Help for the Haunted (11 page)

Rose jogged to the truck, rainwater splashing beneath her sneakers. By the time I caught up with her, she was leaning into the passenger window and they had launched into a conversation.

“The ghostbusters won't be done for a while,” Howie said to both of us. “What do you say we go have some fun?”

I stepped up, poked my head inside the window. The air inside smelled of beer and smoke. The dashboard lights glowed orange and made the scruff of my uncle's beard glow too. An unlit cigarette dangled from his lips, bouncing when he spoke. “Hey there, kiddo. You've grown some, haven't you?”

My unexpected shyness returned. In the meekest of voices, I told him hello.

“Damn if you don't look like a carbon copy of your mother. I swear it's like she had you all on her own. I don't see my brother in you. Not one tiny bit.”

Rose nudged me away in order to pull open the door and climb inside.

“You want to come with your sister and me?” my uncle asked.

“Where?”

“
Where?
We're going for a ride. Spin the wheels around this shit-box town for a bit. Who knows? Maybe we'll hit an arcade if we're lucky to find one. I'm guessing you like Ms. Pac-Man and Ping-Pong.”

“You guessed wrong,” my sister told him. “The girl doesn't like any of the normal things kids her age like.”

Part of me wanted to climb into that truck simply to prove her wrong. I might have if Howie didn't look right at me, cigarette bouncing, and say, “Come on, Rose. What are you waiting for?”

“I'm Sylvie. She's Rose,” I corrected him.

The lighter popped out of the dashboard. Howie reached for it and lit his cigarette so it glowed like the rest of him. “I know that. It's just, like I was saying, you look so much like your mother, a guy can get mixed up is all. Anyway,
Sylvie,
get in the truck.”

His voice had changed, so it sounded more like an order than an invitation. Now I was the one who stood caught between two choices, while the wind blew and the palms made a frantic swooshing above and that man with the scratches called into the bushes, “It's all right. Come on. It's safe. I promise.”

“Just forget her,” Rose said.

My uncle leaned across the seat, his hairy, tattooed arm brushing Rose's stomach as he pushed open the door. “Get in the truck,” he said again.

And then came another voice, “Sylvie!”

I whirled around to see the revolving door of the conference center still spinning even after it spit my mother from the building. She moved in my direction, one hand clutching her silver cross necklace. When she saw Rose sitting in my uncle's truck, her face took on a stricken expression. Over the sound of the wind and the chugging engine and that man calling into the bushes, my mother raised her voice louder than I'd ever heard, “Get out of that truck! Get out of that truck now, Rose!”

“You better step on it, Uncle,” my sister said.

When my mother reached us, she must have realized that my sister had every intention of ignoring her. She looked at Howie and said, “Tell her to get out.”

He laughed. “You want
me
to tell her?”

“Yes.”

“Don't you think that's a little messed up? I haven't seen the girl in years and she's going to listen to
me
. Sounds like you have trouble controlling your own kid.”

My mother gave up reasoning with him. One last time, she tried with my sister. “Rose, I'm asking you to get out of that truck.”

Rose's only response was to pull the door shut. My mother tugged back, but Rose hammered down the lock and cranked up the window. I watched her say something to my uncle, but it was as though there were two worlds now: one inside the truck, which we could not hear, and another outside, where that man by the bushes was still calling into the bushes.

My uncle pulled away from the curb. As their taillights disappeared out of the lot, my mother clutched her cross and asked if I knew where they were going.

“For a ride. And maybe to an arcade if they find one.”

Her eyes shut a moment, and I knew she was praying. When she opened them again, I asked how she knew that Rose and I were outside. I thought maybe she'd tell me she had one of her feelings, but instead she said that the security guard had checked the greenroom and reported back that it was empty. My mother had excused herself from the talk and left my father on the stage while she came to find us. “I can't believe she's gone off with him.”

I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for not living up to the promise I made to my father, but someone else spoke first.

“Excuse me,” the voice said.

My mother and I turned to see the man with the scratches. We had been so preoccupied, staring out at the parking lot, that neither of us noticed him approach. Beneath the visor of his baseball cap, I saw a long nose with flared nostrils and skinny lips. He must have wiped his hand on his face, because blood smeared across one cheek.

“I'm sorry to bother you, but—”

“This is not a good time,” my mother told him, letting go of her cross and straightening her posture. It was never her way to be rude, but this moment called for an exception. “As I'm sure you just witnessed, we are having some family difficulties.”

“I'm sorry.” The man stepped closer, and I could see that beneath the smudges of blood, his skin looked smooth and creaseless. “I really am sorry. But, please. I drove all the way here, hours and hours, to hear you and your husband speak.”

