Help for the Haunted by John Searles

card from Saint Julia’s that I was surprised she had not thrown away, and a newspaper where she’d circled an ad: PARTY PLANNER WANTED: MUST BE DETAIL-ORIENTED & ORGANIZED . Even though Rose talked about going back for her GED, so far she had done nothing about it, instead taking random office jobs only to get fired because she lacked the exact skills listed in that ad. I gave her old globe a spin and thought of the way she used to do the same, planting her finger on random locations and bringing it to a stop, announcing Armenia or Lithuania or Guam.
    I was about to check out her closet when the Hulk’s chain rattled on the lawn.
    I went to the window. Outside, the dog’s bone must have thawed, because she gnawed frantically on it, causing her chain to make that clanging sound. Except for Rose’s truck, the driveway remained empty. Relieved, I stepped through the minefield on her floor and opened the closet. Since so few of Rose’s belongings were ever put away, the space was mostly vacant. Nothing from Howie, but I located a plastic bag labeled Baltimore County Police Department . Flashlight, road map, repair bills, oil change receipts—its contents included everything the police had removed from the Datsun before returning the car to us. I stared at my father’s signature on a receipt, imagining his hand moving a pen across the bottom. Finally, I pulled out the only remaining item: Help for the Haunted: The Unusual Work of Sylvester and Rose Mason by Samuel Heekin.
    Despite all the months that had passed, holding that book in my hands made me every bit as nervous as it had that night in the backseat. Some part of me worried about Rose coming home still, so I clicked on the flashlight and turned off the ceiling lamp, then sat down on the floor and flipped pages. My mother used to complain about Heekin’s convoluted way of stringing together sentences. Judging from passages that leaped out, I understood why:
    If you are a believer who has come to this narrative, there is nothing that I, the author, can do to prepare you, the reader, for what you are about to discover . . .
    . . . The Masons could very well open a museum of curiosities in the basement of their home, for that is where the remnants of their excursions in the realm of the paranormal live. I use the word “ live ” because, to this visitor at least, many of the things I encountered on my tour beneath their house did feel exactly that: alive. One of the very first artifacts I took note of upon entering the basement was a hatchet, which seemed to carry a life force all its own. This weapon was used in a tragic family slaying at what was once the Locke Farm in Whitefield, New Hampshire. But that, as they say, is only the beginning . . .
    . . . Perhaps the most infamous case that the Masons have spoken about in lectures and media outlets is that of Penny, the child-sized Raggedy Ann doll hand-sewn by a mother from the Midwest with instructions from a mail-order kit. A gesture of hope, it was a gift to her only child, a girl who lay terminally ill until she died with the doll at her side . . .
    â€œHe writes like he talks,” I could still hear my mother saying as I sat in Rose’s dark bedroom, her humidifier puffing away like a sick old lady reading over my shoulder.
    â€œYou mean a lot of hogwash?” my father said in response.
    â€œI mean too many words. Someone should take a vacuum cleaner to his sentences. No wonder the man’s a reporter for the Dundalk Eagle and not a big-city newspaper. We never should have let him into our lives.”
    â€œYou’re right about that last part,” my father told her. “But his writing style is the least of our problems.”
    I skimmed the mess until I came to the photo section with the image I’d lingered on in the backseat of the Datsun. That night, it had been too dark to make out the caption, but I saw it