A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  Annie smiled at the wisdom of her pupil’s words. Still looking into his eyes, she said, “And Rhonda? Your turn. Who would you like to thank?”

  “First and foremost, Ganesha Ashanti Sinclair—oh my God, you rocked! Though I wish I’d had a landlord who was older . . . That’s probably just Ganesha still trying to say, ‘Don’t take me, girl, I’m too young to be a landlord, take someone else!’ But it’s true, Annie, I do wish it wasn’t Ganesha. He was way too young to have had a stroke. My grandma had one but she was sixty-eight. And she didn’t even die!”

  Winston sporadically glanced from the floor to the players, uncomprehending but taking everything in.

  “It’s time,” said Annie. She nodded to Violet (Lydia realized who she reminded her of: a less voluptuous Scarlett Johansson) and the gorgeous techie skipped to the table, eagerly lighting the candles Bumble had already stuck in the banana cream cake. “Tell us what song you’d like—your choice.”

  He scratched his chin. “Well, it ain’t gonna be ‘Macarena,’ I can tell you that.” Everyone but Honeychile laughed at the remark. “Tell you what,” said Rhonda. “Let’s do something different. Since I won’t be seeing y’all again.”

  “Just make sure we know the words,” shouted Daniel.

  “Oh, I think you might,” said Rhonda. “Obscure as they may be.” Violet sat the cake down in front of him, on the little table the sentry brought over. He closed his eyes and softly began.

  “‘Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me’—”

  The others joined in, and sang the roof off.

  He blew them out to raucous applause and then drew the palms of his hands together in prayer.

  “Namaste,” he said softly.

  2.

  After the Meeting, the Porter spoke quietly to Winston while a few others lingered. Maya and Violet girl-talked in a corner and Daniel made cordial conversation with Dabba Doo.

  Annie draped a mothering arm around the girl’s shoulderless shoulders. The poor thing was shaking. The Porter made the required more shall be revealed pitch but felt like the captain of a ship with broken masts. She told Winston how brave she was to have returned and urged her to keep coming back—yet had nothing more in her arsenal. Winston let her cheek be kissed before slinking out the same way she slunk in. Maya smiled pitifully at her as she passed by, a smile that seemed to say, “So sorry about the absolute clusterfuck you’ve found yourself in—that we’ve all found ourselves in!”—but was focused on speaking to Annie. Accosting the Porter, she said, “I have something I need to say.”

  “Dabba Doo is next, Maya. You’ll have to wait your turn.” Sometimes she had to talk to them that way. They were children after all and needed to mind their manners.

  Maya balled up her fists in a fury and said, “Rhonda did something very, very bad.”

  “Please lower your voice!”

  “She killed someone she shouldn’t have—”

  Annie looked like she’d been stung. “What are you saying?”

  “Someone was there—someone else during her moment of balance—who had nothing to do with Rhonda’s murder! And she killed her anyway.”

  “That just isn’t possible,” said Annie, in disbelief.

  “It is, it happened. Ask my brother!”

  The ship was foundering and the Porter felt herself going overboard. At the moment, further details—like how Maya and Troy had come upon such knowledge—were insignificant.

  “It was wrong,” said Maya. “That’s not supposed to happen, Annie—is it?”

  “I’m not sure.” She was wondering how much of “haywire” to divulge when her mouth broke the impasse. “But all of this may have something to do with my leaving.”

  “Leaving? For where?”

  “I’m—I’m dying, Maya.”

  “No!” she cried.

  “Please lower your voice.”

  From across the room, Daniel and Dabba Doo turned to look before self-consciously resuming their conversation.

  “What do you mean, ‘dying’?”

  “I don’t know when, but soon.”

  “Can’t you come back? Like we did?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just doesn’t, not for Porters. Anyway, I’ve been preparing. I’ve known about it a long, long time.”

  “But what will happen to us?” she implored.

  The little-girlness of her entreaty broke Annie’s heart.

