A Guide for Murdered Children Read online

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Sparrow

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sparrow, Sarah, author.

  Title: A guide for murdered children : a novel / Sarah Sparrow.

  Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017022133 (print) | LCCN 2017031872 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399574542 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399574528 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524743833 (international edition)

  Classification: LCC PS3619.P3723 (ebook) | LCC PS3619.P3723 G85 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022133

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_2

  For the children

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Book One | Closely Watched Trains WICKENBURG, ARIZONA | Present Day

  Watching the Detective

  SAGGERTY FALLS, MICHIGAN | July 4, 2000

  Troy and Maya

  THE MACOMB ORCHARD TRAIL | Present Day

  Before the Death of Lydia

  After the Death of Lydia

  After the Death of Daniel

  The Porter

  Willow Unbound

  Miniature Dreads

  Lydia Takes a Meeting

  Honeychile

  The Sleepless Porter

  Willow in New York

  Maya and Troy

  Going Home

  Off the Orchard Trail

  Amends

  Mystery Train

  Haywire

  Book Two | The Spirit Room Moving Day

  Closure

  Hear Me, Willow

  Reunions

  Rise

  Missing Children

  The New Age

  Riders on the Storm

  Savasana

  Trespassers

  Single Room Occupancy

  Dysphoria

  Cross Wires

  Resurrection

  Book Three | Local and Express Visitations

  Relapse

  Decompensation

  You Only Die Twice

  Balancing Acts

  Debriefing

  Memorial Day

  Station to Station

  Ghost Train

  About the Author

  ——A simple Child,

  That lightly draws its breath,

  And feels its life in every limb,

  What should it know of death?

  —William Wordsworth

  book one

  Closely Watched Trains

  I know it’s all a bit overwhelming (to put it mildly!) but in time you will understand your purpose here. So WELCOME HOME, everyone, and GOD BLESS every one of you!

  —from “Hello and Welcome!” (the Guidebook)

  WICKENBURG, ARIZONA

  Present Day

  WATCHING THE DETECTIVE

  In rehab now—

  —again.

  Detective Willow Millard Wylde.

  Fifty-seven years old: shitty health and shaky spirits.

  Kind of a fattie . . .

  Which is usually what happens to him at the end of a run.

  He was drinking around the clock. Burning his fingers, his mattress, his couch, and his car seat with those bullshit alkie Marlboro Blacks. Burning down his anxieties and dreams. Chugalugging pain pills with Diet Dr Pepper from the moment he awakened to the moment he passed out—and even in the middle of the night, after being startled to wakefulness by his own stertorous snores and otherworldly screams.

  No diabetes—yet.

  No prostate cancer—yet. (Though tests showed peskily chronic microscopic amounts of blood in the urine, etiology unknown.)

  Just some scabby, top of the head, sun-induced cancer, but no melanoma.

  Yet.

  Still no tangible signs of early-onset dementia . . .

  Cialis seemed to work most of the time for those few and far-between afternoon delights. Sometimes he had little romantic dates with himself when chemical enhancement wasn’t required and performance wasn’t the issue. But generally he’s lost the urge.

  Generally lost all urge.

  Willow—that haunted half-oddity of an eccentric name that his grandmother bestowed on him, a name he love-hated, a name he’d always been forced to explain (women were enthralled, men were suspect)—Willow Wylde, that complicated, beautiful, ruined American mythic thing: Washed-Up Cop. That luminous travesty of premium cable, movies and fiction, high and low: retired alcoholic homicide cop (one of his exes called him a “functional assaholic”), bruised and battered three-years-into-forced-retirement cop, unlucky in love, depressed, once flamboyant, once heroic cop, decorated then dirty then borderline absolved, now demolished, a revolving door AA member too played out to be a suicide threat. Friends used to arrive en masse to take his weapon away but after the first few interventions bailed in the ensuing months then years of relapses. In time, “Dubya”—he had the nickname long before George Walker Bush but didn’t mind sharing it (sometimes he just wasn’t in the mood to be Willow)—alienated even his die-hard boosters. Their patience and goodwill expired, and they were dispatched or dispatched themselves from his life one by one.

  On this day, late June, in the Year of Our Damaged, Dysfunctional Lord:

  He walks from building to building in the absurd, nearly intolerable blast furnace of Sonoran Desert heat. It gives him solace to singsong-whisper under his breath the mantra, “I’m broken. Broken. Broken . . .” The tidy personal prayer seemed to go well with the rehab’s favorite motto, “Hurt people hurt people.”

  Oh, true dat.

  His daughter Pace went online and found a place called the Meadows. She read that famous people went there. Well maybe they did but all Dubya knows of famous are a European automobile heir who looked like a comic book prince and a jovial, forgotten, once sitcom actor who resembled a spooked and bloated farm animal—mixed in with the usual head cases, drunks, dope fiends and sex addicts.

