If my experience is any guide, Emma Sandling must have been subjected to some heavy interrogation, although she, at least, seems to have had the wit to ask for a lawyer. She was not charged but held “for questioning” for thirty-two hours.
The boys showed up eight weeks later at a shopping mall near Eureka, California. According to a feature story in the Sacramento Bee, the boys had been riding in a small motor home for “a long time” when the driver stopped for gas. It was the kind of RV – a truck and trailer, really – where the driver’s cab is separated from the passenger compartment. The boys waited for the driver to let them out. They wanted to tell him it was too hot in back; they wanted ice cream; they wanted to pee. But the driver didn’t come. They banged on the side of the trailer and yelled; then one of them threw himself at the door and, to their surprise, it fell open.
They climbed out. One boy wanted to go into the convenience store attached to the gas station, find the driver, and get money for ice cream. But the other boy had come to doubt the story their abductor told them. He was worried that he and his brother never left the compound where they were being kept. This trip in the RV was the first time. He wanted to telephone their mom’s best friend, Phoebe. So he and his brother ran toward the shopping plaza, went inside, and looked for a pay phone. They were old hands at making collect calls, but the pay phone wouldn’t work. So they went into a gift shop to ask if they could use the phone to make a collect call. The clerk recognized them and called the police.
By the time a squad car came to the scene, the RV was gone.
In the aftermath, press coverage of the happy reunion of Sandling with her sons was muted. There was cynical speculation about how that RV door “fell open,” about Sandling’s successful efforts (enlisting a helpful lawyer working pro bono) to protect the boys from aggressive interrogation by the authorities. Against this kind of negative stance on the part of the police and the larger community, it was not surprising that despite a wave of testimonials from employers, personnel at the school the boys attended, and friends about how Sandling really had turned her life around – it took several months and a lawsuit for her to regain custody of her sons.
I expand my search and pull down everything I can about the Sandling case; a couple of hours later, I’m convinced that my whole impression was biased by coverage that scapegoated Emma Sandling. Shoffler seemed to have bought into that, too, along with Judy Jones of the FBI – at least they never talked as if the case was relevant, despite its obvious parallels to my own.
The parallels – six-year-old twin boys kidnapped from a public place – are so striking I can’t stop reading the clips. Maybe there’s something I overlooked when I bought into the assumption that Sandling’s sketchy personal history meant she’d somehow rigged the kidnapping of her own sons. Reading through it all, though, there’s no evidence that anything other than what Emma Sandling said happened did, in fact, happen. Trueblood had an alibi. No other accomplice surfaced. Sandling never once changed her story. And although the gift store clerk was allotted a portion of the reward, none of it ever trickled down to Sandling.
I spend the next two hours talking to the police stations in Corvallis and Eureka. At first, when I introduce myself and explain my area of interest – the Sandling case – I get the runaround. When I push it, the reaction surprises me: I get stonewalled.
Using names published in the newspaper accounts of the kidnapping, I hunt down the telephone numbers of Emma Sandling’s clients, her social workers, her lawyer, and anyone else whose name I can prise out of the media coverage. I reach about half of them and I get the same reaction. They don’t know where she is. They can’t help me.
I push myself out of my chair, realizing that it’s dark outside and I’ve been hunched over the computer for hours. I intend to continue my pursuit of Emma Sandling, but I know I should eat something. I’ve been losing weight steadily since Liz left me; people are beginning to remark on it.
I head for the kitchen to forage, although I know there’s not much left. In the fridge are a couple of dried-out pieces of cheese, a moldy cantaloupe, and a half gallon of milk that proves to be sour. A rotisserie chicken I failed to wrap is now as desiccated as a mummy. The freezer holds nothing but shrunken ice cubes and a single frozen pizza. I look on the pizza box for the pull date and find it under an encrustation of frost crystals. The date, faint and purple, is more than a year ago.
Even this depresses me. The pizza has been in the freezer since before my bust-up with Liz, since before my life disintegrated. It was probably bought as dinner for the boys. I have a moment during which I elevate the pizza to some kind of talismanic status. I find I’m reluctant to throw it away. I shake my head, upend the milk in the sink, and toss everything else.
I’ve been eating out most of the time. That’s got to stop; it’s too expensive. I tell myself I’ll go shopping tomorrow, get some TV dinners. And some healthy stuff. Apples. O.J.
For the first time since the boys were kidnapped, I pull on my running shoes and head out into the humid Washington night. I’m way out of shape, but running is a relief. I enjoy the sensation of moving, of the sweat collecting on me, of the labored rhythm of my breathing. I like the way the cars rumble past, the haloed lights in the mist, and how my attention focuses on basic issues: where to put my feet, how to angle my run to pass pedestrians most efficiently, how to time street crossings in such a way that I don’t have to break stride.
I go out for about fifteen minutes and then head back. I stop at the 7-Eleven on the corner of Porter and Connecticut, breathing hard, sweat pouring off me as I dig out the five-dollar bill from the key pocket of my shorts. It, too, is damp with sweat.
The clerk is the one Jack started calling Slo-Mo – as in “Oh, no, it’s Slo-Mo.” She’s a shy, thin woman, little more than a girl, with beautiful features. She does everything at such an exasperatingly deliberate pace that customers who know her have been known to turn around if they see more than one person in line.
“Two Jamaican beef patties,” I tell the clerk. These will be dinner: tasty, if greasy, meat pastries.
The clerk looks at me with enormous brown eyes and then looks down at her hands.
“You the man who children is gone,” she says.
“That’s right.”
“My uncle – he know these thing from the other world.” She presses one finger to her forehead. “He say your boys all right.”
“Your uncle? What other world? Does he know where the boys are?”
“No, no.” Her fingers twist together and she looks to the side, eyes cast down. “It’s – what you say? – spirits world. He say your boys not there, still in this world. I tell him that you live near this shop, that you come in here many day. My uncle say this – your boys all right. I think myself you like to know.” She fashions her facial expression into a shy smile that is also a kind of shrug.
“Thank you.” And I mean it. I’ll take whatever glimmer of light I can find in the world. “Thank you for telling me.”
“You welcome.” She pauses. “Spicy or plain?”
I toss the change into a big glass jar set out to collect funds for a child named Belinda, who has leukemia. Another shot in the dark – like the websites, like the milk cartons, like all of it. When it comes to children, you can’t go with percentages or probabilities; you do what you can, whatever you can.