“Well, my husband is still inside speaking. If you hurry, you can hear him.”

“I know that. I was in the auditorium earlier. But I had to leave, because, well . . .”

As his voice trailed off, my mother seemed to take him in for the first time. I watched her face soften in such a way that she appeared more like her usual, serene self. “What is it?”

“It's . . . well . . . I need your help.”

He pointed to the bushes, and my mother walked toward them. I had the sense that she did not want me to follow, so I lingered behind. The man did too. From the curb, we watched as my mother gathered the hem of her dress and crouched to the ground. Rather than call into the darkness the way he had been doing, she began humming, the same song she hummed on the drive down to Florida to shut out Rose's bad behavior. At last, when her humming stopped, my mother held her hand into the shadows. I cringed, expecting the rustle and high-pitched snarl.

Except for the wind shaking the palm trees, things were quiet. I looked closer and saw, not far from my mother's hand, a pair of eyes. Wet and shiny, they made me think of an animal blinking there in the dark. And then, slowly, she appeared. Not an animal. A girl. She was older than me, I could tell, though not by much. Thirteen, I guessed. Maybe fourteen. Her blond hair was matted. Her expression, empty and dazed. She placed her hand in my mother's. Together, they stood. On the girl's forehead, my mother made the sign of the cross over and over again, so many times it was not possible to count. When that was done at last, she placed her palms on the girl's cheeks. Eyes closed, my mother's lips moved in prayer. “In the name of the Father,” she said finally, “the Son, the Holy Ghost.”

The girl's hand in hers now, she led her to where we stood by the curb in the spot my uncle's truck had been only a few moments earlier. As rain began to fall once more, misting my cheeks and dampening my hair, I studied the girl more carefully. No shoes. One sock. Ratty shorts and T-shirt. Her cherub cheeks and arms scratched, same as the man's. Her bright blue eyes stayed trained on my mother and no one else. She opened her mouth, actually moved it up and down in a vague, marionette sort of way, but no sound came.

Still, my mother seemed to understand. “It's okay,” she said, turning to the man. “Come take her.”

With my mother's blessing, he stepped toward the girl and held out his hand. When she took it, he spoke in an astonished voice to my mother, “It's true what people say. You have a gift.”

She gave a small nod, but that was her only response. After so many years, my mother still did not like to be made the center of attention. And more than likely, her mind was on her oldest daughter, out there on the dark roads with her drunken brother-in-law at the wheel.

Before they turned to go, the man reached out his scratched hand and shook my mother's. “Thank you, and God bless. My apologies for intruding on your difficulties.”

“It's okay,” she told him. “You needed help. And certain kinds of help are hard to come by in this world.”

“Well, I'm grateful to you for understanding,” he said. “By the way, my name is Albert Lynch and this is my daughter, Abigail.”

 

Chapter 9

Little Things

W
ITNESS SURFACES WHO MAY CLEAR SUSPECT IN KILLING OF FAMOUS MARYLAND COUPLE
.

The headline could not be missed on the newspaper folded neatly in the wastebasket by Boshoff's desk. When I walked into his office the morning after Halloween, I glanced down to see those words and Albert Lynch's unlined face—his bald head, long nose, and wispy mustache—staring up at me.

I'd been avoiding stories about my parents' case in the papers ever since Cora gave me what I thought was her only worthwhile advice: “The things people write will mess with your head. Better off letting the detectives and lawyers keep you abreast of what you need to know.” So I did my best to focus on Boshoff, who unwrapped a cough drop and placed it on his pink farm-animal tongue before telling me, “I read a poem last night that put me in mind of you, Sylvie.”

“A poem?”

“Yes. I've been anxious to tell you about it all day.” As I took a seat, he went on to say that when he had trouble sleeping, he read poetry. Cookbooks were his favorite reading material, but he had worked through all the titles on his shelf, and they were too costly to buy more. “Some people would claim that's not much of a change, since recipes are little poems in their own way. Wouldn't you agree?”

I nodded, remembering the recipe my sister recited before I left for school. Considering all that happened the night before, it was no surprise I never slept. Not long after the sun came up, a car turned into the driveway. Peeking through my window, I glimpsed Cora tugging the Hulk into her backseat while Rose burst through the front door and began vomiting downstairs.

“I know what you're thinking,” Rose said, wiping her mouth and straightening up after I followed the retching sound to the kitchen. The green makeup was washed from her face, though clumps still clung to her hair. “You're thinking: don't puke in the sink. But who says the toilet's the only place a person can puke? Now that I think about it, the sink's way more sanitary.”

