A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  He let his mind drift, glancing at the corkboard as he played back that afternoon at the Rummers’. Ronnie went to find the kids to borrow lighter fluid from a neighbor. When he came back to the grill, they bullshitted awhile. Stomachs were growling and Ronnie got mad that Troy and Maya were taking so long; Willow could remember his face darkening, as if by a shadow. Ronnie jumped in the Camaro and went looking. Then all hell broke loose. A few days later, they drank some beers in Ronnie’s garage, a small reprieve from the hourly onslaught of fresh agonies. That was when he told Willow what was going through his head as he hightailed it down the road to find them—crazed-parent images, like his children being cut down in the middle of a field by a Cessna as it made an emergency landing.

  The detective walked to the window. He saw Lydia and Daniel in the pocket park across the street, in deep discussion. He wondered what they were saying. He was growing inordinately fond of the two. Willow had never met anyone like them but didn’t even know what that meant. He thought of sucking on a cigarette but reached in his jacket for a Nicorette instead. He’d lost the craving for drink and drugs—maybe all it had taken was the new gig. Someone showing a little faith.

  He bent down to gather a balled-up scrap that missed the wastebasket. He unfolded it, for no particular reason—a stick figure drawing of a girl with flaming red hair. Below it, also in a child’s scrawl, was hoo hert me? For a moment he thought it was evidence, but there was no stamp or penciled case file number. They wouldn’t be crumpling up evidence and tossing it anyway. He retrieved more drawings from the basket. One was of a small boy, with a cartoon bubble drawn above his head that read PAPA!!!!

  As he left the room, Lydia’s purse caught his eye. He looked out the window again; the novices were slowly on their way back to the building. He rummaged through the bag, a compulsion he’d had for as long as he could remember. His mother rapped his knuckles when she caught him, but he didn’t think that was fair because he never intended to steal. The habit persisted, occasionally getting him in trouble with girlfriends. He justified the quirk as the naturally curious predilection of a born detective.

  He pulled a folded paper from the side pocket, focusing on one of the paragraphs:

  Rule Number Three: As time goes by, you will find that you are becoming more “yourself.” But remember—while ADULTS are PLAYFUL, and CHILDLIKE qualities are usually tolerated and enjoyed, do NOT call ATTENTION to yourself with too much CRAZY HORSEPLAY! Listen to your Landlord!!!!

  That was unexpected—he didn’t peg Lydia as a New Agey “inner child” workshop-type.

  (But that part about landlords . . .?)

  He stuffed it back when he heard their footsteps in the hall.

  RIDERS ON THE STORM

  1.

  Each day after work, at Lydia’s place in Richmond, they threw themselves on the couch and measured their progress. It was Friday, the end of a week that had brought them to their knees.

  They were scared.

  It wasn’t because they didn’t yet have the leads they hoped for (it was still so early in the investigation)—no, it was something else, something ominous. They shared a disquieting sense of pending doom, as if any day the rug of the moment of balance would be yanked from beneath their feet, banished forever. Inexorably, their initial, almost religious feeling of purpose was being stripped away, replaced by indifference and accidie.

  A listlessness, a sickening blankness, crept in like a fog.

  “It just doesn’t make sense,” said Lydia. “I mean, aren’t we supposed to know what we’re doing by now?”

  “Like I’m the expert?” said Daniel.

  “Well, aren’t we kind of supposed to be the ‘experts’? And you know what I mean, Troy. By now, we’re supposed to at least already have some sort of an idea—”

  “I know what you mean.” He was ruminative but noncommittal. It just wasn’t a fun thing to talk about.

  A few days ago they began calling each other by their child-tenant names, but only while at home. The Porter told them that would happen—a “crossover day” when the children became not so much dominant as present, and began to assert themselves within the borrowed brains and bodies of their landlords. From then on, adult and child would enhance each other, preparing the way for the moment of balance. (In speaking of that process, the landlords often used a word not in the children’s vocabulary: “synergy.”) By blending beings—Lydia with Maya, Daniel with Troy—the end result would be far greater than its separate parts.

  “I still can’t shake this feeling,” he said.

