I can’t account for every moment of my afternoon. Never did it occur to me that I would one day be called upon to do so but, that being the case, I will report what I remember. I can comfortably testify that, on the afternoon of December sixteenth, I visited the White Paw Shopping Center, where I spent a brief amount of time in The Slack Heap, searching for a gift for Kyle. I found what he wanted but not in his size. I then left The Slack Heap and walked over to ——- & ——-, where I bought a ——- for my daughter Jacki. (I’m not going to ruin anyone’s Christmas surprises here. Why should I?) I stuck my head inside Turtleneck Crossing and searched for candles at Wax and Wane. I bought a gift for Clifford at ——-, and I suppose I browsed. There are close to a hundred shops at the White Paw Center and you’ll have to forgive me if I can’t provide a detailed list of how long I spent in this or that store. I shopped until I grew wary of the time. On the way home I stopped at The Food Carnival and bought a few items. It was getting dark, perhaps four-thirty, when I pulled into the driveway of our home on Tiffany Circle. I collected my packages from the car and entered my home, where I was immediately struck by the eerie silence. “This doesn’t feel right to me,” I remember saying to myself. It was an intuition, a mother’s intuition, that unexplainable language of the senses. I laid down my bags and was startled by the sound they made — the crisp noise of paper bags settling against the floor. The problem was that I could hear the sound at all! Normally I would have heard nothing over the chronic bleating of Baby Don and the incessant blaring radio of Khe Sahn.

“Something is wrong,” I said to myself. “Something is terribly, terribly wrong.”

Before calling out for Khe Sahn or checking on the baby I instinctively phoned the police. I then stood there, stock-still in the living room, staring at my shopping bags until they arrived (twenty-seven minutes later!!).

At the sound of the squad car in the driveway, Khe Sahn made an entrance, parading down the stairs in a black lace half-slip and a choker made from the cuff of Kevin’s old choir robe.

“WHERE IS THE BABY?” I asked her. “WHERE IS DON?”

Accompanied by the police we went upstairs into the nursery and stood beside the empty crib.

“WHERE IS MY GRANDCHILD, DON? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO THE BABY?”