The book starts with a family picnic: it’s the spring of 1912, and the Dunbar family – mamma, papa, 3-year old Bobby, and his baby brother – have taken the train out to their fishing shack along the swamp outside of their home in Opelousas, LA. They and their good friends and family cleaned out the shack – which was filled with mud from the spring floods – and then started fishing. Little Bobby tagged along with his older cousins while his mother (and the other ladies) cooked up a big dinner. Bobby had been hanging along, getting in the way, and throwing tantrums when he didn’t get what he wanted. When the dinner bell rang, everyone raced back to the picnic tables and there was chaos while the food was served. As things calmed down, Bobby’s mother looked around for him and couldn’t find him, and panic set in.

Had he fallen into the quick mud? Been eaten by an alligator? Carried off by a bear? The menfolk spread out and riders raced off to town to alert the sheriff and call for help. Someone noticed a trail of little footprints, the left big toe smaller than the right from an accident making the trail distinctive. It trotted out of the clearing and down the road, disappearing near the railroad.

And the realization set in: little Bobby had been kidnapped!

Kidnapping was a big deal around that time period, with children being taken and held for money. Bobby’s father immediately offers a reward and the men of Opelousas supplement the small funds available to him with their own money.

But no one asks for a reward.

The search for little Bobby grew to the scale of JonBenet Ramsey. Sentimental songs were published – along the lines of Candle in the Wind – and became popular sensations.

Anyone from a non-dominant group found with a small child was suspect. African-American nursemaids taking their little charge for a walk were suspect. Any African-American, Hispanic, Italian with a little blond toddler were accused of child-stealing. The homeless – hobos searching for work on the railroads, vagrants wandering from town to town – were also targets.

People in far off states were drawn in: a man leading a small child dressed as a girl was accused of disguising little Bobby. Turns out the girl was a girl. And he was her father. And he was kidnapping her from her mother.

And then, right there in the next state over, Mississippi, upper-class white women notice an itinerant piano-tuner, traveling from piano to piano in a horse-drawn cart, has a small boy that he whips, with a whip. The boy looks like Bobby, could it be…? The boy is taken from the man and housed with the deputy, and the man is imprisoned. Bobby’s father races to Mississippi to evaluate whether this is indeed Bobby. He doesn’t hold high hopes: he has been disappointed so many times before; so many times that his wife has sunk into a deep depression that is even affecting her physical health. Mr. Dunbar remarks to the press (who were as intrusive as the press during the JonBenet Ramsey case, or possibly even more so) something along the lines that he was worried that, if this were not Bobby, it might kill his wife. So he begins the long trip to see the child for himself.

Meanwhile, the imprisoned man retains legal counsel, and provides evidence that the child was in his company long before Bobby disappeared – just ask the former governor of the state, he says, when the child got sick, I left him with them for several months while I continued on in search of work. The former governor telegrams that, yes, he did take care of the child, and he and his wife begin the long trip to testify on behalf of the imprisoned man.

When Dunbar arrives, he finds a crowd of thousands of people who want to observe his reunion with his son – and seize the kidnapper from jail and string him up, if the child is indeed Bobby Dunbar. It was an unsafe time to be someone without power in the South. In little Bobby’s home town, over 250 African-Americans were killed to avoid giving them the opportunity to vote. The “kidnapper” is in real danger of being strung up as the child is united with little Bobby’s father and mother and carried away by train – but, regardless of the risk, he man insists the child is little Bruce – not Bobby – the child of a woman in North Carolina and (the man believes) his brother, making the child his nephew.

The train makes its way back to Opelousas, stopping to allow great crowds at each town and whistle-stop to view “Bobby” for themselves. The longer the child is with them, the more certain the parents are that it is their child: although the deformed left big toe seems to have miraculously healed, other birthmarks seem to be the same, and they say that the little boy talks about his baby brother and mentions other shared memories.

Meanwhile the former Mississippi governor arrives to testify that the child with the arrested man did accompany the man to visit them prior to little Bobby’s disappearance, and the crowds – so ready to instigate a lynching – quickly shifts to standing up for the man, demanding the return of the child, who is now in Louisiana, the governor of whom not only states that “Bobby” will not be returned but demands that Mississippi extradite their prisoner to Louisiana.

Meanwhile the press finds “Bruce’s” mother in North Carolina. A single mother, never married, who has given birth several times. Bruce’s older sister has been put up for adoption; then there was Bruce who she gave to this vagrant; and later another baby, perhaps also put up for adoption. So, a fallen woman, who clearly doesn’t deserve her children, the Louisianans state, comparing her to Bobby’s mother. But the woman claims that Bruce was not the vagrant’s nephew – his father was someone else entirely – and that she didn’t give Bruce to the man; she allowed the man to take the boy to visit the man’s parents nearby, with the understanding that he would bring the child back. She didn’t authorize the man to keep little Bruce permanently. (Making him a kidnapper after all.)

This is a fascinating book and very well-written. As you read, you think, oh yes, it’s Bobby – and then oh, no, definitely not Bobby, must be Bruce. And then back again. You wonder where the heck Bobby is – the initial search was so thorough that they shot alligators and slit them open looking for Bobby’s body, and men swam through the quick-mud and the swamp searching for his drowned Bobby.

So what really happened? Read it and see…