Little Girls (31 page)

There was a grimy plastic bag inside. It looked like a Ziploc bag. There was something inside, though the bag was too grimy and foggy with age for her to clearly make out what it was. She opened the bag and shook the item out into her hand. It turned out to be several items, although they were apparently part of a set. Old Polaroid photographs.

It took her several seconds to realize what she was looking at. But by the time she turned to the fourth photo in the stack,
she knew.
The variations of the flesh tones . . . the crease that could be the bend of an elbow or a knee or something else . . . the places exposed that should have never, ever been exposed, not on a child, a little girl. She didn’t know who the girl—the
victim—
was until she saw the fearful, blank-eyed face appear in one of the photos. Then, in another, she could clearly make out Sadie’s profile. Potting soil beneath the fingernails, Myles Brashear’s big hand covered Sadie’s mouth in yet another photograph. Touched her buttocks in another photo. Touched her in worse places in yet another....

Unable to look at the rest, she dropped the stack of photos to the floor. She tried to stand, but found that she couldn’t. Her face burned and it was becoming difficult to breathe. She realized she had been crying.

When she turned to Sadie, she expected to find that the girl had vanished. But she was still there, having in fact taken a step closer to Laurie while she had been going through the photographs. The girl’s bare feet were black with mud. There was an absence of expression on her face.

“I had no idea he did those horrible things to you. You weren’t evil. An evil man did evil things to you, but
you
weren’t evil. You just needed someone to help you.”

“He did it right in here, in this place.” Sadie’s voice was flat, unemotional.

“Sadie, had I known, I would have helped you. I would have.”

“You knew.”

“Honey, no—how could I know such a thing?”

“Because I told you.”

“I just thought you were a bully. I just thought you . . . for some reason, that you’d
changed
. . . .”

“I told you what he was doing to me. You called me a liar. We climbed up the tree so I could show you where he did it to me. Right in here. Right in here.”

“No, no—
you
climbed the tree. I watched you.”

“You didn’t want me to tell on him,” Sadie said. “You thought the police would take you away from your family so you didn’t want me to tell on him. He kept doing it and you didn’t want me to tell.”

Laurie tried to speak but couldn’t. Suddenly, a part of her had returned to that afternoon, watching Sadie climb the tree, her cheap black shoes scrabbling for purchase on the low-hanging branches.
Had
she gone up, too?

“You didn’t want me to tell,” Sadie droned on, “and you got mad at me. You said I was making it up. You got very mad, Laurie.”

Had
she gone up? Had they
both
been on the branch that day? Insanely, she thought of that inspirational poster again, the one with the kitten dangling from the branch with the caption that read
HANG IN THERE
!

“You got mad,” Sadie said. “You—”

“No!” Laurie shouted. She dropped the flashlight and clamped her hands to her ears. “No! Stop it!”

Had
she gone up there and gotten mad?

“—pushed me,” finished Sadie.

Laurie screamed until her throat ruptured. In her mind’s eye, she could see Sadie losing her balance, swinging down one side of the limb, her hands laced together around the limb . . . then snapping apart as she dropped through the roof of the greenhouse. She could
see
it, just as she had seen it a hundred times before in her nightmares . . . only this time, her perspective had changed. The angle was different. This time, she watched Sadie Russ fall to her death while she sat up in the tree. She watched Sadie from above.

Weeping, Laurie collapsed to the floor. Only vaguely was she aware of Sadie’s dirty bare feet shuffling toward her.

“So now I’ve come back for you.”

“I won’t go,” Laurie sobbed into the dirt. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

“Then I will throw Susan down the well and wish you dead.”

“
Please—”

“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe. Who’s it going to be?”

Laurie propped herself up. Her whole body hitched with sobs. As she stared at Sadie, the little girl’s wounds began suppurating. Blood spilled from the gashes in her throat while great red magnolias bloomed beneath her filthy checkerboard dress. For the first time, she could see the jagged geometry of broken glass jutting from the girl’s ghost-white flesh.

“I’ve been following you forever,” Sadie said. “I’m always just off to the side, watching you. You saw me that day in the car.” Sadie’s lips stretched into a grimace. “You couldn’t handle it so your mind shut down. It was fun for a while—I like games—but now I’m tired of it. So if you won’t do what I say, I will play with Susan. We’ll play
hard,
Laurie. I’ll haunt her and drive her mad. I’ll do
things
to her. Don’t you remember the terrible things I can do?”

Laurie sobbed.

“I can get at her any time I want. You know that’s true. There’s only one way to protect her. Kill yourself.”

“Please . . .”

“It’s you or your daughter,” Sadie said.

