Children of Chicago

by Cynthia Pelayo

  Bobby scanned the faces of his students. Many hid behind their laptops and tablets. Others tried to hide that they were scrolling through their phones, their eyes drawn downward, here but not.

  “Think about these things. Think about how these stories have influenced our thoughts and behavior around fear. How these tales of heroes, kings, princesses, brave children, devils and villains, of especially the boogeyman, which we concentrated on today, have influenced our culture. Quick,” he raised a hand as a show of encouragement “Give me some examples of boogeymen...”

  “The Pied Piper,” someone shouted from the back of the room before anyone else could say anything.

  Bobby took a step back and glanced at his seating chart. He did not recognize the boy in the blue hoodie. The room was dark as he had dimmed the lights for the presentation, but this boy was utterly cast in shadows. When he realized that there had been too much of a gap in between the boy’s suggestion and his response and that the sounds of students rustling in their seats had increased, he spoke.

  “That’s interesting. I was just talking about the Pied Piper earlier today, but yes, he is an acceptable example of the boogeyman.”

  “I saw something about that online the other night,” a girl in the front row said. “There’s someone calling themselves the Pied Piper, killing people in the city.”

  “Let’s keep the discussion relevant please,” Bobby said.

  Someone laughed. “It is relevant. Killer. Boogeyman.”

  “Serial killer,” someone else said.

  “I saw the graffiti. There was some over the Kennedy Expressway,” another boy said. “It was right out there tagged on a billboard, ‘Pied Piper.’”

  Another student responded, “It’s an internet game people play. Make a deal with the Piper, and he’ll get rid of your pest. Just like he got rid of pests in the fairy tale, except here pests are people.”

  “How do you play?” A girl in the center aisle turned around and asked. “I’ve got more than enough people I want to get rid of.”

  “You call him three times like Candyman. Stand in front of a mirror with a candle and say a rhyme or his name or something, and he appears.”

  “Someone, text me those instructions,” a student said as he was scrolling through his phone followed by laughs.

  “Didn’t he kill the town’s kids because the mayor didn’t pay him for getting rid of the rats?” A girl asked.

  “Yes,” the boy in the back responded again. “Professor.” He looked in the direction of Bobby, but Bobby could not see his face from this distance, just the outline. His face was blurred by the shadows.

  Bobby rubbed his eyes. He was tired, he reasoned, and his eyesight was worsening over time, all of those late nights in front of his computer screen.

  “Yes...”

  “You mentioned “The Smith and the Devil,” but what about older stories? There are mythologies surrounding forests. What about the god Pan? He’s much, much older than any fairy tale.”

  “You’re right,” Bobby said, walking over to the light switch. “But this is Comparative Folklore and Fairy Tale. Ancient Mythology is being taught by another professor.” He flipped the light switch, but the lights did not turn on. He tried again. Nothing.

  “Can someone explain this whole Pied Piper thing, because I’m lost. Who is using his name to kill people?” A male student said from the middle row.

  Bobby returned to the podium. “Okay, fine, then let’s deconstruct this,” Bobby said. “If there is someone killing people using the Pied Piper’s name, then why? Why use that character’s name?”

  The class remained silent. Bobby pressed. “Think about everything we discussed today. What is the Pied Piper?”

  “He’s a villain?” A boy in the middle of the room said as he yawned.

  “Yes, and what else?”

  “He’s a boogeyman,” a girl said as she tied her dark hair back in a ponytail. “There’s no specific reason why. He’s a villain and a boogeyman, and it’s all about chaos for the sake of chaos and what better place to bring chaos then to Chicago where a bunch of young people are already suffering high rates of crime.”

  “Interesting,” Bobby said, nodding his head. “Chicago is a city, but it does have many parks. So, the setting is there. Most people associate fairy tales with enchanted forests. Sometimes they can be places of refuge. Snow White found refuge there with the dwarves from her stepmother. But other times, the forests are places where there are monsters. One of the oldest tales, the Epic of Gilgamesh has the hero going to the forest to defeat monsters.”

  “So, you’re saying stay away from trees?” A boy asked, followed by laughter.

  “Maybe,” Bobby said jokingly. “In all seriousness, if we can talk about fairy tales with real reason, most people associate the forests in fairy tales as a scary place, a place where the unknown lives, and the unexplained happens. There are some woods so dark that no one dares enter. Our heroes are often warned beforehand, but they still charge forward.”

  The boy in the back of the room with the hoodie leaned forward in his seat. He raised his hand, and Bobby called on him.

  “It likes those dim places, where the light barely penetrates. Those sunless places welcome suffering. Chicago makes a good temporary home. There’s suffering enough here which is why that symbolism could work in this city. This is the home of the once largest stockyards on the planet. The World’s Hog Butcher they called Chicago. Where millions of animals were slaughtered. Millions of pounds of animal innards, skin and waste, were dumped in the Chicago River. The river forever turned a murky green. Bubbly Creek, it was called then and now, because the decomposition of the animal remains left there produced gases that bubbled to the surface, producing a stench that stretched across the city. The sick smell of death infected everything and everyone from that river and still does. There’s something about that, about Chicago, about this infection, about it being a consistent host to horrible things that it just continues to breed horrible things. The Fort Dearborn Massacre, Chicago Fire. Eastland Disaster, Camp Dearborn, the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Numerous serial killers. It’s as if Chicago is the perfect setting for a dark fairy tale.”

