by Skylar Finn
“The Pied Piper of Hamelin. It’s based on a story about how the children of Hamelin disappeared.”
“The thing with the rats?”
“The rats and the man with the pipe and the river.”
“How do you figure?”
“I was an English minor.”
“Of course you were.”
April jittered her way over to the table. “What’s all this about?”
“Was Crystal studying poetry?” I asked.
She scrunched her face, as if the word was foreign to her. “Poetry?”
“In English class. Did she ever talk about studying poetry?”
An expression of triumph crossed April Deakins’ twitching features. She knew this one. “No. No, she was not,” she said. She swayed out of the dining room—really more of an extension of the small kitchen that bled into the living room—and returned with a book in hand: Watership Down. “She was reading this book. She hated it. Said it was about rabbits or some damn thing.”
I took the book. I flipped through it briefly. Long enough to see, there were notes in the margins. The handwriting wasn’t Crystal’s.
“May we take this?” I held up the book. Harper was taking pictures of Crystal’s notebook with his phone.
“Well, sure. I guess.” She looked baffled. “What’s this got to do with Hayes?”
“I’m not sure yet, Ms. Deakins. I’d like to find out.”
“Will you call me when you do?” Her eyes and voice were forlorn. Much of her initial brass and sass had dissipated, leaving a sad and vulnerable woman in their wake.
“Of course we will,” said Harper.
“Thank you.” She sounded quietly defeated. It was much worse than the hostility with which she’d confronted us on our previous visit.
I could see the reality of her situation setting in—her daughter missing, her feelings of helplessness. The thought that she had neither money nor influence to aid her in getting Crystal back safely, the way she imagined the Hayes did. She couldn’t have known about the scene we witnessed on the lawn, how Mrs. Hayes had come undone even faster than she had. Fires all around her.
Mrs. Hayes, I had already determined, would be our next stop.
Mrs. Hayes seemed determined to pretend the incident on her front lawn had never happened. She greeted us much the same as she ever had—oddly composed, immaculately put together. If I hadn’t known she was all hopped up on pills, she would have been my chief suspect.
“Please come in,” she said, gracious as Jackie O. when she was still Jackie Kennedy, ushering us into her White House of lies and false facades. “Do you have any leads?”
I always had the terrible impulse to laugh whenever a civilian asked me if I had any leads. It was so cinematic and ham-fisted. It also would have been wildly inappropriate to laugh in the face of a bereaved family member. I bowed my head and tried to look appropriately stoic as we entered the Hayes household.
She was on the defensive rather than the attack. Instead of judging me harshly, she’d be looking to escape harsh judgment after her pyrotechnic antics on the front lawn. She’d be more focused on that than suspecting us of wanting to rifle through her daughter’s things in order to sully her good name. Plus she was intensely overly involved in her daughter’s life, which was at the moment highly advantageous to us.
“Mrs. Hayes, was your daughter studying poetry, by any chance?” I asked.
“No, she was reading Red Badge of Courage,” she answered immediately. “I have it on her reading list on the refrigerator.”
Of course, she did. “Not Watership Down?” asked Harper.
Mrs. Hayes frowned. “No, not for class,” she said. “They assign that book to the remedial readers. Although she did have a copy of it. She said it was to help Crystal.” She sighed, evidently thinking of her daughter’s selflessness and heroism towards her more unfortunate peers at school.
“May we see it?” I asked. “Along with her school things?”
Mrs. Hayes looked a little bewildered as if she didn’t fully understand the request or had just swigged a lemonade-and-Valium cocktail before we arrived. More than likely, it was both. She bustled up the stairs. She was gone a long time.
Harper and I sat in the prim and floral living room. There was a silver plate of Vienna fingers left out for a house devoid of both guests and people. He took a tentative bite of one; made a face. Then he took another.
“Are they stale?” I asked curiously.
“Yes,” he said.
“Give me one of those,” I said. My blood sugar was getting low.
When Mrs. Hayes finally returned, she looked slightly more composed. She clutched a notebook and a paperback under her arm. She handed both to Harper. He handed the notebook to me while he flipped quickly through the book. Over his shoulder, I could see the same handwriting in the margins as the handwriting we saw in Crystal’s book.
I occupied myself with the notebook. Brittany’s notes were much more detailed. She had copied notes from class, with all of her homework neatly written out. It wasn’t until the last page that I found it. The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning.
“When, lo, as they reached the mountain's side,
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children follow'd,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountain side shut fast.”
She had highlighted a different section from Crystal had. I didn’t think it was anything pertaining to school. For one thing, Crystal, at least, was not known for her propensity toward scholarship and had demonstrated no discernible interest in school when we had spoken to her. I suspected Brittany’s efforts extended as far as her mother imposed her enforcements on her. She sounded as though she was more interested in her friendships and boys than she was in school, like many girls her age.
But both had exhibited a dissatisfaction with their surroundings, their families, their home lives. A longing, a need to get away. A wondrous portal opened wide. A longing that made them vulnerable to an outsider who could easily prey upon and exploit those feelings, using them to his own ends in some larger and diabolical design.
