Help for the Haunted(45)

“It means it’s some senile old couple’s word against yours, Sylvie. You watch. It’ll turn out she’s half blind and he’s bat-shit crazy. Or that the time was set wrong on the crap register at the station. So whatever you do, don’t start panicking.”

“Panicking about what?” Dereck had made his way back from the fountain. He towered over us, wearing the same barn jacket and clingy sweats as when we met.

“Nothing for you to worry about, Seven,” Rose said.

“You okay, Sylvie?” he asked. “You don’t look so great.”

“I’m fine,” I told Dereck, which was hardly the case. I spotted a clock on the wall, and the calculation seemed to do itself in my mind: sixty-five hours and forty-two minutes until I had to report back here and give Rummel and Louise an answer.

“Okay, then,” my sister said. “Let’s try to forget all this for a little while and go get some money.”

[page]All week long, we’d been waiting for the day when we could go to the Dial U.S.A. office and pick up Rose’s check. Since striking our deal, my evenings had been spent making calls to faraway cities listed on number sheets Fran provided. At the start, most people cut me off to ask, “How old are you, young lady?” The ones who didn’t wanted to know if it was some kind of prank. So I practiced making my voice sound mature while memorizing the instruction sheet Fran included for Rose but she never bothered with: 1. Be direct and clear with questions. 2. If respondent wavers, state exactly what you want to know, thus keeping respondent on point. 3. Never say, “Thank you for your time,” because time is money and Dial U.S.A. does not pay for opinions. Ridiculous as those rules sounded, they helped me rack up more surveys than Rose predicted. It meant I could begin replenishing my savings and buy Boshoff a cookbook.

On our drive into Baltimore, we passed the church and I did my best not to look at it. My sister did the same, pushing in her AC/DC cassette and beating her hands on the wheel. Dereck spread his legs east and west as he sat between us, so one of his tree trunks pressed against me, the other against my sister. More than once, Rose stopped singing to say, “Would you close your legs already, Seven? You’re like an old whore!” He did as she said, but soon they drifted, and I’d feel him there, which I might not have minded if I didn’t feel so bothered about what happened back at the station.

Every parking space outside Dial U.S.A. was taken except one with a safety cone in the middle. Rose got out and tossed the cone in the back of the truck before pulling in and cutting the engine. Dereck and I watched her walk toward the building and spin through the revolving door, his leg pressed to mine still. Once she’d been sucked inside, I glanced at the clock on the dashboard, something I’d been trying hard not to do: sixty-five hours and three minutes. The rabbitlike tic-tic-tic of my heart persisted.

“Want to guess?” Dereck asked me. When I didn’t answer, he added, “Our game, I mean. Do you want to guess?”

What I wanted was for him to stop talking. My mind was too preoccupied with the myriad of unthinkable ways things might unfold now. Newspaper headlines would shout from the pages that I had been wrong to accuse Albert Lynch, that because of me, he’d been waiting behind bars all these months without bail. Worse still, Rummel and his men were bound to uncover the lie I’d told about Rose being home that night. Even though I knew my sister was not capable of killing her very own mother and father, no matter how troubled their relationship had become, that’s the way it would look to the world. And it would appear as though I’d been a part of it too.

“Are you okay?” Dereck asked, nudging me with one of his tree-trunk legs.

“Not really.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No. Actually, I think I need to go for a walk.”

“A walk? Where?”

I put my hand on the door handle. “Just around the lot. Until Rose gets back.”

Dereck placed his hand on my arm, gently tugged it away from the door. “Hold on. Whatever it is, let’s try taking your mind off it. Besides, selfishly I don’t want to sit here by myself.”

I sighed, doing my best to give him the person he wanted. “A wood-shop accident?” I said.

“Already guessed that.”

“I did?”

“One of your first actually. Not counting the turkeys.”

“A raccoon with rabies?”

“Guessed that too.”

“A rabid possum?”

“I know you don’t want hints, Sylvie. But let me save you some trouble. No humans were harmed by animals in the making of my missing fingers.”

Like a lot of Dereck’s jokes, that one didn’t quite work, but I forced a smile. Normally, the expression came naturally whenever we played the strange game the two of us had concocted in the random moments Rose left us alone. “No animals. No wood-shop or chain-saw accidents. This is tougher than I thought.”

“Lots of ways a person can lose three fingers, Sylvie. You have to think harder.”

“Does my sister know how it happened?”

He used his good hand to reach up and biff a Scooby head he’d given Rose. Scooby hung from the rearview mirror whenever we rode with Dereck. The second he was gone, Rose tossed him on the floor. The abuse had left the dog with a scuffed nose. “Robably,” Dereck said. “Retty ruch reveryone rin rour raduating rass rew.”