I heard Rummel’s heavy shoes shift on the floor behind me, heard him let out another of those faint sighs. In the moments after I had made the request to see Lynch, the detective had offered the same option: that I could just look at the transcripts. But that’s not what I wanted. What brought me to the prison was that long-ago conversation with my mother in the bed of our hotel room, the one where she told me I could sense the truth inside a person if only I allowed myself. “I want to hear what happened from you,” I told Lynch.
He did not respond immediately, or at least not directly. Instead, Lynch told me, “I’ve had a lot of time to read in here, Sylvie. Guess which book I spent the most time on?”
“The Bible,” I said, since the answer seemed obvious.
“Wrong. That’s for other people in here. I’ve decided at long last that I’ve had enough of that book. Enough for a lifetime actually. So, no. The one that’s been keeping me company is the book about your mom and dad. The reporter who wrote it had a few interesting things to say about your old man, Sylvie. Have you ever read it?”
“Yes,” I told him.
The night before, after I’d found those candles in the trash, I’d cleaned up the mess, then returned to the house. Since Rose was up in her room, I couldn’t get the book from her closet. Instead, I scoured the house for a second copy, finding one crammed inside the curio hutch with all those other old books of my father’s. That fall when it was published, my father sat quietly in his chair reading the book. The clock ticked. My mother made tea. She kept busy flipping through those wallpaper patterns until he was done. That’s when my father told us we were never to speak of the book or Heekin again. All that and yet, there were those few extra editions in the hutch anyway. For so long, I had told myself that what kept me from reading the final pages had been the promise I made to my mother that morning on our steps when she held the manuscript in her hands and wept. But it was something more, I realized. I was afraid to read that final section—“Should You Really Believe the Masons?”—because I did not want to face what it might say.
“So,” Lynch was saying now. “You know the things your father told that reporter.”
Be direct and clear, I thought, repeating those survey rules in my mind. “That’s not what I want to talk to you about. I want to hear what happened in the moments before I entered that church.”
Lynch looked behind him at the guard, no more than ten feet away, then at the clock on the wall. Twenty-one minutes—that’s all we had left. He turned to me again, but said nothing.
Rummel came closer, put his hand on my shoulder, and squeezed. “We can go, if you like.”
“No,” I told him. “Not yet.”
I waited for him to step away again, and when he did and the clock showed only nineteen minutes remaining, this is what I offered Lynch: “If you want, I can tell you what happened that summer you left your daughter with us. I can tell you what I know of her last night in our home. The things that went wrong.”
That got his attention. Lynch raised his head and said, “If you’re planning on feeding me the same lines about those demons who drove her from your house, then save it, Sylvie. I already heard that crap from your old man before he died.”
I swallowed, noticed that my hands were shaking. I moved them beneath the table and took a breath, trying to calm the rabbit beat of my heart. “I’m not going to tell you the same story as my father. I’m going to tell you the truth of what I know. So long as you do the same for me.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “You first.”
How much easier might this conversation have been if I had never lost my journal, if I could simply open to the pages where I’d written all about that summer, all about that last night in particular, then slide the book across the table for Lynch to read?
I remember that when I ran across the street and burst through the front door, the first thing I wanted to do was hug my sister, since I had not hugged her the day she left home. But the sight of Rose made me stop abruptly in the entrance to the living room.
“What are you gawking at?” Rose said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Your head,” I told her. “What did you . . .”
She reached a hand up and ran it over her scalp, still nicked and bloody from the razor. “Funny, I had a full head of hair when I got here this morning. But when I found someone else sleeping in my room, wearing my clothes, living my life, I thought I better do something to set myself apart from her.”
“Rose,” my mother said. “Your father and I explained why you found things the way you did. You never should have—”
The front door opened and my mother grew quiet. A moment later, Abigail padded up the hall in bare feet until she was standing beside me. Why had I failed to notice earlier that the shirt she wore was not one of those tattered things she had arrived with, but rather a simple black tank that belonged to my sister? How many other days and nights had she taken to wearing her clothes without my noticing?