was of Amelia Earhart when the papers were saying it was her fault. And how angry she was when I didn’t fly. The lessons do make sense to me.”

“But she used to fly. Long before now.”

“I know that, John,” Margaret said, testy. “She was Dad’s navigator.”

“Yes, but I remember it,” he said, firm yet warm enough that Margaret backed off. John’s wife, Susan, had told her just the night before that John forgot his Monday breakfast meeting that week, the meeting he’d been going to for eighteen years. Same place, same time, same people. “They all thought something awful had happened—the only time the meeting was canceled before was when Jim Sheridan’s wife was in a car accident,” Susan had said. “Anyway, it’s killing him, your parents’ being gone, but he’ll not say so.”

MARGARET HOPED HE’D say something to her in the car that day, and she was quiet enough that he might’ve. But as she watched the methodical rows of corn click by outside her window, he remained silent.

THANKSGIVING DAY, ten days ago, their parents seemed fine. After a rousing game of dodgeball with the children, Great-Grandpa Henry made his special hot cocoa and Margaret kept imagining his arthritic hands dropping the teakettle and scalding young and old socked feet. She was a catastrophist, as Terry frequently said, and this was another good reason they’d never had children themselves; Margaret would have stayed two steps behind them, murmuring, Be careful, their whole lives.

Father wore the new cashmere vest Margaret and Terry had bought for him last Christmas and he talked about the reunion he was planning in Miami with the Frenchman who taught him to fly after World War I. “His sight is as good as ever and the FAA won’t let him fly,” he told Margaret in the kitchen before dinner. “The bastards.”

“He’s blind in one eye,” her mother said from the sink.

Father raised his hands and rolled his eyes toward Margaret in impatience or conspiracy. “He’s always been nearly blind in that eye and he’s been flying for the better part of seventy years,” he said. “Some young upstart who’s younger than the jet engine is telling him he can’t get up in his Piper Cub, which, frankly, your dog Fern could fly half blind.”

Margaret laughed and Mother conceded the point.

Everything was mostly in order by two, and Bloody Marys were made while children changed into nicer clothes and the turkey finished cooking. They sat down to dinner, fourteen of them, at four o’clock.

Friday, they went down into the city, braved the crowds at the Field Museum with the grandkids, and had bratwurst and one beer at the Berghoff. Her mother said she was thinking of doing an Elderhostel trip to Italy with her walking friend, Jeanie Cooper, and a woman from the church chess club, which her mother had started a few years back. “Your father says he doesn’t want to go with all the old people,” she said. “But I don’t see him organizing any grand plan for us to go alone, so until he does, it’s Elderhostel.” She even brought the brochure so that they could all look at the map and itinerary together. Margaret had been expecting the trip to be overpriced and dull, but it looked good and she told her mother this.

Nothing seemed wrong, for sure.

Looking back on those three days, time and again, as everyone couldn’t help but do, the only discernible clue was this comment of her mother’s: “I’m just ready to travel for a bit. I’ve worked hard all my life, so has your father. Now I think we should do things together. For us.”

Margaret started calling the farm every half hour once it got past seven on Saturday and no one had heard from them. Henry and Ruth had left John’s in Wilmette around noon. Usually they did the trip in four hours, tops, with a couple rest stops for the bathroom and one can of Pepsi, which they passed between them like it was moonshine. The 230 miles between Wilmette and Cedar Bluff was not so far in a Cadillac on four- and six-lane highways, a sixty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit, and her father driving beyond it.

She barely slept for fear she’d miss their phone call Saturday night; when Sunday morning came and still there was no word, she began to believe the worst. Even if the car had broken down somewhere or they got home to some disaster, they would have called by now, she kept thinking, to let someone know they were fine, to tell the damn story, as Mother so loved to do. By Sunday noon, when they had been missing for twenty-four hours, Margaret called the police. “My eighty- and eighty-seven-year-old parents disappeared on the way home from Thanksgiving,” she said. She gave their physical descriptions, the car’s, and told where they had been headed. She answered the nasty questions about fights they may have had or medicine they might die without or suffer dangerous side effects from; she dutifully reported that her mother carried nitroglycerin because she had angina and her father was on Furosemide for his blood pressure. The police also wanted to know their financial details and any business partnerships, soured or not, that existed.

The trooper hung up and then called back around three P.M. She was drinking a glass of wine by then.

