Help for the Haunted: A Novel

by John Searles

  And so, at last, I found the words to tell him all that I’d come to know and exactly how I’d come to know it. The story took time as I explained about my visits with Father Coffey and Sam Heekin and my uncle and, of course, Emily Sanino. It took longer still to tell him about Abigail and my parents and the things I’d learned about my father. After a long while, though, I came to the end of that story. When I finished speaking, the detective gazed at me with his bright blue eyes and asked the very question I’d been wondering since returning to the house: “Where is your sister?”

  Seattle. Montreal. Madrid.

  Sometimes, I sit on the bed in my room at Kev and Bev’s house and spin that globe, imagining I know the answer. I try to picture her life in any one of those places. I try to imagine her happy too, which I hope is so. The most I know for certain, the most the police know as well, is that her truck was found the next day in a rest stop off the highway in Pikesville, Maryland. Whatever money she had, Rose took from the house, right down to the coins inside the old doorbell box, which she had put there as a child, not knowing that someday she would rip it off the wall and retrieve every cent before leaving home forever.

  These days, Howie comes to visit me quite a bit. Often, he is full of updates, since he’s been working with the courts again in an effort to be appointed my legal guardian. His plan—our plan, I can safely say as the days pass and we spend more time in each other’s company—is that I will go to live with him in a new apartment he is renting in Philadelphia. The place is situated on a quiet street, near a good school, and has a second bedroom that he says I can decorate any way I want in the few years I have left before college. The theater is up and running again, and even though there’s only a smattering of bands booked to play the stage in the summer ahead, Howie tells me it’s a sign that someday there will be more. When I mention those details to Kev and Bev and the caseworker who comes by regularly to check on me, they all say the same thing: a good home and a successful business will work wonders in helping my uncle to get custody this time around.

  Howie sold off his motorcycle and bought a Jeep like Dereck’s. On the days when he visits, we take rides together, usually going by the old house just to look at the place with a For Sale sign out front. Even though I avoid the newspapers still, my uncle told me there was a recent story in the Dundalk Eagle by Sam Heekin about a new developer who plans to buy up all the properties on the lane, finish building houses atop those forgotten foundations at last, then sell them off. So far, things there look the same, but I can already picture what it will become, since I’d been imagining real houses there for years.

  Just today, when my uncle came to get me, the weather was warm enough that the top was off the Jeep. He asked if I wanted to take our usual route by the house, but I told him there was another errand I needed to run first. Rather than pull my hair back as we drove, I let it whip around me the way Rose used to do, the way Abigail used to do too. My hand surfed the wind, and I did my best to stay out of my head as I’d been taught that summer on our way to and from the ice cream shop and the pond.

  By the time we pulled in front of the school, it was nearly the end of the day. Since I’d opted to finish the academic year with a home tutor, I had not been inside the building for months. It was the last day before summer vacation, and when I walked past the smoking area beneath the overhang with its ratty furniture, on through the front door, the air hummed with a palpable excitement. I moved through the halls until arriving at the windowless office Boshoff shared. Inside, I found him peeling his Just Say No posters off the wall, rolling them up, one by one. I stood in the doorway, watching him a moment before he saw me.

  “Sylvie,” he said, smiling. “What a nice surprise. Please, come in. Sit.”

  I stepped into the space but did not sit. “I can’t stay long. My uncle is waiting.”

  Boshoff put down the posters, and we stood gazing around at the walls covered with bits of stray tape. Everything else was gone. “Each June,” he said, “the maintenance crew tells me and the other faculty to leave the place bare, so they can paint over the break. The thing is, they say that every year and no one ever does a thing.”

  We both laughed, and that’s when I handed him the package I’d brought, wrapped up with a bow.

  “Sylvie, you didn’t need to get me a gift.”

  “I wanted to,” I told him.

  Boshoff tried his best to neatly undo the paper before giving up and simply tearing it open. Inside, he found a cookbook—not one I’d bought, but rather, one I’d made by gluing a wallpaper swatch over two pieces of cardboard then sandwiching a dozen or so empty pages inside. With duct tape from Kev’s toolbox, I bound it into a book, which looked less homemade than I imagined. Even if I never managed to find wallpaper that perfectly matched my personality, I found one that suited Boshoff’s book just fine. The Keep Calm—that’s what it was called. The pattern was the deep blue of a nighttime sky with a dusting of dim yellow stars placed here and there. It seemed the sort of thing that might calm anybody who had trouble sleeping at night.

