Help for the Haunted(34)

“As I told you, Sylvie, the poem itself is about an unrelated topic. However, those lines might offer a way for you to think about your sister.”

I learned to love the little things about Rose, because of all the big things I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.

Never once had I mentioned the larger blame I placed on my sister for making that call and luring them to the church or my role in not telling the police about it, but perhaps Boshoff had sensed something in my silence, the way my mother once taught me to do.

“Do you think you could try that, Sylvie? Since you have to live with her for the next few years at least, it might help you to focus on the positive.”

“I’ll try,” I said, unable to muster even a hint of enthusiasm in my voice.

“Well, why don’t we start by making a list of little things about her that are lovable? We can begin it together. Do you have the journal I gave you?”

That small violet book came with me everywhere in my father’s tote, since leaving it home meant Rose might discover all I’d been writing there about the things from our past I did not want to forget, like that night with Dot, that trip to Ocala and what came after. On account of what I’d written, I didn’t like the idea of taking it out, so I told Boshoff I didn’t have it. He riffled through the desk and found a pad instead. In his sloppy script, he wrote “Little Things” at the top, numbers one through three down the side, before handing it to me.

“You once mentioned Rose has a nice voice when she sings with the radio. That seems like a small enough thing to love, right?”

Reluctantly, I wrote: My sister has a decent singing voice.

When I was done, I stared at the impossibly vast spaces beside those next two numbers. “I’m sorry,” I said, my gaze shifting to Albert Lynch in that photo once more. “I’m not feeling well. Do you mind if we stop?”

This time, Boshoff’s gaze followed mine to the wastebasket. His lips parted and he brought a finger to his mouth, like he was pushing a button there and turning something off. “Sylvie, you’re aware I share this office with a handful of rotating staff. I got here a short while before you today. Had I noticed the paper there, I would have removed—”

“I think I need to go to the nurse. But can I take that newspaper with me?”

“Of course. If that’s what you want. But wouldn’t you like to talk about it?”

After weeks of him gently circling the topic, I felt bad that this was the way it had come about. Even so, I shook my head, forgetting about Louise Hock’s insistence that I practice speaking my answers. I reached into the basket, feeling as if I were reaching down and down into our well to fetch one of those rag dolls by its fingerless hands. I grabbed the edge of the newspaper, a coupon section and the sports pages falling away, leaving me with the pages I wanted. I carried them with me as I left poor, startled Boshoff and his list of “Little Things” behind.

The direction of the nurse’s office—that’s the way I headed, even though I had no intention of ending up there. Instead, I took a detour down the industrial arts hall, where the smells were unfamiliar: sawdust and solder. At a water fountain, I splashed my face, because it was true that I didn’t feel so well, before unfolding the newspaper.


Dundalk—The killer shot Rose Mason, 45, leaving her to die by the altar in a small chapel in a quiet Maryland town twenty miles from the state capital. Sylvester Mason, 50, her husband, was killed a few feet away with a gunshot to the back of the head.

The younger of the couple’s two children, a 13-year-old girl, had been sleeping in her parents’ car outside the chapel when she woke to the sound of gunfire. “When I heard the second shot, I opened the car door and walked into the church,” she told police, though no further details of her account have been released to the press. Officers reported that they did not find the girl, who was crouched beneath a pew, until hours after the investigation had begun. “Her head was bleeding and she was drifting in and out of consciousness,” said Detective Dennis Rummel of the Baltimore County Police Force. “We got her out of there as soon as we could.”

In the weeks following the investigation, a lone suspect emerged: Albert Lynch, 41, a drifter, originally from Holly Grove, Arkansas. Since 1986 Mr. Lynch had been seek—

“Excuse me, young lady.”

I looked up to see a teacher I didn’t recognize. “Yes?”

“Do you have a pass to be out here loitering during class time?”

“I’m on my way to the nurse’s office.”

“Well, this is a roundabout way of getting there.”

I folded the paper, left the hall with its unfamiliar smells, and once more walked in the direction of the nurse’s office. But when I came upon an exit, I slipped through it. Rarely did I miss class, never mind skip out in the middle of the day, but I wanted to go someplace where I could read the article without interruption. Considering how often I took it, the path I first followed when Dot had been locked in our parents’ bathroom should have been well tread by then. But like some fairy-tale forest, it remained forever overgrown and unwelcoming. A maze of stone walls led me to the barbed-wire fence behind Watt’s Farm close to Butter Lane. Most of the year, the field there held no sign of life, but come fall it teemed with white-feathered turkeys. The way they arrived, all at once and fully grown, left me suspicious about how many were actually raised on premises, but nevertheless, mornings when I was early for school, I stopped at the fence and watched those birds strutting about on their scaly, bent-backward legs. The high-pitched warble that rose from their throats made them seem like nervous old women.