Little Girls (10 page)

“Yes, ma’am.”

So now I’m getting the “ma’am” treatment,
Laurie thought.

Ted waved a hand at the girl. “Go on,” he said. “Go.”

Susan pivoted around and stalked across the room to her father. She hugged him around the hips and, after a moment, he bent down and kissed the top of her head. “Okay. Good night. Now get going.”

A moment later, listening to the sounds of her daughter brushing her teeth in the upstairs bathroom, Laurie reclined in the chair and felt her ankle throb. Ted went into the kitchen and filled up a Ziploc bag with ice. When he returned, he placed the bag of ice carefully across her swollen ankle.

“How’s that?”

“Throbs,” she huffed. “You know, it’s important we show a united front.”

“She was playing with some cuff links. She didn’t steal them.”

“She knows better than to go through someone else’s stuff like that.”

“She was probably just bored.”

“Don’t make excuses for her.”

“It’s not an excuse.”

“And it’s not just the stealing. I understand that she’s stuck in this house and that she’s bored, and just looking for stuff to do, things to play with. But since when does she lie to us like that?”

He held up one hand and swiveled away to the liquor cabinet. He poured himself a glass of cognac. “Maybe you just caught her off guard and she didn’t know what to say.”

“You give her too much latitude,” Laurie said.

“You’re right. I should go up there and beat her unconscious with my belt. How’s that?”

“Don’t be an ass, Ted. You spoil her. I’m the only one doling out any discipline, and I’m starting to feel like the bad guy because of it.”

“She’s ten years old, Laurie—”

“And she’ll be eleven next month, and an adult before we know it. She needs boundaries
now
.”

There was something on the tip of his tongue, Laurie could tell. Yet he swallowed it. His lips remained firm, as if whatever words he had swallowed had tasted bitter, but he refused to give in to it.

“Is there something else?” he asked. This time, his voice was even and steady, though not without care.

“Something else what? What do you mean?”

“Is there something else bothering you?” he clarified.

All of a sudden, she thought his eyes betrayed the distrust he had of her mental stability. One look at him and she could tell he was thinking about her little episode on the highway last year. Those looks came more and more frequently, like she was slowly losing her mind, yet she was the only person oblivious to the fact.

“No,” she said, turning away from him, too embarrassed to continue looking him in the eyes. “There’s nothing else. I’m just exhausted.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry. I’ll talk with her about it tomorrow. Okay?”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“How ’bout some fresh tunes?”

She smiled wanly up at him.

Ted set his drink down, then selected another album from the box. He slid the record out and was halfway to the phonograph when he paused.

“That’s strange,” he said.

“What’s strange?”

He turned to show her. In one hand, he held the record and the cardboard sleeve. In his other hand he held a folded piece of paper, thick and yellow like parchment, the edges quite visibly frayed. He unfolded the paper and stared at it, the expression on his face pure incomprehension.

“What is it?” she repeated.

He brought it over and handed it to her.

It was an eleven-by-thirteen black-and-white photograph of three men in suits standing before a bank of steel doors. Each door had a number painted on it, and Laurie thought they looked like garage doors or large storage lockers. In the background, concrete smokestacks rose up from a multi-windowed brick building networked with catwalks and pipework. There was no date on the photo, but if she had to guess by the men’s attire, it had been taken sometime in the late sixties or early seventies.

“The man in the middle is my father.” She pointed as Ted leaned over her shoulder to look more closely at the photograph. “I don’t recognize the other two, but my guess is they were co-owners of the steel mill with my dad. That looks like the mill in the background. There are some smaller pictures of it in a photo album in my dad’s study. I’d seen it once in person when I was a little girl, too. Just before my parents got divorced, my dad drove me out to Sparrows Point—that’s the industrial park along the water in Dundalk—and showed me all the buildings.”

“Why do you think he stuffed it in the record album?”

“Dora Lorton said he was really out of it toward the end of his life. To try and figure out what was going through his head at the time would be . . .” She let the words trail off. Then she pointed to the liquor cabinet. “That empty frame that had been hanging on the wall the day we got here? It’s behind the liquor cabinet, on the floor. Get it, will you?”

Ted went to the cabinet and crouched down. “Yeah, I see it.” He reached behind it, grabbed the frame, and carried it back over to Laurie. “Looks like it’s the right size frame.”

