Little Girls
Page 33
“How are you feeling?”
“How did you find me?” Her voice was hardly a wheeze. “How did I get here? I don’t remember.”
“I came home. Susan saw you go off into the woods. I found you in that greenhouse. You’d cut . . . you’d hurt yourself pretty badly. You were unconscious when I got there.”
“Susan?”
“She’s fine.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s fine. She’s safe. Babe, relax. Your heart monitor’s racing.” He took one of her hands in his. Hers was cold. “Laurie, what happened? Why’d you do this to yourself?”
“It was Sadie.”
“Who?”
“The little girl who lived next door to me when I was a kid,” she rasped. “The one who fell through the greenhouse—”
“And died,” he finished. “Yes.”
“She came back. She was going to hurt Susan if I didn’t . . .” Her eyes went distant. She tried to struggle up off the bed but it took little effort for Ted to keep her down.
“You need to relax, Laurie. You need to lie here and get better. Do you understand?”
“You and Susan have to get out of that house.”
“We will. As soon as they let you out of this place, we’ll all leave together.”
“No,” she croaked at him. “You have to do it now.”
He squeezed her hand gently. “Okay, okay. We will.” “Promise me.”
“I promise. Scout’s honor.”
“Ted, that girl was in the house. My father wasn’t just hearing noises—she was really there.”
“That’s not true, Laurie. Sadie is dead.”
“No. Sadie is Abigail. She’s been in our house while we were there, too.”
“No, she hasn’t.”
“You don’t know, Ted. Remember the cuff link? My father’s cuff link? Susan hadn’t been lying—it was Abigail who’d come into the house and taken them. She had my mother’s diamond earring and she was digging it out of the same hole where she and Susan had been burying—”
“Susan took the cuff link.”
Laurie’s lower lip quivered. “What?”
“I didn’t tell you. I spoke with her like I said I would and she admitted that she had taken the cuff links from your father’s study. She was too ashamed to tell you so she told me. So, you see, no one was in the house. No one but Susan took those cuff links. You see?”
Even as her facial muscles relaxed, the terror in Laurie’s eyes did not abate.
“What?” he said. “What is it?”
“That’s true? What you just told me?”
“Yes.”
“Then . . .”
“Then what?”
“Then I’m crazy. I’m crazy, Ted. If none of it is real, that means I imagined it all. It means I’m out of my—”
“It means you’re stressed. Your father just passed away and you’ve had unresolved issues with that. Then you made that discovery—you remember it, right? The girls—”
She closed her eyes. “Yes.”
“Laurie, your father was a very bad man. You were lucky to have been taken from him when you were a kid.”
She opened her eyes and just stared at him.
He leaned in and kissed the side of her face. It was like kissing a wax sculpture. “Then there’s you and me. Mostly me. I’m no good. We can talk about that once you’re better. I just want to tell you that I’m sorry. Incredibly sorry.”
“I know you are. It’s okay. We can work through it, can’t we?”
He felt something lurch forward in his chest. “God, yes. Yes, we really can, Laurie. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I want to work it out. I want us all to be happy—you, me, and Susan.”
“That’s all I want,” he said.
She smiled thinly at him, then turned away. He could see her eyes welling up with tears, and once again she looked very fearful.
“You’re not crazy,” he told her. “You’re going to be okay.”
She whispered, “Okay.” Then she smiled at him, which caused her cheeks to come to points. “Okay. Thank you.”
“Can I get you anything before I leave?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Good. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
He turned and went to the door but she called him back.
“When I get out of here,” she said, “I’ve got something to tell you. It’s something that happened a long time ago—something I did—but I feel the need to tell you. And maybe this way you won’t ever let me forget it. Maybe this way it’ll set things right.”
He nodded.
“It was a terrible thing,” she said. “I’m my father’s daughter, after all.”
He was surprised to find himself close to tears.
It was almost midnight by the time he arrived back at the house on Annapolis Road. The storm still raged and there were downed trees blocking the driveway. He parked as close to the house as he could, then raced across the yard with the collar of his sport coat tugged over his head.
The house was dark. The Rosewoods had been kind enough to take Susan off his hands and let her sleep over. She had been so rattled by what Laurie had done that she hardly seemed like herself. She was eager to spend the night with Abigail, and Ted considered that a small victory.
He fixed himself a drink, then languished on the sofa in the parlor, the lights off. The sound of the rain kept lulling him in and out of sleep.
