Time-Travel Duo

by James Paddock

  “There it was! There was my story. I was so excited, I drove the seven hours back to Charleston – that was a long trip back then from Atlanta – and stormed into my parent’s house demanding to know where my chest was. Mom wasn’t home. Dad said something about throwing a lot of junk away and then he had to calm me down. In the end we found it in the attic. I spent that weekend making notes from the diary and my father’s memory. I recall thinking at the time that he was holding something back. I even asked him. He assured me he told me everything he knew. I made a lot of trips to Charleston that semester digging through old newspaper archives and police files, and visiting hospital employees and neighbors. I drove out to the beach house as well. There was a poor family living there. They were reluctant to give me more than the time of day until I mentioned it might be worth a few dollars just to answer my questions. What I wanted to know was did they find anything when they moved in, or since. That brought up a big blank until their eight-year-old boy said, ‘What about the records, Daddy?’”

  James looked at Sam. “You didn’t get them all?”

  “No. It was dark when I went back. There was a compartment under the floor where I had them stored. I pulled them out by feel and missed two. Never did realize it because it was eighteen years later before I looked at them. By then I had forgotten how many there were.”

  Gracy continued. “They opened the secret compartment and pulled them out. I gave them five dollars for each. That was an ungodly sum for a couple beat-up records; at the time I had no idea why I bought them. I thought I was just being nice and intended on throwing them out if the music wasn’t to my liking, or if they skipped at all. For whatever reason I didn’t end up throwing them away even though there was no music. There were only two people talking. I never listened long enough to them to pick any names. At summer break the records went into another chest in my parent’s attic. I got a bare B on the report and switched my major to political science the following year. That’s where I found my interest – government – and then eventually politics.”

  Gracy paused for a few seconds and James said, “You’ve got these two records. What happened next?”

  “Well, they sat in that attic for twelve years, until July of 1969. July 20... Do either of you recall the significance of that date?”

  James and Abigail looked at each other and then back to Gracy.

  “Something about a guy named Armstrong, first name, Neil.”

  “The first moon landing!” James said.

  “So there I am with my husband and two boys glued to the TV like every other person in the country when I hear Armstrong say, ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ What I heard in that brief listen to the scratchy and warped records over a decade before was a woman going on about space travel. One of the things I was able to make out clearly through the hiss and scratchy noise were those very words. I sat there on the edge of the sofa staring at the snowy moon images, and said to my husband, ‘I’ve heard that phrase before,’ but I couldn’t recall where. It was four days later, while in the shower, that it came to me. By this time I was living in New York, preparing my run for my first office. I couldn’t just run down to Charleston and dig through my parents’ attic again on a whim, but I couldn’t get it off my mind. I simply couldn’t shake it. The next day, Friday, I was on a flight to Charleston. I left my husband, boys, and campaign manager at home, perplexed.

  “My father wasn’t far from celebrating his 70th birthday. He was still healthy physically and mentally and an avid golfer. He told me that nothing got in the way of his golf game and when I got up in the morning he would likely be already on the course. I found the chest, dug out all my research, the report, and the two records. I then carried them down to his den. By this time it was late. I reminded Dad of our conversation twelve years before, then showed him the two records, and told him what I remembered. I can still see the look on his face like it was yesterday. The corners of his mouth turned up and his eyes left the room. When they returned, he said, ‘I was told about the records but they were never found. I understood there to be more than two though.’ Then he made a phone call and canceled his morning tee-time with his buddies. From then on, into the wee hours of the morning, he told me things extremely hard to believe. Then we listened to the warped recordings. Right there, recorded 26 years before, was Anne Waring’s account of Neil Armstrong’s moon landing. I had a hard time believing my father’s words, but there it was, right on the records I myself found twelve years before – the confirmation of his story.

