by Emby Press
“Someone disappeared?” asked Mingun “Just like in the old tales.”
“Well,” admitted Munro, “I expect it was a murder. Though there’s not much to go on.”
“I thought forensics was a lot more thorough than that,” said Mingun “Everyone leaves some kind of trace,” he quoted his favorite television program.
“Forensics didn’t exist in 1923,” said Munro flatly.
“1923?” exclaimed Mingun. “You guys really are like a terrier with a rag doll aren’t you?” They arrived at the detective’s rental and he opened the door.
“Well, it’s still an open case,” said Munro seating himself. “Cold as hell, but still open.” He closed the door, but opened the window.
“Good luck then, Detective,” said Mingun with a wave.
“Thanks, and thanks for all the help,” responded Munro, returning the wave as he backed out of his spot. He rolled up the window and headed back to town. He had just enough time to get dinner before catching his flight back. This would make a strange report but at least he’d gotten further with the Algonquin than anyone else had. Sure it sounded like supernatural hocus pocus, but it was something new all the same.
During the flight back he organized his next set of investigations, Theresa Collins’ descendants, maybe memoirs if she wrote any, her study notes and published works. Maybe a clue would surface there. After that, all that would be left is the farm and its barn. Then he would be out of leads to follow.
That night he dreamed he was being chased by the shadow with the flaming eyes and mouth. When he was finally cornered and the thing came rushing up on him, he awoke suddenly, sweat rolling off his body, soaking everything.
This case really sucked. It was giving him the creeps. He decided to make a note of the strange dreams, only because they seemed to correspond to the sightings and legends. He noted dates and details as well as he could recall them. Writing them out seemed to be cathartic because, by the time he was done, he was ready for sleep once more.
The next day he went to look in on the family of the late Theresa Collins. It turned out that Miss Collins had never married and her family descendants were not much help. According to them she was an odd old woman who kept very much to herself. When she passed, though, she willed her entire body of work to the university library and the rest of her estate to her church. The family had contested it, of course, but had lost. The church itself, The Church of the Holy Blood, had folded a few years later and disappeared.
On his way to the university, Munro had the kid in records start a check on The Church of the Holy Blood. When he got to the library, he asked the librarian where to find the definitive works donated by Theresa Collins. He was directed downstairs into the archives. There was an entire alcove of bound volumes and loose papers. He took a deep breath, blew it out and set to work to locate anything to do with his case.
Two hours later the kid from records called him back, saying that the church in question had been short lived at best, maybe thirty years, no other branches, records spotless, and closed claiming their aging membership had been dying off and could no longer keep it afloat. Apparently their church’s practice of banning sex entirely had prevented any new members from joining, though all the original members had willed their estates to the church. It sounded like a scam to the detective but, scam or not, it was a dead end.
After four hours of searching, Munro found a very slim book entitled The Red Brotherhood. He took down the reference number and then photocopied the entire volume. It was more new information that had not been found before. Taking his photo copy, he went back to the office to read it at his desk. Many of the pages were diagrams and strange symbols along with their relevance and meanings. However, the book outlined a cult that sacrificed animals like sheep and chickens, not human beings, in order to complete their rites. Also much of what was described in the journal was missing from the text. The leader in the red robe with black stripes, the black stone and shackles, and the shadow that moved were not mentioned anywhere. The book was dated after the disappearance of Pete Granger, and so must have been edited to exclude anything that might cast a backward shadow on Miss Collins herself. He sketched these notes into the margins of the appropriate pages, looked at his watch and figured he had just enough time left in his shift to go visit this farm and close down this, still cold, investigation.
He logged his destination in with the duty officer and drove out to the scene.
It was tThe last place anyone ever saw Pete Granger. It was a reasonably long drive out to the country, the sun setting twenty minutes before he pulled up to the farm. He checked to be sure his gun was loaded and he grabbed the big flashlight out of the trunk, turned it on, and started making his way towards the barn on the hill.
The path was barely visible through the overgrown weeds and half grown trees. It had been a long time since this path had been walked. It wound its way up the hill to the barn. Every building on the property was in serious disrepair, the barn looked like it was one stiff wind away from falling down. Munro hauled back on the door, grunting with effort and the hinges screamed in protest as the large door swung wide. The building sounded hollow, it’s volume filled with the inky blackness that was devoid of even the glimmer of star light.
Panning the bright beam of the light about, he saw that everything was coated in a thick layer of undisturbed dust, cobwebs hanging in thick sheets from the rafters and beams. Roughly the middle of the barn had been cleared and there, right where the description had indicated were all of the candles, only about half way burned down, the stone with the shackles was missing but he could see an indentation in the ground where it had been. Leaving tracks in the dust, he went to each of the places Pete Granger had listed as his hiding spots and, sure enough, they were there exactly as they were described but it was clear that they had never been used. He could barely make out whatever strange writing had been on the wall, most of it had peeled away with time but enough remained for him to get the image in his mind. His attention was drawn again to the circle of candles.
