Little Girls (24 page)

“Is it?”

The woman’s pinched face turned toward her. Their noses were less than five inches apart and Laurie jerked her head back.

“You have a young daughter, don’t you?”

“Yes. Susan.”

“Very dangerous to keep this open like that,” said the woman. “You should shut it up.”

“We had a lid on it until yesterday. . . .” Laurie waved a hand over the plank of wood and clumps of bricks that lay strewn about in the grass beside the well.

The woman winced and turned her head away from the well’s opening. “Smells like death down there, dear. It would be a smart idea to put the lid back on.”

“Yes. Okay.”

A smile suddenly creased the old woman’s face. Her teeth looked like coffee beans. “I’ll let you know how the china sells,” said the woman. She was taking it on consignment and hadn’t paid anything for it upfront.

“Thank you,” said Laurie. She realized the woman only had her father’s phone number and address, but she didn’t give the woman her cell number or contact info for the house in Hartford.
I don’t care if that china sells for a billion dollars,
she thought.
Once I leave here, I want to cut all ties and not look back. Leave no tethers behind.

“Good day,” said the woman. She waddled to her car—a Ford Escort whose backseat was crammed with boxes—and drove away.

Laurie looked back down into the well. It had begun to fill back up with water, a cruddy brown soup ringed with frothy white bubbles. And it
did
smell like death—a rancid, raw sewage odor that stung her nose. Feeling cold, Laurie bent and replaced the cover on the well, setting the bricks down around the perimeter to secure it. When she was done, she went around the side of the house to check on Susan. The girl was playing by herself with some Barbie dolls, kneeling in the tall grass. Daisies bloomed all around her and Laurie suddenly wished she had brought her painting supplies. It would take her mind off things.

Back in the house, Laurie gathered up the broken picture frame and the folded photograph and set them both down on the piano top beside Ted’s beloved liquor bottles. She contemplated dumping the remaining liquor out in the sink, the ancient bottles in the trash, then decided against it. There was a brownish watermark on the back of the old photo—a perfect stamped circle. She fingered it, then unfolded the photo. Her eyes were drawn to the same things as before—the three men standing before a row of garages while, in the background, the smokestacks of the mill rose up into a monochromatic sky. But then she noticed something she hadn’t before . . . or, rather, she attributed more meaning to what she had previously seen. Maybe it was coincidental. Maybe it meant nothing at all. She couldn’t tell for sure . . . yet her eyes were drawn to it nonetheless....

The garage doors were all numbered—big numbers stenciled on the corrugated metal doors in white paint. There were seven garage doors depicted here, the numbers on the bay doors ascending until they disappeared off the edge of the photograph. The door on the far right was cut in half by the frayed edge of the photo, but she could still make out the number painted on it, just as clearly as she could make out the chunky padlock on the door’s handle. The number on the door matched the number engraved on the key she had found in the body of the baby doll. Fifty-eight.

She waited until after dinner to leave. There were a few reasons for this. To begin with, she didn’t want to get caught in rush hour traffic along the Key Bridge, and although Derrick Rosewood had mentioned that much of Sparrows Point was an empty wasteland, she didn’t want to run into anyone working out there who might question her trespass. Also, she feared she might look like a lunatic sprinting out of the house the second Ted came home from his run. More than that, she didn’t want to make it look like she was fleeing from him; she didn’t want him to think she was being a coward. So she went about the rest of the day like someone who had been granted a peek into the future on the pretense that she couldn’t share what she had seen with anyone else. Susan was back to her old self—children have short memories—but Ted had been cold to her since their argument last night. She found herself wanting to hate him, but she was only capable of hating herself.

After dinner, Ted and Susan settled together on the sofa to watch a DVD. Laurie pinched the car keys from the kitchen counter and told them she was going out for a while. On his third drink of the evening, Ted had given up trying to rationalize with her. His response was merely an acknowledging nod of his head to show that he had heard her.

