Little Girls (14 page)

Teresa shrugged. It was obvious that whatever had happened after things got worse made this part seem trivial. Whatever it was, it still nested inside Teresa Larosche. She was still afraid of it.

“After a while, he became focused on one door in particular.”

“The front door?” Laurie guessed.

“No. The door off the kitchen. The one that leads out into the side yard. I thought maybe because it was dark and hidden from the road, and if you were a burglar, breaking in through that door would make the most sense.”

“But my father wasn’t thinking logically by then. He had no sense left in him.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.”

“Did you ever ask him why he had become obsessed about that particular door?”

“Yeah, I did. But his answers never made any sense to me.”

“What were his answers?”

“Something about locking up the passageways, that passageways let it in and out like a turnstile. He actually said that—like a turnstile.”

“It lets
who
in?”

“Sometimes he called it the Hateful Beast,” Teresa said. “Other times, it was the Vengeance. Most times, though, he didn’t
have
a name for it, or at least didn’t give me one. God, it sounds so silly now, sitting here in a coffee shop telling you about it—and look at that, my hands are shaking—but it used to spook the hell out of me when he’d say it.”

“What exactly did he mean? What was ‘the Vengeance’?”

“Beats me. All I know is it scared the shit out of him and it started scaring the shit out of me, too. I assumed he got it from the Bible. He read the Bible most nights. When he was able to, anyway.”

“I never realized he had become religious.”

“You didn’t know him very well, did you?”

“Not since I was a little girl. And even then I don’t think I really
knew
him.”

Teresa nodded. The look on her face was one of understanding. Perhaps she had issues with her own father. “Anyway,” she went on, “I humored him, and that seemed to make us both feel better. Sometimes he’d have me lock that door five or six times. Once, he watched me lock it and when we were headed back out into the parlor, he paused in the kitchen doorway, turned around, and insisted I
relock
the door. Of course, for him it wasn’t
relocking,
because he’d forgotten we had already locked it the first time. Times like that, when the forgetting came on him so quickly, I could almost see the memories draining out of his face.

“He only really became upset when he thought someone had actually gotten into the house. He said he could hear someone, and that they were hiding from him. Sometimes he would go looking for them, shouting and stomping around the house and checking all the rooms. Other times, the poor guy would cower in his bedroom and not come out. It really freaked me out when he would get like that. I mean, it sounds so incredibly naïve, but he started to . . . I mean, there were a few times when he had . . .”

“Yes?”

“He had started to convince me.”

“That someone was in the house?”

“Sometimes I thought I could hear someone talking softly in the next room, or that there’d be footsteps at the far end of the house. A few times I thought I caught movement out of the corner of my eye when no one was there. That sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, I know—jumping at shadows, right? I believe it now, but it was plenty real in that house when it’s the middle of the night and you’re starting to let your imagination run wild. It was like I could hear everything
he
could hear, and it didn’t matter if you were sane or crazy to hear it.”

The waitress came over to refill their coffees. Laurie found she was thankful for the brief interruption. She had begun to sweat under her arms.

“After he was content with the doors being locked,” Teresa went on after a while, “he would sometimes stare at the ceiling. Just randomly, you know? He reminded me of my father when he would do that. I grew up in Havre de Grace, in a big old farmhouse, and one fall a family of raccoons took up residence in our attic. The noises they made were tremendous—you wouldn’t think raccoons could make so much noise—and we didn’t know what was going on at first. Finally, my dad went up there and chased them out. He found the hole they’d come in through and boarded that up, too. That kept them out for good, but my dad spent the rest of that year periodically peering up at the ceiling, his head cocked like an old hunting dog, as if in anticipation of some noise the rest of us couldn’t hear.”

“Did my father ever say what noises he was hearing?”

“Dry creaking noises. Like attic beams settling.”

“That’s how he described them?”

“No, he never told me what they sounded like to him. I never asked.”

