Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

  Slowly, I slipped over the seat, making as little noise as possible when I stepped from the station wagon. Outside, I looked at the side of the police car: Rehoboth Township. The sight should have made me feel safer, but somehow it worried me more.

  I gazed up at the house again. Lights glowed in the windows on the first and second floors. Nervous as it made me, I followed the path of crushed shells to one side of the property, where a row of garbage cans and a chain-link fence divided the backyard from front. In the moonlight, I could see a cement patio, a picnic table, and a kettle grill. In the yard stood a statue of the Virgin Mary, vines winding up her open arms and obscuring her face. In the corner was a wooden shed, newly built with two sturdy locks on the door.

  “I cooked it earlier today.”

  The woman’s muffled voice from inside the house startled me. I looked up to see that I was beneath a small window. Now that I was paying attention, I heard water running, the clatter of dishes and silverware. The sounds faded as I moved into the yard, keeping near the fence, until I reached the shed. I couldn’t hear anything from this vantage point, but I saw them through a picture window, seated at a table. The man was bald and wore a white T-shirt that hugged the bulky muscles of his arms and shoulders. I watched as they bowed their heads and closed their eyes, then the man made a quick sign of the cross before shoveling food in his mouth without so much as looking up. The woman didn’t eat more than a few bites and simply stared across the table at him, until finally standing to clear the dishes.

  As they moved from the window, I returned to the side of the house where I’d be able to hear what was going on inside. At first there was only more of her humming while the water ran. From somewhere deeper in the house came the sound of footsteps moving about. A toilet flushed. A door closed. All the while that woman kept humming until the footsteps moved into the kitchen, and I heard his deep voice telling her, “Not that song.”

  “Sorry. All day long, I find myself halfway through before I realize. I try not—”

  “Well, try harder.”

  She fell quiet, before asking, “Don’t you ever wonder?”

  “No. Not anymore. I’ve let it all go, and you need to do the same.”

  I stood there waiting for something more when without warning a porch light snapped on in the backyard, flooding the cement patio with light. I froze there in the shadows a moment as the back door swung open and the man stepped from the house, carrying an overstuffed garbage bag. He moved directly to where I stood by those trash cans, so I turned and slipped quickly through the gate. Out on the street, I paused along the sidewalk, looking back to see him drop the bag into a can and press down the lid, then start dragging the can toward the road.

  The narrow front lawns in the neighborhood and so few trees left no easy places to duck out of sight. If I stepped behind a car in a neighboring driveway, I worried someone might see from a window and snap on their light too. So instead I simply walked down the street as though I belonged there. Before I got too far, I crossed to the far side and turned back in order to get a better look at him. He was no longer dressed in just a T-shirt but wore a police uniform, the buttons of his shirt still undone.

  While dragging the second can to the curb, the man glanced up and caught sight of me across the street. He lifted his hand to his forehead, visor style, and asked in the same gruff voice he used to speak to that woman, “What are you doing out here?”

  I couldn’t tell if he recognized me, though I certainly didn’t recognize him. “I’m just . . . here,” I said.

  “Are you on your way home? And do your folks know where you are?”

  “Yes and yes,” I said.

  “Well, get there safe.”

  He turned away from me and finished up his business with those cans before retreating to the house and snapping off the light out back. So I was a stranger to him after all, I thought, walking to the corner and wondering what to do now. A few minutes later, the roar of an engine filled the quiet air, and I glanced back to see the police car come to life and roll out of the driveway. Windows down, I heard the static squawk of the police radio inside. When he passed me, the officer looked my way and waved.

  The moment his taillights disappeared around the corner, I turned back again, feeling braver now that it was just the woman alone. Knock on the door, I told myself. Ask her point-blank who she is and why she has been coming to Dundalk. I was about to work up the nerve when I saw the garbage cans. I knew from the times when vandals tipped over our trash that all sorts of personal information could be revealed that way.

  I looked up at the house. A glow came from the windows still, but the curtains were drawn. Quickly, I lifted the lid of the nearest can and tore into the plastic, then held my breath and reached in among the crumpled papers and dirty napkins and balled foil.

  It didn’t take long before I pulled out an envelope that offered more information: Nicholas and Emily Sanino, 104 Tidewater Road, Rehoboth, DE. I tried to recall if I’d ever heard those names before.

  “Can I help you, young lady?”

  The sudden voice led me to drop the trash can lid. If it had been the old metal kind, there would have been a loud clatter. Instead, the plastic made a dull thud at my feet. I looked at her and searched for the right words. None came so I just held up the stained envelope. “Are you Emily Sanino?”

  The woman stepped nearer, swooping down for the garbage can lid, placing it back on the can. Her face, I saw, looked softer up close. In the streetlight, I could see a web of faint lines around her eyes and mouth. She snatched the envelope from my hand. “Who are you? And what are you doing out here in the dark digging through our garbage?”

  “I’m Sylvie,” I told her. “Sylvie Mason.”

  The woman was pressing down on the lid to be sure it was secured, but the moment I spoke my name, she stopped. A hand went to her mouth. “Rose’s sister?”

