A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  “I’ll find something online,” he said.

  “I can help with that if you need me to.”

  “I think I can manage. I’m the bachelor-apartment king.”

  “You oughta see if our old place in the Falls is available,” she said with a smirk. She’d meant it to be funny but realized it wasn’t. “Mount Clemens might make the most sense. That’s where your office will be, no?”

  “Yeah. We’ll see—maybe someplace by the lake. And, Addie . . . I’d prefer you didn’t mention any of this to Pace—the job opportunity or my little drive-by this morning. Not just yet. Okay?”

  “You got it, Dub. Seen our grandchild lately?”

  “Just a few weeks ago. He’s a kick and a half.”

  “They haven’t been here in a month and I’m jonesing for my Larkin. Might have to bushwhack ’em.”

  It was clear that Pace hadn’t told her about the boy’s condition. After all the hospitality and goodwill, Willow had mixed emotions about withholding the news, but in the end convinced himself it wasn’t his information to give. It was their daughter’s.

  He got his things together and she walked him to the car.

  “Guess we’ll be seeing a lot of each other,” he said drolly. “You know—extended family dinners, Sunday brunches. Watching Game of Thrones and Super Bowls, that sort of thing.”

  “For sure. Don’t forget the extended family vacations! And I’m not a Thrones gal, I’m a Homeland gal. It makes me so tense I almost throw up.”

  “You always liked negative excitement.”

  They hugged, heartfelt. She stopped herself from saying, All this could have been yours—another attempt at humor that would have laid an egg. She watched him pull away.

  “Hey!” shouted Adelaide, running after him. He stopped and rolled down the window. “I’m going to get you a Casper for your new digs! Easy and great, right? My housewarming gift.”

  2.

  He found a little place for $775 a month on Craigslist, an apartment on Beech Drive in Sterling Heights with a “terrace” off the dining room big enough to wedge yourself in for a smoke. (Though Miranda the bodyworker might have a problem.) It was a twenty-minute drive from Mount Clemens.

  The weekend before he moved, Willow organized the Port Hope trailer and scoured it clean. He wasn’t ready to sell; there wouldn’t be any takers anyway. It wasn’t so much a teardown as a blow-away. Down on his knees at 2:00 A.M., the gusts off Lake Huron shimmying the walls, he took a Brillo Pad and scrub-a-dubbed the kitchen floor, cackling to himself that it was just the kind of OCD ritual folks were known to engage in pre-suicide. At least he could laugh. Whistling along with the wind while he worked, he ruminated on his ex . . .

  They met in the early eighties when he was a rookie cop in Chicago. Addie was a waitress, with that Jewish/Italian thing that always made him hard. She was funny too—she was biting, another thing that got Willow off. He was all about waitresses and changed coffee shops whenever the affairs blew up, which they inevitably did. But it was different with Adelaide. They knew what they had but tried to keep it light. They didn’t even move in together until she was pregnant. Didn’t get married either, not until a couple of years after Pace was born.

  A decade flew by like a dirigible on fire. Ten years of booze and coke, of stealth waitresses and skimming money from small-time drug dealers, of beating the shit out of arrestees during joyrides back to the station—Brave Old Cop World before the nightmare of political correctness and nonstop social media surveillance put a stake through its black heart. His suffering wife began a last-ditch pillow-talk campaign about how much better their lives would be if they got out of Dodge. A homeboy who worked violent crimes in the 4th District (and grew up in Macomb County) told him that the police department in Saggerty Falls, Michigan, was currently recruiting. “Dubya, you just might be overqualified for the job.” When it looked like Willow might be fired for his latest tomfoolery, he and the Chicago PD parted ways, with both parties pretending to be amicable.

  The village had a goofy Thomas Kinkade flavor, sans water mills and thatched-roof cottages. The houses were all newish, the neighbors awesome and the schools decent—which meant it took all of fourteen months for Willow to lose his mind. He kept a grip on his insanity by playing musical waitress chairs, but there were only so many coffee shops in the surrounding townships. Adelaide knew what was going on. He’d begun to think that she always did, and wasn’t sure whether to love or hate her for that.

