“Right. So anyway, here’s what the guy tells me. He doesn’t really remember the twins, just two kids about the same size; he didn’t really look at ’em. What he remembers is that the group struck him as weird.”

“The group?”

“The two kids, the man, the dog. I ask what does he mean. He’s got knights and princesses up the kazoo, he’s got boatloads of Goths and… this little group strikes him as weird? Weird how? Weird why? And what he tells me is he noticed that the man was in costume, the dog was in costume – but the kids were not. That didn’t make sense to him. Usually, he said, it’s the other way around.”

“Hunh.”

“When he said that, it rang true, you know? It’s not the kind of thing you’d make up. Plus, he nailed the dog.”

“Said it was a whippet?”

Shoffler pulls out his notebook, puts on his glasses. He’s very attached to his notebooks, and he writes everything down. Sometimes he’ll refer to notes several times in the course of a conversation. He’s got hundreds of notebooks. He jokes that one day he’ll write his memoirs.

Now he finds what he’s looking for. “Yeah, so here it is. I ask him what kind of dog the tall guy has, and he tells me it’s ‘one of those fast dogs. Like a greyhound, but not as big.’”

“There you go.”

“So then I ask him what the owner was wearing. And he says: ‘I told you – a costume.’ I keep at it: what kind of costume? He tells me his sister got him the job, he’s not into this Renaissance shit. Then he points out the obvious – people don’t come to Renaissance fairs dressed up like cowboys or superheroes.”

“Right.” I can tell Shoffler is excited about this, but I can’t see where he’s going.

“The guy’s getting real tired of me,” the detective says, “but I press him. Can he be more specific? Well, the tall man wasn’t a king. He wasn’t a knight. The guy didn’t know what he was. His costume – it had this ruff, same crazy neckware as the skinny dog. And then he tells me the guy wore some kind of tights and he had a flute.’” Shoffler looks up at me, peering over his reading glasses. “I say hold it, he had a flute? Cause I got that from one other source, but I didn’t make much of it. The kid brightens, you know, like he’s just had a realization. ‘I think that’s it,’ he tells me. ‘The guy wore this jacket, you know, four different colors. And the flute. That’s what he was supposed to be: the Pied Piper.’”

Shoffler closes his notebook. He looks pleased with himself, but I feel a skitter of dread down the back of my neck. How did the fairy tale go? The way I remember, the Piper got rid of the village’s rats, but the town wouldn’t pay up. He piped a tune and all the children followed him. And then – didn’t the children disappear?

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.