A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  “A family friend?” said Willow, his rage building. “Really?”

  Daniel improvised. “We know her folks, that’s all. It was . . . an emotional decision and we were wrong.”

  “It was dumb,” said Lydia. “Totally inappropriate and we’re sorry.”

  “How do you know the family?”

  Daniel made an executive decision that the only way out of the shit was to go deeper in. “I know the dad from a veterans’ group. I work with a PTSD group.”

  “Harold and Rayanne called us from the hospital,” said Lydia. “They sounded so frightened. My heart went out.”

  Willow was still red hot. “What in hell did you think you could accomplish by seeing that girl?”

  “It was stupid,” said Lydia. “They wouldn’t let her see her parents and then we thought that if we could get in to see Honeychile for a few minutes, we might be able to calm the girl down.”

  “Calm her down,” said Willow, stunned by their idiocy.

  “Maybe make it easier for Owen and his people to interview her,” said Daniel, in futile damage control.

  Willow looked like he was going to have an embolism.

  “They wouldn’t let the parents see her—they won’t let the fucking sheriff see her—but somehow you two, the casual acquaintances and bleeding hearts—somehow you thought, We’ll ride in like the cavalry and save the day for the department! That it’d be just a wonderful idea to drop in on the prime suspect of an ongoing homicide investigation and potentially contaminate said investigation. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “I know, I know,” said Lydia, in star-spangled my bad mode. “It’s totally crazy and effed-up, and, sir, we completely apologize.”

  “A terrible judgment call,” added Daniel.

  Willow shook his head in disgust and resignation.

  “I’ll tell you who you’re going to have to make those apologies to: Sheriff Owen Caplan. You better hope and pray he’s not going to hang your asses out to dry. And not just from this unit—you better hope he doesn’t ask you to turn in your guns and badges, period. That man went out on the line to put you here and you go and do something so stupid, like a couple of kids—”

  “We’re sorry, sir,” said Daniel.

  “It won’t happen again,” said Lydia.

  “Damn straight it won’t. I’ll fire you myself.”

  3.

  The sheriff spoke to Zelda at the Mount Clemens office of the Detective Bureau, with her parents present. He would have liked to have done the interview at her home but needed everything on video. Honeychile’s best friend was completely unglued, crying nonstop. He was joined by the detective lieutenant heading the case, but Owen was taking charge for now.

  About fifteen minutes in, he asked Mom and Dad if they would mind waiting outside. They didn’t, of course, because he’d already had a private conversation about it with them. He said there were things a teenager tended not to talk about if their parents were in the room. They understood.

  “Zelda,” he said, softly sympathetic. “I know this has been very, very hard on you. It’s a terrible shock and I know that you’re worried about your friend. But I want to assure you that right now she’s in the absolute best place she could be, getting the best of care.”

  “K,” said Zelda, sniffling and avoiding his eyes.

  The detective lieutenant sat back, doing his best to become part of the wallpaper so as not to antagonize the girl.

  “Can you tell me a little bit about Renée?”

  “We call her Honeychile.”

  “Right—Honeychile. From everything I’ve heard, she sounds like a very good person. A sweet, decent girl.”

  “She is,” said the loyal friend. “Oh my God, she’s the best.”

  “That’s why what happened is so hard to understand. Because I’ve talked to a lot of people about her. And they say she’s a wonderful, funny girl. A joy to be with. That’s not up for argument—that’s a fact.”

  Zelda nodded. She was getting calmer, which was good. It was all about building trust.

  “What really bothers me,” she said emotionally, “is that people are saying—some people—that she was on drugs. She is so not on drugs, she hates drugs. She never even tried marijuana!”

  He pushed a box of Kleenex her way.

  “Okay. Okay. And I believe that. I really do believe that, Zelda. And I understand how hurtful it is to hear people make false accusations about a friend.”

  “They are so false!” she said, blowing her nose.

  “What I need to know—what I’d like to know, if you’ll help me—is if there was anything you noticed that was different about her, different about your friend. In the past few days or weeks. If she was hanging out with any kids or even grown-ups that you didn’t know. At school or outside of school—”

  “Not really,” she said, nonplussed.

  “I need you to think about it. Really think. Because it’s important—if you want to help your friend. If you want to help Honeychile.”

  “All I want to do is help her!”

  “I know. I know that. And you’re helping her right now, Zelda, just by meeting with me and talking with me in exactly the way that you’re doing. I just need you to think about what I asked. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a big thing or a small thing, Zelda, you can let me decide. All I want you to do is go back in your mind and think—we can meet again too—go back and search your thoughts about Honeychile’s activities and behavior over the last few weeks.”

  “Well . . . she did start acting kind of different—”

  “Okay. Good. Tell me about it.”

  “After the asthma attack.”

  “She had an asthma attack.”

  “A really bad one.”

  “When was that?”

  “Maybe a week ago? Oh my God, we thought she was going to die. Maybe she got scared that it would happen again. Maybe she started acting different because she thought it was going to happen again and that she would die. It was really, really bad.”

  “Can you tell me how she was acting ‘different’?”

