“What about the material?” Liz asks. “That skin or whatever it is.”
“Apparently it does feel like skin. It’s called elephant hide. But in fact it’s a special kind of paper used in origami.”
“Really.”
“It stands up to being folded wet, the expert explained. Very commonly available and pretty much the paper of choice at a certain level, especially for animal forms. I’m afraid tracking the source of the paper does not look promising. The Internet alone has dozens of sources.”
Liz looks as if she’s going to start crying.
“The other area Detective Shoffler has asked me to pursue,” Jones says, “is the question of Mr. Callahan’s possible enemies. I’ve got a copy of the list Mr. Callahan supplied, and when we’re done here” – she shifts her gaze to me – “I’d like to go over it.”
My mother sticks up her hand, as if she’s in a classroom. Her face is bright red. “What if it’s because they’re twins,” she blurts out. “I keep thinking about that Nazi doctor… his experiments.” She presses her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking at Liz and me.
My father puts his arm around her shoulder. “I thought of that, too,” he says.
This is a possibility I try to keep out of my head. I can’t handle it, can’t stand the idea of some modern-day Mengele doing things to the boys. They’d be better off dead. And so would I.
“I checked on twins,” Judy Jones tells us, with a negative shake of the head, “and I can tell you that in the past twenty years, there are very few cases of twins being kidnapped. Or twins going missing. None at all that seem relevant to this case.”
“What about those boys out in L.A.? Lopez? Some kind of Hispanic name.” This from Jack.
“The Ramirez twins,” I say.
“It sounds like Alex knows why that case isn’t relevant,” Jones says, with a nod my way.
“Police caught the kidnapper with the bodies of the boys,” I tell them. “Then he committed suicide.”
“That’s about as closed as a case can get,” Jones says. “So…”
Liz’s mother, Marguerite, flies in from Maine, and nearly requires hospitalization again after fighting in through the press crowd.
Although, already – just one week after the abduction – that is beginning to diminish.
Compassionate strangers keep on volunteering for the search teams – which continue, weather permitting, to comb the area around the fairgrounds. When we can, we join them – Liz, Jack, Liz’s mother, my father, and me. Outfitted in cutting-edge gear donated by Tenleytown Outdoor Sports (a friend of a friend of mine owns it), we drive the hour and a half to Cromwell and then separate, according to police direction, each of us joining a different search team.
Mom’s eyesight won’t allow her to stumble around in brambles and ravines. She stays behind to help with the Power-of-Prayer outreach group launched by one of her friends, working a vast network of e-mail circles.
The single telephone in my study has been joined by half a dozen other receivers, spillover lines installed by the authorities. “If the kidnapper does call,” my mother explains to one of her group, “we don’t want him to have any trouble getting through.”
The phone never stops ringing. When we’re at home, we all pitch in to answer calls, logging name, number, and purpose of call on printed information sheets.
Shoffler stops by one afternoon, now ten days after the disappearance. Everyone else is busy so we talk alone.
First he tells me he’s getting a lot more information about the man with the dog. “What we’re getting is that this guy had kids around him all the time. It’s the dog, right? It’s a very cute dog. It works like a magnet for this guy. A kid magnet.”
“That’s what I saw – a bunch of kids petting this dog.”
“We got some confirmation from one of the ticket sellers at the gate. He remembers the boys leaving with a man and a dog.”
“Remembers them leaving? Really? Where’s this ticket seller been?”
“He’s kind of a reluctant witness. Has a rap sheet. He wasn’t coming forward to volunteer, that’s for damn sure. We got to him the second time around. We’re going through the whole employee roster again, see – and this time we ask did he see a tall man with a dog and two kids leaving the park. Well, this kid, basically a kind of nervous Nellie, a law-abiding citizen except he likes to smoke pot, you know – he worries about it. What if he keeps his mouth shut? Would that be lying? Would that be obstruction? Would that be a parole violation? So, he comes forward.”
“Huh.”
“I was skeptical, too. How can he remember this? Thousands of people coming and going every single day – half of ’em dressed like Friar Tuck or King Arthur. And we’re talking about more than a week ago now.”
“Ten days.”
“Right. So anyway, here’s what the guy tells me. He doesn’t really remember the twins, just two kids about the same size; he didn’t really look at ’em. What he remembers is that the group struck him as weird.”
“The group?”
“The two kids, the man, the dog. I ask what does he mean. He’s got knights and princesses up the kazoo, he’s got boatloads of Goths and… this little group strikes him as weird? Weird how? Weird why? And what he tells me is he noticed that the man was in costume, the dog was in costume – but the kids were not. That didn’t make sense to him. Usually, he said, it’s the other way around.”
“Hunh.”
“When he said that, it rang true, you know? It’s not the kind of thing you’d make up. Plus, he nailed the dog.”
“Said it was a whippet?”
Shoffler pulls out his notebook, puts on his glasses. He’s very attached to his notebooks, and he writes everything down. Sometimes he’ll refer to notes several times in the course of a conversation. He’s got hundreds of notebooks. He jokes that one day he’ll write his memoirs.
Now he finds what he’s looking for. “Yeah, so here it is. I ask him what kind of dog the tall guy has, and he tells me it’s ‘one of those fast dogs. Like a greyhound, but not as big.’”
“There you go.”
“So then I ask him what the owner was wearing. And he says: ‘I told you – a costume.’ I keep at it: what kind of costume? He tells me his sister got him the job, he’s not into this Renaissance shit. Then he points out the obvious – people don’t come to Renaissance fairs dressed up like cowboys or superheroes.”
“Right.” I can tell Shoffler is excited about this, but I can’t see where he’s going.
“The guy’s getting real tired of me,” the detective says, “but I press him. Can he be more specific? Well, the tall man wasn’t a king. He wasn’t a knight. The guy didn’t know what he was. His costume – it had this ruff, same crazy neckware as the skinny dog. And then he tells me the guy wore some kind of tights and he had a flute.’” Shoffler looks up at me, peering over his reading glasses. “I say hold it, he had a flute? Cause I got that from one other source, but I didn’t make much of it. The kid brightens, you know, like he’s just had a realization. ‘I think that’s it,’ he tells me. ‘The guy wore this jacket, you know, four different colors. And the flute. That’s what he was supposed to be: the Pied Piper.’”
Shoffler closes his notebook. He looks pleased with himself, but I feel a skitter of dread down the back of my neck. How did the fairy tale go? The way I remember, the Piper got rid of the village’s rats, but the town wouldn’t pay up. He piped a tune and all the children followed him. And then – didn’t the children disappear?
CHAPTER 13