“Mrs. Donnelly, are you forgetting anything they told you?” the state trooper asked.

“Like what?”

“Like plans to go away, I don’t know, something mostly secret that one of them might have whispered to someone. This happens all the time, by the way,” he said. “People get so caught up in planning and preparing sometimes that they forget the obvious things.”

“Like telling their adult children they’re going away?”

“Yes,” the trooper said, waiting for a more considered response.

She thought about it, but came up with nothing. “No. They talked about going to Italy in May, but that’s it. My father might go to Miami around Eastertime. Look, my mother cooks and shops a lot for Christmas and basically begins the Monday after Thanksgiving. She wouldn’t have taken a trip during this time. And there’s one other thing—icing the leftovers. If she’d been sure they were going to be more than five hours between refrigerators, she would’ve gotten more. She became very sick from rotten meat once, so she’s fanatical about keeping things cold.”

“They could’ve got ice at any gas station,” the trooper pointed out.

“Right. Well, you asked. That was the only detail I could think of. That, plus the fact that she said she was hoping to walk with her friend Jeanie if the snow was cleared from the sidewalks when she got back.”

“Have you spoken with Jeanie?”

“Of course I have,” Margaret said. She tried her best not to be riled by his condescension.

The state trooper said he’d be in touch and hung up.

Terry came home with a stack of movies, but all she could do was keep moving, and no amount of wine seemed to touch her. Cooked a pot of soup and baked a loaf of banana bread, even though the freezer was already bulging with food since they had about three pounds of leftover turkey and Tupperware spilling over with stuffing, sweet potatoes, peas, mashed potatoes, and beets. Next she consolidated pickle jars and mustards—regardless of the fact that some were dill, some were sweet gherkins; some had horseradish, and some were French Dijon—to fit everything in. Finally, she cleaned the oven and the floor.

She called John every hour.

THEY WENT TO work Monday morning, and the Cedar Bluff police took over. On Tuesday, Officer Sargent called her around ten in the morning and she got John on the phone, too, and they learned that their mother had made a $2,500 withdrawal exactly a week before. The bank teller who processed the cash said her mother had commented with a smile, “Christmas shopping starts Friday.”

“Well, that could make sense,” Margaret said. “She has a lot of people to buy for, and Dad likes to travel with a lot of cash, no matter how much we discourage it, right, John?”

“That’s true.”

“And she always pays cash,” Margaret continued. “Usually we go shopping on Saturday and they leave Sunday. This year they left on Saturday because they said they were scheduled to take the gifts up at Mass on Sunday morning, ten a.m. But, way back on Tuesday, Mother maybe forgot this, or maybe she didn’t even know, and was thinking we’d shop like we always do.”

The officer said he’d call the church and look into it. Then he told them that Jeanie Cooper said her mother had recently been talking a lot about California. And Martha who worked at AAA said she had come in recently and picked up some maps and travel books. Given all this, the officer said, foul play was looking less and less likely, and the “secret vacation” scenario was gaining credibility.

“But it’s just not like them,” Margaret insisted.

“Well,” the officer said, and coughed. “We do value your opinion, Mrs. Donnelly.” He told her that the whole of I-88 and I-80 and nearby secondary roads between Chicago and Cedar Bluff had been swept. No accidents were found; no tow trucks had been called to a white four-door Coupe de Ville.

“So, what’s next?” John asked.

“We’re going into the house tomorrow and we should have credit card and telephone reports by then.”

“Yes, well,” Margaret jumped in, “my father hates credit cards and he more or less refuses to have them unless it’s an emergency.”

“She’s right,” John said.

“We’ll monitor them anyway,” the officer said, without any tension or aggression.

“And if you find nothing?” John asked.

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“For something to turn up on their credit cards, for them to turn up in a bank or a hospital, or for a policeman or trooper to spot them.”

There was silence for a moment. “Sounds like a needle in a haystack to me,” Margaret said. “There’s got to be more you can do.”

“We’ll enter them into the missing persons bank and every local and state police station in the country will receive their picture. But you must understand—we can’t suddenly pursue them like they’re wanted fugitives. They may be causing an undue amount of concern, but they do have rights and there’s nothing to suggest that they are dangerous to themselves or anyone else—”

“Not a danger to themselves?” Margaret burst out. She couldn’t believe the cool nonchalantness that seemed the tenor of this search for her parents. “They’re almost ninety goddamned years old! And they’ve disappeared! If they’ve done it themselves, they are a danger to themselves—they’ve lost their minds. You’re trying to tell me that’s not dangerous?” Margaret was breathing hard. She knew she had crossed a line, she knew the police weren’t to blame for any of this, but it still felt good to yell a little bit. Maybe she should’ve done it sooner. John closed the conversation neatly, erased as much tension as he could, and the officer hung up.