“Okay,” she moaned. “Okay—
me
. I’ll pay for it. Please—leave my daughter alone.”

“Kill yourself and I will,” said Sadie.

Her vision bleary, she felt around for the knife.

“No,” Sadie barked. She extracted a triangular wedge of broken glass from one of her wounds, and extended it toward Laurie. “Use this. The same glass that cut me.”

The glass was weightless in her hand. She managed to come to a kneeling position once again. When she looked at the glass, a part of her recoiled at how dirty it was . . . and then she laughed at the absurdity of such a thought.

“Cut,” said Sadie Russ.

Laurie cut.

 

Ted had to smash a window to get in the house. No one had answered when he knocked on the door. He went around to the side of the house, but the door there was locked, too. He picked up a large stone from the garden and was about to send it hurling through the bay windows when he thought he heard Susan’s voice screaming for him. He looked around and couldn’t see her. The storm was playing tricks with his head. Then he sent the stone sailing.

“Laurie? Susan?” His voice echoed through the kitchen and out into the parlor. The house was dark and silent.

He raced out into the front hall and paused again, this time
certain
he had heard Susan screaming for him.

Upstairs,
he realized.

He took the stairs two at a time, then froze at the top of them. The bedroom doors all stood open . . . yet Susan, whose screams he could still hear, sounded impossibly far away. Then his eyes fell on the door to the belvedere. It was closed and locked with the padlock.

“I’m here, Susan! I’m here!”

He rammed his shoulder against the door four times before the frame split. He kicked it the rest of the way off its hinges just as Susan came streaming down a set of narrow stairs. She dove into his arms, sobbing hysterically.

“Okay, okay,” he said, smoothing her hair and kissing her hot cheeks. “Calm down. It’s okay.”

She shrieked, “Mommy!”

“Where is she? Where’s Mommy?”

“She went into the woods! I saw her! She went into—” She buried her face against him.

Ted scooped her up and carried her downstairs. He set her down in the kitchen.

“Daddy,
no—”

“Call nine-one-one, pumpkin. Can you do that?” He touched the side of her face.

“Where—”

“I’m going to get your mom.”

Susan’s chest hitched. Before he could leave, she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tight. He kissed the side of her face, then reluctantly broke the embrace.

“Do it now,” he told her. “Do it now, Susan.”

He didn’t have the key to unlock the side door, so he climbed back out the window. He hadn’t realized he’d cut himself until he was jogging down the wooded path and saw that the front of his shirt was soaked in blood. A sharp pain radiated from his left side.

When he reached the clearing, he saw the door of the greenhouse standing open. He rushed inside and was quickly attracted to a dull cone of light issuing from the floor. It was a flashlight. A second later, he saw Laurie. She was sprawled out seemingly dead on the floor surrounded by a black jungle of dripping, stinking plants. Both her wrists had been cut open and she lay there with the bloodied, jagged piece of glass pressed to her throat.

Ted rushed to her side, shoving the broken shard of glass away. He listened to her chest and felt for a pulse. Counted. For a minute, he couldn’t differentiate his heartbeat from hers. But then he could. She was still alive.

He gathered her up in his arms and ran back to the house.

W
hen Ted came back from the bathroom, Detective Freeling was seated in one of the molded plastic chairs in the waiting room of the hospital. Ted didn’t recognize him at first. Freeling spotted him and rose quickly. They were in the middle of shaking hands before Ted recognized him.

“I’m sorry to hear about this,” Detective Freeling said. He looked haggard and deflated, though Ted was fairly certain he looked even worse. “Will she be all right?”

“She’s stable. The doctors said she passed out after doing her wrists, but that she didn’t lose too much blood.”

“Thankfully.”

“Had she not passed out and got to her throat . . .” He didn’t complete the thought.

“How about you? You holding up okay?”

“Sure.”

“And . . . Susan, was it?”

“She’s fine. She’s with the neighbors. I didn’t want her to see her mother like this.”

All pertinent questions dispatched, Detective Freeling looked suddenly at a loss for words. He sawed an index finger back and forth beneath his lower lip while his eyes darted fervently around the hospital waiting room.

“They’ve been keeping her pretty sedated,” Ted said, offering the man a lifeline. “I haven’t actually spoken to her yet.”

“I see.”

“I can’t imagine what . . . what state she’ll be in when she comes around. I’m almost afraid for her to wake up.”

Detective Freeling put a hand on his shoulder. It was a firm grip and a genuine gesture, but there was little comfort in it.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” said the detective. “Was there anything you needed? Anything I can do?”

“No. I’ve got it all taken care of.”

