Page 50 of Darling

“You need to sign these nondisclosure agreements before we continue.” He placed a few pieces of paper in front of her and handed her a pen. “Ominotago, Fyodor, and the rest have already signed theirs. Your mother has, too, actually. It’s about twenty years old, but I could pull it for you, if necessary.”

Wendy read the paper carefully and despite her better instincts signed the bottom. It had been a solid seven hours of confusion, but at least if she went to jail, she would go to jail with answers.

Hook put the cooperation agreement in the envelope, and Wendy was pleased to see the paper underneath hers had Ominotago’s name on it, so at least he wasn’t lying about that.

He put the folder of documents to the left and took another folder off the pile, pulling out another mug shot and placed it in front of her.

“This,” Detective Hook said with incredible gravity, “is Peter Pan.”

The mug shot was old.

Peter stared back at Wendy from the image, looking not entirely different from when they had met. There were small changes: His eyes were a bit brighter, he had a bit more fat around his face, and his auburn hair was chopped in a rakish mullet—just long enough to still look cool, decades in the future.

Wendy could hear her heart pounding in her ears.

Detective Hook jabbed the center of Peter’s face with a thick index finger. “When we took this mug shot, I was still a beat cop. I’ve been a detective for seventeen years.”

Wendy’s eyes scanned the image as she sat there numbly. The unbroken nose, the rosier cheeks, no stubble at all.

“I don’t…” Wendy started, at a loss for words as she tried to do the math.

“Peter Pan is thirty-six years old.”

Wendy pushed herself away from the table. She leaned over and tried not to vomit. She put her head on her knees and swallowed hard over and over until her throat burned with the bile she’d forced back down her throat. With that one sentence, the context of everything had changed. She had been alone in her bedroom in the middle of the night with a thirty-six-year-old man. She allowed a thirty-six-year-old man to lure her out of her family home. She had watched a thirty-six-year-old man threaten a child.

She had let down her defenses around him because other kids weren’t inherently scary most of the time. Peter must have been using that to his advantage. She remembered with violent clarity the moment they met. When Peter was facing the window in her bedroom, silhouetted by a streetlamp, and she thought for exactly one second that he was a man. But when he turned his face to her, she corrected herself. She looked at his small, cute face and bright wide eyes and thought, This is a kid like me, this is a boy in my house, this is a boy who might need help. This is a boy.

Wendy remembered the hot press of his body as he’d climbed down the side of her house and how she’d liked it, and she felt like clawing her own skin off to get rid of the memory of the feeling. Things he had said ran through her mind at rapid speed. This is Bella’s dance, the ‘Never Bird.’ She’s been doing it at this place for fifteen years, I’ve heard … You want to look like you’re fifty in your thirties, keep smoking like this … I’ve had this jacket for a very long time … Fyodor calling him a man, Ominotago calling him a man. Everyone calling him a man but her.

Wendy thought about her mom.

Her mom, clenching the bar tightly on the train, describing this man–describing Peter—in fits and starts, haunted by a ghost that turned out to still be alive. Moving away to escape the memory, waiting until she felt safe, then inadvertently placing her family back into the path of the same predator that had haunted her nights. Her mom. Who would have to learn that Wendy had spent a night the same way she had, with the same predator, when she came to pick Wendy up from the police station.

The necklace Peter made her hours ago suddenly scraped against her skin like rope. Wendy pulled it off and threw it hard across the room.

Detective Hook watched the acorn and string bounce off the concrete wall and land on the floor, and wisely chose to say nothing. He waited patiently until Wendy was able to pull herself together and sit up again. Then he got up and poured Wendy a glass of water from the water cooler and placed it in front of her, along with a box of tissues. Wendy pushed the tissues away but grabbed the water, gulping it down gratefully.

“Who else knows?” Wendy choked out. “Do the others—”

“They know. They learned about a month ago. Genevieve punched me in the face when I told her, so you’re handling this better than she did.”

“Genevieve?” Wendy asked numbly.

Detective Hook rolled his eyes. “She likes to be called Tinkerbelle, I think.”

Wendy could unpack that later. “They let me be close to him when … they let him touch me … they let…”

Detective Hook thumbed through Peter’s folder and took out a few more pictures, but this time he held them in a stack instead of handing them over. “They know, but it’s not their fault that you didn’t know. They’re all contractually restricted from sharing that information with anyone outside of people working on the case. Also, they spent the majority of their time with him not knowing, either, much longer than you. Peter is very charismatic and convincing; it’s not hard for him to trick a group of teenagers. But the thing is that it only works if they’re teenagers. He can’t trick people who are much older than you are right now. Whether it’s because we’re old enough to recognize another adult when we see one, or because the things that make him charismatic stop working after a while, we don’t know. But we know that he knows it, too, and that he doesn’t allow this situation to happen if he can manage it by keeping the age of people around him low enough for it to keep working. How long have you been with the others? It couldn’t have been long … a week, maybe?”

“Seven hours,” Wendy said, her chest as hollow as a gourd.

Detective Hook grimaced apologetically. “Peter works predictably. He makes friends with vulnerable children, figures out what they need most in the world, and then gives it to them. Food, a home, a brother, a father, a friend. He sticks by them for a couple of years, roughly until they turn eighteen, then he gives them a choice: to leave the city permanently or … to leave the city permanently.”

Detective Hook set down the photographs he was holding and fanned them out so Wendy could see them all at once. They were candids of street kids, all roughly seventeen or eighteen, ranging from blurry shots of grunge-kids in band T-shirts, all the way up to crisper digital pictures that couldn’t have been from more than five years ago. Wendy didn’t recognize any of the boys she’d already met, and the names at the bottom of the images weren’t any that had been mentioned tonight, either.

“These are his victims. We originally thought disappear- ances correlated with convenience as a motive, but thanks to Trevor, or well … ‘Curly’—” Detective Hook took a moment to do air quotes disrespectfully, “—we now know that it actually corresponds with their ages. He rarely takes in two older kids around the same age. Brian—‘Nibs’—would have been next to go. His eighteenth birthday is in four months.”

“Peter…,” Wendy said helplessly.