John was taking it all very calmly, as if performing a complicated surgery. “I understand your frustration,” he said to Margaret when they were alone on the line. He was standing at the window of his office in Evanston that looked out over a broad, tree-edged lawn, now white and perfect as if a giant wool blanket had been drawn across it. “But maybe this Officer Sargent is right—maybe they’re in Vegas—maybe they just didn’t want their overcautious children to know, so they just took a lot of cash and went. What about the bank withdrawal, Mom’s AAA visit, the car being checked, and whatever this Jeanie Cooper is reporting?”

“You’d think they’d call, John. Don’t you think it’s rude, at least? They must know we’re worried.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Of course I’m concerned, but it does sound like they could be playing a game. A stupid, selfish game, admittedly, but a game. And the police are right—until we have evidence or barely a suggestion of foul play, there’s nothing we can do.”

“I think you’re a little too calm about this, myself,” she replied, standing up from her desk on the seventy-sixth floor, turning, leaning close to the huge window behind her, looking out at the clumps of wet snow that were swirling down in between the skyscraper she was in and the one facing her. Then she sat back down. “Your eighty- and eighty-seven-year-old mother and father have disappeared without a trace and you’re making jokes about Las Vegas as if they’ve done this before—as if we’re even sure of where they are, which we don’t actually have the slightest clue about.”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “Mother’s always done these spur-of-the-moment trips. Remember when they took us to Niagara Falls? It was completely unplanned. She just herded us into the car and we went. And there was the trip to Amelia Earhart’s house. She loves to do things like this.”

If, indeed, John believed that they were just playing games, why didn’t he feel as angry about it as she did? She couldn’t let go of being hurt and offended by their actions, like her parents were taunting them with carelessness. John and Margaret switched supporting roles quite a lot, such that if one of them was needy or hysterical, the other stayed calm and rational. When he was twelve and she was eight, he crashed his bike into a fence post. The barbed wire cut his head, not too badly, but still, right behind the ear and it bled all over the place. Mom and Dad were gone someplace so Margaret called Grandma and John lay in her lap on the front porch as she held a towel on the cut. The washcloth absorbed blood as it kept spilling, all over her legs and into her socks, and there was water, too, as the ice melted and her tears fell on him. John was very scared, in shock probably, but she was the one who cried. She sobbed the entire time it took Grandma to get there, not very long, and then the drive to the hospital, and it worked: Margaret did all the crying and John stayed calm.

With her parents’ disappearance, she didn’t think that one of them needed to stay calm while the other was upset. She realized, this time, she needed him to be upset, too. “Why doesn’t this bother you more?” she said. Her secretary’s voice came over the intercom then, telling Margaret the scheduled conference call was waiting.

“Don’t tell me how much this whole thing does or doesn’t bother me, Margaret,” he said. “We’ll hear from them in the next few days, I’m sure.” He thought his parents’ actions strange and frustrating, but he assumed they were fine, off on a whim somewhere, as the police said. He had always believed—and gerontologist friends said so—that any independence his parents claimed as they aged was a good thing, given they were healthy, which they were. He had told himself this throughout his fifth, mostly sleepless night.

“If they don’t call tomorrow, to see how your lecture went, will you be worried then?” She signaled to her secretary, who was now at the door, that she needed two minutes.

John sighed. “I’m worried now. I wish you’d stop telling me that I wasn’t. I’m just trying to be reasonable about this—”

“Even though I’d feel a lot better if you weren’t so reasonable?”

“Yes, even then,” he said. He was now officially tired of speaking with her. He knew she was curling, then flexing her toes inside her shoes—or maybe they were off—as they talked. This was her nervous tic. She laughed about doing it sometimes in important meetings—slipping her shoes off where no one could see and flexing, curling, pointing. It calmed her, who knew why. In his head, John wished his “little” sister a pleasant afternoon of toe curling, and when she was ready to be an adult again, could she call him back? They had things to talk about. “Call me later,” he said aloud, simply. “I’ve got to run.”

