After a couple of weeks, however, they stopped asking and just left with a wave. Day in and day out, sometimes three days a week, Byron and Miranda slid into the Tercel, waved and sped off, taking for granted that Crolley would be there to watch over the boys. Crolley realized that they didn’t appreciate him, just as all those drivers rushing past in their cars didn’t appreciate the work he put into building and repairing their roads and interstates.
Then, on the day the Shifflett boys would disappear, Byron came over and offered Crolley a check. For his services, Byron told him, a smug smile on his lips. Crolley wanted to clomp down those steps and punch those lips, those lips that kissed Miranda Shifflett. He had never asked anything of Miranda and in time he would have accepted that she’d never take him as her lover. But the idea that Miranda and Byron thought he needed to be paid, that they didn’t consider him a friend or even neighbor willing to help them for free, insulted him. They were treating him like a stranger, a mere acquaintance they could pay and then forget about, someone they only talked to when they needed something. The acrid smoke in his chest filled his mouth, laced his words. “I don’t want your money,” he said. A long silence blew in and then Byron sheepishly nodded and crossed back to Miranda’s house. An hour later, they’d driven off in Miranda’s Tercel, and two hours after that, the boys were gone.
Now, in the growing dark, the light of the television tinting his skin blue, Crolley began to weep. He had learned from all the crime dramas he’d watched over the years that sometimes all the pieces came together, but sometimes, they didn’t add up and only led you down a blind alley and you’d always be haunted by what you could’ve done, by the mysteries left unsolved. No matter how hard you tried to cope, the world wouldn’t make sense ever again.
The Friday after the boys went missing, Frederick Shanks was located. He had no family and few friends in Harrisonburg, and it had been difficult to track him down. Unable to find a job locally, he’d moved to Beckley, West Virginia, a couple of days after threatening Byron, and was currently staying with an ex-girlfriend. Shanks had a solid alibi, however, because on the afternoon the Shifflett children vanished, he was in the hospital being treated for kidney stones.
The local news in Harrisonburg covered the story every day, repeating the scant facts and recycling the many speculations. News vans drove up and down the Kelley Street hill at all hours, gathering footage of the homes and describing the neighborhood as “lower income” or “the side of Harrisonburg most people never see.” The residents became wary and resentful. Black kids go missing every day, they said, but nobody’s crying out over that, and there ain’t any Daily News Record headlines saying “Tragic Disappearances Shake Harrisonburg to Core.”
The police dropped by Miranda’s house to tell her about Frederick Shanks. She received the news with a ceramic face much like her dolls’ and closed the door without a word. Byron rushed over, trying to get information, but the policeman wouldn’t tell him, and when he went to Miranda’s window to speak to her, she shut it.
She didn’t resent Byron anymore, or his sister. He was just a part of her life before her kids vanished, a life that no longer existed, and she couldn’t see how he fit into this new life; he’d only remind her of what she’d lost. He was unnecessary, like outgrown shoes, like a key to a house she no longer lived in.
She hadn’t needed someone to give her things because she’d wanted little. She didn’t need someone to call her beautiful, because she wasn’t. She just needed someone who gave a damn. Byron, so different from her ex-husband, acted as if she were the only woman on Earth. At the grocery store, they were like two unattended children, throwing items in their cart so impulsively that even Josh and Dusty asked, “Mama, do we really need this?” Their meals were whimsical; they’d eat fried oysters, baked spaghetti, and peach cobbler in a single night. He took the boys roller-skating, to the Bull Pen to practice their baseball swings, and to the go-carts. They went driving on Skyline Drive, spent days at Sherando Lake, and once, they went all the way to Charleston, West Virginia, to the dog races. He promised to take them all up to Massenutten to snow tube when winter came. But in the soft heat of that September, the September of her vanished boys, winter seemed like a fairytale.