Five

I DON’T NOTICE exactly when the rose-and-peach sunset drains away beneath the horizon, but suddenly it’s night. A crescent moon, startling in its clarity, hangs kitty-corner in the inky, star-strewn sky. I pull my cell phone out and call voice mail at home – for about the tenth time.

Nothing’s changed, no messages.

Shoffler wouldn’t let me go out with the initial search teams. Everyone offers the same advice: the best thing I can do is wait. It’s my sons who are missing, yet I’m supposed to sit and watch, a spectator at my own disaster.

And yet it’s oddly familiar, this sense of being in the audience while the well-oiled machinery of catastrophe rolls into action. Between the news and TV crime shows, disaster flicks and reality TV, we’re prepped for every kind of nightmare. No matter what it is, it’s already happened in some form to someone else – filmed in gritty detail and with a musical score to punch it up. I should know.

From my bench, I can hear Shoffler from inside headquarters, voice at volume: “Start at the intersection of 301 and Shade Valley Road. Then the bird should deploy at point 19, first sweep the fairground …”

At first the words make no sense. And then bird and deploy and sweep drop into the proper linguistic slots in my brain and I understand the detective is talking about a search helicopter.

Christiansen says: “If the kids’re in the woods, you won’t see them from a copter.”

When yet another squad car arrives with a trunkful of powerful flashlights and four more uniformed men from Carroll County (with more on the way), Shoffler organizes new teams.

Food has appeared from somewhere. Papa John’s Pizzas, Gatorade, cans of Pepsi, big aluminum thermos dispensers of coffee, inverted towers of white foam cups. Someone’s pinned a topographical map to the wall and marked it into a grid. The first search party departs in a welter of raspy walkie-talkie communication, and then the second. When the third, consisting of four men and two women, assembles to watch Shoffler delineate their area on the topo map, I find myself on my feet.

“I’m going.”

Shoffler hesitates. “If we find them,” he starts, “it’s possible …”

His voice trails away, but I can read his mind: It’s possible they won’t be alive. I nod to show I understand.

Shoffler opens his mouth, as if he’s about to launch into his tired spiel about the best way to help being to stay put. But then he changes his mind, nods his assent. “What the hell,” he says.

We walk through a densely wooded area in a ragged line, each person separated from the next by the prescribed double arm’s length distance of six feet, a span that shrinks and expands wildly depending on the terrain and its obstacles. Flashlights burrow into the darkness, probing and tunneling in well-defined cylinders of light until the beams fray off at the outer reaches of their scope and then dissolve into incandescent mist. The beams of the flashlights pry into hidden corners of the dense underbrush, illuminating tangles of multiflora roses, the crevices of big moss-covered rocks, the rough bark of tree trunks, leaves and branches, patches of glittery streams, the bright startled eyes of animals. Beams skid wildly through the sky as the searchers clamber over rocks and fallen logs. Every once in a while, the jaunty tune of a cell phone makes its anomalous intrusion and someone conducts an awkward conversation with spouse or friend.

The search party, a segmented monster, makes a huge amount of noise as it crashes along, each man or woman yelling, “Sean! Kevin!” Above, the helicopter contributes even more noise, the thudding of its rotors as it makes methodical sweeps over the fairgrounds throwing up such a din that we can hardly shout over it at times. The voices calling for Sean and Kevin sound thin and puny, hopeless cries into the wilderness.

We trudge and grope and clamber our way through terrain that’s not only rugged and full of unexpected and hidden ravines, but choked with brambles and vines, this underbrush often head high. It’s very tough going, as Shoffler warned us all, and it takes its toll. Every few minutes, there’s a yelp of pain, a curse. Within ten minutes, my legs and arms are torn up from the thorns, and my face is bleeding.

An occasional raspy bulletin from Shoffler crackles out from the leader’s walkie-talkie. We halt until it’s clear that the communication is routine and involves no news of the boys. Each time this happens, my heart bangs against my rib cage and there’s an electric surge of adrenaline. I’m suspended, teetering between hope and dread.

The search group also pauses when the helicopter hovers, as it does every few minutes, hesitating in one of its sweeps to cast a brilliant cone of light beneath it, so powerful it turns night into day. Then someone says, “Let’s go,” and we continue, clawing through the dense foliage, shouting until we’re hoarse.

