Help for the Haunted(36)

“Fingers off the fence,” I repeated.

With that, I picked up my father’s tote and started down the last of the path until it opened up to the lot across from our house. As I passed, I glanced at the foundation, which looked like a drained swimming pool. A tree had fallen inside, knotted roots balanced on the ledge, twisted branches soaking in a puddle at the bottom not far from the rusted steel rods that rose up in one corner. I thought of how much time Rose and I once spent down there, drawing the details of our imaginary home. Nothing used to make me so gloomy as when the rain came and washed it all away. Back then, my sister cheered me up by pointing out how fun it would be for us to draw everything all over again.

I left those memories of what seemed like two other girls behind and made my way across the street. That’s when I noticed another of those foil-covered dishes on our step. Not far from our house, a wood-paneled station wagon idled down the lane, a woman in a frumpy beige dress walking toward it.

“Wait!” I called, figuring she must be the one leaving all that food.

She turned my way, giving me a glimpse of her grim, head-on-a-totem-pole face, before quickening her pace, pulling open the door, and slamming it shut on the hem of her dress. As the station wagon sped away, I squinted at the license plate, making out the colors but not a single number.

After she rounded the corner and was gone, what was left for me to do but turn back to the house? Even in daylight, that bare bulb could be seen burning behind the dusty glass of the cellar window. Given how hung over Rose had been that morning, I expected to find her passed out in bed, but her truck was gone. With that light on, no part of me liked the idea of being home alone, but I hurried toward the door, scooping up the dish before stepping inside.

Stuffed shells—that’s what we’d been tempted with this time. I deposited them on the kitchen counter for my sister to inspect then returned to the living room, where I pressed my good ear to the carpet same as I’d done months before. After hearing none of the rattling or breaking I once did, I sat on the sofa and turned on the TV. When the afternoon news came on at last, I listened as a perky anchorwoman repeated the same information about the elderly man who had come forward in the case. As she spoke, pictures flashed on the screen of Albert Lynch, then my parents, then, finally, a photo that news programs and papers loved to trot out: the shot of my mother standing on our front lawn, cradling Penny as if the doll was her living, breathing child.

After it was over, I lay back on the sofa and allowed myself to think of that night in the church. I remembered the way my eyes adjusted to the dark until I made out three silhouettes near the altar. When I called, none moved. Waiting there in the cold shadows, a detail drifted back to me from the few times I’d been inside that church. Painted statues surrounded the altar: a robed man with forlorn eyes and a beard, rosary beads dangling from his fingers; a nun with an oddly shaped habit, clutching a bible. But there had only been two statues. The thought led me to look more closely, which was when I saw that the third figure was moving after all.

“Hello,” I called out again. And again, it sounded like a question: Hello?

And then there was the tumble of heavy footsteps moving out of the darkness in my direction, the sound of something exploding by my ear, then nothing until I woke in the hospital. How many times had I been over those details and so many others with Rummel and Louise? At some point during every meeting, Louise impressed upon me how crucial it was that my account never waver, saying, “We have Lynch’s footprints and fingerprints inside that church. We have the details of his threats toward your parents. But what the jury needs to hear, Sylvie, is that you saw him with your own eyes when you stepped inside. That’s what’s going to seal the deal and put him away. That’s what’s going to make it so your mother and father rest in peace. And isn’t that what you want?”

“Yes,” I told her whenever she asked that question.

Yes, I thought as my eyes fell shut on the sofa.

When I opened them, the sunlight through the front window was gone. The TV had moved on to the evening news. As Peter Jennings droned on, I looked at the ticking clock: almost seven. What had caused me to wake, I realized, was the sound of someone at the door. Those boys again, I worried. But before I could get up and twist the locks, it swung open and Rose stepped inside. She wore a top I’d never seen before, nicer than her usual, with a little bow at the collar as though she was making a gift of herself. In the flickering blue light, I saw that she held something in her hands. Mail, I guessed, since she set it on the stairs to carry up later. After that, she turned to the cross on the wall and brought her hands together in a gesture that looked like she might be about to pray.

“Whooaa!” She noticed me at the last second and spun around. “What the hell are you doing just sitting here in the dark?”

“I fell asleep in front of the TV. I was tired after school.”

“Well, you scared the crap out of me. And try working a job when you’re tired. It’s not easy.”

I let the mention of a job go for the moment. Her praying, too. “Dereck says hello.”

“Dereck who?”

“I don’t know his last name. He works at Watt’s Farm and at a garage in town.” I held up my thumb and index finger, twiddling the way he did. “Missing digits. Werewolf teeth.”

“The one with brown hair?”