Back when they were partners in Saggerty Falls, Owen had been awed by Willow’s reluctant necromancy. “You, my friend, are spooky,” he’d say. There was that time his beloved Rover disappeared and Willow said he had a “feeling” about the dog’s whereabouts. The next day, he led them through a mile of forest to the animal, accidentally shot dead by a hunter. (Owen futilely tried to get the visiting detective to track the missing Rummer kids the same way.) The sheriff’s lame prognostication about the greenhorns becoming Cold Case legends served to put Willow on notice that hey, Owen Caplan could be spooky too—real schoolyard pissing contest shit. In an oh shit moment, it occurred to him that Adelaide was the secret sauce behind Owen feeling competitive.
After all, Willow got there first.
“The sheriff said you worked Cold Case in Manhattan,” said Lydia, nervously taking the lead.
“That would be correct.”
“He mentioned you had ‘special talents,’” said Daniel. He’d been staring at Willow from the moment he walked in, as if trying to place him.
“More like special needs.”
The three of them laughed and everything got better. Willow realized he was as jittery as they were. It’d been a long time since he had anyone under his wing, and he wasn’t sure he was up for it.
“That was actually my nickname in New York. ‘Special Needs.’ True story.” The couple smiled, warming to him. “So, what do you think of your new job description? It’s a helluva change from being out in the field. You’re definitely not going to have the kind of action you had recently.”
“That’s probably a good thing,” said Daniel.
“Sometimes when you have an encounter like that, you get a little taste and want some more.”
“Not me, sir,” said Lydia. “That’s not my purpose.”
He thought the phrasing was odd. “And what do you think that purpose might be, Deputy Molloy?”
As she began to reply, Daniel cut her off. “To bring justice and closure to those who no longer have a voice.”
“To be their voice,” said Lydia, with gusto.
“Well played,” said Willow. “It’s long hours, with not a lot of satisfaction. Cold Case isn’t glamorous. On TV, they solve everything in an hour—and I mean everything. In the real world, you might work on a case for a year and still be trying to tree the wrong bear.”
“We have three to five months, six at the outset,” said Lydia mechanically.
“How’s that?” said Willow.
The deputy awkwardly explained away the remark, as if it were a joke about being gung ho.
Well, she’s an odd one.
“Let me tell you something,” said Willow. “You crack a case in six months and you’ll be up for some kind of medal.”
“One thing doesn’t make sense to me,” said Daniel. “This is kind of a big deal, right? The money comes through for a Cold Case team and the sheriff handpicks us? No offense to my partner and me, we’re going to do an amazing job, one hundred percent. But why pick us? And not—I don’t know—a couple of seasoned detectives?”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” said Lydia, annoyed.
“Sheriff Caplan had a feeling about you. And as for the ‘seasoning,’ I guess that’s where I come in. Don’t think too hard about it.”
“We’re honored,” said Lydia. “I know we’ll learn a lot from you.” She turned to Daniel and said, “Any other brilliant questions?”
“Nope.”
“More will be revealed,” said Willow.
The Cold Case Kids smiled at each other; indeed it would.
* * *
• • •
In the Spirit Room, their lighthearted demeanor changed.
Willow noticed the temperature of the space growing colder. The detective started getting “feelings” of his own that he couldn’t identify. He had planned to dip the deputies’ toes in the water by sifting through the contents of a box or two but hung back and watched.
The familiar blueness of the room that sometimes wafted like smoke appeared for a moment—a long moment—wrapping itself around Lydia and Daniel in an embrace of curiosity before migrating to their heads, where it sparkled in excitation like a swarm of cobalt fireflies.
Willow was entranced.
Deputy Molloy was the proactive one. Deputy Doheny monitored her moves in a way that seemed almost chivalrous. She looked like she’d fallen into a trance. She ran her hand over the topmost boxes of the stacks, putting Willow in mind of a professional medium the department once hired when he worked homicide in New York. There was an elegance and focus to her movements that was almost balletic. The area became an enormous stage; the detective had a sense the orchestra was tuning up.
