“About what? What do you mean? Talk to me, Lydia.”
“I didn’t kill him—he died on his own. I just stood there and watched. And he knew that would be the worst thing. He knew . . .” She smiled like a martyr on a stake about to be set on fire. “He won. Roy Eakins won.”
A thousand things went through his head, half the concerns of a Porter, half those of a professional sworn to uphold the law. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? There’s a body—need to file a report. I’ll say we were following up on a lead—that the print on the birthday card was a footprint, not a palm print—but Owen’s going to ask what we were doing here, why we came to his house before getting the results—and why didn’t I call for backup? Fuck fuck fuck—and Lydia—what if she dies? Right there in the chair? Because isn’t that more or less the fuck what happens after moments of balance? Don’t they drop dead after the ones who murdered them are gone?
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 mad
e 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.”
She put the blade into one eye and then the other and Grundy Eakins screamed, not a scream like Maya-Lydia’s but not a human one either. Then she looked up toward Willow and the room where her brother lay. “Finish him, Troy!” she shouted, awash in ecstastic, unfathomable horror and resolution. Willow had the sense she was in some sort of fugue state, because even in the magical world whence she came (and would soon return to), he doubted that Troy’s or Daniel’s participation was an option. Both landlord and tenant had been released—he felt it in his Porter’s bones.
She went back to work with the “heirloom.”
Less than a minute had passed when Grundy’s protests ended and the moment of balance came, albeit secondhand.
3.
Seven sheriff’s cars and three ambulances converged.
It wasn’t yet noon; the storm made everything into a dark slurry, a Turner seascape.
Willow sat in the white-trash solarium, shrouded in a scratchy blanket provided by paramedics. His bumpy, bloody head was swabbed and bandaged. Beside him was Lydia in her own blanket, though looking more serene—almost religious. Her face was ethereally calm, like the emblem of a dreamer. The bodies hadn’t yet been loaded into the coroner’s van and the forensic team was busy measuring, taking pictures and bagging evidence. Laverne Eakins insisted on walking to the ambulance unaided but the request was denied. They cuffed her to the gurney.
After his walk-through of the crime scene, Sheriff Caplan went to the sunroom and stood there, composing himself. His autocratic gaze shifted between them—the disheveled, slightly sheepish cold case detective and the spaced-out rookie. The blood of Lydia’s partner had been wiped (mostly) from her face and hair but was still painted on her clothes.
“Can you tell me,” he said, “what the fuck went on here?”
Willow sighed before pronouncing the words he’d been rehearsing in his head: “Grundy Eakins killed Winston Collins.”
Owen was startled but merely bit down on his lower lip, mindful of a set of circumstances whose gravity could not be overstated—one of their own had been tortured to death. He tabled Willow’s news flash. “What happened to Doheny?”
“He got here before we did,” said Willow, not that it explained anything. He just hadn’t had time to formulate a feasible narrative. For now, the best strategy was to state the obvious. “A few weeks ago he told me that he felt Grundy Eakins was a strong suspect. Lydia and I were looking at . . . various others. I told Daniel not to pursue until we had a consensus.”
“He came here without informing you?”
“That’s right. I think the death of the Collins boy hit him hard, harder than he let on. It became personal. I warned him about not getting involved that way. It happens.”
Lydia spoke up, to Willow’s surprise. “It was PTSD—a PTSD thing. A boy died when he was in Afghanistan and he felt responsible. I don’t think that’s something you ever get over. I know Daniel didn’t.”
“Are you telling me,” said Owen, “that he came here as some kind of vigilante?”
“He wanted to be a hero,” she said, putting a compassionate spin on what in some quarters is called an epic goatfuck.
“I don’t know if he was planning to arrest him or kill him,” said Willow. “And that’s the God’s honest truth.”
“Jesus,” said Owen, shaking his head. “The suspect was crucified. And his eyes! His fucking face—” He looked at Lydia’s bloody hands and said, “Did you do that?”
“His father did that,” she said. “Roy Eakins did that to him.”
“What?” said Owen.
“That’s right,” said Willow, thinking it best to go with the flow. Buy now, pay later. “His father killed him.”
“And how did you two get here?”
“I had a feeling he might be here,” she said. “So I told the Porter and we—”
“Who the fuck is ‘the Porter’?”
“I meant my supervisor—”
“We came over together,” said Willow. He shot her a glance that said: put a sock in it.
It was difficult for the sheriff to keep a lid on the stew of anger, grief and bedevilment he was floating in. “You had a feeling so you just raced over to an alleged serial killer’s compound without calling it in. Jesus, Willow!”
