Little Girls (15 page)

“Be my guest.”

Already shaking a cigarette from the pack, Teresa crossed the coffee shop and stepped outside. Through the narrow window beside the door, Laurie watched her lean against the building and light the cigarette.

“Did you want another refill, ma’am?” said the young waitress as she appeared beside the table. She held a stainless-steel carafe in one hand.

“Yes, please. Thank you.”

The girl refilled the coffee and Laurie asked for a lunch menu. By the time the girl returned with the menu, several minutes had passed. Laurie looked up and out the window to the street. She could no longer see Teresa Larosche leaning against the building, smoking. Laurie got up and went out the front door. She looked up and down Main Street, but it was a futile search. Teresa Larosche was gone.

T
ed was in the parlor scribbling notes in the margins of the John Fish novel when Laurie returned home. A bottle of Cherry Heering liqueur stood on the table beside a stack of Ted’s papers.
Pagliacci
played on the Victrola.

“Where’s Susan?” she asked.

“Upstairs.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “Goddamn it, I’d say this is like trying to condense the Bible down to one hundred pages, but I wouldn’t want to gift John Fish with the literary comparison.”

“Do you smell something funny?”

“Funny like what?” he said, not looking up at her.

“I don’t know. It just smells bad in here.”

“So open some windows and air the place out.”

She went upstairs and found Susan lying on her bed reading
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

“Everything okay, pumpkin seed?”

Susan eyed her from over the top of her book. “Hi.”

“Did you want lunch?”

“I already ate.”

“What’d you eat?”

“Peanut butter and jelly.”

“Did Daddy make it for you?”

“I made it myself.”

Laurie smiled at the girl but Susan’s concentration was wholly on her book. For a moment, Laurie was reminded of Susan’s first day of preschool, and how Laurie had walked her into the classroom while tightly gripping the girl’s hand, reluctant to relinquish her into the throng of children. It had taken more strength to let her go than to hold on to her.

“I saw your little friend Abigail the other day,” Laurie said.

“Oh.”

“Have you ever been over to her house?”

“No.”

“Have you ever met her parents?”

“No.”

Laurie felt her left eyelid twitch. “Do you like Abigail?” Susan shrugged. “She’s okay.”

“What kind of games do you play?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she tell you to take granddad’s cuff links from the study?”

Susan’s eyes swept up to meet Laurie’s from over the top of her book. Laurie didn’t like the sudden change of expression on her daughter’s face.

Smoothing Susan’s hair out of her eyes, Laurie said, “Does she sometimes tell you to take things out of the house and bring them to her?”

“I didn’t take anything out of the house.” Susan’s soulful eyes hung on her mother’s. They were Ted’s eyes now.

Hurt, Laurie sighed. She couldn’t help but feel that if it had been Ted who had initially confronted Susan, she wouldn’t have lied to him. Because Laurie was the disciplinarian, she had earned herself a modicum of distrust in her daughter’s eyes. Not for the first time, Laurie wished she could just shirk the responsibility of parenthood and simply embrace her daughter, love and laugh with her, and not get caught up in worrying about her.

“Okay,” Laurie said at last. “Never mind.” She leaned in and kissed the girl’s forehead.

Out in the hall, she slipped the silver key Teresa Larosche had given her from her pocket and approached the locked belvedere door. It was silly, but she suddenly heard Teresa speak up in her head:
I guess your father just got to me. Scared me, you know? Like that movie about the crazy guy who turns the psychiatrist crazy, too.

The little silver key fit the padlock perfectly. She turned it and the lock popped open. The door squeaked and inched toward her, as if some presence on the other side was gently pushing on it. Laurie removed the padlock from the eyelet, flipped over the clasp, and pulled the door open. A set of unpainted wooden stairs—steeper than regular stairs—appeared before her. There had once been a handrail, but that was gone now. The walls were paneled in dark wood, just as they had been when she was a child and had lived here. As a young girl, she had been forbidden to enter the belvedere. Her father had said it was unsafe and her mother had silently agreed. Now, climbing those stairs, she was overcome by a strange sense of rebellion even after all these years.

