Little Girls (18 page)

Ted said nothing; he stared straight ahead at the darkened house, his mouth firm.

“There were times when I would come downstairs to breakfast to find Sadie already in the house, waiting for me. My parents had let her in. She was good at fooling parents. She put on a mask, a different face. Lots of people do that, sure, but Sadie was different than other people. My father used to grow these harmless-looking flowers that were actually poisonous, and Sadie was like that. By the time she died, she had become a monster.”

“Died?”

“Hold on. I’m getting there.”

He squeezed her knee, urging her to go on.

“She made me steal stuff from my parents,” Laurie said. “She would see a wristwatch my father wore or some jewelry my mother had on, and she would tell me to steal it and bring it to her. And if I didn’t bring it to her, she would be . . . well, she would be just
horrible
to me. There were times when I refused to do the things she asked, and she would hurt me. Other times she would make me eat dirt, bugs, other things.

“One afternoon, after I had refused to steal a pair of my mother’s diamond earrings, Sadie approached me in the yard with a shoe box tucked under one arm. Sadie always wore hand-me-down dresses that were too big for her, and this day was no different—one bare shoulder poked up from the wide neckline of an ugly pleated sundress. God, I remember it so clearly. I told her to go away, that we weren’t friends anymore, but she refused.”

“Why didn’t you just tell your parents?”

“Because by that point I had already stolen some stuff for her and she threatened to tell my parents what I’d done if I stopped being her friend and told on her.”

“How
old
was this kid?”

“Susan’s age.”

“Jesus. What was in the shoe box?”

“When she opened the shoe box, I didn’t know what I was looking at, and I wouldn’t truly know until I was older and had my first period. To me, it was just some cylindrical cotton tube that had been saturated in a dark clotted fluid. But I knew what that fluid was, even then, and the idea of it horrified me.”

“God,” Ted said. “You mean . . . was it . . . ?”

“A tampon. Used. Her mother’s, I suppose, fished out of the bathroom trash or wherever. I don’t think Sadie had started having periods by that point.” Laurie swallowed and her throat felt raw and abraded. “She made me put it in my mouth. Suck on it.”

Ted said nothing; he stared blankly out the black windshield.

“If I didn’t do it, she’d hurt me. She kept threatening to tell my parents about all the stuff I stole from them, the stuff she told me to take. Somehow she got me believing that I was the one who’d done wrong.” Laurie placed her hand atop Ted’s own. “I know it’s uncomfortable for you to hear, but I feel I have to say it,” she said.

“Then say it.”

“She was eleven years old when she died,” Laurie said. “I was there. I saw it happen.”

“Jesus.”

“You and Susan saw the remains of that old greenhouse in the woods?”

“Yes, we saw it,” Ted said. “It was the first day we got here. There’s a path that leads to it.”

“It was my father’s. When I was a little girl, he would spend hours in that greenhouse tending to his flowers, his plants. Sometimes it seemed like his plants were the only thing he truly loved. He had taken me in there on a few occasions, and even now I can remember the great bursts of flowers and the thick, rubbery leaves of the plants. The air was always humid and rich with the scent of vegetation and soil. I remember the black soil in little heaps on the floor, dotted with white foamy specks, and the terracotta pottery stacked underneath tables. Vines crisscrossed the glass ceiling. There is something wondrous and transcendent about a structure made entirely of glass and filled with flowers.

“There were shades that hung from the windows, similar to the kinds of plastic pull-down shades you see in classrooms. When my father wasn’t working in there, he would pull the shades down. The only way you could see inside was by climbing a nearby tree, crawling out on a limb, and peering down through the greenhouse’s glass ceiling.

“One afternoon, Sadie wanted to see inside. She climbed up into the tree and crawled out on the limb that extended over the roof of the greenhouse. I climbed the tree, too, but Sadie lost her balance and fell before I crawled out onto the branch.”

“She fell through the roof?” Ted whispered.

“Yes.”

And she could see it even now: the girl’s oversized dress billowing out as she dropped . . . the crashing glass as she went through the peaked roof . . . the shower of crystal shards that rained down, both inside and outside the greenhouse . . . the awful, bone-crunching thump as Sadie struck the ground.

