“What is your religion, Alex?”

“What?”

“Your religious conviction. Your faith.”

“I’m not very religious.”

“Are you an atheist, then?”

“No, not exactly. What does this have to do with anything?”

“Bear with me, okay? Say you had to check off a box, for instance – would you check off atheist?”

“No. I’m sort of a lapsed Catholic. I – I don’t know. I’d check off Christian, I guess.”

“You guess.”

There are questions about what I think about animal sacrifice, about a piece I once did about Santería in south Florida, about my spiritual convictions, my opinion on religions such as Wicca.

“Look,” I say finally, “where are we going with this? I don’t understand the relevance.”

“You don’t like this line of questioning?” Price asks, a surprised frown on his face.

“I just don’t get it,” I tell him.

“It’s not idle curiosity,” he says. “I can assure you of that.”

And looking at him, at the professionally disappointed expression on his face, I finally realize that no amount of cooperation on my part is going to exonerate me. I’m trying to prove a null hypothesis – and you just can’t do that. No matter how many questions I answer correctly, Jason Price is interested only in answers that point toward my guilt. And since I’m not guilty, there’s no reason to sit here and endure this.

I tell him I want to go home.

“You refuse to submit to further questioning.”

“I don’t see the point.”

“You refuse. Is that what you’re telling me?”

I shake my head. “You don’t quit, do you?”

Jason Price offers a thin smile. “Is that a yes?”

I decide to oblige him. What can it matter? “Yes,” I say. “I refuse.”

Price gets up. He leaves me alone in the room.

A rap on the door jolts me out of a half-sleep. I don’t know how much time has passed, but it’s Shoffler, not Price, who steps into the room. “Let’s go,” he says.

I know right away that something’s happened. His attitude toward me has changed, but in a way I can’t read. He turns off the tape recorder, and I follow him out to his car. It’s a big white Ford, a Crown Victoria. It’s daytime – morning. I spent the night in the interrogation room.

It scares me when Shoffler holds open the door for me. Why is he suddenly solicitous of my feelings? Because: He feels sorry for me.

When he gets in and fastens his seat belt, I brace myself, rigid against the expected somber tone, the terrible news, the very worst news. It isn’t until we’ve gone a couple of blocks that I realize I’m holding my breath.

“The test came back,” Shoffler says, shaking his head.

“What?” This is not what I’m expecting, and my relief is immediate and profound. “You mean the polygraph test?”

“No,” Shoffler says. “No – the lab test. The test on the T-shirt.” He lets out a jet of air as he steers the car around a corner.

“And… what?”

“Chicken blood,” he says, with a quick look my way. “The shirt was soaked in chicken blood.”

“Chicken blood!” I repeat, elated. I’m not sure what it means, but it’s good news, I know that much. The blood was not human blood. It wasn’t my kid’s blood.

“UmmmHmmmm,” Shoffler says.

I realize now what Jason Price was getting at with his questions about religion and animal sacrifice. My elation fades.

“Look,” Shoffler says, “we pretty much, well, we also came up with some solid witnesses who saw you at the fair with the boys.”

“Huh.”

“Coupla fair employees,” Shoffler goes on. “The guy who runs the Jacob’s ladder – he remembered your boys real well. Told us one of the kids climbed the ladder like a monkey.”

“Sean.”

Shoffler nods. “Yeah, well for a while after your kid got to the top, there was a big line to try the ladder – older kids who figured if the little guy could do it, it must be a piece of cake. At a buck a try, the guy who ran the concession was grateful, so he had a good reason to remember.”

“He just sort of came out of the woodwork?”

“Had the Sunday and Monday off, so we didn’t get to him until this morning. He’s a local, doesn’t travel with the fair. And then after we questioned him, we wanted to check him out.” A sigh. “Make sure he doesn’t know you, doesn’t know Liz, doesn’t know the kids – that kind of thing. Actually, we got a number of fair employees who saw you and the kids. The guy who runs the archery concession – he remembers you and your boys real well. And there were others.”

“Hunh.”

“After we found that T-shirt, we had to check, you understand? Because if you went to the fair to set up an alibi – well…”

“I guess.”

“Look” – Shoffler is irritated and makes a dismissive gesture with his hand – “The chicken blood, all the people who saw you – none of that lets you off the hook.”

“No?”

“Think about it. Even if you’re at the fair with the boys, who’s to say you didn’t take them somewhere afterwards, you know? – then go back to Prebble yellin’ about how you can’t find your kids. The chicken blood? I don’t know. Maybe you got a secret life.” A blue Mercedes SUV cuts him off, and he reacts by hitting the horn. “Jesus, look at that guy. I should stick on the bubble. Anyway, what does get you off the hook is we got your afternoon pieced together now from stand-up witness to stand-up witness, got you covered from the time you dropped off the tape at the TV station with the kids in tow to the time you showed up at security saying the kids were missing.” He pauses. “So… looks like I owe you an apology, Alex.”

We’re sitting at a light. My euphoria lasts about as long as it takes for the light to turn. Yes, it feels good that I’m no longer a suspect. But the kids are still gone. It’s still the same nightmare.

I say nothing.

“I’m sorry about the polygraph test,” Shoffler continues, “and that whole routine with Price. I apologize. I really do.”

“You thought I did it.”

He shrugs.

We turn onto Klingle Road and head toward Connecticut. I look out the window, shake my head. “And in the meantime, whoever took my kids has all the time in the world…”

I think of the kidnapper with my kids, in my house, that creepy folded rabbit, the line of dimes, the shirt soaked in blood. And me in the interrogation room – and all the while the trail getting colder.

I rant on about this, and Shoffler just lets me go at it until finally, it seems pointless to continue. Out the window, a couple of little kids holding balloons from the zoo walk past with their mother. If only we’d gone to the zoo. I try to suppress these useless excursions into rearranging the past, but they pop up at least a hundred times a day. I press my eyes shut.

After a while, Shoffler says: “This man with the dog, at the jousting ring. Got a couple of witnesses claim they saw him with your boys.”

My heart goes cold. “You think that’s the guy?”

“Well… we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. The tall man, the dog with the ruff – all that was in the news, so we take everything with a grain of salt. Still, we start asking if anyone saw the missing twins with this guy? And of course people did see this. Or at least they” – he makes quotation marks in the air – “think so.”

“They think so.”

“Lucky for us, somehow it never got into the news what kind of dog it was – so that gives us a kinda litmus test for the witnesses. We know it was a whippet, so if they saw a man with a German shepherd or a dachshund…”

“Right.”

“I was gonna ask you about what kinda look you got at the guy? You remember his face?”

I hesitate. I can bring the scene up in my memory, but what I was looking for was Kevin and Sean, to reassure myself they were still where they were supposed to be. As soon as I spotted them in the crowd of cheering kids, I relaxed. “I don’t know,” I tell Shoffler. “I didn’t really pay attention. I noticed his costume, and the dog. I thought he worked for the fair.”