Help for the Haunted(113)

Behind us, the doors of the Datsun opened. Immediately, Abigail retreated back to the shore. I didn’t move fast enough, though, and my mother arrived at the water’s edge to find me ankle-deep. She glanced at Abigail’s feet, slick with water, then looked at her slim watch and said, “Now that we’re here, your father and I agreed you might as well take a dip. It’ll help you sleep tonight at least. So go in with your clothes on if you like. You’ve got ten minutes. And let’s hope we don’t get arrested or find out this place has become a toxic waste site.”

If Rose had been with us she would have let out a loud Wooohooo! Abigail simply waded in again, deeper this time. When the water reached the hem of her shorts, she turned to my mother, my father too, who had just arrived at the water’s edge, looking shaken. Neither protested, so she sucked in a breath and slipped under.

In the silence that followed, the three of us stood waiting and waiting for her to emerge. Abigail seemed strange enough that she might have been capable of sprouting gills and fins, capable of swimming down to some watery underworld, or out into the shadows of those trees and the starry sky beyond. At last, however, her head emerged, small and turtlelike, far out in the pond. Since we didn’t have much time, I waded up to my shorts too, trying not to think of creatures beneath the surface as I slipped under as well. When I came up again—sooner than Abigail, closer to the shore—I saw that she had swum the entire way to the reedy area with the half-sunken dock. Rather than follow, I floated on my back and studied the stars dotting the sky.

If I kept my splashing to a minimum, it was possible to hear my parents. My mother took a seat on a slanted bench not far from the water’s edge and my father stood next to her. “We’ve received requests for lectures that pay more than ever,” he was saying. “Not to mention all the places people want us to investigate. There’s an old estate in New Zealand that a widow refused to leave after her husband died. Now she’s deceased as well, and people there are reporting some pretty bizarre occurrences.”

To all of this, my mother said only, “New Zealand.”

“That’s right. They’ll fly us there. All expenses paid.”

“What about the girls?”

“They’ll fly Sylvie too. And Abigail if that’s what we want. We hold the cards now, my dear. How’s that for a change? No more sharing the stage with that phony Dragomir Albescu and his fingers full of fake jewelry. No more humiliating myself at Fright Fest just to make a—”

“Abigail is not our daughter, Sylvester.”

“Excuse me?”

“When I asked about the girls, I was talking about our daughters. You remember who they are, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” my father said, clearly exasperated and offended too.

“Well, you didn’t mention Rose coming on this trip of yours.”

“First of all, it’s not my trip, it’s our trip. And who do you think worked so hard at finding a way to help Rose? Me. But since we’d have to go to New Zealand soon, I assumed she wouldn’t be able to join us.”

“Then I won’t be either, because I don’t feel comfortable traveling so far from home with her at that . . . that place. Never mind taking a trip with someone else’s daughter. So we’ll just have to decline or put it off until things are back to normal.”

“Okay, then,” my father said. “Okay. Okay.” I watched him walk to the edge of the bench. He seemed to be looking for some way to sit beside her, but it was too crooked for that. At last, he gave up and remained standing, telling her, “I understand what you’re saying. Besides, we’ve got other offers closer to home. And come fall, Sam’s book will be out. By then, we’ll be even more in demand. That night I saw him a few weeks back, he told me his publisher has already been getting quite a bit of interest from the media.”

I looked to my mother on that bench—bouncing her legs, biting her lip—responding only with, “Ninety days.”

“Pardon?”

“That rule at Saint Julia’s. It just seems like an awfully long time.”

“Oh, yes. That. Well, it’ll go by in a blink. You’ll see.”

“Maybe so. But I’d at least like a phone call to—”

“To what? Fight the same old fights with her?”

“To hear her voice. To know she’s okay.”

“She’s fine. She’s better than fine, she’s improving. We’re going to get her back good as new.”

After that, they grew quiet. I must have drifted, because I found myself in a particularly cold patch of water. It seemed to move through me the way my father said spirits do, with an unmistakable chill. I swam away, making a show of splashing about so they did not suspect me of eavesdropping. Across the pond, Abigail perched on that half-sunken dock, a mermaid at the bow of a doomed ship, pale arms and face bathed in the moonlight, hair curly once more from the water. She stared back at me, back at my parents too. From that distance, I doubted she could possibly hear them. Still, the way she looked so intently left me wondering if their voices carried across the water.

“Eventually, the summer will end,” my mother was saying as I went still in the water once more. “School will start up. Sylvie will be in eighth grade. We could get Rose enrolled in a few classes at a local college. Come fall, what I’d like most is for all our lives to be back on track. Which means . . .”