“Then how do you know what they sounded like?”

“Because I heard them, too,” Teresa said.

“Oh.” Laurie blinked. “So . . . then they were real noises. . . .”

“Yeah. I mean, I thought it was just the house settling . . . but the way your father looked up at the ceiling when he heard it . . .” She shook her head, as if to rid it of the memory. “Like I said before, I was beginning to wonder if I wasn’t losing my mind in that place. I figured if he stayed just one step ahead of me—forgive me for how I say this, but I kept thinking that if he stayed just one step ahead of me on the crazy scale—then I might be able to see the full-fledged insanity coming before it got me.” She hung her head. “I’m sorry. That sounds horrible. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You did, but that’s okay. You’re being honest with me and I appreciate it. Please go on.”

“Then one night he lost all interest in the side door, and turned all his focus on that narrow little door in the upstairs hallway. It leads to that strange little room upstairs on the roof. You know what I’m talking about?”

Laurie didn’t answer. Suddenly, she was looking at Teresa Larosche from the wrong end of a telescope. Her flesh prickled.

“Mrs. Genarro? You okay?”

“Yes.” Her mouth was dry. “Please, go on.”

“Well, he became paranoid that someone was up there, or maybe trying to get into the house from up there. A few times I wanted to take him up there and show him that wasn’t the case, but he refused to go. I went up there by myself a couple of times just to show him there was nothing there.”

“Did you . . . did you ever find anything up there?”

“No. Of course, I didn’t. It was just an empty room. Very creepy, but there was nothing there.”

Some teenagers burst into the coffee shop on a wave of raucous laughter, startling Laurie. She hadn’t realized how low they had been talking until just then. Laurie watched the teenagers—there were four of them—go to the counter and take a long time placing their orders. Even the young waitresses in the green aprons looked irritated.

“Downtown sucks in the summer,” Teresa commented. “Every idiot and their mother comes down here and ruins the place.”

One of the teenagers was handed a paper cup. He took it over to a counter on which stood several insulated drums of flavored coffee. He hummed loudly as he peered at all the labels on the pots, then spilled some coffee on the floor when he went to fill his paper cup.

“Anyway,” Teresa continued, digging around in her purse now, “that’s how that door came to be locked.” She set a small silver key on the table and slid it over to Laurie.

“So the lock wasn’t put on the door to prevent my father from going up there . . .”

Teresa shook her head. Her expression was grave. “It was to prevent someone from coming
down
,” she said. “To stop them from getting into the house. Your father was convinced someone would get in if the door wasn’t locked—that someone was
trying
to get in.”

“But the police report said—”

“I tried explaining it to the police, but they didn’t understand. Police don’t like things like dementia or Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia—anything that muddies up the waters of logical thought. They can’t make sense of things that aren’t logical.”

Laurie let this sink in. At the coffee station, the coffee-spiller was joined by his three friends, each of who seemed incapable of reading the labels on the coffee drums quietly and to themselves. Behind the counter, someone dropped a plate and the teenagers cheered. Heads throughout the place swiveled in their direction. Once the four teenagers left and the place quieted down, Laurie turned her attention back to Teresa Larosche.

“What did my father think would happen to him if this . . . person . . . actually got in?”

Teresa’s mouth unhinged the slightest bit, though for a moment she didn’t speak. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I have no idea. I don’t even know if he believed it
was
a person.” Teresa seemed to consider this last point.

“Tell me about what happened the night he died.”

Teresa shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Her eyes darted across the room, as if drawn to the large chalkboard scrawled with the day’s specials at the opposite end of the coffee shop. When she spoke again, she sounded as if something were caught in her throat.

“It was sometime after midnight. I was asleep in the guestroom upstairs, at the opposite end of the hall from where your father slept. He had gone to bed around nine and hadn’t gotten up at all, so I was thinking—well, hoping—that it might be an easy night.

