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daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the world, Ambassador Dwight Morrow’s daughter, Anne, the world applauded the man called Slim or Plucky. The Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of breathtaking aviation, the splendid couple, blond and beautiful. A couple that hid from the world, demanding privacy they could never have. A world that came crashing down when their little baby was snatched from his cradle one windy night.
    So here he was, a brisk walker, long strides, a tall, lanky man, slight of frame. I studied his face. A farm boy, I considered: that Midwestern Scandinavian fairness, so pale in comparison to Bruno Hauptmann, the man who was his dark shadow—the brooding German with the deep-set blue eyes that never seemed to blink. A morality tale, this. Black and white, good and evil, the forces of light and the forces of darkness. A miracle play, a mystery play from the Middle Ages being played out on small-town American soil, the awful conclusion probably written in stone from the moment the police nabbed him on that New York street.
    Lindbergh stopped in mid-stride in the middle of the street, and a passing car ground to a halt, waited patiently. Schwarzkopf and Breckinridge looked at each other, the four state troopers standing at attention. Lindbergh’s look swept the street and briefly focused on the Union Hotel. I was afraid to move my face from the window. Indifferently, his eyes caught mine and I thought: a hayseed, this brave Minnesotan lad, a barnstormer with wrenches and gadgets and propellers, who had lifted himself off the ground and into misery. His head shifted—a profile of a man who seemed helpless, his chin weak and stiff, but a man also, lamentably, callow. A good man who’d taken the wrong turn on the country lane and hated the sense of loss that quaked within him. Now a shabby man boldly approached him, but before one of the troopers could extend a forbidding arm, Lindbergh closed up his face, a look that demanded distance. An impenetrable mask. So the man, flustered, backed away, his face red.
    Stillness in the café.
    When I turned to look behind me, Annabel Biggs was laughing quietly to herself. Her eyes danced.

Chapter Three
    That night I barely slept. What bothered me, other than the lumpy mattress and intrusive springs and the babble of drunk reporters down the hall, was that street tableau I’d observed: the conquering hero Lindbergh pausing in the winter street, a statue in place, but, worse, my startled realization that the sculptor had forgotten to fashion a face that was—well, heroic. A boy happy to perform airplane stunts at the country fair, surprised by the rapturous looks of the farm girl from one town over. That Lindbergh—not the heroic figure whose image now evoked such sadness in America. What did it all mean? I wondered.
    But I supposed what also rankled was Annabel Biggs’ mysterious laugh, calculated and giddy, which followed her cryptic remarks as she served me tea and pie.
    Five a.m., an ungodly hour to be sitting up in bed, especially in New Jersey. A vacuum of space and time.
    A walk, I convinced myself. Back in Manhattan, snuggled in my penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side, I religiously walked each morning, though not at such an ungodly hour—my purposeful stride up Park Avenue, over to Lexington, down Madison, a mile or more, invigorating, thrilling, the streets waking up, the sanitation trucks washing the streets as the garbage men clanged their buckets. Here, in early-morning Flemington, the world was still frozen, time stopped. Here, in Jersey, the citizens slept and dreamed under homemade quilts. Bruno Hauptmann slept in his cell down the street in the jail behind the courthouse, guarded by a trooper, the shrill light always on, perpetual sunshine. Maybe not slept—I was told that he paced the night away. Back and forth in the six-by-eight cell. A cot, a toilet, a sink. Slippers. Perhaps, like me, he was haunted by the