Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

  Rose had yet to walk through the front door, so I slipped down the hall to her room. Quickly, I slid open her nightstand and dug out that laminated prayer card she had saved. Clutching it, I went down the hall to our parents’ room again and picked up the phone on their nightstand.

  “Saint Julia’s Home for Girls,” a man’s voice answered after I dialed the number on the back of that card.

  It felt like ages since I’d made those survey calls, but I summoned that grown-up voice I used to interview all those people. “Hello,” I told the man on the other end. “I’m looking for a school for my daughter.”

  I waited for a moment to see if he would ask how old I was. But he did not. “Well, this isn’t exactly a school. You know that, don’t you?’

  “Yes. My daughter, um, she needs a place to go to”—I paused, remembering my father’s long-ago words—“to get her head right. I assume that’s the sort of situation you treat there.”

  “Yes. We treat young women who have developed a sexual confusion. One that goes against the teachings of the Bible,” he told me. “But you should know we have rules. Once you sign your daughter into our care, you entrust her well-being with us. Our treatment is quite serious and not to be taken lightly. One of the first things we require is that no one from the outside have contact for the first thirty days of admission—”

  The door opened and closed downstairs, and I slammed down the phone. Rose’s feet came pounding up the steps. She rounded the corner and stopped when she saw me there, sitting on the edge of our mother’s bed. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

  I lifted that torn newspaper article, showing it to her the way I had been tempted to do for days. “Who is this in the picture with you?”

  “What picture?”

  I stood, walked closer to her out in the hallway. “This picture. It was taken after you came home from being sent away. After the accident where Dereck lost his fingers. Who is that with you?”

  Rose made a show of squinting at the photo, but I had the sense she wasn’t really looking. “I don’t know. I have too much on my mind for your egghead crap today, Sylvie. I’ve signed up for GED classes and I have homework to do. You, more than anyone, should be able to sympathize with that.”

  “Franky?” I said.

  “Who?” my sister asked, but I could hear a knowing quality in her voice.

  “Frances? Frances Sanino, the daughter of Emily and Nick Sanino?”

  Rose’s face took on a stunned look, as though she’d been slapped, a look she quickly tried to conceal, pinching her lips together and sucking in a breath. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  “Yes, you do. Because her mother has been the one leaving food here on the steps. And I know why you didn’t want us to eat it. It wasn’t because you thought it was poisoned. It was because you were saving it for someone else. Franky.”

  “Shut up,” Rose said. “Shut the hell up, Sylvie. You think it’s easy for me? Do you? All I wanted was to be free of this place, and now I’m stuck here taking care of you. And what do I get in return? Nothing but a bunch of ungrateful back talk. I’m sick of it. So I’m going to my room. If I were you, I’d steer clear of me for the night, because now you’ve put me in a mood.”

  “I know!” I screamed at her. “I figured it all out!”

  “You didn’t figure anything out,” Rose said. “You are crazy. You told the police and the reporters and everyone else that you saw Albert Lynch that night. And it turned out you were wrong, because that old couple came forward. Now you are waving some newspaper article around and getting ready to make God knows what new accusation. You think you are so smart, Sylvie, but you are dumb. Really, really dumb.”

  “You can say that all you want,” I told her, stepping past her and starting down the stairs. “But I’m about to prove you wrong.”

  “Where are you going?”

  I did not answer as I made my way to the first floor, then cut through the living room toward the door that led to the basement. The entire time Rose was right behind me. When I pulled open that door and stared down into the shadowy darkness below, lit only by that yellow glow, she stepped in front of me and said just one word: “No.”

  “Yes,” I told her. “Now move.”

  Rose lifted her hands and shoved me. I stumbled back, losing my balance and falling. The newspaper article slipped from my hands, landing in the space between us. I stared at my sister’s sneakers on her small feet, thinking of that day in the truck when I crawled around, scraping for the money I’d earned only to end up with loose change.

  All our lives together, Rose won every fight with her words and with her might. Never once did I stand a chance. But now as my hands began to shake, as my heart banged in my chest, I stood and reached up and, with everything I had in me, I shoved her back. In an instant, she lost her footing and stumbled toward those stairs. For a moment, it seemed like we could stop what came next. She reached her hand out, and I grabbed for it, because I hadn’t meant for this to happen. But our hands didn’t catch one another in time, and so she tumbled backward down the stairs.

  After Rose hit the cement floor with a great crash, a thick silence followed. I thought of that cassette tape when my parents’ voices had stopped, those tiny wheels spinning round and round as their words echoed in my mind: I guess what I am trying to say is that we are like any other parents. We are trying to raise our daughters with good Christian values in a world that is increasingly secular. A feeling of shame, a feeling of pure horror, filled me up at the realization of what I’d done. Useless as it sounded, I spoke to her down in the basement. “I’m sorry, Rose. I’m so so sorry.”

  My sister did not respond, and the dread that this could be more grave an accident than I first understood took hold. I pounded down the steps to where she lay, her right leg bent in the most unnatural position. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Please tell me you are okay.”

  “It’s my leg,” she said, and I heard in her voice that she was crying, releasing the kind of exhausted sobs I’d never heard from Rose before. “You did something to my leg.”

