Help for the Haunted (42 page)

Abigail listened. She
smiled. She closed her eyes.

“Then what?” Lynch asked.

“I was about to ask you the same thing. After you
made the deal with my sister and drove to church, what happened next?”

Lynch rubbed his face, glancing up at the clock.
Eight minutes before our visit would come to an end.

“Stop wasting time,” I told him.

“I'm not wasting time!” he burst out. “You come
here! You demand this story I've told a thousand times. You tease me with this
information about my daughter! So I need a minute to clear my head!”

Rummel's heavy steps moved toward the table, but I
held up a hand and they stopped, then retreated. “Okay, then,” I said to Lynch.
“I understand. Take a minute. But we haven't got long.”

The man blew out a breath and rubbed his hands over
his bald scalp. “I parked on the street behind the church. Your parents knew my
van by then, so I figured if they caught sight of it, they would turn right
around and leave. Your sister told me the key was kept in the window boxes at
the church, a detail she recalled from your father's days as a deacon. Sure
enough, there it was. I let myself in.”

“And you brought your gun along—the one I saw the
day you showed up at the end of our street?”

“Yes. But it was just to scare them. I promise you
that was my only plan. I wanted the truth from your father and mother, instead
of the silent treatment I'd been getting and the lies before that. My intention
was to turn on the lights inside the church, but I couldn't find the switch. All
the better, I decided in the end, since the darkness might give me an advantage.
I waited up front in one of the pews near the altar until I saw the headlights
of your car pull into the snowy parking lot outside.”

He stopped a moment, and although some part of me
wanted to prod him to keep going, I knew better. Besides, my mind flashed on the
three of us turning into the parking lot of that church, of my father getting
out and walking through the snow toward the red doors before disappearing
inside, of me asking my mother, “Do you ever feel afraid?”

“I waited there,” Lynch said at last, “bracing
myself until the door opened and I heard your father call into the darkness,
‘Rose?'

“ ‘No,' I told him. ‘It's me.'

“ ‘Who?' he asked in a confused voice. And then he
took a few steps closer into the darkness and said,
‘Albert?
I don't understand. What are you doing here?'

“ ‘I came to get answers about my daughter,' I told
him. ‘Once and for all.'

“Your father turned to go then, but I raced after
him, tugging on his coat and pulling that pistol from my pocket, making sure he
saw the flash of silver in the dim lights of your car through the stained-glass
windows. ‘You're not going anywhere,' I told him.”

Lynch leaned back from the table. “There,” he said.
“Your turn.”

This time, I didn't even look up at the clock. “I
finished Abigail's night-time ritual, then headed up to my bedroom and fell
asleep. In the morning, I walked into the kitchen and heard my parents' voices
in the basement, so I went down the stairs again. That's when they told me she
was gone. Only the basement looked nothing like it had the night before.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everything was strewn about. The things from my
parents' work—a doll we kept in a cage was on the floor. A hatchet too. So many
rings and trinkets and leftovers from their trips were scattered everywhere. It
looked like—” I stopped, feeling an ache in my chest as I remembered the
strained look on my father's face when he knelt on the floor to pick it all up.
Then later as he wrote out that sign—
DO NOT OPEN UNDER
ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!
—and attached it to the front of the doll's
cage.

“Like what?” Lynch prodded.

“Like someone had done battle with a demon down
there. At least that's what my father suggested.”

“Uh-uh, Sylvie. You told me you weren't going to
make the same claims as your father.”

“That's not what I'm telling you,” I said, thinking
now of Heekin's book and the tapes from the interviews and the things Howie told
me too. “I think my father wanted it to seem that way.”

“Why?” Lynch said.

“It was one more story to tell. One more way to
make people believe him.”

“And what do you believe, Sylvie?”

“For a long time,” I began, but stopped, thinking
of all those words I'd put down in the pages of that journal, all the
conversations I'd had over the last few days, the way certain details about my
parents began to sift from the mess of our lives so that I began to see them
differently than before. Again, I said, “For a long time, I wouldn't let myself
think so many things. But now, well, I have come to believe that, for one,
Abigail did plan to leave that night. That she only told me about her idea to
slip out of the grocery store to put me off for a while. Who knows? Maybe she
worried I'd change my mind during the night. Anyway, I think that after I left
she opened that sliding glass door and stepped out into the night. And then, the
next morning, as we all stood in the basement looking around at the chaos, we
heard the knocking coming from upstairs.”

“Knocking?” Lynch said.

“Yes,” I told him. “It was you. You had come for
your daughter.”

“But what—”

“The church,” I said, cutting him off.

Just then, the guard announced, “Time's up.” From
somewhere in the prison came a loud buzzing sound. I could hear the rumble of
footsteps outside the walls of that room where we sat.

“The church!” I said. “Finish telling me about the
church!”

The guard came up behind Lynch and put his hand on
the man's arm, all but lifting him from the chair. When he was standing, Albert
leaned forward and told me, “Your father gave me the same excuse he did that day
I showed up knocking on your door. Demons had driven her away. He apologized.
Oh, believe me, he apologized. I told him I didn't buy it. I had wanted to come
earlier in the summer, but every time I called, he insisted that he and your
mother wanted—
needed
—to keep Abigail longer in order
to help her. And I just let him fleece me, sending money and apparently giving
him one more story to tell in his lectures.”

“The church,” I said again. “Stick to the
church.”