“I ran to my house and told my parents. My mother called for an ambulance while my father ran out to the greenhouse to see what had happened. I wanted to go with him, but he wouldn’t take me.”

“Of course, he wouldn’t.”

“I sat in the backyard and waited for him to come back. The next thing I remember was Mrs. Russ screaming and running through the yard toward the woods. Sadie’s father ran with her, his face ghostly white and expressionless as he hurried along the fence and ran down the wooded path to the greenhouse. Then I heard sirens coming up the block.” She blinked and found her eyes wet with tears. “I don’t remember much of what happened after that. It’s all jumbled in my head.”

Ted shook his head. “I can’t imagine what that was like.”

“She was cut to ribbons, Ted.”

Ted said nothing. The sudden silence was like heavy wool draped around them both.

“So that’s what’s been going on with you?” Ted said after a while. He turned to her. Half his face was masked in shadow. “That’s why you’ve seemed so on edge? Because of what happened all those years ago, and having to come back here and relive it all over again in your head?”

“It haunts me,” she said.

“It’s in the past, Laurie. That all happened a long time ago.” He reached out and rubbed the back of her neck. She was surprised by his tenderness.

“My father was cut up by the glass when he fell through that window,” she said. “Just like Sadie had been. And just before it happened, he fouled the rug just like a scared little kid might do. Like someone had frightened him.”

“I noticed you said he
fell
as opposed to he
jumped
,” he said. “You want to tell me what that’s about?”

“I don’t know, Ted.”

“Do you want to hear what I think?”

“All right.”

“I think you’re overstressed and thinking about all this too much. You had a lot of unresolved issues with your father—and I’m sorry about that, I really am—but now you’re trying to find some understanding in the messy pieces of his death.” Gently, Ted squeezed the back of her neck.

“You’re right,” she said. “It makes sense.” Yet in her head, all she could hear was Teresa Larosche saying,
Sometimes he called it the Hateful Beast. Other times, it was the Vengeance.

“First thing tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll pack some bags and grab a hotel in town. You don’t need to spend another day here in this place.”

“No. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to run from it.”

“It wouldn’t be running.”

“Of course, it would.” Gently, she touched his arm. “Thank you, but no. I need to stay until we’re done here.”

Ted leaned in and kissed the side of her face. “If you think that’s best.”

“I do.”

He opened his door. “You go on inside. I’ll grab the kiddo from next door.”

They got out of the car, Laurie going up the walk while Ted cut across the yard to the Rosewood house. Laurie watched him go, hugging herself in the chilly summer air. Then her gaze cut to one of the upstairs windows of the Rosewoods’ house, where a light shone brightly, bracketed by sheer curtains. The silhouette of a young girl stood there, both palms splayed against the glass.

Staring.

O
f course, there had been things about Sadie that she simply couldn’t tell her husband.
Her dirty little hands all over me, tugging at my pants, pulling up my skirts.
One afternoon while they were playing in the woods, completely out of the blue, Sadie hiked her own skirt up over her head and showed young Laurie Brashear her nakedness. The girl wore no panties and the sight of her smooth cleft between her legs caused Laurie to cry out. Sadie had laughed and called her a big sissy baby.

But Sadie Russ hadn’t always been that way. The change had come on gradually, manifesting itself at first in an introverted sullenness. She would become easily angered—perhaps if something didn’t go her way or she was reprimanded by a schoolteacher—and this anger would arrive on a sudden, shocking tide of obdurate cries. She began printing dirty words on her school papers; she whispered them to Laurie when they passed each other in the hallways or on the playground; she carved them in the trunks of trees. At recess, other kids stopped playing with Sadie. Some kids teased her mercilessly, and there had been one boy who seemed to enjoy firing phlegm onto her scuffed black Mary Janes. But Laurie knew that deep down they were scared of her, too. Sadie began to frighten a lot of people. Even some of the teachers.

Sadie the sadist. Sadie’s twisted wretchedness. She had grown gaunt. A thin blue vein descended from each corner of her mouth, making it appear as though her mouth worked on a hinge, much like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and might at any moment drop open. Those self-inflicted bruises, the gashed knees with their tortoiseshell scabs. The creases of Sadie’s palms had always been black with grit.

