Most people, they are afraid to believe in ghosts. Me, I’m afraid not to believe. Because, well, what then? If there really is nothing else—nowhere to go after this, no way to linger on this plane to finish unsettled business if we must, then that means each moment, each breath, each passing second, is as ethereal as the wind. It means all we do here on earth—the going and coming, the loving and hating—it is all for naught. So, no. Ghosts don’t scare me. But no ghosts—that terrifies me.
Enough about that, though. Back to what I was saying previously, Mr. Heekin. Forgive me, I mean, Sam. What I have always wanted, more than anything, is to build a good life for my daughters and my wife. To have a family of my own with proper values. Growing up, my father drank too much. He was not abusive, but his remote nature was in its own way a form of abuse. My mother and I had our tender moments but shared such different interests that we were never close. And my brother, well, he did things I can never forgive. For all those reasons, I ended up creating my own world.
What’s that? Excuse me?
No, no. That is not what I am saying. Those things I saw—still see—are every bit real. What I mean is that I created my own life apart from the family I was born into. I moved away. I found the Bible. I came to believe that a life lived in the light, free of sin and reproach, protects us as we move through this world. It keeps the darkness at bay.
The tape came to an end, and the cassette player in Detective Rummel’s car automatically ejected it. He asked if I wanted to listen to the other side. “Depends,” I said, my father’s voice echoing in my mind still. “How close are we?”
Rummel lifted a hand from the steering wheel, pointing to an impossibly high metal fence in the distance. I looked to see barbed wire curlicuing across the top, a compound of low-slung brick buildings on the other side. “We’ve got a little time still, Sylvie. But why don’t we wait until after to hear more, so you can clear your head?”
Days. Weeks. Months. It might have taken that long to arrange a meeting with an inmate on the other side of that fence. But the morning after I found those candles in the trash, I drove in silence with my sister to the police station. The two of us had barely spoken since that fight in her truck over the money from Dial U.S.A., and our silence had become so palpable it felt as though we were both holding our breath, daring the other to let it out first. Once they separated us—Rose on that bench in the hall, me inside that achingly familiar interview room—Rummel and Louise asked if I was prepared to either recant or uphold my account of the evening last winter.
And that’s when I told them I wanted to see Albert Lynch. I refused to say anything more or even see my sister again until they made arrangements. Louise stepped out into the hallway to speak to Rose about the need for her permission, since I was a minor after all, and she was my legal guardian. While waiting, I asked Rummel about those interview tapes Heekin had told me about. For all the trouble I had given him, the detective maintained his kindness toward me. In an almost tender voice, he said that if I thought the tapes might help somehow, I was welcome to give them a listen. He brought a cassette player into the room, and my father’s interviews with the reporter filled the air around me. At different points on the recordings, Heekin’s faltering voice could not be heard, so it was just my father speaking between the occasional pause.
By midafternoon, Rummel poked his head into the room to inform me that the prison had okayed the visit and that Rose had begrudgingly acquiesced and granted permission too. The only thing we were waiting for was to find out if Lynch himself would agree to see me.
A short while later, word came that he did.
Nearly five hours after I entered the station, I walked out, carrying the one cassette I had yet to play. In the hallway, Rummel and I passed my sister on that bench, flipping through the same old safety brochures. It startled me to see her, since I assumed she had given up and gone home by then.
“Sylvie,” she said when she laid eyes on me.
Head down, I kept walking. Some part of me felt the urge to take the detective’s hand for comfort. Instead, I squeezed the cassette harder, bracing myself for this moment with Rose, bracing myself for the trip to the prison that lay ahead.
“Sylvie!” She tossed those brochures on the floor and stood. “I’m talking to you!”
“I’m just going to see him,” I told her over the rising shhhh.