Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

  “Or thought she saw.”

  For months, those words had been waiting, sealed inside, like those baby birds in the whitewashed houses of my mother’s childhood. Now that I’d set them free, a strange, humming silence followed. In the midst of that silence, only Dereck’s voice could be heard in the hall, his words unclear, though the warm, meandering way he spoke had a way of soothing me before Detective Rummel said, “Excuse me?”

  More quietly this time, I said, “Or thought she saw.”

  “What do you mean, ‘thought she saw’? We’ve gone over every detail of that night dozens of times, Sylvie. We took your affidavit. We filed it in court. We have a man sitting not twenty miles from here, behind bars for the last nine months, awaiting trial on account of what you told us.”

  Beneath my flimsy tank top, my heart beat hard and fast. The shhhh grew louder, muddling even my own shaky voice when I said, “I know what I told you. But it was late. It was dark in that church. I had just woken up. And I was afraid.”

  Rummel leaned forward, pressed his hands to the table, the same hands that held mine during those visits at the hospital, the same that filled my plastic cup with water and adjusted my pillows. They seemed like someone else’s now. “So what exactly are you saying, Sylvie?”

  “I’m saying that maybe I was wrong,” I told him, tears welling. “Maybe I didn’t see him.”

  Louise came closer, her shoulder pads shifting again as she leaned down and spoke up at last. “If that’s the case, this about-face in your testimony is quite serious, seeing as you’ve never so much as hinted at any doubt before.”

  “But that’s because you made it seem like it had to be him. I insisted, because I felt pressured to give the right answer, the one that you and everybody else wanted.”

  “Are you saying we pressured you?”

  Hands shaking, I reached for my journal, opened it and read, “ ‘All we need to make certain a jury puts him away for a long time and that your parents rest in peace is your testimony.’ ” I flipped to another page. “ ‘Your account is the key ingredient to our case. It will bring all the evidence together for your parents’ sake.’ ” Again, I turned. “ ‘We have Mr. Lynch’s prints inside the church. We have the details of his threats toward your mother and father. All evidence points to his guilt. But we need you to seal the deal and bring justice in your parents’ honor. Isn’t that what you want?’ ”

  “Maybe we did tell you those things,” Louise said. “But never—not one single time—did we encourage you to lie.”

  “I didn’t lie!” I shouted, my voice cracking, tears spilling down my cheeks. “I told you what you wanted to hear! I told you what would help my parents! I gave you the right answer because I didn’t want to be wrong!”

  “All right,” Rummel said, pushing back his chair, standing up too. “Let’s everybody calm down. Let’s everybody take a breather.”

  Louise went to the door, yanked it open, stepped out. As her heels clicked away down the hall, Rummel became his old self for a moment, walking to the water cooler, filling a cup for me. After I wiped my eyes and took a sip, he told me he was going to give me a few minutes. “Would you like your sister and her boyfriend to come inside?”

  Her boyfriend. It was the first anyone had referred to Dereck that way, though given the amount of time he spent with Rose lately, I supposed it was true. That need to practice speaking my answers didn’t seem to matter anymore, so I just shook my head. Rummel went out to the hallway, shutting the door. I heard him say something briefly to my sister before his footsteps receded in the same direction as Louise’s.

  Alone at the table, I thought of the lingering doubt I’d lived with ever since Detective Rummel first brought Lynch’s photo to the hospital and asked if it was the man I saw. How much of his and Louise’s talk about making things right for my parents—of being their good daughter one last time, which was what they were saying even if they didn’t know it—had helped me to feel certain? And how much was tangled in the lie Rose and I had told . . . were still telling? The thought led me to look at the folders Rummel left on the table. As I listened for the return of his footsteps, I leaned forward and opened one. On top lay a photo of a gun that I recognized: a small black pistol with a blunt silver nose. I turned it over, kept searching. Most details I already knew, but I found a piece of information buried in those papers that I’d always wondered about. I read the line over and over again, until Rummel’s thudding footsteps moved down the hall in my direction. Quickly, I began to close the folder, but not before I noticed words scratched randomly on the inside in blocky script:

  Howard Mason. Brother of male victim. Lacks verifiable alibi in the days surrounding murders. Motive?

  “Where’s Louise?” I asked as Rummel opened the door, seconds after I pushed that folder away.

  He stopped a moment, taking in the sight of me at the table, those folders he’d left behind. “Ms. Hock decided she’s done for the afternoon. We all are, actually.”

  I reached for my father’s tote and began to stand, but the detective held up a hand and told me to hang on a second. I sat back down, studying him. Judging from his grim face and hunched shoulders, I got the feeling that he and Louise had a fight about me. He folded his arms in front of his chest and said, “Here’s how this is going to work, Sylvie. Right now, it’s Friday. Just after three. Not much is going to get done at this point. But come Monday, nine A.M., the gears start turning. So we’ll give you till then. That’s—”

  “Sixty-six hours,” I said, staring at the watch on his hairy wrist.