They would all require some recovery. Not just physically, but emotionally. Laurie would need to speak with a therapist—he had insisted on it after her inexplicable blackout on the highway last year—and this time he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was willing to seek counseling to salvage their marriage, too. It was important to him, though perhaps he hadn’t realized just how important until he arrived back in Hartford without them. They would have to be open and honest with each other from here on out—no more secrets, no more lies. No more living separate lives under the same roof.
In that case, you’re off to a good start, Teddy-biscuit, he thought now, his mind already retiring to some shadowed corner of half-sleep. The woman was not even conscious a full five minutes and you were already lying to her face.
She’d said, That’s true? What you just told me?
He’d said, Yes.
Maybe some lies are good lies, if they help a person, he convinced himself. Does it really matter that I lied to her about the cuff link if it makes her feel better? He had never asked Susan about it. In fact, he had forgotten about it until Laurie brought it up again tonight.
Soon, his thoughts collided with other thoughts. He dreamt he was a grown man sleeping in a child’s bed—his own childhood bed—only to be awakened in the middle of the night by the terrible clash of thunder. When he went to look for his parents, he found their dusty corpses spun in spiderwebs propped up in their bed. Downstairs, in the dog crate, Stooge had been turned inside-out, his entrails gleaming like wet, purple snakes in the moonlight. Then, at another point in the dream, he thought he heard the distant wails of a little girl—Susan?—calling out to him in the night. Shrieking. After a while, the cries went silent.
When he awoke in real life, it was because the telephone in the kitchen was ringing. In the midst of Laurie’s madness, she had also shut the ringer off on the phone—he had realized this yesterday, while waiting for Laurie’s doctor to call. Outside, the storm had stopped. Daylight crept up over the trees. Birds sang brightly.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Ted, it’s Liz Rosewood from next door. I’m sorry to wake you so early, but I just got up and Abigail told me about Susan getting upset in the middle of the night. Ted, I had no idea she went back over to your place, and I’m completely embarrassed. I’ve already scolded Abigail—she should have told me and I would have come over and sat with Susan until you came home.”
Ted scratched his forehead and stared at the glistening raindrops on the bay windows.<
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“Anyway, I just wanted to apologize. Is Susan all right?”
“To be honest, she isn’t up yet. I haven’t seen her. I didn’t even realize she was here last night.”
“I hope you’re not upset.”
“Not at all.”
“How’s Laurie?”
“She was awake. We spoke for a little bit.”
“Will she be okay?”
“I think so.” What he almost said was, I hope so. It was what he meant, anyway.
“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” Liz said. “I’ll bring some lunch by for you and Susan later today.”
“Please don’t trouble yourself.”
“I insist.”
“All right. Thank you.”
He hung up the phone, filled up the coffeepot, then wandered out into the front hall. Peering through the windows, he could see the damage left behind in the wake of the storm—the felled trees, the trash strewn about the yard, some of the fence pickets broken. Apparently, the wind had been strong enough to tear the plywood cover off the well, bricks and all.
He climbed up the stairs and went down the hall to Susan’s bedroom door. The door was closed. He knocked on it.
When she didn’t answer, he knocked again.
When she still didn’t answer, he opened the door, poked his head in, and called out, “Susan?”
The room was empty. He stood there for a few seconds, puzzling over this. Then he went back downstairs and searched the rest of the house, but she wasn’t there. By this time, he was replaying the phone call with Liz in his head and wondered if he’d misunderstood her. He considered calling her back up for clarification, but in the end, decided he would just walk next door.
It was cold outside. He went down the porch steps and cut across the yard, pausing to survey the bricks that had been tossed about, the sheet of plywood that lay discarded on the lawn. Must have been some wind last night.
He kept walking across the lawn, then paused. Some nonspecific disquiet had settled all around him. It was as if he’d inadvertently walked through a spider’s web. Something didn’t sit right.
He turned around and cut back toward the house, stepping over the discarded bricks and maneuvering around the sheet of plywood. Crickets sang in the overgrown grass. A cool breeze rustled the leaves in the trees.
He peered over the side of the well and looked into the darkness.
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Copyright © 2015 Ronald Malfi
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ISBN: 978-1-6177-3606-3
First Electronic Edition: July 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1-61773-607-0
ISBN-10: 1-61773-607-4