“Yeah.” She smoothed out the photograph, then overlaid it on top of the frame. The frayed edges of the photo were a perfect match for the tufts of thick paper still bristling from the inside edges of the frame. “That’s the right picture, all right.”

“But why . . .” Ted began again before letting his own voice fall away. Gently, he sighed. “I guess we could drive ourselves mad trying to figure out what was going through his head, huh?”

She handed him the frame and the photograph. “I’m tired of thinking about it,” she said.

 

Unwilling to tackle the staircase with her sprained ankle, Laurie spent the night on the sofa. Fitfully, she slept. In her dream, she was sleeping on this very sofa when a figure came into the room and approached her. It was too dark to make out the figure’s features, but she assumed by the litheness of the approach that it was a child. Susan. In her dream, she was powerless to move, though something called to her to reach out and touch the figure. Then the figure had turned and gone over to the phonograph. The handle was cranked with deliberate sluggishness. A record was placed on the spindle and the needle set into a groove. The sounds that followed were not of music but of a distant whalelike lament. Finally, she was able to sit up. The record stopped and the figure shifted out into the hall. Backlit by the moonlight falling through the front windows, Laurie could see that the figure was not Susan after all, but that of another young girl. When the girl passed beneath a panel of moonlight coming through one window, Laurie could clearly see Abigail’s face looking down on her.

I
n the kitchen, Ted and Susan were at the table enjoying a breakfast of waffles with maple syrup, bacon, and tall glasses of chocolate milk. They had been in the middle of some low-voiced discussion when Laurie walked in. They both looked at her and Ted offered her his winning smile. Both he and Susan sported chocolate milk moustaches.

“Sleepyhead,” he said. “How’s the foot?”

“Much better, thanks.”

“There are waffles on the counter.”

“Great.”

“I hope we didn’t wake you.”

She went to the stove, lifted the coffeepot and found it empty. “Not at all,” she said.

“Susan brought the bags of clothes down this morning and set them on the front porch,” Ted said, “and I already called the Salvation Army. They’re sending a truck out this afternoon.”

“Well,” she said, folding her arms and leaning her buttocks against the front of the stove. She smiled at them. “I feel like the shoemaker who has been visited by elves in the night.” Yet this made her think of the dream she’d had, recalling Abigail’s pale, moonlit face looking down on her as she lay motionless on the sofa, and the smile quickly evaporated.

“I filled in the hole in the yard, too,” Susan added. Her hair, which she usually wore in a ponytail, was loose and curled just underneath the lines of her jaw. It made her look older. “First thing when I got up, just like you said.”

“Thank you, sweetie.”

“You should relax today,” Ted said. “This whole thing has been stressful on you. Let’s go into Annapolis for the afternoon. How’s that sound?”

She picked apart one of the waffles from the stack on the counter. “That sounds nice but there’s still too much to do. I haven’t even gone down into the basement yet. The longer we put it off, the longer we’re stuck here.”

“Then give us chores,” Ted suggested. “Let us help out.”

Laurie popped the piece of waffle in her mouth. “Tell you what,” Laurie said. “Why don’t you two go to Annapolis together for the day and I’ll stay here and wade through the stuff in the basement. If anything needs to be thrown away down there, I’ll make a list for you guys and you can take care of it for me when you get back.”

“That’s silly. Let us help you.”

“How can you help? It’s my father’s stuff. It’ll be easier for all of us this way.”

“Are you sure, hon?”

“Positive. And you guys can pick up some groceries for me, too. I’d like some fresh vegetables and fruit.”

“Okay,” said Ted. He turned to Susan. “What do you think? You want to go back downtown for the day?”

“Can we go see if the drawbridge will open?” There was a drawbridge that connected Eastport with historic Annapolis, which they had seen on their previous trip downtown. They had waited for nearly ten minutes to see if the bridge would open but it hadn’t, and Susan had been sorely disappointed.

“Sure thing,” Ted said. “If we get there early enough, maybe some of the sailboats will be going out to the bay.”

Upstairs, Laurie took a hot shower. The water made her ankle feel better, and much of the swelling had gone down. She went over the incident from last night and while she didn’t think she had acted unreasonably toward Susan, she was too emotionally exhausted to maintain any level of irritation over the matter. Besides, both Ted and Susan had made their peace with her. Perhaps today would be a better day.