I no longer suspected Hayes, nor Lipman. The infiltration into someone else’s mind—through literature, through ideas—was evidence of a more sophisticated manner of thinking. It was evidence of a sociopath.
Daniel Hayes was definitely hiding something, but he was no criminal mastermind. If he were, he’d have been hiding whatever he and Lipman were up to a whole lot better than he was.
No, this was someone far more methodical, detail-oriented, and thoughtful. A plotter, a planner. Someone who watched from the shadows and bided their time. Waiting for the perfect opportunity.
I had seen it before. I knew better than anyone what such a mind was capable of. And if it was such a person, they were buried far more deeply than even uncovering the illegal narcotics activities I still believed Lipman and Hayes were up to. We would have to descend several layers more to get to the person who held the girls. Not to the outermost rings of hell, but the innermost.
16
Witness
Dana organized a fish fry at the same church CARD was operating out of to help raise money for a reward for any information leading to the safe return of her friends. It was an incredibly sweet gesture, especially from someone so young. It was the kind of thing I expected from the families of the missing, but Mrs. Hayes and April Deakins were too strung out, and Daniel Hayes was too busy doing whatever it was he was doing with Katy Lipman.
People from the neighborhood milled around, eating Coleman fish sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and balancing slices of pie on paper plates. Dana stood behind a folding card table in disposable gloves, serving pie and collecting money in a gray lockbox. I was waiting for it to slow down so I could question her again. I wanted to know if she knew anything about the poem in both Brittany and Crystal’s noteboo
ks. I wanted to know if she knew about the man Brittany was talking to—and if Crystal was talking to someone, too.
She had been holding more information than we’d initially thought when we’d first spoken to her, and a second visit had revealed more than she’d concealed out of fear of Crystal. Was there someone else she was afraid or intimidated by who was keeping her quiet now?
Teenage girls were a tough nut to crack. Secretive and evasive, they often had more experience keeping things quiet than the CIA. I wondered if that was the case now.
Harper was getting a fish sandwich. I hung around at the edges of the crowd, examining each face in turn. It could be any of them. Or it could be none of them.
I spotted April Deakins in the corner. She was drinking a Styrofoam cup of what I assumed was either coffee or alcohol in a coffee cup so no one would notice she was drinking at eleven o’clock in the morning. She was talking to a hugely pregnant woman, and I quietly threaded my way through the crowd until I was within hearing range.
“I’m going to name her Clementine, for ‘clemency,’” the woman said. “I want her to be merciful.”
“I named my daughter Crystal,” said April. “After my favorite drug.” Her loud, braying voice carried halfway across the room.
She’s so blatant, I thought. I watched as the pregnant woman excused herself. I guess the mention of meth had made her nervous.
April spotted me watching her. She moved closer to me and took another sip from her coffee cup. I caught a whiff of Irish whiskey.
“Thinks she’s the bell of the ball, does she?” she said contemptuously.
I followed her gaze. It was leveled at Dana across the room, smiling at an elderly woman as she handed her a piece of lemon meringue pie over the table.
“Didn’t she organize this to help try and find the girls?” I asked.
“Still,” she said, watching the girl, unsmiling.
Randall came up behind her, slowly and methodically eating a piece of lemon cream pie with his fingers at a glacial pace. He gave no sign he’d heard her words and expressed no larger awareness that I was there.
“This is her hour, isn’t it? She doesn’t have to be in the shadow of my girl, anymore. Her or Brittany. You know she was jealous of Crystal, don’t you?”
“I was unaware of that.”
“Well, maybe you should be aware. She was jealous of their friendship. Dana and Brittany were thick as thieves, best friends since they were in diapers, and when we moved to town and Crystal started hanging out with them, Brittany realized my girl was more fun than Little Miss Perfect over there. Had to make her resentful, didn’t it?”
“You think Dana had something to do with their disappearances?” I turned to look at her, evaluating the size of her pupils. I wanted to know if she was actually positing a sincere theory or just strung out and paranoid from a constant state of wakefulness.
“I wouldn’t put it past her.” She narrowed her eyes. Her pupils were small and undilated. The venom in her voice was real. “Acts all nice so no one will ever suspect a thing. She probably got them down to the river and pushed them in.”
I looked at Dana, a small and slight thing. It was hard to imagine her overpowering a girl as wily and mean as Crystal Deakins unless she’d gotten into Mrs. Hayes’ supply of tranquilizers and drugged her first. Even contemplating April Deakins’ strange train of thought made me feel irrational. My eyes scanned the room for Harper.
“We’ll look into it, Ms. Deakins,” I said. “In the meantime, please remember you have my card.”
“Oh, I have it, all right,” she said. She managed to make even this simple thing sound vaguely menacing.
I shook my head and went over to the coffee station, where Harper was eating a slice of pie. “What kind did you get?”
“Sweet potato.” He nodded to the table. “I got you one, too. Peanut butter chocolate silk.”
“My favorite.” It legitimately was. I used to order a slice from Perkins every time I studied for a final there in college. It was like he had a sixth sense about food.
“Do you think he’s here?”
