Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

“What about that partitioned area in the basement? I thought—”

  “You thought it was done. I know. So did your mother. But after all these years, that little project of mine has a ways to go still. There’s no electricity, for one. Not the best furniture either except for that cot and old dresser. So even though no one exactly invited our guest into Rose’s room, now that she’s there, it seems kinder to let her stay put. For a few nights anyway.”

  The basement was good enough for all the other haunted people who had come here before, I wanted to say. But I held back because I knew the response he wanted—didn’t I always? And even though it left me feeling all the more guilty toward my sister, I gave it to him anyway.

  In the days that followed, it hardly mattered. Whenever I was on the second floor, I stayed in my room with the door closed. Not a single time did I so much as glimpse Abigail. If she used the bathroom, if she descended the stairs to the kitchen, I never saw.

  And yet, things remained quiet inside our house. My parents slipped in and out of Rose’s room so discreetly it was as though they were coming and going from a confessional. Early mornings, I heard my mother’s gentle voice praying on the other side of the wall. Evenings, I heard her reading scripture. Most often, it was the same passage from deep in the Book of Philippians, one I came to know by heart; if Abigail was paying attention, she must have come to know it too:

  Do not be anxious about anything. But in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your heart and your mind in our Lord Jesus Christ.

  Those words were not intended for me, but I tried my best to heed them anyway. Fighting off any anxious feelings, however, became just that: a fight. It did not help that the phone kept shrieking at all hours, until at long last my parents turned off the ringer and let calls go to the answering machine. It also didn’t help that I woke some nights to the sound of a car motoring down our street, bass thumping, as people shouted from the windows about Penny and Satan and things they believed were happening in our home. And it did not help that, despite my father’s reports to the police and his careful work of regularly resurrecting the mailbox, we discovered it knocked over, along with our garbage cans, again and again.

  The initial arrangement my mother made with Albert Lynch—that he should call in a few days and see about getting his daughter—was not mentioned. Instead, a few days turned to four, four turned to five, five to eight, and on it went. One afternoon, I glimpsed my mother slipping into Rose’s room, carrying a tray of food like some do-good nurse in a ward for the infirm, when it occurred to me that Abigail had been with us a total of two and a half weeks. Seventeen days, I thought, working out the math in my head.

  By then, it was early July. The official holiday had come and gone, but backyard fireworks could still be heard, popping off now and then like distant gunshots in the night. Temperatures had spiked to such a sweltering degree that my mother took to preparing cold dinners—beet soup, tuna sandwiches, tomato and cucumber salads—meals she normally reserved for the thick of August. Window fans worked overtime, whirring all over the house, blowing hot air around.

  On this particular evening, my mother must have felt tired of those nonsupper suppers, so she baked a vegetable lasagna from a recipe clipped out of the newspaper. The idea sounded good, but after the oven had been on for over an hour, it created a sweltering, junglelike atmosphere in our house. Nevertheless, we took our same old seats at the kitchen table.

  “I remember,” I said, swatting a mosquito that had made its way inside, “when Rose and I were little, and it got this hot, you used to take us swimming at that pond over in Colbert Township.” It was a memory none of us had talked about in years, but I could still see my sister and me in our bright bathing suits, splashing in the water, burying each other’s feet in the rocky dirt on the shore. I waited to see if my parents remembered too.

  My mother kept eating, or not eating exactly, but dissecting the dish she had prepared, segregating peppers from onions from tomatoes on her plate. During the previous seventeen days—since Penny had been put in the cage, since the light had been left on below, since Abigail had arrived and my father returned home without Rose—my mother had not uttered a word about feeling unwell. And yet, I couldn’t help but sense that something about her, something unnameable, was no longer the same and, if I was truthful with myself, had not been since our trip to Ohio.

  The way my father’s gaze lingered on my mother in certain moments, as it did then, made me wonder if he noticed the change in her too. He waited to see if she might respond to what I’d said; when she didn’t, he told me he remembered those swims, adding that when he was little, his father took Howie and him to an Indian Well outside of Philly to cool off some summer afternoons. Then he asked my mother, “Didn’t you used to swim in a pond on the farm in Tennessee?”

  My mother quit segregating her food and looked up. “Yes. But someone once drowned in that pond, so I was always afraid of swimming there. Plus, it was such stagnant water it made for a buggy place. I only went when I felt desperate for—”

  She stopped abruptly, and my father and I waited for her to finish. Window fans whirred. Moths beat against the screens in a haphazard rhythm. More mosquitoes hummed in the air. All the while, my mother just stared at the entryway of the kitchen. And then we turned to see her in the white nightgown intended for my sister.

  She looked different than she had that first afternoon. There was the fact of that gown—cleaner, more simple, than the tattered clothes she arrived in. There was the fact of her hair, brushed so all the curls had gone straight. There was also the fact of those bruises and scrapes on her feet, healed now, I discovered with a quick glance down. But there was something more to it than those physical details. I couldn’t help but sense a deep and noticeable calm about the girl, a calm that had not been there before.

  “Well, hello, Abigail,” my mother said.

  “Yes, hello,” my father said too.

