Guide for Murdered Children

by Bruce Wagner

Genres: Literary Fiction; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

"In her astonishing thriller, Sarah Sparrow has joined the ranks of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. A warning: there is no safe place to read this book."
–David Cronenberg

 Originally Published under the name Sarah Sparrow, Bruce Wagner's A Guide for Murdered Children is terrifying, thoroughly original, and hauntingly written. 

Ex-NYPD detective Willow Wylde is fresh out of rehab and finally able to find a job running a Cold Case squad in suburban Detroit. When the two rookie cops assigned to him take an obsessive interest in a decades-old disappearance of a brother and sister, Willow begins to suspect something out of the ordinary is afoot. He uncovers a series of church basement AA-type meetings made up of the slain innocents and a new way of looking at life, death, murder—and missed opportunities—is revealed to him.
 
A Guide for Murdered Children is a genre-busting, mind-bending twist on the fine line between the ordinary . . . and the unfathomable.

Release date: November 26, 2024

Publisher: Arcade

Print pages: 384

Sample

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 fall-back, 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 soulmate. 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 soulmate 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, gal-friend, 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 bet 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.

“Look, history nerds and their mutant offspring aren’t really my thing,” says Penny. “I like the tall, dark, childless type.”

“Oh come on, honey, Roy Eakins is a friggin’ action hero. He’s a great dad and that says a lot. He’s single and quirky and brilliant—which means your kids would be single and quirky and brilliant.”

“Ha!”

“Plus he’s friggin’ funny. He’s very dry.”

“Just like my pussy.”

“We can remedy that!”

“We’d make pretty spectrum babies. You know, all scary and autistic.”

“You’d be cute together. And whatever—you could do it one time, to break the ice.

You know, that’s formed between your legs.”

“Can you leave my pussy alone, please?”

“I’ll join the club! Know what I heard Roy say? ‘History doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.’ Don’t you love that?”

“That’s Mark Twain, brainiac. Now Twain, I’d fuck.”

“I’m serious, Pen, we have got to hook you up. With someone.”

“The ink on the divorce papers isn’t dry, Ellie.”

“Oh, bullshit. Use it or lose it, girl. How long has it been?”

“Since—?”

“You know.”

“By my own hand? A few hours ago.”

“You are such a slut.”

“Actually, I meant a few minutes ago. In the guest bathroom.”

In paroxysms again.

…

At this same moment, Ronnie Rummer stands by the grill in a spattered GOTTA PROBLEM WITH THIS? cook’s apron, tiny American flags tucked over both ears. Next to him is the action-figure history teacher Roy Eakins, oblivious to the tipsy, prying eyes apprising him from the kitchen window. Ronnie goads the meat until it sizzles, then gyrates triumphantly, embarrassing his son, Troy, but delighting daughter Maya, provoking her to buffoon-salacious imitation. The nine-year-old is a freckle-faced Alfred E. Neuman doppelgänger; his younger sister’s hair a fiery red torch, a geyser, a local attraction that Elaine maintains with religious devotion.

Through it all, Roy’s son stands apart, examining his own man-sized hands—deep in the solving of their mysteries.

As if called by a sovereign voice, Troy rushes off and Maya follows like one attached by rope. Grundy looks up and moves toward them before Roy commands, “Stay. You stay with us.”

Penny and Elaine exit the house bearing full glasses of wine. Enter Detective Willow Wylde, in from New York to surprise his daughter with a puppy on her Sweet Sixteenth. (Word is, she knows he’s at the barbecue and is dodging him. She’s been dodging the world for a few years.) Willow has a rep as a rake and a bad boy and likes that the girls have had a little too much. He’s already been working Penny, who he always thought had a thing for him back in the day when he was a policeman in the Falls; his upgrade to the Manhattan big leagues 

 can only have helped his case. Willow’s research in the field had proven that certain women, particularly divorcées, couldn’t resist the glamour of a big-city cop, particularly the glamour of a New York City narcotics cop. He and his NYPD drinking buddies liked to call it the job description that launched a thousand blow jobs. When they said their prayers, they thanked the TV procedurals for that.