L
aurie took 695 East and found herself encroaching on the tail end of rush hour. At one point, she pulled onto the shoulder of the road and cried into a wad of tissues. The spell lasted just a few minutes, but when she finished she was completely exhausted. All her strength had been siphoned from her.

It was already a quarter to eight when she got off at the Sparrows Point exit. Beyond the raised concrete ramps of the beltway, sunlight speared through the trees and between the row homes as the sun sank slowly on the far side of the Chesapeake. The commercial shopping centers, restaurants, and housing developments that had flanked various portions of the beltway had vanished; she was now surrounded by sloping gravel pits, cyclone fences, and the occasional bulldozer tucked beneath an exit ramp like a slumbering dragon.

The road narrowed to a single lane. To her right, behind a chain-link fence capped in concertina wire, stood a single-story concrete building with unmarked white trucks in the parking lot. The only sign was a blinking red neon notice behind a panel of smoked glass that read
DEPOT CLOSED
.

The air smelled fishy. She rolled up the windows and turned on the A/C. Up ahead, orange road cones rose up on the shoulder of the single-lane road. As she approached a slight incline, she could see construction signs dotting the horizon. Yet as she crossed up and over the crest of the road, there were no road crews at work. The construction equipment that stood in the grassy median looked like it had been expediently evacuated in the moments before a nuclear holocaust.

Directly ahead was the wasteland industrial park of Sparrows Point. Along the shore were cargo ports crowded with dark ships that belched smoke into the air and, at the horizon, Laurie could make out the schizophrenic jumble of ductwork and pipes. On the other side of the road stood a complex of redbrick apartments with bars on the windows and a fire escape zigzagging from window to window all the way to the ground. Blinking red lights told Laurie which side roads were off limits. She continued driving until the factories rose up to greet her. They stood like medieval fortresses along the ramparts of the bay, their smokestacks like prison towers, their massive parking lots the color of moat water in the fading daylight. Beacons winked intermittently from the tops of the smokestacks, a warning to careless low-flying aircraft.

Laurie pulled along the shoulder and put the car in park. Her purse was beside her on the passenger seat. She opened it, took out the old photograph, and unfolded it. She wasn’t sure exactly where this particular lot was located, and she had no addresses to go by. Instead, she held the photo up and peered past it through the windshield at the crenellated silhouettes of factories along the cusp of the water. She wasn’t sure if the water itself was the Chesapeake Bay or one of its tributaries, though with dusk creeping up over the east, it looked expansive enough to be the goddamned Atlantic Ocean. Cargo ships were black specks dotted with Christmas-colored lights far off in the distance.

She thought she recognized the same arrangement of smokestacks in the photo down one of the closed-off access roads. There was an arm-bar blocking the gravel road and a construction barrel equipped with a blinking orange hazard light on the shoulder, but she thought she could hop the grassy hillock beyond the barrel and make her way around it. She switched the Volvo back into drive, spun the wheel, and eased the vehicle up the slight grassy incline of the shoulder. It was a tight squeeze maneuvering the boxy Volvo between the construction barrel and a chain-link fence woven with leafy veins of ivy, but she managed. When she cleared the barrel and the arm-bar, she negotiated back onto the roadway to find the surface bumpy and irregular. The Volvo’s steering wheel vibrated in her hands. She tightened her grip on it.

To her right, the factories’ smokestacks seemed to have repositioned themselves. She continued along the roadway, slowing down each time a dirt road branched off from it, cutting through the shallow scrim of trees toward the factories and ports. Any one of those dirt service roads could lead her to where she wanted to go. For all she knew, the road she was currently on might dead-end at the cusp of the bay.

She cranked the wheel to the right and took the service road. It proved even bumpier than the previous road. Tree limbs reached down and scraped the Volvo’s hood. Through the tangle of branches she could see a thumbnail moon surrounded by many stars.

