Little Girls (9 page)

“That’s a good idea.”

“You have my number. Call if you have any questions prior to my visit.”

“See you Friday,” Laurie said, and hung up.

She spent the remainder of the day doing just as Stephanie Canton had advised: taking inventory of all the items in the house. When she arrived in her father’s study, she went through the boxes Dora Lorton had packed up, removing all the items from within and setting them down in rows on the desktop like a soldier disassembling a machine gun. Pipes, lighters, candlesticks, incense, a letter opener, sets of keys, a pewter ashtray with a faded crest engraved in the dish, and similar accoutrements. A second box held silver tie clips, two pocket watches (one gold, one silver, neither operational), old pairs of wire-rimmed glasses, yellowed and brittle stationary, a clutch of pencils punctured with teeth marks and bound together by a rubber band, and a few coffee mugs with unfamiliar emblems on the sides. The third box contained perhaps forty or so records—large vinyl LPs in timeworn sleeves that smelled musty and old. Laurie took out a number of these and examined the sleeves. Frowning, she recognized none of the names, none of the faces. Pursing one album sleeve, she reached in and pinched the LP between her thumb and index finger and slid it out. It was made of a material sturdier than vinyl. She blew a film of dust off the record and saw that the grooves looked to be in workable condition. Nary a scratch was visible. She let the record drop back into the cardboard sleeve, then replaced the album back in the box with the others.

The final box, which was the largest of all the boxes, contained two three-ring binders. The first was full of her father’s paperwork, including the deed to the house, his medical information, bank records, a copy of his will, and various similar documents. The second binder was slimmer than the first and contained grainy photographs as well as a few more recent ones of Susan when she was younger. The photos of Susan were still in the envelopes in which Laurie had mailed them. The older photographs were housed in protective plastic sleeves held in place by the binder rings. She flipped through a number of them. The only people recognizable in any of them were her parents and herself as a little girl. And there were only a slim few of those. One of the photos was of a family trip they had taken to Ocean City one summer. The photo showed the three of them at the cusp of the ocean, smiling widely for the stranger whom her father had enlisted to take the picture. Laurie recalled being worried that the stranger would run off with her father’s camera, but he hadn’t. In the picture, her parents looked lively and healthy and happy. It was not how she remembered them at all.

The last few pages of the album were comprised mostly of photos of strangers. Some were of men working at the old steel mill. Others were of various automobiles. A few strange faces flashed smiles at her. Other photos were more esoteric—a long stretch of blacktop fading to a point at the horizon; an unidentifiable young girl smiling as she leaned out from beneath the shadow of an overpass; two dogs on their hind legs engaged in a fight in a grassy field; several photos of the mill’s stately smokestacks. The next few pages were empty, the protective plastic sleeves holding no photos. She flipped past them to the back of the album. The final few photos were of Laurie, when she had been about Susan’s age. There were no dates printed on the backs of the photographs, but Laurie surmised it was the year before her parents’ separation.

She replaced the photograph binder back in the box, then went upstairs with the keys she had found in the first box. One by one, she tried them on the padlock on the door that led up to the belvedere. None of them was the right key. Frustrated, she made a mental note to call Dora and then went into the bedrooms where she sifted through the drawers of the nightstands and dressers. Most of the items she came across were articles of clothing. Curiously, the top drawer of the nightstand beside her father’s bed contained a silver crucifix and a Bible. The crucifix was perhaps five inches long and it felt weighty and substantial in Laurie’s hand. She had never known her father to be a religious man, and the discovery of the items right there beside the old man’s bed surprised her. She supposed some people became more easily accepting of a higher power the closer they got to death. Wasn’t that why churches were mostly filled with the elderly? Did it become easier to believe in God the older you got or were you just hedging your bets? She set the crucifix on the nightstand, glad to be rid of it.

She proceeded to dump the clothing out onto the floors of the various rooms and then went back downstairs to retrieve a box of trash bags from the kitchen. On her way through the parlor, she found Ted on the sofa, a pen propped in the corner of his mouth, a notebook in his lap. There was the thick John Fish paperback on the table in front of him, the pages dog-eared and tabbed with countless yellow Post-it notes and index cards. She knew he was having a tough time of it. Ted was a true artist at heart, which meant he required constant encouragement and coddling. She had done her best back in Hartford, often to the detriment of her own artistic pursuits, but she just didn’t have it in her at the moment. When he looked up at her despondently, the pen now clutched between his teeth, she could offer him only the most rudimentary nod of consolation. She felt bad about it a second later, but her mind was too overcome by all that now surrounded her to indulge her husband’s practiced sense of humility.

