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  “So . . . no leads so far?” she asked. She paused, and then she heard herself saying, “Do you think they might be dead?”

  Special Agent Rylance looked at her and his eyes were half-closed like a lizard’s. “I won’t try to deceive you, Mrs. Blake. The longer that a child of tender years goes missing for, the higher the likelihood is that they’ve been killed. But this is usually when we’re dealing with your straightforward sex abductions. When we’re dealing with your parental kidnaps, the survival rate is dramatically improved.”

  “But you still don’t know for sure if it was my ex-husband who arranged to have the children taken?”

  “Not one hundred percent, no. I’ll admit it.”

  “So it could have been some pedophile group? Or a couple of psychos?”

  “It could have been, I admit. But we’re not inclined to think so. The longer that Mr. Blake stays missing for, the higher the chances are that your children are with him.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” asked Lily. “It’s been nearly a week.”

  Special Agent Rylance sat down next to her and took hold of her hand. “I want you to try and trust our expertise, Mrs. Blake. The NCAVC has truly amazing resources for finding missing children and abductees.”

  “Like what? Like putting their faces on milk cartons?”

  “That’s one way we do it, yes. But we also have huge resources of DNA samples and fingerprint files and telephone records and minute-by-minute credit-card transactions. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for anybody to vanish off the face of the earth.”

  He looked at Lily for a long moment, “We’ll find your children for you, Mrs. Blake, don’t you worry about that.”

  But a week became two weeks, and in the middle of November the cold weather system came sweeping down from Alberta and suddenly the streets of Minneapolis were whirling furiously with snow.

  Lily returned to her house, but after a few days she went back to work for Concord Realty, because she couldn’t stand sitting by the phone all day waiting for a call from the FBI, or sitting on the children’s beds trying to remember what it felt like to have them there. She was even beginning to forget what their voices had sounded like.

  Her parents telephoned her every evening from Escondido, in southern California. Douglas Frazier was seventy-four now, with a bad heart, and Iris Frazier had recently dislocated her hip, so they couldn’t make the trip to Minneapolis, especially now that winter was closing in. But they tried to reassure her that it was only a matter of time before somebody would recognize Tasha and Sammy on a street corner someplace, and bring them home. Every time she put down the phone, however, she believed them a little less.

  Agent Kellogg called her too, sometimes three times a day, no matter where she was or what she was doing. But each day the calls were the same. “We had a sighting in Presque Isle, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Sorry.”

  The snow grew thicker and thicker and the lakes turned to stone. WCAM Radio 830 forecast that this was going to be the worst winter in the Twin Cities area since 1864, when temperatures had dropped to minus forty-five. A strange hush descended on Minneapolis, as SUVs crept around like tumbrels, and people stalked around like drunken scarecrows on Stabilicer boots, and even diesel fuel started to freeze.

  “We had a sighting in St. Louis Park. We had another sighting in Mankato. Both false alarms. Sorry.”

  But on the second day of December, just as she was leaving the house, the mailman came across the snowy front yard and handed Lily a secondhand manila envelope, stuck down with Scotch tape. The previous addressee’s name had been heavily crossed out in blue ballpen and her own name and address written to one side. Lily turned it this way and that; then she carried it back inside the house, took off her gloves and opened it up.

  Inside, she found a yellowed old photograph, about ten by eight, stuck to a piece of cardboard. It showed a small boy in a striped T-shirt and dark shorts standing outside a barn, holding a piece of wood shaped like a rifle.

  She felt the stubble on her head prickle, and her hand started to tremble. Jeff. This was Jeff, when he was a boy.

  She went across to the phone and punched out Sylvia’s number. The phone rang and rang for over two minutes before Sylvia eventually answered.

  “Blake residence?” said Sylvia, as if she wasn’t too sure about it herself.

  “Where is this?” Lily demanded. “This place in the photograph?”

  “It’s Christmas in two weeks. I thought if we could find them . . . maybe I could see them at Christmas.”

  “Where is this?” Lily screamed at her. “You knew about this place and you didn’t tell me?”

