Little Girls(102)

As the flashlight played across the remains of her father’s greenhouse, Laurie realized that she was looking at a man-made structure that had wholly and unwaveringly been usurped by Mother Nature. After Sadie’s death, her father had shut down the greenhouse and, to the best of her knowledge, had never returned to it. What plants he’d kept inside hadn’t died; on the contrary, their roots had burst through their terracotta pots and the corrugated tin flooring in search of soil and water . . . and had found it. The interior of the greenhouse had become a swampy black jungle, the air so fragrant with pheromones that it was difficult to breathe. Water dripped from perhaps a hundred places, tapping against leaves and draining into puddles on the floor. Large flies curtained the air. She took a step forward and her foot sank down into an inch or so of putrid black bile.

A shape stood partially hidden behind a curtain of dense foliage. Laurie flicked the flashlight over it. The checkerboard dress looked incongruous, even with its mud-colored blood soaking through the fabric. The girl wearing it was no longer Abigail Evans. It was Sadie Russ. Lacerations streamed red across her otherwise cadaver-white face. The darkened knots of Sadie’s nipples were visible beneath the sodden fabric of the dress. Her hair was a wet, twisted tangle that framed her face. Only her eyes looked alive—piercing, lucid, lighter in color than Laurie had remembered.

She found she was no longer afraid.

“Why did you come back?”

Sadie’s lips peeled back into a hideous clownlike smile. “To take you back with me,” she said. It was Sadie’s voice, but it was still somehow Abigail’s voice, too—two little girls speaking simultaneously from the same mouth.

“Why?”

That grotesque smile did not falter. “Find the circle.”

In response, Laurie tightened her grip on the knife.

Sadie laughed. It was an adult man’s laugh now. “You can’t kill me. I’m already dead,” she said.

“I won’t go with you.”

“Then I’ll take the other one,” Sadie said. “I’ll take Susan. If I can’t have you, I’ll have her. Let me have her. I’ll break her neck and make a wish out of her. I’ll throw her down there in that dark hole with all your father’s girls. It’ll be the best wish I’ve ever made. Eeny, meeny, miney—”

“Why are you doing this?” she sobbed. The knife trembled in her hand.

“Because I’m the Vengeance. I’m the Hateful Beast.” Sadie extended a pale white arm ribboned with deep cuts and pointed to a spot on the floor, perhaps a foot or two in front of Laurie.

Laurie redirected the flashlight to the spot Sadie had pointed out. The floor was a squishy cushion of mud networked with plant roots. With her sneaker, she cleared an arc through the mud to reveal the corrugated tin floor beneath.

“The circle,” Sadie hissed.

Indeed, there was a small circular grate covering a drain, perhaps just slightly bigger in diameter than a softball, set into the floor. It reminded her of the drains in the locker-room shower stalls where Coach Linda had made all the girls take showers after gym class back in high school. Two flathead screws were bolted into the grate. Trembling, Laurie sank to her knees. With her thumbnail, she dug crud out of the groove in the head of each screw. Using the blade of the knife, the flatheads unscrewed willingly enough. The grate itself gave more of a protest. She wedged the blade of the knife around the edge of the grate until she was finally able to pop it off.

She looked down the drain but saw nothing but darkness. She thought of those pictures Susan had drawn and stuck to the refrigerator: They hadn’t been pictures of the well after all, but of this drainpipe. She could hear water running below and, even as she stared at it, rainwater spilled down into its mouth. Then she remembered the flashlight. She directed the beam down into the hole . . . and saw the box.

It was a rusted tin piece of garbage that, at one time, might have been a cigarette case. Someone—her father, most likely—had wedged it halfway down the throat of the drain, to the part where the pipe narrowed and prevented it from falling all the way down. Laurie retrieved it, the casing scabrous with rust. There was a small release button on one side of the metal box. To cut her flesh on it would be to welcome a whole host of infections into her bloodstream, so she was cautious when she pushed it. The box sprung open.

There was a grimy plastic bag inside. It looked like a Ziploc bag. There was something inside, though the bag was too grimy and foggy with age for her to clearly make out what it was. She opened the bag and shook the item out into her hand. It turned out to be several items, although they were apparently part of a set. Old Polaroid photographs.

It took her several seconds to realize what she was looking at. But by the time she turned to the fourth photo in the stack, she knew. The variations of the flesh tones . . . the crease that could be the bend of an elbow or a knee or something else . . . the places exposed that should have never, ever been exposed, not on a child, a little girl. She didn’t know who the girl—the victim—was until she saw the fearful, blank-eyed face appear in one of the photos. Then, in another, she could clearly make out Sadie’s profile. Potting soil beneath the fingernails, Myles Brashear’s big hand covered Sadie’s mouth in yet another photograph. Touched her buttocks in another photo. Touched her in worse places in yet another....

Unable to look at the rest, she dropped the stack of photos to the floor. She tried to stand, but found that she couldn’t. Her face burned and it was becoming difficult to breathe. She realized she had been crying.