Children of Chicago

by Cynthia Pelayo

  His lungs filled with the rank liquid, and just as his eyesight faded from the awful vision before him, just as the sound of rushing water quieted around him he heard it.

  A flute playing.

  CHAPTER 20

  They had married a year ago at City Hall. This is not how she had expected to spend her first wedding anniversary, working. Or, maybe it was the only way she could spend it? Working. She took Washington’s advice—stay away from the office and work from home for a few hours in the morning. It was the most rest she would allow herself. Still, she worked. She could make calls from home, and did. She called Evie’s mother who insisted her daughter was still in no position to talk. Then she called Mohammed’s father. The man cried uncontrollably on the phone. When she offered to come to his house and speak with him there, the man proceeded to wail. She said she would call again later. Fin’s stepmother said she could not talk. The baby was teething and upset, and it would be best to speak with Fin’s father, not her.

  Now, Lauren was here alone in her living room reading witness statements and drinking strong Puerto Rican espresso. Lauren had remembered the call to her father the day she got married. Yes, it was a silly, spontaneous thing, but she loved Bobby. She’d known she would fall in love with him the day they met at the zoo when he told her about magic, wonder, fairy tales, and the Dream Lady. She was the only person she knew who was obsessed with such things. He called her Lore, and he knew that fairy tales could bring both happiness and destruction, the same as she had come to discover in her life. When Lauren had shared the news that she and Bobby had gotten married, eloped at City Hall, her father had said, “Your mother wouldn’t consider it valid, it wasn’t in a church.”

  Angry, Lauren had hung up and when Bobby asked what her dad had said she’d lied.

  The morning after they married, work called. A two-year-old had been shot in the head. The boy had been in an alley with an eighteen-year-old relative. They had just gotten home. A dispute at a party a few houses down spilled into the alley. There were shouts, then shots. Bleary-eyed, and with stomach acid climbing up her esophagus she crawled out of bed, but his hand had caught hers.

  “You just went to bed a couple hours ago.”

  One hand reached for a pair of black jeans on the chair while she scrolled through the message on her phone with the other. “I have to check this out.”

  Bobby sighed and laid his head back on the pillow.

  “A little kid’s been killed. I don’t really have much of a choice.” She was annoyed that he would even question if work could wait. No, work could not wait.

  Work could never wait. This is what she did. This is who she was.

  In some ways, she thought of herself as some variation of Charon, the ferryman who carries souls of the newly deceased across the river Styx. In Greek mythology, Charon is given a coin for safe passage, but those who could not pay the fee, or were left unburied, had to wander for a hundred years, aimlessly. Lauren felt if she could not bring these people justice then they would be left to wander alone in the darkness.

  Bobby kicked the sheets off and got out of bed.

  “Where are you going?” She asked, pulling on her jeans.

  “Figure you’d need coffee or something.” He said as he moved towards the kitchen.

  No one had ever done that for her, bothered with her, that is. He could have stayed in bed. He could have gone back to sleep, but he did not. He went and troubled himself over her.

  It was that same night when she’d realized the end was coming soon for her father. On her drive to work he had called—to tell her Marie wanted to speak with her.

  Marie had been dead more than half of Lauren’s life. She had told him to get some sleep, and she would check in on him in the morning. Driving towards the police station, thinking of her father and her long-dead sister, in silence, is when she’d heard it — a sound so faint, so light. She’d known it was not coming from a nearby car. No cars were driving alongside her. There was just her, the dark streets, and the sound of music filling her car.

  It was like that now. This morning, sitting in her living room, going through her notes after speaking with Ramon Castro yesterday—she heard music. It was soft, a steady hum. She closed her eyes, and a flash of memory came into view, and it was like she had always known.

  He was getting closer.

  Her phone vibrated on the table. She looked down at the message.

  Hope you’re doing well.

  How do you respond to your ex-husband on what should have been your first wedding anniversary?

  The marriage failed. Bobby could not accept her love affair with her job, so he left. Well, she’d told him to go. She was surprised he sent her a message. Yes, he’d been at her father’s funeral. Yes, he’d helped with some of the arrangements, but she thought he did that as a courtesy—for her father, and not necessarily for her.

  She stared at the screen.

  When Lauren tapped the darkened screen the message from Bobby appeared again, begging for a response:

  Hope you’re doing well.

  No, Lauren was not doing well. She tapped letters.

  I’m fine. Thanks.

  Her phone proceeded to blink and buzz and vibrate: the alarm indicating it was time to go.

  In the garage, before she turned her car on she shut her phone off. Just in case Bobby messaged again. He did not need to come back into her life right now, but she regretted feeling that she needed him, even with danger brewing. Something was stirring in the city. There was a soft anger that reverberated in the streets. She could feel it. It was not the pressure and charge of the changing of the seasons, from summer to fall to winter. Electricity hung in the air. There was a sense of dread and doom so pronounced she could feel it getting closer, brushing against her skin. It was the same terrible power she had felt in her father’s house ever since the deaths of Marie and Diana. The house had never been the same, nor this city, nor her.

