Mortal Danger

and quite probably even lies. Moving there was supposed to be another chance for them. Perhaps neither could foresee what might happen if they failed.
    Perhaps one of them did.
     
    She sometimes thought back to where they’d begun, when their meeting had seemed so serendipitous. The circuitousroute that most people take to meet that one person romantically dubbed the love of their lives makes one marvel that anyone ever finds that person. Sometimes those fated to meet—for one reason or another—cross each other’s paths a few times before the timing is right.
    Or wrong, in some cases.
    Lifelong love or friendship—or endless unhappiness—may result. All perceptions of love and romance seem great at the start.
     
    Kathy Ann Jewell was born in Mount Vernon, Ohio—in Knox County—as the second half of the twentieth century began. Mount Vernon is about halfway between Mansfield and Columbus. As a teenager, I spent one summer in Mansfield visiting my aunt and uncle. All I recall of note was the surprise elopement of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, a huge social event for Mansfield. Bogart had extricated himself from his third marriage so he could marry the much younger Bacall. She was twenty and he was forty-five, and their affair was the talk of Hollywood when they were married at author Louis Bromfield’s farm estate.
    Kathy Ann—who soon was called just Kate—wouldn’t remember that, of course; she was only a baby at the time. Her father, Harold Jewell, worked in her uncle’s appliance store, as both a salesman and a repair specialist. The first television sets were hitting the market, and the American public was enthralled with the new medium for communication. In the fifties, the sets were black-and-white only, and there weren’t many programming choices. Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town variety show and Milton Berle’sTuesday-night Texaco Star Theater drew huge audiences. Some television viewers were so entranced that they found even the test patterns intriguing.
    Later, Kate’s father worked in the accounting department of the Cooper-Bessemer Company, Mount Vernon’s main industry, a company that had manufactured gold-standard compression engines for 175 years.
    Kate’s mother, Hannelore Erlanger Jewell, was—like most mothers then—a housewife. The Second World War was over and the Korean War seemed so far away. The mood all over America was optimistic, and Mount Vernon’s twelve thousand citizens were no different. It was an idyllic town, a good town to grow up in.
    Harold Jewell was born and raised in Mount Vernon. He joined the Marines after high school and became a paratrooper, one of the first wave of Marines to hit Iwo Jima. He was also one of a handful of men in his company to survive that assault. Although he rarely spoke about the war, he once revealed that his assignment was to be the last man off the LST (Landing Ship, Tank), an amphibious vessel designed in World War II to land battle-ready tanks. His job was to gather guns and ammo that might have been left behind. Once, he found the lieutenant in command there huddled in a corner, terrified.
    “I had to slap him to get him up and moving,” Jewell commented. “By the time I finished gathering up all the gear, I was separated from everyone in my company.”
    A few nights later, Jewell dug himself a foxhole in the black sand and pulled a piece of tin roofing over him, only to be wakened and ordered to the shoreline to fight off an expected Japanese attack. That never happened, but whenhe got back to his foxhole, he found it obliterated by an air strike. He thanked his lucky stars he’d survived Iwo Jima.
    Hannelore, Kate’s mother, was born in Germany to a Jewish father, Lothar, and a Christian mother, Minna, although they were not allowed to marry at the time. Lothar’s father forbade his son to marry a non-Jew, so Hannelore and her sister, Margo, were sent to live with a nurse from the local hospital. It was only when her parents had a male child that her grandfather permitted Lothar and Minna to marry and Hannelore and Margo went to live with their birth parents.
    Her foster mother, the nurse, had a daughter, Katja, fifteen, who adored Hannelore. It was mutual. Hannelore had a happy girlhood until 1939, when she was eleven and suddenly became a pariah—an ostracized Jew—living in fear with her family. Somehow, Lothar Erlanger managed to get his family out of Germany on the last ship before the war began, and they