  I watched as Boshoff opened the book to see that I’d filled the pages with recipes. Beef barley soup. Pork piccata. Lady Baltimore Cake. Those and the others were the meals my mother used to make during my childhood. Before leaving home, I’d found them written in her careful cursive on index cards she kept tucked in a kitchen drawer. It seemed important that she be remembered for something besides the strange artifacts on display in that room in Marfa, Texas. What I wanted was for some people—even if it was just the two of us—to remember her as a mother first, because that was the more important role she played during her time in this world. For that reason, I also filled the last of those pages with passages I once underlined in the books she made me read, like:

  If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

  That was just one, but there were others. I thought those lines were like poetry in their own way too, because you had to stop and think about them in order to understand their connection to things around you.

  Boshoff turned the pages, clacking a cough drop against his teeth, but not saying a word. After some time, I worried he did not understand what it was meant to be, so I explained, then finished by saying, “It’s just a little something to read at night when you can’t sleep. That’s all. Anyway, how is your wife?”

  When he looked up, I could see his eyes were rimmed with red at the lids. He blinked a few times, and I thought he was about to deliver sad news when he told me, “You are a very thoughtful young lady, Sylvie. Thank you for this book. It will remain special to me, always. And thank you for remembering my wife too. You’ll be glad to know that she’s doing well actually. In remission for a few months now, which is the biggest blessing we could ask for.” He closed the book and said he wanted to save it to read at night the way I intended. “Now, tell me about you. How is your ear?”

  “My uncle took me to a doctor,” I said. “Turns out the shhhh I heard all this time is caused by tinnitus brought on by the gunshot that night in the church. The doctor said it will come and go for a long time, since there’s no cure.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It seems to be getting quieter every day actually. I get the feeling that, pretty soon, I won’t hear it at all.”

  “That’s happy news. And your sister? Have you heard anything?”

  “No word,” I told him, thinking of that globe spinning and spinning, all those faraway places. “But someday, a long time from now, I bet I’ll hear from her.”

  “Well, it is important to stay hopeful,” Boshoff told me.

  With that, the bell rang. The sound broke some spell between us as the halls filled with the roar of students eager to leave this part of their lives behind and start the next. I supposed I was one of those students now too. “I should go,” I said. “While I can still escape the stampede.”

>   “Okay, Sylvie. Thank you again for thinking of me.”

  “Thank you,” I told him.

  When I stepped into the hallway, I turned in the direction of the crowd, which did not part the way it used to do, but rather, carried me along until I was moving out the front doors into the daylight once more. When I climbed into the Jeep, my uncle was waiting for me. He had rolled down his sleeves so I could see only a hint of his tattoos, not that I minded them. “All set?” he asked.

  “All set.”

  We managed to beat the buses and pull onto the main road ahead of the traffic. Howie asked if I wanted to go by the old house or maybe go visit Dereck at the garage, which was something we sometimes did. But I told him that maybe we could skip those things for today. Instead, we turned up the radio and just drove for a while, as I leaned back and felt the sun on my face. Sometimes, when we were together, I glanced over and glimpsed my father in his resemblance. Whenever that happened, my mind flashed on the morning I went down to the basement to find Abigail gone and my father cleaning up the chaos with a strained look on his face. Why had she decided to go against our plan and leave during the night, stopping at Father Coffey’s house on the way? And when my father discovered her gone, did he decide right then and there to make it look as though she had left on account of those things in our basement, arranging the scene just so in order to support that story? And did that wrench wrapped in a towel in his nightstand have something to do with those horses and the way they were broken? Some answers, I still did not know and supposed I never would. Mostly, I found myself wondering if he really did send Rose away because of his beliefs or if it was simply convenient once she caught on to what he was doing.

  When all that becomes too much to think about, I turn to my journal still. There was only a handful of empty pages left when I arrived at Kev and Bev’s, and I’ve since filled them with those things I wonder about, hoping the answers might be made clear. Just last night, in fact, I realized I had come to the final page. Instead of putting down any more questions, I decided to write about something else instead. This is what I wrote:

  Sometimes at night, when it is dark inside my room, I get down on my knees to pray. First, I pray for my sister. And then I pray for my parents’ souls. Whenever I do that, I feel something change in the air around me. It is more than their memory returning; it feels like their spirits. Despite all the things that haunted my mother and father during their time in this world, despite the mistakes they made too, the feeling of having them close brings me comfort somehow.

  When I am finished praying and get into bed and close my eyes, I picture my father. Only not the person I knew. Instead, I conjure him as a young boy standing in the dark of that theater, watching shadows dance around him, having no idea about the truth of what they were and how they would change the course of his life.

