Help for the Haunted (36 page)

“Why do you leave it? I mean, if you don't know us.”

“You're right. I don't know you.” She stood by the table now, staring straight at me and speaking in a stiff voice, as though choosing her words carefully. “I only met your sister a handful of times. Still, I have enormous sympathy for you girls, considering what you've both been through.”

“Did you know my mother and father? Were you someone who came to them in need of their help?”

She ran her hands over her plain dress. “You know what? Let's go into the living room. That way I can listen for my husband's patrol car. We have to make sure he doesn't find you here when he gets back.”

I considered telling her that I'd spoken to him outside, but I kept it to myself; the last thing I wanted was to distract her when we had so little time together. In the living room, I went to that side table and looked at the trophies, five in all. On top of each, the miniature gold figure—running, jumping, swinging—was a girl. The framed photos showed a dark-haired toddler wearing a soft pink dress, the same girl a few years older at the beach in a bright bathing suit, hair long and wet, sand stuck to her elbows. In the next frame she was a lanky adolescent, mouth full of braces, wearing a T-shirt that said
GOD'S LOVE SUMMER CAMP.
Finally, I saw the girl had grown into her teens. She had wide shoulders and womanly breasts, her hair looked darker and shorter.

“That's my daughter,” Emily volunteered when she saw me looking.

I glanced at the staircase on the far side of the room, remembering the lights I'd seen on the second floor when I stood out front earlier. She took a seat on a recliner. I went to the rocker and sat too. “Is she here?”

“No. I'm afraid not.”

I saw something pass over her face. Sadness, but something more that left me with a hunch about where this was going. Like the Entwistles, the Saninos must have reached out to my parents for help. There seemed so much to say, but neither of us spoke for a long moment, and then without any prompting from me, she simply began.

“We wanted more children, an entire brood, but my husband and I, well, we started late. So we were just grateful for the blessing of her. She got all the attention. She had better clothes than we did. She got sent away to summer camp. There were endless sleepovers and birthday parties.”

“It seems like a good way to grow up,” I told her.

“It was. But raising a child holds no guarantees. You can follow all the right steps, do all the right things, and still something can go wrong— Actually,
no
. That's a word my husband would use. I won't say wrong anymore, I'll say differently than planned. That's what happened to my daughter when she reached her teens.”

I remembered Albert Lynch, standing at the end of our lane, warning us that Abigail could seem perfectly normal until suddenly everything changed. I remembered the girls I'd read about in that “history” book years before too.

“As a mother, you think you know your child. You brought her into the world, after all. You changed her diapers and picked her up when she cried. You read her stories each night before bed and slipped coins under her pillow so she believed in the Tooth Fairy. But then, despite all that love and effort, years go by and one day she turns sullen. She keeps secrets. She doesn't want to be near you. I used to ask her what was wrong, but she always told me the same thing: I wouldn't understand.

“Then her grades dropped. She began skipping school. She didn't want to be with her old friends anymore. Despite all that, she managed to graduate. We sent her off to a good Christian college in Massachusetts. We thought the freedom of being away from home would help. But after a month, we received a call from the dean informing us that she had stopped attending classes. Worse still, her behavior had become erratic. She was caught breaking into someone's dorm. When the R.A. reported her, she threatened the girl with a knife.” Emily stopped and looked toward the window, listening. When there was no sound, she smoothed her hands over her dress and told me, “I don't think she would have done the things she did if my husband had not been so hard on her.”

“Is that when you turned to my mother and father?” I asked.

Mrs. Sanino tilted her head, her mouth dropping open into an oval shape that made me think of a Christmas caroler. “Your parents?” she said after a moment. “We never took her to them. Although I read all about your mother and father, and saw them interviewed on TV, we did not meet.”

“But if you didn't seek them out, then how—”

“My daughter came to know your sister when we sent her away to Saint Julia's.”

This was not the story I'd been expecting after all. I needed a moment to adjust things in my mind, but Emily Sanino didn't allow for that.

“As you no doubt have learned about me,” she pushed on, “I'm not afraid to take a road trip while my husband is away from the house. Nick is an officer three towns over, so he doesn't get home certain days when he's doing a double on patrol duty. I'd tell him I was going to see my sister over in Dover. Really, I snuck away to visit our daughter. During those trips, that's when I met Rose. Did you ever go to see her there, Sylvie?”

“No. My father promised that we would, but he kept putting it off. He told us the staff prohibited visits, because it created setbacks in the behavior of the girls there.”

Emily scoffed. “Well, he wasn't lying. That was their policy. No visitors. For the first thirty days anyway.”

“Ninety,” I said, remembering how endless that summer seemed without her.

“No,” she told me. “I'd remember if it was
that
long. But either way, they didn't welcome the influence of the outside world at that place. Still, I didn't care. I never wanted to send her there in the first place. Even if I couldn't bring her home for good, I found a way to sneak her out for the day. And those times, well, they were the first in a great while that my daughter actually seemed happy to see me. Rose usually managed to sneak out too and join us.”

“Where did you go?”

“No place special. Hiking. Walking in the park. But it
felt
special. Those girls were like prisoners set free. Every little thing made them laugh. We'd stop for ice cream before heading back to Saint Julia's, and it was as though I was giving them the treat of their lives. They were that grateful, that happy.”

I tried to place my sister in the scenario she described, laughing, eating ice cream. Instead, what I conjured was the memory of trips to the ice cream parlor with my parents during the months Rose was gone, the strange guilty peace I felt during that time. Those memories led me to say, “My sister didn't last there more than that summer.”

“Neither did my daughter.”

“What happened?”

“I don't know exactly. She had agreed to stay there originally for a full six months. But then one morning, the psychiatrist from Saint Julia's called to tell us they found her room empty. She left just like that. And, really, she was free to go all along since she was of age.”

“Did she come home?”

“She knew better, I'm sure. Her father would have sent her right back. So instead, she just . . . disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

Emily Sanino stood and went to that side table and pulled back the curtain to look outside. I wanted to tell her that we'd hear the patrol car well before seeing it, but instead I simply repeated the word, “
Disappeared?
”

“We've not heard from her since,” she said in a stiff voice, letting go of the curtain and pressing her fingertips to the sides of her eyes, as though forcing back tears. After a moment, she took a breath and turned to me. “Now that you know everything you came to find out, we need to get you out of here. How will you get home if you—”

“Wait,” I said. “I still don't understand why you've been coming to our house.”

That question gave her a long pause. She stared at me, blinking, before saying, “When I read about what happened to your mother and father, Sylvie, I thought of how special those days with Rose had been. The idea of that poor girl on her own raising you, well, it broke my heart. I remembered how she used to devour the food I brought on those trips, so I decided the least I could offer was more of that nourishment. It's what the Bible teaches, after all: charity of the heart.”

“Well, thank you for remembering us. I only wish you'd left notes, so we knew who it was from. Didn't you ever think to do that?”

“Yes. But I didn't want to open old wounds. I'm sure Rose doesn't exactly want reminders of her time at Saint Julia's. My guess is she never speaks of it. Am I right?”

I nodded. My brain felt fuzzy with the events of the day. I tried to think of what more I could ask, but just then, Emily Sanino's back stiffened. A moment later, I heard a car motoring down the street. “I need you to leave,” she said, peeking through the curtains as the flash of lights washed over her. “How will you get back to Dundalk?”

“I don't know,” I told her, standing. We walked to the kitchen, and she pressed a hand on my back to get me there faster.

“What do you mean, you don't know?”