“It happened so fast,” said the beleaguered detective. He had always detested that catchall phrase but at the moment was grateful to put it to use. “I’m sorry. You’re right, of course you’re right. I should have called it in.”
“You’re sorry.” Owen took a deep breath. “Is there a connection to the girl in all of this? Renée Devonshire?”
“Honeychile?” said Willow, with a familiarity that struck the sheriff as odd. “None whatsoever.”
“You’re saying she didn’t know this asshole? That Honeychile had zero contact with the Eakinses . . .”
“Zero,” said Willow. To sound a little less sure of himself (about everything), he added, “That we know of.”
“Let me ask you something else, since you seem to be all-seeing and all-knowing. There was a time we were looking at Grundy as a suspect in the Rummer case—if you’ll recall.” Everything he said had a terminal tinge of mockery. “Has it occurred to you and Deputy Molloy that those suspicions were correct?”
Willow touched his bandage and winced, as if to signal that he preferred that the interrogation be postponed. “I don’t think so. I don’t think he—Grundy—participated.” Then it came out. “It was Roy who killed those children.”
“Roy?” said Owen, trying to get a footing.
“That’s right,” nodded Willow. “Roy Eakins killed Troy and Maya Rummer.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“I have proof.”
“And when were you going to tell me about this? Or do I work for you now?”
“I wasn’t sure until last night, Owen.”
Willow prayed that the prints he’d sent to the lab would match—if they didn’t, he’d be skipping town. Maui was looking pretty good right now. Maybe Woody Harrelson would hire him as a gofer.
“Where is Roy Eakins.”
“At his house in New Baltimore.”
“We need to go pick that man up!” said Owen, waving one of his men over.
“There’s no hurry,” said Willow. “Roy’s dead.”
Owen became irate. “You better not be telling me that Daniel Doheny already took care of that!”
“No,” said Lydia, calmly. “He died of natural causes.”
The sheriff threw up his hands. The confetti of information needed to be properly sorted outside the war zone. “I want you both to clean up and be at my office within the hour. You’re going to start from the beginning and walk me through to now. Is that clear?”
“Of course,” said Willow. “And thank you, sir. I think we both need a moment.” He turned to Lydia. “I’ll take you home.”
“One of my men will take you.”
“I’m okay. I’m fine to drive.”
“Like hell you are. Leave your car. We’ll take care of it.”
The detective got paranoid, wondering if Owen was going to turn the automobile over to forensics. He panicked, wondering if he’d left some o
f the Guides Annie had given him in the trunk.
“Take your showers,” said Owen. “I’ll see you on the hour.”
As they walked to the waiting sedan, the sheriff caught up to Lydia. He gently touched her arm, the human part of the baffling equation suddenly making itself known. He knew the deputies were in a relationship.
“I’m sorry about your loss, Deputy Molloy.”
“Thank you,” she said, warmly. “I’m sorry for you too. It’s a big loss for everyone.” Her tears had dried up.
They looked up at the police chopper circling above. A media helicopter was keeping a respectable distance.
“Well,” said Owen. “The circus has come to town. And you won’t believe the elephant shit we’re going to be shoveling.”
“We’re not the heroes,” said Lydia, as if she hadn’t heard him. “Daniel was.”
Somewhat cynically, Owen said, “More will be revealed.”
DEBRIEFING
1.
Lydia and Willow lived in opposite directions from Wolcott Mills. The detective told the deputy who was driving to drop him at home in Sterling Heights first, then take Deputy Molloy to her place in Richmond.
As they pulled away, the first thing he did was phone Dixie. He wanted to reach her before she heard about the whole shit show from a coworker who saw it on the news. She asked if he was okay. When he said he was fine but “got a little scrape on my noggin,” Dixie told him that she was leaving work and would meet him at the house. He said that wasn’t necessary but she wasn’t having it. He ignored the repeated calls from Adelaide because he didn’t have it in him for a conversation right now. Besides, he knew that her husband would tell her that he was okay, if he hadn’t already. Ditto for Pace—Mom would do the same. Willow smiled when he realized he’d been putting Dixie first. That felt good. It felt right.
There were other, more urgent matters. Lydia of course would have no worries—for imminently departing child-tenants, the aftermath of moments of balance excluded real-world consequences—but that didn’t hold true for Willow. When her body died, which would probably be soon, he’d be left holding a very large bag of brown matter.
A Guide for Murdered Children Page 32