  And then I think of my mother beside me, hair fanned all around on the pillow the way it had been that night in our motel room so long ago. If I keep my eyes closed, I feel her there again. I hear her breath, hear her voice telling me, “Each of us is born into this life with a light inside of us . . . What’s most important is to never let that light go out, because when you do, it means you’ve lost yourself to the darkness. It means you’ve lost your hope. And hope is what makes this world a beautiful place. Do you understand what I am trying to say?”

  I think about those words a lot, and I think about their spirits too.

  If you believe in those sorts of things.

  I do and I don’t believe.

  But mostly—mostly, mostly—I do.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank three amazing women in my life who make everything happen: My talented, insightful, and patient editor, Kate Nintzel, read endless drafts and helped to shape this story and keep it moving. My incredible literary agent, Joanna Pulcini, offered inspiration and devoted countless hours discussing these characters and figuring out their world. And Sharyn Rosenblum, my friend and book publicist, brings boundless energy and so much fun to our work together.

  Also at HarperCollins, I am enormously grateful to Liate Stehlik, Michael Morrison, Lynn Grady, Virginia Stanley, Kayleigh George, Annie Mazes, Tavia Kowalchuk, Carla Parker, Beth Silfin, Andrea Molitor, Laurie McGee, Kim Chocolaad, Caitlin McCaskey, Erin Simpson, Jennifer Civiletto, and Margaux Weisman.

  I am indebted to the Corporation of Yaddo, where I began writing this story in earnest while living in an old Tudor in the woods not unlike Sylvie’s old Tudor in the woods. In particular, Elaina Richardson, Candace Wait, and Jonathan Santlofer helped immensely with my two generous residencies there.

  Also tremendously helpful were homicide detective Dennis Harris of the Boston Police Department and Cory Flashner, the assistant district attorney of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, who sat with me in an interview room at the station and answered my endless “what if?” questions. Plus, Ed McCarthy answered all my questions about how certain things might happen in an old theater.

  The careful responses and encouragement from my early readers were invaluable: Stacy Sheehan, Elizabeth Barnes, Carolyn Marino, Jennifer Pooley, Ken Salikoff, Katherine Hennes, and Jessica Knoll.

  On the film and foreign fronts, I am indebted to Matthew Snyder and Whitney Lee for all they do on behalf of my books. At Cosmo, I’m thankful to current Editor-in-Chief Joanna Coles. I also had the great fortune to work side by side with Cosmo’s previous longtime Editor-in-Chief, the one and only Kate White, and I owe her a huge thanks.

  And then there’s the people I’m just lucky to have in my life: Susan Segrest, Amy Chiaro, Betty Kelly, Michele Promaulayko, Abigail Greene, Isabel Burton, Amy Salit, Colleen Curtis, Cheryl (Cherry) Tan and Nicholas (Butter) Boggs, Ross Katz, Fred Berger, Kate Billman, Carol Story, Wade Lucas, Jamie Brickhouse, Esther Crain, Blake Ellison, Glenn Callahan, Boo Wittnebert, Brenda Tucker, Lucy (Lulu) Puls, Jeremy Coleman, Oscar (Oscy Pants) Gonzalez, Danielle Atkin, Adriana Trigiani, Hilary Black, Matthew Carrigan, Dean and Denise Shoukas, Bob Sertner, Alan Poul, Zoe Ruderman, Andrea Lavinthal, Ashley Womble, Christie Griffin, Dan Radovich, Diane Les Becquets, Jan Bronson, Ruth Calia Stives, Michael Taeckens, Kristin Matthews, Bethane Patrick, and David (Doo Doo) Vendette.

  Finally, I’m always grateful to my family: Mom, Dad, Keri, Ray, Tony, Joyce, Mario, Birute, Paul, Beth, Christian, Yanna, and most especially, Thomas Caruso.

  About the Author

  JOHN SEARLES is the author of the national bestsellers Boy Still Missing and Strange but True. He frequently appears as a book critic on NBC’s Today show and CBS’s The Early Show. He is the Editor-at-Large of Cosmopolitan. His essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other national newspapers and magazines. He lives in New York City and can be found on Facebook and also on Twitter @searlesbooks.

  www.john-searles.com

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  Also by John Searles

  Boy Still Missing

  Strange But True

  Credits

  Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  Cover photograph © by Jennifer Short/Trevillion Images

  Copyright

  “Little Things” from The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds, copyright © 1987 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc., for permission.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  HELP FOR THE HAUNTED. Copyright © 2013 by John Searles. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-b
ook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-06-077963-4

  Epub Edition SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780062199430

  Version 09062013

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