Book Five, Chapter 6: Sunflowers

I looked Benny right in the face. Underneath the grease, he had one of those cherub faces that looked the best when it was smiling. His thinning hair was curly but well-kept. Though he kept casting glances back at the green sedan that had caused him so much pain, he was polite and attentive and seemed, to the best of my understanding, very concerned about the missing child.

“Yeah, it was me and my boy,” he said as Kimberly held the microphone in his face. “We’ve seen that girl coming around here a lot. She likes looking at the farms and the plants and the trees in the fields. Nice girl, never done anything wrong. And on this day, I remember she looked upset. That’s what I told the cops. Normally, she’s smiling and skipping like the sun is her best friend, but that day, she was sad, and I could see she had been crying. I wish I had called out to her to see what was wrong. I had no way of knowing, you understand,” Benny started to say before the words caught in his throat. He almost got caught up in his emotions. His brow was heavy, and his eyes were clear due to a thin covering of tears.

“And this was three days ago?” Kimberly said.

“Right.”

“Yes, ma’am. Three days. Me and the boy been out in the woods and the fields looking for her. We’ve been doing our part. She was headed back toward town. I just don’t know what could have happened to her.”

“So you’ve heard it here, a tragedy in Eastern Carousel. Tamara Cano remains missing. If you have any information on the missing girl, please call the Sheriff’s Department number on your screen,” Kimberly said to the camera. “Citizens of Eastern Carousel like Mr. Benjamin Harless are out in droves searching for the missing girl, and hope remains high that she will be found and returned to her mother. This is Kimberly Madison with Carousel News 9.”

“And we’re clear,” I said. I wasn’t actually sure if news producers were supposed to say “cut” or not, but I vaguely remembered someone saying something like “and we’re clear” when I was watching April O’Neil do a news report in a Ninja Turtles movie.

I didn’t even know if that film was being broadcast. Nick took care of everything. I just wore headphones and looked intense to try and seem like I was working.

~-~

“How did I do?” Benny asked earnestly. “You think this is going to help find that girl? Tamara used to come around. She used to play with my son, Rustle. I don’t know what I’m going to tell him if something’s happened to her.”

“Your son?” Kimberly asked. “He knows Tamara? Is there a chance that we’ll get to meet him?”

“I suppose that’d be all right, but you gotta know he… he had a hard life before he came to us, and he don’t talk. But he can understand you, and he’s real smart. The thing is, he gets nervous around some people, so if he don’t want to talk to you, it ain’t gonna happen. Hope you understand.”

“I totally understand,” Kimberly said. “I’d just like to see if maybe he has something to say… in his own way.”

We were still On-Screen, so we didn’t have the opportunity to talk about anything with each other, but things were moving forward at a very organic and slow pace, so I felt comfortable.

Kimberly was in her element. While she didn’t have the natural warmth of Anna, she was good at talking to people and knew all the right places to sigh and look sad. That was a skill in and of itself.

“Let me do the talking,” she said as Benny led us around to the other side of his shop.

“You realize you aren’t the only one with… moxie, right?” I said.

“I realize,” she answered.

As we rounded the shop, my jaw dropped at the reveal of one of the most beautiful and intricate gardens I had ever seen. It was late fall, so most of what was still green were the plants that held squashes, pumpkins, and corn along with as many different kinds and colors of sunflowers as I had ever seen.

“This is wonderful,” Kimberly said.

“Well, thank you,” Benny answered. “But I can’t take credit; that’d be my wife and my boy.”

As soon as he mentioned them, I saw them out in the garden. His son was small, but if I were to guess, he must have been around ten years old.

As I watched the sun shining off his face, he was pulling a large worm or perhaps a caterpillar off one of the sunflowers. He looked at the worm in awe and wonder and dropped it into an old coffee can as he continued to search for more worms.

On the red wallpaper, his name was Rustle, not Russell, but Rustle as in what leaves do in the wind. The woman next to him noticed us as we arrived. Her name was Rose Harless. Both of them were NPCs.

Rose gave new meaning to the term flower child. She was wearing a tiara of white flowers and a sundress that I thought only the fae were known to adorn. She was barefoot and her hair was long and flowing. She looked at Rustle like he was the sun to her flower.

From the way Benny had talked, Rustle was not biologically related to them but was adopted. To look at him, that sounded accurate. The Harlesses had dark hair and Mediterranean features, whereas Rustle had pale skin and hair so fine it was almost white.

Benny went over to his wife to discuss the arrangement. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but she was clearly hesitant. Despite this, she relented. She grabbed Rustle by the hand, and she and Benny led him back to Kimberly and me.

“No cameras,” Rose said. “And I don’t know if Benny told you this, but if Rustle doesn’t like you, there’s no talking to him. That’s that.”

“Absolutely,” Kimberly said. She knelt down to around Rustle’s height and said, “How about it, buddy? Do you think you could talk to me about your friend Tamara? I’m just trying to find her, is all.”

Rustle got close to Kimberly and looked her in the eye. Quietly, I saw an eerie intelligence in his eyes. They were piercing dark—so dark I couldn’t find his pupil. After a moment of intensity, Rustle smiled. He looked back at his mother and nodded. Then he looked at me and then back at his mother.

