Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

  Heekin brought his hands to his sides, balling his fists to keep the seeds from dropping. “It’s my own guilt. That’s the simple answer, anyway.”

  “Guilt?”

  “For betraying your mother by writing certain things in that book. For whatever part I played in the demise of your family. But it’s not just that. Even if the Dunns hadn’t come forward to offer Lynch an alibi, I never believed the man was guilty.”

  Twenty-two hours, I thought again. “Why? That’s the story that makes sense. He was angry at my parents about what happened to Abigail. So he had a motive. Plus, he was at the church.”

  “Even if your sister and uncle refused to speak with me, Albert Lynch was willing. I’ve visited him a few times in jail for the pieces I wrote. And—”

  “How did he seem?” I couldn’t help but ask, since I was the one who put him there.

  “How did he seem? Like a man who has lost everything. His wife, years before. Then his daughter. And for almost a year now, his freedom.”

  I looked at another tiny bird moving from branch to branch with a blurry flapping of wings. If I really had been wrong, it was hard not to feel guilty. But when I thought of Abigail, I also couldn’t help feeling that I’d protected her somehow.

  “He’s a troubled man, Sylvie. That’s for sure. But a murderer? I don’t think so.”

  “I’d like to see my uncle,” I said, changing the subject. “Do you think you can take me to him? Maybe he’ll talk with you if I’m there. Maybe—”

  “Shhhh . . .”

  This time the sound did not come from inside my ear. Heekin motioned toward a cedar branch. A bird perched there, closer than before. Rather than hold up his hands, he went still. I kept mine raised, outstretched, doing my best not to move either. I thought of those statues in the church, the way they stared off into nowhere. For a few moments, we were like them, motionless, until in a sudden flurry, the bird flew to me, landing in my palm. Its delicate body felt no heavier than the seeds in my hand. I watched its movements—quick, herky-jerky—as it picked up a seed, tilted its head back, and swallowed. It repeated the motion with a second seed before spreading its wings and flying up into the branches, singing.

  Heekin looked at me and smiled. “How did that feel?”

  I lowered my hands, letting the rest of the seeds drop. “Like you promised.”

  “Magical, right?”

  “Magical,” I told him, because it was true.

  “Well, I’m glad you got to experience it. Your mother—she couldn’t get enough of those little birds. And they couldn’t get enough of her. We used to stand here for hours, feeding them and talking, then trying not to talk so they’d come.”

  It took work picturing my mother with Heekin on that path in the woods, to imagine the circumstances that led to their being together in the first place. “What did you two talk about when you came here?”

  “Lots of things. You girls. Sometimes, if you want the truth, we talked about your father. The way things were between them. Mainly, we discussed her desire to stop.”

  “Stop?”

  “Their work. She found it tiring. I’m not sure you were aware of that. The way she explained it, those feelings of hers came and went of their own accord, rather than something she could switch on and off. But your father needed her to do exactly that. In many ways, their livelihood depended on it. Her times with me here became an escape from all that. They were an escape for me, too.”

  “Were you two—” I didn’t know how to ask my next question, so I stopped.

  This time it was Heekin who changed the subject. “You were saying something a moment ago about your uncle?”

  “Will you take me to see him?”

  “Now? What about your sister. Won’t she wonder where you are?”

  “Don’t worry about her,” I said.

  Heekin opened his fists, and I watched the seeds fall. “Well, we’d have to call first, to see if he’s even there and if he’d agree to it. And there’s the matter of my car, which is on its last legs, though I suppose it could manage.”

  “Okay then. And maybe on the way, you can tell me about you and my parents.”

  He looked down at the violet journal peeking out of my coat pocket, and almost as an afterthought, said, “I once thought I’d be the person to write the definitive book about your mother and father. But I was too cynical. My story got too tangled with their own to be objective. And let’s face it, I’m too much of a hack. Who knows, though? Your mother used to tell me about those essay contests you win. Maybe someday, Sylvie, you’ll be the person who puts down their story—the one who tells it the way it should be told.”

