Little Girls

by Ronald Malfi

  Ted leaned back in his chair. He dabbed the corners of his mouth with a cloth napkin, then tossed the napkin on the table. “Someone? You think this Larosche lady pushed him?”

  “No.”

  “Then who? No one else was in the house.”

  “Maybe someone got in.”

  “You’re getting that based on what this Larosche woman told you? That your father—who suffered from dementia, don’t forget—thought someone was trying to get him?”

  I think the Larosche woman believed it, too, she thought. Toward the end, anyway. He had convinced her of it, I think. Or perhaps poisoned her with the notion of it.

  “Maybe it wasn’t the dementia,” she said. “Maybe he was actually aware of something.”

  “Aware that someone was trying to kill him,” Ted said flatly. “Honey, that’s silly. Listen to yourself. Don’t you hear how silly that is?”

  “If you’re going to jump out of a window, wouldn’t you open it first?”

  “Laurie, I wouldn’t jump out a window. See? That’s the difference. Your father wasn’t rational. You can’t infuse logic to an illogical situation. You’ll make yourself mad.”

  His words were close enough to what Teresa Larosche had said back at the coffee shop—about being afraid that Myles Brashear’s dementia might seep into her and cause her to go crazy—to cause Laurie’s flesh to grow instantly cold.

  “The board over the window is loose,” she went on. “There were nails on the floor, like someone pried them out.”

  “See?” Ted beamed. “That explains your noises.”

  “Does it? How?”

  “It’s the wind blowing against the board. You said yourself it sounded like a door slamming up there.”

  It seemed like an impossibly plausible explanation. Yet it didn’t make her feel any better.

  “Isn’t it possible that someone could climb onto the roof and get up into that room?” she suggested. She was thinking of the way the tree branches crept out over the roof. All someone would need to do was climb the tree, get on the roof, and push open the loose board—

  “No,” he said flatly. “It isn’t possible. And even if someone could do that, the door’s locked. Where would they go? They couldn’t get into the rest of the house.”

  “But it’s possible. . . .”

  “Darling, no one has been getting into the house. I’ll hammer down that board when we get back to the house tonight,” Ted assured her. He took a sip of his wine and ran his tongue along his teeth. “You know, when my parents died, I thought, wow, I’m a goddamn orphan. I’m just like one of those little street urchins with fingerless gloves and hats that are too big for their heads, like in a Dickens novel. I had no brothers and sisters and I thought, damn, I’m alone. And maybe for a while I really was. But now I’m not. I’ve got you and I’ve got Susan.” He touched her hand across the table—strangely similar to how Liz Rosewood had done when she asked if Laurie minded if she smoked. “You’ve got us, too, Laurie.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I mean it. Don’t forget that. Don’t lose sight of it and run off chasing things that aren’t there.”

  She believed him. There had been a time recently in their marriage when Ted had grown distant and incommunicative, spending more hours than necessary working outside the house. She knew he had been unfulfilled in his career, overly stressed about what the future held for him and his writing, so she had allowed him to remain for a time in his self-pitying cocoon. During this period she wondered if he would ever return to her, the man she had married, or if his emotional distancing signaled the eventuality of divorce. But he was here now, and she found that she trusted him.

  After dinner, they walked down Main Street, peering in at the crowded bars and watching middle-aged couples stroll up and down the cobblestones. Midshipmen in their starched whites flocked together outside bars, their faces impossibly young, square, hairless. Down along the water, boats clanged in their moorings. People in shorts and crewneck shirts lounged on the decks of large yachts, their radios tuned low while their conversations were lively and inebriated. Ted laughed and waved to a boat deck of young men and women passing around a bottle of tequila, and some of the women and one of the men waved back.

  There was a cigar shop with a wooden Indian on the curb across the street from the outdoor restaurant where they had eaten the day after visiting David Cushing’s office. Ted squeezed Laurie around the waist and said he had the strange urge to buy a cigar.

  “Go on,” she told him.

