Little Girls(14)
The phone call about his death came a week ago from Charles Claiborne, managing director of Mid-Atlantic Homecare Services. Laurie had been reading a Janet Evanovich novel in the living room when the call came in. Ted had answered the phone. She listened and could tell it wasn’t a typical phone call. Just hearing the tone of Ted’s voice, she had thought, It’s about my father. He’s dead. And now I’m going to have to deal with all that.
After he hung up the phone, Ted had come into the living room and sat beside her on the couch. He rubbed her back and told her what Mr. Claiborne had said. She had thought that maybe his heart had given out or that he’d suffered a stroke, but it wasn’t to be that simple. Laurie listened to it all in stunned silence. She tried to imagine what he must have looked like lying there on the stamped concrete pavers, all twisted and broken and useless . . . but then realized she had no idea what the man had looked like in old age, and was only able to summon images of him from her youth, when he had been her father and not some desperate recluse barricaded inside some aging old manse. Later, her father’s lawyer, David Cushing, called and spoke with her. The house in Maryland—that aging old manse—was now hers, along with all of her father’s belongings, as well as what money was in the man’s accounts. There were papers to be signed and things to go over, but David Cushing had promised to make it as simplistic and painless as possible. Cushing had given Laurie his condolences and then hung up the phone.
Now, standing in her dead father’s kitchen, Laurie was overcome by a tidal wave of erratic emotion. At least guilt wasn’t one of them. Not that she could tell, anyway. It angered her that this had been her mother’s house for a time, too, but the entire place seemed wholly and solely infused with her father—that singular haunting entity. Her mother had been a kind and intelligent woman who did not deserve to have her memories overshadowed by her father’s.
Before the anger turned volatile, Laurie went into the parlor to find her husband and daughter on their hands and knees looking under the sofa.
“Don’t tell me,” Laurie said.
“Mommy, it’s under the couch,” Susan said, looking up at her mother. The expression on her face was one of worry, as if the sofa had designs to eat her poor frog alive.
“You better get it.”
“It’s so tiny,” Susan whined, and Laurie didn’t know if the statement was meant to allay Laurie’s fears about having a rogue amphibian loose in the house or to state Susan’s own concerns about the poor little frog’s helplessness.
“There!” Ted said, and vaulted up onto his feet. “It’s getting away!”
Susan shrieked and Ted laughed. They both darted between the sofa and loveseat and chased after the tiny black dot that bounced toward the hallway. Still laughing, Ted told Susan to be careful and not to accidentally step on the little fellow.
A phantom coldness overtook Laurie. Shivering, she turned and saw through the adjoining sitting room that the storm door that led out into the side yard stood open. Laurie went to the door and shut it. There was a locking mechanism on the handle which Laurie thumbed to the locked position. Out in the side yard, the slope of the lawn had darkened as the sun began to set. The sky beyond the trees was a brilliant panorama of orange and pink threaded with scudding white clouds. The green moss on the fence now looked black and the trees that drooped over the fence swayed in what looked to be a strong summer wind. On the other side of the fence, she could see the green car in the neighbor’s driveway. The second car was still parked at the curb, and she could see now that the emblem on the door was a dark green BGE logo—Baltimore Gas and Electric. There was a light on in the window of one of the upstairs rooms of the house, too. A silhouette stood framed in the center of the lighted window. The longer Laurie stared at the silhouette, the more she was able to convince herself that the silhouette was staring back at her. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, she thought of a dead girl named Sadie Russ.
Chapter 5
Laurie prepared dinner while Ted and Susan brought their bags in from the car. When Susan learned they would be staying in the big house with the nice yard that sloped toward the woods and the gray river beyond, she cheered for joy and hugged Ted around the hips. Laurie told her that there would be ground rules, which they would address in time, but Susan, now basking in the simple pleasures of childhood vindication, was only partially listening. Ted asked where he should bring the bags and Laurie informed him that Susan’s stuff could go in Laurie’s old room at the end of the upstairs hall, since there was still a bed in there. Ted could take their stuff and put it in the master bedroom, though she confessed that she hadn’t yet been in there to look around and did not know the state of it.
Dora had done a noteworthy job stockpiling the refrigerator and cupboards with suitable groceries, so Laurie whipped up some stir-fry with shrimp, which was Ted’s favorite, and promised Susan they could make brownies together after dinner. Again, Susan cheered—it seemed the world was smiling down on this young girl who, as recently as yesterday evening, had planted herself obstinately in her bedroom closet with her headphones on and cried about having to leave Hartford and all her friends for the summer. Susan helped Laurie set the dining room table—there were good Wedgwood dishes in one of the cupboards—and the three of them ate with great relish. It had been a long and exhaustive day, and they hadn’t realized just how ravenous they’d been.