  With that, Heekin turned to walk back up the path. I walked with him and we passed person after person who stood in silence, arms in the air. All around, birds moved through the branches, flapping and singing, as people waited for the magic those creatures could bring them if only they were patient, if they were still, if they listened, saying nothing, not a word at all.

  He first saw them at a small event at the old Mason Hall in Bethesda—the Masons at the Mason, my father joked from the podium. That night, the story he told was about the Locke Family Farm in Winchester, New Hampshire. A stagecoach traveling south from Montreal in the winter of 1874 broke down not far from the place, and the farmer and his wife took in the men. “Before we go any further,” my father said to the group of only a dozen or so, “I should clarify that this is not going to be one of those farmer’s daughter jokes.” People laughed, and he went on about the travelers being treated to a fireside dinner of roast pig, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie. Their stay turned out to be such a pleasure that the men asked to repeat it on their trip north months later, then again the following year. In this way, the Locke Family Farm slowly transformed into an inn that expanded over time to a hilltop structure with twenty-three guest rooms.

  While my father spoke about the night that farmer went mad—butchering his wife, children, and seven guests at the inn, all with the same hatchet—Heekin listened intently, though his gaze kept shifting to my mother. She appeared uncomfortable onstage, rocking back and forth in her chair, staring at the floor except for a lone glance up at her husband as he removed the actual hatchet from a small black case. Holding that weapon in his hands, he went on to speak of the years following the massacre, when the hotel fell into disrepair, until finally closing in 1919. By the time he was done describing the strange apparitions that appeared to so many who entered the inn, even Heekin felt as though the family of ghosts had made their way into the room. He pictured a headless Mrs. Locke moving clumsily around the stage. He pictured Mr. Locke in blood-splattered overalls, that hatchet in his hands instead of my father’s. He imagined the children, climbing up out of the well where their bodies had been disposed of, joining hands and resuming the game they had been playing when everything went so horribly wrong.

  Ashes, ashes, we all fall down . . .

  Afterward, Heekin did his best to shake those illusions, drawing on his usual sensibilities and skepticism. And yet, his curiosity persisted. He had first learned of my parents while writing a mundane story for the Dundalk Eagle about proposed renovations to the Mason Hall. On his first visit to the building, he noticed a flyer on the lobby bulletin board promoting the event. On this, his second visit, he lingered by the same board following the lecture, waiting for my parents to exit in hopes of striking up a conversation. When the moment arrived, Heekin introduced himself, shaking my father’s warm, strong hand, then my mother’s cooler, fragile one. At first, my father did not show much interest, Heekin thought, but when he mentioned his job as a reporter, my father divulged more details about their trip to the Locke Family Farm, which was a fully functioning inn once more. The new owners had found the hatchet in an old storm cellar and turned it over to my parents in hopes that it would rid the place of unwanted spirits. Ever since, he told Heekin, things there had been peaceful.

  If the news of Heekin’s occupation and his i
nterest in writing a story about them caused my father to open up, it had the opposite effect on my mother. She stepped away from their conversation. Heekin kept glancing over at her, trying to catch her eye, but my mother gazed through a window in the lobby, paying no attention to him.

  On the ride home—this was a part Heekin did not know until later—my father asked my mother why she had become so taciturn, sullen even, both up on the stage and in the lobby with Heekin. Once again, she stared out the window, not answering.

  “I can only gather that it makes you uncomfortable,” my father pushed. “Am I right?”

  “Yes, Sylvester. The things we do—well, as you know, I’ve always thought of it as a private matter. A gift we should use to help people, not to draw attention.”

  My father sighed and they drove in silence for a while, my mother staring out at the dark woods. At last, my father said, “Name a painter you admire.”

  “I don’t know what that’s got to do—”

  “Just name one.”

  “Fine. Norman Rockwell.”

  “A writer?”

