Little Girls (22 page)

The ladder went down into the hole, the legs sinking a few inches into the fetid sludge at the bottom. Due to the narrowness of the well, the ladder stood almost vertically. Ted jockeyed it into the most secure position he could find, wedging it between two dimpled niches in the stone. He had equipped himself with a flashlight, a plastic garbage bag, a pair of bright yellow rubber dishwashing gloves, a broken broom handle nearly three feet long, and a wire coat hanger stretched into an approximate hoop covered in a pair of Laurie’s nylons, which Ted thought looked like a makeshift pool skimmer. He had fashioned a plastic shopping bag around each of his sneakers, and they were held in place just below the knees with several rubber bands.

“Just keep the ladder steady against the stones,” he instructed Laurie before descending. “Hold on to it. I don’t want the damn thing wobbling all over the place.”

Laurie gripped the extended legs of the ladder, one in each hand. “Be careful.”

“Be careful, Daddy,” Susan repeated, glancing almost forlornly at him and then down into the pitch-black hole in the earth. “Watch out for that snake.”

He swung his right leg down into the well and set his foot on the second rung down from the top. He felt the ladder sink lower into the muck another couple of inches. Gripping the sides of the well with both hands—he had tucked the flashlight, rubber gloves, the broom handle, and makeshift skimmer into the rear waistband of his jeans—he slowly lowered himself until his left foot came down on the rung just below his right foot. The ladder sank down another inch or two, and he waited for it to settle before continuing his descent.

It was like sinking into a grave. The smell was no better—a putrid, eye-watering stench that came at him in a nearly solid cloud. Small flies and gnats dive-bombed his head; he swatted the larger ones away while still keeping a strong grip with his other hand on the rung just above his head. He imagined their tiny pinprick corpses stuck in the sweat on his forehead. Halfway down, he glanced up and saw the faces of his wife and daughter gazing down at him. They looked impossibly far away, as did the opening of the well itself, as if it had shrunk to the size of a softball while he wasn’t looking.

Two rungs up from the bottom, he stopped. The well was just slightly roomier than a manhole, and it was with some contortion that he was able to reach behind him, select the broom handle, and withdraw it from his waistband. He crouched as best he could, propping one foot flat against the wall of the well while the other balanced on the rung of the ladder, and drove the broom handle down into the peaty black sludge. It sank down several inches before it struck what felt like solid stone underneath. He felt some relief.
That’s not as bad as I’d thought.
For all he knew, it could have been a bottomless chasm that dropped straight to hell.

Releasing his grip on the broom handle, it remained standing straight up out of the muck.
I claim this land in the name of Ted.
He reached around his back again and felt for the flashlight, grabbed it, switched it on, and cast its harsh white beam down on the floor. He caught sight of the black snake retreating into a crevice between two stones, where the mortar had worn away. There were other critters down here as well—mostly bugs. Fat black beetles trundled through mossy, dark green strands of what looked like sea grass while spotted slugs appeared to respire—expanding, then deflating—each time the flashlight’s beam passed over them. Earthworms as thick as fingers squirmed and sought solace deeper into the mud. Whitish grubs wriggled up from a tarry swath of black slime; he could hear their collective movements, a sound grotesquely similar to squeezing a handful of wet noodles. There were other critters down here aside from the bugs, but these were all dead and in varying stages of decay—several water-bloated mice and a decomposed bird were among the ones he was able to identify.

With the flashlight propped under his left armpit, he grabbed the broom handle again and, like a witch stirring a cauldron, drew tracks through the muck. Before he stepped down into that mess he wanted to make perfectly sure there weren’t any other critters hiding beneath the mud. Particularly critters with teeth.

He realized pretty quickly that he would not be able to bend down with the ladder in the well with him. There just wasn’t enough room. Plus, it was slowly sinking into the mud, causing him to wonder just how deep into the earth the well went. He stepped down into the sludge and felt his plastic bag–wrapped sneakers sink into it.

“Hey,” he called up the channel, his voice reverberating till it made no sense to his own ears. The opening at the surface was no bigger than a dime now. “Pull the ladder up!”