  “What feeling.”

  “That I’ve met him before.”

  “Who.”

  “Our supervisor—Detective Wylde.”

  “Well, he’s an old friend of the sheriff, isn’t he? You’ve probably seen him around.”

  “Maybe,” he said, elongating the word.

  “They used to work together in the Falls.”

  “I know, I know.” He paused to organize his thoughts. “I’ll tell you something else that’s been troubling me,” said Daniel. “Don’t you think it’s weird that we’re cops?”

  “Weird like how?”

  “And not just cops—cold case cops.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “It’s just that . . . everything Annie’s told us about the mystery of it all, everything we’ve learned at Meetings—let me ask you this.” His smile became ironic. “When the train brings everyone back, does it drop them off to enroll in detective school? Are all the other kids, like, secretly going to night classes to learn about investigative techniques? Because that’s what we’re doing, isn’t it? Where’s the so-called mystery in that?”

  “I guess we are the only ones. Who are cops, I mean.”

  “You better believe we are! Fucking ‘Macarena’ José wasn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Please don’t use bad words,” she said. “But I still don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

  “Come on, Maya! Don’t you think it’s just a little bit strange that out of everyone in the group, we happen to be the ones who are actual cold case cops? We solve old murders for a living!”

  Something clicked in her head. “Oh my God,” she said, with a shiver. “That is totally brilliant. But what does it mean?”

  “I’m not the expert, sis.”

  “We have to talk to Annie—”

  “At the next Meeting. We’ll talk to her after.”

  “I don’t want to wait—let’s find out where she lives!”

  “Down, girl. Don’t go off the deep end, Freckles.”

  “It’s a little too fucking late for that,” she exclaimed.

  “You swore, you swore, you swore!” he said, in delight.

  “Lydia swore!”

  She blushed, clapping a hand over her mouth in prudish repentance. She started to giggle and Troy did too until both were practically rolling on the floor.

  After they composed themselves, he said, “You know, I did kind of talk to Annie about it already.”

  “What!”

  “Just a little . . .”

  “When, when, when?”

  “The last time we saw her.”

  “Oh my God, what did you say?”

  “What I already told you . . . but I hadn’t really thought about it as much as I have now. I said, ‘Annie, if after we get here we’re just supposed to know—you said it’s this mysterious knowledge that just comes—if that’s supposed to be what happens, why are my sister and I, like, in training to be cold case cops?’”

  “And what did she say?” said Lydia-Maya, rapt.

  “The Porter was, like, stumped. And it wasn’t some teaching moment either—you know, when she goes all Yoda-‘more-shall-be-revealed.’ Which was what I was expecting. She could have said that being cold case cops was just random—a random
thing that didn’t mean anything. But she didn’t. Nope! Wouldn’t go there. It was like my question had seriously fucked her up.”

  He anticipated Maya swatting him for the expletive but she ignored it, staring out the window in the same way she did when her brother used to read to her from a spooky fairy tale book.

  * * *

  • • •

  That night, Lydia sat bolt upright, startling him.

  “Oh my God,” she said. Her face was wet with the tears she’d shed while dreaming.

  “What’s going on?” he said, groggily.

  “It’s here!” she said, blissed out.

  “What?”

  “It’s here, I know it . . . I know now—” She paused and he waited for her to speak. “We need to get up! We need to go . . .”

  “Go where?”

  “We need to go to the airport.”

  “O-kayyyy,” he said. He looked at his phone; it was a little after 4:00 A.M. “So where to? Barcelona? Paris? How about Barbados?”

  “St. Cloud.”

  “St. Cloud, Minnesoda pop?”

  “This isn’t a joke, Daniel!”

  She leapt from bed and stripped off her PJs. The Daniel part liked to see her nude, but the Troy part looked away. He sat up and started to sing. “‘Don’t know why . . . there’s no clouds up in the sky, stormy weather . . .’”

  “It’s no sun up in the sky, not ‘clouds,’ doodie-breath. And it’s going to be cold, so dress accordingly.”

  “Can I have a little coffee first?”

  “At the airport,” said Maya.

