A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  “Look, history nerds and their mutant offspring aren’t really my thing,” says Penny. “I like the tall, dark, childless type.”

  “Oh come on, honey, Roy Eakins is a friggin’ action hero. He’s a great dad and that says a lot. He’s single and quirky and brilliant—which means your kids would be single and quirky and brilliant.”

  “Ha!”

  “Plus he’s friggin’ funny. He’s very dry.”

  “Just like my pussy.”

  “We can remedy that!”

  “We’d make pretty spectrum babies. You know, all scary and autistic.”

  “You’d be cute together. And whatever—you could do it one time, to break the ice. You know, that’s formed between your legs.”

  “Can you leave my pussy alone, please?”

  “I’ll join the club! Know what I heard Roy say? ‘History doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.’ Don’t you love that?”

  “That’s Mark Twain, brainiac. Now Twain, I’d fuck.”

  “I’m serious, Pen, we have got to hook you up. With someone.”

  “The ink on the divorce papers isn’t dry, Ellie.”

  “Oh, bullshit. Use it or lose it, girl. How long has it been?”

  “Since—?”

  “You know.”

  “By my own hand? A few hours ago.”

  “You are such a slut.”

  “Actually, I meant a few minutes ago. In the guest bathroom.”

  In paroxysms again.

  * * *

  • • •

  At this same moment, Ronnie Rummer stands by the grill in a spattered GOTTA PROBLEM WITH THIS? cook’s apron, tiny American flags tucked over both ears. Next to him is the action-figure history teacher Roy Eakins, oblivious to the tipsy, prying eyes apprising him from the kitchen window. Ronnie goads the meat until it sizzles, then gyrates triumphantly, embarrassing his son, Troy, but delighting daughter Maya, provoking her to buffoon-salacious imitation. The nine-year-old is a freckle-faced Alfred E. Neuman doppelgänger; his younger sister’s hair a fiery red torch, a geyser, a local attraction that Elaine maintains with religious devotion.

  Through it all, Roy’s son stands apart, examining his own man-sized hands—deep in the solving of their mysteries.

  As if called by a sovereign voice, Troy rushes off and Maya follows like one attached by rope. Grundy looks up and moves toward them before Roy commands, “Stay. You stay with us.”

  Penny and Elaine exit the house bearing full glasses of wine. Enter Detective Willow Wylde, in from New York to surprise his daughter with a puppy on her Sweet Sixteenth. (Word is, she knows he’s at the barbecue and is dodging him. She’s been dodging the world for a few years.) Willow has a rep as a rake and a bad boy and likes that the girls have had a little too much. He’s already been working Penny, who he always thought had a thing for him back in the day when he was a policeman in the Falls; his upgrade to the Manhattan big leagues can only have helped his case. Willow’s research in the field had proven that certain women, particularly divorcées, couldn’t resist the glamour of a big-city cop, particularly the glamour of a New York City narcotics cop. He and his NYPD drinking buddies liked to call it the job description that launched a thousand blow jobs. When they said their prayers, they thanked the TV procedurals for that.

  The Rummers had invited Owen Caplan, but he politely declined to attend. Willow and Owen once were patrol-car partners, the local Starsky and Hutch, before the shit blew up between them in so many ways, and in the years since he’d left for the Big Apple, Owen had been appointed by the city to be chief of the five-man Andy of Mayberry department. (He’d always been ambitious, and Willow thought, Good on the little fella.) Adelaide, Willow’s ex, had also been invited but politely declined. Hmmmm. Pace, Willow’s child with Adelaide, was invited too, but MIA—to be fair, his daughter hadn’t actually RSVP’d (not being a student of Emily Post) and Willow still hoped she’d turn up. If Pace didn’t care to see him (it seemed like half the world didn’t care to see him), she might just give a shit about seeing the $650 puppy he brought. If Dad had been unreliable in everything else, he’d at least been consistent with guilt-induced, over-expensive birthday presents.

