Most people on Kelley Street could recall Miranda Shifflett and her sons moving in on a Sunday in June, three months before the boys went missing. Miranda lifted as much as her moving men did, and when she flirted with them, her laugh was loud and raspy, as if she had phlegm stuck in her throat. She took frequent cigarette breaks. She was a fat woman with dough-white skin, splotchy red cheeks, and thick, bright blonde hair. She was thirty-seven years old. She didn’t lumber or huff or puff like a large woman might, but instead rushed around with a kind of vitality that her children lacked. The two boys carried their plastic Fisher Price chairs and boxes containing districts of their Lego city and their arrowhead collection, but when they reached the heavier loads, they stood back and watched with disinterest as their mother and the men grunted and sweated the rest of their belongings from the moving truck to the house. One of the movers gave the two boys a yo-yo, and they dragged the toy around by its string, watching it scrape and scuttle on the crumbling sidewalk, as if they didn’t know it was meant for bouncing.
The first suspect behind the Shifflett boys’ disappearance was Don Crolley, age thirty-four, and the only other white resident on Kelley Street besides Miranda Shifflett and her sons. He, like Miranda, had moved to Kelley Street because the rent was cheap. On any given weekday during the warm months, Crolley propped his window open with a broken broomstick and lugged his television onto the front porch. He balanced the TV on a wobbly plastic end-table. The cables stretched back into the house, and flies perched on them like birds on telephone lines. There, on his porch, Crolley watched television and his block of Kelley Street all day. On that Monday in September, Miranda and Byron had told the boys to stay put and play their video games, locked the front door, and trusted Crolley to keep an eye out.
The boys were used to this arrangement and they’d never left the house before, had never gone to Crolley’s or anywhere else. Still, when Miranda discovered them missing, she’d rushed to Crolley’s porch, and when he told her he hadn’t seen them and that he hadn’t moved from his porch or seen anybody go in or out of her house, Miranda lost her composure.
“Where were you, Crolley?” she screamed.
“What you mean you didn’t see nothing?” Byron added, without moving from the sidewalk. Miranda stomped onto Crolley’s porch. Crolley would always remember her fists on his shoulders and face—they felt like warm, hard dinner rolls. He didn’t stop her. He took the beating because he was in love with her. He’d never told her this, but she knew it. Miranda yelled a long time and then slapped his face before Byron stepped in to restrain her. Her screams echoed across Kelley Street and the neighbors watched the scene unfold from their stoops and porches until finally Reginald Yates shouted for Miranda to stop all that hollering if she wasn’t going to really kick somebody’s ass. Miranda turned on Yates and told him her boys were gone, missing, vanished, disappeared.
“Call the damn police,” Yates said. “Yelling in the middle of the street ain’t gonna bring them home.” Residents began to search the neighborhood, calling the boys’ names—Josh! Dusty!—and finally they told Miranda that yes, she should call the police, and they retreated behind their screen doors.
When the police asked the residents of Kelley Street about Don Crolley, most said he was a strange man, but harmless. In general, nobody spoke to him. The young people promenaded past in noisy, melodramatic packs, or glided by on rickety bikes as if his little green house were an empty lot. The older folks nodded a curt good morning as they stepped into their cars or checked their mailboxes. Crolley had only lived on Kelley Street for five years, but his neighbors felt as if he’d always been with them, as if they’d grown up with this gaunt white man staring out from his front porch. He unnerved them. It wasn’t his sunken eyes, stringy hair, or patchy beard that bothered them: it was his silent watchfulness, how they never knew what was on his mind. Miranda Shifflett, on the other hand, let everyone know what was on her mind whether they wanted to know or not, and her neighbors appreciated that. And even though she was outspoken, Miranda never acted hateful to anybody. Even when she was telling somebody off, she winked as if to say, it’s all right, I already forgive you. But when she attacked Crolley, it was clear to everyone that she hadn’t forgiven him, not at all.