Help for the Haunted(130)
“Rose, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But we’ve got to get—”
“Those are the words from that book you used to underline. Jane Eyre. I remember it, because it’s how I felt about Franky. And anyway, we planned to get out of there and save money and find some way to live a normal life together in time. But when I got home, I’d already been replaced by Abigail. So I gave up trying. And the fights with Mom and Dad—Dad, in particular—got worse. And so one night I’m out. And who do I run into but Albert Lynch?”
“I know,” I told her. “You don’t have to say. We need to get you help. And I told you, I figured it all out.”
“No, you didn’t!” she screamed. “Because I bet you didn’t figure out the way I felt in all of this, did you?”
The rage, the sadness—those things in her voice frightened me into silence.
“Did you?” she screamed.
I shook my head.
“Fifty bucks to talk to Mom and Dad. That’s what he offered me. And happily, I arranged it. But Franky knew what I was up to. She was the one with me at the bar, after all. Since I wasn’t of age, she kept sneaking in and getting us drinks then bringing them out to the car. After I made the call to Mom and Dad, she gave me some bullshit excuse that she wanted to go back to a friend’s house where she’d been staying ever since we left Saint Julia’s. So I let her go. Only Franky didn’t go to her friend’s. She went to see them at the church too.”
Rose stopped. For a moment, I caught us both looking around that basement, the strange world my parents had created down there. That hatchet on the wall. The old branch with what looked like a howling face in the bark. The dozens of trinkets and objects hanging from the ceiling and filling the shelves. Those dusty old books about demons. And, of course, Penny in the old rabbit cage, smiling that placid smile.
DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!
The sign was still there just the same.
“You know what can make a person possessed, Sylvie? It’s not Satan or Lucifer or any of that nonsense. Do you know what it is?”
“What?” I asked her, desperate to let her finish so I could get help.
“Love and hate. Greed. Revenge. Pride. Those things turned Dad into his own demon. He knew the things he was doing were dishonest. Mom’s gift wasn’t powerful or controllable enough for him. He needed something greater to get the attention he craved. He needed all of us to support his stories, so he set out to make us believers too.”
Famous? I remembered the way my father shimmied against that nozzle, rain sopping his hair, dripping from his lashes as he said, Well, now that you mention it, I suppose it would be nice to show them.
“And so, when those people stayed here in the basement, he messed with them. Putting all kinds of pills he had access to in their food. They weren’t in their right minds to begin with, but after he messed with them, who knows what sort of delusions they experienced? It was the same with Mom. He did it to her. Abigail too—”
“How do you know that?”
“You think you’re the only one to figure things out? I watched him. Made a study out of it. And I caught him one day in the kitchen crushing a pill and mixing it into some food. When I asked, he told me it was just some medicine. But I knew better. I’d read those labels on the prescription containers in his desk drawer. And the fact that I knew he was a fraud only made him resent me more.”
I pressed my face into my hands, remembering my mother being so ill and unlike herself after that trip to Ohio. Had he done that to her because she wanted to stop their work the way Heekin told me? Or was it so that she would have no choice but to believe in the power of Penny and so many other claims he made? Is that why Abigail did not feel well that last night? There was so much to understand but I found myself asking, “What did you mean about love and hate? Were you talking about Dad?”
“Yes. But I mean me and Franky too,” she said. “Those things made us demons as well. First her. And then me.”
I waited for her to tell me more, but she was crying again.