Little Girls (30 page)

Glass can be broken.
She thought about the busted window in the belvedere.

In the foyer, she found the front door unlocked. Fear clenched her in its fist. She screamed Susan’s name but Susan didn’t respond. She turned the bolt and heard the lock slide sturdily into place.
She could already be in the house.
Then she thought of Susan.
Susan could have gone out!

“Susan! Susan!”

Susan was weeping from somewhere in the house. She couldn’t pinpoint the exact location.
Sound travels funny here.
Lowering her voice to a more reasonable tone, though unable to keep out the tremolo, she said, “Susan? Honey? Where’d you go?”

Susan’s sobs grew louder but she still did not answer.

Laurie took three silent steps toward the stairs. Susan was perched halfway up the staircase, her hands pressed into her lap and her face a slick red map of tears. When she saw her mother, the tears came harder. Her lower lip shook and her chin wrinkled.
Walnut chin,
Ted would have said.

“Hey,” Laurie said, placing a foot on the first step and a hand on the banister. “What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with
you
?” the girl sobbed. “You’re
scaring
me!”

“I’m only trying to protect you.” She ascended another step.

“I want Daddy to come home! I want Daddy!”

“I’m going to fix it, okay? I’m going to make it all better.” Two more steps. “I just want to make sure you’re safe first, Susan. I love you, honey. You know that I do. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

Susan lowered her face and cried into her lap.

“Come with me,” Laurie said, stopping two steps below Susan. She reached out and rubbed the girl’s head. She could feel the smoothness of her skull beneath her thin hair. “We’ll get you safe. Safe as milk.”

Susan struck out and swatted Laurie’s hand off her head. “No!” she shouted at her mother, simultaneously gripping the banister and pulling herself to her feet.

Laurie snatched the girl’s forearm with both hands and dragged her the rest of the way up the stairs.

Ted was less than an hour from the house when the storm hit. It didn’t begin slowly and graduate to a full-on thunderstorm; instead, it dumped out of the sky all at once, bringing traffic along the interstate to a screeching halt. Cursing audibly, he rolled up his window and tried Laurie’s cell phone again. Like the previous times, it went straight to voice mail. Similarly, the house phone kept ringing and ringing until an operator disconnected the line.

When he began to see signs for the Harbor Tunnel, he leapt up onto the shoulder and rode the rumble-strip to the exit. Two police cars sat on the other side of the median, but the rain must have made a traffic stop seem about as appealing as a tooth extraction to the officers, and neither vehicle pursued him.

 

There was an eight-inch butcher’s knife in one of the kitchen drawers. Laurie gripped its handle, then retrieved the flashlight from the counter, where Ted had left it after his expedition down into the wishing well. Susan’s cries were muffled now, but she could still hear them rattling around in her head. Outside, rain pattered against the bay windows. At the edge of the patio, the black-eyed Susans bobbed and whipped about, as if puppeted by strings.

Laurie undid the bolt on the side door. She turned the knob, opened the door, and was instantly accosted by a cold, rain-speckled wind more befitting of late winter than early summer. The storm had arrived. Before stepping out, she scanned the area. Trashcans stood against the siding to her left. To her right, wildflowers had been reduced to spongy green mats by the storm. The fence that ran between the two properties was overgrown with vegetation. The trees beyond resembled dancing, shambling black smears.

“Abigail.” Her voice was flat, toneless.

She stepped outside, shut the door, then quickly locked it with the key. She followed the walkway around to the back of the house. Directly above, large mottled storm clouds pulsed with an unearthly light. When the next whip crack of thunder resounded from across the river, Laurie felt its reverberation in her back teeth.

Intermingled with the sounds of the storm was a steady banging noise.

Where are you, Abigail?
Or was Sadie fully in control now?

She approached the fence and peered down beneath the whipping branches of the willow tree. The banging noise was the door in the fence; not properly latched, it slammed repeatedly against the fence post in the wind.
The passageway,
Laurie thought. She grabbed the door and shoved it all the way open. Rain splattered her face and soaked her shirt. On the ground, small footprints were quickly filling with brown water.

Over the storm, she thought she could hear Susan screaming for her. It took all her will to block out the sound.

A checkerboard dress passed through the trees up ahead.

She pursued, the knife leading the way.

 

The idea to call 911 didn’t come to him until he saw the massive swarm of taillights blocking all lanes of I-97 South. Even if he was overreacting—

—he would still feel better having the police check things out.

“Fuck it,” he said and dialed 911.

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

“I’ve been trying to reach my wife at home but she’s not answering the phone.”

“How long have you been trying to reach her?”

“A few hours. I’m worried something’s happened.”

“Is your wife sick, sir?”

“No. She’s . . . I don’t know. . . .”

“Is she expecting a call from you?”

“No, no.” His mouth was dry. “She’s angry with me.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Her name is Laurie.”

“No, sir—
your
name,” said the woman. “What’s
your
name?”

“Ted Genarro. I’ve got the address, if you could send a car by—”

“Do you have any reason to believe your wife is in any type of danger, sir?”

“Fuck,” he blurted, then killed the call.

 

She was freezing, her teeth knocking together in her skull by the time she reached the greenhouse. Great swirling puddles expanded along the dirt path. At one point, lightning struck a nearby tree and sent a branch roughly the width of a telephone pole plummeting to the earth. Glimpsed through the treetops, the sky itself had deepened to the color of blackboard slate.

