Max Collins - Stolen Away

He took a small step back and slipped his arm around his wife’s shoulder; she pressed close to him, weeping quietly. “That’s right,” he said. “And we love our son, mister. And he loves us.”

“That’s just swell. You do know who the boy is?”

“Yes, we do. He’s Carl Belliance, Jr.”

“You got the ‘junior’ right, anyway.”

Madge Belliance, lip trembling, said, “We’ve never said that…never said that name. Never spoken it.”

I raised an eyebrow, the gun still trained carefully on them. “Charles Lindbergh, Jr., you mean? Where is he?”

“He’s at school,” she said. She was trying to summon some defiance, but it wasn’t playing.

“When does he get home?”

“You’re not going to hurt him…” she wondered, gripping her husband’s shirt; he patted her.

“Hell no, lady. I’m giving him back to his real parents. When does he get home?”

“It’s a long walk,” she said. She licked her lips. “In half an hour, maybe. We never did anything wrong, mister.”

“Ever hear of a guy named Hauptmann?”

“Yes,” Belliance said, and he raised his chin. “We hear he was a goddamn extortionist and is getting what he deserves.”

“Oh, is that what they told you? That’s a good one. You got a hired hand?”

“Not now,” he said. “Some of the year I do.”

I glanced quickly around the place. “You seem to be faring pretty well, here, despite hard times. What are you raising on this farm, besides a stolen kid? Berries? Corn? Never mind-I don’t really care. Here.”

With my left hand, I extended the roll of electrical tape toward Madge Belliance. She took it, with reluctance and confusion.

“Use some of that to tie your husband’s wrists behind his back. Do it now.”

“But…”

“Now , I said. Let’s get this done before Junior gets home, and that’ll lessen the chance anything bad does happen.”

She exchanged glances with her husband; he looked at her gravely, and nodded, and she sighed heavily and nodded back. He turned his back to her, put his wrists behind him and she bound him with the tape.

When she was done, she held the tape out to me. I took it and told her to turn around and put her wrists behind her. With the nine millimeter held in the crotch of my left arm, I quickly wound the black tape around her wrists. Then I nudged her forward. I told them to turn and face me again, and they did.

“Let’s go to the cellar,” I said.

They led me there; the double storm-cellar doors were along the side of the house where I was parked. They went down the half-flight of wooden steps ahead of me. The basement was hard-packed dirt. It had that same reddish cast.

“Sit against that wall,” I said. “I don’t want to have to knock anybody out.”

They sat. Keeping back from them, the gun tucked under my arm, I used the hunting knife to cut the rope. I bound both their ankles, and added a length of rope to the wrists of each. Then I had them sit back to back against a support beam and tied them together, around the chest and waist, the beam between them. Nobody said anything through any of this.

Her apron I cut into strips with the knife and gagged them that way; that was kinder than using the electrical tape, which had been my original plan. When you’re pulling a kidnapping, you have to be flexible.

I stood before them. “I don’t want you to make a sound,” I said. “Don’t alert that boy you’re down here.”

Belliance’s eyes were hard; his wife’s were soft.

“You behave yourselves,” I said, “and maybe I won’t turn you in. All I want is to put that boy back with his rightful parents. Understood?”

They just looked at me.

“Understood?” I repeated.

The father nodded curtly; then, hesitantly, his wife nodded, too, several times.

I put my gun in my shoulder holster, not in my raincoat pocket, and left them in the cellar with the dirt and some rakes and a wall of jarred preserves.

Then I climbed from the cellar to the cool fresh air and walked around and sat on the front-porch swing and waited for Charles Lindbergh, Jr., to come home from school.

It wasn’t a long wait. Less than fifteen minutes.

From my vantage point on the porch of the hillside farmhouse, I could see down on the gravel road where half a dozen kids of various ages were walking, kicking up a little dust as they did. He was the youngest-what would he be, now? Six? Almost six. This was either his first or second year of school.

He came up the gravel lane all alone, a tiny figure in a brown coat and gray slacks; his hat-it made something catch in my throat to see it-was an aviation-style helmet with decorative goggles that the kids had been wearing the last couple years. He had mittens. No schoolbooks-too young for that yet, I guessed. He walked up the lane like a little soldier. A little man. And the closer he got, the more that face was Slim’s.

He hesitated when he saw me, then he moved confidently toward the porch and said, “Who are you, mister?”

I got up off the swing. I smiled. “I’m a friend of your parents. Come on up here, Carl.”

He thought about that. The dimpled chin, the baby face, were so familiar. Was he hesitating, because somewhere in his memory he remembered getting pulled here and there by strange people?

“Where are Mom and Dad?”

“They had to go away, suddenly. They asked me to pick you up after school, and take you to them.”

The little eyes narrowed. “I’m supposed to go with you?”

“That’s right. I’m going to take you to your folks, real soon.”

“Well. Okay. But I’m hungry.”

“Let’s see if we can find you something in the kitchen,” I said.

A pie was cooling on the kitchen table. Other food was still in various stages of preparation; some chicken Madge had been about to roll in breading sat naked on the counter. Peeled potatoes were in the sink. But the little boy didn’t put it together.

“Can I have a piece pie?” he asked. He was taking off his coat and hat and putting them neatly on a chair; his mittens were already off.

“Sure,” I said. “Then later we’ll stop for a hamburger on the way to see your folks, okay?”

“Okay.”

So I cut him a “piece pie.” Dutch apple. I had a big slice myself; I’d worked up an appetite. Delicious.

I gave him a napkin and he wiped off his cute little Lindy mug and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Okay,” I said.

I followed him upstairs. He asked me to undo his pants and I did. But he went in by himself and did what he had to. I stood by the closed door and listened as he flushed the toilet and ran the water and washed his hands.

He was drying them on his pants as he came out.

“Let’s go in your room,” I said, bending to button the pants back up, “and get some of your things, and then we’ll go. If you have some special toys you want to take with you, pick ’em out. We can’t take everything.”

“Why do you keep your raincoat on in the house?”

“Because we’re going, real soon. Now, let’s get your things.”

He was picking some toys out of a chest by the window, while from a dresser I was getting a few of his clothes, which I was in the process of stuffing in a pillowcase, when I heard something outside. Something like gravel stirring. I went to the window.

A car was pulling in, next to mine. It was a black Ford, brand shiny new. Two men got quickly out.

“Jesus,” I said.

“What’s wrong, mister?”

“We’re going to play a game, Carl,” I said, bending down again, taking him by his little shoulders and looking him straight in his dark-blue eyes. “It’s like hide-and-go-seek. I want you to hide under your bed, and I don’t want you to say a word or make a sound, okay? Until you hear me say, olly olly oxen free.”