Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

“Not really.”

“Okay. That’s fair enough too.”

“ I know what you can call me!” she said, in a playful burst of enthusiasm.

The therapist welcomed the girl’s change in mood. The first half hour was always the toughest. It usually took at least three sessions for defenses to begin to drop.

“You can call me Winston .”

“Winston?” said Jacquie. “Okay! And who’s Winston?”

“Winston is who I am .”

“So you’re a boy.”

“Well, a girl wouldn’t be called Winston. Maybe a cigarette, but not a girl.”

Honeychile giggled and Jacquie noticed that her voice had changed. It was thinner, reedier, childlike.

“And how long have you felt like a boy and not a girl?” She grew silent and the therapist gave her a nudge. “Sometimes little girls feel like they’re in the wrong bodies. Sometimes little boys feel that way too. Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Winston?”

“Yes.”

“Good—and that’s okay . I’m so glad you’re sharing this with me. Have you shared it with anyone else?”

“Nope. I was gonna share it with Hildy but I didn’t.”

“I love Hildy. Are you still in touch?”

“ Yes. But I was scared to tell her I was Winston.”

“Why were you scared? That’s something Hildy would understand. And support. Why were you scared to tell Hildy?”

“Because I’m her son . They hurt my mouth and pee-pee with a sword, then put me in the ground.”

Jacquie’s heart quickened. In a few stroboscopic seconds, the stunned woman put it together: “Winston” was the name of Hildy Collins’s missing child. Her diagnosis caromed from gender dysphoria to psychosis.

“You’re Hildy’s son?” she said, almost stammering.

“ Yes. But I can’t find who kilt me.”

Her voice and her language were regressing further.

“You can’t find them?” said Jacquie. All she could do was fall back on her training, to echo and mirror.

“That’s why I didn’t tell Hildy .”

“That’s why you didn’t tell Hildy.”

“Because I can’t find them. I’m s’posed to find the bad people but I can’t . And I’m scared to tell Annie ’cause she’ll be so mad.”

Annie? Was she dealing with a multiple?

“And who is Annie?”

“From the choo-choo. She brought lemonade and cookies. She sent me.”

“Annie sent you?”

“To hurt the people who kilt me. But I can’t find them. I know I’m in the marsh -muds but not who kilt and burying me.”

The girl grew quiet and so did the shrink.

Jacquie took some long, slow breaths, trying to decide, in a rare in-over-her-head moment, just where to go next. Before the session ended, she needed to bring her client back from whatever world she had gone to. She needed to get proactive and take control.

“Winston… can I talk to Honeychile? I’d really like to have a few words with Honeychile. Do you think I can do that?”

“Honeychile is dead .”

“She’s dead?”

“She die of a asthma . That’s when Winston the tenant come.”

“Winston came…”

“When Honeychile die in a asthma attack!”

“When Honeychile died from asthma—?”

The girl nodded, disembodied, like a bobblehead soothsayer.

“But I see you,” said the therapist. “I see Winston and Honeychile—won’t you let me talk to Honeychile again?”

“You can talk to her dead body . Only her dead body is here. But if I find the people who kilt me, you won’t see her dead body no more . She’ll be completely dead and go away forever!” Honeychile’s glee turned to despair and she began to hyperventilate. “But I can’t find them! I can’t find the people who kilt me—and Annie is going to be very, very mad!”

2.

They tailed Dabba Doo from the Meeting and sat in the car in front of his modest New Baltimore home. Lydia wasn’t really sure what they were doing there—it’d been her idea to come—but Daniel trusted her instincts, even though they’d gone somewhat askew when it came to Rhonda and the incident at Jacobs Prairie.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “did you really want to go see the old house in the Falls?”

“ May -be,” she said, without taking her eyes off the house.

“You’re the one who brought it up.”

“I know, but it’s… weird. Sometimes it’s the only thing I think about—and sometimes it’s the furthest thing from my head. Like, zero interest.”

“Do Mom and Dad still live there?” he asked, sounding very young.

“ No ,” she answered, almost contemptuously. “But right now can we please just focus on what we’re doing?”

“What are we doing? Why are we here?”

“I don’t know… it’s just a feeling that maybe there’s some way Dabba Doo can help. Anyway, it can’t get worse than it already is.”

When they knocked, he threw open the door with a frisky smile, as if he’d been waiting for them. Lydia noticed how everyone at the Meeting tended to be like that—friendly and funny in an open, sweetly eager way, not only because they were scared and drew strength from the fellowship, but because all of them were longing for playmates.

“Hope you’re not starving,” said Dabba Doo as he walked them to the living room. “Afraid I don’t have much to offer in the culinary department. I do have gummy bears. You may have all the reds and the yellows you like, but lay off the greens .”

“I’m a red gummy man myself,” said Troy.

“Then there shall be no controversy. Take a load off, kiddos!” He planted himself on a beanbag chair in front of the TV and his visitors sat cross-legged on the floor.

The local news got everyone’s attention. A man and woman had been murdered at a farmhouse in Minnesota. They were holding a fourteen-year-old runaway captive; the police floated a theory that the couple may have been killed by “one of their own,” a third accomplice to the kidnapping. They were digging up the property because the girl said that her assailant had threatened to bury her where the pigs slopped. “You’ll meet a lot of new little friends there,” he told her. They showed the sty being disinterred by backhoes—sets of human remains had already been uncovered. Local politicians expressed outrage when the dead man was revealed to be a Person of Interest in the disappearance of a young girl in Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, eight years back.

Her name was Rhonda Whittle.

“Yabba Dabba Doo!” squawked their host when he heard the reporter say Rhonda’s name. “Now we know what the yogameister did to earn that birthday cake. Well, good on him—I mean her!”

Maya shot a glance at Troy, telegraphing that she was about to get real.

“We were there,” she said. “At the farm, when it happened.”

“You were not ,” said Dabba Doo, excited as could be.

“Saw the whole deal go down,” said Troy. “Rhonda’s moment of balance .”

Dabba Doo was beside himself with merriment. “Well how in the world did that happen?” A lightbulb went off. “Ha! I know—you were after him too! That busy sonofabitch killed you and Maya!”

“He didn’t,” said Maya, shaking her head.

“He didn’t ?” said Dabba Doo, half-confused, half-disappointed.

“No—I just had this feeling we should go there. This vision came to me out of nowhere that Rhonda was on his way to a farm in Minnesota. So I went with it.”