The staircase entered the belvedere through a rectangular cutout in the floor. There was a half-wall here, to which the upper part of the banister had once been bolted. As Laurie came up through the floor, her first thought was that the room was much smaller than she had remembered it. Despite being forbidden to tread up here in her youth, she had still on occasion snuck up. A few times she had even taken Sadie up here, though those instances were usually at Sadie’s behest. Sadie had thought of the room as a crow’s nest, like on an old pirate ship, and she had taken sinister pleasure in surveying the neighborhood from such a vantage, unobserved. Laurie’s memory of the room was of an expansive four-sided chamber with a large pane of glass on every wall, nearly floor-to-ceiling. From this vantage, one was able to achieve a full 360-degree view of the surrounding area. Facing front, it was possible to follow the curving driveway down to the ribbon of blacktop that was Annapolis Road. At the rear, the tree line looked stunted and it was possible to make out the tree-studded bank on the opposite side of the Severn River.

Now, the room was no more than a narrow shaft with bits of broken glass on the floor and what looked like splotches of dried brown blood on the wood paneling. The window her father had gone through had not been replaced. There was a board nailed over the broken window, not dissimilar to the one used as a covering for the well in the front yard.

Dora and Felix had cleaned the whole house after his death, but they hadn’t cleaned up here. She wondered if it had been left as a crime scene, if the police had forbidden Dora and Teresa from coming up here. But then she thought about what Teresa had said—about putting the lock back in place upon returning to the house so that she would feel safer—and wondered if they had all just forgotten about the room. Maybe on purpose. Or perhaps Dora had no way to access this room once Teresa quit and took off with the padlock key.

Had this had happened to someone not suffering from dementia, would the police have investigated further? Could it be that there
had
been someone else in—

No. She wasn’t prepared to go that far.

She looked out the nearest window and beyond the interlocking branches of the trees to the house next door. An image leapt to her mind then—of standing beneath the portico of the old well on the front lawn with Sadie Russ beside her, both girls peering down. The water was black and sightless. Laurie told her it was a wishing well, and if you threw riches into it, the well would grant you any wish you liked. Sadie said she was wrong, and told her it was an evil well, that if you fell down into it you were sucked off to another dimension where there were evil trolls and dogs with many heads.
And if you throw someone’s riches down there,
Sadie had insisted, grinning as she said it,
you can make horrible things happen to them.
The memory made Laurie’s skin crawl. She had never again thrown anything down into the well after that day.

From this height, the tops of the large trees that grew up from the old Russ property and leaned over the fence were at eye-level. A few of the thick branches twisted like helixes across the span of space between the fence and the house, and a few of the branches extended out over the roof. None of them reached as far as the belvedere itself, but a good number of sturdy branches hung out over the roof.

She was about to turn and leave when she noticed something on the floor. She went over to it, bent down, and picked it up. It was a carpenter’s nail. She glanced around the floor and saw several more scattered about. She went to the boarded-up window and ran her hand along one edge. Nail heads speed bumped against the tips of her fingers. But there were no bumps along the bottom of the board. She got down on her knees and could see that there were nail
holes
but no nails. Someone had pried them out and left them scattered about the floor.

She stuck her hand up underneath the bottom section of the board and could feel the ridged sill on the other side. Bits of jagged glass, sharp as guillotine blades, poked up from the frame on the other side of the board. With both hands, she was able to pry the lower half of the board away from the window frame several inches—enough, she realized, for someone small to slip through. Peering behind the board, she could see the triangular teeth of glass jutting up from the windowsill on the other side. When she let the board slap back into place, it made a sharp report that sounded very much like someone slamming a door.

 

Back in the kitchen, Laurie located Dora Lorton’s phone number on the pad beside the phone and dialed it. It rang several times without answer, and Laurie was just about to hang up when the ringing stopped. Silence simmered in her ear but no one said a word.

“Hello?” said Laurie. She thought she heard someone breathing.

“Who’s this?” It was Dora Lorton’s clipped, businesslike voice.

“Ms. Lorton, this is Laurie Genarro. I hope I’m not disturbing you. Do you have a moment to talk?”

The woman exhaled loudly on the other end of the phone. Laurie thought she heard a TV on in the background. “What is it?”

“I wanted to ask you about the little girl who lives next door,” Laurie said, searching now for a sign of Abigail through the bay windows as she spoke. “Do you know her?”

“There is no little girl who lives next door.”

Laurie thought she had misheard the woman. “The little girl with the long reddish-brown hair. Surely you’ve seen her. She plays in the yard.”

“There is no girl who lives next door,” Dora repeated. “The Rosewoods live next door and they do not have any children.”

“Their last name isn’t Evans?”

“No. There are no families named Evans that I am aware of on Annapolis Road, or anywhere else in the neighborhood, for that matter.”

