26

THE BOWEN SISTERS

ON THE morning of September 30, 1988, Christina and Michelle Bowen, seven and nine years old respectively, were waiting at the school bus stop only two hundred yards from their home when a man in a mint Cadillac Calais pulled over and told them the bus had a flat tire and wasn’t coming and he could give them a lift if they’d like. They accepted—the man didn’t look like a stranger, not the ones their mom had told them about, the kind that offered candy and had a cute puppy to lure them into an unmarked van. Besides, his car was nice and clean, and all the windows were rolled down, and he wasn’t wearing a long dark coat, which was what the girls assumed all strangers wore.

The Bowen sisters climbing into the Cadillac Calais was witnessed by a neighbor, who thought nothing of it because the girls went willingly. They were seen alive only once more, half an hour later, by a gas station attendant as the man driving filled up his car. By this time they were miles away from the school and both girls were in the back seat crying, but the attendant assumed that the man was their father and thought nothing of it.

They were reported missing in the afternoon when the siblings failed to return from school, right around the time that an anonymous tip came through to the police station that a strange man had been seen dumping trash in a dry creek bed on the outskirts of town. The person assigned to investigate was homicide detective Reginald Solar, who normally wouldn’t have covered such things, but his shift was over and he lived near the dump site and everyone was far too busy with the missing Bowen children to pay some trash-dumping miscreant too much attention. So Reg clocked out for the day, sure that the Bowen girls would be discovered at a friend’s house, and went to Little Creek to see what could be done about the illegal dumping.

It was early fall and the river had dried up from years on end without rain, leaving only a wide expanse of sand and trees and scrub. From the bridge, Reginald couldn’t see any sign of the garbage, so he parked his car, a secondhand Toyota Cressida, on the roadside and scaled down the steep riverbank in his suit. It was late afternoon—crickets were chirping and a breeze pulled through the carved-out canyon, not quite cool enough to stop a bead of sweat from slipping down Reg’s spine. He took off his suit jacket and folded it over his arm. The place smelled at once of campfires and tree sap and stagnant water that boiled up from the underground stream and found itself with nowhere to go but to sit and grow putrid.

There was a difference between good detectives and born detectives, Reginald once told Esther. Good detectives were the ones who took in what they heard and saw and smelled. Born detectives did this too, but they had another sense, something in the gut or the soul that guided them even when their senses couldn’t. Reginald stopped and listened to the silence, his eyes watering. He knew, without knowing how he knew, without having even seen them yet, that the Bowen sisters were there in that riverbed. He couldn’t explain it, except to say that dead bodies had a sound, a kind of ominous buzzing silence that he felt in his teeth and the lining of his stomach when he was close to one.

That’s when he saw the footprints in the sand, two and sometimes three sets of them. There were scuffles between the three, and whoever belonged to the smallest set had refused to walk and so had been dragged for a time. Reg followed the footprints without obscuring them and put on gloves to pick up the trinkets he found along the way: a locket, the clasp snapped open as though it had been snatched from a neck; a child’s hat; a copy of A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein; a backpack with the name Christina emblazoned across the pocket in glittery gold letters.

And then, what he knew he would find from the moment he looked out at the riverbed from his car on the bridge, not because he could see them, but because he could feel them, the echo of their lives: the Bowen sisters, both naked and facedown in the sand. They were ten feet apart, the elder girl with her arm outstretched toward her sister.

Esther didn’t go into the details of what had been done to them, a courtesy she wished her grandfather had extended to her. All she said was that their hair had been brushed, and their school clothes neatly folded beside them, and their socks tucked into their shiny black shoes. To look at them from that angle, there were no signs of violence. That’s not to say they could be mistaken for sleeping—far from it. Their chests didn’t rise with breath, and their faces had been pushed into the sand.

Reginald stood frozen for some time, just staring, until his body betrayed him. He dropped to his knees, vomited twice, and felt hot tears streak down his cheeks. And then, with his blood pounding through his body in revulsion and horror, he caught the movement of a shadow out of the corner of his eye. He quickly drew his weapon and pointed it at the man, who was dressed in a dark coat and black hat and was sitting on a piece of bone white driftwood, staring at the dead children. The man, her grandfather was shocked to see, was none other than Jack Horowitz.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Reg said to him.

“Why do you think I am here?” he replied.

“Horowitz, I’m going to need you to put your hands in the air.”

“I must ask you, at this precise moment, not to be an idiot.”

“You’re at the scene of the crime. I have to take you in.”

“I have been at the scene of many crimes today, Reg. Too many. I am not in the mood for humans at the moment.”

Reginald Solar didn’t lower his gun. It hadn’t escaped him that Horowitz, now thirteen years older than when he first met him, hadn’t aged a day.

“Do you really believe I killed them?” said Horowitz, looking up with big eyes framed with black lashes. There, in the afternoon sun, his scars were worse than ever—they bubbled beneath the surface, distorting his features. You might think his parboiled skin made him monstrous, but it had the opposite effect. Most found him to be a sympathetic figure, felt sorry for him, felt a need to protect and follow him when he asked. It would make the former private, in the decades to come, a very successful Reaper.

