A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  They sat in back of the unmarked sedan as if Ubering home, though to him it felt more like they were prisoners. A movie cliché came to mind: they needed to get their stories straight before talking to the sheriff. As they got closer to his house he whispered to Lydia, “I want you to come in with me. Tell him that you don’t want to go home—that you don’t want to be alone.”

  With a measure of gloom, he ruminated on Lydia’s half-life after the moment of balance. Just how long could he expect her to remain in this world? He was new to Portership and so many things were occurring to him, moment to moment, that he hadn’t even had the time to write them down, let alone share them with Annie. One of the mysteries among mysteries was the length of time a landlord remained “functional” after their target was eliminated. The case in point seemed knottier than the norm because Roy Eakins, Maya’s killer, escaped such a fate—not merely because he expired without her (or Troy’s) help but because he was already dead. Things were further complicated by the fact that Grundy died by Maya’s hand and not Winston’s, who by all rules of the Guide was the only one who had the right to such retribution. Would such “complications” cause Lydia to linger among the living a bit longer than the usual?

  The self-serving nature of the speculation coupled with the sheer impossibility of receiving an answer struck him as obscene. On the practical side, he doubted whether the deputy’s looming disappearance would dampen the sheriff’s ardor about getting to the bottom of things; in fact, it was likely to do the opposite. Apart from the complex feelings Willow had toward Lydia, there was an element of calculation to the question. Part of what he was asking, really, was how long did he have to clean things up before Lydia was gone? All manner of unpleasant scenarios dangled before him. What if Lydia died in his apartment, right in the middle of “getting their stories straight”? He even began to wonder about autopsy results: What might a pathologist reveal about the vagaries of the reanimated dead? That he hadn’t raised that particular topic to the Porter suddenly seemed like a glaring omission. It was one more question mark on his long mental list of Things to Ask Annie.

  The driver waited outside. He would take them directly to the Sheriff’s Office in Mount Clemens as soon as they were ready.

  As Lydia stripped off her clothes, Willow couldn’t help but say, “Jesus, did you have to crucify him? What was that about?”

  “It’s what he did to me.”

  “And the whole eye for an eye thing—”

  “It’s what Roy did to me,” she said high-mindedly.

  “Okay, okay. It just . . . doesn’t make things any easier.”

  He brewed some coffee while she showered. Dixie arrived not long after. She hugged him and said, “Poor baby!” then touched the skin around his bandage—a little bit of blood was seeping through. Hearing the shower water turn off, she looked quizzically in its direction.

  “That’s Lydia—she lost her partner today. Her boyfriend.”

  “Oh my God. Is she okay?”

  “As okay as she can be.”

  Lydia appeared in the hall, stark naked and still wet.

  “Should I just use your towel?” she asked.

  “Um, yeah!” said Willow, abashed. He shooed her back to the bathroom. “Go for it! I left a shirt out for you on the bed.”

  “Thanks!” She smiled at Dixie and then retreated.

  Dixie twisted her mouth in a What the fuck?

  “She’s in a little bit of shock,” said Willow. “Which I guess is kind of understandable.”

  It was flattering, even under the surreal circumstances, to watch his girlfriend get jealous.

  Dixie shook her head and said, “Whatever.” Then, still ruffled: “‘I left a shirt out for you on the bed’?”

  “Hers had blood all over it.”

  “Oh shit.” It brought Dixie back to the gruesome reality of what went down. “Are you guys hungry?”

  “I don’t feel like I am. But food’s probably a good idea.”

  “I’ll go fix something.” She kissed him again and held him tight. “Try and keep your clothes on, Casanova.”

  After she left, Lydia came and sat on the couch.

  “That was Dixie—a neighbor. She’s bringing us some sandwiches.”

  “Are you an item?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. They were quiet for a while. “So . . . how do you feel?” In spite of himself, Willow wanted to sponge up as much as he could. “What does it feel like? After the moment of balance?”

  “It feels . . . strange. I feel—strange.”

  “You mean, like you might be . . . leaving?”

  He thought that any moment she might keel over.

  “No, not that—though, that too . . . I will be leaving, but not just yet. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I’m not Lydia anymore but I’m not Maya either. It’s like I’m no one—I’m no one and everyone. Maybe that’s what ‘moment of balance’ really means. That the balance isn’t revenge, but the moment you become . . . no one and everyone.”

  There was much he wanted to ask but they needed to triage, as Dixie would say. There wasn’t much time.

  “We need to talk about what we’re going to say,” said the detective. “How we’re going to explain to Owen what happened today.”

  2.

  Dixie changed his dressing. The bandage was small and clean and he looked presentable. He even put on a suit. But the deputy was a different story—seeing her through the eyes of the very serious group who was gathered in the conference room, Willow admonished himself for being remiss. She wore a pair of Dixie’s borrowed jeans and an oversized T-shirt that Pace had mailed him during his stay at the Meadows. It said CHICK MAGNET and bore an illustration of a cartoon magnet with baby chicks stuck to its end.