  She found a parking spot right in front this time, and as she walked to the center, she turned her phone back on. Another message from Bobby appeared on the screen as she entered the room. He asked if she needed anything. This time she would not answer.

  “Look at you being on time,” Jordan said as she took a seat.

  “Told you I wasn’t going to be late.”

  He removed his earbuds and placed them on the desk.

  “Look at you being unproblematic and living up to your responsibilities.”

  “Do you know who stole your last pair of headphones?”

  He laughed. “Some dude on the bus yanked them off and ran. Whatever. I’m fine, Medina. I don’t need a security guard.”

  “You tell me if you’re ever in trouble, okay?”

  “Yeah, you’re the first person I’d call.” He gave a dry laugh and then set a notebook down on the table.

  “Is that sarcasm?” She asked.

  “I can’t help you through life, Medina. You’ve gotta figure it out for yourself.”

  Lauren fought back a smile. Jordan was a lot like her at that age, independent and unapologetic. She and Marie had been different, for so many reasons. Maybe if Marie had been a little bit more like Jordan things would have turned out differently, better. Lauren brushed the thought from her mind. It was Diana’s fault. It had always been Diana’s fault.

  Jordan turned the pages, passing page after page of text until landing on a clean sheet. “You know,” he said “You’re kinda not that bad...for a cop.”

  Lauren laughed.

  “Why’d you want to be a cop anyway? They’re all bad,” he said as he pressed pencil to page.

  “My father was an officer for a long time, then detective. He died just a few months after retiring.”

  “That’s messed up. And your mom?”

  “My real mom...she left one night when I was seven. Just walked out the front door and never came back. My dad assumed she’d gone to her favorite jazz club, Rosa�
�s. I have pictures of her just sitting there at the bar, just water in hand because she didn’t drink. She said alcohol didn’t allow her to feel the music right. She wanted to feel the music completely. She never called. We never found her car. We never found her. My dad married Diana a few years later. A musician.”

  Jordan scratched his forehead with the eraser of his pencil. “Nothing, no phone call. Nothing?”

  “She just disappeared.”

  “Completely.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jordan placed his pencil down, stood up and walked around to her and threw his arms around her neck. Fairy tales always told you about the stepmother, how evil and cruel they were, but what they never told you was what happened to the real mothers and that was the cruelest thing of all.

  Jordan pulled away and gave her a smile, a smile somewhere between a baby face and a grown man, and she felt in that moment that he would be okay, whether in this city or beyond.

  “What do you remember about her?”

  Lauren smiled. “She was absolutely beautiful. She smelled like cinnamon and I remember we ate a lot of cookies. She always tried making them from scratch and they always burned. So, she kept packaged cookies on hand and would pretend those were the ones she baked. We read a lot, well, she read to me. She would read to me after school, and every night, and it was always fairy tales. She loved the beautiful ones, the happily ever after ones. She was just...so kind and so sweet and everything that my father and I weren’t.”

  “Your stepmother...” Jordan began.

  The very word conjured a badge of cruelty pinned on the figure that took place of the real mother. Stepmothers in fairy tales were cannibals or wicked witches, and more often than not they were cursed with the ability to weave damaging spells. And it was always their stepdaughters who were the quiet sufferers and patient martyrs of their cruelty. There were no good stepmothers in fairy tales, Lauren knew, she’d checked. Biological mothers rarely played a central role in fairy tales. It was with their death or disappearance that caused the darkness to swallow up everything, leaving children lost in the wilderness and open to assault.

  “What are your plans for college?” She asked, changing the subject.

  He frowned. “Go, for one. UIC. I’ll need a job to help pay for books and stuff. I’ve got some scholarships and some small loans to help. I’ll be good. I’ll be living at home and taking the bus to the blue line, and the train will leave me right on campus. It’ll be a lot of work, but I can do it.”

  She believed he could, and he would. He had worked so hard to get here all by himself.

  Before Jordan slipped his headphones on Medina stopped him.

  “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Okay...”

  “There’s a news conference planned for later this afternoon. We have a suspect in custody.”

  Jordan’s head bowed. He remained silent, listening. “Who is it?”

  “Your classmate.”

  He raised his head. “What? Who?”

  “Finley Wills confessed yesterday to her doctor.”

  “Fin? How? That’s impossible. The girl’s like five feet nothing.”

  “You don’t need to be that much more in order to pull a trigger.”

  “But…why?”

  “Her doctor spoke with her yesterday. She’s not well. It’s admissible in court, and it’ll take time, but I believe her. She says she shot and killed Hadiya.” Lauren took a deep breath, because she already knew this was a lot for anyone to hear. “Jordan, she says she also participated in the attack on Evie and Daniel with the help of Mo.”

  She allowed the reality to settle for a moment, that a classmate had killed his best friend, and that same classmate had participated in the killing and attack of another. Then finally, she added. “Jordan, there’s something I need to ask you.” She handed him her phone. “Do you know anything about this?”

  She showed him an image of the graffiti sprayed across the school doors.

  He rubbed his eyes, they were pink and puffy. “I already told you, I don’t know anything.”

  “I think you’re lying.”