“He said all the same things that night, but I
still didn't believe him. And then your mother came inside. Your mother—she was
different, Sylvie. You should know that much by now. Maybe she and your father
were a team, but they were not the same. Somehow, and I'll never know exactly
how, she managed to calm me down. She sat with me in a pew. She prayed with me
while your father lingered in the shadows by the altar. And then I saw the
person I had become: a man wielding a gun, making idle threats, looking for his
daughter who had never wanted to be with him in the first place.”

“So what did you do?”

“I tossed down my gun and fled the church through
the front doors. I got in my van and drove toward the highway, faster than I
should have in the snow. And then I stopped at that Texaco, where I saw that old
man in the restroom and helped rescue his wife's dogs out in the parking lot.
That's the truth, Sylvie. So help me, that's the truth.”

As the guard pulled him back toward that door where
he had entered, toward the sound of all those footsteps, I sat watching,
thinking of that song my mother used to hum and trying my best to sense the
truth inside him the way she believed I could. The moment the door clanged shut,
Rummel and I were left in a vacuum of quiet. He approached and put his hand on
my shoulder again. I stared down at his heavy black shoes a moment before
getting up. The two of us were led by another guard back the way we came,
through the series of doors and gates, until we were outside in the car.

As we drove away, I stared at all the barbed wire
and thought of Dereck telling me to keep my fingers off the fence that first day
we met in the field. For all I knew, he was slaughtering turkeys at that very
moment, since Thanksgiving was only a few days away now.

“Are you okay?” the detective asked.

“Yes,” I told him.

“You know, Sylvie, when you work long enough doing
what I do, you begin to develop a sixth sense about people and whether or not
they are guilty. But I've learned that no matter my feelings, I have to put them
aside and look at the evidence and listen to the testimony. So that conversation
in there, you shouldn't let it sway you too much one way or another. The facts
are the facts.”

“I understand,” I said. And then at last I told
him, “But I didn't see Mr. Lynch that night in the church.”

The car wheels spinning on the pavement. The wind
whistling through Rummel's partially opened window. The crackling static of his
police radio. Those were the only sounds for some time. “Are you sure?” the
detective asked finally.

“I'm sure,” I said. “So what now?”

“We need to talk to Louise Hock. Like I told you,
Lynch will be released. Since it's gotten so late in the day, all that's going
to have to happen tomorrow. If you like, I can pick you up myself first thing in
the morning.”

That was the plan we made. And when he dropped me
off at home, my gaze went to the empty front step. Emily Sanino was likely all
done with those gifts, for a while anyway. Rose's truck was gone, and that
yellow glow from the basement window shone even in the daylight.

Inside, I went to my parents' room where the red
light on the answering machine was blinking away. I ignored it for the time
being and went about finding my father's old cassette player tucked in his
nightstand with an empty prescription container, and oddly, a wrench wrapped in
a towel. I put that aside and, from my pocket, pulled the cassette tape that had
been in Rummel's car. Since it was evidence, I figured he wouldn't let me keep
it overnight. That's why I'd slipped it from the recorder when he let me back in
the car at the prison and went around to the other side. Now, I popped in the
tape and pressed Play. For a moment, there was nothing but static, and I thought
perhaps this side of the tape had become warped after so long. But just as I was
about to hit Fast Forward, a voice came alive in the room. Not my father's, but
Heekin's. I turned the volume as loud as it could go.

HEEKIN
:  As I've been writing the book, I've grown
increasingly frustrated with some discrepancies in your narrative.

MY
FATHER
:  (woozy-voiced) You are beginning to sound like my
brother and some of our other critics. I thought you had become a friend,
Sam.

HEEKIN
:  I am a friend. But I am also trying to do a job here.
My job is to report the truth.

MY
FATHER
:  The truth is that a lot of the people who come to us
are lost causes.

HEEKIN
:  Lost causes?

MY
FATHER
:  Yes. I guess you could even say they're not all there.
Crazy even. You know how I first started? By placing an ad in the back of a
newspaper. “Help for the Haunted” it read then offered our services. Tell me,
what sort of sane person answers an ad like that?

HEEKIN
:  So what are you saying?

MY
FATHER
:  I'm saying write the book, make it appropriately scary
and you'll have done your job. That's what people want, isn't it?

Heekin cleared his throat, and I had the sense this
conversation had gone in a direction that left him flustered. He rambled and
sputtered the way he did when he was nervous until there was a loud click and
the tape went silent. And then, a moment later:

HEEKIN
:  Can I ask about your children?

MY
FATHER
:  Sure.

MY
MOTHER
:  I'd rather you not.

MY
FATHER
:  My wife likes to keep our work and home life
separate.

HEEKIN
:  And you don't?

MY
FATHER
:  These things have a way of melding. Besides, I said
you could ask, I did not say we would answer.

HEEKIN
:  Well, then. Allow me to try. What do your daughters
make of what you two do?

MY
FATHER
:  We don't talk too much about it.

His voice sounded clear, not at all woozy, and I
realized the tape had cut to another conversation from some other time when my
mother was present.

HEEKIN
:  And do you find, Mrs. Mason, that either of your
daughters shares your gift?

MY MOTHER
: I
do, but let's leave it at that.

HEEKIN
:  So they are accepting?

MY
FATHER
:  As much as any children are accepting of their
parents. (Laugh) 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. It is not easy with all the immorality out
there. Take our daughter, Rose—

MY
MOTHER
:  That's enough, Sylvester. We don't need to go into
that.

MY
FATHER
:  (after a pause) My wife is right. See how much I need
her to keep me in line? I guess I'll just say we've had more than our share of
trouble with Rose. My wife and I have done a lot of praying that she will come
around to our values again.

HEEKIN
:  Values?