Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

He wanted to call Annie but Annie didn’t have a phone. Anyway, she was dying too… everyone was dying. Everyone was dying and coming back, to die all over again. He wished he had a Guide , like the children did, to tell him what to do. A Guide that could dig him out of the deep shit he was in.

“He wouldn’t tell me where Troy was.” Her façade collapsed and tears sprang to her eyes. “I begged him! ‘You can’t do this to him again!’ —”

Willow shuddered, not from her words but in reaction to the aria that erupted in the air around him. A castrato’s soprano, ecstatic and apocalyptic, pierced the void and a wild, refulgent cerulean blue filled the room.

“I still feel him, Willow!” said Lydia helplessly. “He’s here, he’s here —he’s somewhere here but I can’t find him, I can’t find him! I failed, failed, failed, I failed like Honeychile!” The look she gave Willow seared his heart. “What if he’s out there buried somewhere? Buried but still alive—?”

“I know where he is,” said Willow.

He was no longer Willow; Lydia knew what he’d become.

“Porter, tell me! Please, Porter, please ,” she cried plaintively.

Her lower lip trembled as she made her entreaty, like the bravest child stalwartly holding its ground.

“Please, Mister Porter, please sir, take me to my brother.”

2.

A downpour began as they barreled toward Wolcott Mills.

Midmorning now, but dark enough to be dusk.

Willow got that full-circle feeling as they hot-rodded through the middle of Saggerty Falls, where so many things had begun and ended… Maya looked straight ahead, saying nothing as he drove. He stole glances and was alarmed by what he saw, or thought he saw: a mountain lion sitting in the passenger seat.

“ This way,” she said, when they got to 29 Mile Road. “Turn here ”—on Indian Trail—“go there ”—past the old dam and old mills of the Metropark, bisected by the Clinton River. In ten minutes they were on the muddy road leading to Grundy Eakins’s home.

Water pelted the windshield faster than the wipers could handle. He saw a house in the distance, but Maya ordered him to pull over. Get out, she said; he hesitated and then obeyed. She slid into the driver’s seat and said, Get in . He walked around and opened the door. The seat was burning hot, wet with something.

“Grundy Eakins killed Winston Collins,” she said, like an oracle. “I’m going to have a moment of balance —but not my own. It won’t be mine and Troy’s, it’ll be Winston’s . And my brother will have it with me, if there’s still time. Please put on your seat belt.”

She floored it for the quarter mile or so left. When they arrived, the car sailed like a projectile through the fence, crashing into the front porch. The impact was so forceful that even though the airbags deployed, Willow managed to bang his head against the windshield. By the time he gathered his wits, Maya’s body was smashing her way through the front door.

The detective’s adrenaline overruled his concussion. He lurched from the car and drew his weapon as he cautiously entered. He could hear the begging screams of a woman shouting that she was pregnant. Maya shouted back, “I’m not interested in you or your fucking baby! Move! Move! Move!”

Their voices were coming from the second floor.

At the top of the stairs, tools were scattered beside a framed poster of the band Motörhead that was propped against the wall, waiting to be hung. Willow ducked into a dark room and then got down on his hands and knees so that he could peer into the hallway without being seen.

Halfway down, Grundy Eakins pointed a rifle at Maya. She was calm but so was Grundy.

“ Bring me to him ,” she said. “Bring me to him now and I’ll let you live.”

Willow knew she was buying time. She’d been taken by surprise, something he hadn’t thought possible—but surmised that shit happens, even during the moment of balance .

“Dad didn’t teach me to run,” said Grundy.

“I know what he taught you,” she said acidly. “Listen to me: take me to my brother and I’ll let you get away.”

“That crying little bitch in the bedroom is your bro ? Sweet! I’m gonna let you suck me, like he did, though I doubt you’ll do any better. Boy’s a natural . Sorry—just can’t let you go in there. Which, if you really want to know, is actually a great kindness I’m extending . Hell yeah. Because the man’s a sight for sore eyes.”

“You piece of shit.”

“The real reason you can’t see him… is because you’re about to be dead.”

Willow entered the hall and the pregnant woman tackled him as he fired, ruining the shot. They tussled and then tumbled down the stairs. The commotion was enough to distract Grundy, and Maya leapt, seized the rifle and scuttled it down the hall. The detective lay at the bottom of the stairs—the pregnant woman got knocked out—struggling to remain conscious. He heard an otherworldly scream: Lydia’s. It was loud and prolonged enough that he covered his ears in pain. (The pregnant woman did not stir.) He heard hammering and now it was Grundy who was screaming, but this time the screams were identifiably human. When he managed to climb back to the second floor, he saw him in the hallway just outside the bedroom.

Willow walked toward him, gun drawn. Grundy’s hands and feet were nailed to the wood floor and his cheek and part of the nose had been bitten off. But he was alive. He went to the bedroom and stood at the door looking in. It seemed like the detective had spent a lifetime following this creature into a thousand rooms, like the eternal sidekick of some horror-film queen. She crouched over Troy, who lay motionless on a stripped mattress stained with blood and everything else.

Willow took a few steps forward.

She was cradling her brother in her arms. “It’s Maya! I’m here, sweetheart—your little sissy’s here…” Both Daniel and Troy were dead. She shook her head in bottomless sorrow as her eyes played over the body. “What did they do to you! Look what they did…” She turned to Willow and with the gentlest countenance said, “He’s back on the train.” Her smile was beatific. “Troy’s waiting for me on the train…” She touched her brother’s forehead, rearranging the locks of hair, then wiped the blood from his brow. It reminded Willow of the end of a play he saw when he was very young—Shakespeare?—as a boy, he didn’t understand what was happening but now he could, and had to look away. Maya stood, passing him in the doorway as she walked from the room.

He watched her go to Grundy.

She took out a pocketknife. “Your father used this,” she said. “On my brother and me. I found it in the drawer next to his bed.”

“Don’t,” he wet-whispered, through ragged breath.

“I wonder who else he used it on… down through the years. Did your father take it off some Boy Scout he killed? Did you ever get a chance to use it, Grundy? Ever get a chance to use this cute little pocketknife?” He vigorously—as vigorously as he could—shook his head. The exposed rows of teeth on the right side of his face made him into a grinning anatomical model. “Are you sure? Are you sure you didn’t use it on Winston?” When he shook his head, she said, “Well, I guess you’re telling the truth. Maybe it was a family heirloom Dad was waiting to pass on. Your father’s dead now—so you can have it.”

Grundy was saying something but Willow couldn’t hear it.

“He carved and carved us with that Red Cross knife,” said Maya. Grundy’s chest began to heave. “Would you like to hear what he did with that pocketknife? I think you would—that’d be like some kind of bedtime story for you, wouldn’t it? Well, some other time. I’m going to tell you a better one to help you sleep.”