  “I wanted to know more but I couldn’t just dump my family and campaign in New York. So, I packed it all back home with me and, like Sam, locked it all up. It took me three years, a little bit here and a little bit there, to figure it out. I won my office as State Senator in ‘70 so, between that and my family, I was quite busy. But I still managed to get into Roper Hospital’s records from ‘42 and ‘43 and found out where Doctor Bronson came from. When I started probing the medical university in Chicago, I found records of Nathaniel Bronson and a letter from a medical school in Germany. In June of 1972, I arranged a family vacation to Germany. I left my husband and boys to sightsee on their own and paid a visit to the school, which I was surprised to find was still operational and maintained excellent records. They weren’t initially cooperative, but I gave them some BS line about family tree research and they eventually softened up. However, much to my disappointment, but not surprise, Nathaniel Bronson didn’t exist in their records. I was prepared. ‘Do you have annuals or photographic records of your graduates?’ I asked them. ‘Certainly,’ they told me, and for the next hour I scanned photos, comparing them with the photograph I obtained from Roper Hospital. I almost gave up at the class of ‘31 and then forced myself to go back one more year. There he was, in the class of ‘30. Constantin von Frick. At first I thought I really had something, but then it didn’t seem to go very far. The last thing I found was that he entered the school in 1924, and a letter of recommendation signed by Hitler. The letter got even the school officials excited. But that was as far as I was able to go. I returned to my family and the vacation, never telling them I had finished the main reason I had gone to Germany.

  “At this point I was very discouraged. For whatever reason, which I did not question, I was driven to find out who Anne Waring was – or will be – but I had absolutely no leads on that. I had already gone to Boston and searched out all the Warings, but there was no Steven. I knew nothing more. I did not know what her name was before marrying. All I knew about her in 1972 was that she was a nine-year old named Anne who may or may not be living in Boston. I figured that it was useless to pursue that, for at least another ten years. What I did instead was pursue what I knew, and that was Nathaniel Bronson. So when that kept taking me further and further back, I got more and more discouraged. I began questioning what my purpose was, what I was trying to accomplish. My decision at that point was to put it all away until 1980 and then visit MIT every year until a name pops up. So I tried to put it out of my mind.

  “In August, just a few months later, I was attending a political fund-raising event – only months away from the presidential elections – standing around listening to someone say there was an organization dedicated to searching out Nazi war criminals. They had lists and lists of names, and reams and reams of documents right there in New York. A week later I paid them a visit. I showed them the copy of the letter from Hitler and that got them to looking. We hit pay dirt for me but not much for them. There were a lot of von Fricks, but none were on the war-crimes list so they saw no point in pursuing it any further, but they let me continue my own search. I spoke a little German, but unfortunately read it badly. I found a member of my staff, Lester, who did and had nothing else to do in his spare time. So on and off for the next couple of weeks we visited the archives and dug. I told him what I told everyone else – I was researching the family tree, and wanted anything with the name Frick in it. About the middle of Septe
mber, Lester popped up with a document telling of an attack by the German Army in 1918 upon an underground farmhouse belonging to Gustav von Frick. Killed in the attack were von Frick and his wife as well as his son and his son’s wife, Karl and Eva. Their son, Gustav’s grandson, was believed to be in America at the time. His name was Nathaniel von Frick. I thanked Lester for his time, gave him a monetary appreciation, and headed for Ellison Island. To anyone else it may have been coincidental, but something in my gut told me Nathaniel Bronson and Nathaniel von Frick were one and the same.”

  Abigail said, “Did your family know what you were doing yet?”

  “No. Once I got into political office and the limelight got old for them, they kind of left me to my own devices. Mom is always doing her politics or congressional stuff, they would say. If they knew, they would have thought I was crazy. Hell, I thought I was crazy but I couldn’t shake that need to find the answers. It did bother me a lot that although it was Anne Waring, time traveler, who I wanted to find, it was this Nathaniel von Frick, AKA Constantin von Frick, AKA Nathaniel Bronson, German spy, who I relentlessly pursued. I was able to cover my trip to Chicago after Ellison Island with the excuse that I was making contacts in the national political scene.”

