Help for the Haunted(136)
“Rose!” he called, pushing open the door to our house.
The antique clock ticked. The oversized cross hung on the wall. The curio hutch showcased my father’s haphazard stacks or books behind the glass. Considering all that had occurred, it seemed even those things should offer an indication of being altered somehow. And yet, it all remained the same, indifferent as ever.
“Hello!” Dereck called when we did not hear an answer.
Words refused to come to me still, but with my hand in his, I guided us to the kitchen and that door to the basement. For a long moment, we stood at the top of the wooden stairs that so many of those haunted people had clomped down in hopes of leaving their demons behind. We stared into the shadowy space, where I had last seen my sister. There was my torn T-shirt. There was the dishtowel with Popsicle juice dripping in all sorts of bright colors from the steps to the cement below. But there was no Rose.
It must have been the man who first opened the door back at the farm who thought to call the police, because soon sirens wailed in the distance and drew closer. Before long, car doors slammed outside, footsteps pounded up the front steps and around back of the house. At least a half-dozen officers arrived on the scene, maybe more. Many of them I recognized from the hallways at the station, or perhaps in my vague, flickering memories of that winter night when I was pulled from beneath the pew at the church. The last to arrive was Detective Rummel, since he had already gone home for the day. By then, Dereck and I were sitting on the steps outside. Yellow police tape had already been set up around the foundation across the street. Officers were unspooling even more around our yard too, stringing it among the birch and cedar trees. I wore Dereck’s barn jacket still and rocked and back and forth, since my body carried a chill I could not shake.
Same as he did that first day at the hospital, Rummel took my hand in his. He spoke gently, saying, “Tell me what happened, Sylvie.”
And so, at last, I found the words to tell him all that I’d come to know and exactly how I’d come to know it. The story took time as I explained about my visits with Father Coffey and Sam Heekin and my uncle and, of course, Emily Sanino. It took longer still to tell him about Abigail and my parents and the things I’d learned about my father. After a long while, though, I came to the end of that story. When I finished speaking, the detective gazed at me with his bright blue eyes and asked the very question I’d been wondering since returning to the house: “Where is your sister?”
Seattle. Montreal. Madrid.
Sometimes, I sit on the bed in my room at Kev and Bev’s house and spin that globe, imagining I know the answer. I try to picture her life in any one of those places. I try to imagine her happy too, which I hope is so. The most I know for certain, the most the police know as well, is that her truck was found the next day in a rest stop off the highway in Pikesville, Maryland. Whatever money she had, Rose took from the house, right down to the coins inside the old doorbell box, which she had put there as a child, not knowing that someday she would rip it off the wall and retrieve every cent before leaving home forever.
These days, Howie comes to visit me quite a bit. Often, he is full of updates, since he’s been working with the courts again in an effort to be appointed my legal guardian. His plan—our plan, I can safely say as the days pass and we spend more time in each other’s company—is that I will go to live with him in a new apartment he is renting in Philadelphia. The place is situated on a quiet street, near a good school, and has a second bedroom that he says I can decorate any way I want in the few years I have left before college. The theater is up and running again, and even though there’s only a smattering of bands booked to play the stage in the summer ahead, Howie tells me it’s a sign that someday there will be more. When I mention those details to Kev and Bev and the caseworker who comes by regularly to check on me, they all say the same thing: a good home and a successful business will work wonders in helping my uncle to get custody this time around.
Howie sold off his motorcycle and bought a Jeep like Dereck’s. On the days when he visits, we take rides together, usually going by the old house just to look at the place with a For Sale sign out front. Even though I avoid the newspapers still, my uncle told me there was a recent story in the Dundalk Eagle by Sam Heekin about a new developer who plans to buy up all the properties on the lane, finish building houses atop those forgotten foundations at last, then sell them off. So far, things there look the same, but I can already picture what it will become, since I’d been imagining real houses there for years.
Just today, when my uncle came to get me, the weather was warm enough that the top was off the Jeep. He asked if I wanted to take our usual route by the house, but I told him there was another errand I needed to run first. Rather than pull my hair back as we drove, I let it whip around me the way Rose used to do, the way Abigail used to do too. My hand surfed the wind, and I did my best to stay out of my head as I’d been taught that summer on our way to and from the ice cream shop and the pond.
By the time we pulled in front of the school, it was nearly the end of the day. Since I’d opted to finish the academic year with a home tutor, I had not been inside the building for months. It was the last day before summer vacation, and when I walked past the smoking area beneath the overhang with its ratty furniture, on through the front door, the air hummed with a palpable excitement. I moved through the halls until arriving at the windowless office Boshoff shared. Inside, I found him peeling his Just Say No posters off the wall, rolling them up, one by one. I stood in the doorway, watching him a moment before he saw me.