The day after Miranda’s sons disappeared, the case’s head detective and a social worker dropped by and filled her in on their leads: her neighbor Don Crolley appeared innocent and they were still searching for Frederick Shanks. Then the social worker told Miranda that after the search was closed, after the boys were found, she’d most likely be charged with neglect for leaving her sons alone. Miranda slammed the door in their faces. Then she opened it and slammed it again. The last time she opened it, she said, “Don’t come back unless you have good news.”
As they walked to their car, the detective told the social worker that Miranda Shifflett, too, was a suspect in the disappearances. The social worker asked why. Because, the detective said, you should never underestimate what a mother is capable of doing for and to her children.
Miranda lay down on her bed and stayed there for hours. The sun fell behind the Alleghenies and her sons were one more night without her. She searched her mind for the moment she went wrong. She wanted to be able to say, yes, that’s where my mistake was, that’s where I failed my kids. Of course she blamed herself, even when she blamed others. Every day Byron checked on Miranda, but she only spoke with him through her bedroom window, mumbling one-word answers to his questions. Sometimes she didn’t even answer him when he called her name. When he pleaded with her, comforted her, demanded to be let in, all she heard was a man she’d allowed to come between her and her children. He’d convinced her to join the Monday afternoon bowling league (she had Mondays off from the doll store), and while it had been her idea to let Crolley keep an eye on the house, Byron had agreed with her. What could possibly happen, he asked, when Crolley, the eye of Kelley Street, was watching over them all like a hawk?
Now she didn’t want to be touched. Every time someone touched her, she only felt the boys’ pale hands, sticky from Jolly Ranchers, marking her flesh. The boys chased each other through her brain all day and all night, visions of them filling her, following her, weighing her down: their white eyelashes and hasty goodnight kisses and their little boy smell of baby powder and warm grass and potato chips. Josh’s awful snore, the way Dusty never picked at his scabs like other kids did. She imagined them out there in the wild night, wandering downtown Harrisonburg, or maybe somehow they’d gotten farther, had stumbled into the mountains, their Reeboks snapping fallen branches. Maybe they’d already traveled so far that they’d wandered out of Virginia entirely and over into West Virginia. Maybe some hunter would mistake them for game, or a farmer would shoot them for trespassing. Maybe they were at the bottom of the Shenandoah River. Maybe they were chained in the basement of some pedophile who forced them to do hideous, unthinkable things to him or to each other. Maybe they were at the mall, at the toy store, and the Harrisonburg Police Department was just too inept to notice them. Maybe, maybe.
Yesterday, both before and after she’d called the police, she’d called all her relatives and her friends from their old trailer park in McGaheysville, but their voices, stiff with pity and blame, were like needles in her ears. And this morning, she’d driven the Tercel around, searching, but she raced home after only a couple of hours, afraid that Josh and Dusty might return to the house and she wouldn’t be there. Her body trembled in the bed. She wanted to crush glass in her hand to make herself think about another kind of pain.