There were two unopened boxes of Glad trash bags beneath the kitchen sink. She took out one box and was about to head back upstairs when she paused midway across the kitchen. Out the bay windows, the day was beginning to grow old. The color of the lawn had deepened, as had the apparent depth of its incline. The lush richness had been drained from the trees. Sodium lights at the far side of the river caused the horizon to glow a vaporous and inhospitable orange.

Two girls were kneeling in the yard, their heads bowed close together as if they were whispering secrets to each other. One was Susan, dressed in one of her long-sleeved cotton tops, her dark-skinned legs folded up under her. She had her dark brown hair pulled back into a stunted little ponytail that curled like a comma from the back of her head. The other girl’s identity remained a mystery, up until Laurie approached the bay windows for a better look.

It was the girl she had seen running across the yard yesterday, the one who had watched her from behind a stand of saplings while Laurie had been examining the remains of the old greenhouse. The girl whom she had thought to be a ghost. She knew this strictly by the girl’s clothes, which seemed outdated, unseasonable, and the wrong size. From her angle at the window, Laurie could not make out the girl’s face.

Laurie backed away from the windows, setting the box of Glad trash bags on the kitchen table. Her feet carried her over to the screen door that led out onto the square slabs of concrete at the back of the house. A chill in the air caused gooseflesh to rise up on her arms. She thought it was awfully cold weather for the beginning of summer. At the center of the yard, the two girls remained with their heads bowed toward one another. Susan appeared to speak while the other girl listened. Then the other girl spoke while Susan cocked her head to one side like an inquisitive dog. Laurie could hear none of what they said. The other girl was dressed improbably in a muted yellow frock with puffy sleeves that reminded Laurie of the title character from
Alice in Wonderland.
The frock was too big for her and drooped down around the girl’s pale, narrow shoulders, exposing the smooth white rim of her collarbone. The girl’s hair was a striking auburn color, made even more remarkable in the diminishing sunlight, and spilled in waves down her back. The girl’s feet were bare and dirty.

Laurie approached them. When her shadow fell over them, they both looked up at her in what appeared to be practiced unison. Laurie’s eyes flitted to her daughter for just a moment before settling on the other girl.

It was Sadie Russ.

The girl’s face was a moonish oval, the skin pearl-colored and unblemished except for a streak of dirt that started at the corner of her mouth and extended across her right cheek. The girl’s eyes were a deep brown, almost black, beneath curling auburn bangs.

“Hi, Mom,” Susan said. “This is my new friend, Abigail.”

“Hello,” said Abigail.

For a moment, Laurie could not move, could not say a word. She was suddenly aware of a prickling sensation along her scalp and down the nape of her neck as the hairs there bristled. When she spoke, it was as if some ventriloquist were forcing the words from her mouth.

“Hello, Abigail,” Laurie said.

The girl gazed up at her with dark eyes. A few strands of her hair were slicked to the corner of her mouth.

Of course, Sadie Russ was dead. She had died a long time ago. But this girl . . . this Abigail . . . could have been Sadie’s identical twin.

“How long have you been out here?” Laurie asked Susan.

“Just a little while,” Susan said. “I got bored watching Daddy work.”

Laurie looked down at a shallow hole that had been dug in the ground between the two girls. “What have you two been doing?”

“Looking for treasure,” Susan said.

“Is that right?” Laurie’s throat clicked.

“Abigail says there’s treasure all over the place.”

“Pirates used to bury it close to the beaches,” Abigail said. “That was a long time ago, but they never came back and got all the treasure. Sometimes they forgot where they buried it.”

“Is that true, Mom?” Susan asked her mother. The look on her face expressed that while she did not believe in such nonsense, she very much wanted to.

“I suppose anything is possible,” Laurie said.

“I’ve found gold ’bloons down by the beach before,” Abigail said.

“That’s pirate money,” Susan said, having apparently already been indoctrinated into the vernacular.

“Sounds interesting,” Laurie said. “Do you live around here, Abigail?”