  Rummel glanced at it too. “Is that what it works out to?” He fixed me with a look I didn’t recognize. “You’re a quick thinker, Sylvie. And that’s right: you’ve got sixty-six hours to consider exactly what you did or did not see in the church last winter. First thing Monday you will report back here and you will let us know whether or not you’ll be recanting your account of that evening. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  Rummel gathered his folders from the table as I sat watching.

  “And if I do recant, what happens?”

  “What happens, Sylvie, is that the game changes. Significantly. Lynch will likely be released. We’ll be back to square one.”

  “And will you look at other suspects?”

  “That’s my job.”

  “Who?” I asked, thinking of the note scratched inside one of those folders.

  “Well, if it comes to that, I’d count on you and your sister to help. We should have talked about other possibilities in greater detail early on, before zeroing in on just Lynch. That was my slipup. But if things change come Monday, I’ll want to hear from both of you if there was anyone else who had reason to do your parents harm. Someone you might not have thought of before. Also, we should talk again about why they left Rose at home that night. I know you both said that was normal, but other people might not think so.”

  Mr. Knothead—that was the name of Rose’s pet rabbit who once lived in the cage out by the well. She had begged for him one Christmas years before and given him that name on account of the bony lumps between his ears. Unlikely as it seemed, I thought of that twitchy-nosed creature then, the way I used to press my cheek to its soft white fur, feeling the frantic tic-tic-tic of his heart beneath. That’s how my heart felt the moment Rummel brought up my parents leaving Rose at home—a detail that had been dissected early on in the case but had since been accepted as fact. Now it was back, and I’d have to repeat the same story again, being more careful than ever not to give away the truth.

  I took a breath. Swallowed. My mouth felt impossibly dry, but there was no more water in the paper cup Rummel had given me. Even if there had been, I thought it best not to speak for fear he might pick up some signal—a wavering in my voice, like ripples on water—that would give birth to new suspicions. And so I said nothing more. I stood from the table. I picked up my father’s tote. I tucked my journal away.

  “Guess you write about mo
re than school in that little book of yours. Those things you read to Ms. Hock and me before? Not exactly notes on a homework assignment.” Before I could respond, he turned and stepped out into the hall.

  I took a minute to compose myself, then followed. Rose was sitting on a bench, flipping through one of the random safety brochures we both took to reading while we waited. The Heimlich Maneuver. Stop, Drop, and Roll. Pedestrian Precautions. By now, we were prepared for just about anything. I wondered if the detective might want to see her alone again, but he simply informed her in a more formal tone than usual that we were both required to be back at the station Monday morning at nine. As they spoke, I glanced down the hall where Dereck hunched over a water fountain, his height making it appear like one meant for children.

  After Rummel walked off, my sister turned to me and asked what happened inside that room. Again, I glanced at Dereck, guzzling away still. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it here—”

  “Old Seven drinks more than a farm animal,” Rose told me, “so it’ll be a while. And the guy wonders why he has to pee all the time.”

  “He’s your boyfriend,” I told her, testing the label.

  “I wouldn’t go that far, Sylvie. Now what happened?”

  Quickly, quietly, I ticked off the details about the second snowbird, about the dog that broke loose, about Lynch saving it from running into the street. I was about to tell her more when she stood from the bench. I watched her walk to the bulletin board, tack the brochure back where she found it next to one I’d already read about the dangers of going near a live wire after a storm. “I already knew that stuff,” she told me, turning around again. “They talked to me first, remember?”

  The doubt I felt about who I’d seen inside the church was something I’d never confessed to anyone before—not even Rose. I was afraid of how she would react if she knew I’d let it slip out at last, but she needed to know, so I pushed on, “Mrs. Dunn gives him a stronger alibi, which means—”

  “It means it’s some senile old couple’s word against yours, Sylvie. You watch. It’ll turn out she’s half blind and he’s bat-shit crazy. Or that the time was set wrong on the crap register at the station. So whatever you do, don’t start panicking.”

  “Panicking about what?” Dereck had made his way back from the fountain. He towered over us, wearing the same barn jacket and clingy sweats as when we met.

  “Nothing for you to worry about, Seven,” Rose said.

  “You okay, Sylvie?” he asked. “You don’t look so great.”

  “I’m fine,” I told Dereck, which was hardly the case. I spotted a clock on the wall, and the calculation seemed to do itself in my mind: sixty-five hours and forty-two minutes until I had to report back here and give Rummel and Louise an answer.

  “Okay, then,” my sister said. “Let’s try to forget all this for a little while and go get some money.”

  All week long, we’d been waiting for the day when we could go to the Dial U.S.A. office and pick up Rose’s check. Since striking our deal, my evenings had been spent making calls to faraway cities listed on number sheets Fran provided. At the start, most people cut me off to ask, “How old are you, young lady?” The ones who didn’t wanted to know if it was some kind of prank. So I practiced making my voice sound mature while memorizing the instruction sheet Fran included for Rose but she never bothered with: 1. Be direct and clear with questions. 2. If respondent wavers, state exactly what you want to know, thus keeping respondent on point. 3. Never say, “Thank you for your time,” because time is money and Dial U.S.A. does not pay for opinions. Ridiculous as those rules sounded, they helped me rack up more surveys than Rose predicted. It meant I could begin replenishing my savings and buy Boshoff a cookbook.

