MISSING
ON A MID-DECEMBER DAY IN 1919, A TRAVEL-WEARY STRANGER stepped off the train in St. Marks, a forlorn fishing village along Apalachee Bay in northwestern Florida. He was there to find a man named John Williams.
Everyone in town knew Williams: the postmaster who shipped off Williams’s delicately crated bird skins and eggs; old Aunt Maria, whose restaurant chimney he had cleared of a flycatcher nest smoking out the kitchen; the young men he’d led in field drills during World War I; anyone who needed something notarized. Though Williams had lived in St. Marks for less than a decade, the entire community was at least decently acquainted with the slightly cross-eyed, middle-aged, avian-loving eccentric.
The stranger most likely found Williams at Linton’s, one of several ramshackle canneries teetering on the bank of the St. Marks River where he kept the books. The two men immediately recognized each other, according to accounts. “Bystanders being present,” it was later reported, “they greeted each other casually, despite their amazement.” Williams invited his visitor back to his home, a three-room shack by the ruins of a Spanish colonial fort. Neighbors were not privy to what unfolded inside, but by the next morning, John Williams was gone, leaving the people of St. Marks to wonder if they had ever even known him at all.
SIX AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER AND A THOUSAND MILES north, another birder had disappeared. On Thursday, May 15, 1913, 55-year-old realtor Charles J. Pennock took his second wife, Mary, shopping in Philadelphia. While she returned home to Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, 40 miles away, he stayed in town for a meeting of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club (DVOC) at the Academy of Natural Sciences.
First came the announcement that a beloved young club member named William Crispin, just days earlier, had fallen to his death while searching a Delaware River cliff for the nest of a duck hawk (Peregrine Falcon). Crispin was an unrivaled egg collector, and the news hit the group hard. To clear the pall, member James Rehn followed up with a rich account of Great White Herons and Gray Kingbirds he’d seen on a recent trip to the Florida Keys.
Pennock left the meeting with Witmer Stone, his friend and mentor who was the curator at the Academy’s museum and editor of The Auk, the official publication of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU). They parted ways at the entrance to Broad Street train station, and from there, newspapers differed on where Pennock was last seen: either walking up the station stairs or sitting on a bench. Regardless, he never arrived home.
After two days of mounting worry, Richard “Dr. Dick” Phillips, Pennock’s friend and the brother of his first wife, Nellie, alerted the police, unleashing a
