Volunteers gather at a storefront where the search for a 12-year-old girl kidnapped during a slumber party is directed. They talk about jobs, spouses or neglected household chores. What they don't talk about is giving up their search.
Nearly three weeks after a knife-wielding stranger snatched Polly Klaas from her bedroom, the search shows no sign of slowing."To quit would be to say, `We lost, you won. You took her, you can keep her,' " said spokesman Jay Silverberg. "We simply won't allow that."
Organizers estimate nearly $1 million in cash, supplies and equipment has been donated to the effort. That doesn't include the hours put in by a volunteer force of more than 3,000.
Television has jumped on Polly's peril, with Fox's "America's Most Wanted" broadcasting segments and MTV news picking it up when actress Winona Ryder, a Petaluma native, offered a $200,000 reward.
Millions of fliers showing Polly's picture and a composite sketch of her abductor have been spread cross-country from truck stops to store windows.
Polly's mother, Eve Nichol, calls it "pretty miraculous."
"We ask and there it is," she said Tuesday, gazing around the search headquarters where volunteers, many wearing Polly's favorite color (purple), answered phones, stuffed envelopes and set up fund-raisers.
"They're all family for life," Nichol said of the strangers who've turned out to help. Nichol and Polly's father, Marc Klaas, are divorced, but they have been working together on the search.
There have been tense moments, like the extortion attempt by a man whose first mistake may have been asking for $10,000 - $190,000 less than the reward.
That man, 20-year-old James Arthur Heard Jr., is due in court Friday for a bail hearing. His lawyer says he may not be competent to stand trial.
The Petaluma man was arrested Monday and booked for investigation of attempted extortion and posing as a kidnapper. He's not a suspect in the abduction.
Searchers know that many kidnappings end in tragedy, but they focus on those that haven't, including last year's recovery of a newborn stolen from a Berkeley hospital.
"No one will allow themselves to say we'll never get her back," Sil-ver-berg said.