Little Girls(24)

Chapter 9


The next morning, Laurie awoke to find Ted’s side of the bed empty. His running shoes and preposterous-looking spandex shorts were gone, too. She washed and dressed in the adjacent bathroom, then stood for a moment looking at the rumpled bedclothes while trying to remember what it had been like when her parents had still been together and she had lived here. She found it nearly impossible to do so.

As she stepped out onto the second-floor landing, a muted thump caused her to pause. She went down the hall to Susan’s bedroom, opened the door, and was surprised to find the bed empty. Susan rarely got up early on her own accord.

Back out in the hall, Laurie lingered for a moment, waiting to see if the sound would repeat itself. Old houses suffered all sorts of ailments, made all sorts of noises. It could have been the clang of a water pipe or the struts settling in the attic. It could have been anything. Yet her eyes arrived at the locked belvedere door. The padlock was still in place.

She went to the door and pressed her ear against it. The sound on the other side of the belvedere door was no different than the imaginary murmurings of the sea in a conch shell—muffled nothingness.

She looked down. A hazy strip of daylight filtered from beneath the door. Laurie got down on her hands and knees and peered beneath the door. On the other side of the door, she could see the bottom of the first step that ascended into the belvedere. Daylight glowed on the wood floor from above. She pressed the right side of her face down against the hall floor to attempt a better view of the stairwell on the other side of the door. As she did so, a shadow passed quickly through the panel of sunlight.

Laurie gasped and sat up. She felt her scalp prickle. Bending back down to the floor, she peered beneath the door again. There were no shapes, no shifting shadows. What she had seen must have been nothing more than the shadow of a tree branch in motion, projected through one of the belvedere windows and onto the floor like a strip of film on a screen.

Downstairs, Laurie found Susan seated alone at the kitchen table eating a large bowl of Cheerios. Laurie smiled at her daughter. “You’re up early.”

“It’s after ten, Mom.”

“Is it?” She looked around and realized there were no clocks in the kitchen. “I guess I’m just being a bum then.” Laurie went to the sink and rinsed out the percolator, then refilled it with fresh coffee, opting this time for raspberry swirl. Who the heck comes up with these coffee flavors, anyway? She imagined a gnomish old man hunched over a series of test tubes and Bunsen burners in the basement of some remote warehouse in the New Mexico desert.

“How did granddad die?”

The question caught Laurie off guard, not because of the inquiry itself but in just hearing Susan refer to Myles Brashear as “granddad” once again. The girl had never met the man, and the familiarity with which she referred to him struck Laurie as absurd.

For a moment, Laurie considered how to respond, including an evasiveness she didn’t think Susan would swallow. In the end, she opted for the truth.

“He fell out of a window and broke his neck.”

Susan set her spoon down in her bowl. “What window?”

This is why I wanted to stay in a hotel, Laurie thought, sucking on her lower lip. She went to the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk and some eggs. Briefly, she considered lying to her daughter. Then she decided against it. “The window upstairs, in that little room above the second floor. The belvedere, remember?”

“In the house?” Susan said. “Here?”

“Don’t tell me you’re a superstitious old biddy, too.” Laurie was thinking of what Felix Lorton had said to her about his sister, Dora, on that first day: She was uncomfortable returning here alone after . . . well, what happened. My sister can be foolishly superstitious.

“What does that word mean?”

“Superstitious means you believe in spirits and omens and karma. And karma is like, you know—what goes around comes around.”

“No. The other word.”

“What word?”

“Biddy.”

“Oh.” Laurie realized she didn’t actually know the true definition. “A nosey old lady, I guess.”

Susan scrunched up her face. “Why would you call me that?”

“It’s just an expression. Eat your cereal.”

“Did the police come here?”

“Why would the police come here?”

“I don’t know. But that’s what that lawyer said, remember? That’s what they do on TV when someone dies, too.”

Laurie took a frying pan out from the cupboard and set it on the stove. She turned the burner on, then went to the fridge and took out the butter. “Yes, Susan, there were police here. When someone has a bad accident like . . . like granddad did . . . you’re supposed to call the police. And an ambulance, in case they need medical attention.” As an afterthought, Laurie added, “We’ve talked about you watching those kinds of programs on TV, haven’t we?”

“Did that lady find him dead?”

“What lady?”

“The lady who was here in the house when we got here, Mom.” She sounded exasperated.

“Dora Lorton? No, honey.”

“Who did?”

“There was another woman here when it happened.”