Help for the Haunted: A Novel Read online

  “Public toilets give me the skeeves. I’ll go at home if I don’t wet myself first.”

  My mood had shifted by then, same as it did whenever I thought about Rummel’s questions. And even though I wanted to get dressed and walk out of the store, I needed new clothes so I kept trying them on. Each outfit looked worse than the next, until finally I dressed in the capris and tank I wore to the mall and stepped out of the booth.

  “Where are you going?” my sister asked.

  “To pick out my own stuff.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Rose didn’t offer up an answer right away so I turned in the direction of the Junior Miss department, figuring the dress on that mannequin deserved a second look.

  “Because I need to watch our budget, that’s why,” she blurted.

  I knew we didn’t have much money, not even when our parents were alive. People didn’t pay well for the services they provided. They wrote letters begging for help and only occasionally enclosed a check to cover gas or airline tickets. Or they showed up on our doorstep with a glazed look in their eyes, offering promises to undo the debt later if only my parents could make all that had gone wrong in their lives right again—there, too, money rarely materialized. Instead, we relied on income from my parents’ lectures to support us. Once Sam Heekin’s book was published, however, that income dried up. Still, I’d seen my sister blow plenty on things we couldn’t afford, namely her truck, purchased with insurance money and the sale of our parents’ Datsun after the police released it from impound. When I turned around and reminded her of that, she broke into an all-out fit, her voice pitching higher and higher until she yelled, “Whether you like it or not, Sylvie, I’m your legal guardian now!”

  With that, she walked out of the store.

  Whenever that phrase passed her lips it caused some part of me to fold in on itself. I remembered, of course, the lawyers, my parents’ nonexistent will, the endless paperwork and court appointments, Norman’s visits and now Cora’s. I remembered, too, the afternoon Uncle Howie had been located somewhere near his apartment in Tampa, days after that night at the church. The way he came around, announcing his intention to take care of us, and the way that ended when Rose and the attorneys raised the issues of his DUIs, a drug arrest, and his lack of any consistent history of involvement in our lives. And yet, the knowledge of how our situation came to be did nothing to keep that feeling away. I stared down at the flat red carpet in JCPenney’s while customers who had been watching our feud slowly returned to their shopping.

  “Honey,” a passing clerk said, “are you okay?”

  I looked up at the Can I help you? pin stuck to her enormous bosom but did not make eye contact. Instead, I just nodded before heading out to the parking lot. I couldn’t find the truck at first, and I wandered the rows of vehicles, certain Rose had left without me. When I finally did spot it, there was no sign of her inside. The heat of the passenger door warmed my back as I waited. For a place teeming with cars, it seemed strange that so few people were around. In the distance, a woman strapped a wailing baby in a car seat. Farther away, a man in a green uniform arranged bags in his trunk. Other than that, it was just me out there until I heard keys rattle nearby. I turned to see Rose coming my way, sipping a mammoth soda and devouring an oversized bun out of a carton.

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  “You wasted so much time, I had no choice but to use the scummy restroom. And then I got hungry.”

  She unlocked my door, went around to hers. As we climbed inside, Rose said she would leave it to me to explain the way I dress to Cora if the woman stopped babbling long enough to ask again. My sister started the truck, the monstrous engine vibrating the floor beneath my feet. “Besides, I barely notice what you wear when you walk out of the house anyway. More important: there’s nothing I like less than hovering over a toilet seat in some filthy restroom. So don’t make me do it again.”

  On the drive back to our faded Tudor hidden among the thinning cedars and birch groves at the end of Butter Lane, neither of us spoke. Rose kept the windows down and failed to signal when she changed lanes, but the radio remained off. As the last of the sunlight vanished, I stared at the dead leaves on the lawns we passed. One family had carved their jack-o’-lantern too soon and, with three days to go until Halloween, already the face was caving in on itself.

