On the edge of our bathtub is a little green elephant. It has stood there since the children were small. My wife keeps it there to hide the soap behind it.

Once upon a time, there were a boy and a girl. The boy was five and so was the girl. They were twins who looked nothing alike at all. The little boy, that was Klaas, had black hair like his father. The girl, Melissa, had blonde hair like her mother.

No one was ever to notice that I had been in the barn. More corpses might not be buried there, but the people from the FBI Laboratory could still show up. That’s why I didn’t break the padlock with one of the tools for changing tires.