Daniel joined her as she lingered by the box scrawled RUMMER/JULY 4/’00. She lifted the lid and pulled out a tiny T-shirt found at the scene of the roadside abductions. He took it from her hand and held it to his much larger chest, turning to Willow with a smile to show him what was written there:
BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER
RISE
1.
She noticed a change and it was scary.
For all Honeychile’s gregariousness and sporadic outbursts of affection, Zelda, in the role of codependent bestie, was a close observer of her brilliant friend’s other moods as well. She understood that what the world (or student body) judged to be standoffish, bitchy, embarrassing or sometimes outright ridiculous—her nickname at school was Funnychile, not meant to be endearing—was simply a misunderstanding of Honeychile’s deep insecurities. It made Zelda so sad! She wanted to “fix” her friend, but lately their enmeshment wasn’t meshing so well. The BFF’s usual words of support had no effect.
Zelda spoke to her own mother about it, using her as a sounding board for her latest theory that the change in Honeychile’s personality might possibly be related to her cleidocranial dysplasia. She’d done a fair amount of Internet research on the subject, though as yet couldn’t confirm or deny. Each time she came across a dreadful user comment on various message boards that invoked horror-film scenarios of what could or probably already had happened to the brains of people afflicted with the condition, she comforted herself by watching YouTube interviews with Gaten Matarazzo, the amazing star of Stranger Things. He was smart—more than smart. He was, like, the smartest kid in the room.
Just like Honeychile.
When her mom offhandedly said, “Maybe she’s just manic-depressive like your uncle Walt,” Zelda went down that Internet rabbit hole faster than Alice herself.
What was it? What was wrong with her bestie?
The teacher expelled Honeychile from class because not only did she start humming “Rise,” but actually started to sing. Really belted it out. The kids were shocked at first and then began to laugh, which only seemed to inspire her. WTF? Zelda knew that Honeychile was a total Katy Perry hater—she liked Pink and Alessia Cara and Twenty One Pilots (and maybe parts of the Chainsmokers and Sia), but held Katy in outright contempt. She was always schooling Zelda on people she’d never heard of, like Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone and that amazing YouTube video of a bald woman who stared right at you the whole time as she sang this incredible breakup song.
And that crazy place they went that day at the museum! It was fun for a little but then it got seriously fucked-up and weird. In the cab, Honeychile told her that she was “just looking for a friend” and wouldn’t answer when Zelda kept asking, “What friend?” Finally, Honeychile said, “The friend I’m looking for is dead, okay? And I’m going to fucking hunt down and kill the person who did it!” She seemed utterly serious before dissolving into peals of laughter, like the theatrically silly girl Zelda once knew. Then the laughter turned into creepy cackles. “I’m writing a movie about a girl with superpowers who avenges death,” she said, her voice all different and really, really young-sounding. Zelda j
ust shook her head and let it go; all she wanted was to have her friend back. She was afraid, not only because she felt like she was losing Honeychile, but because she suddenly realized how much she meant to her.
The morning after the “Rise” incident at school, Zelda sat up in bed as if struck by a thunderbolt. The answer had arrived in the exact same way her teacher said that answers came to famous scientists in their sleep. She googled her brainstormy diagnosis and confirmed her suspicions:
Honeychile had multiple personality disorder!
2.
The texts came one after the other—
YOU SING LIKE KATIE PARY.
YOU LOOK LIKE KATE PARY.
ACCEPT U HAVE NO FUCKING TITS
AND U R SO FUKING UGLEE AND NOT FAMMOUS
++YR VOICE IS SHIT THEN +++++YOU R A FUCKTARD/DEEFORMD HORE
UGLY BITCHCUNNT
UGLIEST DEEFORMD CUNTBITCH HOREMONNSTER—
—but Honeychile was oddly unaffected. She thought the whole bully thing was tiresome and overplayed. Anyway, she could give as good as she got, laying low her detractors with a laser-beamed Funnychile aperçu. She liked to pretend her words had the same effect as in that awesome episode of Stranger Things, when Eleven made the bully pee his pants.