  Like an excited child, he scampered across the cobblestone street and disappeared into the small smoke shop. A young woman in spandex running gear paused beside the wooden Indian to let her Pomeranian lap water from a great silver bowl someone had set out for just such a purpose. Laurie smiled to herself.

  She turned and found herself facing the neon handprint in the window of the palmist’s reading room. She recalled Susan running up to the glass on their previous trek downtown together, touching her small hand to the lighted one, and saying, Ooh. It’s warm.

  There were memories—distant ones—of coming down here as a young child with her parents. She could recall these memories only in brief snapshots. One particular memory had her family framed along the bulkhead that overlooked the inlet. It was around Christmastime and the parade of boats came down the inlet, one by one, their masts spiraled with colored lights, their bows decked out with small decorated pine trees and holly wreaths hanging where the life preserver should have been. Some of the boats had small speakers affixed to the tops of the masts where tinny Christmas music would trickle out and echo across the inlet and out into the Chesapeake Bay.

  It could have been someone else’s memory for all it mattered now.

  “Curious what the future holds?” Ted said, coming up behind her. He had an unlit cigar in his mouth. She thought he looked ridiculous.

  “What?”

  “Palm readings.” Just as Susan had done, he placed his palm against the neon hand behind the glass. “It’s warm,” he said.

  Laurie was silent for much of the car ride back to the house. Ted smoked his cigar with the windows down, the smell of the smoke making Laurie woozy. It reminded her of the way her father’s clothes had smelled, and how the closets in the house still smelled. With some disillusionment, she wondered if she were trapped in some time warp, where things reflected other things, and new people took on the personifications of old ones.

  After they pulled into the driveway, Ted turned off the ignition and squeezed her left knee. “I had a nice time tonight. I’m glad we went out. We both needed it.”

  She hugged herself and stared out the passenger window. It was fully dark now. The trees were black pikes rising out of the earth.

  “What?” he said. “What is it? Are you cold?”

  “I’m not cold.”

  “Then tell me. We had a good time, didn’t we? What is it, Laurie?”

  She remained silent.

  “Please,” he insisted.

  “There’s something you don’t know,” she said. “Something I’ve never told you. I never thought I would, to be honest, because I never thought I would have to. But I’m back in that house now, and . . . well, maybe it’ll help you understand what’s been bothering me lately.”

  “Jesus, babe, what is it?”

  “When I was a little girl living in that house, I was friends with the girl who lived next door. Her name was Sadie Russ. We were friends at first, but as we got older, she started to . . . I guess . . . change. Out of nowhere she would have these fits. Tantrums. She would scream and pull at her hair. A few times when this happened and I was there, she would rush at me, hit and pinch me, or try to knock me down. She would always apologize later, but she started to scare me. We were just little girls. I tried not to play with her after a while, but she would always come to the house calling for me, and my folks would always let her in.

  “Then she got worse. She would still hit me and pinch me . . .
but then she would laugh, like it was all a big joke. She stopped apologizing. Sometimes she would go down to the water and catch frogs, and squeeze them to death. Or she would catch minnows in a net, then smash them on the rocks. Once, she took one right out of the net and bit it in two. Blood spurted down her chin.”

  “Jesus Christ, hon.”

  “It made me feel bad, and I would sometimes dig a hole and bury the dead animals that she killed. But Sadie, she would dig them up just to spite me, leaving all these little holes in the yard. It was all part of her twisted game.”

  Ted said nothing; he stared straight ahead at the darkened house, his mouth firm.

  “There were times when I would come downstairs to breakfast to find Sadie already in the house, waiting for me. My parents had let her in. She was good at fooling parents. She put on a mask, a different face. Lots of people do that, sure, but Sadie was different than other people. My father used to grow these harmless-looking flowers that were actually poisonous, and Sadie was like that. By the time she died, she had become a monster.”

  “Died?”

  “Hold on. I’m getting there.”

  He squeezed her knee, urging her to go on.

  “She made me steal stuff from my parents,” Laurie said. “She would see a wristwatch my father wore or some jewelry my mother had on, and she would tell me to steal it and bring it to her. And if I didn’t bring it to her, she would be . . . well, she would be just horrible to me. There were times when I refused to do the things she asked, and she would hurt me. Other times she would make me eat dirt, bugs, other things.

  “One afternoon, after I had refused to steal a pair of my mother’s diamond earrings, Sadie approached me in the yard with a shoe box tucked under one arm. Sadie always wore hand-me-down dresses that were too big for her, and this day was no different—one bare shoulder poked up from the wide neckline of an ugly pleated sundress. God, I remember it so clearly. I told her to go away, that we weren’t friends anymore, but she refused.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell your parents?”

  “Because by that point I had already stolen some stuff for her and she threatened to tell my parents what I’d done if I stopped being her friend and told on her.”

  “How old was this kid?”

  “Susan’s age.”

  “Jesus. What was in the shoe box?”

  “When she opened the shoe box, I didn’t know what I was looking at, and I wouldn’t truly know until I was older and had my first period. To me, it was just some cylindrical cotton tube that had been saturated in a dark clotted fluid. But I knew what that fluid was, even then, and the idea of it horrified me.”

  “God,” Ted said. “You mean . . . was it . . . ?”

  “A tampon. Used. Her mother’s, I suppose, fished out of the bathroom trash or wherever. I don’t think Sadie had started having periods by that point.” Laurie swallowed and her throat felt raw and abraded. “She made me put it in my mouth. Suck on it.”

  Ted said nothing; he stared blankly out the black windshield.

  “If I didn’t do it, she’d hurt me. She kept threatening to tell my parents about all the stuff I stole from them, the stuff she told me to take. Somehow she got me believing that I was the one who’d done wrong.” Laurie placed her hand atop Ted’s own. “I know it’s uncomfortable for you to hear, but I feel I have to say it,” she said.

  “Then say it.”

  “She was eleven years old when she died,” Laurie said. “I was there. I saw it happen.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You and Susan saw the remains of that old greenhouse in the woods?”

  “Yes, we saw it,” Ted said. “It was the first day we got here. There’s a path that leads to it.”

  “It was my father’s. When I was a little girl, he would spend hours in that greenhouse tending to his flowers, his plants. Sometimes it seemed like his plants were the only thing he truly loved. He had taken me in there on a few occasions, and even now I can remember the great bursts of flowers and the thick, rubbery leaves of the plants. The air was always humid and rich with the scent of vegetation and soil. I remember the black soil in little heaps on the floor, dotted with white foamy specks, and the terracotta pottery stacked underneath tables. Vines crisscrossed the glass ceiling. There is something wondrous and transcendent about a structure made entirely of glass and filled with flowers.

  “There were shades that hung from the windows, similar to the kinds of plastic pull-down shades you see in classrooms. When my father wasn’t working in there, he would pull the shades down. The only way you could see inside was by climbing a nearby tree, crawling out on a limb, and peering down through the greenhouse’s glass ceiling.

  “One afternoon, Sadie wanted to see inside. She climbed up into the tree and crawled out on the limb that extended over the roof of the greenhouse. I climbed the tree, too, but Sadie lost her balance and fell before I crawled out onto the branch.”

  “She fell through the roof?” Ted whispered.

  “Yes.”

  And she could see it even now: the girl’s oversized dress billowing out as she dropped . . . the crashing glass as she went through the peaked roof . . . the shower of crystal shards that rained down, both inside and outside the greenhouse . . . the awful, bone-crunching thump as Sadie struck the ground.

  “I ran to my house and told my parents. My mother called for an ambulance while my father ran out to the greenhouse to see what had happened. I wanted to go with him, but he wouldn’t take me.”

  “Of course, he wouldn’t.”