Look—see here? Let me touch you here. Then you do it. Do it to me. See that? You see? How do you like that?
Moisture crowded the corners of Sadie’s small mouth.

And still—

How much were genuine memories and how much had Laurie’s mind unconsciously altered after all these years?

 

S
tephanie Canton called early Monday morning and advised Laurie that she had begun compiling a list of interested buyers to come to the house and look over the items. This would begin later that afternoon, as Stephanie had someone very interested in the office furniture in her father’s study. Laurie agreed to the time and hung up, feeling somewhat lightheaded from Stephanie Canton’s efficient and businesslike approach to conversation.

A few minutes later, as Laurie began making breakfast, she heard the shower turn on upstairs. A moment after that, a resounding clang reverberated down through the ceiling. Ted’s curses were muted, but the rage in his voice was not. In the upstairs hallway, Laurie found Susan standing in her sleepwear in the doorway of the master bedroom. Laurie moved past the girl, grazing her small shoulder with a soft hand, before rushing into the bathroom.

Naked and wet, Ted stood with one foot inside the shower and one planted firmly on the ecru tile floor. Something metallic roughly the size of a softball was in his hands. When he looked up at Laurie, there was bemused expression on his face. A reddish knot swelled at the center of his forehead.

“What happened?”

He showed her the metallic softball-sized object. “Goddamn showerhead shot right off the spigot. Cracked me in the cranium.”

“Oh, my God, are you okay?”

“I’ll live. The bitching thing could have taken my head off, though.” He thrust the showerhead at her, then turned off the water. It dribbled from the broken nozzle jutting bent-elbowed from the shower wall.

At that moment, the smoke alarm went off.

“Oh, damn!” Still clutching the showerhead, she rushed back out into the hall (Susan still stood mesmerized in the doorway, shocked into speechlessness at her father’s barrage of curse words) and down the stairs. In the kitchen, smoke roiled from the slices of French toast that burned in the pan. She scooped the pan up off the burner and rushed it over to the kitchen sink where she dropped it, along with the broken showerhead, unceremoniously. Snatching a dishtowel off the counter, she hurried to where the little white disc beeped in the ceiling. She climbed onto a chair and flapped the dishtowel like a matador’s cape until the smoke dissipated and the alarm went silent.

 

At two o’clock, Stephanie Canton arrived with a companion—a fastidious little man with a droll smile and the flattened nose of a prizefighter. He wore circular glasses with wire rims. The top of the man’s head was completely bald while the sides and back were in full bloom with wiry corkscrews of hair so dense it more closely resembled the fur of some woodland creature. He wore a forest green sport coat of a material that looked suspiciously like velvet and pants whose cuffs had been hemmed too high over the tops of his suede loafers and seaweed-colored socks.

His name was Smoot and he was a self-proclaimed collector of antiquities. He was the proprietor of a boutique on West Street that sold refurbished pieces from the turn of the century. In the study, Smoot ran stumpy hands with abbreviated though well-manicured fingers along the aged wood with a lover’s caress. Laurie watched him with curiosity, the way one might watch a small but colorful beetle thudding around inside a mason jar.

“Would you like some coffee?” Laurie offered him when it seemed he was permanently lost in a trance while staring at the piece.

“Never, never,” chirped Smoot. “Gives me angina.”

Susan, who had been in the hallway eavesdropping, broke into a fit of giggles and scampered away. Laurie smiled apologetically at both Smoot and Stephanie Canton.

“Very nice,” Smoot said, returning his concentration back to the desk. He spoke with an effeminate lisp. “This is a Cutler, you know. A handsome model, too. There is no date-stamping, but I would guess it’s circa 1910 or thereabouts.”

“Wow,” Laurie said.

“Wow, indeed,” said Smoot. He opened and closed the desk’s flexible tambour, then stood upright while straightening his sport coat. “Do you have any of the original paperwork?”

“I wouldn’t know. My father’s old housekeeper might know where it is, if it’s still around.”

Smoot nodded perfunctorily. “I’ll give you eighteen hundred for it. And an extra two hundred for the bookcase.”

Laurie blinked. “Dollars?”

“Do you prefer francs? Pesos? Indian rupees, perhaps?” He smiled wryly and Laurie could see that this was as close to humor as this punctilious little man probably came. He withdrew a slender checkbook from the inside pocket of his coat.