  She shook her head and he didn’t want to press.

  “Did Honeychile ever mention Mrs. Collins?”

  “The woman who placed her?” said Zelda.

  “That’s right. Did she ever talk about her?”

  “Not really—but I know she really loved her.”

  “Did Honeychile ever talk about Mrs. Collins’s little boy? She had a son named Winston. You probably heard what happened to him.” Zelda nodded. “Did she ever talk about Winston?”

  “I don’t think so—”

  “Did she ever tell you about going to visit Mrs. Collins?”

  “No . . .”

  “Are you sure? That would have been sometime recently. Are you sure she never mentioned going to see Mrs. Collins?”

  “She didn’t!”

  Owen believed she was telling the truth. Still, he followed the theme. “Did Honeychile ever say anything to you about Winston, before or after he disappeared? Anything at all? It’s important, Zelda.”

  “No.”

  “She never said she was upset about what happened? That she was upset for Mrs. Collins and wished she could find the people who were responsible for what happened to her little boy?” Zelda kept shaking her head. “Did the two of you ever go to the beach together?”

  “Not really.”

  “‘Not really’—does that mean ‘maybe’? Try to remember. Did you ever go to New Baltimore? The beach over there? I used to go when I was a kid. There’s a pier there and a park. Did Honeychile ever take you there?”

  She shook her head once more, then said, “There was something—it sounds really dumb . . .”

  “If it’s ‘dumb,’” he said, smiling, “which I promise it won’t be, then w
e’ll laugh about it together.”

  “Honeychile asked if she could sleep over. After she had the asthma attack. We’d been fighting so much I thought it would be really nice. The next day, we went to the museum in Detroit. Five classes went. And we . . .”

  “Go ahead, Zelda.”

  “Am I going to get in trouble for this?”

  “You’re not going to get in any trouble, I promise.”

  “Well—Honeychile said there was someplace she needed to go, so we left. I don’t want to get thrown out of school for this!”

  “You’re fine. No one has to know but you and me.”

  “We left—I mean, while everyone else was still there. But only during lunch hour! We were totally back in time and no one even found out.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “To this church—we took a cab.”

  “You went to a church . . .”

  “I don’t think she ever went there before, but it was like she knew exactly where she was going. But they wouldn’t let us in.”

  “Who wouldn’t let you in?”

  “These people. It was weird, I can’t explain! This woman . . . actually, they wouldn’t let me in, they were going to let her in but the woman said I couldn’t come. Honeychile told the woman no way—that she wasn’t going to go if I couldn’t go.”

  “You said that she told a woman. What woman?”

  “She was older and wore a long dress. And jewelry—like turquoise jewelry? She said I couldn’t come with. She wasn’t, like, mean about it, she was really nice. She said I could sit outside and they’d bring me cookies and lemonade. But only Honeychile was allowed to go in.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “We left.”

  “Did Honeychile tell you who the woman was?”

  “I don’t think she even knew,” said Zelda. “It wasn’t like they were friends.”

  “Did Honeychile tell you what was going on? After you left?”

  “She wouldn’t. I kept asking but I finally gave up.” Zelda’s face contorted in a mask of misery. “It wasn’t her fault, what she did! Everyone hated him! He was a bully and everyone hated him!” Her entire body seized. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I know he shouldn’t have died, no one deserves to die, but he was so horrible, he texted such horrible things to her! People don’t have a right to do that either, do they? And I know she probably didn’t mean to hurt him like that—she probably didn’t even know what she was doing! Because she’s a really, really good person! And I just want to see her! I just really need to see her! Can’t I see her? Why can’t I see her! Why can’t I see her?”

  He knew the interview was over.

  RESURRECTION

  1.

  The entity known as Dabba Doo sat in front of the television at the end of a long day, as was his habit. All of his days were long now—almost beyond belief.

  He was not a child; nor was he a man.

  Neither a landlord nor a tenant be . . .

  He was a diver who’d spent too much time in the lower depths, with no decompression chamber waiting.

  His memories were a miasma, a stew dissolving into broth. His physical body, such as it was, flicker-faded. Intermittently, his breath became labored and he could feel his very blood coursing its last lap. When he asked himself (with growing infrequency) what it was that had happened to him, he was baffled, and dropped the thread. What he lived for, if living is the word, was the Meetings—communion with those who were like family now. For the first time in his life, he loved and felt loved in return.

  But even that was beginning to flicker-fade—

  His son and daughter-in-law saw the change in him and searched for evidence of a stroke. They wanted him to get a check-up but he refused. He never left the house anymore, except for the hour-and-a-half round-trip to the Meetings in Detroit.

  Then—one morning after a morose and hectic sleep—something happened that seemed like a miracle. He began to remember everything about his old life, a life that’d been slipping away since the murdered boy Dabba Doo settled in with his childish ways, his childish memories.