  “Would you like to join us?” my mother asked. Rather than wait for a response, she stood and quickly set an extra place at the table.

  Abigail lingered in the entryway long enough that I thought she might turn and retreat upstairs. Finally, she walked to the table and slipped into Rose’s chair. None of us said a word as she placed her napkin on her lap, picked up her knife and fork, and took the first hesitant bites of dinner. She kept eating, quickly and simply, until her plate had been cleaned. Then she looked up and said in a smooth and serene sort of voice, “May I please have seconds?”

  My mother nodded, and she helped herself to another portion. That’s when I made an effort to bring back the previous moment, asking my mother to finish what she was saying about the pond on the farm. She didn’t elaborate on the topic, though, telling us it was just a pond and not a very nice one at that.

  At last, Abigail wiped her mouth and said, “Lake Ewauna. Or Lake Ewaumo.”

  “Pardon?” my father said.

  “When we used to live in one place. Out west. There were so many lakes near the ministry, one in particular we loved. I could never say the name, but it was something like that. We used to go swimming there. Only at night, under the moon, when no one was around.”

  “That sounds lovely,” my father told Abigail.

  She gave a shy smile and went back to eating.

  “Maybe we could go to that pond in Colbert and swim some night,” I said, trying again to yank back the conversation. Pushing my luck, I added, “Just us.”

  Those words should have had some effect, but Abigail kept her head down and went on eating. My mother told me she was not even sure the pond was still accessible to the public. “It was owned by some farmer, I believe. Ever since they opened the town pool, I never hear of people going there anymore.”

  “You know what?” my father said. “All this talk of late-night swims has given me an idea. How about we go out for ice cream? It’ll h
elp us cool off.”

  All my life, we had never been a family that went out for ice cream. Back when we were younger, Rose and I used to get the idea in our heads and take to begging only to hear the same lecture from my father about how absurd it was to shell out money just so some kid could fill our cones. Instead, my mother kept a tub of sherbet in the freezer, or Popsicles when she wanted to give us an extra treat.

  That night, my mother pointed out that she had both sherbet and Popsicles in the freezer, so there was no need to make a trip across town to the ice cream shop. Unlike my father as it was, he told her to forget that. “It’ll be good to get out of the house. Before we pass out from the heat or these mosquitoes eat us alive.”

  “What about . . .” My mother allowed her voice to trail off, but he understood.

  “Abigail,” he said, turning to the girl. “How do you feel about this idea?”

  Her plate was empty again. I wondered if she might ask for thirds. Instead, she just stared at it the way she had those photos of Rose and me, as though seeing something there no one else did. “I’ll be okay here by myself.”

  That was all I needed to hear. I pushed back my chair and stood to rinse my plate in the sink with the intention of going up to be sure my bedroom door was locked before leaving. Nothing had happened to my horses since Penny had been put in the cage and Rose had been sent away, but I wasn’t taking chances. Then I heard my father say, “You’re misunderstanding me. I’m asking how would you feel about coming with us?”

  “Sylvester,” my mother said. “I think perhaps—”

  My father held up a hand, keeping his eyes on Abigail, so that my mother fell silent.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s very nice, Mr. Mason. But I don’t want to be in the way.”

  “Don’t be silly. We’re happy to see you up and about.”

  Maybe my mother did not tell him about that warning from her father, how the girl could seem normal—or almost normal—but that’s when she changed. Or maybe my mother did tell him, and he thought he knew better. Either way, even if no one else was thinking about Albert Lynch’s words, they whirred in my mind like those frantically spinning window fans. On the few occasions I’d been in Abigail’s presence, never once had she looked at me—not directly anyway. It was something I hadn’t realized until, there in our kitchen, she did for the first time. The effect was that of seeing some strange, poisonous flower bloom before my eyes, opening its petals and turning its face toward me. I watched as she lifted her gaze from her empty plate, fixing those wild blue eyes upon me, while speaking to my father in that serene voice. “Sylvie doesn’t want me to go.”

  “Nonsense,” my father told her.

  “It’s okay,” Abigail said. “If I were Sylvie, I wouldn’t want me to go either. It sounds like a family thing. And I get the feeling it’s important to her.”

  That tub of sherbet, those Popsicles—my mother chimed in about both again, but those things had become consolation prizes nobody wanted, least of all me. My mother must have sensed it, because her next offer was to stay home with Abigail while my father and I went and brought back ice cream for everyone. But my father seemed determined we go together. “Sylvie, tell her it’s not true. We didn’t raise the kind of daughter who leaves out a guest in our own home.”

  They were all watching me, but it was Abigail’s gaze I felt most. I looked into her wild blue eyes and my mind filled with the memory of the afternoon her father slid open the van door to reveal her lying on the thin mattress inside. I thought of how calm she seemed now, so different from the girl with snarled hair and bruised feet who hid behind my mother, who toppled the very chairs where my parents sat, who shredded our wallpaper. But despite that newfound serenity and my mother’s days and nights of prayer and scripture, I did not feel comfortable having her around.

  Even so, I looked back at Abigail while speaking to my father, same as she had done to me. “I’m not sure where Abigail got the idea I don’t want her to come. But I don’t mind. If that’s what she wants.”