  “You don’t have to yell at me. I forgot all about it till this weekend, when I was tidying up Jeff’s old room. Then I remembered you asking me if he had a favorite hideout.”

  “Sylvia, I need to know where this is, and I need to know right now.”

  “There used to be an abandoned farm about a mile away—Sibley’s place. It’s all built up now, mostly, but the old barn is still there. When he was a boy, Jeff used to play in that barn all day sometimes, pretending he was a cowboy. He used to walk around with a spent match in his mouth and his eyes all slitty and telling me that he was Clint Eastwood.”

  Lily was still trembling. “Sylvia, if I find out that Jeff took my children there . . .”

  “I’m trying to help you, Lily. You don’t have to get so mad at me. You think that I don’t want to see those children, too?”

  Lily held up the receiver in front of her face, staring at it in anger and disbelief, as if she could throttle it. But then, with an effort, she quietly hung it up. Angry as she was, she knew that Sylvia was more confused and worn-out than malicious, and she didn’t want to antagonize her, in case she needed to ask her for any more help.

  She dialed the number that Special Agent Rylance had given her.

  “Mrs. Blake?” said Special Agent Rylance. He sounded very weary.

  “I think I might have found Jeff’s sanctuary—the place where he used to go when he wanted to get away from the world.”

  “Give us twenty minutes, Mrs. Blake. We’ll call around and pick you up.”

  It started snowing again, quite suddenly, and they had to drive to Nokomis at a crawl. Even though it was only ten thirty A.M. the sky was dark, and all of the vehicles on Forty-Second Street had their headlights on.

  Special Agent Rylance looked at the back of the photograph. “Jeff, Sibley’s Barn, 1981. You don’t want to get your hopes up about this, Mrs. Blake. All the same, I wish your mom-in-law had shown it to us before.”

  “Ex-mom-in-law,” Lily corrected him.

  They rolled slowly past Sylvia’s house, kept on going until they reached a new development of three- and four-bedroom houses, built around a curving hill and landscaped in descending terraces. This morning the hill was deeply buried in snow, and a crowd of twenty or thirty young children were tobogganing. Lily couldn’t stop herself from looking carefully at each of their faces, just in case they happened to be Tasha or Sammy. Totally illogical, she knew. Totally impossible. But she still couldn’t help herself.

  Special Agent Rylance frowned at the large-scale local map that was unfolded on his lap. “Here we are . . . Sibley’s End. This is where the old farm used to be. The barn is actually marked here—look. Sibley’s Barn, circa 1882. Take a left here, Nathan, then we should see it up on the right-hand side.”

  Sibley’s End turned out to be a small collection of two-story brick homes with snow-covered SUVs parked in their driveways, and a motley collection of snowmen standing in their front yards. Special Agent Kellogg parked at the very far end of the development, where there was a black overgrown tangle of briars, and they all climbed out of the car. Between the briars they found a narrow zigzag pathway that led to what was left of Sibley’s Farm—a half-acre triangle of snowy field. In the far corner of the field stood a dilapidated barn, its roof sagging and most of its green paint weathere
d away.

  Lily pushed her way through the briars and started to trudge across the field, with Special Agents Rylance and Kellogg following close behind her. In the near distance, they could hear the whistling and screaming of airplanes at Minnesota International, as they lined up for their slot to take off. A fat gray rabbit jumped and scurried across the field and vanished into the briars. Lily couldn’t help thinking about Sammy. He used to love the story about Brer Rabbit and the Briar Patch.

  “Hang me just as high as you please, Brer Fox,” says Brer Rabbit, says he, “but for the Lord’s sake don’t throw me in the briar patch.”

  “Nobody’s been here since the snow started,” said Special Agent Rylance.

  Special Agent Kellogg approached the barn’s main door. It had collapsed on its runners years ago, but there was still a small access door in the middle, which was fastened with nothing more than a long twist of rusty wire.

  “Looks like this wire could’ve been disturbed not too long ago,” said Special Agent Kellogg.

  “Kids, probably,” said Special Agent Rylance.