She apologized, thanked him, stared out at the snow for one more minute, and then turned back to her notes and picked up the conference call.

But Margaret couldn’t get herself to feel calm or patient. She kept imagining her parents out on the side of a back road somewhere, bleeding, crying, hoping someone would stop for them, but their windows were fogged up so no one could see in; no one could see they needed help; no one stopped. Her mother’s white hair was down because she took it down out of the bun and twisted it around her whole hand when she was nervous. Maybe her father had a heart attack or maybe just a little stroke or maybe their car was broken down and it was too cold to get out and walk.

And what if they did take a plane up and crashed it way out where no one would see them? She tried to tell herself that air traffic control was too exacting for a plane to just disappear without comment, but she wasn’t sure of this. She kept seeing them slip out from under the radar’s swoop, escaping a single tower’s notice, and click, they’re gone. But why?

FOUR DAYS LATER, coming into Cedar Bluff, they passed the tiny, private cemetery nestled into the corner of two fence lines defining a smallish pasture now next to the new post office. Some of the headstones were broken in half, some were leaning against a fence post, and in the very middle, one small, faded American flag such as children wave in Fourth of July parades stood at a slight angle to the ground. Turning down Main Street, they saw that the antique stores were doing well, as was the grill-your-own-steak place. The ice-cream stand boasted year-round hours and there was a new restaurant, with a sign in the window proclaiming, VEGETARIAN SPECIALTIES AND FISH. Must be some alums from the university, Margaret thought, living the idyllic country life. John turned right at the Sunoco station at the end of town, headed straight on, about three miles, until the jokey twenty-foot-high “airmail” box. MR. MRS. HENRY GUTTERSON. RR 46. And the white Prarie-style farmhouse with a deep front porch, green shutters, and the oak tree in the side yard.

Grandpa had given sixty of his seven hundred or so acres to his daughter and new son-in-law as a wedding present and then twenty acres to John and Margaret on their first birthdays. At first, Father didn’t farm the parcel—he used twenty acres for a landing strip, and in what sounded like a standoff, the remaining forty were left fallow. Margaret imagined Grandpa was convinced Father couldn’t resist the temptation of free land, empty and rich, and that he would certainly give up flying to take over the whole farm. When ten years passed and the farmers in town began to say the men were both fools, Grandpa Paul planted those forty acres and began working it again.

His final tender was the house, as if giving Father the farmer’s house would tip the scales, once and for all, and convince him to be a farmer. Father took the farmhouse when Margaret was five because his family was too big for the tiny house up the hill and because Mother insisted, but he stuck to his flying lessons and crop dusting—and perhaps this was disingenuous, because Grandpa Paul was furious. “Waste of a house,” he said one day when he finally realized Father was going to do exactly as he pleased, which didn’t include taking charge of the whole farm. “I should give it to the hired hands that help me. The output on this farm could double soon, and you’d rather be shooting around on the breeze.” As the story goes, Father told Grandpa he had a singer’s talent for words and Grandpa swung at him right across the cheek. But things got better as everyone got older and Father helped the farm plenty, both in dusting and spraying the fields with his planes and contributing his income to upkeep, and it was Father who found Grandfather dead out there next to his tractor one day.

John shut off the car and they climbed out. On the porch, the old swing did a slow, constant to and fro in the wind as the chains groaned weakly against the hooks set in the ceiling. John had dug up a key, although Officer Sargent was there, too—he had to be, he said, apologizing—and he had a key if they didn’t. The house hadn’t been locked more than five times in her whole life, Margaret figured, but with all the publicity around the case, looting or robbery was a possibility. The screen door slammed shut with a large metal thwack behind them and the old smells washed over her, flowery hand soap and furniture polish and a salty food smell she could only nearly identify as chicken broth. It was warm, as if her parents were just out for a few groceries, and she made a mental note to turn the heat down at the end of the day. Margaret saw that her mother had already put up the clear plastic draft insulation in the windows. In the kitchen, the Metamucil and vitamins were lined up between the sink and the coffeemaker, along with a spare traveling pill container. There was a half month’s worth of frozen food in the freezer. All seemed normal.