  Like most of the neighborhood men, Ronnie Rummer had done a lot of thinking about Penny and what it’d be like to have her. She had a wild streak that she didn’t try too hard to conceal, and they’d always had one of those easy, flirty things going on, or at least he thought they did. He’d have to watch himself a little because the low stone fence of Penny’s marriage was now gone. His own fence was tall and strong, but like any suburban Superman he could see himself leaping over it in a single bound.

  The fire in the grill goes out.

  Ronnie squirts the can—no lighter fluid.

  He turns his burger-flipping chores over to Dubya and goes to find the kids.

  Troy’s in the meadow behind the house with a sparkler. On the front of his T-shirt it says BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER. On the back, AND PARTY ON, DUDES.

  “Hey! What’d I tell you about sparklers, Troy? You wait until tonight.” Troy casts his eyes to the ground while his little sister cavorts to unheard songs. “I need you to go to Ebenezer’s for lighter fluid.”

  “Can I take Maya?”

  “Okay. Ride on over but don’t be long.”

  The smile returns to his son’s face. Reinvigorated by a mature, useful task, he looks at the sparkler and then looks at his dad—what to do? “Put it in the ground,” says Ronnie. He buries it and, with that task done, is ignited anew. (Nine-year-old boys are all about ignition.)

  The siblings run off, the invisible rope between them taut.

  * * *

  • • •

  What was it that caused Willow to shiver when Ronnie left the dormant grill? No—more than that, more a sickening familiar vortex than a shiver—a fluish, dizzying, feverish gust that raced his pulse and seemed to make gooseflesh of his very soul, nearly knocking him off his feet.

  Standing at the barbecue, a sense-memory déjà vu turned his stomach . . . and with it came that blueness again, age-old, without origin, without earthliness. (In his mind, he always called it the Blue Death.) Nana used to nurse him through what she called “the fits,” but Willow’s mother didn’t like the term, hated it, countering that it was merely “the ague”—that odd, antiquated word—no, Mom didn’t like the spooky way Nana fussed over her boy’s ague at all. His grandmother would then submit to her daughter before faking her out in order to comfort him, sneaking into his room and whispering in his hot pink ear through the blue delirium. He never understood or recalled what she was saying, so dreamlike, yet still it soothed, but the nature of the elixir remained forever tongue-tied and unknown. Nana—how he loved his Nana!—was for sure some kind of Old World witch. One time when “the fits” happened, Willow heard barking in his head; Palomar, their runaway German shepherd, was in the midst of dying crosstown, impaled on a fence by three neighborhood sado-punks. The Blue Death . . . The Wyldes hadn’t even known the dog had escaped the house.

  Guests begin arriving with Tupperwares of egg salad and coleslaw, medleys of macaroni and fruit salad, potpourris of this and that from family recipes. And desserts: brownies and apple pie, peach cobbler and s’mores, banana pudding and Oreo creations, the whole Great American Sugar Songbook.

  Maya pedals furiously, that rope between she and her brother too tight then too loose, the wild garden of hair on her head burnt-orange in the midday sun. Troy exults in his superior strength and locomotion, leaving her in the dust. (Nine-year-old boys are all about lording it over little sisters.) Her unicorn is in the flowery bicycle basket—she made a daybed for it with a silk pillow Mom had given her. When she isn’t looking toward Troy, she glances at the sleeping creature with the devotion of a rehearsing mother.

  Troy races to Ebenezer’s amid the distant ambient s
ounds, some near but mostly far away, of Roman candles and firework rat-a-tats. Apparently not everyone got Dad’s memo to wait until dark. The pulse of his heart accelerates at the hijinks of the taboo breakers but he isn’t envious, only becoming more excited about tonight’s celebrations.

  A block from Ebenezer’s, he turns to look back—sister gone.

  She isn’t dead, not yet, but will never speak again or have recordable conscious thought. Maya’s body has a week left of breathing and making all manner of unrecognizable sounds, an animal’s involuntary reaction to the work being done. Troy will soon be in water, reunited (in a sense) with his sister-princess, looking on with supportive, sightless eyes like a figurine propped on the balcony of a decayed castle in a forgotten aquarium.

  THE MACOMB ORCHARD TRAIL

  Present Day

  BEFORE THE DEATH OF LYDIA

  The body lay in a gulch, about a hundred yards off the hiking trail.

