Little Girls

by Ronald Malfi

  “You did, but that’s okay. You’re being honest with me and I appreciate it. Please go on.”

  “Then one night he lost all interest in the side door, and turned all his focus on that narrow little door in the upstairs hallway. It leads to that strange little room upstairs on the roof. You know what I’m talking about?”

  Laurie didn’t answer. Suddenly, she was looking at Teresa Larosche from the wrong end of a telescope. Her flesh prickled.

  “Mrs. Genarro? You okay?”

  “Yes.” Her mouth was dry. “Please, go on.”

  “Well, he became paranoid that someone was up there, or maybe trying to get into the house from up there. A few times I wanted to take him up there and show him that wasn’t the case, but he refused to go. I went up there by myself a couple of times just to show him there was nothing there.”

  “Did you . . . did you ever find anything up there?”

  “No. Of course, I didn’t. It was just an empty room. Very creepy, but there was nothing there.”

  Some teenagers burst into the coffee shop on a wave of raucous laughter, startling Laurie. She hadn’t realized how low they had been talking until just then. Laurie watched the teenagers—there were four of them—go to the counter and take a long time placing their orders. Even the young waitresses in the green aprons looked irritated.

  “Downtown sucks in the summer,” Teresa commented. “Every idiot and their mother comes down here and ruins the place.”

  One of the teenagers was handed a paper cup. He took it over to a counter on which stood several insulated drums of flavored coffee. He hummed loudly as he peered at all the labels on the pots, then spilled some coffee on the floor when he went to fill his paper cup.

  “Anyway,” Teresa continued, digging around in her purse now, “that’s how that door came to be locked.” She set a small silver key on the table and slid it over to Laurie.

  “So the lock wasn’t put on the door to prevent my father from going up there . . .”

  Teresa shook her head. Her expression was grave. “It was to prevent someone from coming down,” she said. “To stop them from getting into the house. Your father was convinced someone would get in if the door wasn’t locked—that someone was trying to get in.”

  “But the police report said—”

  “I tried explaining it to the police, but they didn’t understand. Police don’t like things like dementia or Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia—anything that muddies up the waters of logical thought. They can’t make sense of things that aren’t logical.”

  Laurie let this sink in. At the coffee station, the coffee-spiller was joined by his three friends, each of who seemed incapable of reading the labels on the coffee drums quietly and to themselves. Behind the counter, someone dropped a plate and the teenagers cheered. Heads throughout the place swiveled in their direction. Once the four teenagers left and the place quieted down, Laurie turned her attention back to Teresa Larosche.

  “What did my father think would happen to him if this . . . person . . . actually got in?”

  Teresa’s mouth unhinged the slightest bit, though for a moment she didn’t speak. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I have no idea. I don’t even know if he believed it was a person.” Teresa seemed to consider this last point.

  “Tell me about what happened the night he died.”

  Teresa shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Her eyes darted across the room, as if drawn to the large chalkboard scrawled with the day’s specials at the opposite end of the coffee shop. When she spoke again, she sounded as if something were caught in her throat.

  “It was sometime after midnight. I was asleep in the guestroom upstairs, at the opposite end of the hall from where your father slept. He had gone to bed around nine and hadn’t gotten up at all, so I was thinking—well, hoping—that it might be an easy night.

  “I was lying in bed reading a book. I had one earbud in so I could listen to my iPod, but I always kept one out so I could hear if he made any noises in the night. Just before midnight, I went down the hall and checked in on your father. I could hear him snoring, so I knew he was okay. So I went back to my room and went to sleep.

  “Sometime later I woke up. Or maybe I thought I did. I don’t remember. I heard low voices talking in whispers, or maybe that part was in my dream.”

  “Voices? More than one, you mean?”

  Teresa appeared to consider this for a while before answering. “I think maybe it was one voice, though it sounded like one end of a conversation.”

  “Meaning my father had been talking to himself.”

  “I guess. I mean, something like that. I can’t really be sure. I never heard the door open—that door that goes to the room upstairs.” Again, she paused to consider this. “I think I dreamt I heard the door open, but maybe I never did. All I know is I didn’t get out of bed until I heard him shouting. I got up, went into the hall, and saw the door standing open. I was shocked at this, you know, because it was always locked.”

  “But was it that night?”

  “It was always locked,” Teresa repeated. “We checked it every night.”

  “And I assume my father didn’t have access to the key?”

  “Of course not. I kept it on my keychain with my car keys, and those were in my purse.”

  “Okay. So the door is open . . . ?”

  “By the time I reached the door and looked up the stairs, your father had stopped shouting. The whole house went eerily quiet. Then I heard the window smash. I ran up the stairs to the room and saw the window broken. When I looked out, I saw him on the pavement below. He was cut up from jumping out the window—he hadn’t opened it first, just jumped through the glass—and I could tell by the way he was lying down there that he was dead.”

  “Did you see anyone else out there in the yard when you looked down?”

  “No. Who would I see? It was after midnight.”

  Laurie picked up the silver key. “Why was the lock put back on the door after my father’s death? There would have been no reason to prevent him from going up there anymore.”

  Again, Teresa Larosche glanced down at her hands. Her unpainted fingernails had been gnawed down to nubs, the cuticles stained to the color of mercurochrome from nicotine. There was a small tattoo of a butterfly in the fleshy webbing between the thumb and index finger of her left hand.

  “Teresa?” Laurie prompted when it didn’t appear that the girl would respond.

  “It’s silly,” Teresa said. Laurie couldn’t tell if she was about to laugh or cry. “Mr. Claiborne insisted we clean the house up, get it ready for your arrival. 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. I just felt . . . safer . . . being back in that house with the door locked.” When she finally looked up, Laurie saw that her eyes were moist. “Stupid, right?”

  Laurie reached out and touched one of the young woman’s hands. “Not at all,” she told her.

  “I quit the next day. I just couldn’t be in that house. I was hearing things by then, too . . . or at least convincing myself that I was. I kept thinking that Mr. Brashear was dead but his phobias were not. Toby said it could be ghosts. He believes in life after death and all that weird stuff. Even if I don’t—and I don’t, I don’t believe in that stuff—Toby might still have a point.” She laughed uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I guess I sound like an idiot.” Almost apologetically, she added, “Toby’s my boyfriend.”

  Laurie’s smile felt like a grimace on her face. “You were there that night, so I want to ask you a question, and I want you to be perfectly honest with me in your answer. I don’t want you to be embarrassed or think I’m judging you or anything. Okay?”

  Teresa’s silver rings made knocking sounds against the tabletop as her hands started to vibrate again. She smiled painstakingly at Laurie. There was sadness in her smile, a tired resignation. “Yeah, okay.”

  “Do you believe there was someone else in t
he house with you the night my father died?”

  “Now you’re just freaking me out,” Teresa said.

  “That’s not my intention. I just want to know what you think.”

  Teresa Larosche stared at her for an indeterminate amount of time, not blinking. “Listen,” she said after a time, “do you mind if I grab a smoke real quick?” She stood and slung her purse over one shoulder.

  “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.

  Chapter 15

  Ted 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.

  Then who did? Who came into this house and took them? And where is the missing one?

  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.

  Those brownish bloodstains on the floor. . . .The fact that the window looks like it had been broken from the outside instead of on the inside . . .

  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.