The Rummers had invited Owen Caplan, but he politely declined to attend. Willow and Owen once were patrol-car partners, the local Starsky and Hutch, before the shit blew up between them in so many ways, and in the years since he’d left for the Big Apple, Owen had been appointed by the city to be chief of the five-man Andy of Mayberry department. (He’d always been ambitious, and Willow thought, Good on the little fella.) Adelaide, Willow’s ex, had also been invited but politely declined. Hmmmm. Pace, Willow’s child with Adelaide, was invited too, but MIA—to be fair, his daughter hadn’t actually RSVP’d (not being a student of Emily Post) and Willow still hoped she’d turn up. If Pace didn’t care to see him (it seemed like half the world didn’t care to see him), she might just give a shit about seeing the $650 puppy he brought. If Dad had been unreliable in everything else, he’d at least been consistent with guilt-induced, over-expensive birthday presents.

Like most of the neighborhood men, Ronnie Rummer had done a lot of thinking about Penny and what it’d be like to have her. She had a wild streak that she didn’t try too hard to conceal, and they’d always had one of those easy, flirty things going on, or at least he thought they did. He’d have to watch himself a little because the low stone fence of Penny’s marriage was now gone. His own fence was tall and strong, but like any suburban Superman he could see himself leaping over it in a single bound.

The fire in the grill goes out.

Ronnie squirts the can—no lighter fluid.

He turns his burger-flipping chores over to Dubya and goes to find the kids.

Troy’s in the meadow behind the house with a sparkler. On the front of his T-shirt it says BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER. On the back,

AND PARTY ON, DUDES.

“Hey! What’d I tell you about sparklers, Troy? You wait until tonight.” Troy casts his eyes to the ground while his little sister cavorts to unheard songs. “I need you to go to Ebenezer’s for lighter fluid.”

“Can I take Maya?”

“Okay. Ride on over but don’t be long.”

The smile returns to his son’s face. Reinvigorated by a mature, useful task, he looks at the sparkler and then looks at his dad—what to do? “Put it in the ground,” says Ronnie. He buries it and, with that task done, is ignited anew. (Nine-year-old boys are all about ignition.)

The siblings run off, the invisible rope between them taut.

…

What was it that caused Willow to shiver when Ronnie left the dormant grill? No—more than that, more a sickening familiar vortex than a shiver—a fluish, dizzying, feverish gust that raced his pulse and seemed to make gooseflesh of his very soul, nearly knocking him off his feet.

Standing at the barbecue, a sense-memory déjà vu turned his stomach … and with it came that blueness again, age-old, without origin, without earthliness. (In his mind, he always called it the Blue Death.) Nana used to nurse him through what she called “the fits,” but Willow’s mother didn’t like the term, hated it, countering that it was merely “the ague”—that odd, antiquated word—no, Mom didn’t like the spooky way Nana fussed over her boy’s ague at all. His grandmother would then submit to her daughter before faking her out in order to comfort him, sneaking into his room and whispering in his hot pink ear through the blue delirium. He never understood or recalled what she was saying, so dreamlike, yet still it soothed, but the nature of the elixir remained forever tongue-tied and unknown. Nana—how he loved his Nana!—was for sure some kind of Old World witch. One time when “the fits” happened, Willow heard barking in his head; Palomar, their runaway German shepherd, was in the midst of dying crosstown, impaled on a fence by three neighborhood sado-punks. The Blue Death … The Wyldes hadn’t even known the

 dog had escaped the house.

Guests begin arriving with Tupperwares of egg salad and coleslaw, medleys of macaroni and fruit salad, potpourris of this and that from family recipes. And desserts: brownies and apple pie, peach cobbler and s’mores, banana pudding and Oreo creations, the whole Great American Sugar Songbook.

Maya pedals furiously, that rope between she and her brother too tight then too loose, the wild garden of hair on her head burnt-orange in the midday sun. Troy exults in his superior strength and locomotion, leaving her in the dust. (Nine-year-old boys are all about lording it over little sisters.) Her unicorn is in the flowery bicycle basket—she made a daybed for it with a silk pillow Mom had given her. When she isn’t looking toward Troy, she glances at the sleeping creature with the devotion of a rehearsing mother.

Troy races to Ebenezer’s amid the distant ambient sounds, some near but mostly far away, of Roman candles and firework rat-a-tats. Apparently not everyone got Dad’s memo to wait until dark. The pulse of his heart accelerates at the hijinks of the taboo breakers but he isn’t envious, only becoming more excited about tonight’s celebrations.

A block from Ebenezer’s, he turns to look back—sister gone.

She isn’t dead, not yet, but will never speak again or have recordable conscious thought. Maya’s body has a week left of breathing and making all manner of unrecognizable sounds, an animal’s involuntary reaction to the work being done. Troy will soon be in water, reunited (in a sense) with his sister-princess, looking on with supportive, sightless eyes like a figurine propped on the balcony of a decayed castle in a forgotten aquarium.

