Help for the Haunted

by John Searles

  “Thanks,” Abigail said, sounding genuinely grateful. “But there’s one more thing. I need money, Sylvie. Enough for a train ticket at least.”

  At some point during our late-night talks, I’d let slip a mention of those essay contests and how proud I was of winning them, how I’d been saving the money for something special, though I didn’t know what that was just yet. “Let’s go back to the house and have dinner,” I said, stalling before she mentioned the obvious. “Maybe go get ice cream and swim. It’s still warm enough.”

  “No,” she told me. “It might still be warm enough for that. But it’s almost fall now, then winter will come. And he’ll be here to get me long before that. I have to do something. And I have to do it now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, giving the answer I know my parents would have expected of me. “But I can’t help you.”

  I turned again toward the stairs, put my foot on the first step as a few chunks of the cement crumbled away. From behind me, there came a shuffling sound. A moment later, when I reached the top of the steps, I heard the smallest of moans before Abigail shouted, “Sylvie! Look at me!”

  Something in me did not want to turn back, but her voice grew louder as she called out again. And when I looked at last, I saw that she was standing by those twisted iron rods, the ones Rose speculated had once been the start of a fireplace. Blood pooled on one of her open palms. The sight caused me to gasp.

  “Now do you see?” she said. “I do have something inside of me? It may not be the demons other people talk about, but it’s something that makes me capable of hurting myself if I need to. Hurting other people too unless I get what I want. So please. What I want is your help.”

  It seemed I should have made some sudden move, scrambled back down the stairs to help her by trying to stop the bleeding. Or run quickly as I could away from her before she tried to harm me too. But, no. I just stood at the top of those stairs, staring at her a long moment, watching blood drool down her fingers and drip onto the cement of the foundation. Neither of us said a word. And then came the sounds of another voice, calling “Sylvie! Abigail!”

  It was my father.

  “I have to go,” I said. “We both do. You’ve got to clean that wound and bandage it up.”

  Abigail still did not speak, but she reached over and dragged her other hand across one of those rods, releasing another moan, louder this time as her face contorted in pain. When she was done, she held her blood-smeared hands out to me and said simply, “The money. I know you have it. I can’t ever promise to pay you back, but please.”

  “Okay,” I told her at last, since it seemed the only way to make her stop. Still, I couldn’t help stalling if only to give me time to figure out the best way to handle the situation. “I’ll give it to you tomorrow.”

  “I can’t wait until tomorrow. I need that money tonight. When I’m asleep down in the basement, bring it to me.”

  “The basement?” I said, surprised. “Why would you be sleeping down there?”

  “Because, Sylvie, that’s the other thing I have to tell you. Your parents are putting me downstairs on the cot tonight. That person I mentioned, the one who’s at your house right now with them, well, it’s your sister. You won’t be going to see her this weekend, because Rose has come home at last.”

  Chapter 21

  Help for the Haunted

  Most people, they are afraid to believe in ghosts. Me, I’m afraid not to believe. Because, well, what then? If there really is nothing else—nowhere to go after this, no way to linger on this plane to finish unsettled business if we must, then that means each moment, each breath, each passing second, is as ethereal as the wind. It means all we do here on earth—the going and coming, the loving and hating—it is all for naught. So, no. Ghosts don’t scare me. But no ghosts—that terrifies me.

  ENOUGH ABOUT THAT, THOUGH. BACK TO WHAT I WAS SAYING PREVIOUSLY, MR. HEEKIN. FORGIVE ME, I MEAN, SAM. WHAT I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED, MORE THAN ANYTHING, IS TO BUILD A GOOD LIFE FOR MY DAUGHTERS AND MY WIFE. TO HAVE A FAMILY OF MY OWN WITH PROPER VALUES. GROWING UP, MY FATHER DRANK TOO MUCH. HE WAS NOT ABUSIVE, BUT HIS REMOTE NATURE WAS IN ITS OWN WAY A FORM OF ABUSE. MY MOTHER AND I HAD OUR TENDER MOMENTS BUT SHARED SUCH DIFFERENT INTERESTS THAT WE WERE NEVER CLOSE. AND MY BROTHER, WELL, HE DID THINGS I CAN NEVER FORGIVE. FOR ALL THOSE REASONS, I ENDED UP CREATING MY OWN WORLD.

  WHAT’S THAT? EXCUSE ME?

  NO, NO. THAT IS NOT WHAT I AM SAYING. THOSE THINGS I SAW’STILL SEE’ARE EVERY BIT REAL. WHAT I MEAN IS THAT I CREATED MY OWN LIFE APART FROM THE FAMILY I WAS BORN INTO. I MOVED AWAY. I FOUND THE BIBLE. I CAME TO BELIEVE THAT A LIFE LIVED IN THE LIGHT, FREE OF SIN AND REPROACH, PROTECTS US AS WE MOVE THROUGH THIS WORLD. IT KEEPS THE DARKNESS AT BAY.