  “You mustn’t worry, darling. You’ll be well taken care of.” Maya was weeping now. “There’s already someone coming—do you hear me, sweetheart? Someone’s coming to help and soon you will all meet the new Porter . . . and when that happens—when the new Porter’s here—everything will be made right again. So please be patient and please don’t worry! Be patient and trust, can you promise me that? Because you—well, you and your brother don’t have much time.” She grabbed Maya’s wrists. “And if you stop trusting, you won’t find the person who did this to you. Do you understand that?” Maya shook her head. “And I’d appreciate you keeping this to yourself. I’ll talk about it with everyone at the next Meeting.” Maya nodded distractedly. “I don’t want the others to know until I know a little more myself. You can tell Daniel—I expect you will—but no one else, because it will only upset them. Do I have your promise? That you’ll keep this to yourself until the next Meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  Maya screwed up her face in sorrow and remorse. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean it when I asked about what would happen to us! I didn’t mean to be so selfish.”

  “Stop it now,” said Annie, hugging her. “I love you and everything is going to be fine. See you Tuesday. Now run along.”

  The Porter nodded to Dabba Doo that she was ready for their conference. As Maya walked to the door, she passed Dabba Doo and her elbow brushed his.

  “We need to talk,” she whispered.

  3.

  For the final time, Ganesha Ashanti Sinclair went home to his subdivided loft in Core City, not far from Cliff Bell’s, the club where he occasionally played jazz.

  After the moment of balance, he felt less like Rhonda—though it wouldn’t have been accurate to say that he felt more like Ganesha either. All identities, all forms, were receding. Annie once told him, “After the moment is done, you will come to know a new kind of serenity.” She said the feeling would be unlike any he had experienced “in this life”—and it was true. He tried comparing it to the peace he’d felt at the ashram in Bangalore but this was something else, otherworldly and indifferent. Impersonal . . . Again, his heart and thoughts touched upon his parents, his twin and all the people he had loved. He recalled his enemies too, real and imagined, closing his eyes to watch the magic lantern of characters pass before him—an extravaganza of poignant beings caught in the majestic dance of suffering and bliss, of birth and death, choreographed by the Source. Everyone was alive but everyone was already dead, like the tale Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. He felt so privileged to have been chosen.

  He made a final cup of tea.

  He unfurled the yoga mat on the floor of the sparsely furnished living room. Before he lay in savasana, the corpse pose, he examined the grain of the wood floor that he had proudly sanded himself. It contained the universe.

  Such was the last wonderment he had on Earth.

  TRESPASSERS

  1.

  In his life, Willow had worn love in all sizes—small, medium and large. A few times, he’d tried to wear all three at once.

  But no woman had ever been kinder to him than Dixie Rose Cavanaugh. She felt his woundedness and was mindful of his moods, knowing when to go toward him and when to back away. (She hadn’t become a nurse for nothing, he thought.) Neither wanted to swamp each other—they were happy to have separate
places to retreat to—but both thoroughly enjoyed their overnights a few times a week. That worked out anyway because Dixie’s migraines forced her into solitude and darkness, sometimes for days. She was a night owl and liked to read for a few hours before she slept; while she perused her Kindle, she multitasked by petting him with a free hand until he passed out. The first time she did that, after an hour of hypnotic caresses, he guiltily said, “It’s okay, babe. You don’t have to.” Dixie said it calmed her. “I do it to my cat,” she said, with a bewitching smile. “It chills us both out.” He came to believe that it wasn’t a codependent, OCD thing, and only an expression of love. What a concept, as Adelaide liked to say. He didn’t believe that Dixie loved him and told himself that he didn’t really care. But he was starting to get feelings and wasn’t sure what to make of that. It seemed too easy, too simple, too perfect.

  Maybe that was true love’s secret.

  Once, in the middle of the night, she did something extraordinary. As he lay back down after having a pee, Dixie’s hand reached out from deep sleep to stroke him. How was that even possible? He tried returning the kindness by holding her in his arms when she had “pre-migraine nightmares.” She yelped while dreaming, and he would shush her and rock her until her screen went blank. She never remembered the demons that gave chase. Her dark side appealed to Willow and made him want her more.

