Help for the Haunted(67)

“Were you two—” I didn’t know how to ask my next question, so I stopped.

This time it was Heekin who changed the subject. “You were saying something a moment ago about your uncle?”

“Will you take me to see him?”

“Now? What about your sister. Won’t she wonder where you are?”

“Don’t worry about her,” I said.

Heekin opened his fists, and I watched the seeds fall. “Well, we’d have to call first, to see if he’s even there and if he’d agree to it. And there’s the matter of my car, which is on its last legs, though I suppose it could manage.”

“Okay then. And maybe on the way, you can tell me about you and my parents.”

He looked down at the violet journal peeking out of my coat pocket, and almost as an afterthought, said, “I once thought I’d be the person to write the definitive book about your mother and father. But I was too cynical. My story got too tangled with their own to be objective. And let’s face it, I’m too much of a hack. Who knows, though? Your mother used to tell me about those essay contests you win. Maybe someday, Sylvie, you’ll be the person who puts down their story—the one who tells it the way it should be told.”

With that, Heekin turned to walk back up the path. I walked with him and we passed person after person who stood in silence, arms in the air. All around, birds moved through the branches, flapping and singing, as people waited for the magic those creatures could bring them if only they were patient, if they were still, if they listened, saying nothing, not a word at all.


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He first saw them at a small event at the old Mason Hall in Bethesda—the Masons at the Mason, my father joked from the podium. That night, the story he told was about the Locke Family Farm in Winchester, New Hampshire. A stagecoach traveling south from Montreal in the winter of 1874 broke down not far from the place, and the farmer and his wife took in the men. “Before we go any further,” my father said to the group of only a dozen or so, “I should clarify that this is not going to be one of those farmer’s daughter jokes.” People laughed, and he went on about the travelers being treated to a fireside dinner of roast pig, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie. Their stay turned out to be such a pleasure that the men asked to repeat it on their trip north months later, then again the following year. In this way, the Locke Family Farm slowly transformed into an inn that expanded over time to a hilltop structure with twenty-three guest rooms.

While my father spoke about the night that farmer went mad—butchering his wife, children, and seven guests at the inn, all with the same hatchet—Heekin listened intently, though his gaze kept shifting to my mother. She appeared uncomfortable onstage, rocking back and forth in her chair, staring at the floor except for a lone glance up at her husband as he removed the actual hatchet from a small black case. Holding that weapon in his hands, he went on to speak of the years following the massacre, when the hotel fell into disrepair, until finally closing in 1919. By the time he was done describing the strange apparitions that appeared to so many who entered the inn, even Heekin felt as though the family of ghosts had made their way into the room. He pictured a headless Mrs. Locke moving clumsily around the stage. He pictured Mr. Locke in blood-splattered overalls, that hatchet in his hands instead of my father’s. He imagined the children, climbing up out of the well where their bodies had been disposed of, joining hands and resuming the game they had been playing when everything went so horribly wrong.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down . . .

Afterward, Heekin did his best to shake those illusions, drawing on his usual sensibilities and skepticism. And yet, his curiosity persisted. He had first learned of my parents while writing a mundane story for the Dundalk Eagle about proposed renovations to the Mason Hall. On his first visit to the building, he noticed a flyer on the lobby bulletin board promoting the event. On this, his second visit, he lingered by the same board following the lecture, waiting for my parents to exit in hopes of striking up a conversation. When the moment arrived, Heekin introduced himself, shaking my father’s warm, strong hand, then my mother’s cooler, fragile one. At first, my father did not show much interest, Heekin thought, but when he mentioned his job as a reporter, my father divulged more details about their trip to the Locke Family Farm, which was a fully functioning inn once more. The new owners had found the hatchet in an old storm cellar and turned it over to my parents in hopes that it would rid the place of unwanted spirits. Ever since, he told Heekin, things there had been peaceful.

If the news of Heekin’s occupation and his interest in writing a story about them caused my father to open up, it had the opposite effect on my mother. She stepped away from their conversation. Heekin kept glancing over at her, trying to catch her eye, but my mother gazed through a window in the lobby, paying no attention to him.

On the ride home—this was a part Heekin did not know until later—my father asked my mother why she had become so taciturn, sullen even, both up on the stage and in the lobby with Heekin. Once again, she stared out the window, not answering.

“I can only gather that it makes you uncomfortable,” my father pushed. “Am I right?”

“Yes, Sylvester. The things we do—well, as you know, I’ve always thought of it as a private matter. A gift we should use to help people, not to draw attention.”

My father sighed and they drove in silence for a while, my mother staring out at the dark woods. At last, my father said, “Name a painter you admire.”