Help for the Haunted(125)
“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.”