Just when she thought she had made the wrong choice—that the service road was actually a conveyor belt in the middle of the cosmos on which she could drive and drive and never reach a destination—the trees parted and the Volvo’s headlights fell upon a
NO TRESPASSING
sign the size of an interstate billboard. Beyond the sign stood a high fence dressed in more concertina wire. Beyond the fence, and at the end of a paved parking lot that looked like the reflection of the night sky, were the rambling concrete structures of the factories themselves. The ones in the distance still trailed white gossamer from their smokestacks, but the ones here along the point—with the exception of the red and green blinking lights at the top of the stacks—looked desolate. They could have been factories on the moon, for all Laurie could tell.

Again, Laurie compared the photograph to the factories on the other side of the fence. A series of smokestacks midway through the rank of stacks matched up to the ones in the photo.

The fence was locked, the gates wrapped up in a tight ball of industrial chain and several padlocks. But age or vandals—or a combination of the two—had seen fit to smash a ragged hole in the meshwork a few yards from the entry point. The opening didn’t look large enough to accommodate the Volvo—not without submitting the vehicle to potential damage, anyway—but she could certainly pass through it on foot. Yet the thought of doing so frightened her. The parking lot itself looked at least a quarter of a mile long, and while there were industrial-sized vapor lamps at intervals throughout the parking lot, none of the lamps were working. It was as dark as infinite space. And once she reached the factories themselves . . . what hideousness might be lying in wait for her there? After all, it had been Sadie—Abigail—who had led her out here. Was she willing to trust the child?

The Vengeance,
she thought.
The Hateful Beast.

Still, she believed she had found that key at the bottom of the well for a reason. The fact that the number carved onto it matched the garage number in her father’s photograph—a photograph her father had deliberately hidden in the sleeve of a record album—couldn’t just be coincidence.

Laurie got out of the car. The air was acrid with pollutants from the steamships and the factories. Beneath her feet the ground seemed to rumble with the pulse of invisible machinery. Her ears picked up a motorized whine emanating from someplace nearby; her mind flashed images of great earth-moving cogs and wheels, of a system of pulleys and ropes just below the surface of the earth, keeping nature in harmony with itself. One careless move on her part could upset the whole balance of the universe. As it was, she felt as though she had inadvertently stepped through a tear in the fabric of space and time—that she was both simultaneously in the past and the future, watching herself from various different angles all at once.

It was silly, of course. She was standing in the woods at the cusp of a rundown industrial park with a key in the hip pocket of her jeans and an old photograph in her hand. The only thing momentous about all of this was the fact that she would have to explain her whereabouts to Ted when she eventually came home. She folded the photo and stuffed it in her back pocket. Crouching down, she crept beneath low branches while snagging her feet on brambles. Things very close to her that had been hiding in the woods took to their feet—or hooves—and trampled through the underbrush. One of them sounded disconcertingly large.

The opening in the fence was indeed large enough for her to pass through, though she did so heedful of the broken, rusty corkscrews of metal that practically hummed with tetanus. She didn’t see the small ravine on the other side of the fence until she planted one foot down into it. She managed to grab a handful of the fence before she fell. Cold water instantly soaked through her sneaker, her sock, and the cuff of her pant leg.

By the time she climbed up out of the ravine, grasping at tangles of weeds for handholds, and onto the solid ground of the parking lot, she already felt bested. Invisible flies droned around her head and she was sweating profusely. Although she was thin for her size, she rarely did any cardio and was already wheezing for breath. Yet here she was: She had been allowed admittance.

The walk across the parking lot felt like it took forever. Her footfalls were hollow thuds that seemed to echo out over the bay while her labored respiration found a rhythm similar to the underground droning of machinery.
I’m being assimilated.
Once, she thought someone was following her. When she stopped and looked around, she could see no one—she was the solitary island in the sea of black asphalt—but she was still not one hundred percent convinced. If Sadie Russ could come back as Abigail Evans and murder her father, was anything truly off limits?

