Bloodline by Jess Lourey
AUTHOR’S NOTE
On September 5, 1944, six-year-old Victor John “Jackie” Theel of Paynesville, Minnesota, walked to his first day of morning kindergarten wearing a blue sailor suit with a square-cut collar. The matching long pants were secured at the waist, a safety pin replacing the back button. Towheaded Jackie sported new black shoes and a fresh scratch below his right eye. His older brother held his hand on the walk. At lunch, Jackie’s teacher allowed him to leave school despite instructions otherwise from his mother.
He never made it home.
Soon after Jackie left school, a woman claimed to have seen a boy weeping as he walked along Highway 23 on the other side of town. A group of teenagers testified that they spotted something similar later that day. The Civil Air Patrol was brought in for search and rescue. A bloodhound tracked Jackie’s route, wandering from the school to the nearby Crow River, before losing his scent. Other leads were followed, but Jackie was never found.
Mrs. Harold Theel, Jackie’s mother, stated in an interview conducted a year after her son disappeared that she had “several theories” about what happened to Jackie but couldn’t prove any of them. The most chilling statement in response to Jackie’s disappearance came from Sheriff Art McIntee, local lead in the 1944 investigation, who had this to say about Paynesville: “[T]here is something in the community we haven’t figured out.”
But outside Paynesville—my hometown—the world moved on.
In 2016, in response to developments in another abduction with Paynesville roots, Kare 11 News reached out to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for an update on Jackie’s then decades-old case. The BCA claimed to have never investigated it. In addition, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office had purged all pre-1960s reports.
There was no official record of Jackie’s disappearance to be found.
However, Jackie’s mom never gave up on finding her son. She had kept tucked in her Bible the original BCA circular, which featured his case number—32719—above a photo of Jackie wearing his sailor suit and smiling shyly.
Bloodline was inspired in part by Jackie’s story and the mystery that still surrounds it.
PART I
A woman’s scream wakes me.
I whip my head and—hunh—pain ricochets, a blistering agony. My skin’s been peeled off, my bones scraped clean.
Breathe.
Where’s the pain coming from?
Everywhere.
Move slowly.
Blink. Blink again.
I’m lying down.
The room. I recognize it. Crown molding. Walls painted lemon. A dresser and next to it a vanity, both in matching oak. The heat is oppressive, the air thick as wool. And the smell. Sweet Jesus. It’s turgid and salty, the rank odor of a heaving animal, cornered, at the end of the hunt.
Get out.
I try to move, but my legs are strapped down.
Or paralyzed.
My breath catches—lord please no—and even that tiny movement amplifies the stabbing torment, but (the struggle makes me weep) . . . I can move my toes. At least I think I can. I must see to believe. I raise my head just enough, swallowing against the brown-green waves of nausea, my eyelids flapping to hold the pain at bay.
I cling to consciousness, promising myself that I am me, that I know things.
I’m Joan Harken. I’m a reporter.
My neck trembles with the effort of holding up my head. Triple images condense to double, and then the vertigo passes, and I can see. A leg pokes outside the bed coverings, a slab of white against the blue-and-red quilt.
My leg. Toes wiggling.
I’m not paralyzed.
This smallest sip of relief is immediately swamped by a sudden clarion panic.
Something’s missing.
The missing is crucial, I know this in my scraped-raw bones, but what is it?
My head drops onto the pillow, skin fish-clammy. I must check the contours of my body, locate the absence. I drag my other leg, the one still tucked under the quilt, a few inches to the side, and the scratch of sheets against flesh assures me.
I have two legs.
I struggle my arms out from beneath the blanket, hold them up, study them as if they belong to someone else. They’re unmarked despite the deep ache at their centers. I wave my fingers, a magician about to perform a trick. They work.
I probe my head. It’s tender, logy but unmarked.
Good. I need my head.
A wheeze, a sort of laugh, hikes my chest, but the motion sets cold worms of nausea squirming across my flesh. I must move slowly, or I’ll black out.
Gently, inch by inch, my hands slip beneath the quilt and travel south.
They find my breasts. Swollen and aching. Damp.
Intact.
Except . . . their peculiar pain licks at something, sharp and bloody.
What is it?
Farther south. My hands don’t want to go there, they’re hot with pushback, but a morbid need to know forces them.
They reach my stomach.
It’s soft, quaggy.
Empty.
My baby is no longer inside.
That’s when I understand.
I am the woman screaming.
CHAPTER 1
Minnesota, 1968
“They’re going to love you, Joanie.”
I smile at my fiancé, grab his hand. Pray that he’s right. It’s been so sudden, this move. My editors had passed me over for the promotion. That same day, Dr. King was murdered in Memphis, where he’d traveled to march peacefully for the rights of mostly Negro sanitation workers.