“This is all you know about the man, then – that he had a dog? Did the dog attack you?”
I explain who I am and why I’m trying to locate someone via his whippet.
“Oh,” she says, her voice gone flat, all the enthusiasm evaporated. “Oh, dear. Well – I don’t know. If the man doesn’t compete, it will be awfully tough to find him. If he does compete, or even if he once did, then maybe there’s a chance. But if he just bought a whippet from a puppy mill or even from a breeder, or acquired one through adoption – I don’t know.”
“Compete? You mean at dog shows?”
“Well, that’s a possibility. Whippets are really, really on the upswing in hounds. We have great hopes for one of the boys at this year’s Westminster, as a matter of fact.”
“How many dog shows are there?”
“Oh, my dear, you can’t imagine. But I think you’d be wasting your time looking in that direction. I wouldn’t guess that an individual such as you’re describing – well, one wouldn’t think he’d seek out the spotlight by going to dog shows, particularly if he used the dog as – it’s so painful to even think of this – as some kind of lure.”
“So-”
“What might be worth a go is to look at other types of competition. No danger of press coverage there. Lots of whippet owners compete – we just seem to relish the battle, you know! And if your fellow was one of the these, someone might recognize him. You did say you had a sketch you could distribute?”
“Yes.”
“You might try that, circulate it amongst some of these groups.”
“What are we talking about? You mean racing around a track?”
A fruity laugh. “Good Lord, not much of that going on these days. Mind you, I don’t say you can’t find old-fashioned oval racing if you really look for it, but coursing is far more popular – that’s a form of racing in which the dogs chase lures. They’re sight hounds, you know – whippets are – they chase on visual cue. Coursing usually involves obstacles and a convoluted path. We use white plastic bags for lures – mundane but humane, as we say. Whippets are also great Frisbee dogs, and they truly excel at flyball and flygility and…”
I let her go on… and on… and at the end she promises to put a link to my poster on her website and to send me a list of whippet groups and breeders.
The packet arrives two days later by Priority Mail. The list inside provides the names of four hundred thirty-four groups and more than two hundred websites she suggests I might contact. There will be some overlap, of course, she notes on a Post-it. Whippet owners are real joiners!
I’ve still progressed through only forty-two events in my list of the medieval events. Now it would seem that exploring the whippet angle will require another huge effort. I feel overwhelmed, daunted, depressed. This is obviously the kind of manpower-intensive activity the police should do. Should have done. In my opinion.
The Elizabethan neck ornament known as the ruff provides another avenue for research. From my roster of vendors, I pull down a list of those involved in sewing and selling Renaissance garb – ruffs, bumrolls, doublets, farthingales. The catalog of dealers expands every time I talk to one of them. The market for ruffs extends beyond Renaissance festivals to drama companies, minstrels, troubadours, jesters, choirs, and circuses (where clowns and various animals wear ruffs). Not unlike the amazing number of medieval festivals and whippet fanciers, ruff-making turns out to be a cottage industry in its own right. You can buy them by mail or over the Internet or at the festivals themselves.
“I’m sorry, but we do most of our trade in cash,” a woman from Carpe Diem Rags tells me. I make a few calls a day, but what looked like a narrow and promising angle now looks like it could consume months of my time.
I wake up in the middle of the night and think: gym equipment. How many people have ropes hanging from their ceilings?
Whatever the answer may be, I find out the next day that you can buy ropes anywhere. The same rope suspended from ceilings for upper-body work is also used to tie off boats, to scallop along the edge of floats and docks for “impact cushioning,” as handrails on gangplanks, for decoration in nautically themed restaurants. It can be purchased in marine supplies stores, also online and through mail order. It’s available at Lowe’s and Home Depot. An ordinary rope can be converted to a climbing rope with the addition of a cable-bight at one end, from which it can be suspended from the ceiling. And old climbing ropes seldom die. They migrate from first-rank health club and big, well-funded high school or gymnastics academy to church-sponsored gymnasiums and community center gyms… and from there to every kind of gimcrack fitness palace.
Emma comes through. The Corvallis police send their files on the Sandling case, which include copies of relevant files from Eureka. I pore over these for hours, and they do supply a few leads – names of fellow residents of the park where Emma and the boys lived in their tent, Dalt Trueblood’s CV, names of the parents of Connor and Chandler’s friends. I follow these leads, I talk to these people, but I find nothing new. How did Shoffler put it? I’m chasing smoke.
I spend hours a day, grinding away at my lists, working the telephone, getting my packets ready for FedEx. I go online at least four hours every day, too, following up on the e-mails still coming in via findkevinandsean.com.
The trouble with these computer sessions is that they wear me down. Hope flares and leads abound, but they all deteriorate into what Shoffler calls “Elvis sightings.” It’s a tightrope walk – trying to remain open-minded and alert without being too hopeful. The continuum of disappointment is wearing me down.
In the first three weeks, the findkevinandsean site was a great source of positive energy. There was a kind of buoyancy in knowing so many people out there were pulling for us. A vigilant public was anxious to help and we got a constant supply of reinforcement and even potentially useful information.
I still get well-wishers every day and the occasional query as to where contributions should be sent. The boys are the subjects of thousands of prayers and prayer chains. But apart from these and daily postings from a few women who have made it an avocation to troll missing children’s sites looking to enable miracle reunions, the website has devolved into a magnet for wackos.
Well-intentioned wackos predominate, amateur and professional psychics mostly, along with practitioners of more eccentric forms of divination – all of them eager to offer their services, some for a fee, some for free. There are writers who want to write books about the boys, earnest types who’ve received messages in their dreams, adherents of various religious sects offering a spiritual haven to me and Liz.
And then there’s what Liz calls “toxic spam.” Badly spelled and syntactically twisted, these are e-mails that bristle with dark hints and bizarre innuendos or, worse, spin out some deeply disturbed fantasies in which the boys star as victims in nasty psychodramas.
There are death threats, too, for Liz and myself, along with cynical offers to market artifacts of the boys’ childhood: artwork, clothing, baby teeth. We always turned over to the FBI the ones that seemed downright threatening, and I continue to do so, but just going through them on a daily basis is depressing.
Days pass when I hardly go outside. I spend fourteen, sixteen hours a day toiling at my lists. On the phone, sealing up packets, trudging through cyberleads. Despite my earlier intentions to be healthy and keep the house organized, I’m living on pizza and bagels and beer. The house is a wreck. My clothes are loose and the face in the mirror is haggard and gray. And disheveled. I’m letting my beard grow, and my hair. My gums bleed. My right hand – my mouse hand – develops a persistent cramp. Most of the time, I work with a kind of mindless determination, but once in a while, a bleak mood settles over me and I admit to myself that none of this work seems likely to get me one step closer to Kevin and Sean. The day comes when, for a moment, I allow myself to think about what it would be like to just… give up.