Gabby asked, “So what is the Blue Lady’s most secret name?”
The children erupted with answers again all at once: “That’s for you to find out.”
“It’s useless if someone just tells you what it is.”
“Even if they did know it.”
“You gotta find out all on your own.”
“Anyone says it out loud is turned into an angel for the war.”
They began addressing one another now. They shared many beliefs with Robin’s band.
Gabby cautiously asked, “Then if, say, for instance, that you and your friends are on a street corner when a carriage comes racing down on you and only one of you knows her secret true name and yells out this name, then only the one will live?”
“No ma’am,” said Audra.
“You don’t get it,” said Danielle. “You see her and she whispers her real heavenly name, then you gotta go with her.”
The tallest boy in the group added, “You’re dead, yeah, but you got eternal life as one of hers and that’s Heaven, see?”
“And it makes you superhuman,” said another.
“So you can fight the Devil.”
“Got it,” said Gabby, fighting back a frown.
“It’s a spell that takes your soul up,” Audra further explained, “and it’s very loving. She says: ‘Hold on’ a lot, meaning, things’re going to get better for us.”
A freight train rushing toward the center of commerce suddenly came up, its roar deafening, so close were they to the tracks. It shook the earth around them.
A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his eye, swollen huge as a ruby egg and laced with black stitches, nodded vigorously at this. “I’ve seen her. The Blue Lady,” he murmured.
A rustle of whispered “me too”s rippled through the small circle of initiates.
Alastair thought, They instinctively know to curry favor with Danielle; that to remain under her considerable protection, they need only agree with everything she says. “And where is Leather Apron in all this? Is he Zoroaster?”
Danielle’s features turned suddenly stony, and she glared at Audra as if she’d like to strangle the younger girl. “Damn you, Audra! How much of your guts did you spill to these outsiders?”
“We just want to understand,” pleaded Jane, “to see the connections, the patterns. How the killer is related to Bloody Mary, for instance?”
“They are interconnected by mutual hatred and war,” Danielle finally explained.
“What is Leather Apron to La Llorona?” pressed Jane. “We want to understand.”
Again the initiates erupted with answers, ignoring Danielle’s undisguised disdain for the way things had gone, as the younger children exploded with responses.
“They’re lovers.”
“Dirty lovers, though!”
“Evil…just evil.”
“Evil, twisted lovers.”
“Addicted to a hatred of children.”
“They eat flesh when they make love.”
“They make love when they eat kids.”
Alastair lifted his blue gun from its shoulder holster. “This proves I am on the side of the Blue Lady,” he announced.
All the children went wide-eyed at the blue burnished steel .38 Police Special. None had ever seen a blue gun before, despite the fact anyone with the money could purchase one from a Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalog.
The gun impressed even Danielle, who suggested it’d make a fine gift for her information, “As an offering, so to speak.”
When Alastair flatly refused, saying, “It’s out of the question,” Danielle flew into a rage. “You wanna know about patterns, do you? It’s hatred fed by the flesh and bone of children, and you high-and-mighty types comin’ down slummin’ among us act as if you’re seeing things for the first time, but it’s only because it’s a senator’s daughter now! Ain’t it the truth?”
Alastair was unsure what they might do with the confusing information they’d collected or how to ferret out truth from fiction, fabrication from whole cloth. Elements of the stories rang as true as sun and moon and stars, while other elements rang a wholly different bell-one alien to them all. Ransom summed it up in a single sentence. “And here I thought I’d heard it all, and I thought I knew what was going on in Chicago.”
Meanwhile, Danielle loudly cautioned the other children, “And once you go into the system, they take your picture and your measurements, and your name and information, and it all goes into Zoroaster’s files, and so now you’re in their files, and it’s only a matter of time before they catch you! And if they don’t torture and skin you alive, they do worse! They steal your soul for all time.”
This frightful idea had silenced all argument, and the band of children began to disappear before their eyes.
“Déjà vu,” muttered Jane.
Ransom didn’t know the French term, but he imagined it a swear word. Then he noticed the discarded doll that Gabby’d twice now gifted over to Audra. Up till now, Audra had kept the doll hidden beneath her fresh petticoats, also a gift from Gabby. Too late to warn her, Alastair realized how terribly attached Gabby had become to the girl. Gabby again tearfully lifted the doll dropped amid the rubble. The petticoats would likely follow as yet another possible sign of weakness at having accepted gifts from demons and of having gone over to Zoroaster.
In the long and sad carriage ride back to their own lives, Ransom attempted to rest his eyes and mind, shut down, while Jane and Gabby talked of their feelings of empty hopelessness that had nearly overwhelmed them as each had listened to the “religion” of the street children.
Gabby had rushed after Audra, offering her a way out, to come live with her and her mother for a time, but Audra followed Queen Danielle and her “family” instead.
“They are all suspicious of any sort of authority,” Alastair, eyes still closed, told Jane and Gabby. Still this did not lessen the heartbreaking moment for Gabby. Knowing Audra’s decision and action amounted to a performance for Danielle and the others, so that she might continue to belong with her street family, didn’t mitigate the pain. Ransom knew that Audra was a rare exception, belonging to two such street families. Even so, Gabby had been hurt by Audra’s last words, shouted loudly for all to hear: “They fooled me! They seemed nice, gave me donuts and presents, but they could still be working for demons!”
As the cab passed into their part of the city, Gabby held the doll as she might an infant, cradled on her lap. Out one eye, Alastair watched her and Jane, sorry for their grief, sorry they’d had to go through this sort of thing, but he wondered what they’d expected. All the same, Alastair now tried another soothing word. “Look, Gabby, with these kids, myth and fear of authority has gotten all twisted and balled up, so that as far as establishing any sort of lasting bond of friendship with any of them…well, you can just forget-about-it.”
“Isn’t that largely the problem, Alastair?” Jane took instant issue. “Everyone would like to forget about it, put it back on the children’s shoulders, as if they had a choice.”
“They do have a choice. You just saw choice twice thrown in your face!”
“Makes it so much easier then for us to ignore it, doesn’t it, In-spec-tor.”
Alastair grimaced. He hated it when she used that tone when calling him Inspector sometimes adding Ran-som to drag it out.
She was on a tear now. “And perhaps, then, Inspector Ran-som, perhaps if enough of us ignore the problem, it will by damn disappear. Just poof! Gone. Impossible situation.”
“They’re just children,” added Gabby, sniffing back tears. “How…how can you be so…so callous, you a professed defender and servant of the people?”