Little Girls(32)

He brought it over and handed it to her.

It was an eleven-by-thirteen black-and-white photograph of three men in suits standing before a bank of steel doors. Each door had a number painted on it, and Laurie thought they looked like garage doors or large storage lockers. In the background, concrete smokestacks rose up from a multi-windowed brick building networked with catwalks and pipework. There was no date on the photo, but if she had to guess by the men’s attire, it had been taken sometime in the late sixties or early seventies.

“The man in the middle is my father.” She pointed as Ted leaned over her shoulder to look more closely at the photograph. “I don’t recognize the other two, but my guess is they were co-owners of the steel mill with my dad. That looks like the mill in the background. There are some smaller pictures of it in a photo album in my dad’s study. I’d seen it once in person when I was a little girl, too. Just before my parents got divorced, my dad drove me out to Sparrows Point—that’s the industrial park along the water in Dundalk—and showed me all the buildings.”

“Why do you think he stuffed it in the record album?”

“Dora Lorton said he was really out of it toward the end of his life. To try and figure out what was going through his head at the time would be . . .” She let the words trail off. Then she pointed to the liquor cabinet. “That empty frame that had been hanging on the wall the day we got here? It’s behind the liquor cabinet, on the floor. Get it, will you?”

Ted went to the cabinet and crouched down. “Yeah, I see it.” He reached behind it, grabbed the frame, and carried it back over to Laurie. “Looks like it’s the right size frame.”

“Yeah.” She smoothed out the photograph, then overlaid it on top of the frame. The frayed edges of the photo were a perfect match for the tufts of thick paper still bristling from the inside edges of the frame. “That’s the right picture, all right.”

“But why . . .” Ted began again before letting his own voice fall away. Gently, he sighed. “I guess we could drive ourselves mad trying to figure out what was going through his head, huh?”

She handed him the frame and the photograph. “I’m tired of thinking about it,” she said.





Unwilling to tackle the staircase with her sprained ankle, Laurie spent the night on the sofa. Fitfully, she slept. In her dream, she was sleeping on this very sofa when a figure came into the room and approached her. It was too dark to make out the figure’s features, but she assumed by the litheness of the approach that it was a child. Susan. In her dream, she was powerless to move, though something called to her to reach out and touch the figure. Then the figure had turned and gone over to the phonograph. The handle was cranked with deliberate sluggishness. A record was placed on the spindle and the needle set into a groove. The sounds that followed were not of music but of a distant whalelike lament. Finally, she was able to sit up. The record stopped and the figure shifted out into the hall. Backlit by the moonlight falling through the front windows, Laurie could see that the figure was not Susan after all, but that of another young girl. When the girl passed beneath a panel of moonlight coming through one window, Laurie could clearly see Abigail’s face looking down on her.





PART II

SPARROWS POINT:

Abigail





Chapter 11


In the kitchen, Ted and Susan were at the table enjoying a breakfast of waffles with maple syrup, bacon, and tall glasses of chocolate milk. They had been in the middle of some low-voiced discussion when Laurie walked in. They both looked at her and Ted offered her his winning smile. Both he and Susan sported chocolate milk moustaches.

“Sleepyhead,” he said. “How’s the foot?”

“Much better, thanks.”

“There are waffles on the counter.”

“Great.”

“I hope we didn’t wake you.”

She went to the stove, lifted the coffeepot and found it empty. “Not at all,” she said.

“Susan brought the bags of clothes down this morning and set them on the front porch,” Ted said, “and I already called the Salvation Army. They’re sending a truck out this afternoon.”

“Well,” she said, folding her arms and leaning her buttocks against the front of the stove. She smiled at them. “I feel like the shoemaker who has been visited by elves in the night.” Yet this made her think of the dream she’d had, recalling Abigail’s pale, moonlit face looking down on her as she lay motionless on the sofa, and the smile quickly evaporated.

“I filled in the hole in the yard, too,” Susan added. Her hair, which she usually wore in a ponytail, was loose and curled just underneath the lines of her jaw. It made her look older. “First thing when I got up, just like you said.”

“Thank you, sweetie.”

“You should relax today,” Ted said. “This whole thing has been stressful on you. Let’s go into Annapolis for the afternoon. How’s that sound?”

She picked apart one of the waffles from the stack on the counter. “That sounds nice but there’s still too much to do. I haven’t even gone down into the basement yet. The longer we put it off, the longer we’re stuck here.”

“Then give us chores,” Ted suggested. “Let us help out.”