Laurie didn’t respond, though her silhouette was still framed in the tiny lighted hole directly above his head. So was Susan’s. He was about to repeat the order when the ladder rose up out of the muck with a sucking, squelching sound, and began to ascend back up the throat of the well.

“Shit,” he grumbled, quickly swiping at his face and hair as bits of gunk rained down on him.
Didn’t think that part through.
Once the ladder was lifted out of his way and the gunk had ceased dripping down on him, he directed his attention to the muddy heap in which he stood. Again, something sparkled as it caught the beam of the flashlight. It was partially covered in mud, so Ted crouched down, tugged on the rubber dishwashing gloves, and picked it up. It was a solid gold wristwatch.

T
he items Ted found in the well included approximately seventeen dollars in loose change, a man’s gold wristwatch with a cracked crystal face, a single diamond earring (he had located only the one), a woman’s brooch that sprouted calcified tumors that looked like dried toothpaste, a few similarly calcified keys, what appeared to be the metal clasp from a girl’s barrette, a simple platinum band that looked almost identical to Ted’s wedding ring—and was in surprisingly good condition—though it was not Laurie’s, a tie clip, a money clip, and various bits of cheaper jewelry that had been reduced to reddish bits of rust. Yet the most unsettling thing was a child’s plastic baby doll, its pink body reduced to a curdled tallow hue marbled with bluish veins of rot, its features faded into nothingness from its submergence for God knew how long in that swampy, fetid water. Ted had found other things while sifting through the gunk, straining the muddy water through the coat hanger with the pantyhose stretched across it like a miner panning for gold—countless buttons, bottle caps, the rubber sole of a shoe, and other bits of garbage, all of which he left down below.

After Laurie and Susan lowered the ladder back down the hole, Ted climbed up with his plastic garbage bag dripping foul water onto the lawn. The poor guy was perspiring and smelled awful. Laurie took the bag from him while offering him a conciliatory smile. She felt as though she were on the cusp of some grand discovery, some penultimate revelation. The sensation was not dissimilar to dizzying vertigo.

While Ted hosed himself off in the yard, Laurie took the bag around to the side of the house where she entered the kitchen through the side door. Susan followed close at her heels. Laurie placed the plastic bag on the counter, stopped up the sink’s drain, then dumped the items out into the basin. Susan dragged over a chair, climbed up, and peered down into the sink and at the items it held.

“Pirate treasure,” Susan said, her voice full of awe.

Laurie rinsed off the items beneath a lukewarm spray. The nicer jewelry cleaned up better than the cheap stuff. The gold watch had been her father’s; she remembered stealing it from a little hand-carved box he kept in his study and giving it to Sadie at Sadie’s behest. She hadn’t wanted to do it but Sadie held some power over her. Similarly, she remembered stealing the diamond earrings from her mother’s jewelry box. Sadie had worn them a few times to school but never at home and never around Laurie’s parents. When Laurie had asked for them back—her mother had become frantic trying to locate them throughout the house—Sadie had refused. She had laughed and warned Laurie that she would get the shoe box again.
It has flies on it now,
Sadie had said of the bloody tampon in the box.
Big black flies. And if you tattle on me, I’ll make you put it in your mouth with all those big black flies on it. I’ll make you put it
down there,
too.
Then one day Sadie had stopped wearing the earrings. Only now did Laurie realize where at least one of them had ended up.

Laurie blinked. The power of the memory had been strong and sudden. At her elbow, Susan was staring at her with a mix of apprehension and confusion in her dark eyes. Laurie summoned a smile for her daughter. After some hesitation, Susan offered her one back.

“Where did all this stuff come from, Mom?”

“From years and years of people throwing it down in there,” she said.

“Why would someone throw jewelry down a well?”

“Sometimes people do silly things, Susan.”

“I bet those things have snake poop on them.”

“I’ll bet some of them do,” Laurie said.

The side door banged as Ted came into the kitchen. He had his sneakers in his hands and the cuffs of his jeans rolled up. His hair was wet and slicked back. “That’s some booty, huh, ladies?”

“There was only one earring down there?”

“As far as I could tell. There are some cracks in the mortar and a small drain in the wall. The drain had a mesh covering over it but it was all rusted and there were pieces missing from it. I guess the other earring could have gotten washed away. Not to mention I don’t know how deep that sludge is on the bottom. There could be a triceratops skeleton down there.” He ran a hand through his wet hair, then sniffed the palm and made a face. “You think any of that stuff is worth anything?”