  They went through the niceties, with pro forma consolations expressed to Lydia for her loss, before getting down to business. (On the way over, Willow reminded Lydia to let him take the lead and to say as little as possible when questioned directly.) The sheriff reiterated they were here to create a painstaking, linear reconstruction of events, “from top to bottom.”

  “We’re waiting for the autopsy report on Roy Eakins,” said Owen. “A window to the house was jimmied open.” Willow knew he’d be coming around to the question of how they had already known Roy Eakins was dead—but hearing the business about the window, the detective scrambled to make an adjustment to the scattershot narrative he’d been constructing. In a blatant oversight, he’d neglected to realize both his and Lydia’s prints would be found on the sill. “But there wasn’t any evidence of a struggle,” Owen continued. “The body was found in bed, like he died in his sleep.” Then he turned to Lydia. “When I asked if Deputy Doheny had anything to do with Roy Eakins’s death, you said that he died of natural causes—you said it right away. How did you know that, Deputy Molloy?”

  Ugh. The question came sooner than Willow expected.

  “Because I was there,” she said coolly. “We both were.”

  Willow’s gut flipped. So much for getting our stories straight . . .

  “You were there, with Eakins?” said the sheriff, incredulous. “In his home?”

  Willow hastily staged an intervention.

  “Yes, we were and I’ll explain why. I’d only just learned about the footprint—we had a piece of evidence with a print. The birthday card belonging to Maya Rummer.” His words came quickly, as if the torrent might somehow stop Owen from taking a swing at him. “The print on the card was always identified as a palm print. But I started to think, what if it isn’t? What if one of the experts made a mistake, and a misidentified ‘palm print’ became gospel—what if it was actually a footprint? So I sent a print of Eakins’s foot to the lab.”

  “And how,” said Owen, “did you obtain a footprint belonging to Roy Eakins?”

  The sheriff hated playing catch-up with his subordin
ate’s breaking news alerts—it embarrassed him as much as it made him suspicious. But suspicious of what? He was pissed off enough that he was becoming determined to hang Willow Wylde’s ass out to dry.

  “I went to interview Roy last week at his house. He stepped on a piece of paper and I confiscated it without him knowing.”

  “He stepped on a piece of paper!” said Owen, laughing out loud. It jarred the room because it was more of a seal’s bark.

  “He liked going barefoot,” said Lydia, trying to be helpful.

  “How would you know what he liked?” said Owen, ready to take a swing at her as well.

  “I mean, apparently,” she said, off a glance from Willow. “A lot of people take their shoes off when they’re at home. I do.”

  “Well, I don’t,” said the sheriff, turning to Willow. “So you’re saying the prints were a match? That Roy Eakins’s footprint was on the birthday card?”

  Willow had sweated through his shirt. “That is what I believe the results will show.”

  “I see,” said Owen, grinning like an executioner. “That is what you believe the results will show.”

  “One thousand percent. That’s why Lydia and I went over to see him.”

  “Before you had proof. Makes perfect sense to me! You were going to arrest him, before you had proof—and without backup.”

  “I admit that may have been a mistake, Owen.”

  “That’s big of you.”

  “We made—I made a lot of mistakes. But in my assessment, the man was only violent toward children. He was absolutely intimidated by adults. I felt there wasn’t any way the situation would have gotten out of hand.”

  “You didn’t think it’d get out of hand because the man was only violent toward children! With the exception of his fully grown son—you know, the one whose eyes he gouged out. The one he allegedly crucified—”

  “I was wrong.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Willow!” A few of the hangmen in the room nodded their heads in disgust. “And why would he kill his own son?”

  “I have a few theories about that,” said Willow.

  “Can’t wait to hear them,” said Owen. “This is like one of those Jerry Springer shows.”

  “Maybe Roy had some regrets toward the end—over what his son had become. What he’d made him into.”

  “Isn’t that touching! Willow, you just brought fucking tears to my eyes. Let me ask you something else. How would an old, decrepit guy like Roy Eakins be able to inflict such damage? That killing was ferocious. We’ll see what Grundy’s wife has to say about it,” he said ominously. “Right now, she’s being a little recalcitrant.”

  Willow had neglected to consider the surviving witness, and the sheriff’s comments put a dent in his mood. “I actually thought that by paying him a visit, we’d have a strong chance of a confession.”

  “A serial killer’s private home is always the best place for that kind of interview,” said Owen sarcastically.

  “I had a relationship with the man. I’d spent a pleasant afternoon with him a week or so back.”

  “My friend, you are out of your fucking skull.”

  “Whereas if we showed up with the cavalry, that wouldn’t have been possible. Less likely, anyway.”

  “So we climbed in through the window,” said Lydia.

  Here we go, thought Willow, closing his eyes and wishing he were somewhere else.

  “You broke into a suspect’s house without a warrant!”

  “We had probable cause,” said Willow.

  “We saw him through the window,” said Lydia. “He looked like he may have been having some sort of medical emergency.”

  “What kind of medical emergency?” asked one of the others.

  “He was having, uh, tremendous difficulty breathing,” said Willow. “We could see that before we went in.”

  The question of why they never called an ambulance hung in the air (in the blizzard of bullshit), but Owen let it go for now. “And just how is it,” he said, “that you ended up at the farmhouse in Wolcott Mills?”

