Little Girls

by Ronald Malfi

  “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.

  Chapter 10

  After 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.

  How the—

  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?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  So now I’m getting the “ma’am” treatment, Laurie thought.

  Ted waved a hand at the girl. “Go on,” he said. “Go.”

  Susan pivoted around and stalked across the room to her father. She hugged him around the hips and, after a moment, he bent down and kissed the top of her head. “Okay. Good night. Now get going.”

  A moment later, listening to the sounds of her daughter brushing her teeth in the upstairs bathroom, Laurie reclined in the chair and felt her ankle throb. Ted went into the kitchen and filled up a Ziploc bag with ice. When he returned, he placed the bag of ice carefully across her swollen ankle.

  “How’s that?”

  “Throbs,” she huffed. “You know, it’s important we show a united front.”

  “She was playing with some cuff links. She didn’t steal them.”

  “She knows better than to go through someone else’s stuff like that.”

  “She was probably just bored.”

  “Don’t make excuses for her.”

  “It’s not an excuse.”

  “And it’s not just the stealing. I understand that she’s stuck in this house and that she’s bored, and just looking for stuff to do, things to play with. But since when does she lie to us like that?”

  He held up one hand and swiveled away to the liquor cabinet. He poured himself a glass of cognac. “Maybe you just caught her off guard and she didn’t know what to say.”

  “You give her too much latitude,” Laurie said.

  “You�
�re right. I should go up there and beat her unconscious with my belt. How’s that?”

  “Don’t be an ass, Ted. You spoil her. I’m the only one doling out any discipline, and I’m starting to feel like the bad guy because of it.”

  “She’s ten years old, Laurie—”

  “And she’ll be eleven next month, and an adult before we know it. She needs boundaries now.”

  There was something on the tip of his tongue, Laurie could tell. Yet he swallowed it. His lips remained firm, as if whatever words he had swallowed had tasted bitter, but he refused to give in to it.

  “Is there something else?” he asked. This time, his voice was even and steady, though not without care.

  “Something else what? What do you mean?”

  “Is there something else bothering you?” he clarified.

  All of a sudden, she thought his eyes betrayed the distrust he had of her mental stability. One look at him and she could tell he was thinking about her little episode on the highway last year. Those looks came more and more frequently, like she was slowly losing her mind, yet she was the only person oblivious to the fact.

  “No,” she said, turning away from him, too embarrassed to continue looking him in the eyes. “There’s nothing else. I’m just exhausted.”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry. I’ll talk with her about it tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  “How ’bout some fresh tunes?”

  She smiled wanly up at him.

  Ted set his drink down, then selected another album from the box. He slid the record out and was halfway to the phonograph when he paused.

  “That’s strange,” he said.

  “What’s strange?”

  He turned to show her. In one hand, he held the record and the cardboard sleeve. In his other hand he held a folded piece of paper, thick and yellow like parchment, the edges quite visibly frayed. He unfolded the paper and stared at it, the expression on his face pure incomprehension.

  “What is it?” she repeated.

  He brought it over and handed it to her.