by John Searles
“Sylvie,” she said when she laid eyes on me.
Head down, I kept walking. Some part of me felt the urge to take the detective’s hand for comfort. Instead, I squeezed the cassette harder, bracing myself for this moment with Rose, bracing myself for the trip to the prison that lay ahead.
“Sylvie!” She tossed those brochures on the floor and stood. “I’m talking to you!”
“I’m just going to see him,” I told her over the rising shhhh.
“Why?”
Absolute certainty—that was why. I wanted to be sure this time that what I believed was the truth. I wanted to be right for Detective Rummel and Louise. I wanted to be right for my mother and father. I wanted to be right for me too.
But I did not explain that to Rose. Instead, I just kept walking as she stood there in the hall calling after me.
SUSSEX COUNTY CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION—I stared at the sign as we drove through a series of gates at the prison. That very first night I opened my eyes to see Rummel at my bedside in the hospital, the man had seemed strong and impenetrable, a statue come to life. But as he spoke to the guards at the gates, the guards at the front doors, and still more guards in the maze inside that rambling brick compound, the detective seemed impossibly human. Something in his heavy footsteps, his quick breaths and occasional sighs, left me with the feeling that Rummel was nervous about this visit too.
Beforehand, we had agreed that he would stay with me the entire time, so when yet another guard led us to a room full of tables and told me to take a seat, the detective lingered nearby. That long, rectangular table where I sat waiting for Lynch was not unlike the ones in the school cafeteria. Thinking of school led me to think of Boshoff and the diary he had given me. I hadn’t been able to find it the night before, and now my only hope was that it was lost somewhere in the bowels of Howie’s theater, like so many dropped possessions of the people who came before me, only never to be found.
I kept thinking about the diary, and all I had written inside, until a door opened across the room, different from the one Rummel and I had come through. I looked up to see Albert Lynch being escorted in by another guard. Slowly, they walked to the table, Lynch in an orange jumpsuit, his gaze on the floor instead of me. The guard pulled back the chair, legs scraping the floor, and Lynch flopped into the seat. “Thirty,” the guard said, pointing to the large clock on the wall.
The half-hour limit was yet another detail that had been agreed upon beforehand. I knew we didn’t have much time, and yet for an extended moment, neither of us said anything. Lynch sat there, staring at me. Without his odd bug-eyed glasses, I was not sure how well he could see, but I wondered what I must have looked like to him. I felt much older than that girl who had witnessed him calling into the bushes outside the convention center in Ocala, more world-weary and wise than that girl who had walked to the end of Butter Lane with her mother to find him and his daughter waiting for us in their van.
Lynch had never been a heavy man, but he had lost a considerable amount of weight since those days. The hollows under his eyes and his sunken cheeks gave the impression of a tent collapsing from the inside. That smooth, babyish skin of his had gone crepey around the mouth. At last, he opened his thin lips and said quietly, “All these months in this godforsaken place, the only visitors I’ve had have been lawyers and detectives like your friend here. When they told me I had a visitation request this morning, you were the last person I expected.”
I stared down at my hands on the table. “No one has come to see you?”
“Who would, Sylvie? No one knows where my daughter is. She was my only family. My only life, in fact.”
I closed my eyes, for just a second or two, but long enough to conjure the memory of that conversation in the foundation with Abigail and the way I had turned from her, racing across the lane toward home the moment she informed me that my sister had returned. When I opened my eyes again, I told myself to put that memory away, to stay in the here and now. “I came,” I said, forcing my gaze upon his, “because I want to talk about that night in the church. The conversation you had with my parents, before—”
“You don’t need me to tell you, Sylvie,” he said, making no effort to hide his contempt. “I’ve given my account to the lawyers and detectives, including the one you brought with you. Just ask him for the transcript.”
I heard Rummel’s heavy shoes shift on the floor behind me, heard him let out another of those faint sighs. In the moments after I had made the request to see Lynch, the detective had offered the same option: that I could just look at the transcripts. But that’s not what I wanted. What brought me to the prison was that long-ago conversation with my mother in the bed of our hotel room, the one where she told me I could sense the truth inside a person if only I allowed myself. “I want to hear what happened from you,” I told Lynch.
He did not respond immediately, or at least not directly. Instead, Lynch told me, “I’ve had a lot of time to read in here, Sylvie. Guess which book I spent the most time on?”
“The Bible,” I said, since the answer seemed obvious.
“Wrong. That’s for other people in here. I’ve decided at long last that I’ve had enough of that book. Enough for a lifetime actually. So, no. The one that’s been keeping me company is the book about your mom and dad. The reporter who wrote it had a few interesting things to say about your old man, Sylvie. Have you ever read it?”
“Yes,” I told him.