“Ms. Lorton, a little girl named Abigail Evans—”

“Some months ago there was some trouble with vandals,” Dora said. In the background, the sound of the TV had vanished. Perhaps she had muted it or turned it off. “People’s mailboxes were stolen, windows were broken, and cars were vandalized. It turned out to be teenagers from a few streets over. Perhaps this girl is one of them.”

“No, no, she’s much too young. The girl is Susan’s age, and she—”

“Susan?”

“Yes. My daughter. The girl is ten years old. You’re telling me you know of no such girl?”

“I have never seen a young girl at that house. I don’t know any family by the name Evans.”

Laurie stood there with the phone to her ear, unable to think of anything else to say.

“Mrs. Genarro? Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Is there a problem at the house?”

“No,” she said, but her voice was small now, nearly nonexistent. “No problem.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Was there anything further?”

Laurie shook her head. She thought she saw someone’s silhouette move between the trees on the other side of the fence, but then realized it was just a leafy bough swaying in the breeze.

“Mrs. Genarro? Hello?”

“Sorry. No, I’m okay. Thank you. Good-bye.”

She hung up the phone.

T
ed was cursing to himself while hunched over his laptop in the parlor when Laurie came through on her way to the front hall. He didn’t even seem aware of her presence. She went out the front door and walked down the driveway. Annapolis Road was a curving band of asphalt that ran a rough parallel to the Severn River, heavily wooded and dotted with lampposts and the occasional parked car. Laurie walked next door to the rundown house on the other side of the fence. Unlike her father’s well-kept property, the front yard here was wildly overgrown and populated by a multitude of ceramic garden gnomes. The driveway was comprised of unpaved concrete slabs that had been reduced to rubble in places. The green sedan was back in the driveway, its bumper dented, its tires bald enough to let the steel bands poke through. The white car with the BGE emblem on the door was gone.

Years ago, when Laurie Genarro had been Laurie Brashear, this house had belonged to Sadie Russ and her parents. In Laurie’s youth, she had been in the house on a handful of occasions, and she recalled the dark rooms and the smell of bad meat coming from the kitchen. The Russes had been liberal and inattentive parents who would let the girls do as they pleased whenever Laurie came over to play. She recalled Sadie leaving empty dishes all over the house, clothes in every corner of her bedroom, socks and shoes left out overnight on the back porch. It looked like the same house now—even more so in its disrepair and neglect—and as she walked up the front porch and knocked on the door, she wouldn’t have been surprised if Mr. or Mrs. Russ answered her knock, though she knew they had moved away soon after their daughter had died.

The woman who answered was not Mrs. Russ, but a woman who might have proven a suitable counterpart. With short, choppy blond hair, a clear complexion, and startling green eyes, she was good-looking in a pleasant, carefree sort of way. She wore an open chambray shirt over a ribbed undershirt, loose-fitting Capri pants, and sandals. With a partial smile, the woman offered her a breathy hello. She looked to be about Laurie’s own age.

Laurie smiled and tried to appear harmless. “Hello. My name’s Laurie Genarro. My father was Myles Brashear. He lived next door.”

The woman’s mouth came together in an
O
while her thin yellow eyebrows drew together. “Oh, shoot. Oh, no. I’m so sorry to hear of your father’s passing. Please, come in.” She stepped aside and allowed Laurie to enter. “I didn’t know your father very well, except to say hello when I saw him sitting out in the yard. That was so long ago now. He seemed like a nice man. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

The house was dim, the windows in the adjoining rooms overrun with foliage that blotted out the daylight and left the hallway as dark as an undersea chasm. The air itself tasted of some nonspecific uncleanliness. Amazingly, it was just as Laurie remembered it.

“I’m Liz Rosewood.” The woman offered her hand to Laurie and Laurie shook it. The woman had small pointy breasts beneath her ribbed undershirt and the figure of a teenaged boy. “Let’s sit inside. Do you drink tea? I’m just about to have some.”

“That would be wonderful. Thank you.”

Liz Rosewood led her into a small kitchen at the back of the house. The walls and floor were done in muted earth tones and there were many papers, magazines, and unopened envelopes scattered about the counter and a nearby hutch. A wall of windows looked out on a weather-grayed deck and an untidy backyard. It was all distantly familiar. Liz Rosewood waved a hand at the small kitchen table and beckoned Laurie to sit. Laurie pulled out a chair and dropped down in it before her knees could give out. Liz went to the stove and poured two cups of hot tea.

