Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing, actually. He just finished his beer and said he wanted to walk back to his apartment, since it wasn’t far. We weren’t ever big on hugging, so he shook my hand. I remember standing outside in the parking lot, watching him go. I didn’t see or hear from him again for almost ten years, when Rose was born. I showed up to see her in the hospital, bringing the first of those horses from the track as a peace offering. But it was never the same between your dad and me. The truth was, it hadn’t been since we were kids.”

  I glanced across the avenue. If Heekin had noticed us, he gave no sign. We had come all that way, but none of what I’d learned put me any closer to the answer I needed most. “That night last winter,” I said to Howie, “I mean, the night they died, where were you?”

  He looked to Lloyd, who stood quietly beside us on the sidewalk still, before turning back to me. “I’ve told you before, Sylvie. I was home in my apartment in Tampa. I’d lost another job and was drowning my sorrows in booze the way I used to do. I didn’t come out of it for a few days.”

  As he spoke, I thought of my mother teaching me how to sense what was inside a person. And though I didn’t really believe I had any of her gift, I did believe that Howie was telling the truth.

  “Sylvie!” Heekin had noticed us at last and rolled down his window. I called back that I’d just be another minute. And then I told my uncle I really did need to go.

  This time, Howie didn’t try to keep me there any longer. Instead, he told me he was glad, after all, that I’d come to Philly. He also said he never planned to go along with Rose’s request for long. “That’s why I kept telling you we’d see each other down the road. Once I got the place up and running, and started making money, I planned to revisit—well, let’s call it the terms of my agreement with your sister. Even if she’s resistant to the idea, I want to help you. I want to be a part of your lives.”

  I stared down at his arms, noticing a tiny horseshoe among the playing cards. My uncle reached out and pulled me close, tighter than before, in a final hug. He spoke into my ear, choosing the good one by chance, and telling me to call anytime, that Rose wouldn’t have to know. When he let go, I said good-bye to him and to Lloyd too, before crossing the avenue.

  I expected Heekin to begin grilling me the moment I climbed into his cramped car. The thought of explaining all I’d learned before thinking it through myself felt daunting, and so I was grateful when the most he said was that I must be hungry, and to help myself to the sandwich and chips he had bought for me. I did just that, fishing lunch from the bag while the car’s engine sputtered to life. As we chugged away from the curb and moved down the street I watched Howie and Lloyd grow smaller and smaller in the side-view mirror, standing beneath the drooping marquee with its crooked letters until they were gone.

  It wasn’t until we were on the highway south, sandwich and chips demolished, that Heekin spoke. He told me that even though it was just three o’clock, I probably felt tired after the long day. He said we could talk about whatever went on inside the theater when I was ready, same went for the unfinished stories he had begun telling on the drive up about his involvement in my parents’ lives. I did feel tired—drained by it all, in fact—so my only answer was to nod and lean my head against the window. It felt as though only a short while passed before we were rolling down the off-ramp of the highway then winding our way through the narrow streets of Dundalk. That’s when Heekin broke the silence at last, saying, “While I was waiting for you outside the theater, I thought of something.”

  I looked away from the window at him. Those weedy gray strands of his hair caught the fading sunlight, the unusual hills and valleys of his face. “What’s that?”

  “Earlier, you mentioned you never wanted to forget certain things. It made me remember the tapes from my interviews with your parents. Their voices are on them. The police made me turn over the cassettes, but you should ask the detective for them, so you can have those pieces of your parents at least.”

  By then, we had reached Butter Lane. Heekin stopped in the exact spot where I’d met him that morning. I told him I would inquire about the tapes, and then he gave me his business card with his home number written on the back in case I needed to reach him. I thanked him and pushed open the door. The question I’d started to ask him back at the preserve had been niggling at my mind ever since, and it made me stop. “Were you and my mother—” I paused, finding it hard still, to say the rest of what I wanted to know.

  “In love?” Heekin said, doing the job for me.

  I nodded.

  “No, Sylvie. I would have wanted something more between us. But she was loyal to your father and to you girls too. I’d be lying if her rejection didn’t fuel some part of my motivation in refusing to change certain details in my book.” He stopped and let out a sigh that seemed weighted with regret. “Anyway, speaking of my book, whatever more you need to know can be answered in the pages you’ve been avoiding. Maybe it’s best if you discover it there. It might not be tomorrow or next week or next year. But I’m guessing at some point, you’ll be ready.”

  Even as he said those things, I knew the time had come. When I was alone in the house again, I needed to dig that book out of the police bag in Rose’s closet and finish it at last. There seemed no point in telling Heekin that, however, so I just thanked him again and got out of the car. Daylight had begun to slip away, so he flicked on his headlights to help me see as I headed down the lane. When I reached the house, I listened as his VW bug stalled out before he started the engine again and sped off down the main road.