Abigail pointed across the yard toward the moldy fence. For one preposterous moment, Laurie thought the girl was referring to the shaggy willow tree that drooped down over the fence. But then she saw the house through the screen of trees, its back porch lights on. She could make out the rear bumper of the green sedan in the driveway again. Sadie’s old house.

“How nice,” said Laurie. She cocked her head at her daughter. “But now it’s time to wash up for dinner.”

“But what about the treasure, Mom?”

“It’s been there for several hundred years,” Laurie said. “I’m sure it can wait another day.”

Susan planted her hands down in the grass, then popped up onto her feet. She moved with the lissome, springy sensibilities of a gymnast. Like her father, she was a natural athlete.

“Say good-bye to your friend,” Laurie told her daughter.

“Good night, Abigail!”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Abigail said.

One hand against her daughter’s back, Laurie ushered the girl back to the house. The kitchen lights were on and the bowing bay windows looked like the glowing cockpit of an airliner.

“How did you meet her?” Laurie asked.

“Abigail?” A strand of hair had come loose from Susan’s ponytail. She brushed it absently behind one ear. “She came from the other side.”

It took Laurie almost a full minute to realize her daughter had meant the other side of the fence.

A
fter dinner, Laurie brought out the box of LPs from her father’s study and set it down on the coffee table in the parlor.

“These are great!” Ted exclaimed. He had a drink in his hands—some primordial swill from Myles Brashear’s liquor cabinet—and he stood craning over the top of the box to examine the contents within like a child peering down into a box of puppies. Eventually, he set his drink down and slid out one of the albums. The sleeve was bleached to an indecipherable unintelligence. Ted let the record slip out into his hand. “It’s a Diva. Lou Gold, ‘On Riverside Drive.’ Vocals by Irving Kaufman. This puppy is old! Where did these come from?”

“They were in my dad’s study.”

“I didn’t realize he collected this stuff.”

Laurie thought it was a strange comment, since Ted knew nothing else about the man, either.

“Put it on, Daddy,” Susan said. She was perched on the loveseat, a glass of apple juice clasped in both hands in her lap.

Ted went to the Victrola and set the record down on the phonograph’s turntable. There was a crank and handle sticking out from one side of the Victrola’s maple cabinet. Ted turned the crank. “It’s like starting a Model T,” he said. When he was done cranking, he set the arm bar down on the record. A crackly whir filled the atmosphere. Then the music played—a tinny West End number that summoned images in Laurie’s head of Manhattan nightclubs from the 1920s.

“Oh, gross!” Susan bellowed. “That’s terrible!”

Ted laughed. “So you don’t want to dance?”

“No way! That music sounds like barf!”

“How is it that you are my child?”

“You
like
it, Daddy? That music?”

Ted twirled the tip of an invisible moustache. “It is what the
cognoscenti
call
eleganza,
darling daughter.”

This, of course, set Susan off into hysterics. Her hysteria only increased once Ted began waltzing around the parlor with an invisible partner. When he came by and swooped Laurie into his arms, Susan had to set her glass of juice down on the coffee table to keep from spilling it, she was laughing so hard.

Ted and Susan spent the next half hour trying out different records on the Victrola, each one more hilarious (to Susan) than the previous. Leaving Ted and Susan to their music, Laurie cleaned up the kitchen, glancing occasionally at the bay windows and the darkened yard beyond.
Sadie.
There was a steady pulsing at her temples. She kept seeing the girl who called herself Abigail staring up at her while digging a hole in the ground, her oversized dress drooping off her thin shoulders. But of course she wasn’t Sadie. In fact, the more she considered this, the more she believed Abigail only shared a passing resemblance with the little girl who had lived next door during Laurie’s childhood. The pale skin, the ovoid face, the dark, overlarge, soul-searing eyes . . . but Abigail’s hair was lighter in color than Sadie’s. Sadie had been taller, too. Just how much could she trust her memory of Sadie, anyway? Laurie had been just a child when Sadie had died.

Ridiculous,
she thought. The shrill little laugh that erupted from her caused her to jump.

She took the box of Glad bags upstairs, where she went systematically through the rooms and bagged up all her father’s old clothes. The clothes were all starched and laundered, though the closets themselves were haunted by the odor of old pipe tobacco and unfamiliar cologne. There were many hats in the closet of the master bedroom, too—old derby hats and bowlers and even a straw cowboy hat—though she could not remember her father ever wearing any of them. Shoes lined one wall of the closet, everything from polished cordovans to threadbare bedroom slippers. Downstairs, the music played on.

