Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

Winston Collins was eleven years old.

He wore gel in a shock of green hair (did the dye job himself) and prescription sunglasses with crazy lime frames, a birthday gift from Mom.

Favorite show: Project Runway . On the walls of his room were pages clipped from magazines featuring his Dream Team: Kendall Jenner, Cara Delevingne, Kaia Gerber. Winston was old-school. Karl Lagerfeld was his icon and the boy-ingenue obsessed about meeting him one day, was certain that he would.

Wrong about that.

Two thousand children go missing each day. The number abducted by strangers is more than a hundred a year.

Most, like Winston, are killed within twenty-four hours.

The thirty-seven-year-old woman sported glasses that, unlike her victim, lent a serious big-box shopper look. She was pregnant, so it was easy to lure him to the minivan—she asked for help with a package, just like Buffalo Bill did with the senator’s daughter in her husband’s favorite movie, The Silence of the Lambs . Laverne was in charge of the binding and gagging (not her forte, which she’d proven time and again), but hers was not to reason why; she did what her man ordered or suffered the consequences.

From Mount Clemens it was twenty-five minutes plumb north to the three-acre home in Wolcott Mills (bought four years ago at auction with a loan from her father-in-law). She enjoyed living in the unincorporated village, with its thickets of elms and tulip trees that called back her childhood. She was house-proud; it was the first place anyone in her family had ever owned.

Her husband carried him down to the rumpus room. (He was wrapped in a carpet by then.) After the Mister left, Laverne looked in on the panicked, wriggling body while she vacuumed, a little ritual that calmed her nerves. When Winston surfaced from the chloroform haze, he choked on the gag and immediately had the urge to vomit; for that very reason, she had been schooled to closely supervise their guests, because he didn’t want anyone aspirating and dying before their time. The young fashion maven’s ears were stopped with hot wax, another predilection of her husband’s that she never “got.” The pain was grotesque and strange—parts of his body had been burned—and a regressive voice inside said, Mama I skairt to be kilt. Yet somehow he still conjured the strains of “Rise.” Winston taught the song to his mom and they made a lip-synch duet for YouTube that he thought was as good as anything Emma Stone did on Jimmy Fallon. Well, almost.

There it was: Katy Perry’s pellucid voice ringing You’re out of time, but still I rise throughout the room and the world itself , belting it out like a private concert for him alone.

When her man finally came home there was a bit of disruption—Laverne had already removed the gag because the boy “wasn’t breathing right,” which pissed him off. He smacked her to the ground, bloodying her nose. She couldn’t understand why, because she was only doing what he had told her to under those particular circumstances. But he didn’t hit her as hard as he used to, back in the time before she was in the family way.

He turned his attention to Winston. To have a prepackaged quarry “dressed” and waiting for him was the most exciting thing, like a feast after the hunt. He usually left them in his wife’s care while he made a trip to the Laundromat (he had his rituals too), to mentally prepare. The anticipation gave him butterflies that soon became hawks, the skies of his head darkening with them, and when he was ready to feed he made Laverne turn her body to the wall like the kids in his other favorite movie, The Blair Witch Project , while he attended to the visitor, impaling him the same way he did his wife, on this occasion timing his release to Winston’s final breaths. He liked keeping them alive for a week or so but sometimes it didn’t work out that way, so he kept them dead.

The last thing Winston saw was the bad man’s T-shirt with the naked woman and huge angel wings.

He thought of Katy, whose voice he heard till the end.

That night he took Laverne to the Sirloin House, close to where his father lived (though he never invited the old man along), a postmortem celebration that she always looked forward to. For a few hours anyway, she relished the loosening of her master’s reins. This is the real him, she told herself. Funny, sweet, romantic. It was a perfect moment for Laverne to begin another ritual: erasing from memory the details of what she—they—had done. Still, she wouldn’t have had it any other way, because how dull would her life be without the spice of her man’s darkness? He was the only one who ever knew about her dark places, without her having to say a word, and she cherished him for that. On those victorious nights, dining out like a normal couple, there was even laughter, which almost never occurred in the house. (She didn’t get around much anymore.) She especially looked forward to steak and ice cream because at home, her diet was strictly regulated. He always left the server a big tip. This time the waitress shook both their hands and nearly wept for the random acts of kindness in the world. Laverne glowed with pride.

She wasn’t wild about the long, hot shower he always made her take before such dinners. It scalded. He stood by the open glass door, keeping a close eye. He wanted to make sure that she didn’t adjust the temperature. She thought it was silly, standing there like that, because why would she ever go against him? She had a mischievous streak and, when he wasn’t looking, angled her body so less of the hot water fell on her—Laverne’s way of getting one over on her man. But she liked that he stood there, she really did. There was something protective about it. She felt extra-special, extra-loved. She was his wife and his woman.

He never showered after his business was done. Sometimes he didn’t wash for a whole week, which she wasn’t wild about either. There were so many smells on him. But that was his way. And he never laundered his “executioner” shirts: Mötley Crüe, Black Sabbath, Metallica. There were five of them that he kept in a secret drawer.

Now there were six.

2.

Suppertime.

A half hour’s bike ride away from the Cherry Street Mall, Honeychile—aka Renée “Honeychile” Devonshire, née Matlock—had been partying with friends from Mount Clemens High (“Home of the Battling Bathers”) on her Not So Sweet Fourteenth. That’s what she called it on her Evites.

The Devonshires, Harold and Rayanne, adopted her at ten years old, and she was their full-on miracle girl. How was it that no one had wanted her until they swooped in? That’s what Rayanne asked herself all through the eighteen months before she was legally theirs. Our child. It was fate that we got her, said levelheaded Harold. How could no one have seen the beautiful soul behind the health issues? Each day, Rayanne’s heart gurgled like a summer fountain over the eccentric, willowy child with the cartoon body and sweet, funny mouth, the infectious laugh and piercing green eyes. Harold and Rayanne spent ten years trying to have a kid—ten years!—and at forty-six, she decided: enough. She was fifty now and realized that Honeychile had saved her, in more ways than she could ever have imagined. The pride and joy, as they used to say, of Rayanne’s life.

Honeychile had cleidocranial dysplasia, the same thing as the boy on their daughter’s favorite show, Stranger Things . She was five feet tall, with shoulders that were almost nonexistent. The Devonshires had her extra teeth pulled so the adult ones could arrive without being mobbed. Rayanne told her husband that she looked just like the young Christina Ricci, but Harold insisted her birth mother had to have been Amy Sedaris. (Harold was wry and bookish and loved all the Sedarises.) She had asthma, which the doctors said was also genetic, but Rayanne blamed her other troubles—quote-unquote behavioral stuff—on the biological mom, “that horrible Matlock woman,” a bona fide crackhead, reprobate and God knew what else. Honeychile could get beyond moody and one time physically lashed out; when Harold sternly told her that would not be tolerated, she was genuinely remorseful and never did it again. Rayanne loved that about their daughter; that she could listen and learn. Still, they hoped she wouldn’t get too crazy when her period started. Rayanne didn’t think it was funny when Harold quipped, “Hope not. You remember that movie Carrie , don’t you?”