But it’s still not going to be cheap. Seventy-five dollars an hour instead of one hundred fifty dollars. Plus expenses.
I speak several times to Krista at the station – which, she tells me breathlessly, has pledged ten grand to a reward fund. The boys’ pictures, an announcement of the reward, and the hotline number will be shown at the top of every hour.
I talk to a woman at the missing children’s center. They’ve set into motion an e-mail “locater” search, which, through an elaborate network of electronic address books, might reach – with its attachment containing a picture of the boys, physical description, and hotline information – as many as three million people.
Friends and acquaintances call by the dozen.
At five o’clock, I realize that the boys have been missing for twenty-four hours. I don’t mention this to anyone.
At six thirty, a bewildered Hispanic kid delivers the food Liz ordered from Sala Thai. My father regards the food with suspicion. Jack eats with gusto, encouraging his daughter to do the same: “Important to keep your strength up, sweetheart.” My mother takes a bite of the Pad Thai and says to my father, “Really, Bob, it’s just linguini.”
It’s seven, it’s eight, it’s nine.
Sleeping arrangements. I’ve been awake for so long, I’m approaching an altered state of consciousness, although I can’t imagine actually falling asleep. Liz bustles around, making up the sleep-sofa in the study for her father, changing the sheets in the master bedroom, which she has assigned to my folks. I trail her, carrying towels and sheets. It’s her intention to sleep in the boys’ room, but she stops in the doorway, frozen. “I can’t… I can’t sleep in here,” she says. “Oh, God… Alex…” She begins to sob and I put my arm around her shoulder, but she stiffens under my touch, pulls away, composes herself. “I’ll take the futon in the family room,” she announces. “You get the living room couch.”
She heads into the bathroom. I follow, with my stack of towels. She stands in front of the vanity and looks into the mirror; then her eyes slide down toward the sink. I see the expression on her face in reflection for a moment before she turns and I see the puzzled frown straight on.
“What’s the deal with these dimes?” she asks.
The vanity has a faux-marble top with a backsplash. On the upper edge of that backsplash and perfectly centered between the faucets rests a row of Liberty head dimes. Seven of them, precisely aligned.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Do these belong to the boys? Did they start a collection?”
“I don’t think so.”
But the ambiguity is only notional. I’ve never seen the dimes before – and I would have seen them. It’s my habit to stand and watch Kev and Sean brush their teeth, to make sure they stay at it for more than two seconds, to see that they rinse their toothbrushes and sluice down the spit and toothpaste. It’s not that dental hygiene is such a big thing with me. My vigilance is due to Liz. I knew I’d be called to account for any evidence of a lapse. No way I would not have noticed a line of coins on the sink. And the sight of them spooks me. They seem like some kind of crazy sign or message.
“Someone put them there,” I tell Liz.
“Who? What?”
“The kidnapper.”
“Oh, God. Alex…?”
“Come here for a sec,” I say, pulling her toward the boys’ bedroom. “I want you to take a look at something.” I point out the little origami rabbit on the dresser. “Does this belong to Kevin or Sean? Because I never noticed it before…”
“No,” Liz says, “I never saw it before.” She looks at me with a little worried frown. “Alex… that rabbit. The dimes. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Tears well up in her eyes, but she shakes me off when I try to comfort her. I follow her back to the bathroom, where she blows her nose, splashes cold water on her face, buries her face in a towel.
When I hear the loud rap at the door, I’m in the family room down on my hands and knees, still trying to get the rickety futon frame to fold down. Jack and my father have been taking turns on door duty, and I hear my father’s husky voice, and another voice, in counterpoint. I’m still extricating myself from behind the futon when my father and the detective arrive at the door.
“How you holding up?” Shoffler asks me.
I manage a sort of shrug. Shoffler himself looks terrible. He wears a crumpled linen sports jacket, one button dangling by a thread. A battered pair of khakis rides low on his hips, forced there by his belly. His weary eyes make it clear he needs sleep. A nap in the car on the way to Ordway Street, in fact, would explain the spiky explosion of hair on the right side of his head. “The press gives you too much trouble,” he says, “I can get D.C. to post an officer.”
I shrug. “I’ll let you know.”
“That the kind of thing you do?” he asks, nodding toward the front of the house.
“I’ve done it,” I say. “It’s just their job.”
“Bob – do I have that right?” Shoffler says, looking at my father. He hooks a finger in his belt and hitches up his pants.
“Yes, you do. Robert J. Callahan.” My father gives a little whinny of high-pitched laughter, a sign of nerves to those of us who know him well.
“You mind calling the others to come in here?”
A gush of fear blooms in my chest. “You have something? You have… news?”
Shoffler shakes his head, and bends to help me, yanking on one of the futon frame’s recalcitrant legs. The whole thing unfolds with a crash. “There you go,” he says.
Between us, we manage to maneuver the awkward futon into position. “My son had one of these doohickeys when he was at Bowie State,” the detective says. “Slept on it once. Pretty comfortable.”
Once Liz and the others are in the room and seated, Shoffler tells us he’s going to give us an update on what’s been happening. The search in the woods outside the fairgrounds proceeds, he tells us, with more volunteers than they can “shake a stick at.” The hotline is swamped with calls, but it’s going “to take time to sort things out.” The questioning of fair employees, he says, “is slow, but it’s coming along. As I told Alex earlier, we’re having some trouble finding reliable witnesses who remember seeing the boys, but we’re making progress.”
An image of Kevin and Sean at the fairgrounds, laughing at a comic juggler, swims up in my mind. I shake my head, as if this motion might dispel the picture. As the hours go on, I can no longer think of the boys without a panicked rush of loss. It’s like falling off a cliff, over and over again.
The one bit of real news Shoffler offers is that the candle-selling pedophile has been cleared of suspicion. “Although the fair, of course, has closed him down. So he’s not going to be selling any magic wands to any little kids for a while. But as for abducting your boys, he can account for every minute of the time in question.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Liz says, pressing her hands against her thighs.
“I thought if an alibi was too rock solid, that was suspicious,” Jack puts in. “In and of itself.”
Shoffler exhales. He doesn’t dismiss Jack’s comment, but responds patiently, as he has to every question asked. In ten minutes, he’s managed to charm and reassure Liz and my mother and to impress Jack and my father. He has a knack for listening that would put most reporters to shame.
“Too good an alibi?” he says. “Well, there’s really no such thing, Jack. I know what you mean, but in this case, we have a whole boatload of witnesses as to this guy’s whereabouts.”
“And what was he doing?” my father asks. “If you don’t mind my asking.”