The knife quivered in her hand as she approached the greenhouse. The canvas rippled in the strong wind while rivulets of rainwater cascaded down the creases. There was no sign of Abigail, and the canvas covering the greenhouse didn’t look as if it had been disturbed, but there were also plenty of places to hide. The tree with FUCK carved onto its trunk clawed at the gunmetal sky with barren, skeletal limbs. The branch Sadie had toppled from all those years ago still extended out over the roof of the greenhouse, its bark the color of marrow.

She approached the front side of the greenhouse. Wind whipped at the canvas covering, making it bulge and ripple in places. She peeled back one of the canvas flaps to expose the blackened glass door beneath. The rope that had held the door shut—the rope she had untied on her previous jaunt out here—was still gone, though it was no longer on the ground where she had left it. She managed to work some fingers between the door and the frame, and pulled. The door squalled open about five or six inches. Blackness seasoned with the heady aroma of rotting vegetation stood just beyond the doorway. She switched the knife to her weak hand, flicked on the flashlight, and stepped inside.

It was moist and humid, like a rainforest. Had the sheet of canvas not covered the structure, she still did not believe much light would have been able to penetrate the blackened, moss-caked windows. Jumbled shapes resolved themselves out of the gloom, vaguely plantlike. The air wasn’t fetid as much as it was merely
earthy
—an orchestra of organic perfumes.

As the flashlight played across the remains of her father’s greenhouse, Laurie realized that she was looking at a man-made structure that had wholly and unwaveringly been usurped by Mother Nature. After Sadie’s death, her father had shut down the greenhouse and, to the best of her knowledge, had never returned to it. What plants he’d kept inside hadn’t died; on the contrary, their roots had burst through their terracotta pots and the corrugated tin flooring in search of soil and water . . .
and had found it.
The interior of the greenhouse had become a swampy black jungle, the air so fragrant with pheromones that it was difficult to breathe. Water dripped from perhaps a hundred places, tapping against leaves and draining into puddles on the floor. Large flies curtained the air. She took a step forward and her foot sank down into an inch or so of putrid black bile.

A shape stood partially hidden behind a curtain of dense foliage. Laurie flicked the flashlight over it. The checkerboard dress looked incongruous, even with its mud-colored blood soaking through the fabric. The girl wearing it was no longer Abigail Evans. It was Sadie Russ. Lacerations streamed red across her otherwise cadaver-white face. The darkened knots of Sadie’s nipples were visible beneath the sodden fabric of the dress. Her hair was a wet, twisted tangle that framed her face. Only her eyes looked alive—piercing, lucid, lighter in color than Laurie had remembered.

She found she was no longer afraid.

“Why did you come back?”

Sadie’s lips peeled back into a hideous clownlike smile. “To take you back with me,” she said. It was Sadie’s voice, but it was still somehow Abigail’s voice, too—two little girls speaking simultaneously from the same mouth.

“Why?”

That grotesque smile did not falter. “Find the circle.”

In response, Laurie tightened her grip on the knife.

Sadie laughed. It was an adult man’s laugh now. “You can’t kill me. I’m already dead,” she said.

“I won’t go with you.”

“Then I’ll take the other one,” Sadie said. “I’ll take Susan. If I can’t have you, I’ll have her.
Let me have her.
I’ll break her neck and make a wish out of her. I’ll throw her down there in that dark hole with all your father’s girls. It’ll be the best wish I’ve ever made. Eeny, meeny, miney—”

“Why are you
doing
this?” she sobbed. The knife trembled in her hand.

“Because I’m the Vengeance. I’m the Hateful Beast.” Sadie extended a pale white arm ribboned with deep cuts and pointed to a spot on the floor, perhaps a foot or two in front of Laurie.

Laurie redirected the flashlight to the spot Sadie had pointed out. The floor was a squishy cushion of mud networked with plant roots. With her sneaker, she cleared an arc through the mud to reveal the corrugated tin floor beneath.

“The circle,” Sadie hissed.

Indeed, there was a small circular grate covering a drain, perhaps just slightly bigger in diameter than a softball, set into the floor. It reminded her of the drains in the locker-room shower stalls where Coach Linda had made all the girls take showers after gym class back in high school. Two flathead screws were bolted into the grate. Trembling, Laurie sank to her knees. With her thumbnail, she dug crud out of the groove in the head of each screw. Using the blade of the knife, the flatheads unscrewed willingly enough. The grate itself gave more of a protest. She wedged the blade of the knife around the edge of the grate until she was finally able to pop it off.

She looked down the drain but saw nothing but darkness. She thought of those pictures Susan had drawn and stuck to the refrigerator: They hadn’t been pictures of the well after all, but of this drainpipe. She could hear water running below and, even as she stared at it, rainwater spilled down into its mouth. Then she remembered the flashlight. She directed the beam down into the hole . . . and saw the box.

It was a rusted tin piece of garbage that, at one time, might have been a cigarette case. Someone—her father, most likely—had wedged it halfway down the throat of the drain, to the part where the pipe narrowed and prevented it from falling all the way down. Laurie retrieved it, the casing scabrous with rust. There was a small release button on one side of the metal box. To cut her flesh on it would be to welcome a whole host of infections into her bloodstream, so she was cautious when she pushed it. The box sprung open.