The factories loomed over her as she approached. They were tremendous beasts, spewing fetid breath from smokestacks into the black night while glaring at her from blinking red and green eyes. At the end of the parking lot, a second fence circumnavigated the factory grounds. This fence was lower and she could have climbed over it easily enough if she had to, but she decided to walk its length and see if there was an easier way in.

There was—an open gate through which passed a stamped concrete walkway. She went through the gate and followed the walkway between two skyscraper-tall buildings. The buildings may have looked abandoned and out of use, but she thought she could hear electrical currents pulsing behind their steel and brick walls.
Old buildings have ghosts, too. Machines are living things with souls. They’re in there right now, crying out to me. They’re no different than people.
For whatever reason, this made her think of Sadie Russ’s headstone in the cemetery behind the park.

The walkway emptied into another parking area. There were storage sheds along the far side of the lot, and beyond the sheds she could see the silhouette of the Key Bridge backlit by a lavender sunset. She took the photo from her pocket and examined it again. Frowning, she realized the walkway had led her around to the wrong side of the building. Well, she was here now, so she continued in the direction she had been headed. She passed large sunken bays at the bottom of a concrete slope. There were old tractor trailers here, tagged with graffiti and leprous with rust. The windows along this side of the building were pebbled and situated behind wire meshwork. Over one iron door, a faded sign read
LOADING
. Over a similar door . . . well, the sign was missing, but she assumed it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that it had at one time read
UNLOADING
.

Out of nowhere, she felt giddy. Christ, she almost felt
good.

The row of garage doors began halfway down this side of the building. There were sodium lights above some of them, casting sickly yellow puddles onto the ground. The first garage had a 12 on the door—faded but still legible. It was followed sequentially by 13, 14, 15, and the like. She had no idea what had happened to 1 through 11, but didn’t waste time worrying about it. Some had padlocks on the handles and some didn’t. Seeing the garage doors in real life, something occurred to her that she hadn’t realized when she’d first seen them in the photograph. The doors were about the same size as a standard garage door on a house, but these sons of bitches looked like they were made of corrugated steel. They looked
heavy.
Even if the key in her pocket fit the padlock on door 58, she doubted her ability to open it on her own.

At door 22, the walkway gave way to a swampy pool of dark, stagnant mud. She climbed overtop a series of propane tanks and dropped down onto gritty cement on the other side. Along the coastline, great steel crates were stacked like monstrous Legos. Directly above her, long metal chutes that reminded her of log flumes deviated from a single iron turret. There was writing on the side of the turret but she couldn’t make it out in the dark. The chutes crossed the gap from this building to the surrounding ones, to include a structure that looked like a water tower emblazoned with graffiti.

A shadow retreated from the walkway and disappeared into the darkness. Laurie caught it in her peripheral vision and whipped her head around to follow its retreat. But the darkness was too great to see beyond the pooling sodium lights.

“Abigail?” she said, her voice shaking. She would have thought speaking the child’s name aloud in this place would have made her feel foolish, but it didn’t. She was frightened. “Is it . . . Sadie?”

No figure emerged. No sounds came through the dark.

She hoped.

On the far side of the building, the numbers on the doors jumped from 32 to 45. This was just fine with Laurie, since the muscles in her legs were beginning to ache. Overhead, the looming smokestacks had once again assembled themselves into position so that they looked just like their counterparts in the old photograph. Laurie felt something flutter at the back of her throat. She walked across metal steam grates—she could hear industrial pumps working far down below, reminding her of the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s novel
The Time Machine
—and passed through an assemblage of concrete bollards before she found the door she had been searching for.

Garage 58 was no different than all the others, with one exception—the padlock looked newer. The other padlocks she had seen had been great hulking blocks of rust that probably wouldn’t open to any key in the known universe. While the padlock on 58 had suffered from some exposure to the elements, there was still some shine to it. Laurie felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. At that instant, she knew with certainty that the key in her pocket was not the key meant to fit this lock.