Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

If one didn’t embrace the amazing journey of this life, then what was the point? He was sorry he’d be leaving the world so soon yet had no regrets. Now it was the amazing journey of death he would embrace.

Annie said that when the moment of balance was nigh, nothing would matter but the task at hand. And it was true: something took over with cyclonic force. In the early days of Rhonda’s emergence, Ganesha experienced the same turbulence of doubt, bewilderment and anxiety common to all landlords. In those first Meetings at the Divine Child Parish he was hesitant, ruled by the instinct of self-protection, until it slowly dawned on him that the “self” he’d spent a lifetime maintaining and protecting was disappearing. An illusion… In the same way one experiences contentment at the end of a long prayer, Ganesha Ashanti Sinclair became aware that his body was effectively gone and clung to it no more; how arrogant to think it ever had been “his,” even after being evicted from it 118 days before! (His guru always told him that we are only “renting” anyway—“Body like hotel,” he’d say.) His strange new predicament was no cause for panic, because something truly miraculous had happened and Ganesha knew he was blessed and would soon slip into the masterpiece of the Great Mystery itself. There were so many gifts along the way! He’d learned to love his tenant as well, that tragic little girl, raped and murdered at age eleven. He’d laughed at her sweet, funny ways, marveled at her memories, laughed with her until they were as one . Now, hurtling toward the moment of balance , he couldn’t find “himself” at all—the very liberation his guru had always spoken of. His only duty now was to serve, to help Rhonda find her way.

To free them both.

The desolate farmhouse was an hour and a half northwest of the Twin Cities, in the unincorporated community of Jacobs Prairie, along Stearns County Road 2 near Cold Spring.

The sixty-eight-year-old man who murdered Rhonda Whittle in 1984 was in the middle of attacking a fourteen-year-old runaway he’d met on the Internet and drugged at a motel when the wiry black yogi, his Ford Escort left a half mile outside the farm’s perimeter, began an unstoppable jog toward the house. His locomotion was so powerful that when he crashed through the heavy door, it broke off its hinges. The girl’s assailant jumped from the bedroom window and ran to his weathered old Mercedes turbo-diesel. (The cracked pink phone of the abductee still lay in the backseat along with her jeans and underwear.) The old man always left the key in the ignition and a weapon under the floor mat of the passenger seat.

Ganesha sprinted through the house, ignoring the still unconscious runaway, her arms and legs tied to bedposts. Just then, the bathroom door opened. Standing there was a thirty-something woman with the sixty-something death’s head of a meth addict. She held out her hands in submission. “He said he wasn’t going to hurt her! I didn’t know, I didn’t know!” She shouted it over and over, as if repetition would inspire belief. Ganesha leapt like a tiger, butting her head until it pulped before jumping out the window himself.

The old man dug beneath the seat for the gun, but it was tucked out of reach.

He looked in the rearview as Ganesha appeared, muttering Crazyass nigger picked the wrong one to fuck with as he fired up the Benz and peeled out. He would circle back and run him over. While reveling over his escape and the anticipation of the kill, he was startled by a jolt—his pursuer had impossibly leapt atop the trunk and was holding on to the groove at the base of the rear window. Piece of shit fuckin’ nigger! The old man fishtailed, but at sixty-eight his reflexes weren’t primo and the ground was sludgy from the rain. He lost control and shimmied into a tree. Staggering out, he saw that his stalker had been thrown from the car. He went to open the Benz’s back door so that he could get the gun out from under the passenger seat but by the time he did, Rhonda was upon him.

“Ain’t keep no money here! Ain’t keep no money here!”

Rhonda smiled and the old man had his first real look at the assassin, a skinny, preternaturally calm young black, his scalp slick with blood from the bedroom battering.

“What do you want?” he said, terrified.

His pursuer answered in an eerie, little girl’s voice, “Please don’t hurt me please, Mister! I just want to go home! I want my Mommy.”

The panicked quarry backed away (he was able to because Rhonda allowed him) and then ran—not to the house but toward the road bordering the eighteen-acre property.

Seeing the approaching car, the old man quickened his faltering pace. Someone was either lost or trespassing—no one had visited in years, not by consent or invitation, except once when a cop asked some dumb questions—and for the first time in the decade he’d owned the place, he was glad of it. More than glad because he wasn’t in the best shape. He was having trouble breathing and his feet were so numb with cold that he was beginning to have trouble standing; the old man knew that if he stopped moving it would be the end. When he saw that two people were in the car, he grew hopeful. He scrambled toward them, yelling Halp! Halp! , and took a quick look over his shoulder.

The nigger was gaining but taking his sweet time.

“Halp!” he screamed, as Lydia and Daniel emerged from their car. “He’s trying to kill me!”

Rhonda was on him in seconds.

She held him down and whispered in his ear. The old man listened in horror, pivoting his head as best he could to mutely plead to the trespassing couple. They remained at their car, watching. In the anarchy of coming death, he feebly grappled with a question: Why don’t they help? Are they a part of it? They all come to rob and kill me? He ran out of the time required to solve such a riddle. His attention returned to the still-whispering assailant, blood from his lacerated scalp now dripping into the old man’s mouth, covering it in red lipstick like the smear of a mischievous child who’d broken into her mother’s makeup kit.

Maya took a small step toward them, but her brother put his hand on her arm, gently holding her back.

It was the old man’s turn to whisper, but only Rhonda heard his last words.

4.

Ganesha was listless while Daniel washed him in the tub.

Lydia tended to the runaway, who was still asleep. She was joyous that the girl would live. She’ll never have to go to a Meeting, she thought. She’ll never be on the train having lemonade. She loosened the straps that bound her but didn’t remove them. Lydia worried that after they left, she might start thrashing and fall from the bed, hurting herself.

Daniel dragged the dead woman to an adjacent room so the girl wouldn’t have to see that when she came to. He wore gloves—a chapter in the Guide warned about leaving evidence, though being a cop made his precautions automatic. He wasn’t sure how careful Rhonda had been but strongly doubted that the yoga instructor was in the fingerprint database of criminal offenders. When they thought he was in good enough shape to drive, they walked Rhonda to his car. Lydia had the temerity to ask him what all the whispering was about. The landlord Ganesha told her that Rhonda wanted to know the details of how she’d been killed. She wanted to know what the old man had done to her. The old man told her that she’d been drugged—apparently his M.O.—which was why Rhonda was so confused about what happened and kept bringing it up at Meetings. From the moment she was abducted to the moment she died, the little girl didn’t have a sentient thought.