Actually, I'd been thinking about the boys who had come to the door and the light in the basement. I opened my mouth to tell her about them, but Rose broke in before I could speak.

“I'm going to make a pizza. Want some?”

“
You're
cooking?”

She reached for a 7-Eleven bag on the table. “Here's my recipe: open box, remove frozen crap, nuke in microwave. I'm no Julia What's-Her-Tits, but I'll manage.”

“The poem has nothing to do with your situation,” Boshoff was saying, luring me back to the here and now of his office. “But it contains a few lines that might offer you a helpful approach. It's called ‘Little Things' by Sharon Olds. I would have written it down, except I was in bed with my book-light on, so I didn't have a pen. Plus, I didn't want to wake my wife. She needs her rest these days.”

The tight-fitting band on his finger should have led me to consider the existence of a Mrs. Boshoff, but I never had. When I tried to picture her what came was a woman with white hair and rosy cheeks, a kind of Mrs. Claus, tucked under the covers beside him. “Why does she need her rest?” I asked.

Boshoff quit clacking his cough drop. “I'm afraid my wife's not well.”

I knew how it felt when people pushed on a sensitive topic, so I told him I was sorry, but I didn't ask more. He nodded his thanks and we let that be enough. I watched him slip on his glasses and lean over his desk, doing his best to recall the poem. As his pencil scratched across the pad, I felt Albert Lynch's eyes upon me. Since there had only been one witness at the church—
me
—I wondered who could have come forward to clear his name.

“Here we go, Sylvie. I can't remember the entire poem. Just the part that made me think of you.” Boshoff swiveled his chair in my direction and read aloud. When he was done, he pulled off his glasses and asked if the passage put me in mind of anything in particular. I had no clue, so I shook my head before remembering to speak my answer. Glasses back on, he tried again. This time, I listened carefully as he read: “ ‘I learned to love the little things about him, because of all the big things I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.'

“As I told you, Sylvie, the poem itself is about an unrelated topic. However, those lines might offer a way for you to think about your sister.”

I learned to love the little things about Rose, because of all the big things I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.

Never once had I mentioned the larger blame I placed on my sister for making that call and luring them to the church or my role in not telling the police about it, but perhaps Boshoff had sensed something in my silence, the way my mother once taught me to do.

“Do you think you could try that, Sylvie? Since you have to live with her for the next few years at least, it might help you to focus on the positive.”

“I'll try,” I said, unable to muster even a hint of enthusiasm in my voice.

“Well, why don't we start by making a list of little things about her that are lovable? We can begin it together. Do you have the journal I gave you?”

That small violet book came with me everywhere in my father's tote, since leaving it home meant Rose might discover all I'd been writing there about the things from our past I did not want to forget, like that night with Dot, that trip to Ocala and what came after. On account of what I'd written, I didn't like the idea of taking it out, so I told Boshoff I didn't have it. He riffled through the desk and found a pad instead. In his sloppy script, he wrote “Little Things” at the top, numbers one through three down the side, before handing it to me.

“You once mentioned Rose has a nice voice when she sings with the radio. That seems like a small enough thing to love, right?”

Reluctantly, I wrote:
My sister has a decent singing voice
.

When I was done, I stared at the impossibly vast spaces beside those next two numbers. “I'm sorry,” I said, my gaze shifting to Albert Lynch in that photo once more. “I'm not feeling well. Do you mind if we stop?”

This time, Boshoff's gaze followed mine to the wastebasket. His lips parted and he brought a finger to his mouth, like he was pushing a button there and turning something off. “Sylvie, you're aware I share this office with a handful of rotating staff. I got here a short while before you today. Had I noticed the paper there, I would have removed—”

“I think I need to go to the nurse. But can I take that newspaper with me?”

“Of course. If that's what you want. But wouldn't you like to talk about it?”

After weeks of him gently circling the topic, I felt bad that this was the way it had come about. Even so, I shook my head, forgetting about Louise Hock's insistence that I practice speaking my answers. I reached into the basket, feeling as if I were reaching down and down into our well to fetch one of those rag dolls by its fingerless hands. I grabbed the edge of the newspaper, a coupon section and the sports pages falling away, leaving me with the pages I wanted. I carried them with me as I left poor, startled Boshoff and his list of “Little Things” behind.

The direction of the nurse's office—that's the way I headed, even though I had no intention of ending up there. Instead, I took a detour down the industrial arts hall, where the smells were unfamiliar: sawdust and solder. At a water fountain, I splashed my face, because it was true that I didn't feel so well, before unfolding the newspaper.

