Little Girls(100)

“Mom . . . ?”

“Get away from the window,” Laurie said.

“Huh?”

She reached out and grabbed Susan by one shoulder. Susan shoved her hand away, spilling cereal on the floor in the process. For a moment, they stared at each other, a corresponding look of terror on both their faces.

Outside, Abigail swished past the bay windows and disappeared around the side of the house.

Suddenly unsure if she had locked the side door or just slammed it shut, Laurie dove for it, toppling a kitchen chair in the process—clack!—and reached for the dead bolt. But the lock had been changed by Dora Lorton and now required a key—

The spare sat on the kitchen counter. Laurie snatched it up, hurried back to the door, jammed the key in the lock. It turned audibly. A heartbeat later, Abigail’s plain white face appeared in the rectangle of glass in the upper portion of the door. Laurie stared. Their mutual respiration fogged up the glass. When Abigail placed one grubby palm against the glass, Laurie made a small hiccupping sound and jerked backwards. One finger began tapping against the window. The nail was black, the knuckles smudgy with dirt.

“Go away!” Laurie shouted at the monster.

Abigail’s finger screeched across the glass. It moved past Laurie and stopped on Susan.

“No!”

“Mom . . .”

“Get in the other room, Susan!”

“What are you doing?”

“Susan!”

Crying, Susan ran into the parlor.

On the other side of the window, Abigail opened her mouth and rolled back her thin lips, exposing all her teeth. Her tongue squirmed.

Laurie hurried over to the bay windows. She closed and latched the open window, her breath coming in quick little gasps now, strands of hair swinging down across her face. She could no longer see Abigail—the rectangle of glass in the door was starkly, incriminatingly vacant—but the black-eyed Susans were swaying at the base of the patio as if recently disturbed.

What about the front door? Had she locked it after Dora Lorton left? What about the other windows? Maybe all the locks have been turned....

She was so terrified of the idea that she was momentarily incapable of movement. Some strange buoyancy made it feel as if her stomach was gradually elevating up through her esophagus. When she broke her trance, she turned and ran into the parlor. Susan was not there. The windows in the parlor were closed, but she couldn’t tell if they were latched. Ted had pried the nails from the frames so they could open the windows when they wanted, circulating some fresh air through the house, yet now she wished he hadn’t. She ran to them, checked them one by one. They were all locked.

Glass can be broken. She thought about the busted window in the belvedere.

In the foyer, she found the front door unlocked. Fear clenched her in its fist. She screamed Susan’s name but Susan didn’t respond. She turned the bolt and heard the lock slide sturdily into place. She could already be in the house. Then she thought of Susan. Susan could have gone out!

“Susan! Susan!”

Susan was weeping from somewhere in the house. She couldn’t pinpoint the exact location. Sound travels funny here. Lowering her voice to a more reasonable tone, though unable to keep out the tremolo, she said, “Susan? Honey? Where’d you go?”

Susan’s sobs grew louder but she still did not answer.

Laurie took three silent steps toward the stairs. Susan was perched halfway up the staircase, her hands pressed into her lap and her face a slick red map of tears. When she saw her mother, the tears came harder. Her lower lip shook and her chin wrinkled. Walnut chin, Ted would have said.

“Hey,” Laurie said, placing a foot on the first step and a hand on the banister. “What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with you?” the girl sobbed. “You’re scaring me!”

“I’m only trying to protect you.” She ascended another step.

“I want Daddy to come home! I want Daddy!”

“I’m going to fix it, okay? I’m going to make it all better.” Two more steps. “I just want to make sure you’re safe first, Susan. I love you, honey. You know that I do. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

Susan lowered her face and cried into her lap.

“Come with me,” Laurie said, stopping two steps below Susan. She reached out and rubbed the girl’s head. She could feel the smoothness of her skull beneath her thin hair. “We’ll get you safe. Safe as milk.”

Susan struck out and swatted Laurie’s hand off her head. “No!” she shouted at her mother, simultaneously gripping the banister and pulling herself to her feet.

Laurie snatched the girl’s forearm with both hands and dragged her the rest of the way up the stairs.





Ted was less than an hour from the house when the storm hit. It didn’t begin slowly and graduate to a full-on thunderstorm; instead, it dumped out of the sky all at once, bringing traffic along the interstate to a screeching halt. Cursing audibly, he rolled up his window and tried Laurie’s cell phone again. Like the previous times, it went straight to voice mail. Similarly, the house phone kept ringing and ringing until an operator disconnected the line.

When he began to see signs for the Harbor Tunnel, he leapt up onto the shoulder and rode the rumble-strip to the exit. Two police cars sat on the other side of the median, but the rain must have made a traffic stop seem about as appealing as a tooth extraction to the officers, and neither vehicle pursued him.