I sink into a kind of trance, focused only as far as the end of my beam of light, which I swing from side to side, methodical as an automaton, making certain to cover every inch of my patch of terrain. Many times, the light falls on a branch or a clump of leaves and tricks me into the momentary belief that I’ve seen a pant leg, an arm, a shoe, the curve of a head.

They’re so small, really. When I check on them, asleep in their beds, when they’re quiet and inert, I’m shocked sometimes by how small they are – considering the space they take up in my life. If they were covered with leaves, even some halfhearted effort to hide them … It would be so easy to miss them.

I blink my eyes, sharpen my focus, close my mind to the thought: covered with leaves. But I can’t keep from my mind the terrible notions that float into it. I can’t stop thinking of that shoe, for instance, Kevin’s shoe, derelict against the metal of that chute. The way it sat, inside its barrier of police tape, waiting for the evidence technician.

These are words I don’t want in my vocabulary: evidence technician, K-9 team, search grid.

When Shoffler orders the team to return “to base,” not a single member of the unit wants to do it. Everyone grumbles, pleads for more time. “We don’t want to give up,” a man named Rusty, who is the leader, barks into his handset, “we’re rollin’, Shoff.”

But Rusty surrenders grudgingly to Shoffler’s insistence. Replacements are standing by. Exhaustion causes mistakes. Fresh eyes are better. “And besides,” Shoffler says, his voice ragged with static, “I need to discuss something with Mr. Callahan.”

The room is a mess, the area devoted to a kind of makeshift canteen already overflowing with foam cups, doughnut and pizza boxes, water bottles. Untidy mounds of clothing and shoes obscure the counter of the Lost and Found desk. Heaped on the floor are piles of communication equipment, stacks of orange traffic cones, vests shiny with reflective tape, a small mountain of olive-green fleece blankets still encased in plastic bags.

I wait for the promised discussion, so tapped out that for the moment I lack the energy to imagine its subject or purpose. It’s not about the boys being found (or a replacement team would not be heading out into the dark), and that’s the only item of interest to me.

Shoffler slings a big arm around my shoulder and tells me it’s time to go home. I sputter my objection, but Shoffler gently reminds me of two matters.

“We’ve got no evidence of abduction,” he starts. “There’s the shoe, but” – he shrugs – “you couldn’t positively identify it.”

“I’m sure it’s Kevin’s shoe.”

“You’re sure it’s his shoe because he’s got a shoe kinda like it and he’s missing.”

“And he was there, at that jousting ring.”

Shoffler shakes his head. “You know how many kids come through this place every weekend? Who knows how long that shoe’s been there? It’s a pretty common type of shoe.” He shifts from foot to foot. “If this is an abduction, and there’s a call, they’re not going to leave a message on your voice mail. They’re gonna want to talk to you.”

I nod.

“We’d like to install a trap and trace on your phone, and that’s gonna go much faster if you’re there – otherwise, we got to get a form signed, get it to these guys, get ’em some keys, it’s a whole rigmarole. If you’re there, it’s done inside a coupla hours.”

“Okay.”

He purses his lips for a moment, cocks his head. “Second thing is,” Shoffler goes on, “you can’t have all these people, helicopters” – he makes a sweeping gesture with his arm – “and keep it secret. Point is, this is gonna make the early news in some bulletin kind of form, and then, by the regular morning news …” He shakes his head. “Well, you would know …”

“Right,” I say. And of course Shoffler is right. I should have thought about this, but didn’t. Not until this moment.

Parents all over the country are already on edge, thanks to a recent series of highly publicized child abductions and disappearances. There’s a trial going on right now in California, in the abduction-murder of a five-year-old girl. It’s an atmosphere in which any new missing child is instantly big news, a national story.

And from the media’s standpoint, the disappearance of Kevin and Sean will be pure gold: photogenic twins vanish in the midst of jousting knights, Elizabethan ladies, men in waistcoats and doublets. It’s not just going to be a news story; it’s going to be a monster.

“And that’s good, that’s all to the good,” Shoffler is saying. “It’s time to enlist the public’s help. And the media, they will do that for you, they will get the word out.”

He stops talking and waits for me to say something. I can tell I’m supposed to be connecting some dots here, but I don’t see what the detective is after. “You probably got people,” the detective finally says in a patient voice, “shouldn’t hear about this on the TV, or because they get a phone call from a reporter.”

Christ! Liz! I’m going to have to tell Liz.

