Help for the Haunted(84)

Inside that alley, void of garbage cans or graffiti or anything more than a single enormous Dumpster with a motorcycle parked behind it, we came to a stop at a flight of iron stairs. The stairs looked no different than a fire escape, I thought, and after a moment I realized it was a fire escape.

“See that door?” Lloyd pointed one story up. “It’s unlocked. Just go on up and head down the hall. Third door on the right.”

I stood there, not moving.

“Don’t wait for me, Sylvie. If I take you to him myself, he’s going to be pissed. So do me a favor: just act like you figured it out on your own. I’ll consider this one small way of making something up to your father.” With that, Lloyd turned and walked out of the alley. Gone as quickly as he came.

If I allowed myself to hesitate, I knew Heekin might return and find me there. I put my foot on the first of those steps and began climbing. At the top, the metal door swung open easily, and I found myself in the dimmest of hallways. What little light there was inside flickered as I walked along. Singin’ in the Rain, Some Like It Hot, Ben-Hur, All About Eve—posters for those films lined the walls. Whenever the lights blinked brighter, I glimpsed old movie stars smiling at me, like ghosts behind glass frames. “Third door on the right,” I whispered again and again, in an attempt to drown out the shhhh in my ear and the tic-tic-tic of my rabbit heart.

When I reached that door, it was open enough for me to see inside a room not much bigger than my bedroom back on Butter Lane. A wooden desk, littered with papers, filled the small space. A reading lamp on top flickered in the same sporadic rhythm as the other lights in the theater. Behind that desk was a narrow cot, the sort my father used to request in our hotel rooms on lecture trips. I looked past the rumpled blankets on top of the cot at the back wall, where milk crates were stacked floor to ceiling—makeshift shelving, I gathered from the clutter they contained.

I stepped into that office or bedroom or whatever it was and waited. From somewhere in the dark of that building, I heard sounds: a clanging pipe maybe, footsteps maybe too. It was difficult to decipher on account of my ear, which distorted things more than usual. I did my best to study the room without touching anything. On the desk lay more work permits like those on the doors downstairs and a calendar with red X’s slashing the days that had passed, blank spaces in the ones yet to come. Inside those milk crates, I saw boxes of cassettes. The handwritten labels made me think of the tapes from my father’s lectures, only these were marked with names and phone numbers. I went over to the cot, where an ashtray filled with cigarette butts sat atop the pillow. On the floor nearby lay a chaos of newspaper clippings:



[page]

INFAMOUS MARYLAND COUPLE MURDERED


DEMONOLOGISTS SLAIN BEFORE ALTAR


DEACON AND WIFE VICTIMS OF BIZARRE CHURCH KILLING

“What are you doing here?”

Startled, I turned to see him in the doorway: Howie. When the lights flickered, he appeared to light up for a moment, same as those movie star ghosts in the hallway. He looked thinner than when I’d last seen him, hair clipped close to his scalp, beard gone, his face less ruddy.

“I told you we were on our way,” I said, in a nervous, wavering voice. “When the front doors were locked, I found the entrance at the top of the—”

“I know what you told me, Sylvie. I asked you not to come. I said we’d see each other down the road.”

Maybe it was the empty promise of that phrase tossed out again: down the road. Maybe it was his resemblance to my father—those wrinkles in his brow, those dark eyes. Maybe it was that the last time I had seen him had been after the court hearing where Rose was appointed my legal guardian. Whatever the reason, tears welled in my eyes.

“Hey,” Howie said, coming closer. “Hey. Hey. Hey.” He wrapped his heavy arms around my body.

“You never came back,” I heard myself saying into the sudden warmth of his sweatshirt. “You told us you were going to Florida. All that talk about tidying up your affairs. All those phone calls. Then nothing.”

“But I did what I said. It took longer than planned, but here I am. This place—”

His words caused my head to whip up. I pulled away, wiping my eyes. “You never once came to see us! Or bothered to write me back! And now I come here and I find—” I didn’t know how to say the things I was thinking, so my gaze just fell to the floor, where all those headlines screamed some version of the same truth: DAUGHTER IS KEY WITNESS IN MURDER OF FAMOUS PARENTS . . . SUSPECT NAMED IN CHURCH KILLINGS . . . DRIFTER ACCUSED OF DOUBLE HOMICIDE AWAITS TRIAL IN MD MURDER CASE. I kicked them away, the words scattering across the floor, that image of my mother and Penny, which appeared in almost every article, multiplying before our eyes like a magic trick.

“I can explain, Sylvie. Please. Just give me a second.”

I waited, saying nothing. A foggy silence billowed into the room, those odd noises from somewhere in the vast belly of the building fading away. Howie pulled a chair over from the desk. I sat on the edge of that bed and he sat across from me, pushing up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. In the tattoos on his forearms, I saw dice and dollar signs and playing cards, an entire casino bursting to life on his hairy skin. “The first thing I want to say—” he began, then stopped. “I mean, the thing I might have said, should have said, on the phone if you hadn’t caught me off guard, is that I did come back to see you girls, just like I promised.”