They set to business right away, exploring the two-drawer file in the pantry, which held all bank account records, land values, house and equipment appraisals, health records, and birth certificates, including Ruth Anne’s, which surprised both of them only because their parents so rarely mentioned her. There had never really been pictures of the baby, as if any memory of her were meant to be erased, any public memory, anyway. Margaret didn’t even know about this older sister until a Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner when she was ten or twelve years old, and they went around the table saying whom they wished especially to bless. It was Grandma who asked to bless “those who have gone before us.” And then, moved by some very strange mood that never came again in the same manner, Margaret’s mother said, “I’d like to bless all three of my children. John Henry, Ruth Anne, and Margaret Elizabeth.”

Margaret had never, ever heard Ruth Anne mentioned directly before, although she’d always sensed somehow that there had been a third child. Still, she had enough manners and apprehension of her mother’s strange mood to stay quiet at the dinner table and to ask only John later when he was reading a magazine in bed: “Who was Ruth Anne?” She whispered this.

John had replied as if he, too, were afraid of mentioning it, even though he was a teenager, nearly a grown-up. “She was the baby who died before you were born, I don’t remember how,” he said, anticipating her next question.

“But where is she buried?” Margaret replied—he hadn’t guessed this one.

“In the north field,” he said quietly. “Beneath the boulder.”

As an adult, Margaret could still remember how much this revelation stunned her—she had played around that rock sometimes. There was a wild rosebush nearby, right up against a fence post, but otherwise there was no indication that the rock was there on purpose, that a baby lay beneath it. Why wasn’t she in a cemetery? Margaret had always thought the boulder marked only the beginning of Father’s landing strip, the highest point on the farm. Hearing this news, imagining a body up there, was grotesque and sad enough that Margaret never, ever asked anyone about the baby again. And then came this day, her parents missing and Margaret pondering her own retirement in idle times, and certainly beyond confusion over such old news; but with the birth certificates and the mood and state of affairs as it were, she was curious and confused all over again and—this was new—annoyed.

THEY HEATED SOME of the frozen dinners for lunch, drank some tea, and afterward, they climbed into the attic. In between the stacks of boxes, piles of old, disassembled furniture and slipcovers, and rolls of insulation, murky light stroked the floors. The square windows on each of the four walls had cobwebs spanning their panes. The air was surprisingly cold and fresh—and then they noticed the window on the south side of the house, overlooking the backyard, with a broken pane in it, inviting a breeze in. “Maybe a heavy bird or a branch from the white oak,” John said, and Margaret nodded, made a mental note to patch it before they left so that nothing could get in, take up residence there. They set about going through the boxes that were stacked neatly and labeled in too-faded ink, not necessarily expecting to find anything relevant to the present situation. They found tea sets and trains, old photographs, school projects, and correspondence between their father, uncle, and aunt in Wisconsin, and with Philippe DeBreault, the Frenchman who taught him to fly, who lived in Miami. And postcards from all over the world, Tangiers, Rio de Janeiro, Reykjavik, written by Philippe and other flying buddies.

In their pictures together in France, Philippe and Father and their friends stood with arms slung over one another’s shoulders. They stood before open-cockpit bi- and tri-wings, half smiling at the camera, or grinning from ear to ear, looking over their shoulders at the plane with eyebrows raised, as if to say, How about that! They were great, ecstatic pictures, full of a youth that was decades away.

Their father had never talked about France too much—there were stories, certainly, but you had to ask. This Philippe, although they’d gone several decades without seeing each other, was Father’s closest friend, the kind of friend only a few people have.

“I think we should call Philippe in Florida,” Margaret said as she closed the box and opened another. “Maybe he’s heard from them.”

“I did call him,” John Henry said, opening another box and finding Christmas decorations. “I called Wednesday.”

“Oh,” Margaret said, surprised and annoyed. “Why didn’t you mention it?”

“He didn’t say anything—he’s very surprised and concerned, too, and concerned that their reunion might not happen. I think I upset him by calling,” John said. “He does not sound very well. A lot of dementia, or even medication of some sort. It took a while for him to understand who I was and why I was calling. So much so that I told Officer Sargent not to bother. Why—do you think we should call him again?” John asked.

“Not necessarily,” she said, looking at a few baby pictures. “Who’s this?” She held up a picture of an infant in a christening gown. She moved closer to John so he could see the picture. “Is it Ruth Anne?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think that’s you. You’re too old—Ruth Anne only lived, I don’t know, a month or so. This one looks older. It’s you.”