  Standing at the edge of the property, not far from the NO TRESPASSING! signs that had never done much good, I looked at Rose’s truck in the driveway, the light in the basement window, which still glowed. Once I walked through the front door, I knew I wouldn’t walk out again until it was time to go to the station in the morning. Fifteen, maybe fourteen hours left, I guessed. The thought, coupled with the idea of facing my sister, made me want to put off going inside a little longer.

  As night fell, I wandered to the empty foundation across the street. For a long while, I stood on the edge, not far from the twisted roots of the fallen tree. Same as Rose used to do, I reached down for a handful of rocks, tossing them at the metal rods that snaked up out of the cement in one corner. And then my memory of Rose was replaced by a memory of Abigail, sketching a map on the wall with a stone in the moments before blood pooled on her palms.

  Now do you get it, Sylvie? Now do you understand how much I need your help?

  When I grew tired of thinking about Abigail, tired of tossing rocks too, I sat on the ledge, legs dangling over the side the way a person sits by a swimming pool. Enough time passed that the last of the sun disappeared and the moon began to loom over the edge of the woods. And then, amid the never-ending shhhh, came the sound of an engine, like an animal rumbling down the street. I looked to see the glow of headlights against the bare tree branches. They came to a stop halfway down the lane, not far from the spot where I witnessed those two witches kissing on Halloween night.

  Slowly, I stood. I saw a figure step out of the car and walk in the direction of our house, carrying an object of some sort. Another teenager with a doll to throw on our lawn—that was my first thought, since the person was difficult to make out with the car’s headlights so bright behind. But when the figure came closer, I realized it was the woman with the grim, head-on-a-totem-pole face, wearing the same sort of frill-less dress.

  Just as I’d done while waiting for birds to land in my hands, I did not move. The woman reached the edge of our property and paused. I waited for the moment when she stepped into our yard—and that’s when I began moving, hurrying along the far side of the road in the direction of her idling station wagon. She had left her door ajar, and I slipped inside, leaning across the seat and reaching for the glove compartment, which popped right open. First thing I pulled out was a bible, thin pages highlighted and dog-eared same as my
mother’s. I dropped it on the floor and fumbled for an envelope, pulling out a yellow slip of paper. In the dim glow of the dashboard, I looked to see:

  Nicholas Sanino, 104 Tidewater Road . . .

  Nearby, I heard footsteps and what sounded, oddly, like my mother’s humming. Lifting my head to look back, I saw that the woman had already left our property and was on her way to the car, close enough that she’d see me if I stepped onto the road. That’s what I should have done, of course: gotten out and confronted her. But panic compelled me to shove everything back in the glove compartment then throw myself over both sets of seats, until I landed with a thud in the very back of the station wagon. I reached around and found a blanket, gritty with sand, which I tugged over my body.

  A moment later, I heard her arrive at the car. That song she hummed was too full of false cheer, too easily recognizable, to be anything like my mother’s, I realized. And where my mother’s tune had a way of slowly fading from her lips, the woman’s stopped abruptly. In the silence, I braced myself for the wide back door of the station wagon to swing open, for the blanket to be yanked off and for her to discover me. But there was only the sound of a door closing up front in a quiet click, the sound of a buckling seat belt, the sound of the car shifting into gear, and then the feeling of motion as the woman turned the station wagon around.

  When we reached the end of the lane, the tic-tic-tic of my heart felt more frantic, more explosive, than Rose’s rabbit’s ever had beneath its soft fur. The shhhh grew louder too. I slipped my hand into my coat pocket to feel those pictures of my grandparents and my father and my uncle—even if I could not see them, I hoped they might bring some small comfort the way Howie said. But as the station wagon pulled onto the main road and picked up speed, moving faster and faster, I fished around that pocket, then another, before realizing the pictures must have fallen out somewhere. Same as all those people’s possessions in the theater years before, they were lost. But that wasn’t all. My violet diary, the pages filled with so many secrets of my parents’ lives, so many secrets of my life as well, it was gone now too.

  Chapter 18

  Gone

  In those thick old novels my mother used to force upon me, characters were forever having foreboding dreams. Jane Eyre dreamed of infants, sometimes wailing, other times hushed in her arms. Pip suffered through feverish nightmares in which he found himself no longer human, but rather a brick cemented into a wall, unable to move.

  The night I dumped Penny down the well, then slipped beneath the sheets of my bed while those horse limbs lay piled on my desk, it only made sense that I should be haunted by turbulent dreams too. My subconscious could have churned up any number of images: Penny climbing out of that watery grave, my mother waking to find her soaked body oozing dank well water on the mattress beside her. Worse, I might have dreamed that it was me trapped down there beneath the earth, crying out for help. Instead, I slept more peacefully than I had in the months since that doll came to our house. Not a single disturbance until the sound of angry voices in real life began weaving their way into my tranquil subconscious.

  “I’ve done everything you’ve asked! Everything!”

  “I don’t believe you! I’m sorry, but I don’t! You’ve used up all your currency! Spent! Done! Gone!”

  “Please. The two of you calm down. Now tell us what you did to her.”