She had a pretty good idea who sent the texts, but at the moment couldn’t really be bothered. She had a lot of other things to distract her—like all those new, amorphous feelings and memories that definitely weren’t hers . . .
In the morning, she awakened from a dream that she was somewhere else—in a bedroom that wasn’t hers, surrounded by a menagerie of stuffed animals and a wall of magazine cutout collages of Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid and . . . Kaia Gerber—Kaia Gerber! How did she even know who Kaia Gerber was? That she was Cindy Crawford’s daughter! How did she even know who Cindy Crawford was? But she did. In the room, there was a mosaic of pictures of Marc Jacobs, all buff and tatted, posing with Neville, a bull terrier in a bow tie. How did she know what Marc Jacobs fucking looked like and that his dog had two hundred thousand followers on Instagram? But she did . . . in the dream, somewhere close by, was a woman with no face, making breakfast—eggs and toast, so real that Honeychile could smell the smells. Who was she? Her biological mother? Maybe that’s why she went to visit Mrs. Collins after all, and not because she missed her. To find her real mom . . .
There were darker thoughts too.
But were they thoughts? Or were they feelings—
Weren’t the two things the same?
Honeychile hated the corrective dental surgeries she’d undergone, dreaded them, and told her parents that she refused to have more. But now she had the strange sensation that she was having surgery again, somewhere else on her body, somewhere down below. Between her legs . . . And that she was being—buried? Buried! She could smell the mud as it burrowed into her nostrils, and tiny seizures of lancing coldness shot through her at the most inopportune times, even when she wasn’t dreaming. Like when she was on the toilet or when Rayanne came into the kitchen to try to talk to her about whatever.
And that nasty woman—the one who sicced those freaky creatures after her on the train. The train! Night after night she found herself onboard, hurtling through darkness. Sometimes she saw children in the corridors, but they were so much younger . . . She couldn’t make heads or tails of it. And that meeting at the church! Why wouldn’t the nasty woman let Zelda in? That wasn’t very nice. Even more vexing to Honeychile was that she really wanted to join the gathering, was desperate to, and as much as she hated that woman, she loved her too . . . It made no sense at all, but Honeychile had the feeling that she belonged there, and ached to meet the people on the other side of the door. Something about it all felt like family . . . so, so crazy! Since that afternoon they went AWOL from the museum, she’d had more dreams of being on the train, but those awful, shadowy creatures no longer wrestled her into the cabin. She’d been behaving herself.
That beast called Annie kept handing her slips of paper but instead of running, Honeychile crossed her arms and rebelliously shook her head, refusing even to look at what was written down.
* * *
• • •
This is what she heard when eavesdropping at Harold and Rayanne’s bedroom door after they thought she was sleeping:
“I’m so worried about her.”
“What now?” said Harold.
(He probably wasn’t even looking at his wife—just reading a book and being chill, which was his way.)
“You mean you haven’t noticed? Have you seen that weird shiver that she does?”
“Maybe she’s getting sick,” he said. “Did you take her temperature?”
“She is not getting sick, Harold. It’s like—like she’s . . . somewhere else. Like she’s someone else.”
“Hey, it’s called ‘fourteen,’” he said. “Fourteen-year-olds are someone else—a lot of the time, anyway. Fourteen-year-olds don’t know who the hell they are. So they try on different outfits.”
“No no no. You don’t know what I’m saying. Something isn’t right. My God, have you seen the drawing? In her room?”
“I don’t go in her room. Probably not a good idea for you to go in either.”
“It’s Katy Perry, Harold!”
“Who’s Katy Perry?”