“Sold,” Laurie said, still in disbelief.

Smoot leaned over the desk and meticulously printed out the check, which he then tore from the checkbook and handed over to Laurie.

“I’ll have some men come for it later this evening,” he said.

As Smoot left, another fellow arrived. Slender and well-dressed, and with an approachable demeanor, McCall was the antithesis to the Dickensian Mr. Smoot. McCall’s interests lay in the ornate bedroom furniture in the master bedroom. Ted was in the bathroom fixing the showerhead when McCall made his circuitous passes around the bed and nightstand; at what was probably the most inopportune time, Ted poked his head out into the bedroom just as McCall bent down to inhale the scent of the wooden headboard. McCall made an offer just slightly less generous than Smoot’s, though still quite impressive, and Laurie accepted it without hesitation.

“I’ll need a truck for the bed,” McCall said, “but if your husband would be kind enough to assist me in transporting it, I can fit the nightstand in my car.”

Together, Ted and Mr. McCall lifted the nightstand and duck-walked it out of the bedroom. Out in the hall, one of the drawers slid open. Her father’s Bible tumbled out and struck the floor.

“That’s seven years bad luck,” Ted commented.

“I believe you’re thinking of breaking a mirror,” McCall retorted.

Laurie scooped up the Bible, then watched as the men slowly navigated the nightstand down the stairs, across the foyer, and out the door. Stephanie Canton followed them out, scribbling diligent notes in her binder.

Laurie looked down. There was something poking out between the pages of the Bible. She opened the book and saw there was a photograph inside. She turned it over to view it and her skin prickled.

It was a photograph of two young girls. One of them was Laurie, around age eight or so. In the photo, she wore a ribbon in her hair, a cream-colored knit sweater, and boyish corduroy pants. Beside her in the photo was Sadie Russ. Sadie was the same age as Laurie, but she looked much taller in the photograph. Sadie’s face was narrow and pale, framed in a cascade of russet hair. She wore a hand-me-down print dress that was too big on her; the hem hung almost to the tops of her feet and only a hint of a few fingertips poked from the long blousy sleeves. At first glance, it appeared that both girls were smiling at the photographer . . . but on closer inspection, she could see that Sadie’s smile looked more like a grimace.

It was irrefutable. Abigail Evans was the identical twin of the girl in the photo.

 

Smoot’s men showed up around five in a paneled truck with no writing on the sides. They were gruff-faced and silent as mimes, and wore little patches on the breasts of their uniforms that read
W.W. SMOOT, ANTIQUITIES
. They hauled both the desk and the bookcase into the back of the truck without as much as a grunt, then left before Laurie could offer them a glass of water or the folded singles she had pressed into her palm as a tip.

The following day, a middle-aged couple came by and, much to Ted’s dismay, relieved them of the old Victrola. Ted even helped them load it into the back of their truck. To Laurie, who watched him from the front windows, he looked like a pallbearer loading a coffin into the back of a hearse.

Recalling Smoot’s request of the Cutler desk’s paperwork, Laurie went into the basement to see if she could find anything in the plastic sleeve that hung from one of the wooden struts beneath the stairs. Inside the sleeve were the papers for the kitchen appliances, as well as for the water heater and furnace. There was nothing for the Cutler desk. With some reluctance, she telephoned Dora Lorton. A part of her hoped the woman wouldn’t answer.

“Yes,” came the woman’s stern, practical voice.

“Hello, Ms. Lorton, this is Laurie Genarro again, Myles Brashear’s—”

“I know who you are.”

“Sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering if you might know if my father had kept any original paperwork for the rolltop desk in his study. A buyer was interested in—”

“If it’s not in with his personal papers, I wouldn’t know where it would be.”

“I see.” It wasn’t until that moment that she realized she had an ulterior motive for calling Dora Lorton, and it had nothing to do with the desk. Since Teresa Larosche’s sudden disappearance from the coffee shop Saturday, Laurie had tried a few times to reach the woman again by telephone. The calls usually went straight to voice mail, with the exception of one time when someone picked up the phone just to slam it back down again. “Perhaps Teresa Larosche might know? Have you spoken with her lately?”

