by Ronald Malfi
There had been no one holding the lamplight for Teresa Larosche. This notion caused a pang of sadness to resonate at the center of Laurie’s chest. There had been no one.
“My father called the intruder the Hateful Beast. The Vengeance. I can see how that could frighten someone as fragile as Teresa Larosche. Heck, it frightened me when she told me. Until I realized what he was really talking about.”
Dora Lorton pursed her lips. “Oh? And what was he really talking about?”
“Tanya Albrecht, the girl whose body I found in that factory garage. Other little girls, too. Maybe it was the guilt that had finally caught up with him, but I don’t think that’s true. I think his brain—in the throes of dementia—turned on him, attacked him. Made him believe they were coming back to get him.”
“Yes!” Dora said this with surprising energy. “Yes, he sometimes mentioned a young girl, though he never spoke her name. I assumed it was you, dear. His mind had become very . . .muddy . . . and he would often slip in and out of the past.”
“At first I thought it was a reference to a girl named Sadie Russ. She lived next door when I was a kid and she died when she fell through the roof of my father’s greenhouse. I assumed he carried guilt over that, though my mother and I didn’t stick around long enough to know for sure. But it hadn’t been Sadie at all—it had been Tanya Albrecht and the other little girls.”
Which means I have been losing my mind the past few weeks, accusing an innocent girl, poor Abigail, of being a monster, she thought.
Both women jumped when the telephone rang. Laurie got up, turned off the ringer, then sat back down.
“What will happen to Teresa Larosche?” Laurie asked, gripping the handle of her coffee cup.
“I don’t know, dear.”
“Once I sell the house, I’d like to help her out in some way. I think she needs to be admitted to a hospital, not sit in some jail cell.”
Dora said nothing to this, but Laurie could tell by the look on the older woman’s face that the sentiment pleased her. After she finished her coffee, her big-shouldered coat rose up from the chair.
“It’s time I leave.”
“Thank you for coming by. It means a lot.”
“You take care of yourself,” Dora said. “And that little girl of yours, too.”
Little girls are like clay, Laurie thought, walking Dora to the front door. Little girls, little girls . . .
When she returned to the kitchen, Susan was there rummaging through a box of cereal.
“Let me make you a proper lunch,” she told the girl.
“I’m just in a snacky mood.”
Laurie dumped Dora Lorton’s coffee into the sink, then replenished her own.
“Are we gonna still live with Dad when we go home?” Susan asked suddenly.
“Honey, why would you ask that?”
“I don’t know. Because I heard you guys fighting.”
“Could you sit down for a minute? I want to talk to you.”
Susan dragged one of the kitchen chairs out, then sank down onto it.
Laurie returned to the table with her fresh coffee, and sat opposite her daughter. Dora’s words still echoed in her head. “Your father and I are dealing with some issues right now, but you don’t have to worry about it. I don’t want you worrying about any of it. Your father and I love you very much and we wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. Do you understand?”
Susan nodded, but there was a vacant look in her eyes, like she was unwilling to affix herself to any of Laurie’s words.
“Honey,” said Laurie. “I know you sometimes think I’m too strict with you. I see how you are with your dad, and I think that’s wonderful, and I know you and I have . . . well . . . a different relationship. I’m strict because I worry about you. I feel the need to protect you. This world is full of awful things, Susan, and I want to make sure nothing ever happens to you.”
“What would happen to me?”
“Nothing will happen,” said Laurie. “I won’t let it. I love you very much. Do you know that?”
Susan nodded her head. “I love you, too, Mom.”
“Good,” Laurie said, smiling softly.
To her surprise, Susan stood and came to her, wrapped her thin brown arms around Laurie’s neck. Laurie hugged her daughter back, feeling the thinness and fragility of her frame within her embrace. When she finally let go, it seemed too soon.
“Hey,” Susan said. She went over to the bay windows and peered out at the gray, overcast backyard. “There’s Abigail.”