  Is it naked?

  No—this isn’t a homicide, so why should it be?

  What is it wearing, then?

  All those things that say runner/hiker.

  Sex?

  Female.

  No mystery here.

  This is no crime scene . . .

  The “Orchard,” northwest of Saggerty Falls, runs alongside the abandoned Michigan Air-Line Railway, stretching from Richmond to Dequindre Road, where it connects to the Clinton River Trail. The path the woman traversed was in an area unfrequented by trailbirds, but Lydia Molloy is—was—a solitary hiker by nature. Her last repose is an almost miraculously hidden spot that cannot be seen from the air, should there have been a rescue effort. There will be no cause for that, at least not for some months.

  Still, there is no mystery.

  We know her name and occupation.

  We know how she died, and it wasn’t on duty . . .

  She was—is—a Macomb County Sheriff’s deputy, age thirty. If the body had been collected, toxicology would reveal low levels of oxycodone. She injured a rotator cuff while wrestling with a suspect a few years back, and the two pills a day that she took to deal with the pain had become a mostly manageable habit.

  She was listening to her Spotify playlist. Inexplicably, she preferred classical music while hike-running but only played “my ladies” when at home—Sia, Gaga, Rihanna.

  At the time of death, the particular track she was absorbed in, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, is notable, but for reasons to be later revealed.

  How is it, then, that there is no mystery?

  What happened?

  She saw something off-trail, glinting in the sun—

  It was that sort of thing one hears about all one’s life, the bad-luck fall that cracks the neck or bleeds the brain. The friend of a friend falls from their bike and their head hits the curb or trivially stumbles and destiny conspires to end everything—memory, desire, breath, life—in an instant. Usually, it’s bodysurfers into sandbars and divers into shallow pools that one reads about. In the deputy’s case, she tumbled down the maw of the gulch before coming to an abrupt, hidden rest. In the moments that Lydia was falling, what was she thinking? She wouldn’t have had time to voice—or think—more than Shit! though not surviving couldn’t have been in her mind-set, not remotely. A gross and damnable inconvenience, yes, but never the end of all things.

  If there was a witness, what would they have seen?

  Woman on trail, walking with resolution. Something ten yards ahead gets her attention. Casually curious, she leans to investigate and then trips and tumbles. A nasty fall but the grassy, sloping terrain is such that a sense of fatality isn’t in the air. The spectator draws closer, their drone’s-eye view hovering over where the hiker has come to rest. The witness zooms in on the rock—the rock of destiny, ending memory and desire—and thinks, What terrible luck. The witness stays a few frantic minutes, uncertain if the hiker is dead (we know otherwise), and is about to go for help when something remarkable happens. The lifeless body has a great seizure, a moment of electrified cosmic astonishment to flesh and bones. It stands, haloed in blue. (What is that otherworldly blue?) The hiker’s anguished and astonished face, like that of a child roused from deep sleep, contorts in tears, the mouth letting out a great yawp—more like the scream of a little girl who lost her parents in a department store of the dead. The witness is transfixed, more by the eerie phenomenon of what they see than by the hard fact of the woman’s sudden reanimation.

  The face becomes a mask of serenity, regal, timeless. The body remains in place, stock-still. Rigid, though not in the sense of rigor mortis.

  A monument now.

  A sphinx.

  And the gulch—the entire valley—is bathed in the parfum of blue mist, sprayed from a nebulizer of the Unknown.

  The body that was Deputy Lydia Molloy and will improbably remain Deputy Lydia Molloy a few months longer begins its slow, labored, somehow elegant ascent from the ravine.

  It stops short of the trail and sees something glinting. Not the glint of the original thing that stirred her curiosity—an inexplicably discarded silver belt buckle, of all things—but rather the iPod that flew from Lydia’s grasp at the beginning of the fall. (Though the earbuds remained attached to the body throughout the fall.) The arm of the body reaches out to retrieve it. The hands of the body plug in the earbuds and she resumes listening to the music.

  Kindertotenlieder . . .