  The mystery student’s words made Bobby’s face grow cold. He felt as if he were in a trance, and he broke free only when the boy stopped speaking. Bobby pressed the home button on his phone. They had gone two minutes past the hour.

  “We can pick this back up next week,” he said dismissing the class. Students stuffed their bags with their devices, notebooks and pens and streamed out of the room. On passing the switch, one of them flipped it and the lights turned on.

  Bobby made sure the projector was off and reached for his bag when a student approached.

  “Professor Garcia, I have a question about the boogeyman. Can he be equated with humanity’s depiction of death?”

  While he would be willing to discuss this during class hours, so the rest of the class could hear, he was too tired to go on about this to a single student, he felt drained of all energy.

  “That’s a good question, and we can discuss it next week.”

  The student gave a weak smile, turned, and exited the room.

  Bobby erased his notes from the whiteboard and placed the eraser back on the ledge. He walked towards the door and then turned around to give the room a quick look to make sure it was in the same condition he found it in.

  It was at the door that he noticed something, a sheet of paper on top of one of the far back tables. He looked at it for a moment from afar and then searched the room again, making sure there was no one there because he was certain there had been nothing there moments before. He approached the table slowly and looked down. It was a single sheet of ruled notebook paper. On it, the following words were written:

  In the year 1284 on the day of Saints John and Paul on 26th June. One hundred and thirty children born in Hamelin were led away by a piper clothed in many colou
rs to their Calvary near the Koppen, and lost.

  Bobby balled up the sheet of paper and looked around the room again. He felt an icy shiver up his spine. He rushed to the door and threw the crumpled mass in the trash on his way out.

  He ran, cheeks red, and chest burning straight to his office to call Newberry Library. He felt the urgency of Lore’s request now. He would get her access to that book now.

  CHAPTER 25

  Lauren stood on the corner. She counted the number of cars that went by in ten minutes. There were thirty.

  Someone must have seen something, even if it had been so many years ago.

  She walked to the end of the block and counted the number of houses on either side. This was the same time of day when the Brady sisters had gone missing long ago.

  People went missing in Chicago. It happened.

  It was a city, and, in a city, things moved. People moved. But more than often they would return. Of course, sometimes things didn’t end happily. An elderly family member would leave their house, get on a bus, and never been seen from again. In those cases, Lauren assumed they wound up homeless and helpless under a viaduct either in this cold city or another, or something worse. It’s the something worse that she could not think about, particularly in the same thought as her real mother.

  One day her mother was there and the next she was not.

  Sometimes Lauren thought those very early years were a dream, a fantasy, a perfect family on a perfect summer day. Then came the stepmother who had a child, loved that child more than her, and Lauren was pushed away and left alone, all the while obsessing over where her real mother had gone. Fairy tales never told you the real mother’s name or what happened to her. They only ever told you what happened to their suffering children, tortured by stepmothers and their cruel offspring.

  Lauren sympathized with the dead, and especially with the missing like Chaunti Bryla, Rio Renee, Mercedes Matthew Keyser, Crumpton. Lizette Mata, Ciaro Rios, Saeid Rahidian, Brian Becker, and so many more. So many with eerie stories like Kiara Colson, a young, pregnant postal worker missing for over a year. Surveillance video captured her walking past her car. She was in her US Postal Service uniform, even though she had called her job and told them she was not coming. A case like that, a person who had completely vanished pained Lauren to her core. Where had they gone? Where were they? Had they fallen down a rabbit hole? Were any of them with her mother? Chicago was plagued with hundreds and hundreds of unsolved murders and missing persons cases. Lauren knew this was her purgatory, her reason for living to find them and set this right.

  The case of the missing Brady sisters was as unusual. One hundred detectives had been assigned to their case at its height. All those detectives, Washington included, had walked this sidewalk, up and down, up and down, at all hours. Lauren wondered how many hours Washington had spent at this corner.

  Washington talked a lot about this case. It haunted him. Each week when he came out here to walk up and down the block, to meet with whoever remained from the old neighborhood, he reopened the wound, sprinkled salt on it and plunged a rusty knife in it. And that’s what a homicide detective did in many ways working on these cold cases; driving themselves into such utter consuming madness that they could only think about the cases they were working on in hopes that they could put something unseen together, to make out the image of the puzzle even though some pieces were missing. When they revisited the material over and over again, the pain of the loss of that person was punched again into the fabric of reality.

  Washington had told her how he’d interviewed and re-interviewed Brady family members and suspects. He was younger then, and had been one of the first to don a protective suit and dive into the Humboldt Park lagoon searching for anything that could lead to where the girls may have gone. Washington jumped into dumpsters, sifted through garbage, and interviewed anyone in jail and out of jail who could have possibly known anything. He told Lauren how he had personally coordinated the interviews of a hundred sex offenders in the area. He had followed tips personally for years, even driving down to a small central Illinois town where a tipster stated the girls were being held. Nothing came from it. Still, everyone was a suspect, and yet no one was a suspect.