The night before, after I’d found those candles in the trash, I’d cleaned up the mess, then returned to the house. Since Rose was up in her room, I couldn’t get the book from her closet. Instead, I scoured the house for a second copy, finding one crammed inside the curio hutch with all those other old books of my father’s. That fall when it was published, my father sat quietly in his chair reading the book. The clock ticked. My mother made tea. She kept busy flipping through those wallpaper patterns until he was done. That’s when my father told us we were never to speak of the book or Heekin again. All that and yet, there were those few extra editions in the hutch anyway. For so long, I had told myself that what kept me from reading the final pages had been the promise I made to my mother that morning on our steps when she held the manuscript in her hands and wept. But it was something more, I realized. I was afraid to read that final section—“Should You Really Believe the Masons?”—because I did not want to face what it might say.
“So,” Lynch was saying now. “You know the things your father told that reporter.”
Be direct and clear, I thought, repeating those survey rules in my mind. “That’s not what I want to talk to you about. I want to hear what happened in the moments before I entered that church.”
Lynch looked behind him at the guard, no more than ten feet away, then at the clock on the wall. Twenty-one minutes—that’s all we had left. He turned to me again, but said nothing.
Rummel came closer, put his hand on my shoulder, and squeezed. “We can go, if you like.”
“No,” I told him. “Not yet.”
I waited for him to step away again, and when he did and the clock showed only nineteen minutes remaining, this is what I offered Lynch: “If you want, I can tell you what happened that summer you left your daughter with us. I can tell you what I know of her last night in our home. The things that went wrong.”
That got his attention. Lynch raised his head and said, “If you’re planning on feeding me the same lines about those demons who drove her from your house, then save it, Sylvie. I already heard that crap from your old man before he died.”
I swallowed, noticed that my hands were shaking. I moved them beneath the table and took a breath, trying to calm the rabbit beat of my heart. “I’m not going to tell you the same story as my father. I’m going to tell you the truth of what I know. So long as you do the same for me.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “You first.”
How much easier might this conversation have been if I had never lost my journal, if I could s
imply open to the pages where I’d written all about that summer, all about that last night in particular, then slide the book across the table for Lynch to read?
I remember that when I ran across the street and burst through the front door, the first thing I wanted to do was hug my sister, since I had not hugged her the day she left home. But the sight of Rose made me stop abruptly in the entrance to the living room.
“What are you gawking at?” Rose said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Your head,” I told her. “What did you . . .”
She reached a hand up and ran it over her scalp, still nicked and bloody from the razor. “Funny, I had a full head of hair when I got here this morning. But when I found someone else sleeping in my room, wearing my clothes, living my life, I thought I better do something to set myself apart from her.”
“Rose,” my mother said. “Your father and I explained why you found things the way you did. You never should have—”
The front door opened and my mother grew quiet. A moment later, Abigail padded up the hall in bare feet until she was standing beside me. Why had I failed to notice earlier that the shirt she wore was not one of those tattered things she had arrived with, but rather a simple black tank that belonged to my sister? How many other days and nights had she taken to wearing her clothes without my noticing?
“Abigail,” my father said, his voice rising with alarm. “What happened?”
I watched as she held out her palms, blood still drooling and dripping from each, as her mouth moved open and closed but made no sound. First my father, then my mother, rushed toward her. In a moment, they had whisked her off to the kitchen, where I could hear water running and my mother praying too.
Meanwhile, Rose and I had been left alone in the living room. There was a little blood on her hand as well from when she ran it over her scalp. But nothing she couldn’t wipe away on her jeans, which she did just then. “Well, squirt,” she said. “I can see things have really normalized while I’ve been gone.”
How could I tell her that in their own strange way, things had seemed normal—happy even—all those months? There was the ice cream. There were those late-night trips to the pond. There were the conversations Abigail and I had through the bedroom wall.
Instead, I said, “I’m glad you’re back. Are they going to let you stay?”
“They’re not happy about it, but I’m not giving them a choice. No way am I heading back to that place. And I’m not going back to school again either. I’m going to stay here through the fall and winter, save my money then get an apartment of my own.”
I thought of that globe up in her room, the way she used to spin it, plunking her finger down on random locations. Warsaw. Buenos Aires. Sydney. “Get a place where?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t figured that out yet. But it won’t be Dundalk or even Baltimore. It’ll be someplace a safe distance from this madhouse.”
I stood there, saying nothing. All summer long, I had wanted the same things as my mother: for Rose to come home, for Abigail to be gone, for things to return to normal. But I realized then that things would never go back to the way they had been. When Rose left that morning months before, she may as well have left for good.
“Sylvie,” my mother called from the kitchen. “Can you run to our bathroom upstairs and get some bandages and peroxide?”
I turned away from my sister and did what our mother asked. When I stepped into the kitchen moments later, Abigail held her hands above her head to slow the bleeding. “Does she need stitches?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” my father answered, then looked to Abigail and asked her, “How did this happen?”