“Some of it, maybe. The diamond. Maybe the gold watch, though I’m sure the works are ruined. It was my father’s.”

“How does a man’s gold watch wind up at the bottom of a well?” When Laurie didn’t respond, he said, “I’m gonna grab a shower.”

With her thumbnail, Laurie attempted to scrape some of the calcification off the face of the brooch. This had also been her mother’s, passed down to her from Laurie’s grandmother. She felt sick to her stomach just holding it.

“I knew it,” said Susan. “I knew we’d find real treasure.”

“Yes.” Laurie set the brooch down on the kitchen counter. “Why don’t you go upstairs and clean yourself up, too?”

“Okay.” Susan hopped down from the chair and scampered off.

Laurie picked up the doll. Water streamed from the seams where its limbs met its body. Its face looked like that of a burn victim, its features melted and indistinct. She turned it upside down and heard what sounded like a stone tumble through its body.

Something crashed in the parlor. Laurie jumped, knocking the earring into the sink. The diamond stud rolled around the basin, though before it could disappear down the drain, Laurie caught it. She set it back on the countertop and then went out in the parlor.

Her father’s urn had been knocked off the fireplace mantel. It lay in pieces at the foot of the hearth, its grayish, powdery contents in a dusty heap in the center of the broken pieces. It looked like a prehistoric egg someone had dropped, its yolk turned to ancient dust.

“Susan?”

But Susan didn’t answer. Laurie crept closer and saw the approximation of a partial footprint in the ashes. When a cool breeze struck her back, she turned around and saw one of the parlor windows was open. She expected to find dusty footprints leading to the window, but there were none. Cold, she shut the window, locked it. Then she swept up the broken bits of urn and her father’s ashes into a dustpan, and dumped them unceremoniously into the kitchen trash.

When she turned around, she found herself staring at the plastic doll on the kitchen counter. It lay facing her, its blank eyes staring right through her. She had dropped it on the counter when she heard the crash from the parlor, but now it looked as though it had been perfectly positioned to watch her from across the room.

She went to it, brought it over to the sink. She moved the arms up and down, spilling more gray water into the basin. Gripping the head, she gave it a sharp twist and jerked it sideways until it popped off. It could have been an actual corpse for how rancid the smell was coming out of it. She turned the doll upside down, leaking black sludge into the sink. Something else tumbled out as well, the item she had mistaken for a stone when she initially upended the doll. But it wasn’t a stone. It was a large brass key with the number 58 engraved on it.

 

Laurie spent the rest of the evening wondering if she was losing her mind. By dinnertime, she suggested they order pizza, telling them she was too tired to cook. Ted pulled a face, but didn’t comment. Susan cheered. When the pizza arrived, they ate in the parlor. Mourning the loss of the Victrola, Ted selected similar music from his iTunes playlist and cranked up the speakers on his laptop. Susan no longer laughed at the old music; she now listened to it with her eyebrows knitted together and her mouth set in an appearance of concentration that showed some hint of approval.

“Could it be true?” Ted said as they were halfway through a Schubert composition. “Has the obstinate young
ragazzina
actually begun to appreciate the music?”

Susan wrinkled her nose. “It’s just okay,” she said, snapping from her trancelike stare at the computer screen. There was pizza grease at the corners of her mouth.

“I can’t believe they took the phonograph but left the records,” he said. “Do you care if I keep them? Or did you not want them to come back to Hartford with us?”

Laurie blinked and looked at him. She had been in a fog and hadn’t fully been listening. “The records? No, that’s fine. Keep them if you want.” She shrugged. The slice of pizza in the plate on her lap had hardly been touched.

“Are you feeling okay, Laurie?”

“I’m still just a little tired.”

“You should go to bed early tonight.”

“You’re probably right.”

Ted sipped at a lowball glass of amber liquor—more of what he’d been scavenging from the liquor cabinet since their arrival at the house. When he set the glass down, he said, “In all the commotion today, I forgot to tell you that Steve Markham called. The meeting with Fish is set up for Friday afternoon in Manhattan. He’s also got us a meeting right after with the producers to talk about something else I’ve been working on. You know that play about the ex-priest and the prostitute?”