“What about this one?” she asked, showing a small picture of Mother holding a newborn, seated in the living room, and Father behind. There was snow piled up on the windowsill behind them and on the tree visible through the window. The baby was wrapped in a couple blankets.

“I think it must be,” John said. “Ruth Anne was the only wintertime birthday.”

“Could’ve been a rogue October snowstorm,” Margaret suggested. “It’s not that unusual, which could make the baby you or me.”

John took the picture and looked very carefully. He tilted it this way and that in the poor attic light. “I think it’s her, yes,” he said. “I’m pretty sure.”

Margaret nodded, took it back, blew some dust off it, looked again. “Well, there she is. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a picture of her.”

“Is that so.” John opened a box of scrapbooks.

Margaret continued looking at Ruth Anne, who was small and indiscernible, really, under so many blankets. How many pictures could there be of a baby who only lived so briefly? How did Mother and Father look? The same. Nothing surprising there.

“You’re going to call Philippe,” John said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Does that bother you?”

“You’re Margaret; you’ve got to do it for yourself,” John said, without edge. “And it’s probably a good idea.”

“Thanks for the endorsement,” Margaret said, moving on, into the cedar chest, which contained antique tablecloths, lace, and her mother’s wedding dress, with its doll-sized shoulders and waist. It looked familiar despite the fact that the only wedding picture of her parents that she knew by heart was the one of them wearing their flight clothes, not this gown, in front of the Jenny. Why in the world do people save such things? she thought. Her own gown was boxed away somewhere, where it would certainly stay for decades yet. We leave these things, she thought, until someone else decides what to do and tells us—or just does it.

By about four in the afternoon, they both began to feel the weight of their eyelids and the age of their knees, which had been asked to bend and rise too many times for one day. They were perhaps most exhausted by what they now saw as the nostalgic purposelessness, or at least fruitlessness, of the afternoon’s work in the attic. They had found no clues there whatsoever. They would drive home that night—both wanted to sleep in their own beds, with their spouses, and take the Sunday to rest. The sunlight was waning and one side of the attic, which had been dark in the morning, was now illuminated. She noticed, while taking one final look around, a dead sparrow, with its wings tucked at its side, in a corner that had been lifted out of shadow. Perhaps this bird had broken the window, and if so, had it been killed on impact? Or perhaps the window had already been broken—from a storm or tree branch—and the bird had flown in, surprised, and never found its way out again. Maybe it finally died trying to get out to the light and air and open sky, trying to find the perfect spot in the tempting invisibility that had beckoned it, Come.

Next to the sparrow in the newly lit corner, there was a typewriter on top of an old metal milk crate, a Royal, with a locking cover, which was clean and dust-free, perhaps because of the breeze from the open window. Margaret went to the typewriter, lifted it, and saw the crate beneath was full of papers, the top ones not particularly old or yellowed. Margaret picked one up. It was dated just few weeks before. She bent down, thumbed through a few of the pages, and they all bore the same address, so she returned to the top one, the only one with little red pencil edits on it. She straightened and read.

November 15, 1987

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

c/o Charles A. Scribner and Sons Publishers

Fifth Avenue

New York City

Dear Mrs. Lindbergh,

It has been nearly fifty-four years since my last letter to you. It was 1933, the year following the one in which each of us lost infant children. I am sorry that I did not write to you when Colonel Lindbergh died in 1974, but I thought much about you.

He was a great, great man and you don’t need me to tell you that. But he was a person who lived by his own convictions and never by what others wanted or expected of him. If only we could all live so truly!

It seems to me that lives grow and change in infinite ways and at different rates—and it is still funny to me that my husband Henry and your Charles started at about the same place—in the northern Midwest, flying for the Air Mail Service. Since the last letter you had of me over fifty years past, Henry and I have not moved from our farm in Iowa, nor have we become important people in any sense. What we have done is raise two fine children—one a doctor and the other a lawyer—and we have stood by and watched as the single-engine biplane spawned the Tri-Motor, then the DC-3, and now all the jets. I wonder how many Curtiss Jennies—remember the original mail plane?—could fit inside this new monster, the 747!

My daughter tells me women still do not have exactly the same choices as men in this world—we never will because we are such different species, men and women—but so many things have changed since our youth. I wouldn’t trade anything that I have had for something that I haven’t, however. Of course this is not to say that I haven’t had my unhappiness, my disappointments. This is only to say that I don’t believe life has been unfair to me. Fairness, of course, is never something God bothers to explain to us, does He? But still, I am at peace. I have lived a full life.