Her mouth moved up and down again, but no words came. You’re good at this, I thought. If I didn’t know better, I’d have been fooled too.
“You were with her, Sylvie,” my mother said at last. “Tell us.”
Abigail’s eyes caught mine then. I thought of that morning when I spoke the truth for Rose and how badly that had turned out despite my intentions. Let them believe what they want, I decided before answering only with, “I don’t know what happened to her.”
Abigail’s eyes were on mine still as my parents walked her to the basement door. Her mouth was no longer moving, though I could imagine words slipping out anyway, saying: “The money. Tonight, after I’m down there asleep, don’t forget to bring me the money.”
“And then what?” Lynch said. He was not exactly leaning forward at the table, but he was sitting up at last, his spindly fingers pressed to the surface. “You went down there and gave her the money?”
“Your turn,” I told him. “Tell me about the deal you made with my sister.”
He balled his hands into tight fists and seemed about to drum them on the table, but shook them in the air a moment instead. “Fine,” he told me. “It’s nothing I haven’t said before. All that fall and all that winter, I kept searching for Abigail. I had ideas about where she might have gone. Back to the ministry in Oregon. Or off to find a friend of my ex-wife’s. Or to a town in the south where we once stayed for a few months, since she seemed to like the other children at the church there more than other places. But she never turned up anywhere. All the while, I kept calling your house, but your parents just let that stupid machine answer. I couldn’t go to the police, because of the way we had been living. Besides, I didn’t know if my ex had some sort of report filed against me. I found out from one of the lawyers after I was in here that she never did stop looking.
“I started coming to your house again. That fall. That winter too. Eventually, your parents didn’t even bother to open the door. By then, I had read that book by Sam Heekin, which meant I knew about the Mustang Bar where he took your father after he apparently popped a few of those pills he liked to take when his back was hurting. The day of the storm, I went through the same routine: hammering away on your front door to no avail until I gave up and found myself sitting at the Mustang Bar too. It had been ages since I’d had so much as a drop of alcohol, never mind the few shots of whiskey I tossed back that night. As I sat at that bar, drowning my sorrows, some girl kept coming in and ordering drinks. Eventually, I realized she was sneaking them outside to the car. When I stood from the stool and made my way outside, who do I see but your sister? She looked different from that night I saw her in the parking lot in Florida, but I remembered her face.”
“And that’s when you made the deal?” I asked.
“Yes. Fifty bucks to call your parents and get them to talk to me. I told her that’s all I wanted to do and she believed it.”
“Then what?”
“She made the call from a pay phone right outside the bar. Meeting at the church was a detail she came up with all on her own. I was expecting to go by your house, but Rose told me that if your parents thought they were going to meet her, that if she was willing to pray with them to get things right in her head, they would venture out into the storm to see her.”
“Only it was you they would be seeing.”
“Exactly.”
“So then you went to the church?”
Lynch glanced behind him at the clock again. I did too. Thirteen minutes. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Your turn.”
I took a breath, thought of those pages in my journal, and began:
Abigail never came back up from that basement—not that I was aware of, anyway. My mother, however—she emerged a few hours later to throw together a quick dinner for Rose and me. While my father took a tray down for Abigail, my mother said she was sorry that we could not eat together as a family, but that any day now, perhaps even the very next, Abigail’s father would return for her at last. A shame, my mother said, that after a perfectly fine summer, this is how he would find the girl. She said she had tried her best, but there were some haunted people she could not help after all.
Once our mother made us two turkey sandwiches then returned to the basement, Rose told me that most nights at Saint Julia’s, she snuck her dinner back up
to her room. That’s what she wanted to do then too. It had been so long since I’d seen my sister, I agreed to whatever she wanted. Inside her room, I watched as she shoved the bed back to where it used to be against the far wall, then stripped the sheets Abigail had been sleeping in and piled them, along with all the girl’s clothes, into the cinnamon-colored suitcase we once shared.
“She can have the old thing,” Rose said. “It just brings back bad memories.”
After I hunted down fresh sheets and helped make the room hers again, the two of us lay on her bed and picked at our sandwiches. It was then that I asked Rose more about Saint Julia’s, but she told me she preferred not to talk about it, except to say that she had left on her own and was never going back. The worst experience of her life, that’s what she said, but also the best because it taught her once and for all who she was. There in that bed, lying side by side the way we used to in those makeshift tents in the living room, we fell asleep.
At some point, I was woken by the sound of footsteps padding down the hall, and I looked to see my father, then my mother, slipping into their bedroom and closing the door. For a long moment, I lay there gazing over at Rose who, with her shaved head, looked nothing like herself. In some ways, it was like sleeping next to a stranger. And I couldn’t help but feel that’s what she was becoming to me. I lay there, wondering about her plan to stay in our house without returning to school and how many more feuds that would cause with our parents. Finally, I decided to stop worrying and instead do my part in making things better.