  Willow’s wrist is in a cast, the bones having been broken in the collision with a barroom
wall. A long pin crucifies the hand to secure the fracture. A tiny red button caps the pin and sits below the pinkie like a ladybug.

  Still limps from an old gunshot wound to the leg, when he worked narcotics in Manhattan . . .

  It’s 118 degrees—he can’t figure out if that’s in the sun or the shade, as if it the fuck matters! The only place hotter in the world is Death Valley. Once a week, the two shit kilns have an apocalyptic do-si-do, competing for Hell’s honors. He could never wrap his head around the fact that the hottest place on Earth was in the U.S. of A., not the Sahara or Bum Crack, Syria, and now, courtesy of his beloved codependent daughter, he’s in rehab in literally the hottest place on Earth—more or less—and shakes his head, muttering, “Broken! Broken! Broken!”

  His only real family is the rehab tribe: counselors, doctors, RNs, kitchen workers, fellow inmate-travelers. They detoxed him for a week in a room next to the nursing station. Rx: Seroquel for sleep and anxiety, trazodone for sleep and anxiety, donuts and Hershey bars and four packets of sugar/four of stevia in black coffee for sleep and anxiety. Jacking off in bed and cigarettes ’round the smoke pit for sleep and anxiety . . . His besties are a Rimbaud dead ringer—a crazy-handsome seventeen-year-old poet whose arm is also in a sling, due to deep tendon wounds from a suicide attempt that put him in Bellevue for three weeks, and a black fire chief from Fort Worth who peaked at sixty Percocet a day. (Willow marveled at that. The most he could ever manage was ten.) And a wry gal, a gay Buddhist from Fort Lauderdale who refuses to call him Dubya (“Willow is such a beautiful name. And Willow Wylde is wildly beautiful”). She’s droll and way broken too and he feels better when Renata’s around. She used to be pretty—everyone used to, even ol’ Dub. He tries feeling sexy about himself and people in general (hey, anything to pass the time), but sexiness corroded a long while back, along with everything else.

  It’s tough to feel sexy when you’re wheezing, broiling and broken, sharing a room with three men, two of whom have sleep apnea and use angry-sounding, portable CPAPs at night. It’s tough with a long ladybug pin stuck impaling your walloped writing hand . . .

  Yet still somehow he possesses that irrational, mandatory—yes, sexy—certainty that somehow all will be solved, all will be made right . . . tomorrow! That knowledge, a reflexive fallback, that a victim’s family will be assuaged and justice will be served. Justice! Because contrary to popular opinion, there was such a thing as closure and screw anyone who said otherwise. Hell, he lived for closure. As a homicide detective, he’d always had a different interpretation of the word. Trouble was, people had the idea that closure was about feeling good—feeling good was the bottom line, the secret of life, everyone always just wanted to feel good, but nothing ever felt good about murder and its aftermath. No: closure wasn’t relief or release, it was a balancing of scales, that’s all. When the scales were balanced, order and some kind of serenity returned to the world, in spite of oneself. A detective’s job was to restore balance. That’s why he became a Cold Case guy, even though he fucked that up like everything else. The natural order of the universe was balance and symmetry, not justice, but balance was justice; give him a ninth-century mummy with a dagger in its chest and Willow Wylde would get his ordered, just results. It was nothing but a crossword puzzle designed by the Creator and he was good at what he did because he saw that, knew that and was never blinded by the personal.

  Now, though, the imbalance was . . . himself.

  He was his own cold case and didn’t have clue one. He wondered if the solution to the crime of Mr. Wylde lay in the idea that hope itself hadn’t died—yet—and laughed at the brilliant idiocy of that new notion. True dat: it was a glorious mystery that he still awakened with the buoyancy of Hope. It gave him a spring in his step as he strolled from building to building in the infernal square dance of punishing heat. He wasn’t even sure what Hope meant anymore, just another bogus word but there it was, his lifelong companion, a big friendly dog, a shaggy dog story that he recognized for better or for worse as his soul mate. When the dog died, where and who would the bereft Willow be?

  He strung together the grimy beads of all those tropes—Order! Balance! Justice! Closure! Hope!—like a necklace of cheap pearls. They still made him feel pretty.

  Such is the travesty of the broken cop—

  As he soaked in the tub of his dorm room, sobbing, his good hand instinctively washing the wounded one as if neither belonged to him (a van drove him to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale yesterday to finally have the pin and cast removed), an idea haunted him: that one morning he’d awaken to find the big dog dead in a field, the soul mate gone maggoty and swollen to near bursting in the heat. Hope abandoned—He’d seen the blessed illusion of Order and Balance disappear in those in whom they burned brightest. He saw what happened when the landlord Hope departed—

  —its tenants became ghosts.