  “I very much doubt it, Dick. Kids don’t play in smelly old barns any more. They stay in their well-appointed centrally heated bedrooms, playing with their X-Boxes.”

  “Well, let’s take a look inside anyhow.”

  Special Agent Rylance unwound the wire and wrenched open the door. He took a flashlight out of his coat pocket and cautiously climbed into the barn. After a moment he reappeared and said, “Empty. No sign that anybody’s been here, either.”

  Lily and Special Agent Kellogg stepped into the barn too. It was high and gloomy, although scores of shingles had slipped, so that dull gray daylight filtered through to the floor. The agents’ flashlights flickered from one side to the other, and up to the hayloft, criss-crossing each other like lightsabers, but there was nothing here except heaps of dusty, dried-out straw, and two rusty plow blades, and part of a half-dismantled generator.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Blake,” said Special Agent Rylance, laying his hand on her shoulder.

  Lily looked around one last time. She was just about to step back out of the door when she glimpsed a small button shining on the floor, almost completely hidden among the straw. She turned to Special Agent Kellogg and said, “Here . . . can you point your flashlight down here?”

  She bent down and picked the button up. It was new, plastic and pearly, and there was a tiny shred of torn cotton attached to it, blue and green.

  She felt breathless. “This is Sammy’s,” she said, holding it up in front of the flashlight. “This is a button from Sammy’s pajamas.”

  Special Agent Rylance came forward and peered at it. “You’re sure about that?”

  “He was wearing blue-and-green checkered pajamas when he was kidnapped, wasn’t he? This is from the same pajama top—I’m sure of it. He was here. So it must have been Jeff who took him.”

  “Too bad you picked it up,” said Special Agent Rylance. “Might have had a partial on it. All the same . . .” He reached into his inside pocket and took out a crumpled brown envelope. “I’ll send it to the lab, see what they can make of it. And we’ll get some forensics people round here ASAP. Nathan—do you want to call Murray Halperin for me?”

  Lily bent over again and quickly started to flick away the straw, trying to find any more evidence that Sammy had been here. But Special Agent Rylance quickly took hold of her arm and said, “No, Mrs. Blake. If Sammy was here, then this is a crime scene, and you mustn’t disturb the evidence. It could make all the difference between finding your children or not finding them.”

  Lily stood up straight and stared at him. “What do you mean ‘not finding them?’ You promised me that you were going to find them. You promised.”

  “Quickly, was what I meant, Mrs. Blake. Finding them quickly.”

  But Lily could see by the way he glanced across at Special Agent Kellogg that he hadn’t meant “quickly.” Tasha and Sammy had been missing now for forty-six days, and the FBI’s own statistics were increasingly pessimistic with every hour that passed.

  Special Agent Rylance escorted her back across the Brer Rabbit field. Their breath smoked in the mid-morning gloom.

  As they climbed into the car, Special Agent Rylance said, “There’s one consolation, Mrs. Blake. If you’re right about that button, and it is Sammy’s—”

  “It is. I’m sure of it.”

  “Well, if it is, we have much less reason to be concerned for Tasha and Sammy’s safety. If they were brought here, then it’s almost certain that your ex-husband took them, and I very much doubt that he would injure them in any way.”

  Lily looked back toward the old barn. “What will they do—the forensics people? Will they be able to tell if Jeff was there?”

  “They’ll look for footprints, fibers, cigarette butts—you name it. If anybody drove a vehicle across that field on the night that Tasha and Sammy were taken, they would have left very deep tire tracks, and since it started to freeze only a few days later, the chances are that those tire tracks are very well preserved. We’ll also start a house-by-house inquiry, to see if any of the residents in this development saw anything unusual.”

  Lily looked around. “If only snowmen could talk,” she said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  But the snowmen remained mute, and the people who lived in Sibley’s End had seen nothing, and the FBI’s forensic team found no tire tracks or distinctive footprints or any other material evidence. The single pajama button with the shred of blue-and-green cotton attached to it was the only indication that Jeff had taken Tasha and Sammy. Even then, Lily had bought Sammy’s pajamas on sale at Dayton’s, so there was no conclusive proof that the button was his.