Laurie stood and came up behind Susan. Abigail was out in the yard on her hands and knees, digging a hole in the ground with a stick. Auburn hair hung in tangles in front of her face. Her feet appeared to be bare.
Laurie set the coffee cup down on the table, then went to the side door where she kicked on her shoes. “Stay here,” she told Susan. “I’ll be right back.”
Outside, the wind was cold and misty with rain. The sun was barricaded behind angry black clouds. Laurie cast no shadow as she crossed the lawn and stopped in front of the hole Abigail was digging.
The girl looked up at her. Her eyes were large and curious, set in the smooth, pale oval of her face, but she did not seem surprised to find she had a visitor.
“There have been a lot of apologies going around today,” Laurie said. She crouched down and met the girl’s eyes head-on. “I guess it’s my turn. I’ve been rude to you, Abigail. I’m sorry. I apologize.”
Abigail’s lower lip twitched. For a moment, it seemed like her eyes unfocused before that quiet curiosity filled them back up again.
“Stop,” Abigail said. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Calling me that.”
“Stop calling you Abigail?”
One of Abigail’s grubby little hands reached into the hole. She dug around in the loose dirt. She wasn’t just being playful—she was looking for something.
On shaky knees, Laurie stood up.
“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe.” Abigail’s voice was grating—the sound of carving knives being scraped together. “Can Susan come out and play?”
Not saying a word, Laurie took a step backwards.
“We’ll make wishes together,” Abigail said. “Good wishes.” Beneath the dirt, she found what she was looking for. She gathered it between her thumb and index finger and brought it up so that even in the sunless afternoon it sparkled. It was the missing diamond earring.
“Sadie,” Laurie managed. She could feel her windpipe constricting.
“Can Susan come out and play?”
“No. You should go home.”
“This isn’t my home.”
“You know what I mean.”
“But it was,” Abigail said. “It was mine.”
Laurie felt like she was struggling to breathe underwater. Briefly, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them, Abigail was still kneeling there, holding the diamond earring. She hadn’t moved.
“Stupid,” Abigail said. But no—she didn’t just say it. The word snarled out of her. “Stupid. Stupid bitch.”
Laurie took another step back. She wanted to run but couldn’t convince her legs to cooperate. Her entire body felt numb.
Abigail laughed. It sounded like two people laughing at once, one laugh overlaid atop the other.
“I came back for you, Laurie. I waited and waited and now we’re together again.”
Laurie wheezed out, “What do you want?”
Abigail’s dark eyes narrowed. That stunning auburn hair framed her face. “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe. You. To come. With me.” A hint of a smile swam briefly across her face. “Or the other one.”
“What other one?”
Abigail pointed toward the house, where Susan watched from the kitchen window.
“No,” Laurie said.
“Eeny, meeny—”
“Go away!”
Abigail brushed a strand of that wavy auburn hair behind her right ear. At first, it looked
like there was grease or perhaps ink running down the right side of Abigail’s face; it started at her ear, coursed down the curve of her jaw, down her neck, and soaked the collar of her checkerboard dress. It was blood. Abigail brought the diamond earring to her mangled ear, pressed it to the flesh. A muddy squelching sound broke the silence. When Abigail brought her hand down, the diamond remained seated in the bulb of bloody tissue.
And that was when it all rushed back to her—the morning commute to the university on I-84, the radio turned to an easy listening station, the weather pleasant. Traffic slows as she approaches the interchange. She eases down on the brake and happens to glance out the window at the car sliding into place beside her. There is a middle-aged couple in the front, the man behind the wheel wearing a baseball cap, the woman with her hair pulled back in a blondish ponytail. The car rolls up a few more inches, and Laurie sees a little girl in the backseat—a girl who turns to her, her eyes hollow black pits, her auburn hair matted with blood and spangled with dead leaves. Bits of broken glass shimmer like confetti in her hair, her eyebrows, her eyelashes. Great slashes have been cut like gills along her cheeks and the sides of her neck. One pink ear dribbles blood so thick it is almost black while a diamond stud winks out from all that madness—
This broke her paralysis. She turned and ran back into the house, slamming the side door shut behind her. Susan watched her in a state of utter perplexity, one hand filled with Cheerios frozen midway to her mouth.
