What the Stranger Has Taken

Picture a pretty street of wood-frame houses and leafy oaks in the middle of a town of many such streets. This is late October, and in the twilight, jack-o-lanterns flicker on every porch. One house is decorated, not only with a pumpkin, but also with a huge purple ribbon tied around an oak tree.

A 6-year-old girl in a flowery dress plays under the tree. In the front room of the house, a candle burns and a woman sits behind it, watching her daughter through the window. The little girl tiptoes down the curb, holding out her arms like a trapeze artist.

“I am going to get a dog,” she announces to a young man standing in the street.

“What kind of a dog?” he asks in the singsong voice some adults adopt when talking to a child.

“I want a golden retriever,” the girl sings back. “Or a pit bull-uh-uh.” She stumbles with new terminology. “Bulldog,” she remembers. A pit bulldog.”

The man returns to his work, adjusting a camera angle so to place the house, ribbon, candle, girl and woman in the window all in one frame. It is a quaint scene, certainly, but Rockwellian imagery is not exactly what he’s after. He is shooting B-roll for a television show. The television show is “America’s Most Wanted.” A few weeks before, 12-year-old Polly Klaas was kidnaped from inside during a slumber party. A “stranger abduction,” the investigators call it. And despite an extraordinary community search and enormous amounts of national publicity, Polly has not been seen since. Which explains the ribbon, the candle, the pit bulldog, and all the rest.

*

Three girls Polly’s age sit cross-legged in a park one block away. They discuss the abduction, at first anyway, in the tough, worldly way of the teen-agers they will soon become. Listen:

-- “They were wrecking this town anyway, before this happened. They are building it up so much. It’s like L.A. or something.”

-- “When Petaluma is a total city and we have drive-bys all the time and all that, THEN I will be totally freaked out. But not now. Now it is probably the safest it has ever been. The parents are all freaked out. Everyone is always saying ‘Be careful. Be careful.’ They are locking doors and windows and everything.”

-- “They teach us what to do if we get in trouble. Where to kick and how to gouge their eyes out. And how to scream. My dad says to yell ‘Help! I really mean it. Help! I really mean it.’ ”

They giggle: the nonsense of adults. As dusk dissolves toward darkness, however, the teen-agers-to-be revert back a bit. They become little girls again. Their eyes grow wider, their commentary less certain. They talk of nightmares and the comfort of a parents’ bed. They scare themselves with bogyman stories. They sneak second glances at your face, the silent calculations are easy to imagine: Who is this stranger? You hold your notebook higher, for all the neighborhood to see.

-- “It’s kind of freaky. We were passing out flyers a few days after. And the kidnaper guy was supposed to drive a gray Honda, right? And this guy was talking to us. And all of the sudden we realized he looked JUST LIKE the guy who did it, you know? And then he got in a GRAY CAR and drove away. I mean we ran home. We were really freaked.”

-- “You hear all these things about what might have happened.”

-- “Cults.”

-- “Devil worship.”

-- “You just don’t know what happened.”

-- “It’s scary.”

-- “It’s like it could have happened to you.”

Finally, one girl says she has to go and hurries toward home. The other two follow close behind. It is now dark. Two elderly women walk by with a dog on a leash. They stop and look you over before walking on. Who can blame them?

*

What the stranger took from Petaluma was more than Polly Klaas, although that for now certainly is his most heinous crime. What he also took from this Northern California town of 45,000--a folksy place known for chickens, arm-wrestling champions and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz--was simple trust. This he stole especially from children old enough to understand the significance of purple ribbons and wanted posters.

For them, and maybe even their parents, the nights always will seem a bit darker, the shadows longer, the strangers more strange. Nothing will ever be just as it was, or quite as it seems. We know this only because it has happened, in different ways, to so many places. Once the bogyman comes, he never really leaves.