“This is an omen,” Liz Rosewood said. “I was just telling Derrick last night that I should bake some brownies or cupcakes or something and come by your house. I felt horrible about not coming by sooner but Derrick said it would be too intrusive, considering what you poor folks are dealing with at the moment. I mean, we saw the ambulance and the police cars that night. Derrick went over to see if he could help in any way. Such a terrible thing.” She stepped to the table and set down the two steaming mugs. “Derrick is my husband.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Laurie said, pulling her hot mug in front of her. “It’s been a circus over there. We’re from Hartford, Connecticut, and we had to pick up and come down here at the last minute. It’s my husband, Ted, and our daughter, Susan. She’s ten, and was pretty upset about coming down this way for the summer.”

“Yes, I’ve seen her playing in the yard,” Liz confessed, sitting down in a chair opposite Laurie at the table.

“Well, I figured I’d introduce myself, seeing how our daughters have apparently been hanging out together.”

Liz smiled, shook her head, and looked down at her tea. “Abigail’s not my daughter.”

“No?”

“She’s my niece. My sister and her husband went to Greece for the summer. Derrick and I said we’d keep an eye on her. We don’t have any kids of our own.”

Relief hit her like a tidal wave. Only then did it occur to her that she had been expecting Liz Rosewood to say she didn’t know what the heck Laurie was talking about, and that no girl by the name of Abigail Evans lived here.

“Oh,” Laurie said. The word was borne on a shuddery exhalation. “Well, that’s good of you. To do that for your sister, I mean.”

“Oh, Abigail’s no trouble. And my poor sister and her husband never get any time to themselves. Derrick and I were happy to do it.”

“Does your sister live in this neighborhood?”

“They live in Ellicott City. It’s not far, maybe half an hour or so. Are you familiar with the area?”

“Actually, I grew up in the house next door.”

“No kidding?” Liz Rosewood brightened. “A Naptown girl!”

“Barely. My parents got divorced when I was ten and my mother and I moved to Virginia. I feel like a bit of an outsider, to tell you the truth.”

“That’s the beauty of this area. It’s a brilliant mix of locals and refugees.”

“Refugees?”

“Interlopers. Imposters.” Liz smiled warmly. “Folks from out of town. With the Naval Academy downtown, we’ve always got tourists and out-of-towners coming in and out of the city. You may feel more welcome than most.”

“Did you know the Russes? They lived in this house when I was a little girl. It was a long time ago.”

“The Russes? No, I’m afraid not. We’ve only been in the house a few years, and we bought it from a family named Cappestrandt. Derrick and I are originally from the Eastern Shore, but he took a job with BGE and the commute over the Bay Bridge was murder on him, so we starting looking around on this side of the bridge. We looked at a number of places in Baltimore—it would have been much cheaper out that way—but it’s so much nicer out here by the water, don’t you think?”

“It’s lovely,” Laurie agreed. “So how long will Abigail be staying with you?”

“Until the end of the summer. We’ve been having fun.”

“When did she get here?”

“A few weeks ago, just after school let out for summer vacation.”

“So then she was here when my father had his . . . his accident. I’d hate to think she was troubled by what happened.”

“To be honest, I don’t think she even knows what happened. The sirens woke Derrick and me up, but I think she slept straight through it all.”

At first, the word
sirens
summoned images of mermaids in Laurie’s addled brain. She struggled to keep a smile on her face. “Well, it’s nice of you to take her for the summer. Your sister and her husband are lucky to have you.”

“My brother-in-law is an architect, so this Greece trip is half pleasure and half business. They kept putting it off until Derrick and I finally said go, go, go. Have you ever been to Greece?”

“No.”

“What do you do?”

“I used to teach, but I’ve been home now with Susan for about a year. Ted, my husband, he’s a playwright. He’s working on an off-Broadway adaptation of a John Fish novel right now.”

“Is that right? Wow, that’s spectacular. I’ve read a bunch of Fish’s novels. I love him. Have you met him?”

“No, but my husband has.”

“That must be very exciting. So he’s writing a theatrical version of one of the books?”

“Yes. It’s called
The Skin of Her Teeth.
”

“I’ve read that one! How fantastic! Will you get special seats for the opening night, seeing how you’re the wife of the playwright?”

“I suppose so.” She recalled opening night for Ted’s play
Whippoorwill
a number of years ago now. There hadn’t been any special seating in the tiny Greenwich theater, unless you counted the metal folding chairs lined up in the walkways.

“Derrick and I saw
Wicked
in DC last year; it was wonderful. It must be such a rewarding profession.”

Laurie thought of Ted cursing to himself on the sofa as she slipped out of the house just moments ago, and she smirked ironically. “It’s a lot of work,” was all she said.

“Well, it’s nice that Abigail has found a friend for the summer. There are so few kids on this block for her to play with, and of course she doesn’t know any of them, anyway. She can be a bit shy, the poor thing. Will you be here much longer?”

“We’re liquidating my father’s estate, so we’ll be here until that’s done. I’m not really sure how long it will take.”

“And then it’s back to—Connecticut, did you say?” She sipped her tea with both hands around her mug. She looked like a squirrel eating a nut.

“Yes. Hartford.”

Liz reached across the table and touched the top of Laurie’s hand, startling her. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Go right ahead.”

Liz sprang up and went to a credenza where she rifled through paperwork and checkbooks until she located a carton of Marlboros. “Want one?”

“I don’t smoke, thanks.”

Down the hall, the front door slammed.

“Well,” Liz said, sitting back down at the table. “Speak of the devil.” A cigarette bouncing from her mouth, she called down the hall, “Abigail! Come here for a minute, love.”

Laurie held her breath as she heard the girl’s approaching footsteps. A moment later, Abigail appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“Hey, peaches,” said Liz Rosewood. “Your friend Susan’s mom stopped by to say hello.”

“Hi,” Abigail said. Her faded blue dress looked too big on her. Harsh black shoes reflected the paneled lights in the ceiling.

Laurie said, “Hello.”

She watched Abigail go to the refrigerator, pop open the door, and scrounge around within. There was artwork on the refrigerator door, if the repetitious drawing of circles could be called “artwork.” Circles of varying sizes in a multitude of colors. They looked like something a kid with Asperger’s might draw. The girl came out of the fridge with a carton of apple juice, which she set on the counter. Laurie saw that her fingernails were black with grit, and there was just the faintest smudge of dirt or grease beneath her chin. There was a step-stool beside the cabinets, which Abigail used to get a glass out of one of the high cupboards.

“I was thinking tacos tonight,” Liz told Abigail. “How’s that strike you, hon?”

“Hooray!” The girl beamed. “Can Susan eat over?”

“Well,” said Liz, turning to Laurie, “that’s up to Susan’s mom.”

Laurie smiled wearily. Her face was beginning to hurt.

“Derrick and I, we sometimes regret not having children.” Puffing on her cigarette, Liz Rosewood looked down longingly at her tea, as if to divine some comfort from its steaming surface. “It’s so much work, but then again, I don’t think you truly
live
until you raise a child of your own. It must be so rewarding.”

It was the sort of thing people without kids seemed obliged to say to people who had them, as if attempting to commiserate over an illness they did not have. She nodded in a simulacrum of agreement while she watched Abigail replace the apple juice in the refrigerator. Then she watched as Abigail chugged down half her glass of juice, her grimy little fingers leaving smudges on the glass.

“It’s no trouble, of course,” Liz said as Abigail put her empty glass in the sink. It clanked against a stack of dishes. “If Susan wants to have dinner here, I mean. It would be nice for the girls to spend some more time together. They’re both refugees this summer.”

Abigail ran a pointy little tongue over her lips.

“I’ll check with Susan,” Laurie said, though the thought of her daughter spending any time in Sadie’s old house—with a little girl who looked disconcertingly
like
Sadie—caused a fist to shove up through Laurie’s guts. Suddenly, she wanted to get the hell out of here.

“We drew pictures of dinosaurs the other day,” Abigail said. She had taken a napkin from one of the kitchen drawers and was running it back and forth across her mouth. “I did a stegosaurus and Susan did a tyrannosaurus.” She balled up the napkin and placed it in the trash. “Tyrannosaurus was the king of the dinosaurs. Its name means . . . something . . . lizard.”

“Tyrant lizard,” commented Liz Rosewood.

“That’s right,” Abigail said gloomily.

Get me out of here,
Laurie wanted to scream.

“I like tacos,” Abigail told no one in particular.

Abruptly, Laurie stood. “I need to get back to the house now.”

“Oh.” Liz stood as well, though with less fervor. The cigarette hung limply from her lips. “Well, it was wonderful meeting you. Won’t you let me know if you need anything from us?”

“I will.”

“And again, I feel horrible for not stopping by earlier—”

“Don’t be silly. Thank you for the tea.”

Laurie moved quickly down the hallway to the front door. Liz set her tea down and rushed to catch up.

“So can Susan come for dinner?” Abigail asked from the far end of the hallway. Her slight silhouette in the oversized dress was framed in the kitchen doorway. “Please?”