Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“We just want to understand,” pleaded Jane, “to see the connections, the patterns. How the killer is related to Bloody Mary, for instance?”

“They are interconnected by mutual hatred and war,” Danielle finally explained.

“What is Leather Apron to La Llorona?” pressed Jane. “We want to understand.”

Again the initiates erupted with answers, ignoring Danielle’s undisguised disdain for the way things had gone, as the younger children exploded with responses.

“They’re lovers.”

“Dirty lovers, though!”

“Evil…just evil.”

“Evil, twisted lovers.”

“Addicted to a hatred of children.”

“They eat flesh when they make love.”

“They make love when they eat kids.”

Alastair lifted his blue gun from its shoulder holster. “This proves I am on the side of the Blue Lady,” he announced.

All the children went wide-eyed at the blue burnished steel .38 Police Special. None had ever seen a blue gun before, despite the fact anyone with the money could purchase one from a Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalog.

The gun impressed even Danielle, who suggested it’d make a fine gift for her information, “As an offering, so to speak.”

When Alastair flatly refused, saying, “It’s out of the question,” Danielle flew into a rage. “You wanna know about patterns, do you? It’s hatred fed by the flesh and bone of children, and you high-and-mighty types comin’ down slummin’ among us act as if you’re seeing things for the first time, but it’s only because it’s a senator’s daughter now! Ain’t it the truth?”

Alastair was unsure what they might do with the confusing information they’d collected or how to ferret out truth from fiction, fabrication from whole cloth. Elements of the stories rang as true as sun and moon and stars, while other elements rang a wholly different bell-one alien to them all. Ransom summed it up in a single sentence. “And here I thought I’d heard it all, and I thought I knew what was going on in Chicago.”

Meanwhile, Danielle loudly cautioned the other children, “And once you go into the system, they take your picture and your measurements, and your name and information, and it all goes into Zoroaster’s files, and so now you’re in their files, and it’s only a matter of time before they catch you! And if they don’t torture and skin you alive, they do worse! They steal your soul for all time.”

This frightful idea had silenced all argument, and the band of children began to disappear before their eyes.

“Déjà vu,” muttered Jane.

Ransom didn’t know the French term, but he imagined it a swear word. Then he noticed the discarded doll that Gabby’d twice now gifted over to Audra. Up till now, Audra had kept the doll hidden beneath her fresh petticoats, also a gift from Gabby. Too late to warn her, Alastair realized how terribly attached Gabby had become to the girl. Gabby again tearfully lifted the doll dropped amid the rubble. The petticoats would likely follow as yet another possible sign of weakness at having accepted gifts from demons and of having gone over to Zoroaster.

In the long and sad carriage ride back to their own lives, Ransom attempted to rest his eyes and mind, shut down, while Jane and Gabby talked of their feelings of empty hopelessness that had nearly overwhelmed them as each had listened to the “religion” of the street children.

Gabby had rushed after Audra, offering her a way out, to come live with her and her mother for a time, but Audra followed Queen Danielle and her “family” instead.

“They are all suspicious of any sort of authority,” Alastair, eyes still closed, told Jane and Gabby. Still this did not lessen the heartbreaking moment for Gabby. Knowing Audra’s decision and action amounted to a performance for Danielle and the others, so that she might continue to belong with her street family, didn’t mitigate the pain. Ransom knew that Audra was a rare exception, belonging to two such street families. Even so, Gabby had been hurt by Audra’s last words, shouted loudly for all to hear: “They fooled me! They seemed nice, gave me donuts and presents, but they could still be working for demons!”

As the cab passed into their part of the city, Gabby held the doll as she might an infant, cradled on her lap. Out one eye, Alastair watched her and Jane, sorry for their grief, sorry they’d had to go through this sort of thing, but he wondered what they’d expected. All the same, Alastair now tried another soothing word. “Look, Gabby, with these kids, myth and fear of authority has gotten all twisted and balled up, so that as far as establishing any sort of lasting bond of friendship with any of them…well, you can just forget-about-it. ”

“Isn’t that largely the problem, Alastair?” Jane took instant issue. “Everyone would like to forget about it, put it back on the children’s shoulders, as if they had a choice.”

“They do have a choice. You just saw choice twice thrown in your face!”

“Makes it so much easier then for us to ignore it, doesn’t it, In-spec-tor. ”

Alastair grimaced. He hated it when she used that tone when calling him Inspector sometimes adding Ran-som to drag it out.

She was on a tear now. “And perhaps, then, Inspector Ran-som, perhaps if enough of us ignore the problem, it will by damn disappear. Just poof! Gone. Impossible situation.”

“They’re just children,” added Gabby, sniffing back tears. “How…how can you be so…so callous, you a professed defender and servant of the people?”

“Oh, dear God,” moaned Alastair. “OK, I see, now the problem is on me? Impossible is right,” continued Alastair in a clumsy attempt to minimize what they’d witnessed and now felt. “Impossible for people on the street, and especially children on the street, as nothing in their lives even remotely appears or feels like permanence-especially bonds.”

Alastair knew from experience and reading police reports that a common rule among homeless parents was that everything a child owned must fit into a small brown grocery bag for fast packing. But during brief stays in shelters, children would meet and tell each other stories-often harrowing true stories. Somehow enough stories told and they became huge exaggerations woven into the fabric of a strange belief system that, while terrifyingly odd, resonated as real for these kids and, in many cases, had likely kept them alert to real dangers. This by way of embracing their fears, mistrust, and suspicions-an animal instinct that was the gift of nature.

Jane must be thinking the same, as she said, “Actually there’s no calculating the lives these cautionary tales may’ve saved, aside from simply getting a child through the harshest of nights.”

Ransom knew from his own heritage as the son of Celtic believers that folktales were usually an inheritance from family or homeland, and that the religions of others were considered cultural folklore by non-believers. But what of children enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey here amid the unforgiving streets of Chicago, where Christ himself would find no pity? No parent or adult in a uniform, or carrying an inspector’s shield, could possibly steel such a child against the outcast’s fate-the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the terror.

So here in the silence reigning inside the moving carriage Jane said, “What these children do is remarkable.”

“How so, Mother?” Gabby wiped at her eyes with a hanky.

“Think of it. They snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, newspaper and dime novel accounts, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers and doomsayers-and like birds building a nest from scraps, they weave their own survival myths.”