  Another thing should have haunted him but didn’t. Instead, it captivated and puzzled, holding him an intrigued, almost genteel hostage. It wasn’t yet fully formed yet rather was a mirage of what was soon to come.

  A persistent vision.

  The vision started on the plane, on his way to the Meadows. He was crammed into coach, still drinking but no longer able to get drunk. Like him, the vision too was a complicated, ruined thing, though not of this world. It was a thing that was coming, a thing that lately had begun to intrude on waking life—like it did the other day when he passed the “talking pipe” to his neighbor at the big Saturday men’s stag share—a hallucination he’d refrained from sharing with the Meadows’ counselors. Though he did mention it to Renata, who was gracious enough to call it “weird and sort of gorgeous” (gorgeous being her favorite word).

  The vision, more a visitation, of a train whose stained-blue passengers were phantoms.

  Not of those he once knew, nor those that Hope had abandoned, but a vision of another world. What world? The bluish whoosh of cabin cars came like a comfort—Willow felt the wind as they roared past—a horror yet a new kind of hope.

  Somewhere in him, he knew it was the last hope.

  SAGGERTY FALLS, MICHIGAN

  July 4, 2000

  TROY AND MAYA

  Cul-de-sac bustle.

  Independence Day festivities, chez Rummer: Elaine, Ronnie and the kids.

  Exurbia unbound.

  The mise-en-scène unfolds about thirty miles north-northeast of Detroit, in the leafy, semirural village of Saggerty Falls, a 2.5-square-mile community in Lenox Township, Macomb County, in the “lower thumb” of Michigan.

  They used to make engine blocks there but the foundry’s defunct . . .

  Pop: 3,073.

  Number of families: 783.

  Median family income: $45,489.

  The Salt River runs through it . . .

  A Fourth of July afternoon—

  —and the little ones run amok on sugar highs, starbursts of growing bones and neurons. Elaine and her galfriend Penny are baking cookies in the kitchen. Elaine uses that word, galfriend, having inherited it from her mother, who’d say about a movie or whatnot, “Why don’t you take a galfriend?”

  “I want to fix you up with someone,” says the lady of the house. (Her mother used to say that too: fix you up.)

  “Not interested, unless it’s Richard Gere.”

  Penny the newbie divorcée moves on to spinning salad, the foundation of her new aerobics empire. She wryly says, My salad-spinning workout video’s gonna make me shit-rich.

  “Well, he ain’t Richard Gere but he’s close,” says Elaine, nodding toward the window overlooking the backyard, where the men hover by the barbecue.

  Penny takes a gander and says, “Your husband?” Galfriend Elaine guffaws. “You know,” says Penny, contemplative, “I might not be comfortable with that—I’m not saying I couldn’t get comfortable. Don’t think I haven’t had my fantasies . . .”

  “I’ll be
t you have, Miss Horndog. Miss Horndog Divorcée.” Elaine gets more specific and points Roy out. “That’s your man.”

  “Roy Eakins?” says Penny, in that sly way of hers that makes you wonder whether she’s completely repulsed or thinks the idea may be worthy of her consideration. “I don’t think so. Though I might be interested if he looked a little more like Demi Moore.”

  “The hair’s close,” says Elaine lightheartedly. “Oh come on, Penny. He’s smart. And funny, in that off-way you like.”

  “Not my type,” she says, returning to her spinning.

  “He teaches history.”

  “Teaches history? Like, that’s all you got? Teaches history?”

  “History teachers are supposed to be seriously well-endowed,” says Elaine, in licentious good cheer.

  “Oh right, that’s totally their rap.” She squints her eyes at the man, saying, “Kind of an odd duck, no? With that super-weird kid?”

  “Grundy? He’s sweet.”

  “As in retarded, potentially violent sweet?”

  “You are so mean!”

  “He isn’t sweet, Ellie, he’s like friggin’ Lennie from Of Mice and Men.” The girls howl at that; they’ve been drinking and are feeling no pain. “How old is that kid, anyway?”

  “Thirteen?”

  “Are you serious? He looks like he’s in his—forties!”

  Again they howl. Funniest thing ever.

  “Grundy’s ‘special needs,’” said Elaine. “And so?”

  “Look who’s being politically correct.”

  “He’s probably some kind of genius. He’s on the spectrum.”

  “Just like me, milady.”

  “Exactly. That’s why I think y’all’d be perfect together. Though you’re actually more on the spectrum . . . of growing cobwebs on your vagina.”

  They lose control again and take the opportunity to finish what’s left in their wineglasses.