“UmmmHmmmm,” Shoffler says.
I realize now what Jason Price was getting at with his questions about religion and animal sacrifice. My elation fades.
“Look,” Shoffler says, “we pretty much, well, we also came up with some solid witnesses who saw you at the fair with the boys.”
“Huh.”
“Coupla fair employees,” Shoffler goes on. “The guy who runs the Jacob’s ladder – he remembered your boys real well. Told us one of the kids climbed the ladder like a monkey.”
“Sean.”
Shoffler nods. “Yeah, well for a while after your kid got to the top, there was a big line to try the ladder – older kids who figured if the little guy could do it, it must be a piece of cake. At a buck a try, the guy who ran the concession was grateful, so he had a good reason to remember.”
“He just sort of came out of the woodwork?”
“Had the Sunday and Monday off, so we didn’t get to him until this morning. He’s a local, doesn’t travel with the fair. And then after we questioned him, we wanted to check him out.” A sigh. “Make sure he doesn’t know you, doesn’t know Liz, doesn’t know the kids – that kind of thing. Actually, we got a number of fair employees who saw you and the kids. The guy who runs the archery concession – he remembers you and your boys real well. And there were others.”
“Hunh.”
“After we found that T-shirt, we had to check, you understand? Because if you went to the fair to set up an alibi – well…”
“I guess.”
“Look” – Shoffler is irritated and makes a dismissive gesture with his hand – “The chicken blood, all the people who saw you – none of that lets you off the hook.”
“No?”
“Think about it. Even if you’re at the fair with the boys, who’s to say you didn’t take them somewhere afterwards, you know? – then go back to Prebble yellin’ about how you can’t find your kids. The chicken blood? I don’t know. Maybe you got a secret life.” A blue Mercedes SUV cuts him off, and he reacts by hitting the horn. “Jesus, look at that guy. I should stick on the bubble. Anyway, what does get you off the hook is we got your afternoon pieced together now from stand-up witness to stand-up witness, got you covered from the time you dropped off the tape at the TV station with the kids in tow to the time you showed up at security saying the kids were missing.” He pauses. “So… looks like I owe you an apology, Alex.”
We’re sitting at a light. My euphoria lasts about as long as it takes for the light to turn. Yes, it feels good that I’m no longer a suspect. But the kids are still gone. It’s still the same nightmare.
I say nothing.
“I’m sorry about the polygraph test,” Shoffler continues, “and that whole routine with Price. I apologize. I really do.”
“You thought I did it.”
He shrugs.
We turn onto Klingle Road and head toward Connecticut. I look out the window, shake my head. “And in the meantime, whoever took my kids has all the time in the world…”
I think of the kidnapper with my kids, in my house, that creepy folded rabbit, the line of dimes, the shirt soaked in blood. And me in the interrogation room – and all the while the trail getting colder.
I rant on about this, and Shoffler just lets me go at it until finally, it seems pointless to continue. Out the window, a couple of little kids holding balloons from the zoo walk past with their mother. If only we’d gone to the zoo. I try to suppress these useless excursions into rearranging the past, but they pop up at least a hundred times a day. I press my eyes shut.
After a while, Shoffler says: “This man with the dog, at the jousting ring. Got a couple of witnesses claim they saw him with your boys.”
My heart goes cold. “You think that’s the guy?”
“Well… we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. The tall man, the dog with the ruff – all that was in the news, so we take everything with a grain of salt. Still, we start asking if anyone saw the missing twins with this guy? And of course people did see this. Or at least they” – he makes quotation marks in the air – “think so.”
“They think so.”
“Lucky for us, somehow it never got into the news what kind of dog it was – so that gives us a kinda litmus test for the witnesses. We know it was a whippet, so if they saw a man with a German shepherd or a dachshund…”
“Right.”
“I was gonna ask you about what kinda look you got at the guy? You remember his face?”
I hesitate. I can bring the scene up in my memory, but what I was looking for was Kevin and Sean, to reassure myself they were still where they were supposed to be. As soon as I spotted them in the crowd of cheering kids, I relaxed. “I don’t know,” I tell Shoffler. “I didn’t really pay attention. I noticed his costume, and the dog. I thought he worked for the fair.”
“I’d like to put you with a sketch artist – see what you come up with. I’ll set it up.”
The light changes and we turn onto Connecticut. “I’ve got a press conference at five,” Shoffler says. “You want to join me? You and Liz? I mean it’s your vindication. You maybe ought to be there to take questions.”
There’s no maybe about it. I know what Claire Carosella would tell me. If it will maximize airtime, Liz and I will stand in front of the crowd of reporters all night.
I know from experience what it will be like. They’ll shout each other down for the right to lob questions at us. The questions will be either rhetorical (“Are you relieved that suspicion has been lifted from your shoulders?”) or impossible to answer (“Do you feel the police are getting closer to finding your boys?”).
“We’ll be there,” I tell him.
In the next two days, energetic friends and neighbors rally around. Now that I’m no longer a suspect, the floodgates are open again. The household is inundated with food – casseroles, cookies, salads, enormous baskets stuffed with every imaginable edible.
Ordway Street is aglow with yellow ribbons. Connecticut Avenue is decorated, too, for blocks in both directions.
A courier brings handmade cards from the boys’ fellow campers at St. Albans: Magic-Marker flowers, carefully printed words of support, cramped and juvenile signatures.
The accumulation of teddy bears and flowers left at the curb gets to me. They remind me of roadside displays at crash sites, the posthumous tributes in Oklahoma City, the heaps of flowers and stuffed animals that followed Princess Di’s accident, the mounds of commemorative tribute outside Ground Zero. Funerary offerings.
The police established a hotline and although they discourage the idea of a second one, a tag team of neighbors can’t be stopped. Jack organizes the volunteers who run this “totline,” coordinating their shifts. Unlike the official hotline, this one promises a reward plus confidentiality.
My old friend Ezra Sidran, a computer genius, sponsors the construction of a website: findkevinandsean.com. Liz’s friend Molly launches a drive to enroll volunteers to monitor the site. Within two days it’s pulling in almost four hundred hits an hour.
Since I’ve been exonerated, the station revives the reward fund, with Krista herself doing stand-ups to make appeals. Fox tops up its original seed money with another five grand. The station’s accounting firm contributes time to receive and tally contributed funds. Within a few days, the fund holds more than $90,000.
A trio of Liz’s old running buddies organizes the printing and distribution of thousands of flyers. For the most part, we’re captives in the house, but we’re told that the boys’ faces are on every conceivable storefront, bus shelter, telephone pole, each flyer with its little fringe of tear-offs imprinted with the hotline number and Web address.
I have a conference with Mary McCafferty, the private eye I hired to help search for the boys. She explains to me what she’s done, which is mostly to “troll for clues” by interviewing dozens of our friends and acquaintances – and new friends and acquaintances of Liz and the boys up in Maine. This has produced “nothing so far.” Recently, she’s been concentrating her efforts on household help: plumbers, babysitters, plaster repair guys, dishwasher installers, painters (I gave her the entire file of home-repair receipts). “It’s amazing how many times it turns out to be someone like that.”