  “Her? You mean it! And I told you, nothing!”

  “How about telling the truth for a change? Now spit it out!”

  “You want the truth? Okay, the fact is this: there is not a single thing wrong with me, but there is something very wrong with the two of you! Who else would put—”

  “Don’t start that up again! I warned you! Now stick to the subject!”

  “I am sticking to the subject! Because it all comes back to the way we live our lives around here! It’s not normal!”

  I opened my eyes. Sun streamed through the window. Quickly, I got out of bed and threw on some clothes, making my way down the hall and the stairs. When I stepped into the living room, my mother was seated in her rocker, wearing her bathrobe and slippers, while my father paced back and forth by the curio hutch.

  “There’s Sylvie,” Rose said. “Ask her. Go ahead. She’ll tell you.”

  “Tell them what?” I asked.

  “Tell them that I didn’t touch their fucking spooky old rag doll!”

  “Rose!” my mother said at the same time as my father yelled, “Watch your mouth, young lady! We don’t talk like that in this house!”

  “Oh, that’s right, because it’s so holy around here!”

  “It’s true,” I said when they stopped speaking long enough for me to find a way in. “Rose didn’t touch it.”

  My words brought a blanket of silence over the room. Something made me think of those horses again. The first time I glued a broken one back together, I’d taken another down from the shelf to compare. I remembered tugging at the legs of the unbroken horse and realizing how difficult it would be for a person to snap them. A hammer, a saw, or at the very least, a good hard whack against the desk—that’s what it would take.

  “Sunshine,” my father said in a softer voice, “it’s very noble what you are trying to do, but I don’t want you lying to cover for your sister. That doll is our property and an important part of the work your mother and I are doing.”

  “I’m not covering for her.” My voice remained calm, though I felt a churning inside. I took a breath and told him, “Rose didn’t drop that doll down the well. I did.”

  My parents looked at me, stunned, which was no surprise. My sister, however, looked stunned too, making me wonder if she hadn’t really expected me to go through with it, if perhaps she’d just been shooting off her mouth the night before.

  “Sylvie,” my mother said, speaking up first. “Why would you do such a thing?”

  Before I could answer my father held up his hand. “Stop right there. I still don’t believe Rose had nothing to do with it. I know you, Sylvie, and this is not something you’d ever do. Not on your own anyway.”

  “So here she is confessing and you’re still calling me a liar?” my sister said. “There is something wrong with you, Dad. You see the world the way you want to see it. Even when all evidence points to the contrary.”

  I assumed talking to him that way would bring about more shouting, but instead my father turned all his attention to me, coming closer, pulling off his glasses. “Look me in the face, angel, and tell me truthfully that your sister had nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

  That churning started up again. I stood there, feeling trapped. For as long as I could remember, I had wanted to be their good daughter, the one who lived up to expectations, the one who won essay contests and brought home perfect grades, the one who gave honest answers. But in that moment, I wanted to protect Rose too.

  “The truth,” my father said quietly.

  “The truth,” my mother said from her rocker.

  “Okay,” I said. It was just one word—truth—but with it they cast a spell on me. “Let me back up and tell you why we did it.”

  “We?” Rose shrieked.

  “I knew it,” my father said. “I just knew it.”

  “Not we, me. I did it,” I said. But then I turned to my sister. “Rose, I just want to explain why we thought the doll had to go. That way they understand the truth.”

  “Sylvie, don’t,” she said, panic rising in her voice. “Not now. You don’t understand.”

  “All you have to do,” my father said to me, “is tell us what happened.”

  His face was before mine still, and I could see small pouches beneath his eyes. It made me wonder how things had gone the night before after he downed that icy tumbler of scotch and headed out the door for his final meeting with Sam Heekin. I watched Rose throw herself on the sofa, crossing her arms and kicking her feet on the carpet in frustration.

  “Go ahead, Sylvie,” my father said.

  After a breath, I began. First, I to
ld them what happened in the truck stop bathroom: how we allowed the waitress to touch the doll, how I worried for my mother inside the stall and later on the drive home when she became ill. I told them that after we returned home with Penny, nothing felt the same, from the broken horses in my room to the all-consuming tension that filled the house. And then I confessed to sneaking downstairs one night, only to duck into the kitchen and find Penny gone from her rocker when I returned. I told them how I let Rose in on what I discovered and how my mother confirmed that something similar was happening when I pulled back the covers and saw Penny in her bed the night before. I spoke faster as I neared the end, telling them about stepping into my room and noticing all the horse limbs scattered on the floor. And so, I said, Rose and I had started talking about the need to get rid of that doll, because of the power it had, or the power we were giving it. But even though the two of us discussed the idea, I made it clear that I was the one who carried out the act.

  “Before things got any worse around here,” I told them, looking at my father’s weary face then at my mother in her chair. “I made up my mind to protect us. I’m sorry. Maybe it wasn’t right. But that’s exactly what happened. I know it’s part of your work, but I felt afraid. Not just for myself. But for all of us.”