  As Lydia makes her way back to her car, wobbly as a foal yet growing stronger and more resolute with each step, she hews close to the tracks, stepping over a rusted rail, making a game of walking over the buried, blown-out ties just as a child might, arms outstretched as if balancing on a tightrope.

  A small smile comes to her lips as she imagines a lumbering, clacking train springing up around her—

  At last, she knows she is home again.

  AFTER THE DEATH OF LYDIA

  1.

  We’ve grown accustomed to these, sometimes preceded by a WARNING: What You Are About to See Will Be Disturbing to Most Viewers. The call of the global village’s electronic tom-toms . . .

  Bodycam tapes, not of the controversial racial genre, but those outlandish in their wholly unexpected outcome: like the Seattle slacker who was asked to show his ID by a cop on beat patrol. The kid is quiet and cooperative, charming even, diffident and polite—looks like, who’s the actor, Jesse Eisenberg?—the tousle-haired, archetypal, benignly twisted boy next door, such undeniable sweetness there, possessed of gentle smarts and nerdy passivity. The cop lowers his guard, because who wouldn’t? There is zero threat. The officer’s even enjoying their friendly exchange and is moving things along into a cozy wrap-up of conversational banter when the millennial pulls a gun from his backpack and shoots him.

  Kills!

  Scroll down for video, scroll down for frisson of shock and horror. Scroll down for madness and perversion, scroll down, scroll down—

  Here’s this one:

  A 911 call at 9:03, dispatched to the Saggerty Falls Sheriff’s Substation. What’s the problem? (Is there really one?) The manager of Tim Hortons seemed to think so. A gentleman in his forties, wearing a natty suit but no shirt or shoes. That in itself is no particular cause for alarm. He’s been there since they opened at 5:30 and now it’s 9:00 A.M. and he’s been singing for half an hour. The manager told him to please stop but he won’t. It started with Ed Sheeran, soft and on-key enough to be mildly confounding yet amusing to customers before seguing into an aggressive version of Panic! at the Disco’s “Death of a Bachelor.” Now he’s doing that song from Suicide Squad with “please don’t make any sudden moves” and it’s riding on the collective nerve.

  You’re lovin’ on the psychopath sitting next to you

  You’re lovin’ on the murderer sitting next to you

  You’ll think, how’d I get here, sitting next to you?

  The cruis
er with Deputies Lydia Molloy and Daniel Doheny is the first to arrive. They wear shoulder-mounted cameras—mandatory in Brave New Video World, even in a small village like Saggerty Falls. A patron or two has already posted cell phone mini-movies of the idiosyncratic soap opera on Twitter. “The whole world is watching” mantra is obsolete; now the whole world is watching itself watch . . .

  Lydia hangs back while Daniel approaches, interrupting the song. The gentleman’s muscular chest is bronzed and shaved, like some GQ model. GQ smiles a wry “my bad” smile at the deputy. Daniel’s cool—he’s always cool, and attuned to the quirkiness of whatever encounter, which is after all what makes work interesting. There’s a brief, unhassly exchange before he motions the gentleman to step outside. He complies. Lydia waits on the sidewalk for them to emerge, hand on gun. When the gentleman hits the street, he stretches out his arms like a sun worshipper and yawns dramatically before letting go an animal bellow of Dionysian bliss. Daniel doesn’t have a particular vibe (other than the oddness of it), but the detainee is built enough to warrant caution. Plus, experience has shown that when he doesn’t have a vibe, well, that’s usually not a good thing. Meth and/or mental illness can mask as anomalous eccentricity.

  The gent refocuses and folksily says, “It’s that bad, huh?”—Daniel knows that he’s referring to his singing voice.

  “I’ve heard worse,” says Deputy Doheny, to defuse.

  “Guess I should cancel my audition for The Voice—”

  With that, he shoves the deputy into the plate glass with enough force that it thunders and cracks. Then wheels around to Lydia, smiling calmly as she draws her gun. Inside the establishment, gasps and herd-scatter, but no one emerges—they rush toward the front counter instead to take cover. Onlookers make movies from across the street and from office windows.

  Deputy Lydia Molloy points her gun.

  “Get on the ground! Now!”