Little Girls (27 page)

There was nothing for him to say to this. He simply stared at her, a dumbstruck look on his face. For the first time since she had known him, he actually looked his age. There were dark patches beneath his eyes with spidery crow’s feet at the corners. His skin looked sallow and nearly transparent. Blood vessels as thin as hairs networked across his cheeks. His appearance gave her some dark satisfaction.

“Okay,” he said at last, and left the kitchen.

 

Though exhausted, she needed a shower. While under the tepid spray, she wept quietly for a full ten minutes, her sadness confused by the fusillade of betrayal she’d felt in the past forty-eight hours. A husband whose infidelity forced her to reexamine herself. A father whose black, unfathomable secrets had just floated to the surface. The only solace she found, which beckoned to her like the pinprick radiance of a distant star, was in the probability that she had been wrong about Abigail Evans after all. Sadie Russ had come back all right, but it hadn’t been to continue tormenting and torturing her. She had come back to reveal a truth that had long been hidden—that her father had done unspeakable things to little girls. Perhaps it was Sadie’s way of atoning for the evil she had brought unto Laurie when they had both been little girls. Perhaps this was Sadie Russ’s salvation from beyond the grave. With some despondency, Laurie wondered what would happen to Abigail Evans now that Sadie’s work was done. Would the girl return to her normal self, no longer the vessel needed for Sadie’s handiwork? Or would the girl simply blink out of existence altogether, as if she had never truly existed in the first place?

T
ed left before noon. Laurie was asleep upstairs, on the mattress that had been left on the floor after McCall’s haulers had taken the bedframe. Ted had spent the evening on the sofa downstairs, and he had already relocated his luggage to the foyer so that he wouldn’t disturb Laurie when he left. As it was, she had already been awake for about an hour, hearing him fumble around downstairs, until she finally heard the front door open and close. A moment later, she heard the Volvo’s engine start up. The urge to go to the window and watch his retreat was strong, but she resisted. Once the sound of the engine dissipated, she lay on the mattress staring at the shapes that seemed to coalesce then disengage in the stucco ceiling.

At two-thirty, an unmarked police car pulled up the driveway. A fresh-faced cop in a frumpy brown suit knocked on the front door. Laurie had just finished showering and her hair was still wet. She pulled her hair back into a short ponytail as she hurried to the front door.

“Hi, Mrs. Genarro. Detective Freeling said to pick you up and bring you to the station for your statement.”

“I’m just a few minutes behind,” she said, propping open the door and waving him inside. “Would you like something to drink?”

“No, ma’am.” He spoke with a heavy Baltimore accent that stretched out his words and made them sound lazy. “I’m just fine, thank you.”

Upstairs, she poked her head into Susan’s bedroom. Susan sat on the edge of her bed lacing up her Keds. The girl looked despondent. Laurie wondered how much of the discussion her daughter had overheard last night.

“You okay, kiddo?”

“Tummy feels yucky.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It just feels yucky.”

Laurie pressed her lips to the girl’s forehead to gauge her temperature. “You don’t feel hot.”

Frowning, Susan shrugged.

“There’s a cop downstairs waiting to take us to the police station. You ready to go?”

“Will he turn on the lights and sirens?”

“Probably not, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

 

The cop, whose name was Freddy Shannon, did not turn on the lights and siren, though he did seem amused by the request. Instead, he let Susan sit up front and listen to the squawking radio while Laurie sat in the back.

“Have you ever been in a car chase?” Susan asked.

“Nope,” Shannon said.

“Have you ever shot somebody?”

“Nope.”

“Have you ever done that thing where you give somebody electric shocks?”

“You mean a Taser?”

“Yeah, that’s it!”

“Nope.”

“Oh. Well, have you ever seen a dead body?”

“Sure have,” said Shannon brightly.

“Really? Oh, wow, was it all nasty like in the movies?”

Laurie cleared her throat and said, “Susan.”

“No, ma’am,” Shannon said to Susan, though his smiling eyes glanced up at Laurie in the rearview mirror. “Wasn’t nasty at all.”

“No?”

“Nope. Was quite peaceful and nice. The fella was done up in his favorite suit and tie and there were all these beautiful flowers all around him.”

Susan made a face that suggested she smelled something awful. “Who was he?”

“Uncle Hubert,” said Freddy Shannon. “Was a real nice funeral.”

The police station was a squat redbrick building with flagpoles out front. Freddy Shannon led them inside, through a vestibule where women sat behind bulletproof glass, down a hallway carpeted in garish fire-retardant berber, and into a small office. The office was empty of personnel, but there were two desks piled high with clutter. A dry erase board hung from one wall, the ghosts of ancient cases still faintly visible despite having been erased. The only photo on the wall was of the governor.

