Some of the news stories mention an incident connected to one of Connor and Chandler’s foster-home stays; terming it “the first abduction.” Reading on, I decide that calling that incident an abduction is unfair, a major (and misleading) exaggeration. It seems to boil down to Emma Sandling’s having returned the boys a couple of days late from an authorized visit – due, she contended, to car trouble.

Then there was the “live-in boyfriend,” plus the fact that at the time of the abduction, Sandling and her two sons were living in a tent in a state park near Corvallis, Oregon.

The boyfriend – whom Sandling insisted was “just a friend” – was a drifter named Dalt Trueblood. Sandling had met him in rehab, and when she bumped into him at the library in Eugene, she’d invited him to stay in her tent for a few weeks. It turned out Trueblood was a parole violator, although Sandling claimed she hadn’t known that.

If child protective services were not happy to learn that home to the Sandling boys and their mother was a tent, they were even unhappier to know that a wanted felon was sharing that space. When the boys disappeared, Trueblood did, too – and until he turned up a few weeks later (drunk and disorderly, directing traffic with a red cape in downtown Portland), it was not unreasonable to think that the Sandling boys might be with him.

Between her addicted past, her lifestyle, and the missing boyfriend – when the boys “vanished,” suspicions settled on Sandling. The idea seemed to be that she and Trueblood were in collusion, that they’d intended to present some kind of ransom plea – although this never happened. As for Trueblood, when the police arrested him in Portland and questioned him, he said he left Eugene because the kidnapping “spooked” him.

The circumstances of the kidnapping were simple enough: Sandling took her boys to the McDonald’s in Corvallis, intending to treat them to a Happy Meal. She left them in the ball pit while she went to get the food. No other kids – or adults – were in the play area. Nine adults – six of them senior citizens holding a book-group discussion – sat in the main area of the restaurant. When Sandling came back with the food, the kids were gone.

Unfortunately for Sandling, the adults and staff in the restaurant remembered seeing her, but none of them saw her children. Some of the stories display diagrams of the McDonald’s, marking the location of customers and staff; these make it clear that Sandling and the boys had to cross the sight lines of other customers and the staff to get to the play area. Apart from the nine customers, six McDonald’s employees were behind the counter when the boys disappeared. Two cars were in the drive-through lane. No one saw a thing.

It didn’t help Sandling’s case that at the time she reported her sons missing, she was known to leave them for hours at a time in the public library while she worked cleaning houses.

What followed was predictable: an explosion of recriminations within the Oregon child-protective bureaucracy and a police investigation with a tight focus on Emma Sandling. The judge who a year earlier had reunited the boys with their cleaned-up mom was condemned on all sides. Social workers who’d attested to Emma Sandling’s newfound reliability were subjected to second-guessing of the most vituperative sort. There was a lot of chest-beating about how the twins – Chandler and Connor – had fallen through the cracks (“chasms,” according to the Portland paper) of the system. There were calls for investigations and the wholesale reform of the child-welfare system.

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.