  “Is the airport even open?”

  “The airport’s always open.”

  “Why don’t I just buy our tickets online?”

  “You can buy ’em on the way.”

  “May I be so bold as to ask what’s in Minnesoda pop?”

  “Rhonda.”

  “Who?”

  “Rhonda’s in Minnesoda pop.” She’d already turned on the shower and was sitting on the toilet to pee. “Rhonda from the Meeting,” she yelled. “He’s there—I saw him. Rhonda’s in St. Cloud.”

  2.

  There was a 6:10 A.M. flight to Minneapolis–St. Paul; Metro Airport in Detroit was an hour away. The sky had no moon and they felt as if they were plunging through the black tunnel of a dream. It was almost like being on the train again.

  “Do you want to tell me exactly what you saw?” said Daniel. “In your vision or your whatever . . .”

  “Just him: Rhonda. He was rushing to meet someone in St. Cloud. He was going so fast—”

  “Who was he meeting?”

  “More shall be revealed,” she said, almost gleefully.

  “Do you think it’s connected? That he’s connected? To us?”

  “He has to be,” said Lydia. “It felt . . . too strong.”

  “Do you know anything about Rhonda? What year she was murdered?”

  Lydia knew what everyone else did about their fellow travelers: next to nothing. The Porter stressed that individual history (of landlords and tenants) was none of anyone’s business and a distraction from the moment of balance. What purpose would such knowledge serve, anyway? God—or as Annie called it, the Great Mystery—was definitely not in the details.

  “I don’t know a thing about her,” she said. “But he’s a yoga instructor. I asked him once and that’s what he told me. Rhonda’s landlord, I mean.”

  Daniel stared at the road ahead, deep in thought, with that connect-the-dots look. Lydia loved watching his wheels turn.

  “Remember at the Meeting,” he said, “when Rhonda kept saying she wanted to know how she died?”

  “I do,” she said pensively.

  “I thought that was twisted. I mean, to be so insistent about it.” He paused. “I sure the fuck don’t want to know how I died.”

  * * *

  • • •

  They were in the air about two hours. Lydia raised an eyebrow when Daniel ordered a drink. He got the message and the tiny bottle sat unopened.

  The same irrefutable feeling that his sister experienced now saturated him: that Rhonda held the key. But could he trust such a thing? Before this, the nascent “visions” that presented themselves as exciting clues to the identity of their killers were ultimately exposed as no more than phantasms, a distorted series of headlines featuring the memories of the child-tenants Maya and Troy and their landlords, Daniel and Lydia. For example, Troy would find himself standing at a door that he was certain would open into the moment of balance, only to realize it led to rooms filled with the dark secrets that his landlord, Daniel, had suppressed: the hauntedness over murdering an innocent child in Afghanistan, the irrational guilt over the crib death of his son, his rage toward his estranged wife, even his shame at being impotent on that night he’d been scheduled to lose his virginity at age fifteen. The same thing happened to Maya, but for her the door was a beautiful wooden gate leading to a profusion of gardens. Each path she took uncovered Lydia’s secrets—the two abortions, the pain of an extramarital affair she’d had in her early twenties with a woman who was violent and possessive, her guilt over shoplifting at thirteen and lying to the police, knowing that her best friend would be taken to jail because of what she had told them.

  They landed in the Twin Cities, rented a car and embarked on the hour-long drive to St. Cloud. It began to storm and they were quiet. Maya was behind the wheel. Daniel found a station that played classical music. They listened to Gregorian chants crackle in and out of reception.

  About twenty minutes in, she swerved to an off-ramp.

  “Hey now!” he said. “Starship Enterprise is off course.” He pointed far right. “St. Cloud’s thataway.”

  “We’re not going to St. Cloud,” she said. “We’re going to Jacobs Prairie.”

  3.

  After teaching his 6:00 P.M. class at the studio called Lotus in Midtown Detroit, the African-American yoga teacher known at the Meeting as Rhonda—but to his students (and the DMV) as Ganesha Ashanti Sinclair—went to the movies at a local revival house. “Ganesha” was the name bestowed upon him years ago by a guru at an ashram in Bangalore; when he returned from his South Asian sojourn to Detroit, he added “Ashanti” in homage to his Ghanaian ancestors. The appellation suited his sportive, free-spirited nature and made him smile. It seemed to make a lot of people smile.