“Can I get you guys a soda or something?” Shannon said.

“No, thanks,” Laurie said before Susan could interject. “We’re good.”

“Detective Freeling got caught up with some other business, but he should be here in a couple of minutes.”

“Thank you.”

When Shannon left, Laurie sat down in one of the two empty chairs that faced the nearest desk. Susan went over to the dry erase board and picked up one of the markers. She popped the cap off, then looked at her mother. “Will they care if I draw?”

“They might arrest you for vandalism.”

Susan snapped the cap back on the marker, then claimed the empty seat beside Laurie.

When Detective Freeling arrived a few minutes later, he had his shirtsleeves cuffed to the elbows and a hasty air about him. A gun and gold shield hung on his hip. He apologized for keeping them waiting. “Things popped up this morning, which I’ll tell you about momentarily,” he said.

“More information about the girls?”

“Not exactly,” Detective Freeling said as he dropped down behind the desk.

“Mommy, what girls?”

“Detective, is there a place where my daughter can wait while we do this?”

“Of course.” He jumped up and went to the door, opened it, and shouted someone’s name down the hallway. When he turned back around, his face was red. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”

“Not a problem.”

“Will Mr. Genarro be joining us?”

“My daddy left,” Susan said before Laurie could respond. “He went back to Hartford without us.”

One of Detective Freeling’s eyebrows went up. He looked at Laurie.

“He had a business meeting in Manhattan,” Laurie explained.

“Oh,” said the detective.

An attractive young woman with a boyish bob of hair appeared in the doorway. She wore sensible rimless glasses, a tweed pantsuit, and a lanyard around her neck. She smiled brightly at both Laurie and Susan.

“Susan,” Detective Freeling said, “this is Miss Debbie. She just intercepted a whole shipment of illegal unicorns, princess gowns, pixie dust, and mermaids. Would you like to go with her and take a look?”

Susan’s jaw unhinged. Laurie laughed.

“You’re terrible,” Miss Debbie said to Detective Freeling. “Susan, hon, I’m Debbie. We don’t have any unicorns or mermaids or whatever, but we do have a litter of puppies in the sally port, if you’d like to come see them.”

Susan sprung up out of her chair. “Yes, please! Can I, Mom?”

Laurie nodded. “Go on.”

“Neat.” She bounded over to Miss Debbie, then followed the woman out into the hallway.

Detective Freeling shut the door and returned to his desk. “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine with Debs. Cute kid.”

“Thank you. Detective, I’ve never done this before. I wasn’t sure what to expect.”

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s no big deal.” He was rifling around the desk drawers in search of something. “I’ll just turn on a recorder and have you tell me everything you told me last night. Couldn’t be simpler.” He frowned, then rubbed his forehead. He had big hands. “If I can
find
the recorder.”

She pointed to the breast pocket of his shirt, where something small and mechanical-looking stuck out. “Is that it?”

He glanced down, then smiled at her embarrassedly. “Yeah, that’s it.” He pulled the recorder out and fiddled with it. “This ain’t even my office. Normally, we’d do this at my desk, but it’s a cube, and there are about twenty other bucket heads moping around back there right now. Here.” He swiped some papers off to the side to clear some room on the desk. “I’ll turn it on, do a little preamble, and then you just tell your story. Don’t get nervous, it’s not a big deal. If you flub it up real bad, we can kill it and start again. Sound good?”

“Let’s do it.”

Detective Freeling hit the record button and then set the recorder down on the desk. He glanced at his wristwatch—a digital Casio that looked like he’d probably had it since high school—and said in a strangely official voice, “This is Detective Brian Freeling, Anne Arundel County Police, Eastern District.” He recited the time and the date, then nodded for Laurie to go ahead.

 

When she had finished, Detective Freeling switched off the tape recorder and dropped it back in the breast pocket of his dress shirt.

“Don’t forget it’s there,” she joked.

“Oh. Ha ha, yeah, no sweat. It’ll probably wind up going through the wash tonight.” He got up and dragged his chair around to her side of the desk, then sat down. “Hey, listen, I said I had some more news for you. It’s about your dad.”

“Oh. I thought you said it had nothing to do with Tanya Albrecht.”

“It doesn’t. It has to do with your dad’s death.”

She realized she was fumbling with the clasp on her purse. She stopped.

“He didn’t fall out that window,” Detective Freeling said. “He was pushed.”

“Someone—” she began, then cut herself off. Suddenly, her face felt very hot.

“We got a confession and made the arrest this morning.”