“Well, all right then,” Rose said. “Go put on your baseball cap, honey.”

Rustle listened and went to fetch a small blue and white cap from out in the garden. He placed it on his head and twisted it around so that the bill faced backward. He was a thin and athletic ten-year-old. True to his father’s words, he never spoke, but he definitely communicated in other ways.

“We have a table and chairs out on the deck,” Rose said. “Let me go get some herbal tea.”

She pointed toward a comfortable set of furniture that looked like it had been made by hand. Benny, Rustle, Kimberly, and I found our seats while Rose went to prepare the drinks. As soon as she was gone, Benny turned to us and said, “So, your friend doesn’t do anything to maintain that car, does he?”

“That would be my guess,” I said. “He’s more of a camera guy.”

Benny nodded. “Yeah, I could tell just listening to it running down the street. I don’t know what he’s done to it. Normally, I can tell just like that,” he said as he snapped his fingers, “but we got multiple things happening under that hood. You mark my words—it’s a party of bad maintenance and bad parts, let me tell you.”

“So, how long have you been a mechanic?” I asked.

“Since before I knew the word ‘mechanic,’ I was under hoods busting knuckles. The Harlesses get to work young. Rustle here has been working in the garden since he was real little, haven’t you, buddy?”

Rustle nodded with a smile. He pointed out at the sunflowers and then pointed back to himself.

“What’s that, buddy?” Benny said. “Oh, he’s trying to tell you that he was the one who found the sunflowers. He likes to go tramping through the woods, and he found some sunflower seeds that he planted last year, and then this year, he planted the seeds from those seeds, and now we got ourselves a whole forest of sunflowers.”

“That is so cool,” Kimberly said. “They’re so pretty.”

Rustle beamed.

As I scanned the garden, I saw something that made my heart jump. It was a scarecrow. This one looked like a normal scarecrow with overalls and an old plaid shirt stuffed with straw. It had no gloves and no name tag. The face, though—the face with its buttons and its little sewn-on hat—was the same scarecrow head that I recognized from Benny the Haunted Scarecrow. It was not sun-bleached or threadbare like I remembered, but it was the same one.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

This scarecrow did not fly or cut people’s heads off. It just hung from a little wooden cross, scaring away crows.

~-~

We talked for an hour or so.

“Really, we were just glad that he had found a friend. So many of the children around here can be judgmental. Tamara was different. They had their own little silent language. She would come over here, and they would play in the fields, and she would help Rustle with his work in the garden,” Rose said.

“Rustle has been very upset since we found out she had gone missing,” Benny said. “I don’t know why they didn’t spend time together that day. Normally, she only leaves to get home before dark. I don’t know why she left early that day.”

Rustle sat in his seat and looked down at the table. His bottom lip was firmly tucked in between his teeth as he chewed on it, a nervous gesture.

“I was just wondering,” Kimberly said, “is there someplace that you and Tamara would go? Maybe a clubhouse, a cave, or a special spot that you would go out to in the woods?”

Rustle shook his head.

“We’ve actually been all through the area that they would have gone together,” Benny explained. “They did have some stomping grounds over near the creek and through the forests and the fields out north, but we didn’t find her there. We had a whole search party in that area; no one saw a thing.”

Trying to talk to Rustle was difficult. Part of it was because he was nonverbal; another part was because he just didn’t want to tell us everything, or at least that’s how his mother, Rose, put it. He was a very secretive boy, and that had nothing to do with his not talking.

Rose stared off into the distance, not making eye contact with either of us as she said, “I know my son, and if he knew anything about this girl’s disappearance, he would say something. He’d find a way.”

And so the conversation went on with mostly pleasantries. Kimberly and I hadn’t had a chance to make a plan of attack since we had gotten here. We were just talking and trying to dig further.

As Rustle played in the garden, we continued to talk to Rose. Benny was already waist-deep in Nick’s car, trying to fix all that ailed it.

“I don’t know if this is rude to ask,” Kimberly said, “but why exactly doesn’t he speak? Does he have autism or some sort of learning disability?”

“No, it’s fine to ask,” Rose said. She looked away from Kimberly as she spoke. “He has what the doctors are calling aphasia voluntaria. The fact is, he should be able to speak—that’s what they tell us. The truth is, he came to us when he was four or five years old. We have no idea what happened to him before that. Doctors think maybe he wasn’t exposed to language or, worse, maybe it’s some sort of trauma response. One doctor said it was a symptom of severe anxiety. He was tested for all sorts of things like brain damage and autism, and they all came back negative. The truth is, me and Benny prayed for a child for so long. I don’t care if he ever talks. Benny says there ain’t nothing wrong with him. That some people are just different. I believe it. He is the way he is.”

Kimberly looked at me. If we weren’t On-Screen and if we were actually able to leave, we probably would have continued our search elsewhere, but the fact that we were On-Screen and our car was in pieces meant there was something here for us to learn. There had to be.

“This may be very personal, but when you say he came to you, does that mean you adopted him, or is he a foster child?” Kimberly asked.