“This Friday?” she said. It was already Tuesday.

“I’ll leave early in the morning and drive back after the meetings. You won’t even have time to miss me.”

“You won’t be too tired? Maybe you should go up the night before.”

He laughed. “Now you sound like Markham.”

“I just don’t want you to blow your opportunity.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” he said.

After dinner, Susan practiced for forty-five minutes on the piano while Ted sat beside her, instructing. Several times he corrected her finger placement on the keys and showed her how to work her thumb under her hand to “glide” to the next key to create a more fluid scale. Restless, Laurie looked in on them every once in a while, though she found it nearly impossible to sit in one place for any sustainable length of time. Several times she went into the kitchen to look at the items Ted had salvaged from the well. Some were laid out on a square of paper towel—the watch, the ring, the diamond earring, and a few other things. Some of the other items that had been more corroded—the brooch, the keys, most of the coins—were soaking in a pot of mineral acids, which Laurie had located in the basement under the stairs among other sundries. Some of the corrosion had come apart, but she could already tell that the image on the face of the brooch was gone for good.

Here they are,
Laurie thought,
all of Sadie’s evil secrets. What horrible wish did you make on that brooch to punish me and keep me in your grasp, Sadie? What evil thing did you hope for? That my mother would die? How about the gold watch? Were you trying to orphan me, you little monster?
Thinking of this now, it astounded Laurie at how calculating and manipulative Sadie Russ had been. She tried to think of Susan behaving in such a fashion—she was just about the same age as Sadie had been when she died—but she found it impossible. There were uncharted depths within her daughter, just as there were in all little girls, Laurie knew, but she did not believe Susan was capable of anything even remotely as wicked.
And if Sadie Russ has truly come back as Abigail Evans, to what purpose? To exact some kind of revenge on me? Did she break into this house and murder my father just to lure me back here after all these years?
This last thought was outlandish enough to snap her back to reality. Sadie Russ had been dead for almost thirty years. People weren’t reincarnated as other people. Or, if they were, they didn’t look the same, and they certainly didn’t come back seeking revenge. Yet . . . those things Abigail had said to her . . .

When Laurie came back out into the parlor, Ted and Susan were just finishing up a duet of “Camptown Races” on the piano. As the final notes sustained, Ted slung an arm around his daughter and squeezed her. They were both grinning goofily at each other. When they sensed Laurie behind them, they turned around, still grinning.

“Did you hear us, Mom? Pretty good, huh?”

“Very good. But it’s time for bed now.”

Susan groaned.

Ted rubbed is daughter’s head and said, “Tomorrow’s another day. Get up early and start fresh.”

Susan swung her legs over the piano bench and stood up. “I can’t wait to tell Abigail about the pirate treasure we found in the well today.”

“I don’t want you to play with Abigail anymore,” Laurie said.

Both Susan and Ted turned to look at her. The matching expression on their faces would have been comical had they not looked
so much
alike at that moment—so much that they could have been one complete person split suddenly into two.

“How come?” Susan said.

“Because I don’t like her. She’s a bad influence.”

Ted looked like he wanted to smile—like he thought she might be joking with him—but he couldn’t quite get there. “Are you serious, Laurie?”

“You should have seen her the other day down at the park,” Laurie said. “She was out of control. She threw rocks at some girl and hurt her, made her cry. And then she wouldn’t listen when Liz called her over.”

“The other girl threw rocks first!” Susan countered.

Laurie glared at her daughter. “No talk backs.”

“It’s not fair!”

“Hush up for a second, Susan,” Ted told her. “Laurie, what exactly happened?”

“Just what I said. She was out of control, and she’s certainly not the type of girl our daughter should be playing with.”

“There’s no one else here,” Susan moaned.

“Susan knows better than to do what some other kid does.” Ted was trying to be diplomatic, but Laurie thought he just sounded condescending. “She’s old enough and smart enough to know right from wrong.”

“You didn’t see what I saw, Ted. This is not up for discussion. I’ve been thinking about it for a few days now.” She turned back to Susan, whose eyes were red and glassy now. “Do you understand me? I forbid you to play with that girl.”