“Mom . . . ?”
“Get away from the window,” Laurie said.
“Huh?”
She reached out and grabbed Susan by one shoulder. Susan shoved her hand away, spilling cereal on the floor in the process. For a moment, they stared at each other, a corresponding look of terror on both their faces.
Outside, Abigail swished past the bay windows and disappeared around the side of the house.
Suddenly unsure if she had locked the side door or just slammed it shut, Laurie dove for it, toppling a kitchen chair in the process—clack!—and reached for the dead bolt. But the lock had been changed by Dora Lorton and now required a key—
The spare sat on the kitchen counter. Laurie snatched it up, hurried back to the door, jammed the key in the lock. It turned audibly. A heartbeat later, Abigail’s plain white face appeared in the rectangle of glass in the upper portion of the door. Laurie stared. Their mutual respiration fogged up the glass. When Abigail placed one grubby palm against the glass, Laurie made a small hiccupping sound and jerked backwards. One finger began tapping against the window. The nail was black, the knuckles smudgy with dirt.
“Go away!” Laurie shouted at the monster.
Abigail’s finger screeched across the glass. It moved past Laurie and stopped on Susan.
“No!”
“Mom . . .”
“Get in the other room, Susan!”
“What are you doing?”
“Susan!”
Crying, Susan ran into the parlor.
On the other side of the window, Abigail opened her mouth and rolled back her thin lips, exposing all her teeth. Her tongue squirmed.
Laurie hurried over to the bay windows. She closed and latched the open window, her breath coming in quick little gasps now, strands of hair swinging down across her face. She could no longer see Abigail—the rectangle of glass in the door was starkly, incriminatingly vacant—but the black-eyed Susans were swaying at the base of the patio as if recently disturbed.
What about the front door? Had she locked it after Dora Lorton left? What about the other windows? Maybe all the locks have been turned....
She was so terrified of the idea that she was momentarily incapable of movement. Some strange buoyancy made it feel as if her stomach was gradually elevating up through her esophagus. When she broke her trance, she turned and ran into the parlor. Susan was not there. The windows in the parlor were closed, but she couldn’t tell if they were latched. Ted had pried the nails from the frames so they could open the windows when they wanted, circulating some fresh air through the house, yet now she wished he hadn’t. She ran to them, checked them one by one. They were all locked.
Glass can be broken. She thought about the busted window in the belvedere.
In the foyer, she found the front door unlocked. Fear clenched her in its fist. She screamed Susan’s name but Susan didn’t respond. She turned the bolt and heard the lock slide sturdily into place. She could already be in the house. Then she thought of Susan. Susan could have gone out!
“Susan! Susan!”
Susan was weeping from somewhere in the house. She couldn’t pinpoint the exact location. Sound travels funny here. Lowering her voice to a more reasonable tone, though unable to keep out the tremolo, she said, “Susan? Honey? Where’d you go?”
Susan’s sobs grew louder but she still did not answer.
Laurie took three silent steps toward the stairs. Susan was perched halfway up the staircase, her hands pressed into her lap and her face a slick red map of tears. When she saw her mother, the tears came harder. Her lower lip shook and her chin wrinkled. Walnut chin, Ted would have said.
“Hey,” Laurie said, placing a foot on the first step and a hand on the banister. “What’s the matter with you?”
“What’s the matter with you?” the girl sobbed. “You’re scaring me!”
“I’m only trying to protect you.” She ascended another step.
“I want Daddy to come home! I want Daddy!”