  It was, of course, exactly what Abigail wanted.

  After changing into a T-shirt with a faded Saint Louis arch decal and shorts my mother had repaired days before with a needle and thread, she got into the Datsun along with us. On a night that hot, any ice cream shop would have been mobbed; the one in Dundalk was no exception. The parking lot teemed with so many vehicles, my father settled on leaving ours a block away.

  The moment we got out of the car, my mother noticed what none of us had before: Abigail was in bare feet. Too late to do anything about it, though, so we walked right past the NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE sign on the door. As soon as we joined the line snaking through the place, a lull rippled through conversations all around. When it came to driving by our house at night, shouting from car windows, batting down our mailbox and trash cans, and speeding away in the dark, people had plenty of courage. But beneath the fluorescent lights of that ice cream shop, they stuck to whispers. They stuck to nudges and stares.

  My parents paid no attention, of course. If Abigail noticed, I couldn’t tell, since she stayed busy studying all the ice cream behind the counter. I kept expecting someone to kick us out, but the line just inched along until I found myself waiting by a freezer with smudged glass doors. Inside, cakes filled the shelves. All those blue ice cream flowers, and blank surfaces, like snow-covered ponds waiting for happy messages to be squiggled on top, made me think of the Rosie cake, which had a way of hollowing me out right there on the spot.

  “What flavor are you going to get?”

  I was so caught up in thinking about Rose and how much our lives had changed that it took a moment to realize the person asking was Abigail—and she was asking me. I turned away from those cakes and looked at the decal on her shirt, plagued with so many delicate cracks it was like gazing at an old painting. I tried to guess which flavor my sister would have ordered if she had been with us, then made up my mind to do it for her. “Chocolate,” I told Abigail.

  “Oh,” she said, smiling. “That’s what I’ll get too. I mean, if you don’t mind.”

  The line lurched ahead. I stepped away from that freezer, away from Abigail as well. “Of course I don’t mind. Get whatever you want.”

  At last, when our cones were in hand, the four of us headed outside to a row of picnic tables where customers congregated. In the dusky sky over Colgate Park, someone was shooting fireworks. I was glad for the distraction, since people were too busy gazing up at the bursts of Roman candles sputtering over the treetops to care about the Mason family and their guest. Even we became hypnotized, while ice cream trickled down our wrists, melting faster than any of us could keep up. When the show was done—cones eaten, napkins balled in our sticky palms—my father looked down and spoke in an oddly remorseful voice. “Maybe I was wrong,” he said, “all these years about it being a waste of money to go out for a night like this. It’s important for a family to share certain moments. When Rose gets back, let’s be sure we do this again.”

  After so many days of no one saying a word about my sister, the mention of her, particularly the notion that she would return and that we would do something as a family, lifted my spirits more than ice cream or fireworks ever could. As we walked back to the Datsun, my happy feelings even led me to wonder if I should be nicer to Abigail. After all, strange as she was, the girl had nothing to do with Rose being gone, and like my father said, she wouldn’t be with us much longer.

  While we drove the dark streets, I stole glances at her. The windows were down and, same as my sister, she did not tuck back her hair. It whipped all around, random strands reaching out and snapping at my cheeks, stinging my skin. I held my hand out the window, cupping my palm and letting it ride the wind, up and down, down and up. Had I not been paying so much attention to Abigail and to my palm, I might have noticed my father take a detour.

  “Sylvester,” my mother said, eventually. “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

&
nbsp; Two words—that’s all they were, but enough to seize our attention. I quit hand-surfing. Abigail gathered up her hair. We leaned forward between the seats, looking out the front window until we made a series of turns and the headlights shone down a narrow dirt road with a strip of wild grass in the middle. We were in Colbert Township, I realized, heading to the old pond. Judging from the way the trees pressed in on both sides and the lack of any official signs, it appeared my mother was right about no one going there anymore.

  “Sylvester,” she said again. “What are we doing?”

  “Just checking things out.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? I don’t know about you, but I’m in no rush to go back to that hot house.”

  “I don’t think this is a good idea. We have no clue if this place has become private property. What if someone contacts the police?”

  My father shrugged. “If the Colbert cops are anything like the dolts in Dundalk, who sound half asleep when I call about the vandals having fun with our mailbox and trash cans, I doubt they’ll care. And if they do, well, then I just might give them a piece of my mind.”

  My mother gave up protesting, but I could tell by the way she folded her hands on her lap that she did not like this impromptu excursion one bit. It didn’t take long before the trees opened up to a clearing and our headlights fell upon the glassy surface of the pond. Not far from the water’s edge, my father stopped the car, then turned off the engine and the lights. We were four shadows, no sound but the crickets and cicadas and night creatures all around.

  I thought my father might instruct us what to do, but my mother spoke instead, saying she wanted to have a private talk with my father for a few minutes. “You and Abigail can go on outside for a little bit.”

  “But we didn’t bring our bathing suits,” I told her.

  “That’s because we are not swimming,” she said in a stern voice. “But you can have a look at the old place if you like. Don’t wander too far, though.”