Help for the Haunted(119)
Days. Weeks. Months. It might have taken that long to arrange a meeting with an inmate on the other side of that fence. But the morning after I found those candles in the trash, I drove in silence with my sister to the police station. The two of us had barely spoken since that fight in her truck over the money from Dial U.S.A., and our silence had become so palpable it felt as though we were both holding our breath, daring the other to let it out first. Once they separated us—Rose on that bench in the hall, me inside that achingly familiar interview room—Rummel and Louise asked if I was prepared to either recant or uphold my account of the evening last winter.
And that’s when I told them I wanted to see Albert Lynch. I refused to say anything more or even see my sister again until they made arrangements. Louise stepped out into the hallway to speak to Rose about the need for her permission, since I was a minor after all, and she was my legal guardian. While waiting, I asked Rummel about those interview tapes Heekin had told me about. For all the trouble I had given him, the detective maintained his kindness toward me. In an almost tender voice, he said that if I thought the tapes might help somehow, I was welcome to give them a listen. He brought a cassette player into the room, and my father’s interviews with the reporter filled the air around me. At different points on the recordings, Heekin’s faltering voice could not be heard, so it was just my father speaking between the occasional pause.
By midafternoon, Rummel poked his head into the room to inform me that the prison had okayed the visit and that Rose had begrudgingly acquiesced and granted permission too. The only thing we were waiting for was to find out if Lynch himself would agree to see me.
A short while later, word came that he did.
Nearly five hours after I entered the station, I walked out, carrying the one cassette I had yet to play. In the hallway, Rummel and I passed my sister on that bench, flipping through the same old safety brochures. It startled me to see her, since I assumed she had given up and gone home by then.
“Sylvie,” she said when she laid eyes on me.
Head down, I kept walking. Some part of me felt the urge to take the detective’s hand for comfort. Instead, I squeezed the cassette harder, bracing myself for this moment with Rose, bracing myself for the trip to the prison that lay ahead.
“Sylvie!” She tossed those brochures on the floor and stood. “I’m talking to you!”
“I’m just going to see him,” I told her over the rising shhhh.
“Why?”
Absolute certainty—that was why. I wanted to be sure this time that what I believed was the truth. I wanted to be right for Detective Rummel and Louise. I wanted to be right for my mother and father. I wanted to be right for me too.
But I did not explain that to Rose. Instead, I just kept walking as she stood there in the hall calling after me.
SUSSEX COUNTY CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION—I stared at the sign as we drove through a series of gates at the prison. That very first night I opened my eyes to see Rummel at my bedside in the hospital, the man had seemed strong and impenetrable, a statue come to life. But as he spoke to the guards at the gates, the guards at the front doors, and still more guards in the maze inside that rambling brick compound, the detective seemed impossibly human. Something in his heavy footsteps, his quick breaths and occasional sighs, left me with the feeling that Rummel was nervous about this visit too.
Beforehand, we had agreed that he would stay with me the entire time, so when yet another guard led us to a room full of tables and told me to take a seat, the detective lingered nearby. That long, rectangular table where I sat waiting for Lynch was not unlike the ones in the school cafeteria. Thinking of school led me to think of Boshoff and the diary he had given me. I hadn’t been able to find it the night before, and now my only hope was that it was lost somewhere in the bowels of Howie’s theater, like so many dropped possessions of the people who came before me, only never to be found.
I kept thinking about the diary, and all I had written inside, until a door opened across the room, different from the one Rummel and I had come through. I looked up to see Albert Lynch being escorted in by another guard. Slowly, they walked to the table, Lynch in an orange jumpsuit, his gaze on the floor instead of me. The guard pulled back the chair, legs scraping the floor, and Lynch flopped into the seat. “Thirty,” the guard said, pointing to the large clock on the wall.