“I’m going to fix it, okay? I’m going to make it all better.” Two more steps. “I just want to make sure you’re safe first, Susan. I love you, honey. You know that I do. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
Susan lowered her face and cried into her lap.
“Come with me,” Laurie said, stopping two steps below Susan. She reached out and rubbed the girl’s head. She could feel the smoothness of her skull beneath her thin hair. “We’ll get you safe. Safe as milk.”
Susan struck out and swatted Laurie’s hand off her head. “No!” she shouted at her mother, simultaneously gripping the banister and pulling herself to her feet.
Laurie snatched the girl’s forearm with both hands and dragged her the rest of the way up the stairs.
Ted was less than an hour from the house when the storm hit. It didn’t begin slowly and graduate to a full-on thunderstorm; instead, it dumped out of the sky all at once, bringing traffic along the interstate to a screeching halt. Cursing audibly, he rolled up his window and tried Laurie’s cell phone again. Like the previous times, it went straight to voice mail. Similarly, the house phone kept ringing and ringing until an operator disconnected the line.
When he began to see signs for the Harbor Tunnel, he leapt up onto the shoulder and rode the rumble-strip to the exit. Two police cars sat on the other side of the median, but the rain must have made a traffic stop seem about as appealing as a tooth extraction to the officers, and neither vehicle pursued him.
There was an eight-inch butcher’s knife in one of the kitchen drawers. Laurie gripped its handle, then retrieved the flashlight from the counter, where Ted had left it after his expedition down into the wishing well. Susan’s cries were muffled now, but she could still hear them rattling around in her head. Outside, rain pattered against the bay windows. At the edge of the patio, the black-eyed Susans bobbed and whipped about, as if puppeted by strings.
Laurie undid the bolt on the side door. She turned the knob, opened the door, and was instantly accosted by a cold, rain-speckled wind more befitting of late winter than early summer. The storm had arrived. Before stepping out, she scanned the area. Trashcans stood against the siding to her left. To her right, wildflowers had been reduced to spongy green mats by the storm. The fence that ran between the two properties was overgrown with vegetation. The trees beyond resembled dancing, shambling black smears.
“Abigail.” Her voice was flat, toneless.
She stepped outside, shut the door, then quickly locked it with the key. She followed
the walkway around to the back of the house. Directly above, large mottled storm clouds pulsed with an unearthly light. When the next whip crack of thunder resounded from across the river, Laurie felt its reverberation in her back teeth.
Intermingled with the sounds of the storm was a steady banging noise.
Where are you, Abigail? Or was Sadie fully in control now?
She approached the fence and peered down beneath the whipping branches of the willow tree. The banging noise was the door in the fence; not properly latched, it slammed repeatedly against the fence post in the wind. The passageway, Laurie thought. She grabbed the door and shoved it all the way open. Rain splattered her face and soaked her shirt. On the ground, small footprints were quickly filling with brown water.
Over the storm, she thought she could hear Susan screaming for her. It took all her will to block out the sound.
A checkerboard dress passed through the trees up ahead.
I’m going to kill you.
She pursued, the knife leading the way.
The idea to call 911 didn’t come to him until he saw the massive swarm of taillights blocking all lanes of I-97 South. Even if he was overreacting—
Of course you are, Teddy-biscuit. Didn’t I tell you that a hundred times?
—he would still feel better having the police check things out.
And what will they find when they get there? A pissed-off wife who doesn’t want to talk to her cheating husband right now? I’m sure the local boys in blue will be plenty pleased about that.
“Fuck it,” he said and dialed 911.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
“I’ve been trying to reach my wife at home but she’s not answering the phone.”
“How long have you been trying to reach her?”
“A few hours. I’m worried something’s happened.”
“Is your wife sick, sir?”
“No. She’s . . . I don’t know. . . .”
“Is she expecting a call from you?”
“No, no.” His mouth was dry. “She’s angry with me.”
“What’s your name, sir?”
“Her name is Laurie.”