  On our drive into Baltimore, we passed the church and I did my best not to look at it. My sister did the same, pushing in her AC/DC cassette and beating her hands on the wheel. Dereck spread his legs east and west as he sat between us, so one of his tree trunks pressed against me, the other against my sister. More than once, Rose stopped singing to say, “Would you close your legs already, Seven? You’re like an old whore!” He did as she said, but soon they drifted, and I’d feel him there, which I might not have minded if I didn’t feel so bothered about what happened back at the station.

  Every parking space outside Dial U.S.A. was taken except one with a safety cone in the middle. Rose got out and tossed the cone in the back of the truck before pulling in and cutting the engine. Dereck and I watched her walk toward the building and spin through the revolving door, his leg pressed to mine still. Once she’d been sucked inside, I glanced at the clock on the dashboard, something I’d been trying hard not to do: sixty-five hours and three minutes. The rabbitlike tic-tic-tic of my heart persisted.

  “Want to guess?” Dereck asked me. When I didn’t answer, he added, “Our game, I mean. Do you want to guess?”

  What I wanted was for him to stop talking. My mind was too preoccupied with the myriad of unthinkable ways things might unfold now. Newspaper headlines would shout from the pages that I had been wrong to accuse Albert Lynch, that because of me, he’d been waiting behind bars all these months without bail. Worse still, Rummel and his men were bound to uncover the lie I’d told about Rose being home that night. Even though I knew my sister was not capable of killing her very own mother and father, no matter how troubled their relationship had become, that’s the way it would look to the world. And it would appear as though I’d been a part of it too.

  “Are you okay?” Dereck asked, nudging me with one of his tree-trunk legs.

  “Not really.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “No. Actually, I think I need to go for a walk.”

  “A walk? Where?”

  I put my hand on the door handle. “Just around the lot. Until Rose gets back.”

  Dereck placed his hand on my arm, gently tugged it away from the door. “Hold on. Whatever it is, let’s try taking your mind off it. Besides, selfishly I don’t want to sit here by myself.”

  I sighed, doing my best to give him the person he wanted. “A wood-shop accident?” I said.

  “Already guessed that.”

  “I did?”

  “One of your first actually. Not counting the turkeys.”

  “A raccoon with rabies?”

  “Guessed that too.”

  “A rabid possum?”

  “I know you don’t want hints, Sylvie. But let me save you some trouble. No humans were harmed by animals in the making of my missing fingers.”

  Like a lot of Dereck’s jokes, that one didn’t quite work, but I forced a smile. Normally, the expression came naturally whenever we played the strange game the two of us had concocted in the random moments Rose left us alone. “No animals. No wood-shop or chain-saw accidents. This is tougher than I thought.”

  “Lots of ways a person can lose three fingers, Sylvie. You have to think harder.”

  “Does my sister know how it happened?”

  He used his good hand to reach up and biff a Scooby head he’d given Rose. Scooby hung from the rearview mirror whenever we rode with Dereck. The second he was gone, Rose tossed him on the floor. The abuse had left the dog with a scuffed nose. “Robably,” Dereck said. “Retty ruch reveryone rin rour raduating rass rew.”

  Probably. Pretty much everyone in our graduating class knew.

  In addition to learning to talk so people would answer surveys, I’d also developed the newfound skill of deciphering Scooby-speak. “How long did you two date back in school anyway?”

  “Ra ronth,” he told me, before switching to his real voice. “Maybe two. Not long. It was probably when I was sixteen and she was fifteen, I guess. How old are you, Sylvie?”

  The question surprised me. “Fourteen. Fifteen soon. In April. How about you?”

  “Nineteen. Last August.”

  We were quiet, staring at that revolving door, waiting for Rose to be spit out of the building again. I knew the mood would shift the mome
nt she appeared. Maybe that’s what gave me the courage to say, “Four years. That’s not much.”

  The words hung in the air until I felt Dereck’s leg move away from mine. “You’re right. But what a difference they make.”

  I kept quiet.

  “Trust me, Sylvie. Things are so different than I thought they’d be back then. I mean, where did everybody go?”

  “Everybody?”

  “The people Rose and I went to school with. After my graduation, they just . . . left.”

  “Didn’t you ever think of leaving too? You know, heading off to college.”

  “That’ll make sense for you in a few more years. Not me.”

  “Why not? Your grades weren’t good enough?”

  “Actually, my grades were never a problem. You might not believe this, but I was in the Honors Society.”

  “I believe you,” I said in a voice that sounded like I didn’t.

  “I can tell.” He laughed. “I’ll show you my yearbook someday and prove it.” His leg drifted against mine once more, and he said, “I have my reasons for not wanting to go to college. I’ll tell you sometime.”

  “What about the army?”

  “Nahh. Too chicken. And not sure they’d take me. Hard to fire a gun when you’re missing so many fingers.”

  I stared out the window. The shhhh in my ear. The tic-tic-tic of my heart. The mention of a gun. It was all too much.

  “Sorry,” Dereck told me after a moment.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Have you been back there? The church, I mean? I saw the way you barely glanced at it when we drove by before.”