My silence did nothing to keep her from coming around to the other side of the truck. By then I’d stepped off the thing and placed the tote on the ground. We stood in our shadowy driveway, staring down at its splayed body and wide white moon of a face. Those blank black eyes and that peculiar shade of red hair. This one was smaller than usual: the size of a possum, but flattened, as though it had been run over.
With the tip of her boot, my sister flipped it facedown into the dirt. “Fuckers!” she yelled into the darkness surrounding our house. “You fuckers!” With each new outburst, she raked her hands over her hair until the staticky strays levitated around her head. I thought again of how she’d first razored it to the scalp more than a year before, mainly because some guy she liked had shaved his and wanted her to do the same. If Franky told you to jump off a bridge, would you? If Franky told you to rob a bank, would you? If Franky told you never to speak to your family again, would you? Those were the questions my parents asked, to which my sister responded, Yes!
“Fuckers!” she yelled one last time before letting out a breath and kneeling in the dirt. Slowly, her hands reached out for the thing.
“Don’t!” I said.
“Don’t what?”
“Touch it.”
Rose looked up at me. She may have had our mother’s name, but it was our father’s face I saw on her: his wide chin, his pronounced nose, his eyes, dark and squinty behind his smudged wire-rims. Though our father never spoke to me the way Rose did when she said, “It’s not going to do anything, you idiot.”
“I know. But please. Just don’t.”
My sister sighed. She stood and walked to the rusted shed at the edge of our property. I heard her rattling around before she returned with a shovel. It took maneuvering, but she slid the foam-stuffed body onto the end and carefully walked to the well we hadn’t used since the town of Dundalk installed city water. I followed and pushed the plywood covering off the top. Rose raised the shovel over the gaping black mouth and, with a flick of her wrists, dropped the doll inside.
“It never ends,” my sister said, hurling the shovel into the darkness where her old rabbit cage once stood. “It never fucking ends.”
“They’ll get bored,” I told her and pulled the plywood back over the hole, careful not to give myself a sliver. “They have to get bored.”
Inside, our house was silent except for the hum of the fridge and the ticking of the antique clock that hung not far from the cross on the wall. I went to the kitchen with its peeling blue walls and ate my dinner: a cherry Popsicle, the best kind. All the while I slurped and felt my lips go numb, I stared at my mother’s thick book of wallpaper swatches on the table and thought about another conversation with Detective Rummel, the morning after the first, at the hospital.
Rummel had slid a photo across the narrow table over my bed. “Do you know this man, Sylvie?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“He once was a friend of my— Well, not a friend. I guess he was what you’d call a client of my parents. His daughter, Abigail, was anyway. She was the one who needed them. Her father just brought her to us.”
“Brought her to you?”
“Yes. Albert Lynch wanted my parents’ help dealing with his daughter’s, well, problems.”
Rummel tapped his thick finger on the photo. “Okay, then. We are going to want to know all about that. But right now, I need an answer in order to help you. Is this the man you saw inside the church the night of your parents’ deaths?”
I thought of the cold air inside that small building after I pulled the door open, so cold it hurt to breathe. I thought of how dark it had been after the door clicked shut behind me, the only lights from the car outside, the beams muted through the stained-glass windows. More carefully, I stared down at the picture. Bald head. John Lennon glasses. Wispy mustache that looked like something a teenager, maybe Brian Waldrup, might grow.
“Yes,” I told Rummel. “That’s who I saw.”