The boy had hitchhiked home, on the understanding that I would drop by after supper, his parents suitably warned. Robert knew I planned to check in at the Bay Farm Airport Hotel, which I did, and it was there that he tracked me down.
“I thought you didn’t have a phone,” I said into the receiver, as I sat on the edge of my bed in the hotel room.
“We don’t,” the kid’s voice said, “but our neighbor does. My folks want you to come over for supper. My mom’s a really good cook.”
I accepted, and drove over there in a buggy that Mantz’s friend, airport manager Guy Turner, loaned me, a ’32 Ford station wagon with bay farm airport stenciled on either side. When I parked out front, the hangars of the airport four miles away were visible from the hill the house perched upon.
Dinner was pleasant enough, in the small dining room of the cramped, modestly furnished home — meat loaf and mashed potatoes and creamed corn, served up by Robert’s mother Anna, an attractive woman in her thirties. His father Bob, Sr., a solid-looking quiet man, a little older than his wife, worked night shift in a canning factory. Robert’s sister, a cute blonde, probably seventeen, and a younger brother, maybe twelve, were fairly talkative, not at all put off by the presence of a stranger.
I had been introduced as a friend of both Paul Mantz and Amelia Earhart, and as a detective who was interested in checking out the short-wave transmissions Robert had reported. They understood I was not from the police, and I implied I was working for Mantz, whom both parents had met at the airport on an occasion or two.
Questions about what Chicago was like predominated, and the father — who had said little throughout the meal — finally said, over apple pie, “You think there’s somethin’ to this? What Robert’s been hearing on the radio?”
“That’s what I’d like to find out.”
“Paper says there’s lots of hoaxers.”
“I know.”
“Any fool with a short wave can get on and pretend to be the King of England.”
“Sure.”
“Lot of sick-in-the-head people in this world, you ask me.”
“No argument,” I said.
“Robert’s always been creative,” his mother said. She had lovely eyes and a nice smile, and Robert and his sister had gotten their blond hair from her, though Anna’s was now a dishwater variety. She had the haggard look of an overworked, underappreciated working-class mother.
“You mean Bobby’s always been a nut,” his sister said.
The younger brother laughed, too loud.
“Shut it,” the father said, and they did.
The mother smiled and laughed, nervously. “Brothers and sisters,” she said. “You know how it is.”
After supper, the father took off for work with his lunch pail in hand, and Mrs. Myers did the dishes, declining my offer of help. Her daughter pitched in, while the younger brother hung around the living room with us, as Robert sat me down on the couch across from the fireplace and the square-shouldered Philco console, which was not yet turned on.
For several mind-numbing hours, Robert showed me the charts and notes and maps he’d created, the supposed physical evidence of the transmissions he’d been hearing. He spread these out on the coffee table before me, and walked me through them, explaining his methods, reading aloud, and I could follow very little of it.
I had begun to suspect that Robert was, indeed, a “creative” young man, and possibly a seriously disturbed one.
Around nine o’clock, Mrs. Myers excused herself, having shooed the younger brother off to bed already (after the boy showed me the flying wings badge he’d sent for from a radio show called The Air Adventures of Jimmy Allen). The daughter had gone over to a girlfriend’s house to spend the night, or anyway that’s what she told her mother. Soon the house was dark, and I was on the couch and Robert — ring notebook and pencil at the ready — was kneeling in front of the Philco, as if it were an altar, bathed in its green glow, twisting the knobs, the dials, searching for Amelia.
And finding static.
“You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll see.”
This went on for some time. I sat with a hand covering my face, feeling like a moron, pitying this kid, exhausted, having slept very little over the past thirty-six hours, wondering why the hell I didn’t go back to Chicago where I had paying clients.
“Oh my goodness, did you hear that?”
The voice came from the Philco.
“Fred just said he saw something!”
“I told you!” Robert said, gleeful. He began writing, recording what he heard.
I sat forward.
“Did you hear that, Itasca? Please hurry, please, please hurry!”
Amy’s voice. It sure as hell sounded like Amy’s voice.
Another voice, fainter, male, but picked up over her microphone: “It’s them! The Japanese!”
“They’re going to be saved!” Robert said, turning to me, eyes glittering in the near darkness. He kept writing. My heart was racing.
The male voice again, faint but shouting: “So big! The guns are so big!”
I stumbled off the couch, and found myself crouching next to Robert, a hand on the boy’s shoulder.
The voice that seemed to be Amy’s said: “They’re lowering small boats...”
“Thank you, God,” Robert was saying, as he scribbled cursive notes. “Thank you, God, for letting someone find them.”
Amy said, rapid-fire words: “I’ll keep talking, Itasca, as long as I can...”
But static flared up.
They were gone.
“Is there anything you can do?” I asked the kid.
His terrified expression belied his calming words: “They’ll be back... they’ll be back...”
Finally, I heard the man’s voice again: “They’re here! They’re opening the door!”
And Amy said, “Did you hear that, Itasca? They’re coming in!”
Robert covered his mouth with a hand. He had dropped his notebook.
Sounds of grunting, metallic banging around in the plane, accompanied Amy’s near screams: “Oh my goodness, he’s resisting them! No, Fred — no! Oh, they’re beating him terribly... Stop! Stop!”
And that was followed by a sound that could only have been a slap.
Then dead silence.
We listened for a long time, but all we heard was that awful deathly stillness, and static. He picked the notebook up and recorded those last terrible sentences. Finally I helped the boy to his feet and we stumbled together over to the couch, flopping there, exhausted.
What had we heard? Cruel hoax? Or cruel reality?
“They’re saved, though, right?” he asked. “It’s better than nothing, the Japs saving them. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
Sitting there in the near dark, I nodded and smiled and put my arm around the boy, and pretended not to notice he was weeping.
He did me the same favor.
Chapter 13
The sky was a glowing pastel blue with bright stars that created shimmering crosses if you looked right at them; the stars were electric, arranged in caricatures of constellations, and the sky merely the sculpted ceiling that rose in a gentle slope from behind the stage to shelter the posh crowd out on the mirror-varnished dance floor. They were gliding around to “A Foggy Day in London Town” as performed by Harl Smith and His Continental Orchestra, at the Club Continental, a shout away from Burbank’s United Airport, formal in its linen-covered tablecloths, fine china, and sterling silverware, intimate in its cozy booths, tables for two, and pastel-tinted wooden paneling.