  The tape came to an end, and the cassette player in Detective Rummel’s car automatically ejected it. He asked if I wanted to listen to the other side. “Depends,” I said, my father’s voice echoing in my mind still. “How close are we?”

  Rummel lifted a hand from the steering wheel, pointing to an impossibly high metal fence in the distance. I looked to see barbed wire curlicuing across the top, a compound of low-slung brick buildings on the other side. “We’ve got a little time still, Sylvie. But why don’t we wait until after to hear more, so you can clear your head?”

  Days. Weeks. Months. It might have taken that long to arrange a meeting with an inmate on the other side of that fence. But the morning after I found those candles in the trash, I drove in silence with my sister to the police station. The two of us had barely spoken since that fight in her truck over the money from Dial U.S.A., and our silence had become so palpable it felt as though we were both holding our breath, daring the other to let it out first. Once they separated us—Rose on that bench in the hall, me inside that achingly familiar interview room—Rummel and Louise asked if I was prepared to either recant or uphold my account of the evening last winter.

  And that’s when I told them I wanted to see Albert Lynch. I refused to say anything more or even see my sister again until they made arrangements. Louise stepped out into the hallway to speak to Rose about the need for her permission, since I was a minor after all, and she was my legal guardian. While waiting, I asked Rummel about those interview tapes Heekin had told me about. For all the trouble I had given him, the detective maintained his kindness toward me. In an almost tender voice, he said that if I thought the tapes might help somehow, I was welcome to give them a listen. He brought a cassette player into the room, and my father’s interviews with the reporter filled the air around me. At different points on the recordings, Heekin’s faltering voice could not be heard, so it was just my father speaking between the occasional pause.

  By midafternoon, Rummel poked his head into the room to inform me that the prison had okayed the visit and that Rose had begrudgingly acquiesced and granted permission too. The only thing we were waiting for was to find out if Lynch himself would agree to see me.

  A short while later, word came that he did.

  Nearly five hours after I entered the station, I walked out, carrying the one cassette I had yet to play. In the hallway, Rummel and I passed my sister on that bench, flipping through the same old safety brochures. It startled me to see her, since I assumed she had given up and gone home by then.

  “Sylvie,” she said when she laid eyes on me.

  Head down, I kept walking. Some part of me felt the urge to take the detective’s hand for comfort. Instead, I squeezed the cassette harder, bracing myself for this moment with Rose, bracing myself for the trip to the prison that lay ahead.

  “Sylvie!” She tossed those brochures on the floor and stood. “I’m talking to y
ou!”

  “I’m just going to see him,” I told her over the rising shhhh.

  “Why?”

  Absolute certainty—that was why. I wanted to be sure this time that what I believed was the truth. I wanted to be right for Detective Rummel and Louise. I wanted to be right for my mother and father. I wanted to be right for me too.

  But I did not explain that to Rose. Instead, I just kept walking as she stood there in the hall calling after me.

  SUSSEX COUNTY CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION—I stared at the sign as we drove through a series of gates at the prison. That very first night I opened my eyes to see Rummel at my bedside in the hospital, the man had seemed strong and impenetrable, a statue come to life. But as he spoke to the guards at the gates, the guards at the front doors, and still more guards in the maze inside that rambling brick compound, the detective seemed impossibly human. Something in his heavy footsteps, his quick breaths and occasional sighs, left me with the feeling that Rummel was nervous about this visit too.

  Beforehand, we had agreed that he would stay with me the entire time, so when yet another guard led us to a room full of tables and told me to take a seat, the detective lingered nearby. That long, rectangular table where I sat waiting for Lynch was not unlike the ones in the school cafeteria. Thinking of school led me to think of Boshoff and the diary he had given me. I hadn’t been able to find it the night before, and now my only hope was that it was lost somewhere in the bowels of Howie’s theater, like so many dropped possessions of the people who came before me, only never to be found.

  I kept thinking about the diary, and all I had written inside, until a door opened across the room, different from the one Rummel and I had come through. I looked up to see Albert Lynch being escorted in by another guard. Slowly, they walked to the table, Lynch in an orange jumpsuit, his gaze on the floor instead of me. The guard pulled back the chair, legs scraping the floor, and Lynch flopped into the seat. “Thirty,” the guard said, pointing to the large clock on the wall.

  The half-hour limit was yet another detail that had been agreed upon beforehand. I knew we didn’t have much time, and yet for an extended moment, neither of us said anything. Lynch sat there, staring at me. Without his odd bug-eyed glasses, I was not sure how well he could see, but I wondered what I must have looked like to him. I felt much older than that girl who had witnessed him calling into the bushes outside the convention center in Ocala, more world-weary and wise than that girl who had walked to the end of Butter Lane with her mother to find him and his daughter waiting for us in their van.

  Lynch had never been a heavy man, but he had lost a considerable amount of weight since those days. The hollows under his eyes and his sunken cheeks gave the impression of a tent collapsing from the inside. That smooth, babyish skin of his had gone crepey around the mouth. At last, he opened his thin lips and said quietly, “All these months in this godforsaken place, the only visitors I’ve had have been lawyers and detectives like your friend here. When they told me I had a visitation request this morning, you were the last person I expected.”