Detective Freeling nodded. His hand slipped off Ted’s shoulder and sought solace in the pocket of his trousers. The detective looked like he wanted to say something more, but in the end, he settled for a meager little smile that made him look no older than a frat boy. When he left, he did so silently.

 

The man who woke him up had stale breath and large gray eyes behind thick lenses. He wore a white lab coat.

“She’s awake, Mr. Genarro.”

 

They had her hooked up to machines through a series of tubes and brightly colored wires. Electronics beeped and pulsed on the rack beside her bed. She was propped up on several pillows, her body shrunken beneath the white cloth gown she wore. Her complexion was ashen and her eyes looked too big for her face. She stared despondently at him as he came into the room. Both her wrists were heavily bandaged.

“How are you feeling?”

“How did you find me?” Her voice was hardly a wheeze. “How did I get here? I don’t remember.”

“I came home. Susan saw you go off into the woods. I found you in that greenhouse. You’d cut . . . you’d hurt yourself pretty badly. You were unconscious when I got there.”

“Susan?”

“She’s fine.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s fine. She’s safe. Babe, relax. Your heart monitor’s racing.” He took one of her hands in his. Hers was cold. “Laurie, what happened? Why’d you do this to yourself?”

“It was Sadie.”

“Who?”

“The little girl who lived next door to me when I was a kid,” she rasped. “The one who fell through the greenhouse—”

“And died,” he finished. “Yes.”

“She came back. She was going to hurt Susan if I didn’t . . .” Her eyes went distant. She tried to struggle up off the bed but it took little effort for Ted to keep her down.

“You need to relax, Laurie. You need to lie here and get better. Do you understand?”

“You and Susan have to get out of that house.”

“We will. As soon as they let you out of this place, we’ll all leave together.”

“No,” she croaked at him. “You have to do it
now
.”

He squeezed her hand gently. “Okay, okay. We will.” “Promise me.”

“I promise. Scout’s honor.”

“Ted, that girl was in the house. My father wasn’t just hearing noises—
she was really there
.”

“That’s not true, Laurie. Sadie is dead.”

“No. Sadie is Abigail. She’s been in our house while we were there, too.”

“No, she hasn’t.”

“You don’t
know,
Ted. Remember the cuff link? My father’s cuff link? Susan
hadn’t
been lying—it was Abigail who’d come into the house and taken them. She had my mother’s diamond earring and she was digging it out of the same hole where she and Susan had been burying—”

“Susan took the cuff link.”

Laurie’s lower lip quivered. “What?”

“I didn’t tell you. I spoke with her like I said I would and she admitted that she had taken the cuff links from your father’s study. She was too ashamed to tell you so she told me. So, you see, no one was in the house. No one but Susan took those cuff links. You see?”

Even as her facial muscles relaxed, the terror in Laurie’s eyes did not abate.

“What?” he said. “What is it?”

“That’s true? What you just told me?”

“Yes.”

“Then . . .”

“Then what?”

“Then I’m crazy. I’m crazy, Ted. If none of it is real, that means I imagined it all. It means I’m out of my—”

“It means you’re stressed. Your father just passed away and you’ve had unresolved issues with that. Then you made that discovery—you remember it, right? The girls—”

She closed her eyes. “Yes.”

“Laurie, your father was a very bad man. You were lucky to have been taken from him when you were a kid.”

She opened her eyes and just stared at him.

He leaned in and kissed the side of her face. It was like kissing a wax sculpture. “Then there’s you and me. Mostly me. I’m no good. We can talk about that once you’re better. I just want to tell you that I’m sorry. Incredibly sorry.”

“I know you are. It’s okay. We can work through it, can’t we?”

He felt something lurch forward in his chest. “God, yes. Yes, we really can, Laurie. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I want to work it out. I want us all to be happy—you, me, and Susan.”

“That’s all I want,” he said.

She smiled thinly at him, then turned away. He could see her eyes welling up with tears, and once again she looked very fearful.

“You’re not crazy,” he told her. “You’re going to be okay.”

She whispered, “Okay.” Then she smiled at him, which caused her cheeks to come to points. “Okay. Thank you.”

“Can I get you anything before I leave?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Good. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He turned and went to the door but she called him back.

“When I get out of here,” she said, “I’ve got something to tell you. It’s something that happened a long time ago—something I did—but I feel the need to tell you. And maybe this way you won’t ever let me forget it. Maybe this way it’ll set things right.”

He nodded.

“It was a terrible thing,” she said. “I’m my father’s daughter, after all.”

He was surprised to find himself close to tears.

