I close my eyes, concentrate. “No,” I say. “That’s not right.”

“No?”

“Last time I saw them was right before the final joust. They were in a crowd of other kids, petting a dog.”

“A dog? What kind of dog?”

“Skinny dog – what do they call it? Like a greyhound, but smaller.”

“Whippet?” Shoffler asks.

“Right. It had a thing around its neck – you know, a collar. A ruffled white collar.”

“You mean – like out of Shakespeare? A… what do they call that? A ruff?”

“That’s right. A ruff. In fact” – the image jumps into my mind – “the guy was wearing one too.”

“What guy?”

“There was a tall guy with the dog.”

“And they were both in ruffs. In costume.”

“Right.”

“Huh,” Shoffler says. “So you took your eyes off the kids to watch the joust and then the next time you looked, they’re gone.”

“Right,” I say, with a trapdoor feeling in my chest, as if I’m on a plane that’s suddenly dropped twenty thousand feet. “They were gone.”

As we approach the ring, I see that someone’s inside the arena: a skinny guy in a faded red Adidas T-shirt. He’s raking up horse manure.

He answers Shoffler’s questions politely. “Allen Babcock,” he says in a British accent. “A, double L, E, N. I’m the head groom, take care of the horses and all that.” He gestures to the manure. “Take my turn doing the scut work, too. Mind if I ask what’s this about?”

“We’ve got a couple of young boys missing. Twins.”

Babcock’s eyes dart over to me. “Your lads, then?”

I nod. “Six-year-old boys. Blond hair. You see them?”

Babcock shakes his head. “Sorry. No one’s about now, and if you mean earlier – I’m not out front much. A few fans find their way back to the entrance chutes, but not many. No twins. Not today. I’d remember.”

“Entrance chutes? So where exactly are you during these events?” Shoffler asks.

“Have a look?”

We follow Babcock through the arena and out a gate at the opposite side to what amounts to a staging area. Two metal chutes, consisting of lengths of tubular metal fence chained together, lead to two wooden corrals. “In one chute,” Babcock says, “out the other. The horses can be a bit headstrong – they don’t like all that fancy tack they have to wear for competition. So I’m back here, helping with the horseflesh, and getting the knights on and off their mounts – a right trick with all that armor.”

“What happens afterwards? You trailer the horses away until the next day or the next weekend?”

“No, no. We stay right out back here.”

“Where’s that?” Shoffler asks.

We follow Babcock toward a six-foot-high perimeter fence. “This fence enclose the entire fairgrounds?” Shoffler asks.

“Right,” the groom says, unlocking a padlock and pulling open the gate.

As soon as we walk through the gate into the area outside the fence, into the wide-open world, I feel panicked. There’s a whole wide world out here. If Kevin and Sean are not inside the fairgrounds, they could be anywhere.

“Horses and tack in there,” Babock says, nodding toward a white clapboard barn. “Humanfolk in the caravan.” He gestures toward a large Winnebago. “The knights – well, they’re actors really, aren’t they? As well as riders. They live in the compound with the others. It’s just me and Jimmy here where we can look after the animals.”

Beyond the barn, a field enclosed with white four-board fencing leads back toward the dense woodland. The cicadas roar.

A huge black horse stands next to the barn, tied on either side to a framework. A short, dark-complected man holds one of the beast’s massive hooves and pries out dirt with a metal pick. Babcock introduces the man as Jimmy Gutierrez. After a few words with him, Shoffler writes down his name and telephone number in his notebook.

“Mind if we take a look in the barn… and in your Winnebago?” Shoffler asks.

“Bit untidy in the caravan,” Babcock says. “But go ahead.”

We’re through the perimeter fence and on our way back into the jousting arena when I see it, near one of the metal chutes: a small white Nike shoe with a blue swoosh on it.

The sight of it stops me cold. Shoffler and Babcock are through the gate and into the arena before the detective notices I’m no longer with them.

“Mr. Callahan?”

I beckon, unable to speak. I stare at the shoe. It’s just sitting there, in the dirt, perfectly upright, as if someone just stepped out of it – although, I see that the laces are still tied.

“That looks just like one of Kevin’s shoes,” I say.

“What?”

“Right there. That shoe.” I point to it, a small white shoe with a smear of mud on its laces. “My son Kevin has shoes like that.”

The sight of the shoe there in the dirt, its laces still tied, reminds me of all the times – the surprisingly numerous times – when I’ve caught sight of shoes separated from their owners. Tied together and dangling over a wire. Stranded solo on a roadside shoulder. Dumped in a trash bin. There’s something about abandoned shoes – even shoes outside hotel rooms, even tagged shoes in a shoe repair shop – that’s always struck me as sad, even ominous.

And this shoe – is it Kevin’s? – seems to me a terrible sign, proof of haste and violence. I lean forward, as if to pick it up, but Shoffler stops me, extending a stiff arm across my chest.

“Wait a minute,” the detective says, his voice suddenly sharp. “Don’t touch it.”

Ten minutes later, Christiansen arrives and the shoe ends up with its own little fence of traffic cones and yellow police tape. Christiansen will stay to await the arrival of the evidence technician. The word evidence worries me almost as much as the shoe itself. Allen Babcock claims he never noticed “the trainer” (as he calls it). Jimmy Gutierrez never saw it, either.

“How do you know it belongs to Kevin?” Shoffler asks, as we walk back toward the entrance gate. “I thought they’re identical twins?”

“They don’t dress the same,” I tell him.

“Right,” Shoffler says. “I forgot.”

“Now, let’s take it from the top, from when you got here,” Shoffler says. “What time was that, by the way? What’d the clerk look like?”

I pull my wallet out of my back pocket. “I should have the receipt.” Pulling out the wallet makes me remember how I thought I’d lost it earlier in the day. Something about that incident worries me, but I let it go when I find the receipt.

“Two-eighteen,” I tell Shoffler, reading the time stamp.

The detective has his notebook out again. “And the person who sold it to you?” he says, without looking up.

The question bothers me. My kids are missing and it’s like the detective is checking on me. I answer the question. “Thirtysomething, eyebrows plucked almost to oblivion.” The woman’s voice comes back to me: “One lord, two squires, is it? On Her Majesty’s royal Visa.”

Two squires…

Shoffler eyes the wallet. “You happen to have a photograph of your boys in there?”

“Yeah. I do.”

Shoffler taps a finger against one eyebrow. “I might send one of the detectives back to the station with a photo. Put us a step ahead. We can prepare to distribute to the surrounding jurisdictions. And to the media.”

I knew that the police would want a picture of the boys, but somehow the official request depresses me. “This is almost a year old,” I tell Shoffler, sliding the studio snapshot out of its transparent plastic compartment. I look at it for a moment, before handing it over.

In the photo, my sons are wearing matching blue-striped

T-shirts, which is unusual for them. Liz must have talked them into it, because they balk at wearing identical clothing and have only a few such outfits, gifts from Liz’s mom. Liz and I always let the boys pick out what they want to wear (within reason), and they almost never choose clothes that would make them seem interchangeable. Except when they want to mess with people and play what they call “the twin game.” They can’t fool their parents – but anybody else is easy game.