  “As I said, Grundy Eakins was a suspect—Deputy Doheny thought he was a suspect, and was actively pursuing that lead. Without our knowledge.”

  “A suspect in the Winston Collins murder.”

  “That’s right.”

  “All right. I see. Everything’s getting very clear. It hasn’t been easy, but you’re starting to make sense. Let me summarize: Daniel Doheny, your rookie, decided he just didn’t want to work Cold Case anymore—he wanted to crack open a recent homicide. So he left the Rummer murders to you and his girlfriend while he went rogue. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No. The Rummer kids and Winston Collins are connected.”

  “Ah! So now you’re saying Grundy Eakins did have something to do with killing Troy and Maya . . .”

  “Not directly,” said Willow. “Look, Owen, it’s possible he may have known about it—about what his father did—he may even have participated in some of Roy’s later crimes. But it’s still my feeling that Grundy wasn’t involved in their deaths.”

  “Your feeling. Well, here’s a dumb question, Dubya. I mean, maybe not dumb for you, because you’re special. You’re like a special genius who does whatever the hell he wants to do and withholds it all day long from the man he’s supposed to be reporting to.”

  “You know that’s not true—”

  “Can you tell me what it was that made Deputy Doheny think that Grundy Eakins had something to do with the murder of the Collins boy?” He crossed his arms like Mr. Clean, prepared to hear a whopper.

  “I can,” said Willow. “I can tell you exactly how he knew. It was serendipity, but it was brilliant.”

  “We’re listening.”

  “In cold case work it’s important to follow your nose. Sometimes there’s no logic or sense to whatever lead you’re—”

  “Save it for the memoirs, Willow. Or the TED talk.”

  “Lydia and Daniel kept having a hunch that Honeychile was somehow connected to our case. The Rummer case. And it turned out that she was—through Winston, not Troy and Maya. The morning after you interviewed her, we went to the hospital to talk to her. I called to tell you we were going, remember? We got there right after she killed herself. We went into her room and saw drawings—sketches she’d been working on. And Deputy Doheny recognized one of the designs, an angel with butterfly wings. He said it was specific to Iron Butterfly, the old rock band.”

  “How does that connect her to Winston?”

  “Honeychile had some sort of psychic knowledge about what happened to Winston Collins. We can’t dispute that because she led us to the body. I’ve seen stranger things . . .”

  “Get to the point, Willow.”

  “The design of the angel she drew in the hospital was the same one that was on the T-shirt of the boy she killed at school.”

  “And Daniel told me,” said Lydia, “that he found pictures on Facebook of Grundy wearing the Iron Butterfly T-shirt. The woman Honeychile drew, with the butterfly wings.”

  Willow thought they were finding their groove; at least Owen was starting to be reflective instead of derisive. “Deputy Doheny had a theory that Honeychile was fixated on the design because it was on the T-shirt that Winston’s killer was wearing when he killed the boy. Dr. Robart said the girl was claiming to be Winston—so Daniel thought she had lashed out at the football player because she was triggered by the design. It was Grundy who she wanted to kill . . .”

  The disgruntled sheriff was peeved that he’d shared the details of the Collins case with his old colleague.

  “When the Porter—I mean, Willow—when our supervisor realized it was a footprint on the card,” said Lydia, “everything fell into place. We knew we had a pair of father-son serial killers on our hands.”

  “It’s rare but not u
nprecedented,” said Willow. “Daniel’s idea about the T-shirts started to make sense.”

  “But how did you end up at the farmhouse?” said Owen insistently.

  “The night before, Daniel never came home,” said Lydia. “He still kept his apartment in Smiths Creek but always stayed with me. He’d go there to sleep when he was stressed out or needed to be alone—usually during the day. I got worried when I didn’t hear from him, so I went over. He wasn’t home but his car was there, parked on the street. Which was weird. I didn’t know what to do. I went to work in the morning and told Willow about it.”

  “I probably should have been more concerned,” said the detective. “I thought maybe he’d spent the night with his ex, but I wasn’t going to suggest that to Lydia. We started talking about the Rummers and I told her the idea I had about the footprint . . . and we went over to see Roy. That’s when we found the body.”

  “And right then,” said Lydia, hamming it up—not just for Owen’s sake, but for Willow’s—“I had the feeling Daniel snapped. That he might have done something not so smart. That maybe he went to pay a visit to Grundy Eakins.”

  “How would he have gotten to Wolcott Mills? If his car was still in Smiths Creek?”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t start?” said Lydia lamely.

  Another flaw in the narrative, thought Willow. But all said, we’re doing pretty well. “We’ll have to check cab and Uber records,” he offered. There were so many holes in their story that he was counting on the fact that both cases had been solved to ultimately save the day.

  Owen called for a break. For the first time, Willow breathed. They’d taken some punches but if they stayed on the ropes the next eight rounds, it would be all right, even if they took a bloody beating. Willow thought anything short of a knockout was acceptable.

  * * *

  • • •

  Everyone left the room but Lydia, who sat staring at the wall with an ethereal smile. Willow and the sheriff stood outside the door talking in low tones.