Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

He took off his clothes. Roy wanted to hear music but her audio setup was too hard to figure out.

“Hey, but Annie’s a helluva gal, don’t you think? She hasn’t looked too spiffy in the last few weeks, have you noticed? Maybe she’s got a thrombosis goin’ on herself.”

He stayed with Sarabeth and Violet until past midnight, long after both departed.

1.

Willow’s day (and night) was full.

He planned to leave work after lunch and drop in on Adelaide before driving down to New Baltimore to keep his appointment with Roy Eakins. Then, in the evening, he would pick up Annie and attend his first Meeting, at the Cross of Glory Lutheran Church in Detroit. (After Honeychile had trespassed, the circumspect Annie moved it from the Divine Child Parish.) Willow had mixed emotions about that.

But mostly, he was scared shitless.

A nagging sense of folie à deux made him shudder—that he was entering into an irreversible pact with a deranged woman. He pictured himself back in AA (he hadn’t been to a meeting since moving to Macomb) and imagined his share before the packed room: “I started drinking again because I got stressed over a new job. I couldn’t handle being the scout leader of a troop of dead kids whose mission was to hunt down and kill their own murderers.” The macabre fantasy made him laugh, and he was glad he still could. He sensed that his laughing days were coming to an end.

He knew that Owen wouldn’t be home when he stopped over, which was best. He wanted to talk to Adelaide before his appointment with Roy, though the detective wasn’t even sure what it was that he wanted from her. He was flying by the seat of his pants—or maybe Roy Eakins’s pants—and none of it seemed particularly promising. What else was an over-the-hill, in-over-his-head cold case fuck-up to do? At least Roy was affable when they talked on the phone. It sounded counterintuitive but if the man had been closemouthed or even nasty, Willow may not have had the energy to further pursue. But Roy had always been affable. Like Ronnie Rummer, he actually sounded excited that Willow had called.

From Adelaide’s, he would pick Annie up at the SRO in Detroit. She was getting weaker and the bus ride to the Meeting had become too challenging. She told him to come at 7:00 P.M. He got nauseous just thinking about it.

Since he’d ripped them new assholes, the Cold Case Kids had gotten down to brass tacks. Lydia even approached him with a few rape kits, breaking her monomaniacal focus on the Rummers. When the detective told them about his visit with Elaine and Ronnie Rummer, they listened attentively, not in that weird way they tended to whenever Willow began talking about Troy and Maya’s parents. In general, they played their emotions close to the vest. Only once did Lydia betray an inner turmoil—when he shared that Elaine tried to kill herself on multiple occasions, the last effort ending in a disfiguring shotgun wound to the face. Willow thought that might have triggered something about Lydia’s own mother, but didn’t want to pry.

Before he left to see Adelaide, they met in the conference room so he could hear a plan of action. He could see they needed a kick in the pants. (The detective was starting to worry that he hadn’t properly been doing his job.) It haunted him that he had always failed as a mentor, from his daughter on down—which begged the surreal yet pressing question: How the fuck am I going to be of any use to Annie?

He scrutinized the corkboard as the rookies spoke of the leads they had chased, admitting with some chagrin that there wasn’t anything that looked intuitively promising.

“Then stop looking for intuitive,” Willow said sagely. “Intuitive can be overrated. Look for the real —connections that are real. Let ‘intuitive’ take care of itself . ”

They nodded gravely, like freshmen in Wizard School.

“Here’s something obvious,” said Willow. “Maybe too obvious but I’d have been on it six ways from Sunday.” He touched the fingertips of both hands, as if encircling a crystal ball. “The serial killer in Jacobs Prairie… that’s not too far from here, right? Are there any dots to connect?”

Lydia brightened—finally, they could please their teacher.

“We looked into it,” said Daniel drily.

“And?” said Willow.

“Timeline doesn’t work.”

“He was in jail that summer,” said Lydia. “Failure to pay child support.”

“You could have told me about that.”

“Sorry, sir,” said Lydia.

“Cold case folks from all around the country have gotten their knickers wet over that little shootout,” added Willow.

He stared at the pinned bag with the birthday card inside. Adorned with a sequined unicorn, it had been found in Maya’s bicycle basket, the one Elaine helped decorate with red plastic roses. The police surmised it had been picked up from the ground where it fell, then fastidiously replaced. It bore two prints: a tire track from the bike itself, and that of a human hand. In a show of solidarity and love, the community offered up their palms—hundreds of them. Willow had already returned to New York when he heard about the voluntary effort, and while it touched him (a three-page feature, “Palm Sunday,” ran in People ), the cynical cop knew better. He thought it was a colossal waste of money and manpower. He tended to agree with Ronnie Rummer. Whoever grabbed those kids was likely transient, and long gone by the time Saggerty Falls staged its compassionate act of theater.

“I keep seeing that card. What’s it still doing here?” he said gruffly. The deputies were perplexed. “Send it to the lab. See if they can get some DNA off the print.”

It had never been swabbed. In 2000, DNA was only something in the air.

“Yes, sir,” said Lydia.

“Seems unlikely, though, doesn’t it, sir?” said Daniel.

“I’d like a dollar for every time ‘unlikely’ turned out to be a grand slam.”

“Yes, sir.”

Since having their backsides spanked, they’d been sir -ing him to death like child actors out of Oliver! It amused more than it annoyed. He returned his gaze to the Ouija board of clues.

“Have either of you come across the name Roy Eakins? Or Grundy Eakins?”

“The teacher and his son?” said Lydia. “Sure. I read his interview—the father’s.”

“The boy was developmentally disabled,” said Daniel.

“That’s right,” said Willow.

“He was ruled out,” said Lydia. “He was at the barbecue all day.”

“They both were—they never left. Why do you ask, sir?”

“I’m interviewing Roy this afternoon.”

“Really,” said Daniel.