I always know how long it’s been since the boys disappeared. I don’t have to do the math; it’s instantly available. Today, as I drive my parents to the airport, it’s been twenty-one days, eight hours and change.
I suggested they go home (as Jack and Marguerite did a week ago) and it didn’t take much to get past their token resistance.
In the terminal, my mother hugs me for a long time, then dabs at her tears. My father gives me a manly abrazo. I linger outside the security bay and watch a bald man with bulky shoulders pull my mother aside for extra scrutiny. Stripped of her bright yellow linen blazer, she stands with her arms outstretched so he can pass the wand around her. He does this so slowly and methodically, her arms begin to shake from the effort of holding the position.
This is how unreliable my grip on my emotions has become: One second I’m just observing the bald man harass my mother and the next I’m incandescent with rage. It takes a real effort not to bust through the security gate and go after the guy. I’d like to take him down. I’d like his head to hit the floor. I can already hear the mantra – “I was just doing my job” – but I don’t buy it. If he’s trying to focus on likely terrorists, he’s wasting everybody’s time and money harassing my mother. He’s not “just doing his job”; he’s on a power trip.
As the days roll by, the media hoopla continues to fade. Kevin and Sean are relegated to the occasional news update. The calls and e-mails, volunteers and donations fall off too. The hotline grows lukewarm, the yellow ribbons start to tatter and fade, the posters of the boys disappear from store windows, displaced by announcements of choral music programs, missing dogs, Run for the Cure bulletins.
Meanwhile, the police are doing “everything we can” – which isn’t much. At least for a while, there continue to be leads, and each one causes in me a brief hope before Shoffler declares it a dead end.
He drops by one night with packages of Chinese food. He tells us they’ve been working hard on the subculture of Renaissance festivals, “looking for the tall man, circulating everything – sketches, descriptions, the dog, the whole shebang. You wouldn’t believe how many medieval enthusiasts are out there.”
“How many Pied Pipers can there be?” Liz asks.
“You shouldn’t think of him that way,” the detective cautions between bites of lo mein. “The costume might have been deliberate – you know, a disguise. It’s like guys in uniform. Say we have a burglary, a bank job – whatever. Man’s in a UPS uniform, mechanic coveralls, maintenance man blues – that’s all anyone remembers.”
“So what about the guy,” I ask, “the tall man? You getting anywhere?”
Shoffler makes a face. “So far,” he says, “nothing but Elvis sightings.”
Cromwell. Most days, I drive out to join the core volunteers, the ones who continue to show up every single day, even in the stultifying heat, to search. I make the long drive willingly; it feels good to get out of the house and do something.
Although I realize, one day, struggling through the underbrush in the area outside the fairgrounds, that I’m participating in the search with no hope of finding any trace of the boys – but also with no fear of doing so. I don’t believe I’m going to see a small crumpled form, the clothing intact, the flesh melting into the leaves and sticks. Liz is different. When she makes the trip, she searches with a stricken intensity that conveys all too well what she expects to find.
Me – I think the boys are with The Piper, whoever he may be, and although by now the dangers of “denial” have been pressed on me many times and I know I may be fooling myself, I still think Kevin and Sean are alive. This makes searching with the volunteers in Cromwell almost a kind of ritual, a form of devotion to the cause of finding the boys, like saying a prayer or making a pilgrimage.
Some of the Cromwell volunteers alarm me. I wonder about their ardor for the task, their willingness to wade into yet another patch of the poison ivy-choked, bug-infested terrain. By now, I’ve grown to know many of them. Although most have just latched on to this search the way others might fasten their efforts to fund-raising for breast cancer or lobbying for a new playground, there’s something unsettling about a few of them. The dark fervor in the eyes of one man disturbs me, as does the quasi-religious devotion of a couple of women.
I wonder what the rest of their lives are like, that they can afford this huge investment of time. Once in a while, I find myself thinking one of them might be involved with the abduction, an accomplice, reporting back to The Piper. Although I feel guilty for harboring such thoughts, I’ve compiled a file of their names and addresses, their jobs and marital histories, their quirks and hobbies. I’ve turned it over to the P.I., Mary McCafferty.
The situation between Liz and me continues to deteriorate. During the first few days after the boys were abducted, what happened was so terrible, we took some comfort in our common loss.
That’s long gone, replaced at first by a Jack-like formality from Liz that’s slowly segued into something even less friendly. When we’re in the same room now, she can’t seem to stay in her chair. When our eyes meet, hers skid away from mine.
Behind it all is the undeniable fact that at rock bottom, she blames me. This comes up more and more, in the form of “if only” scenarios.
I tell myself it’s the same in the aftermath of any disaster: Once over the shock, the loved ones of victims look around for a way in which the event could have been prevented. I remember this from many assignments, the anguished faces of mourners after preventable disasters (the Rhode Island nightclub fire, the Florida Valujet crash, the explosion of the shuttle): “It’s such a tragedy because it didn’t have to happen.” It plays out in our legal system – suits are filed before the flames die down. The litigation of blame.
In this case, there’s no need for inquiry or reconstruction. I’m the embodiment of “human error.” And as the agent who could have prevented the catastrophe, I am slowly becoming – in the heart and mind of my wife – its cause.
We attend a fund-raiser sponsored by the Center for Abducted Children. It seemed impossible to refuse, but the event itself is tough to stomach. Liz and I sit at the dais, along with other celebrities of misfortune. Some of the parents wear laminated photographs of their children pinned to their chests like identity badges, a heartbreaking gallery of winsome smiles and sparkling eyes.
Dozens of strangers offer help and sympathy but there’s something about all this that sets my teeth on edge. In some cases, I get the impression that it’s a weird kind of stardust they’re really after.
The main speech is delivered by a single mother named Melinda. She tells the harrowing tale of her eight-year-old daughter’s abduction in the simple but powerful way of a born storyteller. She makes all the right pauses for effect. Eight years after the girl went missing, her remains were discovered buried in a neighbor’s yard.
“All told, about one hundred children a year are kidnapped and murdered by strangers,” she tells us. “Despite the saturation coverage such abductions and murders get from the media, that makes it one of the rarest of crimes. A child is more likely to be hit by lightning.” She pauses. “Some of us have been hit by that kind of lightning.” She crosses her hands over her heart, according a sad nod to some of us seated at the head table. One of the women lets out a lone sob. “When it does happen,” Melinda tells us in a husky voice, “it’s lightning fast. 74 percent of these kids – my daughter Bonnie was one of them – are killed within three hours of their abduction.
“Of the children who were abducted,” Melinda continues, “the vast majority, seventy-six percent, were girls, with the average age being eleven. In eighty percent of the cases, the children were grabbed within a quarter mile of their homes. So don’t feel your child is safe in your front yard, or riding her bike down your block. It’s the same with car accidents, most of which occur within a mile of home. The vast majority of other types of accidents occur in the home as well. Our homes, ladies and gentlemen, may be our castles – but they are not fortresses.”