“Who?” The word squeaked out of her. She thought for sure he was going to say,
Some little girl named Abigail Evans. Ever heard of her?

“Teresa Larosche,” said Freeling. “She was your dad’s nighttime caretaker.”

Laurie shook her head. “No. That can’t be.”

“Her fingerprints were in the third-floor room—on the inside of the doorknob, around the windowsill where your father went out. I went back to her apartment for a second interview, just to sew up the loose ends, and she must have figured that I knew something that I didn’t. When I started asking about the fingerprints, she broke down and confessed.”

“When did this happen?” Shock had dried out her mouth, making it difficult to speak properly.

“Early this morning. She’s in lockup now. Been cooperative all morning.”

“I don’t . . . I don’t understand. What . . . what exactly happened?”

“She’s a very disturbed young lady, Mrs. Genarro. You’ve met her once, correct?”

“Yes. She’s the one who gave me the key to the room on the roof. She seemed worried about something—scared, even—but she didn’t strike me as someone who would . . .”

He showed her his palms, as if to say,
Well, folks, there you have it.

“Why did she do it?”

“Because he frightened the hell out of her,” said Freeling. “When she first started talking, I thought she was setting herself up for a self-defense argument, but she didn’t go there. My guess now is that a good lawyer might try to get her to plead to temporary insanity.”

“Because he
frightened
her?”

“I know, it sounds ridiculous.”

No,
she thought.
It doesn’t.
Even now, she could hear Teresa Larosche’s words thundering through her head, clear as a bell:
And do you want to hear something ridiculous? After a while, he started to convince
me
of it. And I started to think, shit, what if he’s right? He seems so certain,
what if he’s right?
Soon, I started waking
myself
up just to go around the house and make sure the doors were all locked. And, see, that freaked me out even more because, you know, just like I said—what if his dementia was contagious? What if it had somehow seeped into me?

“It doesn’t sound ridiculous at all,” she said. “Not after last night.”

“She asked to speak with you.”

“Teresa?”

“Normally, we wouldn’t bother, but in this case . . . well, it would be strictly for your benefit, not hers. Unless you don’t want to, of course.”

She didn’t know how to feel about this.

“I just thought you might have some questions,” Detective Freeling said. “This whole thing came out of nowhere. I just thought it might do you some good. Like I said, she’s been cooperative. She hasn’t even requested an attorney, despite her boyfriend’s protestations.”

“Toby,” she said.

“Ah, you’ve met the inimitable Toby.”

“No. Teresa mentioned him the day we met.”

“He’s a piece of work.” He stood up. “Like I said, Mrs. Genarro, it’s up to you. If you just want to get home, I’ll have Freddy take you back right now.”

“No,” she said. “I’d like to speak with her.”

T
eresa Larosche sat in a cell by herself at the end of a cellblock that was rank with the stink of perspiration. Detective Freeling led Laurie down the cellblock past other jailed offenders, each one looking like a caged animal awaiting euthanasia. There was a folding chair set up in the hall facing Teresa’s cell. It reminded her of when Jodie Foster went to talk with Anthony Hopkins’s character in
The Silence of the Lambs.

Teresa Larosche was seated on a bench, her head down, her bleached hair hanging over her eyes. She wasn’t wearing the Hannibal Lecter–style jumpsuit that would have completed the visual, but a plain black T-shirt and jeans. The laces had been removed from her sneakers and she wore none of the jewelry she had worn on the day Laurie had met her for coffee. When the young woman looked up at her, she could see that there was no makeup on her face, either. Her eyes looked haunted.

Detective Freeling placed a hand on Laurie’s shoulder. “When you’re finished, just come back down the hall and push the intercom button by the door.” He smelled like aftershave lotion.

“Okay. Thanks.”

Once Detective Freeling was halfway down the hall, Laurie sat in the folding chair. In the cell, Teresa’s eyes were red, bleary orbs that leaked wet tracks down her cheeks. She looked much older than the woman whom Laurie had met at the Brickfront coffee shop, though only slightly more frightened.

“I’m sorry for lying to you,” Teresa said.

“But not for killing my father,” Laurie said. “Why did you do it?”

“Because he was poisoning me. Because he was getting into my head and I had to stop him from doing that.”

“Why didn’t you just quit?”

“It wouldn’t have done any good. Even when I wasn’t there—you know, during the day—it was like he was still inside my head. Remember that movie I told you about? The crazy guy and the psychiatrist or whatever?”

“I remember.”

“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You feel it, too.”

“In the next few days, there will be a story in the news about my father. I can’t tell you about it now, but you’ll know what it is when it happens. So while I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, it isn’t hard for me to comprehend just how horrible he might have been toward you. Believe me on that.”