“I think you should go home.”

I stare at my feet. Liz.

“Chris here,” Shoffler continues, with a nod toward Officer Christiansen, “he’ll go with you.”

“I’ll be all right,” I say. Shoffler obviously thinks I shouldn’t be alone, but the last thing I want is Officer Christiansen for company.

Shoffler ignores me and nods at Christiansen, then walks us toward the entrance gate. “You got juice in your cell phone?” he asks Christiansen, who lifts the phone from its holster and flips the top open.

“I’m all set.”

Outside, it’s quiet. A faint murmur of traffic. The rhythmic rise and fall of chatter from cicadas. The helicopter is gone for now, having returned to refuel. For a moment, I think I can hear the faint cries of the search team, but then a breeze rustles through the trees and swallows the sound.

We walk through the small cluster of cars and squad cars parked near the entrance gate. “Well,” Shoffler says, stifling a yawn. “We’ll do our best here.” He offers his hand and I shake it. Then he gives Christiansen a little tap on the shoulder and heads back into the fairgrounds.

In front of us looms the vast empty space of the parking lot. Near its far perimeter sits the small squarish shape of the Jeep, alone in the huge field. Christiansen walks beside me, talking in nervous little bursts about “a kidnap case I worked on couple of years back.” “They found the kid in Florida,” Christiansen says. “Boyfriend’s backyard.”

On the long walk to the car, the notion that Shoffler sent the officer with me out of some kind of compassion, because he didn’t want the bereft father to be alone in his distraught state, dissolves into a darker truth. I realize this as I fumble in my pocket for the keys and press the button on the remote. The door locks pop. The headlights tunnel out into the darkness. “That’s what they say, y’know,” Christiansen rambles on. “Nine times out of ten, it’s someone who knows the kid. Nine times outta ten, it’s a parent.”

Here’s the truth: Christiansen isn’t babysitting. I’m a suspect.

I stand with my hand on the door handle. I can’t bring myself to get into the car. Going home without the boys is … wrong. It feels like a signal of defeat and surrender, as if I’m giving up on them.

“Hey, you want I should drive?” Christiansen asks.

Then a sudden effervescence of hope bubbles up in my brain and I can’t get into the car fast enough.

“I guess that’s a no,” Christiansen says, sliding into the passenger’s seat. “Suit yourself.”

By the time I flip on the brights and make it from the grass parking lot to the gravel drive, an entire hopeful scenario has constructed itself in my head. Maybe the boys got disoriented, tried to come back to their hay bale and took a wrong turn. When the joust was over, everybody was leaving; it was chaotic.

I turn from the gravel drive onto a paved road. When they couldn’t find me, maybe the boys met someone – someone from the neighborhood, someone they hadn’t seen since Liz took them to Maine. And these people, they drove the boys home.

Or maybe Liz … Liz followed the boys down from Maine. She wanted to prove some point, so she waited until Alex and the boys were separated … Or not Liz herself, but she hired someone …

I’m filled with maybes, filled with fear and hope. On one level, I know these notions don’t hold up, not if I give them a minute’s hard thought.

Now that I’m on the road, I have an irrational need to get back to the house. As if that will make things right somehow. Tagging home base. I’ll be safe. The kids will be safe. Somehow it’s in my head that the kids will be there, waiting for me.

“You better slow it down,” Christiansen whines.

I glance at the speedometer. I’m doing eighty.

“Come on, man. This road—” The policeman’s voice sounds like a mosquito.

I slow to seventy-five, and then my cell phone rings and I hit the brakes, fishtailing onto the shoulder in a spray of gravel.

“Jesus Christ!” Christiansen squeaks, as I fumble for the phone.

Finally, I’ve got the thing pressed to my ear. “Hello? Hello!?”

“Who is it?” Christiansen asks, but I hardly hear him.

“Hello? Hello!” I’m yelling. It isn’t that the connection is bad, it’s crystal clear, there’s no static at all. But no one’s there, just the silence.

“Sir? Who is it?” Christiansen bleats, but I shove my hand toward the cop to shut him up. I don’t hang up because I realize it’s not quite silence I’m hearing. It’s breathing. Someone breathing.

“Who is this?” I ask, trying to control my voice. “Who is it?”

Nothing.

And then a Roman candle of relief explodes in my chest as Kevin’s voice flutters into my ear, tremulous and tentative: “Daddy?”