  At least he appreciated the company of the man he shared a squad car with. Owen Caplan enjoyed a drink himself and was simpatico to his partner’s borderline behaviors. But Owen was destined for greatness—which included Willow’s wife. “I guess the best man won” was how the loser chivalrously characterized the soap opera in the years that followed the divorce. He got a lot of mileage out of all those three-minute sad-funny shares, honed to perfection in sundry rehabs and midtown Manhattan 12-Step meetings. Women really seemed to go for his sly, self-deprecating line of bullshit.

  He moved out of the house in ’97. Pace was thirteen, that vulnerable, invulnerable age when a girl hates her mom and needs her daddy. Like every couple who separate, they still held out hope, trying to keep it together for the kid, the pension, the fraud of makeup sex, the whatever. Willow hung around for another year. But there always comes that moment when the stoned, exasperated husband throws something at a wall and it bounces back and glances his wife; or he makes a menacing macho move and she backs away in fear, stumbling, and hurts a wrist while breaking her fall. Then one of those events—pick one—becomes alt-fact legend, passed on to the neighbors, the coworkers, the children and generations to come.

  Your father hit me . . .

  Not to say that men don’t beat and kill their women. But Willow Millard Wylde wasn’t remotely capable of that.

  After the split with Addie, he and Owen still rode together but his cohort started getting squirrelly. A little weird, a little distant—like Adelaide!—then one day Owen was pulled from the car and partnered with someone else. Owen evinced mild outrage, acting like he’d been blindsided, but Dubya knew he requested the change. Willow thought it was chickenshit, but it didn’t really rock his world. He just kept drinking and whoring his way through his shifts, going through the merry motions, because he knew it was all coming to an end, some kind of end. And soon. His daughter hated him because he basically ignored her existence. Everything fell in Adelaide’s lap: Pace’s abortions (three), Pace slicing up her thighs (an X-Acto), Pace stealing unused drugs from the room of the dying father of a girl she babysat (Dilaudid), Pace’s correspondence on the Internet with a fifty-something teacher in Fort Wayne. When Adelaide caught Willow driving her to a ballet lesson drunk, she put the plug in the jug and filed for divorce. In six weeks’ time, he said goodbye to all that—the waitresses, the marriage, the whole shitty postcard of a town—and decamped to Manhattan to become prince of the city.

  He said goodbye to Pace too and never forgave himself.

  * * *

  • • •

  The last thing he did before departing Port Hope was to paint over the mural composed of Owen and Adelaide’s address that he’d colored the wall with on his return from the disastrous outing to New York. Like some magnificent coral reef, the numbers and letters had grown into explosive, abstract glory. Somehow it wouldn’t have been right to leave it behind unattended. But Willow had high hopes for the fresh canvas of the new place in Sterling Heights.

  He was already feeling inspired.

  3.

  A photo montage—

  Willow in his Port Hope double-wide, contemplating his navel . . . staring at the ceiling while being serviced by Miranda . . . scrubbing the floor like a man condemned. Willow in Armada, sweaty and disoriented, on a fresh-out-of-the-box Casper, staring at the ceiling of his ex-wife’s guest room. Willow in Sterling Heights, staring at the ceiling o
f an empty utility apartment from a thrift-store futon (the Casper was on its way).

  Such was life—a succession of random walls and rooms, of tiny spaces that we convince ourselves provide continuity, secrecy, safety.

  He’d met a few neighbors during the move, the most notable being an attractive RN named Dixie Rose Cavanaugh. Even the name got him horny. He hoped she didn’t work alongside Adelaide at Macomb General—that would be such a bore. Another was a Viet vet who still managed to climb on his Harley and ride off each day at exactly 11:50 on an excursion to Early World Diner, where all the wounded warriors hung out. A clockwork public lunch dropped them into the babbling brook of humanity and broke the spell of loneliness. It was pretty much the only thing left on their schedules, that and field trips to the VA for whatever was slowly or quickly killing them.

