Little Girls

by Ronald Malfi

  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?

  “Hell,” she muttered to herself when she realized she didn’t have a key for the padlock. She walked down the hall toward the other closed doors and opened each one systematically, not surprised by her lack of sentiment in peering in and seeing the blank walls and sun-bleached carpets. Just like in the rest of the house, the furniture in these rooms was minimal and functional at best—another desk and chair, an armoire, a small bed in the room at the end of the hall. The windows here were all nailed shut, too. I had no idea he was this bad. Who did he think was going to break in through a second-story window? This last room had been hers when she had been a young girl. She assumed it was where the night caretaker, Ms. Larosche, had stayed during the night shift. Again, she was unsurprised by her lack of emotion in seeing it all.

  A door slammed downstairs. Again, Laurie jumped. Was someone trying to drive her mad? She went back out onto the landing and was about to shout down over the railing when she heard Ted and Susan giggling together. Given the bare wooden floors and the overall emptiness of the large house, sound traveled with almost supernatural efficiency. A moment later, Susan’s high-pitched voice called out for her. Laurie heard the girl’s rapid footfalls racing along one of the hallways.

  Thoroughfare, she thought coldly.

  “I’m upstairs,” Laurie called back. She went down the stairs and nearly collided with her daughter in the foyer. “There you are, kiddo.”

  Susan’s face was bright and beaming. She had her hands clasped together and held out in front of her. She thrust them toward Laurie now. “Guess what I caught!”

  “Caught?” Laurie said. “As in, something is alive in your hands?”

  “A baby frog!”

  “Oh, my . . .”

  “There was a whole bunch of them in this little pond by the woods!”

  “Don’t let it loose in the house.”

  “I won’t,” Susan said, and spun away back down the hall. Ted was washing his hands in the kitchen. Laurie folded her arms and leaned against the kitchen doorway, watching him for several seconds before he observed her reflection in the windowpane over the sink. Outside, it was beginning to grow dark.

  “It’s very pretty out there,” he commented, shutting off the water and drying his hands on a dishtowel. Laurie thought it might have been the same dishtowel Dora Lorton had been carrying around with her in the pocket of her frock. “The lawn’s a little overgrown and the trees and shrubbery need trimming, but the grounds are very nice. That Felix Lorton knew how to maintain the property.”

  Laurie smiled weakly at him. She felt suddenly very tired. “Most likely, it was my father. He fancied himself a gardener and an amateur horticulturist.”

  “There’s some water out beyond the trees in the back, too.”

  “That’s the Severn River,” Laurie said.

  “There were some kids flying kites on the other side. We saw them through a break in the trees. Susan yelled to them and I think they heard her. I think they waved, too.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “You’re going to propose something, aren’t you?”

  He came and kissed the side of her face. He smelled like his cologne and there was a piece of dead leaf in his hair. She left it there and said nothing about it.

  “It makes no sense to throw money away on a hotel,” he said. “Unless, of course, you’re that uncomfortable with the idea of staying here at all. . . .”

  “I don’t know, Ted. . . .”

  “And the place is great. It’s the first time Susan’s smiled since she learned she was forfeiting summer vacation with her friends.” He shrugged. Laurie noted how young he looked when he was excited about something, as if the boy within him was given permission to peek out on these infrequent occasions. More and more, she found she was astonished by Ted’s persistent youthfulness. He was three years older than she was yet he looked younger than her. In another five years, she would look like his mother.

  “You have a leaf in your hair.”

  “Also, we don’t know how long it’s going to take to get everything squared away with your father’s estate.” He raked fingers through his hair but did not disturb the leaf. “I could really get some good work done here. There has to be a million rooms to choose from. Trying to work on this adaptation in some cramped hotel room . . .” He made a face that finished the sentence for him.

  “A million and one rooms,” she said. She was thinking of the windows nailed shut, the crosses gouged into the walls of her father’s study. “This is what Susan wants, too?”

  “It was her idea!” He stood beside the counter with his hips cocked, his arms folded just as Laurie’s had been a moment before. “She thinks the place is great.”

  “All right,” Laurie said.

  “But only if you’re comfortable with it.”

  “I said all right. I’m okay.”

  “And only if we take down that creepy empty
picture frame.” He grimaced but there was still joviality in his eyes.

  “I already have.”

  “Wonderful. You’re a saint.” Again, he pecked a kiss on her cheek. Then he bellowed into the next room, “Hey, Snoozin! Guess what!” His voice boomed down the empty halls of the house.

  “It got loose!” Susan shouted from somewhere in the house. Then she squealed. “Daddy! The frog got loose!”

  Laurie shivered. “Oh, Jesus . . . Ted . . .”

  “I’ll get it,” he said, still grinning his boyish grin. He rushed past Laurie and galloped down the hall. “Where are you, Snoozin?”

  He’s going to outlive me. The thought lightninged into her brain out of nowhere. He’ll be like Benjamin Button. I’ll get older and he’ll just keep getting younger and younger.

  She knew dementia was hereditary, and not for the first time since learning of her father’s illness, she wondered if the horrible affliction waited for her somewhere in the future. The last conversation with her father had taken place about six months ago. By then, she was already well aware of the dementia settling cloaklike around him. Eighteen months earlier she had hired a full-time caretaker to look after him from a well-reputed service in Baltimore, which had turned out to be Dora Lorton, and Laurie had since received a few phone calls from Dora’s boss, Mr. Claiborne, on a number of occasions concerning his recommendation and ultimate inclusion of a night nurse in order to provide her father with twenty-four-hour care. But Laurie had not known the true severity of Myles Brashear’s senility until that final telephone conversation with him. Midway through their phone call, the old man’s speech became garbled. Several times she had asked him to repeat what he’d said. When his speech became clear again, the words were there, but they were arranged now in a patternless jigsaw, a litany of nonsense. Twice he called her Tanya. Biting her lower lip, Laurie had remained on the phone and did not interrupt the man until he was once again back in his own head. His apology was pitiable, and she thought that maybe he was crying on the other end of the line. She told him not to worry about apologizing to her . . . though what she really wanted to tell him was that if he’d been more available to her as a father all these years, he could have moved in with her, Ted, and Susan, to live out his remaining years with family instead of in a cold and lonely house with no one but paid caretakers to look after him. It had been on the tip of her tongue. She had watched the seconds tick by on the kitchen wall clock. She hadn’t said it.

  The phone call about his death came a week ago from Charles Claiborne, managing director of Mid-Atlantic Homecare Services. Laurie had been reading a Janet Evanovich novel in the living room when the call came in. Ted had answered the phone. She listened and could tell it wasn’t a typical phone call. Just hearing the tone of Ted’s voice, she had thought, It’s about my father. He’s dead. And now I’m going to have to deal with all that.

  After he hung up the phone, Ted had come into the living room and sat beside her on the couch. He rubbed her back and told her what Mr. Claiborne had said. She had thought that maybe his heart had given out or that he’d suffered a stroke, but it wasn’t to be that simple. Laurie listened to it all in stunned silence. She tried to imagine what he must have looked like lying there on the stamped concrete pavers, all twisted and broken and useless . . . but then realized she had no idea what the man had looked like in old age, and was only able to summon images of him from her youth, when he had been her father and not some desperate recluse barricaded inside some aging old manse. Later, her father’s lawyer, David Cushing, called and spoke with her. The house in Maryland—that aging old manse—was now hers, along with all of her father’s belongings, as well as what money was in the man’s accounts. There were papers to be signed and things to go over, but David Cushing had promised to make it as simplistic and painless as possible. Cushing had given Laurie his condolences and then hung up the phone.

  Now, standing in her dead father’s kitchen, Laurie was overcome by a tidal wave of erratic emotion. At least guilt wasn’t one of them. Not that she could tell, anyway. It angered her that this had been her mother’s house for a time, too, but the entire place seemed wholly and solely infused with her father—that singular haunting entity. Her mother had been a kind and intelligent woman who did not deserve to have her memories overshadowed by her father’s.

  Before the anger turned volatile, Laurie went into the parlor to find her husband and daughter on their hands and knees looking under the sofa.

  “Don’t tell me,” Laurie said.

  “Mommy, it’s under the couch,” Susan said, looking up at her mother. The expression on her face was one of worry, as if the sofa had designs to eat her poor frog alive.

  “You better get it.”

  “It’s so tiny,” Susan whined, and Laurie didn’t know if the statement was meant to allay Laurie’s fears about having a rogue amphibian loose in the house or to state Susan’s own concerns about the poor little frog’s helplessness.

