Little Girls(29)

“Oh, gross!” Susan bellowed. “That’s terrible!”

Ted laughed. “So you don’t want to dance?”

“No way! That music sounds like barf!”

“How is it that you are my child?”

“You like it, Daddy? That music?”

Ted twirled the tip of an invisible moustache. “It is what the cognoscenti call eleganza, darling daughter.”

This, of course, set Susan off into hysterics. Her hysteria only increased once Ted began waltzing around the parlor with an invisible partner. When he came by and swooped Laurie into his arms, Susan had to set her glass of juice down on the coffee table to keep from spilling it, she was laughing so hard.

Ted and Susan spent the next half hour trying out different records on the Victrola, each one more hilarious (to Susan) than the previous. Leaving Ted and Susan to their music, Laurie cleaned up the kitchen, glancing occasionally at the bay windows and the darkened yard beyond. Sadie. There was a steady pulsing at her temples. She kept seeing the girl who called herself Abigail staring up at her while digging a hole in the ground, her oversized dress drooping off her thin shoulders. But of course she wasn’t Sadie. In fact, the more she considered this, the more she believed Abigail only shared a passing resemblance with the little girl who had lived next door during Laurie’s childhood. The pale skin, the ovoid face, the dark, overlarge, soul-searing eyes . . . but Abigail’s hair was lighter in color than Sadie’s. Sadie had been taller, too. Just how much could she trust her memory of Sadie, anyway? Laurie had been just a child when Sadie had died.

Ridiculous, she thought. The shrill little laugh that erupted from her caused her to jump.

She took the box of Glad bags upstairs, where she went systematically through the rooms and bagged up all her father’s old clothes. The clothes were all starched and laundered, though the closets themselves were haunted by the odor of old pipe tobacco and unfamiliar cologne. There were many hats in the closet of the master bedroom, too—old derby hats and bowlers and even a straw cowboy hat—though she could not remember her father ever wearing any of them. Shoes lined one wall of the closet, everything from polished cordovans to threadbare bedroom slippers. Downstairs, the music played on.

When she had finished, the upstairs hallway was lined with several fat bags of clothing. Tomorrow, she would call the Salvation Army and set up a pickup date. That takes care of that. She felt a welcome sense of accomplishment at having completed the task. It wasn’t until she looked over at the padlocked door that her smile faded. It seemed to call to her.

That’s silly, she thought . . . yet she went to it nonetheless. On her hands and knees, she peered beneath the door. A narrow strip of darkness peered back at her. Silliness.

When she returned downstairs, she was overcome by an immediate sense of unease. It felt as if the walls were beginning to constrict all around her, closing in on her. She gripped the newel post at the bottom of the stairs tightly. When her eyes fell on the front door, she went to it, touched the knob—it was cool—then slid her hand up to the dead bolt. She could see by the way it was turned that it was already locked; nevertheless, she took the key from the pocket of her jeans, unlocked it . . . then locked it again. Hearing the bolt slide closed did her a lot of good. The unease slowly dissipated from her.

In the parlor, Ted and Susan were now curled up on the sofa watching a movie on Ted’s laptop. Ted had already complained that he was unable to harness an Internet signal out of the air, but luckily he had packed a few DVDs.

“This place needs a TV,” Susan commented to no one in particular as Laurie went on through to the kitchen.

The bay windows faced a yard as black as infinite space. The sodium glow above the trees and on the other side of the river shimmered on the horizon. She went to check the lock on the side door, too, but thought she caught movement out there in all that darkness, though she couldn’t tell exactly what it had been. It had been no clearer than a dark shape wending through a labyrinth of other dark shapes.

She kicked on a pair of flip-flops that were by the screen door off the side of the kitchen and then went out. A cool breeze came off the water and over the hill, causing the trees to whisper and the bushes to shush along the fence. She peered over the fence and through the trees at the house next door. There was a light on in one of the upstairs windows and a blue flicker behind sheer curtains on the ground that probably belonged to a television set. The cars were still gone from the driveway. In the moonlight, the columns on the neighboring porch looked like polished bones and the backyard looked like a South American jungle.

Laurie crossed the yard to view the neighboring house from a different angle. Here, the trees were denser, but she could see the entire rear of the house through the partings of their branches. The yard looked overgrown and there was yet another light on upstairs at the opposite end of the house that she hadn’t seen previously. As she stared at it, she thought she saw someone moving around in the window.

And then she heard movement on the other side of the fence. Close. Twigs snapped and leaves rustled.

Laurie froze. “Someone there?”

No answer . . . yet she swore she could hear breathing.

“Abigail? Is that you?”

She listened for a while longer, until she became convinced that the breathing she thought she heard was just the breeze shuttling through the trees, and that it could have been a squirrel trampling on those twigs.