  I stared down at my hands on the table. “No one has come to see you?”

  “Who would, Sylvie? No one knows where my daughter is. She was my only family. My only life, in fact.”

  I closed my eyes, for just a second or two, but long enough to conjure the memory of that conversation in the foundation with Abigail and the way I had turned from her, racing across the lane toward home the moment she informed me that my sister had returned. When I opened my eyes again, I told myself to put that memory away, to stay in the here and now. “I came,” I said, forcing my gaze upon his, “because I want to talk about that night in the church. The conversation you had with my parents, before—”

  “You don’t need me to tell you, Sylvie,” he said, making no effort to hide his contempt. “I’ve given my account to the lawyers and detectives, including the one you brought with you. Just ask him for the transcript.”

  I heard Rummel’s heavy shoes shift on the floor behind me, heard him let out another of those faint sighs. In the moments after I had made the request to see Lynch, the detective had offered the same option: that I could just look at the transcripts. But that’s not what I wanted. What brought me to the prison was that long-ago conversation with my mother in the bed of our hotel room, the one where she told me I could sense the truth inside a person if only I allowed myself. “I want to hear what happened from you,” I told Lynch.

  He did not respond immediately, or at least not directly. Instead, Lynch told me, “I’ve had a lot of time to read in here, Sylvie. Guess which book I spent the most time on?”

  “The Bible,” I said, since the answer seemed obvious.

  “Wrong. That’s for other people in here. I’ve decided at long last that I’ve had enough of that book. Enough for a lifetime actually. So, no. The one that’s been keeping me company is the book about your mom and dad. The reporter who wrote it had a few interesting things to say about your old man, Sylvie. Have you ever read it?”

  “Yes,” I told him.

  The night before, after I’d found those candles in the trash, I’d cleaned up the mess, then returned to the house. Since Rose was up in her room, I couldn’t get the book from her closet. Instead, I scoured the house for a second copy, finding one crammed inside the curio hutch with all those other old books of my father’s. That fall when it was published, my father sat quietly in his chair reading the book. The clock ticked. My mother made tea. She kept busy flipping through those wallpaper patterns until he was done. That’s when my father told us we were never to speak of the book or Heekin again. All that and yet, there were those few extra editions in the hutch anyway. For so long, I had told myself that what kept me from reading the final pages had been the promise I made to my mother that morning on our steps when she held the manuscript in her hands and wept. But it was something more, I realized. I was afraid to read that final section—“Should You Really Believe the Masons?”—because I did not want to face what it might say.

  “So,” Lynch was saying now. “You know the things your father told that reporter.”

  Be direct and clear, I thought, repeating those survey rules in my mind. “That’s not what I want to talk to you about. I want to hear what happened in the moments before I entered that church.”

  Lynch looked behind him at the guard, no more than ten feet away, then at the clock on the wall. Twenty-one minutes—that’s all we had left. He turned to me again, but said nothing.

  Rummel came closer, put his hand on my shoulder, and squeezed. “We can go, if you like.”

  “No,” I told him. “Not yet.”

  I waited for him to step away again, and when he did and the clock showed only nineteen minutes remaining, this is what I offered Lynch: “If you want, I can tell you what happened that summer you left your daughter with us. I can tell you what I know of her last night in our home. The things that went wrong.”

  That got his attention. Lynch raised his head and said, “If you’re planning on feeding me the same lines about those demons who drove her from your house, then save it, Sylvie. I already heard that crap from your old man before he died.”

  I swallowed, noticed that my hands were shaking. I moved them beneath the table and took a breath, trying to calm the rabbit beat of my heart. “I’m not going to tell you the same story as my father. I’m going to tell you the truth of what I know. So long as you do the same for me.”

 
“Okay, then,” he said. “You first.”

  How much easier might this conversation have been if I had never lost my journal, if I could simply open to the pages where I’d written all about that summer, all about that last night in particular, then slide the book across the table for Lynch to read?

  I remember that when I ran across the street and burst through the front door, the first thing I wanted to do was hug my sister, since I had not hugged her the day she left home. But the sight of Rose made me stop abruptly in the entrance to the living room.

  “What are you gawking at?” Rose said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Your head,” I told her. “What did you . . .”

  She reached a hand up and ran it over her scalp, still nicked and bloody from the razor. “Funny, I had a full head of hair when I got here this morning. But when I found someone else sleeping in my room, wearing my clothes, living my life, I thought I better do something to set myself apart from her.”

  “Rose,” my mother said. “Your father and I explained why you found things the way you did. You never should have—”

  The front door opened and my mother grew quiet. A moment later, Abigail padded up the hall in bare feet until she was standing beside me. Why had I failed to notice earlier that the shirt she wore was not one of those tattered things she had arrived with, but rather a simple black tank that belonged to my sister? How many other days and nights had she taken to wearing her clothes without my noticing?