Cautiously he stepped past the candles and into the circle to get a better perspective. As he slowly turned in a circle he paused, his back was to the stairs. Had that been a noise? Was the place playing tricks on his mind?
Again another noise came from behind him. He drew his pistol and whipped around. The candles lit up and the flames burst into life, they climbed instantly to more than a foot tall, burning brightly. The last thing he saw was a deep shadow lunging at him from the center of the circle. Its eyes burning with orange flame, fangs gnashing and fire spewing from its mouth, skeletally thin claws reaching for him. He inhaled but never let the scream fly. The lights within the barn all died at once.
*
The next morning the place was abuzz with police. A stretcher carried away the remains they had found inside the barn. Forensics took photos, swabbed for DNA, and covered the entire scene with a fine toothed comb. In the end the coroner determined that the body they found was so desiccated that it had to have been dead for over eighty years and still there was no sign whatsoever of Detective Munro.
WISHED AWAY
Lizz C. Schulz
“Of course she did something to her,” Detective Todd Mills answered me, not even looking back over his shoulder as the blue and white squad car drove away with the crying young woman in the back. “Young single mom, low socioeconomic bracket, history of a crappy childhood herself. The stress of it all just got to her, and she killed the little girl and hid the body. Probably in those woods back there.”
I raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Why report the child missing if she killed her herself?”
My partner shrugged. “Think about it logically, Nora. Someone was going to notice the kid was gone, and it would look bad on her if it was somebody else that reported it, huh?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “Her reaction seemed too genuine. I just don’t feel like she was lying.”
“Come on, No
ra, I know you’re good at reading people,” Todd went on as we walked over to where several uniformed officers were organizing a systematic search of the woods behind the apartment complex. “But you’re confusing guilt with worry. How else do you think it could have gone down?”
He had a point, of course. We had received the call that morning from the mother, Tammi Jennings, that her daughter Kaytlyn was missing. The little girl was one and a half, barely walking. She had been crying inconsolably all morning, and Tammi had finally had enough and put her in her crib and shut the bedroom door. She sat down in front of the TV and turned the volume up loud enough to drown out the child’s screams. An hour later, when she went to check on Kaytlyn, the kid was gone. She wasn’t in her room, or anywhere else in the apartment. The bedroom door had been closed, and it’s one window shut and locked from the inside. The same was true of the apartment door and all the other windows. And the child certainly couldn’t have opened any of those herself, much less locked them again behind her. The apartment was small enough that Tammi would have seen anyone enter, and anyway there was no sign of forced entry, and Tammi swore nobody had a key to the place besides herself and the landlord. She had no family in town, nobody that might want to take the child. Kaytlyn’s father lived two states away and had made it very clear he wanted nothing to do with his ex-girlfriend’s child. A locked-room kidnapping? Ridiculous.
But I had looked into Tammi’s eyes and seen honesty there. Guilt, yes, and shame, confusion, and fear. But not deception. “It’s my fault,” she had sobbed. “She just wouldn’t stop crying! I wished she had never been born. I wished she was just gone. But I didn’t mean it. Did I? Why is this happening?” No, I could never believe that young woman had killed her own little girl. Never.
*
The woods behind Willowbrook Apartments was the sort of scraggled mess that grows up after an area that was once cared for is left to go wild for a decade or two. Lots of pine and cedar, lots of underbrush. There had been a mall there, back in the 80’s, Todd had told me on the way over, with a town park behind it. But the mall had been abandoned, bulldozed, and turned into the big office complex that now loomed behind the run-down rows of cheap apartments. A nice little gated community stood on the other side of the offices, hidden from the low-income residents of Willowbrook by the woods.
Todd and I joined the group combing the woods. Forensics was there, giving orders. It was slow work, and I sighed with relief when my phone rang. “Talk to me, Steve.”
“You won’t believe this, Detective Russell,” the excitable office grunt began. He always began his reports like that, and I had learned to ignore it. “Turns out there have been two other kids to go missing in that area in the past six months,” Steve reported. “A three year old boy who disappeared from a playground, and a five year old girl who ran away or was taken from her back yard. Both within two miles of your apartment complex. Both cases still unsolved.”
I relayed that info to Todd. “Doesn’t mean anything,” he grunted at me. Todd was a big believer in Occam’s Razor. I had to agree in principle, but sometimes Occam sucks.
I was far enough into the woods now that I couldn’t see the apartments any more. Leaves rustled around me and crunched softly under my feet, and the heavy foliage muted the sounds of the other cops I knew were just out of eye-sight. Something moved, off to my left, something too big to be a squirrel. I turned, but it was gone. I took a couple of steps in that direction. A bird called from a nearby tree. At least, I hoped it was a bird. I’m no naturalist, and to me it sounded creepily like a child’s laugh, but edgier. I kept moving, my eyes scanning everything. There was something out of place about the shape of the trees up ahead, and it took my brain a few moments to sort out what I was looking at.
