Help for the Haunted(135)

“I’m here for Dereck,” I told him.

The man removed his white smock and draped it over      my shoulders. He led me through a maze of shelves and bins and small cages to a      back room, where the air was chilled. He told me to wait a few seconds. And it      really did seem like just a few seconds before Dereck appeared, covered in blood      too.

He took one look at me, then went to a locker      across the room and pulled out his battered barn jacket. Like that day I had      jumped from my sister’s truck, he offered it to me, this time slipping it over      my arms and zipping up the front. As he did, I began to cry, the tears warm      against my skin. Dereck put his arms around me. “What happened?” he asked and      asked again, though I could not force the answer from my mouth. Not right away.      Not for some time to come. And still he kept repeating that question, “What      happened? What happened? What happened?”

But the words would not come. All I could do was      take his ruined hand in mine and lead him away from the farm, back across that      trampled field, back over the barbed-wire fence, along that twisted path in the      woods toward home.





[page]Chapter 22

Faraway Places



I did not take much from the house when I moved out. My journal, of course. That lone white horse Rose had given me, the only one that had never been broken. A bag full of clothes. My mother’s silver cross necklace, which I have not taken off, even seven months later, along with her slim gold watch I use to tell time. With the exception of a few other odds and ends, I left the rest behind. It would be boxed up, I was told, put into storage or sold off. My father’s old competition, Dragamir Albescu, surfaced and offered good money for the haunted artifacts in our basement. Rather than let the man pick and choose like some sort of rummage sale, my uncle offered him an all-or-nothing deal. In the end, every last relic from their unusual career—including the hatchet from the Locke Family Farm, Penny in Mr. Knothead’s cage, even my father’s old dental chair and my mother’s rocker—all of it was loaded onto a moving truck headed for Marfa, Texas, where Mr. Albescu maintains the Marfa Museum of the Paranormal.

Before he and the movers drove away, Albescu told my uncle that a special room would be dedicated just to my parents and their contribution to the field. When Howie made some mention of Heekin’s book and asked if the things he had written might keep people away, Albescu waved one of his jeweled hands in the air and scoffed, “Not at all. In fact, these things in our line of work are like a shuttlecock in the game of badminton. They need to be swatted back and forth in order to keep people paying attention.” Then he told us that we were welcome to visit the museum anytime, free of charge.

I can’t imagine a day will ever come when I’ll want to do that.

My life is different now. And the way things are looking, it is going to get more different as time moves forward, though I don’t think I’ll ever forget the life we lived in that house on Butter Lane as Rose once predicted. At the moment, I am staying a few towns over in Howard County, at the home of a couple named Kevin and Beverly. They take in foster children, which for the time being anyway, I am.

When I arrived on their doorstep, escorted by a brand-new caseworker, and carting along my journal, that horse, a bag of clothes, and only a few other possessions, they told me their names were easy to remember, because they rhyme. My mind was in such a daze still that I could not understand how that made any sense. But then Beverly—who wears a never-ending supply of oversized sweatshirts in bright pastels and keeps her hair tugged back in a never-ending supply of scrunchies—let out a bubbling, infectious laugh and said, “You know, Kev and Bev. It’ll be hard for you to forget us, Sylvie. Trust me. Now come on in.”

They showed me to my room, which is clean and simply furnished. There is a single bed with an oak headboard, a matching dresser and nightstand with a simple white lamp on top. The window beside the bed looks out over their fenced yard. The view is not unlike the one I used to draw outside the imaginary windows on the walls of the old foundation across the street. It is late spring now, so I see tufts of grass out there and all sorts of colorful flowers. Most days, there is a bright sun shining in the sky. Sometimes, I sit quietly in that room on the edge of the bed and spin my sister’s globe, which was another thing I took from our house. When I plunk my finger on a random location—Tokyo, San Francisco, Mexico City—I think of the way she used to do the same.

Places like that—faraway places, I mean—they’re where I want to go someday . . .

I hear her voice saying those words and, inevitably, I think of that final afternoon when I took Dereck’s hand and walked back through the woods. I should have noticed that Rose’s truck was gone from the driveway. But we were too preoccupied by the sight at the bottom of the foundation. When I’d fled not long before, I remembered glancing behind to see her back rising and falling. Now, though, the body had gone motionless. Whatever I’d done in the commotion with that rock had brought an end to a life down there. The sight made me shudder, and Dereck pulled me away across the lane.