“I was lying in bed reading a book. I had one earbud in so I could listen to my iPod, but I always kept one out so I could hear if he made any noises in the night. Just before midnight, I went down the hall and checked in on your father. I could hear him snoring, so I knew he was okay. So I went back to my room and went to sleep.

“Sometime later I woke up. Or maybe I thought I did. I don’t remember. I heard low voices talking in whispers, or maybe that part was in my dream.”

“Voices? More than one, you mean?”

Teresa appeared to consider this for a while before answering. “I think maybe it was one voice, though it sounded like one end of a conversation.”

“Meaning my father had been talking to himself.”

“I guess. I mean, something like that. I can’t really be sure. I never heard the door open—that door that goes to the room upstairs.” Again, she paused to consider this. “I think I
dreamt
I heard the door open, but maybe I never did. All I know is I didn’t get out of bed until I heard him shouting. I got up, went into the hall, and saw the door standing open. I was shocked at this, you know, because it was
always
locked.”

“But was it that night?”

“It was
always
locked,” Teresa repeated. “We checked it every night.”

“And I assume my father didn’t have access to the key?”

“Of course not. I kept it on my keychain with my car keys, and those were in my purse.”

“Okay. So the door is open . . . ?”

“By the time I reached the door and looked up the stairs, your father had stopped shouting. The whole house went eerily quiet. Then I heard the window smash. I ran up the stairs to the room and saw the window broken. When I looked out, I saw him on the pavement below. He was cut up from jumping out the window—he hadn’t opened it first, just jumped through the glass—and I could tell by the way he was lying down there that he was dead.”

“Did you see anyone else out there in the yard when you looked down?”

“No. Who would I see? It was after midnight.”

Laurie picked up the silver key. “Why was the lock put back on the door after my father’s death? There would have been no reason to prevent him from going up there anymore.”

Again, Teresa Larosche glanced down at her hands. Her unpainted fingernails had been gnawed down to nubs, the cuticles stained to the color of mercurochrome from nicotine. There was a small tattoo of a butterfly in the fleshy webbing between the thumb and index finger of her left hand.

“Teresa?” Laurie prompted when it didn’t appear that the girl would respond.

“It’s silly,” Teresa said. Laurie couldn’t tell if she was about to laugh or cry. “Mr. Claiborne insisted we clean the house up, get it ready for your arrival. I guess your father just got to me. Scared me, you know? Like that movie about the crazy guy who turns the psychiatrist crazy, too. I just felt . . .
safer
. . . being back in that house with the door locked.” When she finally looked up, Laurie saw that her eyes were moist. “Stupid, right?”

Laurie reached out and touched one of the young woman’s hands. “Not at all,” she told her.

“I quit the next day. I just couldn’t be in that house. I was hearing things by then, too . . . or at least convincing myself that I was. I kept thinking that Mr. Brashear was dead but his phobias were not. Toby said it could be ghosts. He believes in life after death and all that weird stuff. Even if I don’t—and I
don’t,
I
don’t
believe in that stuff—Toby might still have a point.” She laughed uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I guess I sound like an idiot.” Almost apologetically, she added, “Toby’s my boyfriend.”

Laurie’s smile felt like a grimace on her face. “You were there that night, so I want to ask you a question, and I want you to be perfectly honest with me in your answer. I don’t want you to be embarrassed or think I’m judging you or anything. Okay?”

Teresa’s silver rings made knocking sounds against the tabletop as her hands started to vibrate again. She smiled painstakingly at Laurie. There was sadness in her smile, a tired resignation. “Yeah, okay.”

“Do you believe there was someone else in the house with you the night my father died?”

“Now you’re just freaking me out,” Teresa said.

“That’s not my intention. I just want to know what you think.”

Teresa Larosche stared at her for an indeterminate amount of time, not blinking. “Listen,” she said after a time, “do you mind if I grab a smoke real quick?” She stood and slung her purse over one shoulder.