  “The Brontë sisters.”

  “A singer?”

  “Please, can you make your point, Sylvester?”

  “My point is, if any of those people had kept their gifts to themselves, the world would be a less beautiful place. Do you agree?”

  “I do,” she answered, however reluctantly.

  “Well, it’s no different for us. We should be sharing this thing that you—that we are able to do. We should let others know how many people we’ve helped. It’s a hopeful message, Rose, and if there’s one thing the world needs, it’s hope. Do you agree with that too?”

  “I do,” she said again.

  “Good. So let’s find a way to make you comfortable up there. The last thing I want is the woman I love, that girl with a toothache I fell for at first sight, to be unhappy.”

  My mother just stared out the window, saying nothing. Later, she told Heekin she’d been thinking of that story my father shared back at the Mason Hall. Outside, in the dark of those woods, she envisioned the Locke family. Among the shadowy trees, she saw that headless farmer’s wife, her husband in bloody overalls gripping that hatchet, their children playing ring-around-the-rosy. My mother did not spook easily, but this vision left her unsettled, filling her with a sense of foreboding.

  “Are you okay?” my father asked from the driver’s seat.

  She turned from the woods, from that family, to look at him. “I’m okay.”

  “Well, I’m happy to hear it.” He reached over, took her hand, and held it tight. “So about that reporter. The man gave me his card. Mentioned something about an interview for the newspaper. Don’t worry, if it happens, I can do all the talking.”

  And so a week after that night, Heekin found himself standing on the stoop of our Tudor, ringing the doorbell. When no one answered, he knocked. Finally, my father opened the door and ushered him inside, explaining, “My oldest daughter broke the bell years ago. She thought the little box that contains its mechanics right here on the inside of the door was a bank and kept dropping coins inside. Put in so many the bell stopped ringing. One of these days I’ll unscrew the cover and fix it. Probably find a million dollars in there while I’m at it.”

  Heekin smiled, looking furtively around the living room while taking a seat in one of the wingback chairs that my father offered. He noted the large cross on the wall, the antique clock nearby, the curio hutch stuffed with books, but what caught his eye more than the rest were the framed pictures of Rose and me on a small table in the corner. They were taken when we were in elementary school, our eyes bright, our hair brushed and shiny.

  “I take it those are your daughters,” he said as my father sat across from him.

  “Those are my angels, all right. Lovely, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” Heekin told him. “You must be a proud father.”

  “I am. Now, speaking of my girls, they’ll be home from school soon. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get down to business.”

  Sixty-Three-Year-Old Woman Wins Annual Pie Eating Contest. . .

  School Chancellor to Announce New Spending Program. . .

  Librarians Create Quilt to Raise Money for New Annex. . .

  Those were the sorts of stories Heekin normally covered. They had little depth and required only a handful of questions before the lede, body, and kicker unfurled in his mind. But this interview was different—so much so that it left him nervous. Fidgeting there in his seat, he worried that his old stutter would return. It was something he thought he’d resolved with the help of a speech therapist years before, but whenever he felt uncomfortable it resurfaced. In an effort to keep that problem at bay, he had brought a tape recorder and a reporter’s notebook along, filled with questions not addressed in the lecture at the Mason Hall.

  How did the two of you get your start?

  How do the two of you handle it when one senses something the other does not?

  How do the two of you balance your unusual occupation with the everyday demands of raising a family?

  But Heekin had drafted those questions with both my mother and father in mind. They were a unit, after all. Yet there was no sign of my mother. He should just come right out and ask, Heekin told himself. Didn’t being a reporter mean raising inconvenient questions? But like so many things in life—his failed stint in the air force, his failed relationship with his first wife—he’d never been very good at that. Besides, my father did so much of the talking, unprompted, there was no need to put forth more than a couple of questions.

  “The situations you and y-y-your—” Heekin said at one point, interrupting a story my father had already told at the lecture, “y-y-your wife. These situations you and your wife encounter sound terrifying. Do the two of you ever feel frightened?”