  He thought about Dixie, and all the women in his life, to distract himself during the half-hour drive to Farmington Hills. He needed to occupy his brain because he was on his way to see the Rummers, an errand that filled him with trepidation. Willow had been astonished when he learned they still lived so close to the ground zero of the Falls; for some reason, he imagined they would have moved to the farthest ends of the Earth. Wasn’t that what he would have done? Maybe not, because the detective knew it was human nature to stay close to the land of the ghosts one still loved. Even the peasants of Chernobyl refused to leave, their desire so strong that the government could do nothing to prevent them from staying.

  In a different set of circumstances, the Cold Case Kids would have been the ones making the trip to interview them, but it was incumbent on Willow to make the pilgrimage. He’d been with them on that hellish day and all through the hellish nights that followed, and owed them that much. The cruel, inescapable truth was that upon the disappearance of their kids, Elaine and Ronnie Rummer became sacrificial goats, spit-roasted and carved by the parents of Saggerty Falls and beyond. For a few weeks, it felt like the entire nation embraced the myth of the burnt offering because one couldn’t help having the primitive belief that those children’s abduction and likely slaughter were an inoculation, a protective necklace that could be worn to ward off the same fate befalling one’s own.

  The detective wanted to get the lay of the land as well—to reopen his heart and strange gifts to the tragedy. When he made the call from his office, he wasn’t sure how they’d respond. From what he had learned about Elaine at the barbecue, he doubted that she’d be in any kind of shape to meet, and Willow had actually begun to worry that the news of dredging up the case might cause a domino effect ending in her suicide. He was grateful when Ronnie, not Elaine, picked up the phone. They small-talked and Willow tested the waters. He asked about stopping over to say hello.

  “Of course, Dubya, come on by! We’d love to see you.”

  He sounded weirdly insouciant but Willow didn’t want to read too much into it.

  * * *

  • • •

  The day had turned windy and haunting.

  As he stepped from the car, a premonitory image flooded him (as they often did), but without blue mist, without “the Blue Death.” Simply that of Elaine in bed, cocooned in darkness, a bright patch of light at her feet.

  Ronnie Rummer opened the door before he could knock.

  They hadn’t seen each other since the event and the week of its aftermath. In the overeager way of old friends long separated, they took each other’s measure, downloading the version they saw before them while tweaking, updating and deleting the one they’d been carrying in their minds’ eye. Ronnie had a little more work to do than Willow in that regard, because the detective’s rugged travels on Alcohol Road had done some damage to the vehicle. Dubya’s awareness of his own haggardness was rekindled in Ronnie’s wide-eyed look, even as his gaze softened with warmth and affection.

  The man was genuinely glad to see him, almost deliriously so, and it struck Willow that his former neighbor may not have had a visitor in a long, long while. What really took him aback was his host’s sheer normalcy, if one could call it that—he was so affable, so upbeat and well-groomed. Willow had imagined stepping into the broken house of a broken man, but realized in an instant how silly that was, and overwrought; the wound never heals yet people find ways to move on. What about Elaine, though? Her “way” must have wreaked all sorts of havoc on the man . . . Still, it was a bit topsy-turvy. If they’d been put together in a lineup it was Willow, not Ronnie, who’d have been fingered as the casualty and lost soul.

  They shared a pleasant half hour, with Ronnie doing most of the talking. He extolled the quiet life in Farmington Hills and waxed proud over the tool-fitting business that “allows me to spend most of my time at home, which I’ve come to view as the best revenge.” When he finally asked after Adelaide, Willow said, “She’s great. You know, I actually work for Owen now”—a segue designed not only to get the old scandale of his divorce aboveboard and behind them but to serve as entrée to a discussion of the revisiting of the case. Ronnie didn’t bite, which seemed strange. If he already knew that Willow was heading up the task force—hence the house call—he wasn’t yet ready or willing to go there.