 

It was almost midnight by the time he arrived back at the house on Annapolis Road. The storm still raged and there were downed trees blocking the driveway. He parked as close to the house as he could, then raced across the yard with the collar of his sport coat tugged over his head.

The house was dark. The Rosewoods had been kind enough to take Susan off his hands and let her sleep over. She had been so rattled by what Laurie had done that she hardly seemed like herself. She was eager to spend the night with Abigail, and Ted considered that a small victory.

He fixed himself a drink, then languished on the sofa in the parlor, the lights off. The sound of the rain kept lulling him in and out of sleep.

They would all require some recovery. Not just physically, but emotionally. Laurie would need to speak with a therapist—he had insisted on it after her inexplicable blackout on the highway last year—and this time he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was willing to seek counseling to salvage their marriage, too. It was important to him, though perhaps he hadn’t realized just how important until he arrived back in Hartford without them. They would have to be open and honest with each other from here on out—no more secrets, no more lies. No more living separate lives under the same roof.

In that case, you’re off to a good start, Teddy-biscuit,
he thought now, his mind already retiring to some shadowed corner of half-sleep.
The woman was not even conscious a full five minutes and you were already lying to her face.

She’d said,
That’s true? What you just told me?

He’d said,
Yes.

Maybe some lies are good lies, if they help a person,
he convinced himself.
Does it really matter that I lied to her about the cuff link if it makes her feel better?
He had never asked Susan about it. In fact, he had forgotten about it until Laurie brought it up again tonight.

Soon, his thoughts collided with other thoughts. He dreamt he was a grown man sleeping in a child’s bed—his own childhood bed—only to be awakened in the middle of the night by the terrible clash of thunder. When he went to look for his parents, he found their dusty corpses spun in spiderwebs propped up in their bed. Downstairs, in the dog crate, Stooge had been turned inside-out, his entrails gleaming like wet, purple snakes in the moonlight. Then, at another point in the dream, he thought he heard the distant wails of a little girl—Susan?—calling out to him in the night. Shrieking. After a while, the cries went silent.

 

When he awoke in real life, it was because the telephone in the kitchen was ringing. In the midst of Laurie’s madness, she had also shut the ringer off on the phone—he had realized this yesterday, while waiting for Laurie’s doctor to call. Outside, the storm had stopped. Daylight crept up over the trees. Birds sang brightly.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Ted, it’s Liz Rosewood from next door. I’m sorry to wake you so early, but I just got up and Abigail told me about Susan getting upset in the middle of the night. Ted, I had no idea she went back over to your place, and I’m completely embarrassed. I’ve already scolded Abigail—she should have told me and I would have come over and sat with Susan until you came home.”

Ted scratched his forehead and stared at the glistening raindrops on the bay windows.

“Anyway, I just wanted to apologize. Is Susan all right?”

“To be honest, she isn’t up yet. I haven’t seen her. I didn’t even realize she was here last night.”

“I hope you’re not upset.”

“Not at all.”

“How’s Laurie?”

“She was awake. We spoke for a little bit.”

“Will she be okay?”

“I think so.” What he almost said was,
I hope so.
It was what he meant, anyway.

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” Liz said. “I’ll bring some lunch by for you and Susan later today.”

“Please don’t trouble yourself.”

“I insist.”

“All right. Thank you.”

He hung up the phone, filled up the coffeepot, then wandered out into the front hall. Peering through the windows, he could see the damage left behind in the wake of the storm—the felled trees, the trash strewn about the yard, some of the fence pickets broken. Apparently, the wind had been strong enough to tear the plywood cover off the well, bricks and all.

He climbed up the stairs and went down the hall to Susan’s bedroom door. The door was closed. He knocked on it.

When she didn’t answer, he knocked again.

When she still didn’t answer, he opened the door, poked his head in, and called out, “Susan?”

The room was empty. He stood there for a few seconds, puzzling over this. Then he went back downstairs and searched the rest of the house, but she wasn’t there. By this time, he was replaying the phone call with Liz in his head and wondered if he’d misunderstood her. He considered calling her back up for clarification, but in the end, decided he would just walk next door.

It was cold outside. He went down the porch steps and cut across the yard, pausing to survey the bricks that had been tossed about, the sheet of plywood that lay discarded on the lawn.
Must have been some wind last night.

He kept walking across the lawn, then paused. Some nonspecific disquiet had settled all around him. It was as if he’d inadvertently walked through a spider’s web. Something didn’t sit right.

He turned around and cut back toward the house, stepping over the discarded bricks and maneuvering around the sheet of plywood. Crickets sang in the overgrown grass. A cool breeze rustled the leaves in the trees.

He peered over the side of the well and looked into the darkness.