After the shower, she dressed in a white halter top and a pair of old jeans. Beyond the bedroom windows, the day was bright and there looked to be a nice breeze running through the tops of the trees from off the water. Downstairs, she found the Volvo gone and a note on the kitchen counter written in Susan’s decisive print:

It brought a smile to Laurie’s face.

 

The basement was an unfinished concrete crypt beneath the earth. The barren cinderblock walls would have looked more at home in a prison. Exposed beams and electrical wiring crisscrossed the low ceiling. Every few yards, naked bulbs were suspended like calcium deposits from the rafters overhead. Like the rest of the house, there wasn’t much down here. Some old sheets of plywood leaned against the hot water heater. Above the plywood, hung on wall-mounted brackets, was a retractable aluminum ladder. There were some tools hanging from a pegboard beneath the stairwell. Nailed to one of the struts was a dusty plastic bag that appeared to contain paperwork for the various household appliances. A metal tool chest sat on the floor. A few other items—saws, boxes of lightbulbs, coils of extension cords, several cans of paint—lay scattered around. There was the Persian rug rolled up like a burrito and propped in one gloomy corner. It was heavy, but she was able to drag it out of the corner and drop it onto the floor with little difficulty. She unrolled it and then backed away to examine it. As she stared down at the dull rust-colored stain in the center of the rug, Dora Lorton’s voice rose up in her head like vapors:
On the night of Mr. Brashear’s death, the rug had been . . . damaged . . . I suppose you could say.

The old man had evacuated his bowels onto the carpet before throwing himself out the window to his death. She remembered standing in the yard and seeing one of the windows in the belvedere blocked by something. She also remembered the lawyer mentioning a police report.

When she went back upstairs, she found a number of men in T-shirts and jeans collecting the bags containing her father’s clothing off the front porch. They loaded the bags into the back of a paneled truck with the Salvation Army shield on its side. It felt like she was ridding the house of her father’s lingering presence, and she was grateful each time a bag was hoisted off the porch and tossed into the back of the truck.

From somewhere upstairs, a door slammed.

Laurie jumped. She cast her eyes up the stairwell and could see that all the doors were closed. She called out Ted’s and Susan’s names, and although she hadn’t expected a response, she grew slightly more unnerved when none came. Gripping the banister, she ascended the steps with her head cocked, listening for any more noises. Had it been a door slamming? Had that been what she’d heard? She found she couldn’t be sure.

There was no one upstairs. She checked the bedrooms, the bathroom, the hall closet. Of course, the belvedere door was still padlocked shut. Again, the urge to drop to her hands and knees and peer underneath the door accosted her, but this time she was able to fight it off and not give in to it.

She went back downstairs.

In the kitchen, she called information and got the phone number to the non-emergency dispatch for the local police department. The call went through and the man who answered identified himself as Sergeant Martinez.

“Hello, my name is Laurie Genarro. I was trying to locate a copy of a police report.”

“What’s the name of the reporting officer?” Martinez asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the incident?”

She told him of her father’s suicide. Martinez asked her to hold, then came back on the line about a minute or so later. When he spoke, it sounded like he was reading from a teleprompter. “That would be Officer Caprisi. He’s not in, but I can send you a copy of the report. Do you have a fax machine?”

“I have an e-mail address. Do people still use fax machines?”

Martinez laughed. “Good point. Go ahead with the e-mail addy when you’re ready.”

She recited her e-mail address for him.

“Give me fifteen minutes or so, okay?” Martinez said.

“Sounds good.”

“Also, sorry about your dad.”

“Thank you,” she said and hung up.

Hungry, she made herself a sandwich with the lunch meat and bread Dora had stocked in the fridge. It looked nice and warm out, so Laurie opened the windows in the kitchen, then set her sandwich down on the table. She had already pulled out a container of orange juice when she remembered the liquor cabinet in the parlor. Somewhat giddy—and feeling foolish because of her giddiness—she shuffled through the dusty old bottles in the cabinet until she came across an unopened bottle of amontillado sherry. She returned to the kitchen with the bottle, where she pried the stubborn cork out of the neck with a corkscrew she discovered in one of the kitchen drawers. She filled a wineglass and took it to the table, then sat down to lunch.

She was just finishing up her sandwich and on her second glass of sherry when she saw Abigail come out from behind the fence between the two properties. Laurie paused, the corner of her mouth stuffed with food. The girl moved out onto the lawn, looked up over the crest of the hill, then retreated back toward the fence. She disappeared behind a congregation of dense foliage, though her thin little shadow lingered on the lawn. It was the insubstantial shadow of a scarecrow.

