Help for the Haunted(43)

When Rummel was done telling that story again, the air around us fell quiet. I thought of Cora, who had escorted Rose and me to meetings at the station when she was first assigned as my caseworker. Legally, she was not allowed in the interview room, and though I could request a break to see her at any time, I never did. Some part of me wished to see her now, however, if only for the distraction of her mindless rambling and cheerful assurances. But after Halloween night, Cora stopped coming by. Instead, Norman had been reassigned as my caseworker. The most he offered by way of explanation was that the Child Protective Services Department sometimes changed its mind, and this was one of those times.

“So what does this mean?” I asked now.

“It means we keep going forward just the same until the trial,” Louise told me. “But our case is going to be significantly more challenging. Like you said, though, we have the evidence at the church as well as a clear motive. And the Dunns are elderly and may prove unreliable as we dig deeper. The man working the register that night has an arrest record. Nothing major, marijuana possession years back. But that’s something we can use to discredit him in the jury’s eyes. Most important, we have your eyewitness account. And when a girl who lost her parents gets up on that stand, when she points her finger at Albert Lynch and tells the court exactly what she saw—”

“Or thought she saw.”

For months, those words had been waiting, sealed inside, like those baby birds in the whitewashed houses of my mother’s childhood. Now that I’d set them free, a strange, humming silence followed. In the midst of that silence, only Dereck’s voice could be heard in the hall, his words unclear, though the warm, meandering way he spoke had a way of soothing me before Detective Rummel said, “Excuse me?”

More quietly this time, I said, “Or thought she saw.”

“What do you mean, ‘thought she saw’? We’ve gone over every detail of that night dozens of times, Sylvie. We took your affidavit. We filed it in court. We have a man sitting not twenty miles from here, behind bars for the last nine months, awaiting trial on account of what you told us.”

Beneath my flimsy tank top, my heart beat hard and fast. The shhhh grew louder, muddling even my own shaky voice when I said, “I know what I told you. But it was late. It was dark in that church. I had just woken up. And I was afraid.”

Rummel leaned forward, pressed his hands to the table, the same hands that held mine during those visits at the hospital, the same that filled my plastic cup with water and adjusted my pillows. They seemed like someone else’s now. “So what exactly are you saying, Sylvie?”

“I’m saying that maybe I was wrong,” I told him, tears welling. “Maybe I didn’t see him.”

Louise came closer, her shoulder pads shifting again as she leaned down and spoke up at last. “If that’s the case, this about-face in your testimony is quite serious, seeing as you’ve never so much as hinted at any doubt before.”

“But that’s because you made it seem like it had to be him. I insisted, because I felt pressured to give the right answer, the one that you and everybody else wanted.”

“Are you saying we pressured you?”

Hands shaking, I reached for my journal, opened it and read, “ ‘All we need to make certain a jury puts him away for a long time and that your parents rest in peace is your testimony.’ ” I flipped to another page. “ ‘Your account is the key ingredient to our case. It will bring all the evidence together for your parents’ sake.’ ” Again, I turned. “ ‘We have Mr. Lynch’s prints inside the church. We have the details of his threats toward your mother and father. All evidence points to his guilt. But we need you to seal the deal and bring justice in your parents’ honor. Isn’t that what you want?’ ”

“Maybe we did tell you those things,” Louise said. “But never—not one single time—did we encourage you to lie.”

“I didn’t lie!” I shouted, my voice cracking, tears spilling down my cheeks. “I told you what you wanted to hear! I told you what would help my parents! I gave you the right answer because I didn’t want to be wrong!”

“All right,” Rummel said, pushing back his chair, standing up too. “Let’s everybody calm down. Let’s everybody take a breather.”

Louise went to the door, yanked it open, stepped out. As her heels clicked away down the hall, Rummel became his old self for a moment, walking to the water cooler, filling a cup for me. After I wiped my eyes and took a sip, he told me he was going to give me a few minutes. “Would you like your sister and her boyfriend to come inside?”

Her boyfriend. It was the first anyone had referred to Dereck that way, though given the amount of time he spent with Rose lately, I supposed it was true. That need to practice speaking my answers didn’t seem to matter anymore, so I just shook my head. Rummel went out to the hallway, shutting the door. I heard him say something briefly to my sister before his footsteps receded in the same direction as Louise’s.

Alone at the table, I thought of the lingering doubt I’d lived with ever since Detective Rummel first brought Lynch’s photo to the hospital and asked if it was the man I saw. How much of his and Louise’s talk about making things right for my parents—of being their good daughter one last time, which was what they were saying even if they didn’t know it—had helped me to feel certain? And how much was tangled in the lie Rose and I had told . . . were still telling? The thought led me to look at the folders Rummel left on the table. As I listened for the return of his footsteps, I leaned forward and opened one. On top lay a photo of a gun that I recognized: a small black pistol with a blunt silver nose. I turned it over, kept searching. Most details I already knew, but I found a piece of information buried in those papers that I’d always wondered about. I read the line over and over again, until Rummel’s thudding footsteps moved down the hall in my direction. Quickly, I began to close the folder, but not before I noticed words scratched randomly on the inside in blocky script: