Help for the Haunted (44 page)

Hands shaking still, I went to the freezer and
pulled out an ice tray to get ice for Rose's leg. But the tray was empty.
Instead, I grabbed a bunch of Popsicles, wrapped them in a dishtowel, and rushed
back down the stairs.

In the brief time I had been upstairs, the air in
the basement had changed. Outside the window, the light was just the same. That
bare, yellowy bulb still glowed on the ceiling as well. The dank, loamy smell
still hung in the air. And yet, I had the sense that something had shifted.
“Rose,” I said, pressing that cool towel to her leg. “The phone isn't
working.”

“Sylvie, you better go.”

“What? Go where?”

“Anywhere. Just not here.”

“I'm not leaving you.”

I heard a sound in the corner of the basement then,
from behind that partition. I stood, remembering the reason I had been so
determined to come down here in the first place. I thought of Emily Sanino
humming “Happy Birthday.” I thought of that cake she left. I thought of all
those candles too. And then I walked over and stepped to the other side of that
paneled wall. There was only the empty cot covered with rumpled sheets. On the
small dresser by the sliding door that led out onto the backyard, I saw a stack
of empty Tupperware containers that had been left on our stoop.

I stepped back to the other side and looked at my
sister, who had propped herself up into a slumped position against the stairs
and was nursing her leg. “So those noises I heard, they were her?”

Rose nodded. “She was here for a few weeks after
the murders. But then we agreed she had to go. Any plans we had made could no
longer be. At least not until you were grown and gone and nobody suspected
anything. But then—”

Again, I heard a noise somewhere behind me in the
basement. I turned and looked into the shadows, where my father's old dental
chair remained untouched still. Just beyond, I could see the fuse box and a
tangle of wires on the wall. It was then that I realized the phone cord had been
cut. I was not sure what to do so I turned back to Rose. “But then what?”

“But then Franky didn't stay away. She couldn't.
And the truth was, I didn't want her to. So without telling me beforehand, she
came back. On Halloween night, while I was out and you were here alone, she
slipped in through the sliding door and waited for me. That's when you first saw
the light on again. I told her it was better to just leave it on, because I knew
it would keep you from coming down here, since you thought it had to do with Mom
and Dad and the things they did when they were alive. I knew you still
believed.”

I stood for a moment, staring at my sister,
wondering how she was capable of keeping so much hidden for so long. “Did you
. . .”

“Did I what?”

“Did you kill them?”

She shook her head.

“Say it!” I shouted. “I want to hear you tell me
that you didn't!”

“No,” she said, crying and shaking her head more.
“No. No. No. It was Franky. She did it, Sylvie.”

I felt cold all over. Pinpricks up my arms and down
my legs and across my stomach. My entire body was shivering now and I could do
nothing to stop it. Voice trembling, I asked, “How could you cover for her,
Rose? How could you let me go on thinking I had seen someone I did not?”

“Because I loved her. And she did it because she
loved me.”

No noise came from behind me, but I saw Rose's gaze
shift over my shoulder. I felt a presence there, and so I turned around.

For an instant, all those pictures in the living
room of Emily Sanino flashed in my mind. I saw the young woman before me as a
dark-haired toddler in a pink dress, a few years older at the beach in a bright
one-piece bathing suit, as a lanky adolescent with a mouth full of braces and a
T-shirt that said
GOD'S LOVE SUMMER CAMP
. I
remembered the trophies with the little golden girl on top. Track awards. And
now that track star Rose had dated was standing before me, head shaved to the
scalp just as it must have been that night at the church, one of the few details
that had led me to believe it was Albert Lynch who knocked me down on his way
out the door. In one ear, she sported a small silver cross, the sort my mother
used to wear, but the effect was menacing instead of peaceful. When she spoke,
her voice was more composed than I would have imagined. She asked, “What did you
do to Rose?”

Voice still trembling, I told her, “She fell.”

“She fell? Or you pushed her?”

My sister spoke before I could. “Franky, leave
Sylvie alone.”

“Why?” Franky said. “She's the same as your
parents. No good for you.”

“I don't care,” Rose said. “Leave her alone. Let me
handle this.”

“You've been handling this for months and where has
it gotten us?” Franky shouted. “Look at the mess she's made of you.”

She stepped out of the shadows then, coming closer.
I thought of that night last winter, the sound of the gun so close to my ear
before I fell to the floor and crawled beneath that pew. Like some sort of alarm
the
shhhh
seemed to grow louder in that instant, so
loud I almost did not hear Rose shouting, “Sylvie! Run! Get out of here!”

I turned toward the stairs and stepped over my
sister's leg, bent the wrong way still, like those turkeys in the field on the
other side of the woods. But I only made it up a few steps before I felt a hand
snatch the back of my old T-shirt. I grabbed the banister and hung on as Franky
pulled and pulled, until finally, I felt the fabric start to give and then
suddenly the shirt came completely free. The dank air against my bare skin sent
a shiver snaking through me as the sudden shift of pressure caused me to stumble
forward. My hand slipped through the space between the slatted wooden steps, and
Franky came around and grabbed it from beneath. I wrenched my hand free, pulling
away from her with such force that I stumbled back down the stairs again, barely
missing my sister.

“Stop it!” Rose screamed as I scrambled to my feet.
“Please stop!”

“I'm not stopping,” Franky told her, “because if
she gets out of here, she's going to tell the police and everyone what she's
learned. And then you and me, Rose, we are going to be sent away for a long
time. And where they put us is going to make Saint Julia's look like a funhouse.
I'm not letting that happen to us.”

I looked at my sister's contorted face and could
see tears rolling down her cheeks, shimmering in the yellow light. “I'm sorry,
Sylvie,” she said. “I'm so, so sorry. I never wanted it to be this way. I know
you won't believe that, but I didn't want any of this.”

What would I have told her if I had the chance?
That I forgave her? That I understood? That I would make sure things would turn
out okay? But none of those things was true in the moment. The most I knew was
that I felt trapped there in the basement, since Franky had made her way around
from the back of the stairs and was now holding the hatchet from the massacre at
that old New Hampshire farm turned inn. I thought of the Locke family my father
talked about in his lectures, the bloody end the mother and children all met,
the way their souls were said to haunt that old hotel for years afterward.

As if to warn me that she intended the same fate
for me, Franky reached up and whacked the hatchet into the stairs. The blade
sunk into the wood and she yanked it back out. It caused Rose to let out a
shriek.

And then Franky reached up and used the hatchet to
smash the lightbulb. In an instant, the basement grew dark and full of more
shadows, lit only by the stray shafts of sunlight that made its way through the
casement window. I turned and ran toward the partition. Tangled in the blankets,
I saw something I had not noticed before. When I pulled back the covers, there
it was: my journal, wide open and facedown. There was no time to reach for it,
so I went to the sliding glass door just beyond. When I tried to pull it open,
nothing moved. I looked down and saw a broomstick wedged at the base to keep the
door from opening. I pulled and pulled on the broomstick, but she must have
nailed it there, because it would not budge.

When I turned, Franky was watching me calmly since
she knew I could not get out that way. The only thing I could think to do was to
reach for those Tupperware containers. I picked them up and hurled them at her,
then stumbled toward the dental chair, where I reached into a nearby drawer,
grabbed a handful of old dental tools, and hurled them at her too. None of it
did anything to keep her from coming closer still, moving steadily, as though
nothing would ever stop her from attacking me with that hatchet.

I ran to the hulking bookshelf, thinking I could
pull it down to get into the crawl space. Penny and the cage wobbled on top as I
reached around the back and began pulling. The bookshelf rocked a bit, but was
too heavy. One by one, I began throwing those old tomes about demons and
possessed girls my age from so long ago at Franky. She just swatted them away
with the hatchet while I exhausted myself. When I cleared the shelves of most of
the contents, at last I pulled again and this time knocked the entire piece of
furniture over. That shelf and the remaining books and the old rabbit cage and
Penny went toppling down in a loud clatter. I wasted no time pulling my body up
into the gaping hole in the cinder-block wall that led to the crawl space. Only
once did I glance back to see that Penny had come free from her cage and landed,
lifeless and still, on the cement floor while Franky stood there looking
momentarily stunned by it all.

I kept moving, crawling into the darkness, the only
light a small rectangle in the distance created by an air vent on the other side
of the house. My hands were grimy with dirt by the time I reached that light. I
put my fingers on the metal grate and pulled. Who knew how many years it had
been there. Long enough that it wiggled the slightest bit but refused to come
loose.

Behind me, I could hear grunting as Franky lifted
herself into the crawl space too. It made me tug on the grate even more
frantically. Over the sound of the
shhhh,
I heard
her drawing closer with every second.
Soon, she will be
upon me,
I told myself,
and it will all come to
an end there in the darkness beneath our house.

With every last bit of strength I could muster, I
pulled on that vent until it came loose. Fast as I could, I slid my body out
into the daylight. As my feet were about to slip free, I felt Franky grab at
them. But I kicked and wriggled loose before she could get hold. And when I was
standing, I turned to see her hands reaching out from the vent. It would not
stop her, I knew, but I stomped my foot on her fingers. The force caused her to
release a loud howl, and another when I stomped again.

As Franky withdrew her hands into the crawl space,
I looked around and wondered where to go. That's when I thought of Dereck on the
other side of those woods, slaughtering turkeys in time for Thanksgiving. I
began running across the street, toward the path beyond the first of those empty
foundations.

But Franky had made her way out of the crawl space
by then and started running too. Just as I got to the edge of the foundation,
she caught up and shoved me so hard from behind that I found myself falling over
the edge. I landed in a murky puddle at the bottom and looked up to see Franky
standing up above. My mind felt so dizzy that her image shifted and reshaped
itself.

My back, my arms, my legs—
all
of me
—felt in too much agony to move. And yet, I needed to since she
was making her way to the crumbling cement stairs. As I lay there, so many
memories and thoughts flashed in my mind: There was Abigail drawing a map on the
walls around me the night before she left. There was my sister and me creating
the details for our imaginary home over and over again: a window, a painting, a
doorway. There were my parents, who had come to this neighborhood and bought the
lot across the street, starting their lives out like any other new couple. How
could they have known they'd be the only people ever to live here? How could
they have known how horribly wrong things would go for them . . . and
for all of us?

I tried to get up. The most I managed was to roll
over onto my stomach as the murky water splashed around me, soaking my jeans and
sneakers. Franky ambled down the stairs, slipping on the rocks but not falling,
hurrying to reach me. When she did, she grabbed a hank of my hair and pushed my
face into that dirty puddle, holding me there so that I was unable to
breathe.

The
shhhh
in my ear
grew louder still, the sound warping itself into something higher pitched and
hysterical. And then it became an altogether different sound—it became a kind of
tune instead, one I recognized. For the first time, I heard the words as my
mother's lilting voice sang that song she used to hum:

We gather together to
ask the Lord's blessing;

He chastens and hastens
His will to make known.

The wicked oppressing
now cease from distressing.

Sing praises to His
Name; He forgets not His own.

Franky lifted my head by the hair and yanked me out
of that water. For a few fleeting seconds, I saw the cracked gray walls of the
foundation. I saw the fading daylight. I saw the fallen leaves around us. And
then she shoved my head down, smashing my face against the cement. In the white
light and blistering pain that followed, that
shhhh
warped itself into the sound of my mother's voice once more. I heard her there,
so close now, singing that old choir song to me: