Little Girls (5 page)

S
miling to himself, Ted surveyed the property. The backyard was large and pastoral, heavily wooded beyond the property. Along the side of the house, a fence set the demarcation between this property and the neighboring one, where a shabby little house stood beyond a veil of thinner trees. A hard blue sky rose up beyond the tree line. He inhaled and thought he could smell the briny aroma of river water.

Why Laurie had never told him about the grandeur of her father’s home suddenly weighed on his mind. Particularly with all the money problems they had been having lately, exacerbated by Laurie’s reluctance to go back to work, it would have been nice to know there was a potential safety net out there. Even if Myles Brashear had no intention of sharing his fortune with his daughter while he was alive—a scenario Ted guessed had more to do with Laurie’s pride than her father’s unwillingness—it would have been nice to know that once the old fellow passed on, there would be financial spoils waiting for them in the wings.

Susan did a cartwheel across the lawn, her shadow exaggerated to hugeness on the grass. When she popped up, there was an ear-to-ear smile on her face.

“Pretty neat place, huh, pumpkin seed?” said Ted.

“It’s awesome!”

He pointed straight across the lawn to the trees. “I bet there’s water back there.”

“Like the beach?”

“Well, no, not the beach. Maybe a river or a lake or something. Want to go have a look?”

Susan pointed to a darkened niche in the tree line. “Can we go there first, Daddy? It looks like a path.”

“Indeed it does.”

“It can be an adventure!” she said, gathering up his hand and dragging him across the yard to the wooded path.

Awe caused the girl to slow her pace after they walked a few yards into the woods. Colorful wildflowers burst from the ground and the trees sighed softly in the early summer breeze. Tiny white petals fluttered down around them like snowflakes. A smorgasbord of smells met Ted’s nose. He inhaled the rich fecundity of the forest that, even as a teenage boy, had always reminded him—though not unpleasantly—of semen.

“Look,” Susan said, her voice a sudden whisper.

Ted crouched down so he was at eye level with her. She pointed through dense foliage where, at first, Ted saw nothing. But then the geometric shapes of the forest assembled into a pair of antlers, a tapered brown snout, and glossy tar-colored eyes. It was a seven-point buck, still several yards away but nonetheless massive, even at such a distance. It was staring straight at them, seeming to hold its breath, just as Ted and Susan were doing. He had never seen one out in the wild before, and its presence now was nearly transcendent.

“It sees us,” Susan whispered. So close to her face, he could smell candy on her breath.

“It does,” he whispered back.

“Can we go up to him? Pet him?”

“I think,” said Ted, “that if we take another step, the old boy will turn and run off through the woods.”

“But Daddy, we could
try.”

“Go on,” he urged her. “Go ahead and try, sweet pea.”

Susan released her grip on her father’s hand. A strand of her hair had fallen in front of her face, and Ted watched as her exhalations caused it to swing like a metronome. She took one step toward the deer, her arms straight down at her side, as if to keep herself as unimposing a figure as possible. The deer’s eyes were still locked on them. Ted found himself holding his breath. Susan executed another step in the deer’s direction. He watched her profile. That loose strand of hair kept blowing back and forth, back and forth. A timorous smile tugged at one corner of Susan’s mouth.

Go on, kiddo,
he thought.

She took a third step, and this time her sneaker came down on a twig. The twig snapped and, in a flash, the deer vanished into the brush. For several seconds thereafter, Ted could hear its powerful legs pistoning through the woods as it fled.

Susan turned to her father, her eyes brilliant and wide. That timorous smile was still there, frozen to her face.

“Wow,” she marveled. “Did you see how fast it ran?”

“I did,” he said, taking up her hand again.

They walked some more, until they came upon a clearing.

“What is
that?
” Susan said, pointing.

It was a sizable man-made structure, in the vague suggestion of a small house with a cantilevered roof, covered by a heavy blanket of canvas. The canvas was black with mold, its corners held down by chains attached to what looked like railroad spikes driven into the earth.

“Not sure,” Ted said. Together they took a few steps closer to the thing before Ted stopped. He noticed shards of broken glass hidden among the underbrush. “Stay here for a sec so I can have a look.”

The thing beneath the canvas was about the size and shape of the detached garage they had back in Hartford. As he drew nearer, the rich scents of the forest intensified; they no longer rose up to greet his nose as much as they accosted him and tried to bully him into a sneeze. There was a deeper smell beneath the floral perfume, too—the unmistakable sick-sweet odor of rotting vegetation.

