by Skylar Finn
None of the lockers had locks (something to do with bringing guns to school), and it was the easiest endeavor in the world to sift through her things—to unhook her red JanSport backpack from its metal peg and unzip it to see what was inside. Her copy of Watership Down for English, her math and science books, and her notebook—a blue Mead Five Star five-subject, its tan dividers filed neatly with freshly dittoed handouts from all her class.
He flipped through the sections and saw she had reserved the one furthest back for her drawings. He expected unicorns but was startled by what he found instead. Penny was a strange girl with a strange mind and had drawn all their classmates—and several teachers—dead, in a variety of creative ways. Brooke Baldwin choked on her milk at lunch. Billy Fay died on the soccer field after being struck by lightning. Mrs. Farmer, the Home Ec teacher, appeared to eat a poisoned chicken pot pie and keel over in the middle of class.
If Penny had interested him from afar prior to that, now she absolutely fascinated him. He, too, liked to imagine his classmates dying in a number of creative ways, especially the girls—the ones like Brooke Baldwin, anyway. All she did was giggle and flash her thong and seemed to serve no discernible purpose other than to exist and take up valuable oxygen that could have gone to a more deserving person.
He would never do anything about it, of course. He wasn’t one of those weirdo freaks who drew maps of the school in his Mead Five Star and plotted to bring a gun to school. Those kids were seriously mentally disturbed or idiots. Or both. Middle school was finite. None of this was forever. It would end, and with it would end all the memories of all these simple little people and their simple little minds. He didn’t see the point of spending the rest of his life in prison or going to the chair over three brief years that neither he—nor anyone around him—would ever remember, anyway.
He put Penny’s notebook back into the locker with her other things. He placed them with the reverence one reserves to handle a sacred scroll. He zipped up her backpack neatly and returned it to its metal hook inside her metal locker. He closed the door quietly as he could and left the locker room, turning and disappearing through the side exit. He didn’t feel like going to gym class today. He wanted to go somewhere and think.
He followed Penny home. He stayed about half a block behind her, trailing her the whole way. Her back was to him, and she never turned around. But when she stopped at the end of her driveway at her mailbox shaped like a rooster that held the mail in its beak, she turned to look at him. Her eyes were a bright, vivid blue behind her thick glasses. She was pale as a ghost. She looked translucent like she might disappear at any moment.
“Are you coming inside?” she asked.
“Okay,” he said.
Penny’s house was empty. He guessed she was a latchkey kid. He was, too. She’d let herself in with a key she kept on a long chain around her neck. She took off her shoes next to the door and left them there, so he did, too.
They padded quietly through the empty house. He felt like he needed to be extra quiet, because Penny was so quiet, like they were in a church. She took him to her bedroom and closed the door behind them.
“I want to show you something,” she said.
“What is it?” he asked. He would have done anything she asked him to do.
“I have powers,” she said.
“Powers?” Was Penny a witch or something? He saw a movie on cable like that over the weekend, about four teenage girls who use magic to get revenge on their classmates. Did she mean something like that?
“I know a trick,” she said. “Would you like to see it?”
“Yes,” he said.
Penny was so interesting. Brooke Baldwin probably would have just taken off her shirt. Which would have been fine by him, but he knew whatever Penny was about to say would fundamentally alter the course of his existence. Which was a very different thing from seeing Brooke Baldwin’s bra.
Penny looked at the light beside her bed. It was white ceramic and decorated with unicorn stickers. He was pleased. He had been right about her and the unicorns, after all.
The light turned on.
“Wait, what?” He was startled. “How did you do that?”
He thought it must be a clapper or something, but he hadn’t heard her clap. Maybe it was on a timer or something.
“Like this,” she said. She looked at the light again.
The lights went out.
In high school, Penny’s family moved away to South Dakota, a state that invoked nothing but a blank feeling and a general sense of confusion about what people did there and what it was like. He’d looked it up in his geography book, but it didn’t render the picture any clearer. They wrote each other letters. He wrote to her about the books he was reading, and she sent him drawings. Not of dead people or unicorns, but what her life was like there: sitting at the kitchen table, watching her mother while she stared at her reflection in the window over the kitchen sink with an expression of despair. He had never before known what it was like to miss someone. Now he felt it every day.
He hated her father for that. It was because of his job, so because of his job, he made Penny and her mom leave. Someday he would find him, he thought aimlessly to himself. Then he would find Penny.
In the meantime, he looked around his high school for another Penny, but there were none. Even the nice, smart, normal girls who stayed that way all through middle school had changed, had caught up with the others, and there were no real girls anymore. Whoever they had been in elementary school—girls who wore braces and played soccer and read books about talking pigs—was gone. They all had long hair that they tossed around and laughed cruelly if they saw you trip in the hallway.
It was as if they had contracted a virus, he thought. A virus they passed along to all the other girls until they infected all of them with it. Or not quite all of them.