  Christmas came, and the Twin Cities sparkled with lights and decorations, and it snowed for three days solid. Lily took Petra, Jamie, and William to the Holidazzle Parade at the Nicollet Mall, and then for pizza and frozen custard at Marco’s. She found it painful, taking them out, but to watch them clapping and laughing at the marching Santas was a more endurable pain than sitting at home, in her dark and empty house, waiting for phone calls that came less and less frequently.

  She spent Christmas Day with Agnes and Ned and the children. Before lunch they bowed their heads around the table and said a special prayer for Tasha and Sammy and their safe return. Lily had bought Tasha the new Bratz disco doll, and a talking robot for Sammy. She wrapped their presents in gold and silver and left them under the tree, as a way of showing that they were not forgotten, and that she expected them to be home soon.

  She was standing in the kitchen with Agnes, talking and drinking a glass of red wine, when Ned came in and said, “Lily? Couple of gentlemen visitors for you.”

  For a split second she thought: Not Special Agents Rylance and Kellogg, please. Not with bad news, not on Christmas Day. But then Bennie Burgenheim appeared, with snow melting on the shoulders of his big red padded windbreaker.

  “Lil! Happy Christmas!” He came tip-toeing into the kitchen and gave her a kiss. “I brought you a present,” he said. He turned around and held his hand out. In the doorway behind him stood a thin-faced man wearing a long black overcoat and carrying a gray wide-brimmed hat. The man gave Lily a small, tight smile and lifted up his hat by way of acknowledgment. He had dense black eyebrows and black glittery eyes and a narrow, bony nose. His chin was blue, as if he hadn’t shaved since the day before yesterday.

  “Lily, want you to meet John Shooks. John—this is Lily Blake, whom I was telling you about.”

  “Bennie,” said Lily, trying not to sound too irritated. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on here?”

  “For sure. John is the private detective who helped out my brother Myron. I thought since Christmas had come and the FBI still hadn’t found where Tasha and Sammy were taken to, maybe John could have a try.”

  “Bennie, I know you mean well. But I really believe that the FBI is doing everything that anybody possibly can do.”

  “I’m sure the
y are, Lil. But what do you have to lose? You know what it’s like when we’re having a tough time shifting an unattractive property. Sometimes it helps to bring in somebody new, so that they can look at the problem from a fresh point of view.”

  “Agreed,” said Lily. “But selling a clunker is a whole lot different from hunting for somebody who’s taken your children. Those FBI agents told me that they have very carefully planned procedures, so that they don’t spook the people they’re looking for.”

  “Of course they do, Mrs. Blake,” said John Shooks, “and quite right, too.” He had a dry Minnesota accent like a creaky door, and a slight lisp, so that “course” came out “coursh.” He stepped forward and put down his hat on the kitchen counter. “One of the great difficulties when you’re looking for parental kidnappers is that their victims are often willing accomplices to their own abduction.”

  “What do you mean? My children wouldn’t have gone with their father willingly.”

  “Maybe not to begin with, granted. But you can guarantee that he’s giving them the time of their life. And you can also guarantee that he’s been working on them since day one, undermining their feelings for you. It doesn’t take much.”

  Agnes snapped, “Tasha and Sammy could never stop loving their mother, ever, no matter what Jeff might say to them.”

  Shooks raised one eyebrow. “With all due respect, ma’am, young children can be very easily manipulated. They’re young children, after all: they’re supposed to be suggestible. That’s how they learn things. And it doesn’t take much in the way of amusement parks and rocky-road ice cream to convince a pre-teen kid that life with Daddy is a whole lot funner than staying at home with Mommy, tidying her bedroom and washing dishes and doing her geography homework.”

  “I don’t think my children are like that,” said Lily, defensively.

  “What? They don’t like roller-coaster rides? They don’t like ice cream? They don’t prefer swimming to schoolwork? Unusual kids, if you don’t mind my saying so, Mrs. Blake.”