  I nodded.

  “How did you—” Her voice faltered. “What are you doing here?”

  “Trying to find out who you are.”

  Emily Sanino stared at me, considering what I’d said, before asking how exactly I had found her. When I explained, she let out a long breath. “Does your sister, or anyone else, know you’re here?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay, then. Why don’t you come inside? But you can’t stay long. My husband will be back soon.”

  I followed her around the side of the house to the back door. The wood-paneled kitchen smelled of garlic and stewed tomatoes, whatever it was she had cooked for dinner. The smell caused my stomach to grumble, since the last thing I’d eaten was that sandwich Heekin bought me from the deli in Philly.

  I ignored my hunger and looked at the speckled white countertops scrubbed clean, a bright blue mixing bowl on top, a bag of flour, an eggbeater, and her simple black purse with a lone gold buckle. “I was going to bake something,” she explained. “It calms my nerves. But I realized I didn’t have any eggs. I went out to the car to go to the store. That’s when I saw you.”

  “Were you baking for us?”

  “Us?”

  “You know, more of the things you leave at our house?”

  She shook her head. “Not tonight. I left a cake at your house earlier.”

  I wondered if Rose had found the cake on our stoop on her way to Dial U.S.A. and tossed it in the trash just like all the rest.

  Emily Sanino returned the mixing bowl to a cabinet, the flour and milk to the fridge. I peeked down the hall to the living room. I saw a rocker, like my mother’s. Just beyond, I noticed a row of framed pictures on a side table, a cluster of trophies with little gold figures on top.

  “You know,” I told her as she moved about the kitchen, “I’m sorry to say but nobody eats the things you leave for us.”

  She had swung open the door to the refrigerator but turned back to look at me, visibly perplexed. “And why not?”

  “My sister and I have no idea who’s leaving it.”

  E
mily Sanino considered that a moment. I had the sense that she was debating something in her mind, before closing the fridge and saying simply, “I see.”

  “Why do you leave it? I mean, if you don’t know us.”

  “You’re right. I don’t know you.” She stood by the table now, staring straight at me and speaking in a stiff voice, as though choosing her words carefully. “I only met your sister a handful of times. Still, I have enormous sympathy for you girls, considering what you’ve both been through.”

  “Did you know my mother and father? Were you someone who came to them in need of their help?”

  She ran her hands over her plain dress. “You know what? Let’s go into the living room. That way I can listen for my husband’s patrol car. We have to make sure he doesn’t find you here when he gets back.”

  I considered telling her that I’d spoken to him outside, but I kept it to myself; the last thing I wanted was to distract her when we had so little time together. In the living room, I went to that side table and looked at the trophies, five in all. On top of each, the miniature gold figure—running, jumping, swinging—was a girl. The framed photos showed a dark-haired toddler wearing a soft pink dress, the same girl a few years older at the beach in a bright bathing suit, hair long and wet, sand stuck to her elbows. In the next frame she was a lanky adolescent, mouth full of braces, wearing a T-shirt that said GOD’S LOVE SUMMER CAMP. Finally, I saw the girl had grown into her teens. She had wide shoulders and womanly breasts, her hair looked darker and shorter.

  “That’s my daughter,” Emily volunteered when she saw me looking.

  I glanced at the staircase on the far side of the room, remembering the lights I’d seen on the second floor when I stood out front earlier. She took a seat on a recliner. I went to the rocker and sat too. “Is she here?”

  “No. I’m afraid not.”

  I saw something pass over her face. Sadness, but something more that left me with a hunch about where this was going. Like the Entwistles, the Saninos must have reached out to my parents for help. There seemed so much to say, but neither of us spoke for a long moment, and then without any prompting from me, she simply began.

  “We wanted more children, an entire brood, but my husband and I, well, we started late. So we were just grateful for the blessing of her. She got all the attention. She had better clothes than we did. She got sent away to summer camp. There were endless sleepovers and birthday parties.”

  “It seems like a good way to grow up,” I told her.

  “It was. But raising a child holds no guarantees. You can follow all the right steps, do all the right things, and still something can go wrong— Actually, no. That’s a word my husband would use. I won’t say wrong anymore, I’ll say differently than planned. That’s what happened to my daughter when she reached her teens.”

  I remembered Albert Lynch, standing at the end of our lane, warning us that Abigail could seem perfectly normal until suddenly everything changed. I remembered the girls I’d read about in that “history” book years before too.

  “As a mother, you think you know your child. You brought her into the world, after all. You changed her diapers and picked her up when she cried. You read her stories each night before bed and slipped coins under her pillow so she believed in the Tooth Fairy. But then, despite all that love and effort, years go by and one day she turns sullen. She keeps secrets. She doesn’t want to be near you. I used to ask her what was wrong, but she always told me the same thing: I wouldn’t understand.