 

THE MACOMB ORCHARD TRAIL

Present Day

 

BEFORE THE DEATH OF LYDIA

The body lay in a gulch, about a hundred yards off the hiking trail.

Is it naked?

No—this isn’t a homicide, so why should it be?

What is it wearing, then?

All those things that say runner/hiker.

Sex?

Female.

No mystery here.

This is no crime scene …

The “Orchard,” northwest of Saggerty Falls, runs alongside the abandoned Michigan Air-Line Railway, stretching from Richmond to Dequindre Road, where it connects to the Clinton River Trail. The path the woman traversed was in an area unfrequented by trailbirds, but Lydia Molloy is—was—a solitary hiker by nature. Her last repose is an almost miraculously hidden spot that cannot be seen from the air, should there have been a rescue effort. There will be no cause for that, at least not for some months.

Still, there is no mystery.

We know her name and occupation.

We know how she died, and it wasn’t on duty …

She was—is—a Macomb County Sheriff’s deputy, age thirty. If the body had been collected, toxicology would reveal low levels of oxycodone. She injured a rotator cuff while wrestling with a suspect a few years back, and the two pills a day that she took to deal with the pain had become a mostly manageable habit.

She was listening to her Spotify playlist. Inexplicably, she preferred classical music while hike-running but only played “my ladies” when at home—Sia, Gaga, Rihanna.

At the time of death, the particular track she was absorbed in, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, is notable, but for reasons to be later revealed.

How is it, then, that there is no mystery?

What happened?

She saw something off-trail, glinting in the sun—­

It was that sort of thing one hears about all one’s life, the bad-luck fall that cracks the neck or bleeds the brain. The friend of a friend falls from their bike and their head hits the curb or trivially stumbles and destiny conspires to end everything—memory, desire, breath, life—in an instant. Usually, it’s bodysurfers into sandbars and divers into shallow pools that one reads about. In the deputy’s case, she tumbled down the maw of the gulch before coming to an abrupt, hidden rest. In the moments that Lydia was falling, what was she thinking? She wouldn’t have had time to voice—or think—more than Shit! though not surviving couldn’t have been in her mindset, not remotely. A gross and damnable inconvenience, yes, but never the end of all things.

If there was a witness, what would they have seen?

Woman on trail,

walking with resolution. Something ten yards ahead gets her attention. Casually curious, she leans to investigate and then trips and tumbles. A nasty fall but the grassy, sloping terrain is such that a sense of fatality isn’t in the air. The spectator draws closer, their drone’s-eye view hovering over where the hiker has come to rest. The witness zooms in on the rock—the rock of destiny, ending memory and desire—and thinks, What terrible luck. The witness stays a few frantic minutes, uncertain if the hiker is dead (we know otherwise), and is about to go for help when something remarkable happens. The lifeless body has a great seizure, a moment of electrified cosmic astonishment to flesh and bones. It stands, haloed in blue. (What is that otherworldly blue?) The hiker’s anguished and astonished face, like that of a child roused from deep sleep, contorts in tears, the mouth letting out a great yawp—more like the scream of a little girl who lost her parents in a department store of the dead. The witness is transfixed, more by the eerie phenomenon of what they see than by the hard fact of the woman’s sudden reanimation.

The face becomes a mask of serenity, regal, timeless. The body remains in place, stock-still. Rigid, though not in the sense of rigor mortis.

A monument now.

A sphinx.

And the gulch—the entire valley—is bathed in the parfum of blue mist, sprayed from a nebulizer of the Unknown.

The body that was Deputy Lydia Molloy and will improbably remain Deputy Lydia Molloy a few months longer begins its slow, labored, somehow elegant ascent from the ravine.

It stops short of the trail and sees something glinting. Not the glint of the original thing that stirred her curiosity—an inexplicably discarded silver belt buckle, of all things—but rather the iPod that flew from Lydia’s grasp at the beginning of the fall. (Though the earbuds remained attached to the body throughout the fall.) The arm of the body reaches out to retrieve it. The hands of the body plug in the earbuds and she resumes listening to the music.

Kindertotenlieder …

As Lydia makes her way back to her car, wobbly as a foal yet growing stronger and more resolute with each step, she hews close to the tracks, stepping over

a rusted rail, making a game of walking over the buried, blown-out ties just as a child might, arms outstretched as if balancing on a tightrope.

A small smile comes to her lips as she imagines a lumbering, clacking train springing up around her—­

At last, she knows she is home again. ...