Laurie spat the last bite of her sandwich into her napkin, then stood up. The girl’s shadow receded slowly into the trees . . . then appeared again, long and distorted now along the gradual incline of the lawn.

Laurie went out the screen door and broke a sweat hustling across the backyard toward the place where the girl had vanished behind the trees. On the other side of the fence, the woods were lush, verdant, and alive with a chorus of birds and insects. As she approached, the girl’s shadow withdrew completely into the trees. Laurie came up to the fence, but she couldn’t see anyone on the other side. Again, she thought of her dream, and tried to remember how it had ended. Had Abigail withdrawn into the darkness only to vanish? Had her pale face simply dematerialized before her eyes? She couldn’t remember.

In a low voice, as if she did not actually want to be heard, Laurie said, “Abigail?”

The girl emerged just a few feet away, from behind a vibrant blind of magnolias. She hadn’t been on the other side of the fence after all, but right here in the yard. The girl’s proximity startled her.

“Hello,” Abigail said. She wore a red-and-white checkerboard skirt that hung just past her knees and a crimson blouse with short, scalloped sleeves. An embroidered pink rose was pinned over her heart. Abigail’s face was pale and grimy and her eyes looked like they were spaced just a bit too far apart. The only thing luxurious about the girl was her hair—thick and healthy-looking, it cascaded down her shoulders in reddish-mocha waves.

“If you were looking for Susan, she’s not home,” Laurie said despite the dryness of her mouth. “She went out with her father for the day.”

“I was just playing.”

“What’s your last name, Abigail?”

“Evans,” said the girl.

“And you live in the house next door?”

Abigail looked over the fence, through the trees, and across the yard at the house next door. Laurie looked, too, and saw that the driveway was empty and the two cars were not in the street. Despite the fine weather, none of the windows were open.

When she looked back at Abigail, the young girl’s dark black eyes reminded her of the onyx stones in the cuff links. A sudden thought shook her. “Did you tell my daughter to steal her grandfather’s cuff links?” The question was out of her mouth before she even knew what she was saying.

Abigail stared up at her, the girl’s thin black eyebrows slowly knitting together. Gradually, she shook her head. It seemed she shook her head because she did not know what else to do, not because she was actually answering Laurie’s question.

“How old are you?”

“I’m ten and a half.”

“Were you the one who put the cuff link in the hole?”

“I don’t understand you.”

Laurie pointed to where the hole had been in the yard before Susan had filled it back up. “The hole,” she said. “The one you and Susan were digging.”

“There’s no hole there.”

“There was before.”

“We were looking for pirate treasure,” said the girl.

“Yes. In that hole where you were looking for pirate treasure—did you put a cuff link in there?”

“I don’t understand you. There’s a bee near your head.”

Indeed, a honeybee buzzed by the left side of Laurie’s face. Laurie jerked backwards away from it and swatted blindly at the air. The bee trundled toward a magnolia bush, having lost interest in her.

“You didn’t answer my question about the cuff link.”

“What’s a cuff link?”

Laurie chewed on the inside of her cheek while Abigail looked down at her own shadow. Then she looked at Laurie’s shadow, which stretched up toward the crest of the hill. When she looked back up at Laurie, the girl’s face was expressionless.

“Can Susan come out and play when she comes home?” Abigail asked.

“She won’t be home for the rest of the day.”

Abigail’s eyes darted to the right. She watched the honeybee go from blossom to blossom with dutiful diligence.

“Is Abigail your real name?” Laurie asked finally. This question was followed by a slight ringing in her ears.

“Yes.”

“Abigail Evans,” said Laurie.

“Yes.” The girl smiled: This was a game.

I don’t believe you,
Laurie thought.
I don’t believe you and you know that I don’t.

“Are your parents at home right now?”

“No.”

“You’re home alone?”

“I’m not home right now.” The girl’s eyes were the moist black-brown eyes of a deer. “I’m here.”

“Okay. Yes. But are your parents at home?”

“I’m not s’posed to tell strangers if people are home or not.”

“I’m not a stranger. I’m Susan’s mother.”

“Anyway, they’re not my parents.”

“What do you mean?”

“When does Susan come home?”

Laurie shook her head. “I don’t know.” Her voice was almost breathless. “I told you, she’ll be gone all day.”