“It seems plausible,” I said. “But there’s no real way to tell.”
I heard a soft, hissing sound to our left. I looked around for the source, wondering if an animal had gotten in. It was a person whispering.
The woman was so skinny and slight I almost mistook her as Dana’s age until I saw the lines in her face, her broken teeth. Harper set his pie down.
“Are you them FBI agents that’s been lookin’ around?” she whispered.
“Yes,” said Harper. “Can we help you?”
“Can I talk to y’all outside?” Her big-eyed, scared gaze landed on April Deakins across the room, watching Randall eat his pie with a disgusted expression on her face.
She slipped out a side door and we followed; heavy metal clanging shut behind us. We were on a grassy rise overlooking the river. It was misting slightly, more humid than cold.
“Can we get your name, ma’am?” asked Harper politely.
“My name?” Her eyes darted from side to side. “What do you need my name for?”
“It’s just procedure,” I said. “In case we need to talk to you again.”
“My name’s Debbie.” Her eyes were round, wide, blue, and unblinking, like marbles rolling around in her head. Her constantly shifting gaze wandered all over as we spoke. “I’m neighbors with April. April Deakins.”
“Oh?” I raised my eyebrows.
April Deakins’ narrative had never been what you’d call reliable. I was interested to hear what a third party thought about her.
“I know her daughter’s missing, and I just think you should know what goes on over there,” she said.
“What goes on over there, Debbie?” asked Harper.
“Can I inform on them?”
“Excuse me?”
“Can I trade on information? Like say I was to get in trouble later on, could this count towards getting me out of it?”
Harper glanced at me. “Sure,” he said. “What have you got?”
“I got a prior for illegal turkey hunting out-of-season,” she said. “Could it count toward that?”
“Well, it would really depend on the nature of the information you provided,” I said, thinking, turkey hunting? I looked at Harper, and he shrugged.
“Well, all right, then.” She cast a pensive look at the church door before demurely interlacing her hands in front of her and continuing to speak. “They’re cookin’ up dope in the crockpot.”
“I’m sorry?” Harper sounded startled.
“You know. Like the song.”
“In this context, dope refers to…” I waited.
“Not really dope. They’re cooking meth. I don’t know where. Not at their place, or I’d smell it. But they got people comin’ in and outta there like it’s Grand Central Station. I know they’re up to no good. They probably sold that girl of theirs. For unpaid debts or something like that.”
“What kind of people?” I asked.
“All kinds,” she said. “People looking to score, mostly.”
“What about him?” On my phone, I pulled up a picture of Daniel Hayes on his LinkedIn account.
Her marble eyes grew even wider and rounder. “I’ve seen that guy,” she said excitedly.
“What about her?” Harper held up a photo of Lipman on his phone.
“Her, too.” Debbie looked at us eagerly, visions of expunging her record of illegal turkey hunting dancing before her eyes. “They’re in and out of that place all the time. I was wondering what they were up to.”
“Thank you, Debbie,” I said. “This is very helpful to us.”
“Will you tell the sheriff I helped you?” She blinked for the first time since we started speaking to her.
“Sure thing, Debbie,” said Harper, putting his pad away in his coat pocket.
“Thank you,” she said, looking relieved. She scurried back inside; the door clanging shut behind h
er.
I felt kind of bad for her, but I highly doubted she needed immunity in a turkey-related case. Deakins, Lipman, and Hayes were a different story. Judging by the amount of fertilizer Lipman had been picking up and the hit on the nearby farm, whatever they were up to was large-scale, and they would wind up going away for a long, long time.
While I remained convinced Hayes wasn’t the Piper—unless his bumbling, confused, and hapless act was just that, an act—I wasn’t ready to rule out the possibility that whoever it was had been led to Brittany by their narcotics-related activity. We hadn’t explored the possibility that Brittany had been ransomed and the demand had been made directly to Daniel Hayes but not to Mrs. Hayes specifically due to his involvement in drugs, which he’d obviously keep quiet about. April Deakins seemed desperate to point us in every direction possible like she thought she’d throw us off the trail.
The sudden flurry of activity around Lipman and Hayes construction—the massive amounts of fertilizer for the seemingly abandoned construction site, the robbery at the farm—indicated they were cooking a large batch for a big sale. Either it was standard for them, or Hayes needed to find some extra money in a hurry—or pay off an especially large debt.
I told Harper this much before we went back into the church. The crowd had thinned out considerably, and I wanted to speak to Dana again before we reported back to CARD.
“The poem was definitely creepy,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it appears in both Brittany and Crystal’s notebooks. It has no apparent connection to their current curriculum. I’m willing to concur with your theory that someone who would dually influence both girls into obsessing over and meticulously copying the same piece of literature is likely both an intelligent and highly practiced predator—more than likely one who has yet to be caught, given his ability to maintain both invisibility and anonymity with an entire police force and a dozen federal agents in his vicinity.”
“We need to analyze the margin notes in those books,” I said. “Either Brittany wrote in both of them—her own and then for Crystal’s benefit when she was allegedly tutoring her—or the same person provided them with the books.”