  “There!” Ted said, and vaulted up onto his feet. “It’s getting away!”

  Susan shrieked and Ted laughed. They both darted between the sofa and loveseat and chased after the tiny black dot that bounced toward the hallway. Still laughing, Ted told Susan to be careful and not to accidentally step on the little fellow.

  A phantom coldness overtook Laurie. Shivering, she turned and saw through the adjoining sitting room that the storm door that led out into the side yard stood open. Laurie went to the door and shut it. There was a locking mechanism on the handle which Laurie thumbed to the locked position. Out in the side yard, the slope of the lawn had darkened as the sun began to set. The sky beyond the trees was a brilliant panorama of orange and pink threaded with scudding white clouds. The green moss on the fence now looked black and the trees that drooped over the fence swayed in what looked to be a strong summer wind. On the other side of the fence, she could see the green car in the neighbor’s driveway. The second car was still parked at the curb, and she could see now that the emblem on the door was a dark green BGE logo—Baltimore Gas and Electric. There was a light on in the window of one of the upstairs rooms of the house, too. A silhouette stood framed in the center of the lighted window. The longer Laurie stared at the silhouette, the more she was able to convince herself that the silhouette was staring back at her. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, she thought of a dead girl named Sadie Russ.

  Chapter 5

  Laurie prepared dinner while Ted and Susan brought their bags in from the car. When Susan learned they would be staying in the big house with the nice yard that sloped toward the woods and the gray river beyond, she cheered for joy and hugged Ted around the hips. Laurie told her that there would be ground rules, which they would address in time, but Susan, now basking in the simple pleasures of childhood vindication, was only partially listening. Ted asked where he should bring the bags and Laurie informed him that Susan’s stuff could go in Laurie’s old room at the end of the upstairs hall, since there was still a bed in there. Ted could take their stuff and put it in the master bedroom, though she confessed that she hadn’t yet been in there to look around and did not know the state of it.

  Dora had done a noteworthy job stockpiling the refrigerator and cupboards with suitable groceries, so Laurie whipped up some stir-fry with shrimp, which was Ted’s favorite, and promised Susan they could make brownies together after dinner. Again, Susan cheered—it seemed the world was smiling down on this young girl who, as recently as yesterday evening, had planted herself obstinately in her bedroom closet with her headphones on and cried about having to leave Hartford and all her friends for the summer. Susan helped Laurie set the dining room table—there were good Wedgwood dishes in one of the cupboards—and the three of them ate with great relish. It had been a long and exhaustive day, and they hadn’t realized just how ravenous they’d been.

  “So what’s the deal with the locked door upstairs?” Ted asked after he’d finished eating, setting his fork down on his plate. “Yo
u got a deformed stepsister locked away up there or something?”

  Susan’s mouth made an O.

  “There’s a set of stairs behind it leading up into a little room above the second floor,” Laurie said. “My father called it the belvedere.”

  “That tower-looking room on the roof?”

  “The very same.”

  “How come it’s locked?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What’s a . . . a belve—” Susan asked.

  “It’s like a loft,” Ted explained. “A little room.”

  “I’ll have to call Dora Lorton and see if she has a key for the lock,” Laurie said. Yet for some reason she couldn’t explain, the idea of speaking to Dora Lorton again made her uncomfortable.

  After dinner and dessert were finished, they retired to the parlor. Susan’s cheerfulness was short-lived when she realized what not having a television in the house actually meant. Even Ted grumbled about this under his breath but didn’t make an actual show of it. Instead, Susan played the piano while Ted addressed the antique liquor cabinet with a hungry sort of curiosity. Laurie sat on the sofa and looked over the paperwork the lawyer David Cushing had FedEx’d to them back in Hartford. The meeting with Cushing was set for tomorrow afternoon. Back in Hartford, during the phone call with Cushing, Laurie had agreed to have her father’s body disposed of as expediently as possible. Myles Brashear was cremated, and that had been the end of him. There had been no funeral, since there were no family members alive who might be willing to attend—none that Laurie was aware of, anyway.

  Laurie only hoped the meeting with Cushing wouldn’t be too strenuous. Cushing had already agreed to assist Laurie in organizing an estate sale . . . for a nominal fee, of course. She had no use for any of her father’s belongings, minimal as they were. As for the house itself, they would put it on the market and hopefully be rid of it as soon as possible. Once it was all over, she would never have to think about this place again.