  A week ago he showed up at the administrative building of the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office and peed in a cup, just like Owen promised. Good ol’ Charlie Powell did the test. How ’bout that? Took out the dipstick, gave it a glance-over and pronounced, “Dubya, you’re clean.” Willow had always called him Charles in Charge, from back in the day. When Owen bailed on their partnership, he and Charlie rode together, becoming the Falls’ new Starsky and Hutch. Years later, by the time the former Saggerty Falls PD chief snagged the brass sheriff’s ring, Charlie’d already had a few heart attacks. Owen pulled him out of his retirement and depression, anointing him as his de facto assistant and all-around man Friday. Charles was back in charge.

  Sheriff Caplan was supposed to accompany them on a tour of the building on Gallup Street in Mount Clemens but texted that he couldn’t make it. The Cold Case Task Force took up the first floor and climate-controlled sub-basement of a nondescript edifice housing nondescript departments that performed nondescript county services. He and Charlie strolled through empty rooms—most of the rented furniture was yet to arrive—but there were folding chairs and a beat-up metal desk in the space designated for Willow’s office.

  At least there was a guard in the lobby. Greeting him on that first day, Willow couldn’t help thinking such a fate could have been his. Maybe still would be. Becoming a badge monkey might just be the pot of shit at the end of the rainbow.

  “It ain’t Trump Tower,” said Charlie. “But we’ll get the place looking half-decent. Central heating works like a champ. Hang a picture or two, get some carpet. A little paint job.”

  “It’ll do till they realize how important we are.”

  Charlie smiled warmly and said, “It’s real good to see you again, Dubya. Life sure takes some funny turns, huh?”

  “Oh, don’t you know it. Though I have learned that some turns are funnier than others.”

  “Guess we’ve both been through the ringer.”

  “I feel like I’m still in the ringer,” said Willow with a chuckle.

  “I heard that. When the dust settles, let’s grab a drink. Not a drink,” he revised, in a nod to Willow’s sobriety. “Dinner. Play some catch-up.”

  “I’d like that, Charlie. It’s been too long. You still enjoying your whiskey?”

  “It’s wine now. My cardiologist insists,” he winked.

  “We used to do our shifts half-drunk,” said Willow nostalgically.

  “Half? I don’t think so, Dubya.”

  “Maybe you’re right. It did make the time pass, didn’t it.”

  “Not fast enough,” said Charlie. “Kinda sweet to have the dysfunctional Dream Team back, cooking on a burner or two.”

  “We can thank Papa Caplan for that.”

  “Oh, I thank the man every single day—say my prayers to him at night too. Owen Caplan saved my life—I’d have been home on the porch, waiting to die. Probably dead already. He’s the best man I know.”

  Willow said that he wanted to take a look at the basement storage on his own, and Charlie gave him the key. “The files were just transferred so it’s a bit of a mess down there.”

  “We’ll sort it out,” said Willow.

  As the old friends parted, they shook hands.

  “Charles in Charge,” said Willow, in an affectionate adieu.

  * * *

  • • •

  He began to hear a low chorus the moment he pressed B, and when he stepped from the elevator it was loud as a church choir. The cacophony of blended children’s voices was manageable and didn’t frighten him, as it had on first exposure to the Spirit Room in Manhattan. There was nothing to prove anymore and nothing to run from; at least that’s how it felt in this moment. (He knew all moods and feelings were subject to sudden, radical change.) The sheer blueness of the space came back to him, the same mordantly transcendent, otherworldly color and the attendant feelings it evoked, feelings he’d made it his life’s work to suppress.

  This time, he surrendered.

  There were haphazard stacks of cardboard boxes marked by county names, surnames, case numbers. Closing his eyes, the detective (for that’s what he was again, officially) stood and swayed, unpacking at last the psychic gifts he had stowed away as a young boy, unspooling them with the steady, battle-scarred hands of a man who’d paid a heavy price for denying them. He didn’t bother to look through any of the files. Nor did he desultorily examine the plastic bags harboring swatches of stained fabric, human hairs and crime scene photos—bodies in forests, bodies in automobiles, bodies in open fields—the effluvia of cases so cold and forgotten, they were deader than the victims themselves.

  He closed his eyes and stood straight as an anchor’s chain, formally assuming the position of choirmaster.

  4.

  When he got home, Willow went straight to work.

  A virgin wall meant only one thing: mural-time!