Dora’s voice seemed to creak through the phone lines. “What is it you’re doing, Mrs. Genarro?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Ms. Larosche told me about your . . . meeting. She also told me you’ve been calling her nonstop, harassing her. She said you wouldn’t leave her alone.”

“Now that’s not exactly true. . . .”

“No? I don’t see why the poor dear would have any reason to lie to me, Mrs. Genarro.
Have
you been calling her?”

“I tried a few times, but I wasn’t harassing her. I just wanted her to clarify some things she told me the other day, that’s all.”

“She is
afraid,
Mrs. Genarro. Can’t you see that?”

“I’ve already promised her there would be no lawsuit.”

“This has nothing to do with lawsuits.”

“Then what does it have to do with?”

“Leave Teresa Larosche—and me—alone,” Dora said, and hung up the phone.

 

Ted was talking to someone on the front porch with the door wide open. Laurie came up behind him . . . then paused when she saw that the person to whom Ted was talking was Liz Rosewood. The woman wore a thin cotton tee that looked like a man’s undershirt and faded blue jeans. She smiled at Laurie from over Ted’s shoulder.

Ted squeezed Laurie’s forearm and pulled her out onto the porch beside him. “Liz has offered to take the little bugger off our hands for a while,” he said.

“What?” Just then, Laurie saw the two girls, Susan and Abigail, streak across the front lawn, laughing and shouting.

“There’s a cute little park just up the road,” Liz Rosewood said. “Abigail and I were going to go for an hour or so, and I thought Susan might like to join us.”

“That would be great,” Ted said. “Thank you so much.”

Susan and Abigail now stood within a wedge of spindly trees on the front lawn. They spoke in quiet voices while Abigail pointed at something on the ground. When Abigail looked up, Laurie swore the girl looked straight at her.

“That does sound wonderful,” Laurie said. “In fact, would you mind if I tagged along? This house is becoming oppressive.”

Liz Rosewood’s smile widened. “Oh, please do. I’d love that.”

Ted rubbed Laurie’s back. “Great. Then I can get some work done while I’m alone.”

“Just let me put on some shoes,” Laurie said, and hurried back inside the house. Her shoes were in the laundry room where she’d left them, but she went upstairs first and went through her suitcase until she located the bottle of Excedrin she’d packed. She popped the cap and dry-swallowed two tablets. Her temples pulsed. Then she took the photo of her and Sadie and tucked it in the rear pocket of her jeans. Downstairs, she laced up her Keds and went back out onto the porch.

Ted kissed the side of her face. “You girls have fun,” he said. He leaned over the porch rail and shouted to Susan, “Have fun, pumpkin pie!”

Susan laughed and executed a fairly impressive cartwheel. Abigail just watched Susan from between the trees.

“Let’s go!” Liz called to the girls as she climbed down the porch steps. “The train’s movin’ out!”

The park was roughly a mile from the house on Annapolis Road. Back when Laurie had lived here it had just been woods, but it was now a sizeable clearing in which swings, seesaws, monkey bars, and tetherball poles had been erected. A paved parking lot shouldered the road and there were cars in a few of the spaces. Kids raced about while parents, perched on uncomfortable-looking benches, supervised from overtop the paperbacks and Kindles they were reading. In the distance beyond the park, the smooth green lawns of a cemetery rose up, the tombstones nothing but tiny specks behind a black wrought-iron fence.

“Neat!” Susan said as she surveyed the park grounds. Back home, the playgrounds were little more than concrete basketball courts sprayed with broken glass.

Abigail snatched up Susan’s hand. “Come on,” she said, and tugged Susan toward the monkey bars.

Panic rose up in Laurie. “Be careful, Susan!”

“They’ll be fine,” Liz assured her. She shook a cigarette out of its pack as they walked to an empty picnic table. “I’m glad you folks showed up this summer. Abigail was growing bored without someone to play with.” They sat together on the same bench at the picnic table. “It’s only been a few weeks, but it must seem like a lifetime to a little girl when you’re away from your friends. Susan must feel the same way.”

“Yes. She was upset when she found out we were coming down here,” Laurie said . . . though she was hardly thinking about it now. Instead, she was considering the coincidental time frame of Abigail’s arrival in town and her father’s sudden death.

“Have you and your husband decided what you’re going to do with the house?”