  About an hour into The Man Who Would Be King (he’d always been fond of Kipling and loved any adventure story that took place in a faraway land), he left his seat to buy more bonbons. His students still couldn’t believe that their Ganesha, who treated his body like a temple, had developed a thing for the frozen chocolate treats that were Rhonda’s favorites. In the last four months, they’d noticed a host of new quirks, reflecting a childishness in him that struck some of them as puzzling or even pretentious. Many, though, took the new behaviors as a refreshing indication that their teacher had entered a higher, if playful, spiritual plane. He was on his way back into the theater when he bit down on one of the ice-cold nuggets and simultaneously had a stereoscopic vision of the man who had killed him—killed Rhonda, rather—and where that person could be found.

  He immediately left.

  He drove toward I-75S on a route that allowed him to skirt the toll roads. Flying under the radar was paramount because Annie cautioned her flock about the importance of not being identified or linked in any way to the homicide called the moment of balance. (She aimed this caveat more toward the landlords; their child-tenants would not possess such savvy.) The Porter said there would be terrible consequences if one was caught in the act or traced to the crime itself. Even though the landlords would have expired by then—traditionally, the “second,” final death occurred in the hours following the moment of balance—such a revelation would cause unnecessary hurt, shock and confusion to their surviving loved ones. Annie referre
d everyone to the section of the Guide that addressed itself to the essentialness of respect shown not just to landlords but to the friends and family of those borrowed bodies as well. The Porter said that “invisibility and discretion” were almost as crucial as the deaths of the child-killers themselves.

  Because of the storm, his eleven-hour drive from Detroit took fifteen. It was Ganesha who planned and strategized the trip, the way adults do; Rhonda, child and tenant, provided energy and purpose, the propulsive vision informing the whole enterprise. As he navigated the blurry hodgepodge of rain-slicked highway and staccato brake lights, Ganesha meditated on his life. What an amazing journey it had been! His twin brother was in prison, a quarter way into a sixty-year sentence, but the yogi had taken a different path. Ganesha was gay and didn’t come out until his early twenties, after traveling to India. He spent three years exploring the continent before being graced to find his guru. Now thirty-one, he taught yoga five days a week and on Saturday nights played jazz piano at Cliff Bell’s (when they’d have him). He collected pottery and had even been looking into classes with the view of designing his own when his tenant, Rhonda, arrived.

  If one didn’t embrace the amazing journey of this life, then what was the point? He was sorry he’d be leaving the world so soon yet had no regrets. Now it was the amazing journey of death he would embrace.

  Annie said that when the moment of balance was nigh, nothing would matter but the task at hand. And it was true: something took over with cyclonic force. In the early days of Rhonda’s emergence, Ganesha experienced the same turbulence of doubt, bewilderment and anxiety common to all landlords. In those first Meetings at the Divine Child Parish he was hesitant, ruled by the instinct of self-protection, until it slowly dawned on him that the “self” he’d spent a lifetime maintaining and protecting was disappearing. An illusion . . . In the same way one experiences contentment at the end of a long prayer, Ganesha Ashanti Sinclair became aware that his body was effectively gone and clung to it no more; how arrogant to think it ever had been “his,” even after being evicted from it 118 days before! (His guru always told him that we are only “renting” anyway—“Body like hotel,” he’d say.) His strange new predicament was no cause for panic, because something truly miraculous had happened and Ganesha knew he was blessed and would soon slip into the masterpiece of the Great Mystery itself. There were so many gifts along the way! He’d learned to love his tenant as well, that tragic little girl, raped and murdered at age eleven. He’d laughed at her sweet, funny ways, marveled at her memories, laughed with her until they were as one. Now, hurtling toward the moment of balance, he couldn’t find “himself” at all—the very liberation his guru had always spoken of. His only duty now was to serve, to help Rhonda find her way.