  “I sat in the backyard and waited for him to come back. The next thing I remember was Mrs. Russ screaming and running through the yard toward the woods. Sadie’s father ran with her, his face ghostly white and expressionless as he hurried along the fence and ran down the wooded path to the greenhouse. Then I heard sirens coming up the block.” She blinked and found her eyes wet with tears. “I don’t remember much of what happened after that. It’s all jumbled in my head.”

  Ted shook his head. “I can’t imagine what that was like.”

  “She was cut to ribbons, Ted.”

  Ted said nothing. The sudden silence was like heavy wool draped around them both.

  “So that’s what’s been going on with you?” Ted said after a while. He turned to her. Half his face was masked in shadow. “That’s why you’ve seemed so on edge? Because of what happened all those years ago, and having to come back here and relive it all over again in your head?”

  “It haunts me,” she said.

  “It’s in the past, Laurie. That all happened a long time ago.” He reached out and rubbed the back of her neck. She was surprised by his tenderness.

  “My father was cut up by the glass when he fell through that window,” she said. “Just like Sadie had been. And just before it happened, he fouled the rug just like a scared little kid might do. Like someone had frightened him.”

  “I noticed you said he fell as opposed to he jumped,” he said. “You want to tell me what that’s about?”

  “I don’t know, Ted.”

  “Do you want to hear what I think?”

  “All right.”

  “I think you’re overstressed and thinking about all this too much. You had a lot of unresolved issues with your father—and I’m sorry about that, I really am—but now you’re trying to find some understanding in the messy pieces of his death.” Gently, Ted squeezed the back of her neck.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It makes sense.” Yet in her head, all she could hear was Teresa Larosche saying, Sometimes he called it the Hateful Beast. Other times, it was the Vengeance.

  “First thing tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll pack some bags and grab a hotel in town. You don’t need to spend another day here in this place.”

  “No. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to run from it.”

  “It wouldn’t be running.”

  “Of course, it would.” Gently, she touched his arm. “Thank you, but no. I need t
o stay until we’re done here.”

  Ted leaned in and kissed the side of her face. “If you think that’s best.”

  “I do.”

  He opened his door. “You go on inside. I’ll grab the kiddo from next door.”

  They got out of the car, Laurie going up the walk while Ted cut across the yard to the Rosewood house. Laurie watched him go, hugging herself in the chilly summer air. Then her gaze cut to one of the upstairs windows of the Rosewoods’ house, where a light shone brightly, bracketed by sheer curtains. The silhouette of a young girl stood there, both palms splayed against the glass.

  Staring.

  Chapter 18

  Of course, there had been things about Sadie that she simply couldn’t tell her husband. Her dirty little hands all over me, tugging at my pants, pulling up my skirts. One afternoon while they were playing in the woods, completely out of the blue, Sadie hiked her own skirt up over her head and showed young Laurie Brashear her nakedness. The girl wore no panties and the sight of her smooth cleft between her legs caused Laurie to cry out. Sadie had laughed and called her a big sissy baby.

  But Sadie Russ hadn’t always been that way. The change had come on gradually, manifesting itself at first in an introverted sullenness. She would become easily angered—perhaps if something didn’t go her way or she was reprimanded by a schoolteacher—and this anger would arrive on a sudden, shocking tide of obdurate cries. She began printing dirty words on her school papers; she whispered them to Laurie when they passed each other in the hallways or on the playground; she carved them in the trunks of trees. At recess, other kids stopped playing with Sadie. Some kids teased her mercilessly, and there had been one boy who seemed to enjoy firing phlegm onto her scuffed black Mary Janes. But Laurie knew that deep down they were scared of her, too. Sadie began to frighten a lot of people. Even some of the teachers.

  Sadie the sadist. Sadie’s twisted wretchedness. She had grown gaunt. A thin blue vein descended from each corner of her mouth, making it appear as though her mouth worked on a hinge, much like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and might at any moment drop open. Those self-inflicted bruises, the gashed knees with their tortoiseshell scabs. The creases of Sadie’s palms had always been black with grit.