  Lauren could see Jordan shift in his seat.

  “If there’s any time to tell me what you know, it’s now. You’re not in trouble. Not at all. I just need you to tell me what you know.”

  “I’m not going to do your job for you,” his voice cracked, and he reached for his headphones.

  Lauren grabbed them first.

  “Seriously?”

  “You’ve seen it before? Lauren tapped on the screen of her phone. “This name? This marker?”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she said slowly “I just need to know.” She pulled the phone back. “No one wants to talk to me about it. No one. Not even my confidential informants. They say they don’t know anything, but someone has to know something. I’ve seen this at your school. At Hadiya’s shooting, and at the stabbing at Humboldt Park. If I don’t figure it out then more people will die.”

  “No one’s going to tell you who’s doing this because no one knows who it is. It’s there one day, then it’s gone. That’s it.”

  That was true. The graffiti did not stay up long. She did not mention this to Jordan, he obviously knew enough. The words appeared and in a couple of days—maybe even the next day—they were gone. Disappeared. She’d checked with the Department of Streets & Sanitation. No one had called in the graffiti for it to be cleared away. Homeowners did not want to see it scrawled across their houses, garages or community. The Graffiti Removal Program employs “blast” trucks that have a solution of baking soda under high pressure, and with hoses, they wash away unwanted and unsightly graffiti from brick, stone, and other mineral surfaces. Yet, at each of these places, the graffiti was not removed. It was as if it had never been there.

  “Pretty big coincidence that it’s showing up where people have been killed.”

  “No one thinks it’s a coincidence. Everyone thinks it’s there exactly for the same reason you do.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The Pied Piper, whoever he is. He’s making sure he’s letting everyone know that payment is due. The spray paint shows up where someone’s going to get killed. There. That’s what I know. That’s what everyone knows, but we’re all too damn scared to even talk about it, Medina. Do you want him coming after me next?”

  Lauren could feel her jaw tightening. She looked directly into Jordan’s eyes, leaned in closer and said, “You’re not going to get hurt. I promise.”

  He opened his hand, motioning her to give him his headphones back. She shook her head, refusing.

  Pain shot down Lauren’s jawline. “Is that why Hadiya died? She was talking about him?”

  “Hadiya died because she wanted to believe in him.”

  “What else do you know, Jordan?” She slammed her hand on the table and pulled it away quickly. She did not mean to do that. She did not expect to get excited, but she needed to know more.

  He placed his pen down on the table and stared at her for a moment. “There’s this rhyme Fin found in a book. She somehow put it together that it went with the game on the NeverSleep website. That was the missing piece, the rhyme, and she found it and copied it. She thought it was just some stupid game. Like Bloody Mary, or Candyman. Stand in front of a mirror in a dark room and say Candyman’s name five times. He shows up and...”

  “Kills you.”

  Lauren wanted to know why a high school senior would go along with a freshman in this game.

  “Exactly. But thinking of it now. It’s pretty stupid for anyone to try to summon anything that’s supposed to kill you. Hadiya and I were leaving school when she stopped in the restroom. She was taking a long time, and I didn’t think anything of it. Then, she came running out screaming and crying. I asked her what happened, but she said she just wanted to get out of there. When we were a couple of blocks away, she told me Fin and Mo had been in the bat
hroom with the lights off. They had lit a candle, and they were both standing in front of the mirror. Fin was reading some words from a page. When Hadiya’d walked in Fin told her it was a game, just some stupid superstitious game: say the nursery rhyme and the Pied Piper appears. Hadiya said fine, go ahead, and she stood back and watched as they did it. They said the nursery rhyme, and…” he paused, lowering his eyes. “A man appeared in the mirror. She screamed and ran out of there.”

  “What did she see exactly?”

  “A man. Dressed in black clothes. A black hat.” Jordan shook his head as if shaking off the memory of what he had been told. “It’s stupid. They just scared themselves. And Fin’s obviously crazy because look what she did.”

  Jordan held out his hand, motioning for his earbuds again.

  Lauren dropped them in his open palm.

  “Do you believe Fin is crazy?” Lauren asked.

  Jordan placed one earbud in his ear, and he paused before placing the other one in his other ear. “Does it really matter? Hadiya is dead. Maybe we’re all a little crazy if we believe a nursery rhyme has something to do with it.”

  This still did not answer all of her questions. Yes, the Pied Piper was back—there was no doubt about that. She needed to get hold of that book, that was certain, and she needed to talk to the only person who could help her get to it.

  CHAPTER 21

  Fin screamed for hours. It sounded like an animal, raw, and in pain, and when the guards could no longer take it they begged Ruth to give Fin what she wanted. Fin had been given a small collection of art supplies. Ruth had delivered them personally. Now Fin had ruled paper, construction paper, markers, colored pencils, crayons and a couple of glue sticks. What she would have liked were a pair of scissors, but she was told that was not possible. When she tried to reason with Ruth that she would even take the dull plastic kind, the kind kindergartners used, Ruth had said that she would not be able to fulfill that request. When Fin asked why, Ruth had said they were a hazard.