  As we turned into our sloping driveway, past the faded NO TRESPASSING! signs, I couldn’t help but glance at the basement window. A light used to remain on down there at all times. Considering the reasons my parents kept it on, I should not have longed for the sight of that yellowy glow seeping beneath the rhododendrons, but I couldn’t help myself. Not that it mattered. The bulb burned out sometime after their deaths, and neither of us had gone down to replace it.

  “Isn’t it funny?” I said. “All those times Mom and Dad went away and you fought for us not to have a nanny so we could be alone. Now, here we are. Just the two of us.”

  Rose cut the engine. As we listened to the faint tip-tap beneath the hood, she untangled her hair, and I waited for that vibrating sensation to leave my feet.

  “Like that time with Dot,” I began.

  “Why do you have to talk about that stuff?”

  “I just—”

  “I don’t want to think about the past anymore, Sylvie. Mom and Dad chose their lives and beliefs and career. And look what happened. I know I should never have made that call. Believe me, I wouldn’t have if I’d had any idea what would come of it. But Albert Lynch would have found a way to get to them anyway. Or if not him, some other freak. So I don’t think it’s good for either of us to go on about what used to be anymore. Once we get through the trial come spring, we have to leave it behind.”

  As she spoke, I stayed quiet, watching her undo the snarls in her hair.

  “Someday, Sylvie, when you finish school and we move away from this house and live our separate lives, we’re going to forget the one we lived here. I know it seems hard to believe, but one day it’ll be just a bunch of lost memories from a long time ago.”

  Shhhh . . .

  It had nothing to do with that sound; I heard her just fine. Yet I couldn’t see how we would ever be able to leave any of it behind. But what more was there to say? I reached for my father’s tote full of books, including the diary Boshoff had given me earlier that day. I opened the door and lowered my feet to the ground. That’s when I felt something soft beneath my flip-flops. Part of me knew what it was right away. Still, the sensation made me gasp.

  “What now?” Rose asked.

  My silence did nothing to keep her from coming around to the other side of the truck. By then I’d stepped off the thing and placed the tote on the ground. We stood in our shadowy driveway, staring down at its splayed body and wide white moon of a face. Those blank black eyes and that peculiar shade of red hair. This one was smaller than usual: the size of a possum, but flattened, as though it had been run over.

  With the tip of her boot, my sister flipped it facedown into the dirt. “Fuckers!” she yelled into the darkness surrounding our house. “You fuckers!” With each new outburst, she raked her hands over her hair until the staticky strays levitated around her head. I thought again of how she’d first razored it to the scalp more than a year before, mainly because some guy she liked had shaved his and wanted her to do the same. If Franky told you to jump off a bridge, would you? If Franky told you to rob a bank, would you? If Franky told you never to speak to your family again, would you? Those were the questions my parents asked, to which my sister responded, Yes!

  “Fuckers!” she yelled one last time before letting out a breath and kneeling in the dirt. Slowly, her hands reached out for the thing.

  “Don’t!” I said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Touch it.”

  Rose looked up at me. She may have had our mother’s name, but it was our father’s face I saw on her: his wide chin, his pronounced nose, his eyes, d
ark and squinty behind his smudged wire-rims. Though our father never spoke to me the way Rose did when she said, “It’s not going to do anything, you idiot.”

  “I know. But please. Just don’t.”

  My sister sighed. She stood and walked to the rusted shed at the edge of our property. I heard her rattling around before she returned with a shovel. It took maneuvering, but she slid the foam-stuffed body onto the end and carefully walked to the well we hadn’t used since the town of Dundalk installed city water. I followed and pushed the plywood covering off the top. Rose raised the shovel over the gaping black mouth and, with a flick of her wrists, dropped the doll inside.

  “It never ends,” my sister said, hurling the shovel into the darkness where her old rabbit cage once stood. “It never fucking ends.”

  “They’ll get bored,” I told her and pulled the plywood back over the hole, careful not to give myself a sliver. “They have to get bored.”

  Inside, our house was silent except for the hum of the fridge and the ticking of the antique clock that hung not far from the cross on the wall. I went to the kitchen with its peeling blue walls and ate my dinner: a cherry Popsicle, the best kind. All the while I slurped and felt my lips go numb, I stared at my mother’s thick book of wallpaper swatches on the table and thought about another conversation with Detective Rummel, the morning after the first, at the hospital.