  “So that’s what you found at Ellison Island, that they immigrated to Chicago?”

  “That’s correct, Abby. 1914.”

  “So then it all came together?”

  Gracy laughed. “Actually, no. Chicago is where it ended. Then I got lucky. The records that would have helped me were destroyed in a fire in 1952. I understood then that further research was beyond my time resources. It would take months, if not years, of full-time work digging through courthouses and real estate records, and then newspapers and legal documents until a name popped up. And I didn’t even know if they were in Chicago or had moved to another town, or state for that matter. They could have been clean out in Montana for all I knew. It was time to give up.

  “But, like I said, I got lucky. A gold nugget fell out of a dreary sky. I was sitting in the hotel lobby with my bags, waiting for the airport shuttle, browsing through the Chicago Tribune, when I saw an article about a double murder in Will County. One paragraph read, ‘A prominent Chicago businessman and his wife - the daughter of a reputed Chicago gangster - were found shot to death in their car in northern Will County. Sheriff Nathaniel Frick had no comment as to the motive.’”

  “Wow!”

  “Yeah! Wow is right. I rented a car, and headed for Will County, and the sheriff’s office. During the drive I tried to prepare myself that it was just a coincidence of names, even though I was finding that in this search there were no coincidences. When I saw him rise to his feet as I walked in, I wasn’t sure. There was nearly thirty years since the photograph I carried. When I said the name, Nathaniel Bronson, there was no doubt. I had him. It was all over his face.”

  “I thought I was done for,” Sam said. “It was only the week before that I had announced my retirement. From jailer to jailee. That was the first thing to flash through my mind. The second was bribery. Why would this woman show up in my office asking to talk to me privately if not to extort cash for her silence? I actually felt better about that because Francine and I had already built a fair sum in nine years. We could afford a bit of bribe.”

  “But what were you guilty of?” Abigail asked. “You weren’t exactly a war criminal – at least not in the sense of the Jewish death camps.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that clearly then. In any case I was a Nazi at one time. I certainly didn’t want that exposed and to end my career with a Nazi label slapped on my back.”

  “But,” Gracy said, “I wasn’t there to expose him or bribe him. We went to a quiet place for lunch and I uttered the name Anne Waring.”

  “I didn’t know what to say. I sat there like an idiot with my mouth hanging open, trying to understand how anyone could find me. What more about Anne Waring did she know? Did she know Annie Hair, and my relationship to her? I closed my mouth, put on my Sheriff face, and asked two questions. What were her intentions, and from where did she get her information?”

  “I didn’t know,” Gracy said from the other end of the table. “The question of my intentions set me back. I was on this long pursuit of information with no earthly idea what I would do once I found it. And I wasn’t ready to divulge my sources.”

  “And I certainly wasn’t going to admit my previous life secrets,” Sam said, “especially to a woman who has done nothing more than drop two names.”

  “So we had a momentary stalemate,” Gracy said.

  “And I had the Chicago mayor and the Illinois governor on my back on this double murder, which turned into a murder/suicide. So I bid her a good day and returned to my office.”

  “I felt like a child who caught her first frog and not knowing what to do with it, let it go. I drove to O’Hare and caught the next flight back to New York.”

  Francine said, “Sam didn’t tell me about it for three weeks. I thought the job was getting to him. He wasn’t sleeping well and he wasn’t eating much at all. I finally forced it out of him and I had to have a fight with him to do it. Then I got angry with this woman for planting a scare on him and then disappearing. I decided I would find her and find out who the hell she was and what she wanted. But all Sam had was Gracy Keeton – good looking, well dressed, drove a rental. Some kind of observant cop! But, it didn’t take me very long to find her. I called every Keeton in and around the Chicago area, not expecting to get very far because I was sure, with a rental car, she wasn’t from Chicago. I got several no answers, a couple no-one-here-by-that-names, and then a woman who said, ‘There’s no Gracy living here. Are you sure you’re not talking about Congresswoman Keeton of New York?’