Every so often, he’d glimpse one in study hall, or English class, who seemed different than the others. Quiet, apart, removed. Not unlike himself. He wondered what had spared her from the poison that infiltrated her classmates so freely. He wondered what the poison was; he wondered about its source. Could they be saved? He wondered.
In English class, they read a poem by Robert Browning. It was called The Pied Piper of Hamelin. It was about a town on a river overrun with rats. A drifter appeared and offered the mayor and the townspeople a deal: in exchange for a thousand guilders, he would rid the town of all the rats. The mayor and the townspeople eagerly agreed.
He played a magic song on his pipe, and all the rats came scurrying out of hiding: out of larders and pantries, nooks and crannies, attics and basements. They ran straight into the river, hypnotized by the song, where they drowned.
Naturally, the ungrateful townspeople and corrupt mayor reneged on their deal. Surely he couldn’t expect them to give him one thousand guilders! Look how easily he had rid the town of their rats. Why, it had hardly taken any time at all. Instead, they offered him fifty guilders, some mead, and a free meal.
The piper was furious. He told them they would pay, in one way or another. They didn’t believe him. Not until he returned while they were all in church for St. John’s Day and played another tune.
This time, instead of rats, all the children scurried from their homes. They followed the piper into the hills, where they disappeared into a crevice in the side of the mountain. Only one remained behind to tell the adults that the piper had promised them sanctuary and salvation in a magical world the adults could never go.
He liked the story because the pied piper hadn’t started out bad. He did a great good. He only punished the people of Hamelin because they were liars: liars who deserved punishment. He liked it when people got their due.
Aside from English class, he felt bored in school. It was the same lessons repeated over and over every year, ad nauseum. The same boring teachers, the same boring classes. He didn’t understand the meaning behind it at all. He couldn’t wait to leave.
After school,
he laid flat on his back shirtless, staring at the ceiling fan above him. He tried to make it move with his mind. The fan sat idle. How had she done it?
He tried to remember the way he felt with Penny. The electricity that seemed to flow from her, from the very air near her fingertips. He thought of how much he missed her, the way she had made him feel. He closed his eyes and felt the electricity flow through his entire body.
A bright, soft light penetrated the darkness of his eyelids. He opened his eyes to see that the incandescent bulb in the fan shone brightly above him. He blinked, unsure if he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing. He stared up at the light intently.
The light went out.
Brittany lay on her back on the narrow army cot, staring up at the ceiling of her prison. How would she escape? She couldn’t. That much was obvious. Her captor was much too clever, and she felt like a stupid kid who had gotten in a car with a stranger and expected positive results.
What did he want with her? She couldn’t tell for sure how long she had been down here; it was hard to keep track of time with only the narrow little window above her to discern the day from night. It could have been weeks or mere days. She didn’t know.
He hadn’t touched her. She had assumed that was why he had brought her here. She was both relieved and even more afraid than she would have been if he had. If he had, she would know what he wanted with her. Since he hadn’t, she had to assume there were worse things he planned to do than touching her. Torturing her, murdering her. She could think of a million different things.
But he hadn’t done that, either. Not yet, anyway. Every day, three times a day like clockwork, he slid a food tray through the slot carved out of the bottom of the door. There were gallon jugs of water lined up against the wall next to cases of water. There was a creepy old bathroom in the corner of the room she was in: creepy, but functional. She felt reasonably well-cared for, aside from the fact that she was his prisoner.
She was still staring at the ceiling when she heard it: screaming. It came from a distance and got closer as if coming from the top of a staircase down a long, dark hallway. A girl’s screams.
Brittany sat up, eyes wide, her hair spilling over her shoulder like a curtain. She remained this way, rigid, while she listened to the shouts and screams. But not just any shouts and screams. There was something almost…familiar about them.
“Mister, you better take me home, or my mama and her people are gonna come and find you, and they’re gonna kill you, rest assured…”
Crystal.
Brittany rushed to the door. She crouched on the floor and pressed herself up against the slot her food came through. There was a piece of plywood in front of it. She clawed at it briefly, but it was fixed in place.
“Crystal!” she called. “Crystal, is that you?”
The shouting continued unabated and receded into the distance. It sounded like he carried her down a lengthy corridor, maybe around a corner. She sat up and thought.
A staircase. A hallway. A narrow window, high in the wall. A basement.
It could have been anywhere. But it made her feel better, somehow, having a better idea of what her surroundings might be. And as wrong as it was to feel this way, it made her feel better knowing that someone she knew—a girl she considered her best friend—was here with her. Even though it meant that now Brittany felt afraid for not just herself but someone else.
She would have to find a way to reach Crystal somehow. A message. Through the heating ducts, maybe, like in the movies. She didn’t know, but she’d figure one out.
She’d figure out a way to reach Crystal, and then they would figure out a way to escape.
