Page 37 of Haunted

There’s a cross on the front of Shiloh Baptist on Palmer. Lit up, and twelve feet of it. I go around the side of the building instead.

The side door lets into a corridor that smells of coffee and floor polish and, underneath that, of every church hall I’ve ever stood in anywhere in the world. They are the same building in forty countries. Someone always brings a folding table.

There’s a sign with PHOENIX SOCIETY on it and an arrow. I follow the arrow into a meeting room with cinder-block walls and an antiseptic white tile floor under a drop ceiling lit by fluorescents. Chairs in neat rows in front of a podium. A coffee urn at the back.

I’m well over an hour late and that’s deliberate.

There are eleven or twelve people left, stacking chairs and not hurrying about it. A woman is pouring the last of an urn down a sink at the back.

And on an easel by the door, four feet high, there’s a photograph of a boy in an emergency shelter cowering in Lance Broussard’s arms.

FAIRHAVEN REMEMBERS. TEN YEARS.

“Parker! My God, it is you!”

Henry Drumm, my old neighbor, is crossing the hall with a set of stacked chairs still in one hand and a grin that’s already certain I’m as glad to see him as he is to see me.

“Mr. Drumm,” I say, and he puts the chairs down and opens his arms and hugs me. Awkwardly, I step into the embrace.

“Look at you! My God, I can’t get over it. Parker Bishop.”

“I go by Jonny now,” I say. “Nobody’s called me Parker in at least ten years.”

“Jonny.” He tries it out. “All right. Jonny.” He pulls back and shakes his head. “You look so different. I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Oh, it’s just a little henna in my hair.” It’s not the only change, but I’m being modest. Since I started making videos, I’ve had to be more careful about how I look.

“It’s not just that,” Henry says. “It’s everything. You look so—wow. And your accent. Where’ve you been?”

“South and Southeast Asia, mostly. For work.”

“Sit down. There’s coffee.”

“I’m not staying. I came about the photograph.”

“Isn’t it something?” He turns to look at it with open affection. “We had it blown up two years ago. There’s a smaller one behind the podium. That picture built this whole thing, you know that? People see two boys covered in ash and they open their wallets.”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about. I’d like it taken down.”

He stops.

“Taken down,” he repeats.

“From the poster. From the program, if I’m in it. From all of it.” I keep my voice pleasant, because I’ve had ten years of practice being pleasant to people who are about to disappoint me. “I was seventeen. I never consented to that picture and nobody has asked me about it since.”

There’s a woman by the window who has stopped pretending to tidy.

“Son,” Henry says, and puts his hand on my shoulder, “that picture is the reason people came.”

“I understand that.”

“Thirty-one people died, and after about eighteen months nobody wanted to hear about it anymore, and then somebody put that photograph on a flier and we filled a room.” He pats the shoulder. “You did that. You and Lance. You didn’t mean to, but you did.”

“I’d still like it down.”

“I can’t do that.”

He says it so warmly that it takes me a second to register that it’s a refusal.