He crouched down and peered beneath one of the canvas flaps. Then he dropped the flap back into place, stood, and rubbed his hands together.

“What is it?” Susan asked.

He waved her over. “Come here, but watch out for the broken glass.”

Susan stared at the ground as she closed the distance between them. There was a daintiness to her posture that Ted found endearing. When she arrived beside him, he peeled away a section of the canvas to reveal a matrix of black glass rectangles.

“What
is
it?” Susan still wanted to know.

“It’s a greenhouse,” Ted said. “A very old one, but that’s what it is.”

“What’s a greenhouse?”

“What’s the matter? They don’t teach you kids about global warming in school?”

Susan wrinkled her nose, a gesture she implemented whenever she was confronted with rhetoric.

“It’s a little house made of glass where people grow plants and flowers,” Ted said.

“Why do you need a house to grow plants and flowers? Seems like they grow pretty good out here on their own.”

“Pretty well,” Ted corrected her.

“Seems like they grow pretty
well
on their own.”

Ted smiled and gently squeezed the back of his daughter’s neck.

“Let’s go see if I’m right about that water on the other side of the trees,” he said.

T
he house was too quiet and empty after Dora left, so Laurie went outside. She walked around the side of the house to the backyard in search of Ted and Susan. At one point, she thought she heard Susan’s high-pitched laughter, but when she reached the backyard neither her daughter nor husband was there. She lingered momentarily on the stamped concrete that comprised the walkway along the side of the house that wound to the patio around back, scrutinizing each concrete panel as if to glean some pertinent information from it. A cool breeze came through the trees and rattled the leaves over her head. She backed up into the tall grass while her gaze scaled up the side of the house to the stunted turret of the belvedere at the center of the roof. From this angle, she could see two of the four sides of the belvedere. One of the windows looked funny, like something was propped up over the glass—a sheet or a board or something. She shielded her eyes against the sun, but still could not make out what it was.

That’s it. That’s where he jumped.
The realization chilled her.

She was about to go inside when she heard the laugh again—the same girlish pitch, though much closer this time. She turned around in time to see someone moving along the fence on the other side, a shadow gliding between the slats.

“Susan?”

The fence was too high for her to peer over, so she leaned against it, trying to glimpse through the slats. She could see no one—the trees on the other side of the fence were too abundant, the gap through which she peered too narrow—yet she was certain someone was standing just on the other side. She repeated her daughter’s name, her voice now edged with unease. Waited.

After several seconds holding her breath, she went back inside.

 

Dora Lorton had been right: the house was devoid of almost all personal affectations and any other items Laurie’s father might have construed as frivolous in nature. Almost everything served a functional purpose. Laurie spent the next hour wandering from room to room, familiarizing herself with the layout of the house again, and catching glimpses of fleeting memories every time she turned a corner. The trips she had made to the house in her later years, when she had been a teenager and thrust upon her father for brief periodic visits, were less memorable to her than the years of her preadolescence, when she and her mother had lived here. Yet even those memories were hazy at best, sheened in vagueness and populated by questionable details. Myles Brashear had been a large man with huge, calloused hands and a head that looked slightly wider at the bottom than it did at the top. To look upon him was to assume he eked out his profession slogging away at some grist mill, quarry, or foundry. His year-round tan might have suggested a possible career in construction as well. Yet while Myles Brashear had not been afraid to get his hands dirty, he had been a businessman in shirtsleeves and a necktie. He made the first half of his money as the co-owner of an upstart steel-manufacturing company in Sparrows Point that produced steel for both government and private concerns, including bridges, cargo ships, commercial and industrial buildings, and four separate railroads. He made the second half of his money when he allowed his business partners to buy him out in the early 1980s, after recognizing that the steel industry was declining in favor of scrap recycling and the use of oxygenized furnaces. He had retired at fifty-five and spent the rest of Laurie’s childhood tending to various gardens he had planted around the property off Annapolis Road. That was mostly how Laurie remembered him now: a large man with big hands digging in potter’s soil in the yard.

She recalled an afternoon drive she had taken with her father so many years ago now. It was just before the divorce, and tensions in the household were running high. Laurie couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven—young enough to be confused at the breaking apart of her family but powerless to understand the fundamentals of what had gone wrong between her parents. That afternoon, her father had taken her out for ice cream and then out to the park. She had asked him where he worked—she had always thought the name, Sparrows Point, sounded mystical and beautiful—and her father had smiled with just the corner of his mouth. He turned the car onto the beltway. Soon, they were crossing the Key Bridge, the glittering expanse of the Patapsco River extending like a great panel of smoked glass. As they crossed the bridge, Laurie could see large cylindrical concrete towers rising up against the horizon, many of them spewing thick white clouds. “This is it,” Myles Brashear had told her as they reached the opposite end of the bridge. The landscape was filled with steel-and-glass buildings, industrial parks gridded with pipes, scaffolding like jungle gyms, and spacious paved parking lots twinkling with cars. Directly across the street from the factories, Laurie caught intermittent glimpses of marshland and ruinous little one-story houses with large TV antennas on their roofs. Even the air smelled putrid.

Laurie had stared out the window at the sights in horror. This was Sparrows Point? This was no magical wonderland like she had always pictured in her mind. She was about to say something about it all when her father pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road, slipped it into park, and remained staring out the windshield at the collection of foul-looking smokestacks that rose up like medieval turrets along the horizon. They remained there on the side of the road for a while, neither of them speaking a word. She watched her father’s profile and could see his cheeks growing flushed and his eyes becoming glassy.

After several more minutes, he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, turned and offered her a wan smile, and said, “Pretty lousy little place, huh?” She wanted to ask if he was okay, because she could see there was some visible ache within him, but she couldn’t bring herself to formulate the words. Then he lightly pinched her cheek and said, “Let’s get home.” Laurie and her mother had moved out of the house two days later.

She found herself surprised at the welling of emotion that accompanied such a memory. It was one of the few good ones she had of her father, and even that one wasn’t actually
good,
just emotional. Sparrows Point had been a hideous industrial park instead of paradise, and so had her parents’ marriage. She had been too young to make the comparison back then, but it wasn’t lost on her now.

“Stupid,” Laurie told herself as she splashed cool water onto her face in the downstairs bathroom. When she heard footsteps out in the hall, she shut the water off and said, “Susan?” When Susan didn’t answer, she called out to Ted. But he didn’t answer, either. “Are you guys back?”

Beginning to feel foolish for talking to an empty house, she dried her face and hands on the neatly folded plain white towel at the corner of the sink. She was dragging the towel down her neck when she heard the footsteps again. They sounded like they crossed down the hall, through the parlor, and into either the dining room or the kitchen. Laurie dropped the towel and stepped out into the hallway. “Hey,” she called again, more sternly this time. “Is that you, Ted? Susan?” She cleared her throat. “Is someone here?”

The fearful look on Dora Lorton’s face as she peered up at the house while the Cadillac pulled away suddenly resurfaced in Laurie’s head. Again, she felt foolish for allowing her mind to toy with her already frazzled nerves so liberally. Yet she wondered if perhaps the old woman had forgotten something and come back. “Ms. Lorton? Dora?”

She crossed into the parlor and surveyed the empty room—the sofa still creased from where Ted had been sitting, the phonograph and piano, the musty little liquor cabinet, the geometry of daylight coming from the windows and playing across the gouged hardwood floor. Dust motes spiraled in the shafts of light. There were no open windows and thus no breeze circulating in the house, but she thought she heard the faint chiming of the crystal chandelier out in the foyer.

A door slammed at the opposite end of the house. Laurie jumped. It had been the front door. She turned and looked down the hallway to the foyer. The front door was closed, just as she had left it after coming back in from the porch.
Had
Dora Lorton come back?

She went to the door, opened it, and stepped back out onto the porch. The Cadillac had not returned, and there was no sign of Dora or Felix Lorton—or Ted and Susan, for that matter—anywhere in the vicinity. Disquiet settled over her like a shroud. At that precise moment, it was very easy to convince herself that she was the only person left alive on the planet, and that she had imagined the Lortons and had even imagined her husband and daughter—that anyone she had ever cared about had been just a figment of her imagination all along.

She went back inside, shut the door, paused, and then turned the dead bolt.