When she had finished, the upstairs hallway was lined with several fat bags of clothing. Tomorrow, she would call the Salvation Army and set up a pickup date.
That takes care of that.
She felt a welcome sense of accomplishment at having completed the task. It wasn’t until she looked over at the padlocked door that her smile faded. It seemed to call to her.

That’s silly,
she thought . . . yet she went to it nonetheless. On her hands and knees, she peered beneath the door. A narrow strip of darkness peered back at her.
Silliness.

When she returned downstairs, she was overcome by an immediate sense of unease. It felt as if the walls were beginning to constrict all around her, closing in on her. She gripped the newel post at the bottom of the stairs tightly. When her eyes fell on the front door, she went to it, touched the knob—it was cool—then slid her hand up to the dead bolt. She could see by the way it was turned that it was already locked; nevertheless, she took the key from the pocket of her jeans, unlocked it . . . then locked it again. Hearing the bolt slide closed did her a lot of good. The unease slowly dissipated from her.

In the parlor, Ted and Susan were now curled up on the sofa watching a movie on Ted’s laptop. Ted had already complained that he was unable to harness an Internet signal out of the air, but luckily he had packed a few DVDs.

“This place needs a TV,” Susan commented to no one in particular as Laurie went on through to the kitchen.

The bay windows faced a yard as black as infinite space. The sodium glow above the trees and on the other side of the river shimmered on the horizon. She went to check the lock on the side door, too, but thought she caught movement out there in all that darkness, though she couldn’t tell exactly what it had been. It had been no clearer than a dark shape wending through a labyrinth of other dark shapes.

She kicked on a pair of flip-flops that were by the screen door off the side of the kitchen and then went out. A cool breeze came off the water and over the hill, causing the trees to whisper and the bushes to shush along the fence. She peered over the fence and through the trees at the house next door. There was a light on in one of the upstairs windows and a blue flicker behind sheer curtains on the ground that probably belonged to a television set. The cars were still gone from the driveway. In the moonlight, the columns on the neighboring porch looked like polished bones and the backyard looked like a South American jungle.

Laurie crossed the yard to view the neighboring house from a different angle. Here, the trees were denser, but she could see the entire rear of the house through the partings of their branches. The yard looked overgrown and there was yet another light on upstairs at the opposite end of the house that she hadn’t seen previously. As she stared at it, she thought she saw someone moving around in the window.

And then she heard movement on the other side of the fence. Close. Twigs snapped and leaves rustled.

Laurie froze. “Someone there?”

No answer . . . yet she swore she could hear
breathing.

“Abigail? Is that you?”

She listened for a while longer, until she became convinced that the breathing she thought she heard was just the breeze shuttling through the trees, and that it could have been a squirrel trampling on those twigs.

It was when she turned around to head back to the house that she stepped right into a large hole in the ground. She twisted her ankle and dropped to her knees in the cool, damp grass.

“Goddamn it!”

She dug her fingernails into the soil. The pain was sudden and intense. Gritting her teeth, she managed to roll onto her buttocks and extract her injured limb from the shallow hole. It was the goddamned hole Susan and her new friend Abigail had been digging earlier that evening, looking for pirate treasure. Bringing her knee up to her chest, Laurie could already feel the throbbing stiffness in her ankle and the quick tightening of the skin. She had lost the flip-flop in the hole to boot.

“Shit.” Her ankle was already beginning to swell. Rocking back and forth in the grass, she massaged her injury as her ankle ballooned up within her hands. The flesh felt hot. Also, she was sweating.
I’m lucky. I could have broken it.

It was not lost on her that this hole that had hurt her had been dug—partially, at least—by a girl who so closely resembled Sadie Russ. The notion caused her skepticism to temporarily solidify into certainty regarding the girl’s identity and, for a moment, she was paralyzed by fear at the prospect of what such a thing meant. But fear is a fleeting thing, and her common sense quickly filtered coolly over the smoldering red coals of her terror.

First thing tomorrow morning, Susan would be out here filling in that damned hole. Laurie would have some other chores for her to do as well, like dragging all the trash bags full of clothes down from the upstairs landing. Oh, yes, she would put the kid to work, all right.