  “We’re human,” my father said, with a certain amount of pride in his voice. “So fear is only natural. But when we feel it, that’s when we pray.”

  Even though the tape recorder was running, Heekin scratched the answer in his notebook. In truth, he had only asked the question as a way of finally bringing the conversation around to my mother. Not that it mattered, since my father moved swiftly to another topic. “Would you like to see the basement?”

  “The basement?” Despite Heekin’s skepticism, fear clumped in his throat.

  “It’s our work area. The place has become a museum of sorts, chock-full of—well, I guess you could call them artifacts—that we’ve collected on our travels.” Without waiting for Heekin to answer, my father stood. “Shall we?”

  “Um, yes, s-s-sure,” Heekin said, fighting that tongue-tied verbal tic of his.

  As they descended the wooden stairs, he kept his tape recorder on—the air cooler, damper, with every step. The place felt vaster than he might have imagined, the darkness in the far corners bleeding into nowhere. In the center, a worn Oriental rug with a wooden desk and an old rocker defined the space. Against a cinder-block wall: a hulking shelf cluttered with books. Against another: a second shelf cluttered with small statues and figurines and a twisted branch, the knots arranged in such a way that a face appeared to be howling in the wood. That hatchet from the Locke Family Farm was mounted on a wall the way a fisherman would display a prize catch. Beyond it, past the skeleton frame of a wooden partition, in the endless dark of a far corner, Heekin made out what looked to be a mechanical chair of some sort . . . a dental chair, he realized with a peculiar shudder. “What . . .” He swallowed. The clump in his throat had sharp edges now. “What goes on down here?”

  “I told you. It’s where we do our work.”

  “And what k-k-kind of . . . I mean, if I might ask, what is that back there . . . that I’m looking at in the corner?”

  My father turned and looked, then laughed. “Oh, that’s just a leftover from my former life as a dentist. When my wife and I first moved into this house, my plan was to set up a home practice. But zoning laws prohibited it, which in t
he end was a blessing since my heart was never in that line of work. Don’t be nervous, though, Sam. I promise not to pull out my old forceps and extract your molars and bicuspids . . . that is, unless you write an unfavorable story about us.”

  Heekin forced a chuckle and tried to get out a follow-up question about that abandoned career. My father patted him on the shoulder and told him to relax, that no dentists or spirits would do him harm in our basement. Meanwhile, the tape recorder felt brick-heavy in Heekin’s hand. He glanced down to see the wheels turning. If he wanted this story to succeed—which he desperately did—then he needed to begin asking the right sorts of questions. He took a breath and out one came, smoothly as possible: “What’s that area about to be s-s-sectioned off?”

  “It was originally going to be a waiting room for patients, though lately I’ve begun working on it again. I hope to create a proper room where the occasional troubled soul can stay. Right now, I just set them up on a cot over there. It’s not ideal.”

  “Troubled s-s-soul?”

  “That’s my way of saying the unfortunate people who come here in need of help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Well, put most simply, people whose souls have been occupied by malevolent spirits, spirits that have no intention of leaving on their own.”

  Heekin looked at my father’s dark eyes behind his smudged glasses. He knew about my parents’ trips to haunted places. But neither had mentioned anything like this at the lecture. “Do you m-m-mean . . . exorcisms? Aren’t those only performed by priests?”

  “Usually. But even priests find themselves at a loss in certain cases. Some have even been known to send people to us.”

  That tape recorder hummed in Heekin’s grasp.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” My father held up a hand as if to halt an idea. “You’ve watched the same movies as everyone else. But in real life, removing an unwanted sprit from a person is nothing like that. No heads spinning around. No green vomit spewing across the room. That kind of thing would guarantee a more colorful story for your paper, I’m sure. But in this house, it comes down to my wife and me calling upon our faith as we spend days and nights praying over and caring for the suffering person.”