 

There were five rooms on the first floor in addition to two bathrooms—the parlor, the kitchen, a dining room with an adjoining antechamber that had once been a small sitting room but was now completely barren, and her father’s study. Just as Dora had mentioned, the carpeting in some of the rooms had been pried up in corners while sections of molding had been removed from the walls. Moreover, holes had been punched into the walls—and not figuratively either, as it seemed these depressions had been made from
punching
with someone’s actual
fist.
The crenellation of knuckles could be seen in the circumference of the holes. There was a full bath at the end of one of the diverging hallways as well as a small half bath out in the main hallway. With little emotion, she remembered her father had called the main hallway the
thoroughfare.
At the time, the word had sounded impossibly alien to Laurie. Now, it made the place seem less like a home and more like something constructed for strict functionality. It was a
house,
in other words, and not a
home.

Laurie wended through these rooms, impressed by the cleanliness yet chilled by the emptiness of each of them. She grew uneasy when she noticed that the windows in each of these rooms had been nailed shut—large carpentry nails driven through the base of the windows and into the sill. She recalled Dora saying something about her father having grown paranoid near the end, and that he’d had the locks on the doors changed. Had he also come through these rooms wielding a hammer, frantically pounding nails into the framework like a mad carpenter?

On the way to her father’s study, she passed by the empty picture frame hanging on the parlor wall. Disturbed by it, she took it down and dropped it behind the liquor cabinet. Cracking open the stained teakwood door at the end of the hall, she poked her head in. It was a small room outfitted in empty bookshelves and a lush burgundy carpet. There was a handsome rolltop desk at the center of the room. A leather chair piped with brass tacks was tucked into the foot well of the desk. The chair faced a pair of arched windows shuttered in wooden blinds. Bands of fading sunlight issued through the slats. The furniture and carpeting held no memories for her—she couldn’t recall if they’d always been here (for they certainly looked old) or if her father had purchased them later in life, after Laurie and her mother had moved away.

She went to the windows, drew back the blinds, and saw that these windows had also been nailed shut. She took a step back. Daylight now streaming through the windows, she saw that crosses of varying sizes had been gouged into the wood-paneled walls. They were everywhere, hacked into the paneling by some blunt object, too many to count. This surpassed religious zealotry. This was madness.

There were a few cardboard boxes on the floor, stacked in front of the desk. Laurie pulled back the flap on the top box and peered inside. There was a cigar box and a few pipes, a silver letter opener that resembled a dagger, some unused white candles still in the cellophane wrapping, a set of keys on a keychain, and various writing implements. Something glittered and she reached in and took out a gold cuff link with a black onyx face. It was heavy. She dropped it back in the box next to its twin and didn’t bother going through the rest of the boxes that day.

Upstairs, the second-floor landing cut to the left at the top of the stairs. To the right was the closed door of the master bedroom and nothing else. She cracked open the door and peered in through the sliver at a gloomy room that smelled like the antibacterial cleaners used at hospitals. The window shades were halfway drawn, leaving the scarce few items in the room to suggest their shapes without giving up any details. She made out the poster bed and a nightstand, an armoire, and a set of folded linens on the cushioned seat below the shaded windows. The memories that trailed out of that room were multitudinous but vague in detail. They were more like slides shuttled quickly through a lighted projector—images glimpsed at random and out of logical sequence—than actual memories. Biting her lower lip, she shut the door and moved on.

There were two remaining bedrooms and a full bathroom up here along the length of the hallway, each of their doors closed. The door to the linen closet was closed, too. There was one final door among the others, this one narrower than the rest. Laurie knew it led up into the belvedere. Not only was this door closed just like all the others, but someone had drilled a metal plate into the frame and locked it with a padlock. She was reminded of a story she had read when she was just a girl in high school—something about a man having to choose between a lady and a tiger, each one hidden behind a similarly closed door. The story ended before you found out which door the man chose, thus leaving the reader to guess at the man’s fate. For whatever reason, the memory caused her to shudder. She reached out and gripped the doorknob. It turned freely but the padlock prevented the door from opening. She clutched the padlock, and tugged at it. It was certainly secure. Just above the metal plate, the woodwork of the frame was splintered and gouged, as if someone had tried to pry the lock off with a crowbar or screwdriver. Had that been how her father had gained access to the belvedere the night of his death? She thought that was plausible, but then recalled Dora telling her that the door hadn’t been locked that evening, so there would have been no need to pry at the lock. Had Dora been mistaken? Had she gotten incorrect information from someone? Moreover, despite
how
her father had managed to access the belvedere, why had the metal plate been replaced and the door relocked
after
his death?