“I didn't plan things. I just came here without—”

Outside in the driveway, a door slammed. Emily grabbed her purse from the table and told me to hold out my hands. When I did she shook the contents of her wallet—coins, bills, stray coupons, shopping lists—into my palms. A few stray pennies fell to the floor and scattered at my feet, but I didn't bother to pick them up. “I'm sorry,” she told me, her voice an urgent whisper. “But I can't let my husband know about any of this. There's a pay phone in front of the firehouse on West Shore Drive. You can call a taxi from there. You should have more than enough money to get home.”

“West Shore?” I said as she opened the back door and all but pushed me outside. Emily Sanino glanced in the direction of the living room, where her husband's feet pounded up the porch steps. “Left out of the driveway. Right at Bay Breeze, then follow it to West Shore. The firehouse will be in front of you. Across from the ocean.”

“Should I give Rose any message?”

“
Message?
” she said, eyes wide. “Absolutely not. Don't say a word to her about this visit. Trust me. It'll be better that way.”

With that, she closed the door and snapped off the light. I was left standing on the cement patio with only the moon to see by. A moment later, I heard her voice inside as she greeted her husband with all that false cheer lacing her voice once more.

I turned and walked through the alley to the street, her rushed directions blurring in my mind, along with everything else she told me. For nearly an hour, I moved through the sleepy streets of that oceanside neighborhood, making too many wrong turns before backtracking and looking up at last to see the fire department, with a pay phone out front. After dialing 411, I got the number of a taxi company. The man on the other end told me it would cost sixty dollars to get back to Dundalk. While he waited, I counted what I had, but it only totaled up to thirty-four. I asked if he could do it for half price, and the man said, “Yeah, if my driver only takes you halfway. How's that sound?” I told him not very good then hung up. That's when another idea occurred to me. Squinting at the buttons, I punched in a combination I hadn't thought of in some time. After dumping in enough coins, the phone rang and a sleepy voice came on the line.

“Cora?” I said.

“Yes?”

“It's Sylvie.”

“Sylvie? How did— Oh,
RIBSPIN
. That's right. I forgot about that.”

You forgot a lot of things,
I wanted to say,
including
me. “You told me I could call this number anytime I needed something.”

Last I'd seen Cora, she'd had on all that goopy green witch makeup, and even though it didn't make sense, that's how I pictured her now: lying in bed at the apartment she shared with her mother, noodly fingers brushing aside her mottled wig and gripping the receiver as her black lips formed the words, “I did say that, didn't I?”

“Yes. And this is one of those times.”

“Sylvie, are you okay?' she asked with genuine concern in her voice.

“I will be if you could come get me. I need a ride home.”

She fumbled with the phone. “I'm sorry. But I lent my car to Dan. You know, the Hulk's owner. We have a bit of a free trade situation. His dog. My car. Not sure who gets the better end of the deal. Except my mom, she likes having the dog around. Says the Hulk makes her feel loved. As if I don't give her enough love . . .”

I'd forgotten Cora's habit of rambling, and I cut her off to say something I couldn't keep in any longer, “I saw the two of you. Kissing, I mean.”

Silence. While I listened to the faint electric hum on the line, I stared at the fire department. Through the glass windows, I glimpsed the tops of the red trucks inside, the jumble of lights and ladders. The air felt so impossibly damp it was hard to imagine anything catching fire for miles around.

At last, Cora let out a breath. Something about the sound washed away the image of her in that witch makeup. Instead, I saw her the way I did when we first met: holding her clipboard, dressed in her carefully pressed clothing, with her ankle bracelet and that shark or dolphin tattoo, not to mention her intentions to make me dress warmer and see a doctor again about my ear. “I am not going to lie to you, Sylvie. That's wrong, and I've already done plenty of wrong by you. The truth is, I never thought I'd get caught up in the sort of thing that happened with your sister. But I don't have to tell you the way Rose can make things happen. Do you know what I mean?”

“I do,” I said, thinking of Dot, thinking of the night in Ocala when we snuck into my parents' lecture, and thinking most of all of her call that lured us to the church that snowy night last winter.