  Rummel had slid a photo across the narrow table over my bed. “Do you know this man, Sylvie?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “He once was a friend of my— Well, not a friend. I guess he was what you’d call a client of my parents. His daughter, Abigail, was anyway. She was the one who needed them. Her father just brought her to us.”

  “Brought her to you?”

  “Yes. Albert Lynch wanted my parents’ help dealing with his daughter’s, well, problems.”

  Rummel tapped his thick finger on the photo. “Okay, then. We are going to want to know all about that. But right now, I need an answer in order to help you. Is this the man you saw inside the church the night of your parents’ deaths?”

  I thought of the cold air inside that small building after I pulled the door open, so cold it hurt to breathe. I thought of how dark it had been after the door clicked shut behind me, the only lights from the car outside, the beams muted through the stained-glass windows. More carefully, I stared down at the picture. Bald head. John Lennon glasses. Wispy mustache that looked like something a teenager, maybe Brian Waldrup, might grow.

  “Yes,” I told Rummel. “That’s who I saw.”

  When I finished eating, I tossed the Popsicle stick in the trash and headed upstairs. My sister had gone ahead of me, and a thin strip of light glowed beneath her door. No sound came from inside. As I got ready for sleep, I emptied my books from the tote and placed them on my desk until I pulled out the violet diary. Earlier that day, I had felt certain I would not bother, yet there I was searching for a pen. There I was turning to the first of so many empty pages as I sat on my bed. For a while, I did nothing but stare at the pink margins and lines, doing my best to conjure frivolous details from the life of that imagined girl. But she had gone silent, drowned out by the very different particulars of the life I was leading. At last, I clicked the pen and wrote the name DOT at the very top. But before I put down anything about the way the woman’s visit to our house led, in its own peculiar way, to greater troubles for my family, I found myself writing out Boshoff’s question: How would you describe yourself nooow? This was my answer:

  I am the only girl in school who dresses like it is June, even though it is October. Last year’s fall and winter sweaters and pants and skirts are hanging in my closet and folded in my drawers, exactly where my mother left them. But I cannot go near those things. Not because I am beginning to outgrow those clothes, but because putting them on would mean rearranging the things she left for me. Not that it matters since Rose really is my legal guardian now and, like she said at the mall, she barely notices what I wear, even if it’s a flimsy tank top, capris, and flip-flops, and even if the temperature is dropping by the day, and even though she should—

  My sister really should notice.

  Chapter 4

  Dot

  My parents always packed the same supplies. My father: an electromagnetic frequency meter, a motion sensor, thermometers, audio and video recorders, a high-resolution camera, ample rolls of film. My mother: a simple set of rosary beads, a well-worn King James Bible, pages dog-eared and highlighted in a rainbow of colors, and a solitary flashlight. As they prepared for their trip, Rose and I lingered by the front door in anticipation of the latest nanny’s arrival. How many times had I been disappointed? Yet there I stood, hoping for Mary Poppins to glide over the cedar trees. Instead, the nannies were all so bland they blurred in my mind—except for Dot, who arrived at our house when I was eleven and Rose fifteen, and who came to be the last nanny we ever had.

  I remember watching from the front steps as she shoved open the creaky door of her mud-splattered Yugo and climbed out. Dot had skinny arms and legs, but a bulging midsection, hugged tight by the elastic waistband of her yellow uniform. Instead of a suitcase, she pulled a plastic laundry basket from the backseat.

  “This one’s going to be an easy target,” Rose said as we watched the woman lumber up the walkway. “I almost feel bad for her.”

  Run! I wanted to yell. Get out before it’s too late!

  When she met us at the front steps, Rose skipped over any formal greeting and asked, “What’s with the bears?”