  “Two days later, after telling Sam I was going to visit an old friend in St Paul for a few days, I walked into Gracy’s office and did the same thing she did to my husband. I said the name Nathaniel Bronson and then we went to lunch. I was ready to rip her eyes out at the beginning. By the end of the afternoon we had become good friends.”

  “We, all three, became good friends,” Sam said, “but it’s two years yet before we reveal to her our relationship to Anne. It was just before Broad Horizons was formed. By that time Wilson and Henry came into the fold. Although Henry is Francine’s brother’s son, he came to us by way of the Admiral. This leads us to another, quote - unquote, coincidence. Francine’s brother in a sense divorced himself from the family.”

  “Let’s say the truth, Uncle,” Henry said. “My father was a World War II draft dodger and the family wanted nothing to do with him, so he was kicked out. He ran away to Florida. I grew up not knowing I had another set of grandparents and an aunt. He told us he had no family, that he came from an orphanage.

  “The day I met Francine and Sam, I was a freshman state senator, a little wetter behind the ears than Gracy and probably not nearly as graceful. Admiral Harris had a small gathering of people in his home outside of Tampa. This little group included Sam and Francine, Wilson here, and Gracy. I’m still not sure I understand why the admiral thought to bring me into this. Maybe it was some of the late night cocktail discussions he and I had about faith and whether our life-paths are free will or preordained. You probably had some influence I’m sure, Gracy.”

  Gracy said nothing.

  “Gracy and I dated a couple times in college, but for whatever reason we never became romantic. Instead we were good friends, for a time probably even best friends, as she so stated to her Admiral father’s surprised face when she brought me home for Spring break. In any case, years later, I’m at this party and suddenly it turns into a meeting and the admiral introduces me as the newest and final member.

  “Member of what? I envisioned a secret society of devil worshipers and expected a goat to show up for sacrifice in my honor.”

  Everyone laughed except James and Abigail.

  “‘What would you think,’ the admiral said to me, ‘if I told you a woman traveled b
ack in time?’ And that’s the way it began. Of course I wholeheartedly expressed my disbelief, but my curiosity kept me sitting there for hours, listening as each one told their story, not much unlike this afternoon. When they were done, I was still wearing the biggest skeptical face I could ever imagine. Admiral Harris opened a cabinet to reveal a reel-to-reel tape deck. He pushed a button and I listened to all the recordings from the records Sam and Anne made in ‘43. This was in July of ‘74. Among all Anne’s recounting of her life and events during that time, was a brief mention of Watergate. Of course, Watergate had been front page for two years already. At that particular time Nixon was still claiming executive privilege, and it was being speculated that the investigation and court proceedings would go on for many more months, if not years. What Anne said on the tape was that he would be impeached and on August 8, barely more than two weeks away, he would resign. I just laughed. ‘Let’s wait and see,’ everyone said and the meeting broke up. On Sunday, August 9, the day after Nixon resigned, I called the admiral and asked to listen to the tapes again.”

  “And that brings this long story around to me,” Wilson said.

  “Wait a minute!” James said. “Let’s back up a couple feet here. You stated, Henry, that you didn’t know you had an aunt until that night. Are you saying that was when you discovered that Francine was your father’s sister?”

  “Oh, Yes... quite right. I meant to mention that. Later in the evening I was wandering around in disbelief of what I just heard, when Francine Frick came to me and told me her maiden name was Johnston. Johnston, of course, is not that uncommon, and neither of us imagined a connection between Chicago and Miami. We made chitchat about family for a while, or I should say Francine did because my head was still spinning.”

  Francine said, “It was during this small talk that Henry mentioned that his father owned some auto dealerships and that he started out buying and selling used cars. Before the big blow up with my parents, my brother was a buyer for a dealership in Chicago. That wasn’t enough to suspect a connection. It was when Henry said he could still see the big, lighted sign reading, Douglas Johnston Auto Sales, that my legs went weak. My brother’s name was Douglas.”