Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

“Save it for the memoirs, Willow. Or the TED talk.”

“Lydia and Daniel kept having a hunch that Honeychile was somehow connected to our case. The Rummer case. And it turned out that she was—through Winston , not Troy and Maya. The morning after you interviewed her, we went to the hospital to talk to her. I called to tell you we were going, remember? We got there right after she killed herself. We went into her room and saw drawings—sketches she’d been working on. And Deputy Doheny recognized one of the designs, an angel with butterfly wings. He said it was specific to Iron Butterfly, the old rock band.”

“How does that connect her to Winston?”

“Honeychile had some sort of psychic knowledge about what happened to Winston Collins. We can’t dispute that because she led us to the body. I’ve seen stranger things…”

“Get to the point, Willow.”

“The design of the angel she drew in the hospital was the same one that was on the T-shirt of the boy she killed at school.”

“And Daniel told me,” said Lydia, “that he found pictures on Facebook of Grundy wearing the Iron Butterfly T-shirt. The woman Honeychile drew, with the butterfly wings.”

Willow thought they were finding their groove; at least Owen was starting to be reflective instead of derisive. “Deputy Doheny had a theory that Honeychile was fixated on the design because it was on the T-shirt that Winston’s killer was wearing when he killed the boy. Dr. Robart said the girl was claiming to be Winston—so Daniel thought she had lashed out at the football player because she was triggered by the design. It was Grundy who she wanted to kill…”

The disgruntled sheriff was peeved that he’d shared the details of the Collins case with his old colleague.

“When the Porter—I mean, Willow—when our supervisor realized it was a footprint on the card,” said Lydia, “everything fell into place. We knew we had a pair of father-son serial killers on our hands.”

“It’s rare but not unprecedented,” said Willow. “Daniel’s idea about the T-shirts started to make sense.”

“But how did you end up at the farmhouse?” said Owen insistently.

“The night before, Daniel never came home,” said Lydia. “He still kept his apartment in Smiths Creek but always stayed with me. He’d go there to sleep when he was stressed out or needed to be alone—usually during the day. I got worried when I didn’t hear from him, so I went over. He wasn’t home but his car was there, parked on the street. Which was weird. I didn’t know what to do. I went to work in the morning and told Willow about it.”

“I probably should have been more concerned,” said the detective. “I thought maybe he’d spent the night with his ex, but I wasn’t going to suggest that to Lydia. We started talking about the Rummers and I told her the idea I had about the footprint… and we went over to see Roy. That’s when we found the body.”

“And right then ,” said Lydia, hamming it up—not just for Owen’s sake, but for Willow’s—“I had the feeling Daniel snapped . That he might have done something not so smart. That maybe he went to pay a visit to Grundy Eakins.”

“How would he have gotten to Wolcott Mills? If his car was still in Smiths Creek?”

“Maybe it wouldn’t start?” said Lydia lamely.

Another flaw in the narrative, thought Willow. But all said, we’re doing pretty well. “We’ll have to check cab and Uber records,” he offered. There were so many holes in their story that he was counting on the fact that both cases had been solved to ultimately save the day.

Owen called for a break. For the first time, Willow breathed. They’d taken some punches but if they stayed on the ropes the next eight rounds, it would be all right, even if they took a bloody beating. Willow thought anything short of a knockout was acceptable.

Everyone left the room but Lydia, who sat staring at the wall with an ethereal smile. Willow and the sheriff stood outside the door talking in low tones.

“Oh and by the way,” said Owen. “Your little theory about Roy Eakins traveling exclusively in children’s circles is absolute horseshit. We found a purse in his closet with ID belonging to Sarabeth Ahlström. She was murdered in her condo a few weeks ago in Dearborn Heights. At the time of his death, Roy was wearing a pair of bloody panties and the lab’s running tests to see if they belonged to Sarabeth—or someone else.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised. Killing adults doesn’t fit his profile.”

“You’re surprised? Fuck me , Dubya, I’ve been nothing but surprised for the last few hours.”

“Can we not lose sight of the fact that three murders have been solved? Of kids ? And that two of those went unsolved for almost twenty years?”

“I haven’t lost sight of that, Willow,” he said, softening. “I haven’t lost sight of it at all. And I know they didn’t get solved by themselves. I know that and I appreciate that.”

“It sure didn’t sound like that in the conference room. But thank you.”

“I just need to wrap a red bow around it—hell, I’ll settle for twine —but right now you’re asking me to put a ribbon on a pile of horse manure. And it needs to get wrapped, Willow, you know it does, you know that’s how the game is played. It’s all woo-woo dream-catcher at the moment. You’ve got Iron Butterfly T-shirts and hunches… everyone’s having spooky little feelings . I run the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office, not a psychic fair. And I’m fully aware that cold cases are sometimes solved in methods that are slightly unorthodox. The public likes that. But the powers that be are more fond of old-fashioned leg- and lab work.”

“We have both, Owen.”

“You better pray it’s a footprint on that card. And then you need to pray it matches Roy Eakins’s—”

“It will.”

“—and that Grundy’s wife corroborates your story.”

“She’s a nutjob, Owen.”

“Yeah, well. They’re everywhere, it seems.”

“And do me a favor, Owen.”

“What’s that?”

“Can you leave Daniel a hero? I’m asking you not to go down this ‘rogue cop’ road. Daniel Doheny was a natural. A brilliant, intuitive investigator. So leave him a hero—which he was. For real. It won’t do his family any good to paint him black or gray. It won’t do the department any good either. Make him a hero, Owen, and we’ll all be heroes.”

3.

Not long after they resumed, Owen decided that Willow and Lydia were running on empty. The interview was adjourned so everyone could recharge and begin fresh in the morning.

She probably won’t be here tomorrow, thought Willow. She’ll probably be back on the train…

He hoped that wasn’t true, hoped it was another lie (he’d told so many today), because of the large place she now held in his heart. He wanted her to live forever. It was selfish but he couldn’t help himself. He felt for Maya-Lydia, or whatever she had become, the same protective, unconditional love that he had for Pace. He wondered too: Is it my love, Willow’s love? Or is it the love of a Porter…

He realized it didn’t matter. Whatever it was contained all love’s grisly glory—love’s one-and-onlyness.

In the late afternoon, the sheriff called.

Every cell in Willow’s body clenched and split apart. Every fear rose up—that he was being arrested for obstructing justice, even for murder and conspiracy; that he would shame his daughter, wounding her so deeply that she’d go back to taking drugs. Maybe Annie had already been detained and started naming names… He imagined being locked up on a 5150 for belonging to a cult with psychotic delusions of supervising dead children who inhabited dead bodies…