  “Then her grades dropped. She began skipping school. She didn’t want to be with her old friends anymore. Despite all that, she managed to graduate. We sent her off to a good Christian college in Massachusetts. We thought the freedom of being away from home would help. But after a month, we received a call from the dean informing us that she had stopped attending classes. Worse still, her behavior had become erratic. She was caught breaking into someone’s dorm. When the R.A. reported her, she threatened the girl with a knife.” Emily stopped and looked toward the window, listening. When there was no sound, she smoothed her hands over her dress and told me, “I don’t think she would have done the things she did if my husband had not been so hard on her.”

  “Is that when you turned to my mother and father?” I asked.

  Mrs. Sanino tilted her head, her mouth dropping open into an oval shape that made me think of a Christmas caroler. “Your parents?” she said after a moment. “We never took her to them. Although I read all about your mother and father, and saw them interviewed on TV, we did not meet.”

  “But if you didn’t seek them out, then how—”

  “My daughter came to know your sister when we sent her away to Saint Julia’s.”

  This was not the story I’d been expecting after all. I needed a moment to adjust things in my mind, but Emily Sanino didn’t allow for that.

  “As you no doubt have learned about me,” she pushed on, “I’m not afraid to take a road trip while my husband is away from the house. Nick is an officer three towns over, so he doesn’t get home certain days when he’s doing a double on patrol duty. I’d tell him I was going to see my sister over in Dover. Really, I snuck away to visit our daughter. During those trips, that’s when I met Rose. Did you ever go to see her there, Sylvie?”

  “No. My father promised that we would, but he kept putting it off. He told us the staff prohibited visits, because it created setbacks in the behavior of the girls there.”

  Emily scoffed. “Well, he wasn’t lying. That was their policy. No visitors. For the first thirty days anyway.”

  “Ninety,” I said, remembering how endless that summer seemed without her.

  “No,” she told me. “I’d remember if it was that long. But either way, they didn’t welcome the influence of the outside world at that place. Still, I didn’t care. I never wanted to send her there in the first place. Even if I couldn’t bring her home for good, I found a way to sneak her out for the day. And those times, well, they were the first in a great while that my daughter actually seemed happy to see me. Rose usually managed to sneak out too and join us.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “No place special. Hiking. Walking in the park. But it felt special. Those girls were like prisoners set free. Every little thing made them laugh. We’d stop for ice cream before heading back to Saint Julia’s, and it was as though I was giving them the treat of their lives. They were that grateful, that happy.”

  I tried to place my sister in the scenario she described, laughing, eating ice cream. Instead, what I conjured was the memory of trips to the ice cream parlor with my parents during the months Rose was gone, the strange guilty peace I felt during that time. Those memories led me to say, “My sister didn’t last there more than that summer.”

  “Neither did my daughter.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know exactly. She had agreed to stay there originally for a full six months. But then one morning, the psychiatrist from Saint Julia’s called to tell us they found her room empty. She left just like that. And, really, she was free to go all along since she was of age.”

  “Did she come home?”

  “She knew better, I’m sure. Her father would have sent her right back. So instead, she just . . . disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  Emily Sanino stood and went to that side table and pulled back the curtain to look outside. I wanted to tell her that we’d hear the patrol car well before seeing it, but instead I simply repeated the word, “Disappeared?”

  “We’ve not heard from her since,” she said in a stiff voice, letting go of the curtain and pressing her fingertips to the sides of her eyes, as though forcing back tears. After a moment, she took a breath and turned to me. “Now that you know everything you came to find out, we need to get you out of here. How will you get home if you—”

  “Wait,” I said. “I still don’t understand why you’ve been coming to our house.”

  That question gave he
r a long pause. She stared at me, blinking, before saying, “When I read about what happened to your mother and father, Sylvie, I thought of how special those days with Rose had been. The idea of that poor girl on her own raising you, well, it broke my heart. I remembered how she used to devour the food I brought on those trips, so I decided the least I could offer was more of that nourishment. It’s what the Bible teaches, after all: charity of the heart.”

  “Well, thank you for remembering us. I only wish you’d left notes, so we knew who it was from. Didn’t you ever think to do that?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t want to open old wounds. I’m sure Rose doesn’t exactly want reminders of her time at Saint Julia’s. My guess is she never speaks of it. Am I right?”

  I nodded. My brain felt fuzzy with the events of the day. I tried to think of what more I could ask, but just then, Emily Sanino’s back stiffened. A moment later, I heard a car motoring down the street. “I need you to leave,” she said, peeking through the curtains as the flash of lights washed over her. “How will you get back to Dundalk?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her, standing. We walked to the kitchen, and she pressed a hand on my back to get me there faster.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I didn’t plan things. I just came here without—”

  Outside in the driveway, a door slammed. Emily grabbed her purse from the table and told me to hold out my hands. When I did she shook the contents of her wallet—coins, bills, stray coupons, shopping lists—into my palms. A few stray pennies fell to the floor and scattered at my feet, but I didn’t bother to pick them up. “I’m sorry,” she told me, her voice an urgent whisper. “But I can’t let my husband know about any of this. There’s a pay phone in front of the firehouse on West Shore Drive. You can call a taxi from there. You should have more than enough money to get home.”