  “Hey Detective Lauren,” a high-pitched female voice called out, followed by a cackle. “Woman, you need you an umbrella, it’s about to pour.”

  Chicago could not decide if she wanted to allow winter in or the fall to linger. Snow flurries had turned to cold rain. The skies had darkened, and the city was scheduled to endure thunderstorms through the morning.

  “I’m good,” Lauren gave a weak smile. “Cold November rain is to be expected.” She had stood out in the rain during so many cases the cold did not bother her anymore.

  “Get up here on this porch and give me a hug.”

  “How are you, Wilhelmina?”

  “Detective, stop, it’s Mina.” She motioned for Lauren to hurry up the steps of the house. “I’m doing better than you, honey.” Mina gave Lauren a full, deep hug. The kind your mother or aunt would give you after not seeing you for a time. “You’re fading away. You need to get some good food in you.”

  “Just coffee’s good.”

  Mina gave her a wave. “Food too,” her eyes widened. “Now, come inside.”

  Mina had come outside plenty of nights to give Washington a hot cup of coffee and a few minutes of pleasant conversation. Lauren had met Mina several times, and immediately felt like the woman was family.

  Mina tugged Lauren inside and over to her living room table. “I made breakfast.”

  “Apple juice and miniature muffins?” Lauren noticed the spread on the table.

  “Ha, that’s for the kids. Not us.”

  Mina ran an at home daycare out of her house. She cared for kids from the neighborhood. After the Brady sisters had gone missing, her house had been one of the first places Washington had visited, hoping that the little girls would go someplace with other children.

  “I’ve got some scrambled eggs and French toast in the kitchen,” she said, taking a seat at one of the large wooden chairs in the living room. “Coffee’s hot, too.”

  A plate appeared before Lauren could protest. One of Mina’s aides had placed it down and walked away.

  Mina took a long gulp from her coffee mug and said, “Another anniversary is coming up.”

  “You haven’t asked me where he is,” Lauren picked up a fork and took a bite of eggs. It was the best thing she had tasted in days, and now she realized her diet had mostly consisted of dry cereal at home.

  “I know where he is, packing up his life and heading off to where a lot of people go to when they leave this city.” She leaned forward, “A better place. Don’t get me wrong. I want him to find peace from this. These girls. This city stole a lot from him. It’s good that he finds a place that hopefully will give him some love before his time ends. Until then,” Mina set her cup down and slapped the tops of her thighs with her hands “There’ll be the rest of us to sit here and make sure own are protected.”

  Lauren swallowed back fresh homemade French toast and her stomach thanked her. “I thought about these girls...” Lauren started.

  “Don’t you start, too, Detective Lauren. This case will hurt you as much as it hurt him, and I know you’ve got enough heartache behind you and ahead of you.”

  “Mina, do you remember that graffiti that was painted on the building across the way after the girls went missing? You reported it sprawled across the wall of the corner store right next door.”

  “Yeah, I remember. Only because when the police went back to check call logs, including those service calls to 3-1-1, they asked me about it. It was fresh. I remember that.”

  “This was it, correct?” Lauren pulled up an image on her phone and showed it to her. The word “Pied” sat above the word “Piper.”

  “I found this looking through old crime scene photos, and this is the best one I could find that showed thi
s graffiti.”

  Mina tapped the screen. “That’s it.”

  “Who do you think was involved with the disappearance of those girls?”

  “Same person I told Washington. Their father.”

  “Do you think their father killed them?”

  “I’m convinced. But there was just nothing. No evidence. Nothing at all.”

  “And if you had to bet the father did it...”

  “He did something to those girls. Again, Washington tried everything, but there was just no evidence. He was a young father. He didn’t want to have two little girls. He was at work that whole day. There was clear proof of that, but Washington could never connect it to their dad no matter what he checked out or who he talked to. But Washington tried. He gave those girls so many years of his life, trying to find them justice. It’s nice to know that he was around to think about those girls, worry for them.”

  Mina sighed, and just then, the doorbell rang. One of her students had arrived early to start their day.

  Lauren thanked Mina for the coffee and meal. She gave Mina a hug and felt saddened because, in a way, the Brady sisters would be forgotten without Washington, their sentinel who had carefully kept watch over their case for so long.

  When Lauren got in her car, she pressed her head on the steering wheel and closed her eyes. She felt a moan rising in her throat. It finally clicked. Washington had never noticed the graffiti. Plus, he would not make anything out of it if he had seen it. This was not just another random act of vandalism. Lauren knew now that the case that had plagued Washington for so many years could be answered simply—the Pied Piper had murdered those girls, and likely at their own father’s request.

  He was out of the story, out of the book, because he had been summoned so long ago. Lauren needed to get to that book and rip out that page and destroy those words so that he could never be petitioned again.

  Would he know she was coming to stop him?

  CHAPTER 26