Little Girls (17 page)

She bent and kissed the side of Ted’s face. “I’m not mad.”

“Does that mean we can go out and have a nice time?”

Her blood cooled at the idea of leaving the house while Susan was next door. But really, wasn’t she being foolish? Maybe Ted was right after all—maybe it was all just stress and nothing more.

“Yes,” she said. “That sounds nice.”

“Derrick Rosewood told me of a great wine bar downtown. Run upstairs and get dressed?”

 

Laurie showered and dressed in a pair of sleek black slacks and a beige halter top. They were the best clothes she had packed, since she hadn’t anticipated a night on the town while packing her suitcase back in Hartford. As they climbed into the Volvo, Laurie’s anxiety over leaving Susan with the Rosewoods had subsided to a remote disquiet, like the solitary light shining in the window of a house that was supposed to be vacant.

“Derrick Rosewood says it’s the best spot in town,” Ted said as he backed the car down the winding driveway.

As it turned out, it was a nice spot. They sampled different kinds of wine and instead of ordering meals, they snacked on assorted cheese platters, toasted breads, caviar and crackers, escargot, and plates of Italian olives throughout the evening. Ted talked a lot about the play he was working on. After some wine, his complaints about John Fish transitioned to a more diplomatic opinion of what a successful adaptation of Fish’s work could mean for Ted’s career. “Even if we don’t open on Broadway,” he said through a mouthful of escargot, “Fish’s name will bring A-list talent to the production. It could change things for us, Laurie. It could change a lot of things.”

“What about the outline?”

“I’ve decided not to worry about it until I hear back from Steve. I’m hoping this can get squared away as painlessly as possible. And besides, what Fish is asking for is virtually impossible, so it’s not like they can replace me with some other writer.”

She smiled.

“You know,” he said at one point, “you should really start painting again.”

“I’ve thought about it.”

“Have you?”

“It’s probably no different than your writing. A seed is planted in the center of your brain and something inside you just . . . well, it turns it into something. It wants to come out, wants to break free. It’s like growing a plant.” She thought about her father’s greenhouse, now a desolate tomb hidden deep in the woods beyond the house. This made her think of Sadie Russ, and what happened to her.

“What?” said Ted. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing. My mind’s just wandering, that’s all.”

“How’d that cop get up into that room today? I thought we didn’t have a key for the padlock on the door.”

“We do now. I picked it up earlier today.”

Ted frowned. “Picked it up from whom?”

“Teresa Larosche. She met me in Annapolis this afternoon. You were busy working and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“This woman was your father’s night nurse, right?”

“Yes.” She drank some wine and then added, “I also read the police report filed by the officer who responded to my dad’s death. Turned out it was in with some of David Cushing’s papers after all.” She fabricated this last part because she feared she would sound too paranoid admitting to him that she had contacted the county police and requested the report. It hadn’t seemed paranoid to her at the time—in fact, it had seemed perfectly natural—but now she wasn’t quite sure. “Ted, my father didn’t open the window before he jumped out.”

Based on the expression that came across Ted’s face, she didn’t think he had properly heard her.

“He jumped right through the glass,” she restated. “One of the windows up there is shattered and there’s a big piece of wood covering it up.”

“That’s just horrible,” he said, his voice small. All of a sudden, his eyes had become these furtive little beads that she didn’t quite trust. They looked wholly unfamiliar to her.

“Teresa Larosche said he had been concerned that someone was trying to break into the house at night, that someone was trying to come after him.”

“The guy was probably paranoid about a lot of things.”

“And now that police detective who came by, he took some fingerprints. . . .”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m wondering if my father jumped at all,” she said, “or if maybe someone pushed him.”

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.”