The trees and brush had all but swallowed the old playground, but I could just make out the forms of a slide, swing set, and merry-go-round under the kudzu and sticker bushes. There was a jungle gym there, too, but it was hard to be sure of its original shape, as it was buried in vines and half collapsed. Domed, maybe. That laughing-bird sound broke the silence, making me jump. I told myself that it did not sound less like a bird every time I heard it. That was just my imagination. I was about to move on when a swatch of bright pink caught my eye. It was a baby’s sock, caught on a thorn bush.
“Hey, Todd,” I shouted. “Get those forensics guys over here, now!”
*
Hours later, I was at home, staring at my computer screen, trying to find something I had missed. Besides the sock, forensics had found absolutely nothing in the woods. No footprints, no fibers, no disturbed earth where a child’s body might have been buried (thank God for that!), nothing. At my insistence, Todd and I had hit the streets looking for leads. We’d talked to the landlord, the maintenance guys, and Tammi’s neighbors. Then we’d gone across town to the hotel where Tammi worked and spoken with her boss and coworkers. Nobody had seen anything or knew of anyone who would want to take Kaytlyn. We even got in touch with the missing girl’s father, who was concerned for the missing kid, but mostly wanted it not to be his problem.
I’d gone over the police reports Steve dug up on the other two missing kids, but aside from location, they had no common links. Devon, the boy at the playground, had been under the supervision of a teenage babysitter who had admitted that she had been fooling around with her boyfriend and not paying attention to her little charge. Two other adults had been at the playground at the time, but no one had seen anything suspicious. The mother from the other case thought her daughter, Sherrie, had run away because she had lost her temper at the girl and ordered her to get out of the house. When she had gone into the back yard to apologize, her daughter was gone. Nobody from either case knew each other, and I was pretty sure neither of them would know Ms. Jennings, either.
Finally, I gave up and went to bed, hoping sleep would reveal some answers. But all I got were vaguely creepy dreams where laughter that did not sound at all like a bird haunted me and chased me through an abandoned playground. The dream got more vivid toward the end, as I followed the sound into a deserted shopping mall. A shower of playing cards fell on me as I pushed through a door. I bent to pick one up. It showed a young woman kneeling beside a pool of water, long blonde hair covering most of her naked body and trailing out behind her as if caught up in a gentle breeze. She was looking up at a bright star above her, as if it might show her the way to her heart’s desire. When I tilted the card her expression seemed to change from dreamy hope to heartbreaking longing, and back. “Help me,” I whispered to the girl and her guiding star. Then I woke up.
*
In the morning, my partner and I went to check out the sites where the other two kids had gone missing. I was hoping for some kind of connection. Todd was humoring me. One day, and he was all ready to write the case off as unsolvable, but I was determined. There’s just something about cases involving kids that makes me want to try a little harder. Both the playground and the little girl’s neighborhood belonged to the gated community on the other side of the woods from Willowbrook. We went to the playground first. It was early, and I figured most of the moms and babysitters wouldn’t get there with their little ones until after lunch. The only person there was a teenage girl, standing on the railing of one of the play structures. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. Had she been hanging around Tammi’s building yesterday? She wore jeans and a teal peasant-blouse. Her sandals lay on the ground at the base of the play structure. She had climbed to the highest point she could get to, balancing barefoot on the railings. She was eerily still, only her blouse and her long blonde hair fluttering in the wind as she stared out at the woods.
“Excuse me, Miss,” I called up to her. She gave a little start as she suddenly noticed us, then dropped to the ground much more gracefully than I would have thought possible, given that she had been maybe twelve feet up.
“Hi!” Her voice was light, almost musical. “You’re the detectives from Willowbrook Apartments,
right? Looking for the missing baby?”
“That’s right,” Todd responded. “How do you know about that? And what were you doing up there just now?”
“Listening to the wind,” she answered, as if that made perfect sense, and totally ignoring his first question. “There was another child that went missing from here, right? And the woods are in between the two places. It must be something about the woods, then.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The girl started to answer, but Todd cut her off. “Look, kid, this is police business. Unless you saw something pertaining to the case, you need to get out of our way, got it? Scram.”
“I didn’t see anything yet, but I might. I have a different way of seeing things sometimes, and I want to help. You found something in the woods yesterday, didn’t you?”
“Now hang on,” Todd stepped in front of me as I turned to follow the girl. He took out a notepad and pencil. Todd was old-school. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Ellie Aria Windborn.”
“Even if you did have something to contribute here, you’re a minor, and we can’t even ask you questions without your parents’ permission,” Todd insisted, clearly still looking for a reason to get rid of her.
Ellie shook her head. “I’m sixteen, and I don’t live with my parents. I’m an emancipated minor. You don’t need anybody’s permission but mine. Wanna see my ID?” She showed it to us matter-of-factly. It looked legit. “There’s a baby missing. Don’t you want to find her?”
There was something earnest about this girl, something that made me believe she really could help us with the case. Maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part, but I wasn’t ready to give up on Tammi and little Kaytlyn, and this was the only starting place we had. I glared at Todd, and he just rolled his eyes at me. I turned back to Ellie.