  Those flyers on the bulletin board at the police station—in my panic, they came back to me. Hadn’t one advised never to move a person in the event of an accident? Get help—that was always the advice. I was about to go back upstairs to the phone and do just that when Rose spoke through her tears, “Remember that rule they always used to say?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Mom and Dad. The rule that we could always tell them whatever we were thinking or feeling, and they would do their best to understand. Do you remember that, Sylvie?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “But let’s not—”

  “It wasn’t true,” Rose said. “It wasn’t true.”

  I didn’t want to talk about any of that now, but even so, I heard myself asking, “What do you mean?”

  “When I was fourteen, I first told them. They encouraged it, after all, always repeating that dumb rule. But when I said I felt different from other girls, you know what they did? They acted like it was some sort of fucking possession. They prayed over me like one of those supposedly haunted people who came here in need of their help. And they told me to keep my feelings a secret. The more it didn’t change, though, the more they prayed. I tried to give them the daughter they wanted. I tried to be more like you. I brought all those boys home. But it didn’t work. So they sent me away to that home where I was supposed to get better. And you know what? I did get better. I met Franky.

  “Even though Franky’s parents had sent her there too, she already knew the place was a joke. She made me realize there was nothing wrong with the way I felt.” Rose’s words sputtered out as her crying grew stronger. “ ‘Her coming was my hope each day,’ ” she said in a broken voice, “ ‘her parting was my pain; the chance that did her steps delay. Was ice in every vein.’ ”

  “Rose, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But we’ve got to get—”

 
; “Those are the words from that book you used to underline. Jane Eyre. I remember it, because it’s how I felt about Franky. And anyway, we planned to get out of there and save money and find some way to live a normal life together in time. But when I got home, I’d already been replaced by Abigail. So I gave up trying. And the fights with Mom and Dad—Dad, in particular—got worse. And so one night I’m out. And who do I run into but Albert Lynch?”

  “I know,” I told her. “You don’t have to say. We need to get you help. And I told you, I figured it all out.”

  “No, you didn’t!” she screamed. “Because I bet you didn’t figure out the way I felt in all of this, did you?”

  The rage, the sadness—those things in her voice frightened me into silence.

  “Did you?” she screamed.

  I shook my head.

  “Fifty bucks to talk to Mom and Dad. That’s what he offered me. And happily, I arranged it. But Franky knew what I was up to. She was the one with me at the bar, after all. Since I wasn’t of age, she kept sneaking in and getting us drinks then bringing them out to the car. After I made the call to Mom and Dad, she gave me some bullshit excuse that she wanted to go back to a friend’s house where she’d been staying ever since we left Saint Julia’s. So I let her go. Only Franky didn’t go to her friend’s. She went to see them at the church too.”

  Rose stopped. For a moment, I caught us both looking around that basement, the strange world my parents had created down there. That hatchet on the wall. The old branch with what looked like a howling face in the bark. The dozens of trinkets and objects hanging from the ceiling and filling the shelves. Those dusty old books about demons. And, of course, Penny in the old rabbit cage, smiling that placid smile.

  DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!

  The sign was still there just the same.

  “You know what can make a person possessed, Sylvie? It’s not Satan or Lucifer or any of that nonsense. Do you know what it is?”

  “What?” I asked her, desperate to let her finish so I could get help.

  “Love and hate. Greed. Revenge. Pride. Those things turned Dad into his own demon. He knew the things he was doing were dishonest. Mom’s gift wasn’t powerful or controllable enough for him. He needed something greater to get the attention he craved. He needed all of us to support his stories, so he set out to make us believers too.”

  Famous? I remembered the way my father shimmied against that nozzle, rain sopping his hair, dripping from his lashes as he said, Well, now that you mention it, I suppose it would be nice to show them.

  “And so, when those people stayed here in the basement, he messed with them. Putting all kinds of pills he had access to in their food. They weren’t in their right minds to begin with, but after he messed with them, who knows what sort of delusions they experienced? It was the same with Mom. He did it to her. Abigail too—”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You think you’re the only one to figure things out? I watched him. Made a study out of it. And I caught him one day in the kitchen crushing a pill and mixing it into some food. When I asked, he told me it was just some medicine. But I knew better. I’d read those labels on the prescription containers in his desk drawer. And the fact that I knew he was a fraud only made him resent me more.”

  I pressed my face into my hands, remembering my mother being so ill and unlike herself after that trip to Ohio. Had he done that to her because she wanted to stop their work the way Heekin told me? Or was it so that she would have no choice but to believe in the power of Penny and so many other claims he made? Is that why Abigail did not feel well that last night? There was so much to understand but I found myself asking, “What did you mean about love and hate? Were you talking about Dad?”

  “Yes. But I mean me and Franky too,” she said. “Those things made us demons as well. First her. And then me.”

  I waited for her to tell me more, but she was crying again.

  “Rose,” I said, deciding once and for all that this conversation had to wait. “I am going to call an ambulance. We need to get you help.”

