Little Girls(10)

Go on, kiddo, he thought.

She took a third step, and this time her sneaker came down on a twig. The twig snapped and, in a flash, the deer vanished into the brush. For several seconds thereafter, Ted could hear its powerful legs pistoning through the woods as it fled.

Susan turned to her father, her eyes brilliant and wide. That timorous smile was still there, frozen to her face.

“Wow,” she marveled. “Did you see how fast it ran?”

“I did,” he said, taking up her hand again.

They walked some more, until they came upon a clearing.

“What is that?” Susan said, pointing.

It was a sizable man-made structure, in the vague suggestion of a small house with a cantilevered roof, covered by a heavy blanket of canvas. The canvas was black with mold, its corners held down by chains attached to what looked like railroad spikes driven into the earth.

“Not sure,” Ted said. Together they took a few steps closer to the thing before Ted stopped. He noticed shards of broken glass hidden among the underbrush. “Stay here for a sec so I can have a look.”

The thing beneath the canvas was about the size and shape of the detached garage they had back in Hartford. As he drew nearer, the rich scents of the forest intensified; they no longer rose up to greet his nose as much as they accosted him and tried to bully him into a sneeze. There was a deeper smell beneath the floral perfume, too—the unmistakable sick-sweet odor of rotting vegetation.

He crouched down and peered beneath one of the canvas flaps. Then he dropped the flap back into place, stood, and rubbed his hands together.

“What is it?” Susan asked.

He waved her over. “Come here, but watch out for the broken glass.”

Susan stared at the ground as she closed the distance between them. There was a daintiness to her posture that Ted found endearing. When she arrived beside him, he peeled away a section of the canvas to reveal a matrix of black glass rectangles.

“What is it?” Susan still wanted to know.

“It’s a greenhouse,” Ted said. “A very old one, but that’s what it is.”

“What’s a greenhouse?”

“What’s the matter? They don’t teach you kids about global warming in school?”

Susan wrinkled her nose, a gesture she implemented whenever she was confronted with rhetoric.

“It’s a little house made of glass where people grow plants and flowers,” Ted said.

“Why do you need a house to grow plants and flowers? Seems like they grow pretty good out here on their own.”

“Pretty well,” Ted corrected her.

“Seems like they grow pretty well on their own.”

Ted smiled and gently squeezed the back of his daughter’s neck.

“Let’s go see if I’m right about that water on the other side of the trees,” he said.





Chapter 4


The house was too quiet and empty after Dora left, so Laurie went outside. She walked around the side of the house to the backyard in search of Ted and Susan. At one point, she thought she heard Susan’s high-pitched laughter, but when she reached the backyard neither her daughter nor husband was there. She lingered momentarily on the stamped concrete that comprised the walkway along the side of the house that wound to the patio around back, scrutinizing each concrete panel as if to glean some pertinent information from it. A cool breeze came through the trees and rattled the leaves over her head. She backed up into the tall grass while her gaze scaled up the side of the house to the stunted turret of the belvedere at the center of the roof. From this angle, she could see two of the four sides of the belvedere. One of the windows looked funny, like something was propped up over the glass—a sheet or a board or something. She shielded her eyes against the sun, but still could not make out what it was.

That’s it. That’s where he jumped. The realization chilled her.

She was about to go inside when she heard the laugh again—the same girlish pitch, though much closer this time. She turned around in time to see someone moving along the fence on the other side, a shadow gliding between the slats.

“Susan?”

The fence was too high for her to peer over, so she leaned against it, trying to glimpse through the slats. She could see no one—the trees on the other side of the fence were too abundant, the gap through which she peered too narrow—yet she was certain someone was standing just on the other side. She repeated her daughter’s name, her voice now edged with unease. Waited.

After several seconds holding her breath, she went back inside.





Dora Lorton had been right: the house was devoid of almost all personal affectations and any other items Laurie’s father might have construed as frivolous in nature. Almost everything served a functional purpose. Laurie spent the next hour wandering from room to room, familiarizing herself with the layout of the house again, and catching glimpses of fleeting memories every time she turned a corner. The trips she had made to the house in her later years, when she had been a teenager and thrust upon her father for brief periodic visits, were less memorable to her than the years of her preadolescence, when she and her mother had lived here. Yet even those memories were hazy at best, sheened in vagueness and populated by questionable details. Myles Brashear had been a large man with huge, calloused hands and a head that looked slightly wider at the bottom than it did at the top. To look upon him was to assume he eked out his profession slogging away at some grist mill, quarry, or foundry. His year-round tan might have suggested a possible career in construction as well. Yet while Myles Brashear had not been afraid to get his hands dirty, he had been a businessman in shirtsleeves and a necktie. He made the first half of his money as the co-owner of an upstart steel-manufacturing company in Sparrows Point that produced steel for both government and private concerns, including bridges, cargo ships, commercial and industrial buildings, and four separate railroads. He made the second half of his money when he allowed his business partners to buy him out in the early 1980s, after recognizing that the steel industry was declining in favor of scrap recycling and the use of oxygenized furnaces. He had retired at fifty-five and spent the rest of Laurie’s childhood tending to various gardens he had planted around the property off Annapolis Road. That was mostly how Laurie remembered him now: a large man with big hands digging in potter’s soil in the yard.