  They were getting nearer to the heart of the visit when Ronnie said, “How’s Pace doing?” Willow almost whipped out his phone to show him his daughter’s picture—Larkin’s too—but thought better of it. He didn’t want to rub the continuity of life in his face. Ronnie told him that Pace had been sending birthday and holiday cards for years, something she’d never shared with Willow. Through it all, the elephant in the room was Elaine’s absence. He would ask about her in a minute; first things first.

  “I don’t know if you read about it in the paper but the City Council voted to fund a Cold Case unit. Since I had somewhat of a career doing that in Manhattan, Owen asked me to come aboard.”

  “Well, isn’t that something?” he said, with that Stepfordy smile. The detective got the sense he would have reacted the same if he told him he’d been knighted by the queen.

  “And we’ve decided to reopen the case.”

  “Uh huh”—again, with a curious, shiny affectlessness.

  “It’s kind of interesting how all this came about . . .”

  His words trailed off because at the moment he was about to explain how it wasn’t his idea at all but that of his recruits, Willow realized the intense irrelevance of those details.

  “Well, we’ve made our peace with it, Dubya,” said Ronnie, this time wincing a smile. “Elaine and I made our peace, best we could. One thing I have to say is . . . I just don’t think I’d be here—well, I know I wouldn’t, and I think I can speak for my wife—we would not be here without the Lord Our Savior. He provided comfort in our darkest hours. And boy, we’ve had a number of them.”

  “I don’t doubt.”

  “We still have those times—but through His mercy, they’re fewer and farther between.”

  “I’ve been circling ‘faith’ myself the last few years,” said Willow, trying to make a bridge.

  “Come to church with us! We have a marvelous pastor.”

  “I’d like to, Ronnie. I’d like that very much.”

  “If the Lord has shown me anything, it’s that all happens for a reason. I know that’s become a cliché but most clichés have tremendous power, have you noticed? We call them clichés because they contain essential truths that sometimes are pret
ty tough to wrap your head around. The more simple a truth is—well, it’s human nature to either ignore it or make it complicated. So we turn these beautiful truths into greeting cards. But our—the children . . .” His voice broke. “There was a reason and it’s not for us to know. It’s for Him and Him alone. And that’s enough for me. It wasn’t at first—oh, not for a long time. I was too damn arrogant. But it is now. It’s enough. How little we know, Willow. How little.”

  “I don’t think we’re meant to.”

  “That’s right, sir. Because He’s too big and we’re too small. More will be revealed—there’s another greeting card phrase for you, but it’s a good’n. If I wasn’t in polite company,” he said with a wink and a laugh, “I’d say more will be revealed on Judgment Day—but I wouldn’t want anyone who was listening to think I’m a kook.”

  “Nothing kooky about you, my friend. I heard a lot of wisdom there.”

  Willow felt comfortable enough to dance around some memories of that afternoon. He lightly touched on the Persons of Interest—Ebenezer Jamison and some known felons who lived in the area at the time. He even brought up Grundy, Roy Eakins’s challenged son. He had to start somewhere and you never knew the quality of light that would refract through the prism of someone else’s memory. The detective was open to both the hard facts and what he called the “ineffables.” It was part and parcel of the black art.

  “Ebenezer was short a few cylinders but didn’t have a mean bone in his body,” said Ronnie. “I’d have never sent the kids over there if he did. And Grundy? They jumped the shark with that one. When Grundy Eakins got thrown in the mix, that was the day I knew in my heart that we’d never find who took my babies. That big lunk of a damaged boy? And he was there, at the barbecue, remember? I told Owen, ‘You’re grasping at straws, come on, man!’ None of those felons and perverts ever came to a hill of beans. The one thing I do know, Willow, is that it was someone outside the community. From the outside—the palm prints proved it! Whoever did it is in jail or running a successful business or dead. Only the Lord our God knows.”