  “Bears?” Dot had a foamy mouth with permanent spittle in the corners of her chapped lips. Tiny bubbles washed over her crowded teeth. She glanced behind her then looked down at her matching shirt and pants, where pastel bears decorated the fabric. “Oh, these bears. It’s my uniform. I’m an LPN at the children’s hospital in Baltimore. I’m hoping it’ll turn into a full-time job. But right now, I’m just a substitute.”

  The geyser Dot produced pronouncing the word substitute kept me distracted until Rose said, “Well, this ain’t the children’s hospital. So climb back in your four-wheeled fuse-box and keep right on trucking.”

  “Seven-twelve, Rose!” my mother called, coming up behind us. She had developed a shorthand for the scripture she most often quoted to Rose—Matthew 7:12: “Do unto others as you would like done unto you.” Or, as my sister liked to translate, cut the crap and be nice.

  “I just came from the hospital where I work sometimes,” Dot informed my mother after they introduced themselves. “Sorry I didn’t change, but I worried I’d be late.”

  “Are you sure you want this lady bringing hospital germs into our house?” Rose asked my mother. “She could be carting along an army of bacteria for diseases like—” My sister looked at me. “Sylvie, name some weird diseases that might be contagious.”

  Normally, I would not have gone along with Rose’s behavior, but my desire to show off my smarts trumped all else. “Elephantiasis. Progeria. Hypertrichosis,” I rattled off. “Diptheria. Shigellosis. Leptospirosis.”

  My mother gave us a look and said more plainly, “Quit. Being. Rude.”

  “Rubella,” I let slip.

  “Sylvie!”

  “Sorry.”

  She took a breath, then turned back to Dot, who stepped into the house, carrying her laundry basket. Inside, I saw her wrinkled clothing, deodorant, a worn toothbrush, and a bloated copy of The Thorn Birds. “You can change in the bathroom down the hall,” my mother told her, “then I’ll show you around and go over the rules.”

  Dot set her basket on one of the wingback chairs. “Actually, if you don’t mind, I have to wash a few things. So I’ll keep these clothes on until my nightie is clean.”

  “Nightie?” my mother repeated.

  Dot smiled, her mouth foaming a little too. “Oh, don’t get the wrong idea, Mrs. Mason. It’s not one of those lacy Frederick’s of Hollywood getups I used to break out for my husband. It’s just a flanne
l nightgown any old lady would wear to bed. Thing is, my cat hopped up on the bed this morning and peed on it. I guess when she saw me filling her auto-feeder she realized I was skipping out for a few days. Got her revenge ahead of time. Anyway, I figured I’d wash it here.”

  “I see,” my mother said, glancing at her slim watch and probably wondering if she had enough time to call the service and inquire about another nanny.

  My father came clomping up the basement stairs then, carting the suitcase full of equipment and his tote filled with notepads where he recorded observations for lectures. In the hours before their trips, he grew serious and preoccupied—this time was no different. “The flight leaves in a few hours,” he told my mother. “We better get going.”

  Not long after, the two of them were waving and honking from the Datsun as they pulled out of the driveway. No sooner had they disappeared down Butter Lane than Dot asked, “So what’s on the docket, girls? Are you hungry?”

  Rose didn’t answer, but I shook my head.

  “Good. Because I had some Burger King on the way over so I’m stuffed. You can help me get started on my laundry. Oh, and I assume there’s a bathtub in the house.”

  “In my parents’ room,” I told her, “and one in the bathroom Rose and I share.”

  “Great. I need to soak these weary bones. This house has an awful chill to it. You’d never guess it’s May.”

  “It’s the spirits,” Rose told her.

  “Pardon?” Dot wiped the corners of her mouth with her thumb and index finger.

  “The spirits,” Rose repeated. “You know what my parents do for a living, right?”

  “Well, I— The woman at the service warned me it was unusual. But I get all kinds. Money’s money. I told her I didn’t want to know the details. I’m a holy woman—”

  “A holy woman who wears sheer nighties?” Rose said.

  Seven-twelve, I thought. Seven-twelve.

  “I never said sheer. I said lacy. And that was a long time ago, for my husband, Roy, on special occasions. Before he passed. I don’t parade around like some flooz—”