I do wonder what you would say to me if you were to respond to one of my letters, just once. Probably you have never gotten a single one of them. Or maybe you’ve gotten a few, and, having decided that I was completely crazy, you have disregarded all the others. I cannot say that I would blame you. I am very sorry if I ever disturbed you. That was never my intention.

After all these years, I got back up in a plane last October. Henry helped find me an instructor who thought the both of us to be legends after he stumbled upon some old pictures in a deep, dark archive at the University of Iowa library. Pictures of Henry and me flying the mail together back before 1928 and John’s birth; pictures of us with John after he soloed; pictures of Henry in front of twenty different planes over forty-odd years. This instructor was a real nut for history and he wanted to hear all about our lives, everything.

“You’d think we were the Lindberghs!” I said to him once when he was asking so many questions. “You might as well be,” he said. Next, he agreed to take me up in his 172, see if I couldn’t solo at long last. And I did. I won’t tell you what it felt like because you know. You know the ecstasy, the physical and spiritual sensation of lifting from the earth and entering that space that scientists quantify and only pilots swim in. The feeling of being pulled up above the audience as if on a wire, a great wire that will let you go where you want, a wire that you trust as you trusted your mother’s hand on your shoulder or your knee as she read to you or showed you how to cook an egg. The world takes on a different property—namely of being separate from you, a feeling of pure detachment, a feeling of power, as you say, “the glaze on life.”

Henry and I are about to do a bit of traveling just now—perhaps I’ll send you a postcard!—and when we’re finished, I suppose we’ll finally settle into the rest of our lives. I have a feeling that everything has happened to us that’s going to happen, and my feelings like this are usually spot-on. We’re 80 and 87 years old, after all. I suppose it’s about time to face the curtain’s fall. Henry will probably live until he’s a hundred and ten. He has that feel about him. He seems vaguely middle-aged to me even though he’s been napping in the afternoons many years longer than I. As for me, I don’t expect I’ll see 85.

You’ve been a good friend to me, Mrs. Lindbergh, whether you know it or not, whether you care or not. Still, you would have liked me, I think. We would have been great friends because at one time we had a lot in common; and always, I believe as much as I believe in flight itself, have we been similar women. It is too bad that you have never known me as I have known you; you have certainly had the chance. And perhaps, after all, you have read every one of my letters and perhaps they have seemed as close as diary entries, as your books sometimes seem to me, and perhaps you have never known how to respond, that it was not by choice but by inability. But, you must know, I love and admire you no matter.

Your friend,

Ruth Gutterson

Cedar Bluff, Iowa

Hardly aware of her own breathing, her head oddly thick and dull, Margaret began to unpack the crate, setting the hundreds of letters carefully on a box nearby. When John came over to see what she had found, she handed him the top letter without a word. While he read, she reached the bottom of the stack.

April 1920

Dear Dr. Emily Blackwell,

I am 11 years old and live in Cedar Bluff, Iowa, which is a small town near to Iowa City, where the university is. Several years ago, my school teacher, Miss Isabelle Jenkins, gave me a magazine about you and your sister Elizabeth and the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, and I liked you so much I wrote a letter to you—my teacher didn’t tell me you were dead! I wish you were still alive—I would so like to meet you! Instead, I’ll practice writing you.

The other day, our neighbor, Mr. Cilek, hit himself in the head as he was splitting some logs. Something distracted him, a dog running across the yard, his wife calling him, he doesn’t remember, and the back of the axe came right into his head. He’s pretty lucky, of course, that he got away with just a great big lump and some sutures. If he’d turned an inch more, he would’ve taken it on his brow. Old Dr. Fischer came out and spent a good several hours with them. He was afraid, I guess, that the injury was worse than it looked. And when I asked, he let me watch while he stitched Mr. Cilek up. You wouldn’t think there’d be fat in a forehead, but that’s what the doctor said I was seeing. I wonder, have you ever touched a beating heart? I mean a real, beating heart? I wonder what it must look like, or feel—how warm?

I wasn’t squeamish in the least about Mr. Cilek’s head and I thought it was great how Dr. Fischer could help. Which gets me thinking. Maybe I’ll go to college one day be a lady doctor, too!

Sincerely,

Ruth Sheehan

Cedar Bluff, Iowa