15
The Pied Piper
I wasn’t sold on Lombardo as the kidnapper, and neither was Harper. The more we uncovered about Hayes and Lipman—not to mention April Deakins—the more it seemed to point to some serious wrongdoing at hand. I couldn’t believe that they were up to their necks in meth and it was completely unrelated to their daughters disappearance.
Something was sticking in my brain, something small. Usually, it was the smallest and most seemingly insubstantial thing that gave me my biggest insight on a case. In this particular case, it was something April Deakins had said. Something about a connection between Daniel Hayes and her daughter. It was about her need. It was about how she loved to be at the Hayes house because it reminded her of the perfect family—the one she could never have.
A notebook. Hayes had given her a notebook. Had he written anything in it? Something meant just for her?
It was a long shot; if Hayes had been creeping on his stepdaughter and her friend, he was unlikely to do anything as obvious as to leave written evidence of the fact. But maybe he was foolish and bold; maybe he was dipping into his stash and had become overconfident and crazy. Maybe it wasn’t as grand as a cartel taking the girls but something more obvious and closer to home. Something closer to what Brown and Manning suspected about perversion and the many ways it manifested itself.
I brought my theory up to Harper. “Let’s check it out,” he said immediately.
Brown had no immediate need of us that morning as they had picked up a hot tip from the tip line that someone had spotted Lombardo crossing state lines into Pennsylvania. It had been three days since Brittany Hayes had gone missing, and just under twenty-four hours since Crystal Deakins had vanished.
April Deakins looked like she hadn’t slept since we’d seen her last. Her hair was disheveled as a bird’s nest, and the rings around her eyes were darker than kohl pencil. A study in contrast, Randall was passed out, face down, on the ragged old sofa.
“I’m glad someone is bothering to check up on my little girl,” she said, sounding rattled to the core. It might have been the pure fear, stress, and anguish of her child going missing—or all of these things combined with drugs. A powerful stimulant, for example. “I bet those other cops are all chasing after that Hayes girl, aren’t they?”
“We believe the cases are connected, ma’am.” I stepped inside, followed closely by Harper.
“Well, of course, they’re connected.” Her hands were shaking as she lit a cigarette off the one she had just finished smoking. “Obviously, they’re connected.” She jittered her way into the kitchen and put on a fresh pot of coffee. “You looked into Daniel Hayes?”
“That’s what we’re here about, Ms. Deakins. Do you by any chance have the notebook you mentioned the last time we spoke? The one you said he gave to her?”
She whirled around, her eyes going wide and round. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.” She immediately left the kitchen without finishing brewing the pot of coffee. Harper went over to the counter and finished it for her. I could tell he felt bad for the woman: missing daughter, all strung out, probably the only life she’d ever known.
April returned with a purple Mead notebook clenched in her sharp, red press-on talons. She extended it to me. As before, I remained standing. Randall occupied much of the seating.
April busied herself in the kitchen. She looked confused when she saw the coffee was already brewing, then went about setting out powdered Great Value creamer along with mugs and spoons. She miscounted her number of guests by at least three, setting out six mugs for no apparent reason save her own jangled logic.
Harper sat down at a rickety wooden table in the corner that was so buried under the weight of old newspapers that I hadn’t noticed it on our previous visit or when we came in. I sat down next to him and balanced the notebook on top of one of the stacks between us. He leaned over my shoulder as I opened the pages.
Crystal kept a set of indifferent notes for what appeared to be her English class. They were dated in the corner with ‘English’ written in half-hearted, swirly writing in gel ink that seemed to consist partially of notes copied dutifully but inattentively from the board (incomplete sentences, entire words missing, grammatically incorrect) and mostly of doodles she’d drawn when she’d gotten bored. Drawings of clouds, vines,
flowers. Pretty innocuous stuff.
I flipped through page after page of the same. Then on the last page, copied out in meticulous, labored writing—as if she’d wanted to get it just right, every word perfect—was a poem. At first, I thought that it was song lyrics. I had often done the same. Scribbled lyrics to songs I liked in the margins of my notebook rather than learn the quadratic equation, or whatever it was I was supposed to be learning and cared nothing about.
Parts of it were underlined. My eyes automatically scanned down to the first highlighted section that I saw.
“And in did come the strangest figure!
His queer long coat from heel to head
Was half of yellow and half of red;
And he himself was tall and thin,
With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin…”
Harper’s shoulder grazed mine as he leaned forward and traced his index finger down to the next passage she had highlighted. I tried not to notice his proximity to me or the smell of his aftershave. Instead, I pictured the fat pink marker clenched in Crystal’s fist. The gratifying sound of it squeaking across the page, in search of some significance in an otherwise meaningless world.
“And I chiefly use my charm
On creatures that do people harm,
The mole, and toad, and newt, and viper;
And people call me the Pied Piper.”
“What is this?” said Harper.
“It’s a poem,” I said. “By Robert Browning.”
“A poem?” he said. “What poem?”