  I stood, went up the stairs. In the kitchen, I walked to the phone on the wall, only when I picked it up, there was no dial tone. I clicked the receiver a few times, but the line was dead.

  Hands shaking still, I went to the freezer and pulled out an ice tray to get ice for Rose’s leg. But the tray was empty. Instead, I grabbed a bunch of Popsicles, wrapped them in a dishtowel, and rushed back down the stairs.

  In the brief time I had been upstairs, the air in the basement had changed. Outside the window, the light was just the same. That bare, yellowy bulb still glowed on the ceiling as well. The dank, loamy smell still hung in the air. And yet, I had the sense that something had shifted. “Rose,” I said, pressing that cool towel to her leg. “The phone isn’t working.”

  “Sylvie, you better go.”

  “What? Go where?”

  “Anywhere. Just not here.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  I heard a sound in the corner of the basement then, from behind that partition. I stood, remembering the reason I had been so determined to come down here in the first place. I thought of Emily Sanino humming “Happy Birthday.” I thought of that cake she left. I thought of all those candles too. And then I walked over and stepped to the other side of that paneled wall. There was only the empty cot covered with rumpled sheets. On the small dresser by the sliding door that led out onto the backyard, I saw a stack of empty Tupperware containers that had been left on our stoop.

  I stepped back to the other side and looked at my sister, who had propped herself up into a slumped position against the stairs and was nursing her leg. “So those noises I heard, they were her?”

  Rose nodded. “She was here for a few weeks after the murders. But then we agreed she had to go. Any plans we had made could no longer be. At least not until you were grown and gone and nobody suspected anything. But then—”

  Again, I heard a noise somewhere behind me in the basement. I turned and looked into the shadows, where my father’s old dental chair remained untouched still. Just beyond, I could see the fuse box and a tangle of wires on the wall. It was then that I realized the phone cord had been cut. I was not sure what to do so I turned back to Rose. “But then what?”

  “But then Franky didn’t stay away. She couldn’t. And the truth was, I didn’t want her to. So without telling me beforehand, she came back. On Halloween night, while I was out and you were here alone, she slipped in through the sliding door and waited for me. That’s when you first saw the light on again. I told her it was better to just leave it on, because I knew it would keep you from coming down here, since you thought it had to do with Mom and Dad and the things they did when they were alive. I knew you still believed.”

  I stood for a moment, staring at my sister, wondering how she was capable of keeping so much hidden for so long. “Did you . . .”

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you kill them?”

  She shook her head.

  “Say it!” I shouted. “I want to hear you tell me that you didn’t!”

  “No,” she said, crying and shaking her head more. “No. No. No. It was Franky. She did it, Sylvie.”

  I felt cold all over. Pinpricks up my arms and down my legs and across my stomach. My entire body was shivering now and I could do nothing to stop it. Voice trembling, I asked, “How could you cover for her, Rose? How could you let me go on thinking I had seen someone I did not?”

  “Because I loved her. And she did it because she loved me.”

  No noise came from behind me, but I saw Rose’s gaze shift over my shoulder. I felt a presence there, and so I turned around.

  For an instant, all those pictures in the living room of Emily Sanino flashed in my mind. I saw the young woman before me as a dark-haired toddler in a pink dress, a few years older at the beach in a bright one-piece bathing suit, as a lanky adolescent with a mouth full of braces and a T-shirt that said GO
D’S LOVE SUMMER CAMP. I remembered the trophies with the little golden girl on top. Track awards. And now that track star Rose had dated was standing before me, head shaved to the scalp just as it must have been that night at the church, one of the few details that had led me to believe it was Albert Lynch who knocked me down on his way out the door. In one ear, she sported a small silver cross, the sort my mother used to wear, but the effect was menacing instead of peaceful. When she spoke, her voice was more composed than I would have imagined. She asked, “What did you do to Rose?”

  Voice still trembling, I told her, “She fell.”

  “She fell? Or you pushed her?”

  My sister spoke before I could. “Franky, leave Sylvie alone.”

  “Why?” Franky said. “She’s the same as your parents. No good for you.”

  “I don’t care,” Rose said. “Leave her alone. Let me handle this.”

  “You’ve been handling this for months and where has it gotten us?” Franky shouted. “Look at the mess she’s made of you.”

  She stepped out of the shadows then, coming closer. I thought of that night last winter, the sound of the gun so close to my ear before I fell to the floor and crawled beneath that pew. Like some sort of alarm the shhhh seemed to grow louder in that instant, so loud I almost did not hear Rose shouting, “Sylvie! Run! Get out of here!”

  I turned toward the stairs and stepped over my sister’s leg, bent the wrong way still, like those turkeys in the field on the other side of the woods. But I only made it up a few steps before I felt a hand snatch the back of my old T-shirt. I grabbed the banister and hung on as Franky pulled and pulled, until finally, I felt the fabric start to give and then suddenly the shirt came completely free. The dank air against my bare skin sent a shiver snaking through me as the sudden shift of pressure caused me to stumble forward. My hand slipped through the space between the slatted wooden steps, and Franky came around and grabbed it from beneath. I wrenched my hand free, pulling away from her with such force that I stumbled back down the stairs again, barely missing my sister.