Once the pain subsided, Laurie managed to rise and put some weight down on her foot. Fresh pain caused her to wince and she quickly lifted her foot off the ground.
I must look like a flamingo out here.
After nearly a full minute, she settled back down on her injured ankle, more carefully this time. When she found she could support herself, she managed to bend and dig her flip-flop out of that hole—
put that girlie to work tomorrow, you know it—
and that was when she noticed something else in there with her flip-flop. Catching the moonlight in just the right way, it glittered like a jewel. Laurie picked it up and examined it closely.

It was a cuff link. Gold with a black onyx at its center. The tiny object was heavy in her hand.

Her mind did the quick math. Temper rising, she hobbled back to the house and let the screen door slam.

“What happened to you?” Ted asked as she limped into the parlor. He sat up straighter on the sofa and shut the laptop’s screen. Beside him on the sofa, Susan whirled around to face her.

“I twisted my ankle in a hole in the yard.” She looked at Susan. “That hole you were digging earlier with your little friend from next door.”

Ted set the laptop on the coffee table, got up, and went to her. “Are you okay? Let me see your foot.”

“It’s just sprained.”

“Let me help you.” He assisted her over to the loveseat, then snatched one of the decorative pillows off the sofa and set it on the coffee table. “Go on, put your foot up.”

“It hurts.”

“Here.” He took her calf and gently raised her foot to the table. Carefully, he settled her foot down on the pillow. “Is that okay?”

“Yes.”

“It’s already starting to swell,” he said. “I should get you some ice.”

Susan stared at Laurie from the sofa. Her daughter’s eyes were large and she was sucking on her lower lip, something she did unconsciously when she was upset about something. She looked very young just then, and Laurie was reminded of the fears she’d had for the girl throughout certain milestones in her life, such as when she was gone all day on her first day of school, or the first time she spent the night over at a friend’s house.

“What were you doing bumbling around in the yard at night, anyway?” Ted asked. There was a hint of joviality to his tone, as if he was trying to use it to mitigate Laurie’s irritation.

Laurie opened her palm and extended it toward Susan. The cuff link winked, reflecting the soft lamplight.

“Would you like to explain to me why this was in the yard?” Laurie said.

“What’s that?” Ted asked.

“Why don’t you tell your father what it is, Susan.”

The girl looked at the cuff link, then back up at her mother. She said nothing.

“Go on,” Laurie urged.

In a voice that was barely audible, Susan said, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t? Are you sure?”

Susan continued to stare at her.

Ted took the item out of Laurie’s hand and examined it. The look on his face was one of utter confusion, as if he was looking at a tooth that had just fallen from his mouth.

“It’s okay,” Laurie said to her daughter. “I won’t be mad. Just tell me the truth.”

“I don’t know what it is.”

“Then forget what it is. Why did you take it? You know better than to go through someone else’s things and to take stuff that doesn’t belong to you,” Laurie said.

“I didn’t take anything,” Susan said.

“Where did it come from?” Ted asked, still scrutinizing the cuff link. His question seemed to be directed to no one in particular.

“It was in a box with some of my father’s stuff,” Laurie said.

“That stuff in the back office?”

“Yes.” Laurie turned back to her daughter. “Susan, I want you to tell me the truth.”

“I didn’t.” The girl’s lower lip trembled. “I didn’t take it.”

“Please don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying! I didn’t take it!”

“Is that so?” Laurie said. “Should we go into the study and see if those cuff links are still in the box?”

“I didn’t do anything!” A tear streaked down Susan’s cheek.

“All right,” Ted said. He dropped the cuff link back into Laurie’s hand. “First of all, you’re not walking anywhere with your ankle like that,” he said to Laurie.

“Those cuff links were in one of the boxes with my father’s stuff,” Laurie said. “I saw them the day we got here. I even picked one up and looked at it. But when I went through the boxes earlier today, they were gone. I hadn’t even realized it until just now.”

“Did you take them?” Ted asked Susan. His voice was much steadier than Laurie’s.

Susan shook her head, though not immediately.

“I thought you knew better,” Laurie said. “I thought we taught you better than that.”

More sternly, Ted said, “Susan?”

“We taught you better than to lie to us like that,” Laurie said.

“Okay. Enough,” said Ted. To Susan, he said, “I think you should go upstairs and get ready for bed now.”

“And first thing tomorrow, I want you to fill in that hole,” Laurie added. “Am I understood?”