Five minutes later, I see her, hurrying in my direction. It occurs to me it might seem creepy, the way I’m standing in the bushes, so before she gets too close I walk toward my car. I have the vague idea of opening the trunk, to give me an excuse for standing outside the car. At the last moment I change my mind and open the hood instead. Instantly, this seems like a mistake.

She has her keys out and she cuts a wary glance my way before opening her door.

I feel paralyzed.

She rolls down the window – manually. She turns on the ignition. The car sounds as if the timing is off. It’s idling too fast. By the time I can get myself to move, she’s fastening her seat belt. I approach her, holding my hand up.

“Excuse me?” I say.

“I’m sorry, but I’m really in a hurry.”

“Wait.” And then I blurt out, in my newscaster’s voice: “We have a tragedy in common.”

My rehearsed words sound strange, very strange – even to me. Emma frowns, as if I’ve spoken in a foreign language and she’s trying to translate what I said.

“I’m Alex Callahan,” I say, talking too fast now, my words tumbling over one another. “You’ve seen it on the news. My sons Kevin and Sean have been abducted. Your tragedy’s over, Emma, but mine is ongoing. I need your help. I need-”

It’s the sound of her name, I think, that really does it. Nothing else I said really sank in until I used her name. The name she doesn’t use anymore.

I see the realization hit, recognition followed a nanosecond later by horror. Then she’s gone, driving away in a pebbly screech.

I blew it.

But the truth is I don’t feel panicked because I know she can’t get away from me. Not really. I know where she’s going. But just for this moment, I can’t seem to move, can’t seem to get my breath. The air presses in on me, heavy and dense. I’m still standing in exactly the same place when she comes back.

She stops her car, opens the door. Light spills out the open door and she sits there, in its illumination. “Look – I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t feel good about it. There’s a lot of negative energy – me being the one person who could really sympathize with you, but instead I did everything I could to keep away…”

Her voice trails away and for a minute or so she doesn’t say anything. The sound of the traffic seems to be getting louder, gathering force.

“And when I saw about your boys on the television – oh, God.” She takes a shuddery breath. “I knew it was him, I just knew it. And I thought – I actually thought… I thought…” Her voice is falling apart now and she’s starting to cry. “I thought… good, now he won’t come back. He’s got what he wants.” She chokes in a sob. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey,” I start, “that’s okay. I under-”

“No, it’s not,” she says, interrupting. “I’m so ashamed of myself.” A sigh. “The thing is,” she says, “when the kids showed up in Eureka – you’d think everybody would be sooooo happy. But they weren’t, not really. There was this big deal about how it was a miracle and all, and wasn’t it wonderful – but it’s like it wasn’t enough for them. The happy ending was good for… like… forty-eight hours. After that, they wanted to get back to tragedy and disaster, the nastier the better. And it was so hard. The kids came back, and then they took them away from me.”

“That must have been unbelievable.”

She shakes her head, taps her foot, taps out a cigarette and lights it. “I’m trying to quit,” she says. “I never smoke around the boys.”

“That’s good.”

“You have to understand,” she says, “I’m still afraid they’ll find some way to take the boys away. You know?”

“I understand.”

“See they still don’t believe I’m innocent. They never believed that Dalt just left, just spooked when I called from the police station and told him what happened. He’d had a kind of messy past; he spent some time in prison. I knew that, but I didn’t know he was on parole. And then when they couldn’t find him – they fixated on this theory. They just wouldn’t believe the truth – that he took off because he was afraid. They were always thinking they’d find the kids buried somewhere. Or Dalt would turn up and confess that he and I had sold my kids as sex slaves or something.”

“Really.”

“Really. And when the boys came back, it’s like they wanted the boys to be fucked-up. The fact that they were fine, really – I mean more or less fine – was a disappointment. And they just would not leave the little guys alone. They just kept picking away at them. I don’t know. I guess I wouldn’t have trusted me, either.”

“Look, I have a lot of sympathy for you. But the reason I came looking for you is because I’m desperate. I think whoever took your sons has my sons now.”

She looks away from me, and when she looks back, I see that she’s crying. She holds her face in her hands. “I know.”

“So-”

“I just don’t think I can help you. Part of it was that the police fixated on me and Dalt, but part of it was that they had no leads. The CCTV at the gas station had some footage of the trailer, but no license plate. A bunch of people at the gas station saw the guy, but he was wearing a uniform – coveralls and a cap, like a maintenance man. He didn’t show up on the station’s video.”

“Will you talk to me? Just tell me about it.”

She looks at me. “If I can do it without turning my life into a National Enquirer story – yes. I don’t know what I can tell you that’s going to help, but…” She shrugs.

“Thanks.”

She heaves a sigh, looks at her watch. “The babysitter’s going to be worried. Not to mention I’ve gotta get those boys to bed. Why don’t you come to the Bunny tomorrow?”

I don’t know why, but I play innocent. “The Bunny?”

“I saw you there – Orioles cap? You bought a bottle of water.” She taps her temple. “Too bad I didn’t see the guy who took the kids. I never forget a face.”

I help Emma during the times when she gets slammed with customers – handing her cans of soda, restocking the backup cooler, minding the window while she rents out a board or sandcrawler. We talk during the slow periods. Between the roar of the surf, the roar of the generator, and the hum of the refrigeration machinery and air-conditioning, it’s so noisy inside the concession stand that we conduct our conversation at a volume just short of shouting.

By midmorning, we’ve each recited our basic stories. To me, there’s little question that the man who abducted her sons is the same man I think of as The Piper. But Shoffler was right. The parallels are broad. There’s no real detail, let alone evidence, to link the two cases.

We compare notes on what it was like to be suspected of responsibility for the disappearance of our own children. “With me, you can figure it would happen,” she tells me. “I mean, I’m a junkie – recovered, yeah, clean for three years now, but so what? You’re always this far from a relapse.” She pinches a tiny space between thumb and forefinger. “You gotta turn that space into – like – titanium. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“I like your chances.”

She shrugs. “The thing is – with me, it was like they thought it was a shakedown of some sort, I was trying to get money, that’s what was behind the kids’ disappearance. But with you? I don’t get it.”

“My wife and I were separated. Anyway, The Piper – he made it happen. He left this bloody T-shirt in the closet and for a couple of days, anyway, they thought I killed the kids.”

“Oh, that’s right – I remember that. The chicken blood.”

“And that bowl of water – that was part of it, too. I don’t know what they thought – I was keeping the boys locked up in the closet?” I shake my head.

“What bowl of water?”

“There was a bowl of water up on the shelf in the closet in the kids’ room. Way up high. I don’t know what it was doing there. It was the same closet where they found the T-shirt.”