  He remembered he once was a hunter. He was a schoolteacher too, but he had always been a hunter, and childhood memories—not Dabba Doo’s—returned to cosset him. When he was small, he hunted insects, chickens, snakes and mice, before graduating to cats and dogs, household and stray. At twelve, he stole onto a neighbor’s property at midnight and killed a young horse. Thinking about the foal’s dissection gave him a hard-on. That hadn’t happened in a long while, not since his child-tenant took up residence.

  He tried to conjure the hunting life after his teenage years but had trouble. But the miracle had arrived, the miracle of becoming himself again, and those memories, his memories, would soon come as well. He knew there must be a purpose to everything he’d undergone in these strange, epic months, that all had been orchestrated by a force greater than him—some fierce, wild-hearted god.

  Roy Eakins died and was reborn as Dabba Doo, but now the child-tenant was collapsing and something new was taking its place, staking its claim. Dabba Doo slept most of the time now, in a little royal bedroom deep inside the castle of what Roy Eakins was becoming.

  He felt as if he were in the midst of being granted a third life. He was convinced he was changing into something extraordinary and that it would be a mistake to wait passively for his destiny to unfold. He came to believe that had been the whole problem, the reason he’d been there the longest: because he hadn’t seized his destiny. He just sat in Meetings like an addled coward, waiting for it to seize him.

  Now he knew what he must do to be whole—to retrieve the memories of the hunt.

  * * *

  • • •

  Violet answered the door in her business suit. She smiled in friendly puzzlement—she’d never seen a landlord outside of the Meeting before. It was a fun thing but flustered her.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” he said. “Thought I’d stop and say hello.”

  “Yes, hi, of course! Come in!”

  She was winding down after her workday and he smelled wine on her breath. The insurance company paid her well; the condo was beautifully done. She made a joke about being sorry she didn’t have any gummy bears, “not even green ones!”

  He laughed and said, “But I’ll bet you have angel food cake.”

  “My favorite,” she said. “And I do!”

  “I’m Roy, by the way. Roy Eakins. That’s my ‘street name’—my landlord name.”

  “I’m Sarabeth Ahlström,” said the one he knew as Violet.

  “Lovely apartment. My lord.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I guess I had to come to Dearborn Heights to see how the other half lives.”

  “Ha! Well, do you approve?”

  “I more than approve. I envy.”

  “Can I get you a drink, Roy? It might dull the pain.”

  “I’d like that. Whatever you’re having will be fine.”

  She went to the fridge to get ice.

  “Hey, is this kosher?” she called out.

  “The wine? Well, if it ain’t Manischewitz—”

  “You’re silly! I mean, are we landlords supposed to fraternize?”

  “Rules were made to be broken. The Porter’s sure got a lot of them.”

  “Yes she does,” said Sarabeth.

  “Let’s break ’em one by one.”

  “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  “Mum’s the word. I don’t think we can get in too much trouble—what’s Annie gonna do, put us in detention? It’s kind of tough to punish a dead person.”

  Sarabeth laughed out loud. “You’re a wicked man!”

  As attractive and even flirtatious as she was, it was clear that sex wasn’t going to be part of the program. From what she’d shared in Meeting
s about her tangle of spurned lovers, Sarabeth had been a very busy girl before she died. But she’d been around too long now; her child-tenant, Violet, was dominant, killing off the landlord’s body’s memory of desire.

  “Here you go, Dabba Doo,” she said, handing him his drink. “A little dab’ll do ya.”

  He laughed and said, “You better call me Roy—Dabba Doo’s underage and providing a minor with alcohol will get you in trouble.”

  “You’re right! I stand corrected. Or sit corrected.”

  She was a little drunk.

  “You know, you’re awfully young,” he said. “Do you happen to know how you died? That always intrigues me. Some of the landlords seem to know, others haven’t a clue.”

  “Well, I have a suspicion,” said Sarabeth. “I was in the air, flying back from Europe, when it happened—when I felt Violet come. Maybe a blood clot? I googled it. Deep vein thrombosis. I thought maybe that was—”

  With a surge of energy, Roy sprang up and broke her jaw, knocking her off the designer loveseat. He crouched over her as she lay stunned on the vintage flat-weave carpet.

  “So many things are becoming clear,” he said, in a pensive, almost decorous tone. “Have you had any of the same feelings?” He spoke with the openness and vulnerability of an old friend seeking to ratify common experience. He thought she said Why through the bubble and gristle. “Why? Because I can!” he laughed. “Sorry—hate people who say ‘Because I can.’ Just hate it.” He rabbit-punched her stomach until she vomited blood. “Haven’t done this in a while,” he mused, climbing off her. “Can’t even remember the last time I hunted a full-grown. The little ones were always my thing. Which is perhaps ironic.”

  Sarabeth clung to consciousness with just enough awareness to feel Violet trying to escape. The child-tenant cried as she ran through dark corridors, searching for her cabin on the train.

  “And just so’s ya know, I had nothing to do whatsoever with the fool who murdered your precious tenant. What’s sad, though, is that Violet’s killer is about to get full amnesty—gonna go free as a bird. Right? ’Cause let’s face it, if a kiddie blows his moment of balance, he’s seriously fucked in the revenge department. No tickee, no momentito de balancia. Pardon my French.”