Teresa hung her head again. The part in her scalp looked very pink.

“How did you do it?”

“I told you the door was unlocked, but I didn’t know how it had gotten that way. Well, that’s not true. I unlocked it. He swore someone was up there, trying to get in. At first he wanted the door locked to keep them out, but then he wanted to go up there and confront whoever it was. That’s when I really started to get scared. I thought I heard someone up there, too. So I left the door unlocked. In the night, he got out of bed and went up there. He began screaming. Then crying. I went up and he was there, naked, shouting at the walls. Tears were coming down his face. He had . . . there was . . . my God, this huge fucking erection. And he had taken a . . . um, he’d defecated on the floor, too. And then I couldn’t be sure if he was crying or laughing.

“When he saw me, he called me someone else’s name. I could feel his sickness crawling around in my brain. He had a sickness in him, just like my old man had his
own
sickness. Those things poison a person. Well, I was done being poisoned.”

Teresa looked up at her. The young woman’s face had gone slack.

“He pointed to the broken window, said that’s how they’d been getting in the house. He had cut himself on the glass, too, and was bleeding all over the rug.”

“So, wait,” Laurie said. “The window was already broken?”

Teresa nodded. “He was so
big.
I kept shoving him backward, I guess to keep him away from me, but also to shut him up, shut him up, shut him up. I thought the only way to stop the poison from going through my veins was to
shut him up.”

She spoke those final three words through clenched teeth.

“So you pushed him out the window.”

“To shut him up,” Teresa said, her voice now a whisper.

“What name did he call you?” Laurie asked, wondering if she would actually say
Sadie
or
Abigail,
but knowing that it would be the same name her father had mistakenly called her during their last phone call—
Tanya.
But it wasn’t Tanya’s name, either.

“It was
your
name, Mrs. Genarro,” Teresa said. “It was
Laurie
.”

 

Susan complained about stomach pains the whole ride back to the house. This time, they were chauffeured by a uniformed officer in a squad car. Laurie and Susan both sat in the back behind a mesh cage like animals. The officer said nothing until he got lost and had to ask for directions to Annapolis Road. When they arrived home, Laurie located some Tums with her toiletries and gave two to Susan.

“Blech,” Susan bemoaned. “Tastes like chalk.”

“Why don’t you go lie down and I’ll call you when dinner’s ready?”

“What’s for dinner?”

“How about spaghetti?”

“Okay.”

Once Susan had gone upstairs, Laurie poured herself a stiff drink from the remaining bottles on the piano. It tasted like turpentine and she nearly gagged. She thought about the events of the past couple of weeks . . . and found she was wrapped in a blanket of unease concerning the status of her own sanity. This hadn’t been some ghost story. There was no menacing presence haunting her and pointing out clues. There was no Hateful Beast, no Vengeance. Her father had been murdered by Teresa Larosche. Perhaps the only ghosts in this tale were the ones that plagued her father’s deteriorating and guilt-ridden mind as well as the ones that no doubt populated Teresa Larosche’s nightmares. She had believed in the return of a vengeful spirit the way small children believe in Santa Claus. What did that say about her sanity?

In the kitchen, Laurie dialed Harmony Simmons’s number. She got the realtor’s voice mail, left a message, and hung up.

 

She was halfway through cooking dinner when Susan appeared in the kitchen doorway, sobbing. Laurie hurried over to the girl.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“Blood,” Susan whimpered. “It’s really true!”

At first, Laurie didn’t understand. But then she did, and she smiled warmly and hugged the girl. Susan’s arms hung limply at her sides while she moaned into her mother’s hair.

“It’s not so bad,” Laurie said. “Come on. Let’s get you upstairs and cleaned up.”

While Susan soaked in the bathtub, Laurie found some Tampax pads in her purse. She explained to Susan how to use them.

“I don’t like it,” Susan grumbled. She had filled the tub with bubbles and there were some in her hair. “I don’t want it.”

“It happens to every little girl when they become a woman.” For whatever reason, this made her think of Teresa Larosche, and how she had looked sitting in that jail cell, no jewelry on her fingers, no makeup on her face, no laces in her sneakers.
She was once a little girl, too. What horrors did she face at the hand of her own father?
The world, she knew suddenly, was full of innocent little girls turned mad.

“Are you angry about it?” Susan asked.

“Are you kidding? No, hon. What’s to be angry about?”

“I don’t know.”

“I guess I’m just a little surprised. It’s happened so early.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re still pretty young.”

“I’m going to be eleven next month.”

“That’s still pretty young.”

Susan said, “I want Daddy to come back.”