“Like, her nemesis. She drew it right on the wall. It’s huge!”
“Fourteen-year-olds are artistic,” he said with a shrug.
“Well, I think something is wrong and I think she should see someone.”
“Maybe she should see Katy Perry.”
“It isn’t funny, Harold. I’m serious.”
Maybe I should see someone, thought Honeychile as she crept back to her room.
Yes, I should—I will.
Tomorrow!
3.
She sat on the couch with her head against Mrs. Collins’s breast, enfolded in the ravaged woman’s arms.
Her son was irretrievably gone—Hildy knew it in her heart—but for a series of moments, holding the distraught girl as she sobbed inconsolably, the grieving mother had the strange sensation that it had all been a dream, that Winston was here with her now, with them, as she rocked her unexpected houseguest like she used to rock her boy. How strange. She would take her relief wherever and whenever she found it.
It felt good to be a mom again.
When Honeychile asked if she could visit his room—“my room” was how she put it—Hildy said she would get her a blanket and she could nap right there on the couch. But the girl insisted, tenderly pleading, and to Hildy’s surprise it felt right.
She looked in on her an hour later.
It would be impossible to describe the emotions that played across Hildy’s face when, in dusky darkness, she saw the shape of the girl’s small, misshapen body beneath his favorite quilt—bolstered by an army of stuffed animals and watched over by wall-pastings of Kendall, Kaia and Bella torn from the pages of W—dead asleep.
MISSING CHILDREN
1.
As he left Sterling Heights for the Caplan home in Armada, Willow passed a middle school with a PLEASE BRING WINSTON HOME! banner strung across the gymnasium.
Along the way, some of the houses had a smiling picture of the boy on lawn stakes. Over the weekend, hundreds of volunteers went poking around the banks and foliage of the part of Clinton River that wound its way through Mount Clemens. As a cop, Willow knew it was futile and that he was likely dead.
It was way too soon to bring a date to the barbecue.
He wanted to feel the way men do when they walk into a party with a beautiful woman on their arm but didn’t think that would fly—especially not with a gal, technically speaking, who Willow hardly knew. He hadn’t yet earned that kind of goodwill, and showboating Dixie would just make him look foolish. He didn’t want to offend his ex either; young pussy had a way
of stirring the pot. At the same time, he kicked himself for not inviting her, because Dixie had the knack of generally chilling him out (more so since the insanity with Annie), a talent that definitely would have come in handy at the backyard hullabaloo. He kicked himself one more time because his concerns about Adelaide felt codependent, flashbacking him to the worst parts of their marriage.
“There he is!” said Owen, standing at the grill in full barbecue regalia. “How do you like your meat?”
“Young,” whispered Willow, uncharacteristically macho. His thoughts still lingered on Dixie and he felt a tad unruly.
Owen laughed and licentiously prodded at a sizzling patty. “Speaking of which. Had any lately, Dub?”
“Nope. Been sending everything back to the kitchen.”
“Well, at least you put an order in. Trouble with you is you’re too picky,” said Owen. “You didn’t used to be that way.”
“I didn’t used to look this way.”
They chortled and then Adelaide waved Willow down. He dutifully went over.
“Well, hey there, Dubya!”
“Hi, Addie.”
“You good?”
“I am excellent.”
“That’s what I like to hear. And thanks for coming to our event the other day. I know you hate that kind of thing.”
“No worries. I actually had a nice time.” He stared at his shoes a moment, wondering how to approach it. “That lady you introduced me to . . . you know, the volunteer—”
“Annie?” she said brashly. “Little old for you, isn’t she?”
“Very funny,” said Willow. “I was just curious.” He had to circle around to it. “You know—are all those people retired? The volunteers? Or are they independently wealthy?”
“Well, Annie isn’t. Makes the drive from Detroit twice a week. I think she takes the bus. They’re selfless people, most of them. Annie’s a saint.”
A Guide for Murdered Children Page 16