Help for the Haunted(104)

I shook my head.

“Okay, then. Why don’t you come inside? But you can’t stay long. My husband will be back soon.”

I followed her around the side of the house to the back door. The wood-paneled kitchen smelled of garlic and stewed tomatoes, whatever it was she had cooked for dinner. The smell caused my stomach to grumble, since the last thing I’d eaten was that sandwich Heekin bought me from the deli in Philly.

I ignored my hunger and looked at the speckled white countertops scrubbed clean, a bright blue mixing bowl on top, a bag of flour, an eggbeater, and her simple black purse with a lone gold buckle. “I was going to bake something,” she explained. “It calms my nerves. But I realized I didn’t have any eggs. I went out to the car to go to the store. That’s when I saw you.”

“Were you baking for us?”

“Us?”

“You know, more of the things you leave at our house?”

She shook her head. “Not tonight. I left a cake at your house earlier.”

I wondered if Rose had found the cake on our stoop on her way to Dial U.S.A. and tossed it in the trash just like all the rest.

Emily Sanino returned the mixing bowl to a cabinet, the flour and milk to the fridge. I peeked down the hall to the living room. I saw a rocker, like my mother’s. Just beyond, I noticed a row of framed pictures on a side table, a cluster of trophies with little gold figures on top.

“You know,” I told her as she moved about the kitchen, “I’m sorry to say but nobody eats the things you leave for us.”

She had swung open the door to the refrigerator but turned back to look at me, visibly perplexed. “And why not?”

“My sister and I have no idea who’s leaving it.”

Emily Sanino considered that a moment. I had the sense that she was debating something in her mind, before closing the fridge and saying simply, “I see.”

“Why do you leave it? I mean, if you don’t know us.”

“You’re right. I don’t know you.” She stood by the table now, staring straight at me and speaking in a stiff voice, as though choosing her words carefully. “I only met your sister a handful of times. Still, I have enormous sympathy for you girls, considering what you’ve both been through.”

“Did you know my mother and father? Were you someone who came to them in need of their help?”

She ran her hands over her plain dress. “You know what? Let’s go into the living room. That way I can listen for my husband’s patrol car. We have to make sure he doesn’t find you here when he gets back.”

I considered telling her that I’d spoken to him outside, but I kept it to myself; the last thing I wanted was to distract her when we had so little time together. In the living room, I went to that side table and looked at the trophies, five in all. On top of each, the miniature gold figure—running, jumping, swinging—was a girl. The framed photos showed a dark-haired toddler wearing a soft pink dress, the same girl a few years older at the beach in a bright bathing suit, hair long and wet, sand stuck to her elbows. In the next frame she was a lanky adolescent, mouth full of braces, wearing a T-shirt that said GOD’S LOVE SUMMER CAMP. Finally, I saw the girl had grown into her teens. She had wide shoulders and womanly breasts, her hair looked darker and shorter.

“That’s my daughter,” Emily volunteered when she saw me looking.

I glanced at the staircase on the far side of the room, remembering the lights I’d seen on the second floor when I stood out front earlier. She took a seat on a recliner. I went to the rocker and sat too. “Is she here?”

“No. I’m afraid not.”

I saw something pass over her face. Sadness, but something more that left me with a hunch about where this was going. Like the Entwistles, the Saninos must have reached out to my parents for help. There seemed so much to say, but neither of us spoke for a long moment, and then without any prompting from me, she simply began.

“We wanted more children, an entire brood, but my husband and I, well, we started late. So we were just grateful for the blessing of her. She got all the attention. She had better clothes than we did. She got sent away to summer camp. There were endless sleepovers and birthday parties.”

“It seems like a good way to grow up,” I told her.

“It was. But raising a child holds no guarantees. You can follow all the right steps, do all the right things, and still something can go wrong— Actually, no. That’s a word my husband would use. I won’t say wrong anymore, I’ll say differently than planned. That’s what happened to my daughter when she reached her teens.”

I remembered Albert Lynch, standing at the end of our lane, warning us that Abigail could seem perfectly normal until suddenly everything changed. I remembered the girls I’d read about in that “history” book years before too.

“As a mother, you think you know your child. You brought her into the world, after all. You changed her diapers and picked her up when she cried. You read her stories each night before bed and slipped coins under her pillow so she believed in the Tooth Fairy. But then, despite all that love and effort, years go by and one day she turns sullen. She keeps secrets. She doesn’t want to be near you. I used to ask her what was wrong, but she always told me the same thing: I wouldn’t understand.

“Then her grades dropped. She began skipping school. She didn’t want to be with her old friends anymore. Despite all that, she managed to graduate. We sent her off to a good Christian college in Massachusetts. We thought the freedom of being away from home would help. But after a month, we received a call from the dean informing us that she had stopped attending classes. Worse still, her behavior had become erratic. She was caught breaking into someone’s dorm. When the R.A. reported her, she threatened the girl with a knife.” Emily stopped and looked toward the window, listening. When there was no sound, she smoothed her hands over her dress and told me, “I don’t think she would have done the things she did if my husband had not been so hard on her.”