Reginald did not believe that Jack Horowitz had killed the children. He thought it very fucking strange indeed that Jack Horowitz was here in this dry creek bed and staring at their bodies, but no, he did not believe he had killed them. So this was what he did: he holstered his weapon, called for backup, and sat down on the driftwood next to his sort-of friend, the Man Who Was Now Death, and he too stared at the little blond girls who lay facedown in the sand.

“Fuck me,” said Reginald after a moment, partly because of the horror of the scene before him, but partly because, for the first time, he found himself genuinely believing that Horowitz was who he said he was. Horowitz was Death incarnate—why else would he be here? Reg pulled off his hat and wiped away several hard-wrung tears. “Fuck me. How long have you been here?”

“Since it happened. I find myself quite unable to move.”

“What?”

“I believe I am suffering a panic attack.”

Reg looked Horowitz up and down. He was sitting quite rigidly on the driftwood, hands balled into fists on his knees, but apart from that he exhibited no signs of distress. “Are you sure?”

“Oh yes. My heart is beating rapidly, I am short of breath, my limbs are numb, and I feel very much like I am about to die of a heart attack, which I know for a fact to be incorrect. I am not on my own list, you see.”

“Sure.” Reg cleared his throat and patted Horowitz on the back a few times. “Breathe deep, old friend.”

“Why do you do this to each other?” Horowitz said. Reg noticed for the first time that he was, indeed, struggling to get his words out through his strangled breaths. He hadn’t looked away from the little girls, and even though Reg wanted nothing more than to stand up and go home and hug his own children, he looked back at them too. They hadn’t been dead for long. Faint bruises—liver mortis—had started forming across their ribs and arms and shoulders, but from this distance, if you squinted, it might only be a flush on the skin from the heat.

Reginald stood—he was here to investigate, after all, not to provide cold comforts to the last person who should need them—and started to cordon off the crime scene. “You might be in the wrong line of work,” he said to Horowitz as he worked, who’d since gone pale and was now breathing between his knees.

“Did you ever think that Death might not want to be Death?” said Horowitz.

“So don’t be Death.”

“As I told you in Vietnam, I was conscripted. I do not have the luxury of making that choice. We are somewhat short-staffed, apparently.”

“You got shanghaied into a gig as the Grim Reaper because the afterlife was running low on skilled workers?”

“There are more humans than ever before. More deaths than ever before. We are overworked.”

“And underpaid, I suppose.”

“The remuneration is less than you might think.” A beat. “She died, Reg. Lan died.”

Reg thought back to their wedding day. Lan, smiling broadly in her pale pink sundress, a strand of pearls at her throat, white lace gloves on her hands. They’d spoken only once, and briefly at that—but he knew how much Horowitz adored her. Could see it in the way he looked at her, the same way Reg looked at his own wife, Florence. “When?” he asked sadly. “How?”

“Death came for her while I slept. I was still his apprentice. Nothing I could do. We had only been married a month, and living in our little home in Greece for even less. A wave took her out to sea, and the sea kept her.”

“Jesus.”

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he said, quoting the Bhagavad Gita; it was, Reg knew, the same phrase J. Robert Oppenheimer had thought as he watched the first atomic bomb detonate.

“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me who did this?”

Horowitz shook his head. “You will not catch him.”

“I could. If you told me.”

“If I told you who he was, you would kill him, but I cannot, because it is not yet his time.”

“Bullshit, Horowitz. Bullshit. You know this asshole deserves to die, so give me a name.”

“You want a name? How about Eden Gray? Arjuna and Rathna Malhotra? Yukiko Ando? Carlotta Bianchi? These are the murdered children I have reaped today already. These girls will not be the last. They are not special.”

“How about you get to the next murder a few minutes earlier and stop it from happening?”

“I will not give you the name.”

And that is when Reginald Solar—quite calmly—curled his fingers into a fist and punched Death square in the jaw, proving that the Reaper, too, could bleed.

On the way home to his wife and two young children, Reginald stopped at the roadside greenhouse of a local woman who grew orchids, where he bought enough plants to fill up the entire back seat and trunk of his Toyota Cressida. When he arrived home, he went straight upstairs to his children’s rooms, where they were playing before dinner. He sat with them for a long time, watching them, noting the distinct color of their eyes, the way their hair fell across their faces, the shrill sound of their laughter.

After dinner, he went out to the garden and started constructing a greenhouse in which to grow his new orchids. It began raining at 9 p.m., a torrential downpour from a storm system that would last several weeks and cause a flash flood at the scene of the crime, where the coroner and a forensic photographer would be swept away, their bodies to be found downriver more than a week later. The Bowen sisters were not found at all.

Reginald worked through the deluge despite his fear of water, and the greenhouse was complete at dawn. After moving the orchids in, he went back to the police station to begin the long and arduous murder investigation, not knowing, yet, that this would be the one case that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

What he didn’t tell anyone—not his colleagues, not his captain, not even his wife—was that two young girls, both pale and gossamer as spider’s silk, had begun to follow him everywhere. They stood at the end of his bed that night, dead-eyed and unblinking. They followed him to the police station in the morning and hid under his desk, each curled up like the bud of a ghostly flower. They wandered around his greenhouse with him in the afternoon, whispering to the orchids to make them grow. And when he visited the now-raging river two days after their deaths—the closest he would come to a large body of water ever again—they screamed and screamed and screamed, but only he could hear them.