Dundalk
—The killer shot Rose Mason, 45, leaving her to die by the altar in a small chapel in a quiet Maryland town twenty miles from the state capital. Sylvester Mason, 50, her husband, was killed a few feet away with a gunshot to the back of the head.

The younger of the couple's two children, a 13-year-old girl, had been sleeping in her parents' car outside the chapel when she woke to the sound of gunfire. “When I heard the second shot, I opened the car door and walked into the church,” she told police, though no further details of her account have been released to the press. Officers reported that they did not find the girl, who was crouched beneath a pew, until hours after the investigation had begun. “Her head was bleeding and she was drifting in and out of consciousness,” said Detective Dennis Rummel of the Baltimore County Police Force. “We got her out of there as soon as we could.”

In the weeks following the investigation, a lone suspect emerged: Albert Lynch, 41, a drifter, originally from Holly Grove, Arkansas. Since 1986 Mr. Lynch had been seek—

“Excuse me, young lady.”

I looked up to see a teacher I didn't recognize. “Yes?”

“Do you have a pass to be out here loitering during class time?”

“I'm on my way to the nurse's office.”

“Well, this is a roundabout way of getting there.”

I folded the paper, left the hall with its unfamiliar smells, and once more walked in the direction of the nurse's office. But when I came upon an exit, I slipped through it. Rarely did I miss class, never mind skip out in the middle of the day, but I wanted to go someplace where I could read the article without interruption. Considering how often I took it, the path I first followed when Dot had been locked in our parents' bathroom should have been well tread by then. But like some fairy-tale forest, it remained forever overgrown and unwelcoming. A maze of stone walls led me to the barbed-wire fence behind Watt's Farm close to Butter Lane. Most of the year, the field there held no sign of life, but come fall it teemed with white-feathered turkeys. The way they arrived, all at once and fully grown, left me suspicious about how many were actually raised on premises, but nevertheless, mornings when I was early for school, I stopped at the fence and watched those birds strutting about on their scaly, bent-backward legs. The high-pitched warble that rose from their throats made them seem like nervous old women.

That afternoon, I stopped at my usual spot, put down my father's tote, and rested a hand on the fence while I finished the article.

Since 1986 Mr. Lynch had been seeking counsel from the Masons—a couple who built a national reputation, admired in some circles, mocked in others, as demonologists. Those close to the case say Mr. Lynch was disgruntled with the Masons' treatment of his daughter. Lynch admits to meeting the couple at the chapel on the evening of the murders, but claims to have left the church before violence erupted. To date, he has lacked a substantiated alibi, insisting that he was at the Texaco on Route 2 at the time of the killings. The station's security monitors were not in service so no video exists to support his claim. Further weakening Mr. Lynch's case, he asserted through his attorney, Michael Cavage, that after fueling his car, he paid with cash. The clerk on duty has no recollection of seeing Mr. Lynch that evening.

For months, the suspect insisted that an elderly man had seen him in the restroom. With the court case approaching in April, police had all but stopped searching for another suspect, as the witness failed to surface. Yesterday, however, Cavage announced that the person had been located and would corroborate Mr. Lynch's alibi in court. Mr. Patrick Dunn, 71, of Kennebunkport, ME, claims to have seen Mr. Lynch in the men's room that evening while his wife waited outside in the car. The sudden emergence of Mr. Dunn leaves police and investigators without any apparent suspects.

In a final twist to an already bizarre account of the evening, Mr. Lynch has maintained that he paid the deceased couple's eldest daughter, Rose Mason Jr., now 19, a small sum to make a call from a pay phone outside the Mustang Bar in Baltimore, inviting her parents to the church that evening. The allegation has been denied by Ms. Mason who states that she was home at the time of the call, a claim supported by her sister.

Assistant District Attorney Louise Hock told the press a statement would be forthcoming.

“Hello!” a voice called from across the field. “Hey, you! Hello!”

I looked up to see a very tall someone trudging through the field of turkeys in my direction. He wore a tan barn jacket, gray sweats, and enormous boots, laces loose and slithering at his ankles. The sea of turkeys parted, flapping and gobbling in his wake. When he arrived at the fence, he said, “I've seen you here before.”

“Sorry.” I figured I must be in trouble for trespassing or loitering. I pressed the newspaper to my stomach, where the only thing I'd eaten all day—a single slice of Rose's microwave pizza—roiled.

“Don't be. I just wanted to warn you not to put your fingers on the fence. Turkeys are as mean as they are dumb. They'll bite.” He tugged off a glove and held up his left hand, wiggling his thumb and index finger. His ring, middle, and pinky fingers were all missing.

I yanked my hand off the fence. “Is that how—”

“No. But the visual usually makes people listen. You're Sylvie, right?”