  Some folks took pictures; others threw pottery or played chess online. The more adventurous took tango classes, dancing with like-minded strangers on a Saturday night.

  Hell, said Willow. I’m just gonna paint my walls.

  It was a perfect time to pour himself a drink, but he resisted.

  This time, he’d bought oils and watercolors at an art store in Mount Clemens. His apprenticeship with crayons and Sharpies was over.

  He was just finding his groove when he got the text from Adelaide: uhm, still coming, dub? He’d completely forgotten about the late-afternoon shindig at Macomb County General that she invited him to. He couldn’t blow it off—it was important, for lots of reasons, that he attend. He set down his palette, already van Gogh–thick with ocean waves of color, grabbed his coat and dashed.

  He knew it was a little paranoid, but on the drive over all he could think of was bumping into the cute little RN neighbor. He pictured Addie introducing them (“Willow, meet Dixie, my bestie!”) and then raising an eyebrow when Dixie said, “Oh my God, your ex just moved into my building! Isn’t that funny?” He was starting to feel his sap rise for the first time since he left the Meadows and didn’t need any complications. Willow had big plans for him and Nursie—shitting where you eat be damned. He made a mental note to ask Dixie what hospital she worked at the next time he ran into her, so he could stop obsessing over the unforeseen.

  The lobby swarmed with visitors. Trays of cheap crudités circulated, and cheap wine too. Willow clutched a can of half-cold Diet Coke.

  “There you are!” said Adelaide. She was out of her nurse’s uniform.

  “Hey there, Addie. Don’t you look chic. Owen make it?”

  “He’s around here somewhere.”

  “What’s the occasion again?”

  “We’re just thanking some folks who do a lot around here for no pay. Doing amazing shit for love, not money—what a concept, right? Hey, how’d it go today? Wasn’t it your first day at school?”

  “It went really, really well.”

  “How’s Sterling Heights? Are you settling in?”

  “Oh yeah. Just got my Casper. Thank you for that.”
<
br />   “Awesome! Still in the box?”

  “It has been freed.”

  “Excellent. And how do you like your digs—I mean, your Cold Case digs.”

  “The place isn’t turnkey but I like my office quite a bit.”

  “Well, look at you!” she said proudly.

  “Charlie Powell showed me around.”

  “I guess it’s old home week.”

  She saw someone across the room and grabbed Willow by the hand. When they got to the woman, Adelaide said, “Willow Wylde, meet Annie Ballendine—World’s Greatest Volunteer.”

  Annie blushed. “I don’t think that’s true but you’re very sweet, Adelaide.”

  “It is true. But I probably shouldn’t say that too loud or the others’ll get jealous. Annie . . . this is my ex-husband, believe it or not.”

  “Oh my goodness!” she said. “How nice to meet you.”

  He smiled and shook the volunteer’s hand. She seemed to wince at his touch before flashing a warm smile. Willow swore that she muttered It’s you under her breath.

  CLOSURE

  A few hours after José received his birthday cake, he had a massive heart attack and died at home, in the middle of watching Dancing with the Stars. Despite their best efforts, paramedics were unable to bring the engineer, known outside Annie’s Meetings as Tim Norris, back to the land of the living. It was Tim’s habit to unwind in front of the television from 8:00 P.M. to 11:00 while his wife sat beside him, catching up on old New Yorkers.

  Only after he passed did certain things begin to nag. In the last three months, she noticed a change. Some of it was just silly—like Tim’s newfound love of Frosted Flakes in the morning (he was always a no-breakfast guy), an anomaly that she wrote off as a quirk of middle age. And those songs he’d started to sing, in Spanish no less, in a funny, childish voice. He said that a Mexican coworker had been giving him lessons. But some of the changes had a darker feel, like when she called his name and he wouldn’t answer and she’d find him sitting in the basement rec room, brooding in the dark. And the “work-related” day trips he’d taken to Lansing, Flint and Battle Creek, in the ten days preceding his death—what was that about? He was employed by the City of Detroit and had told her that his bosses wanted him to do a little “fact finding” to see how other cities and townships conducted their business. Fair enough, she thought at the time.