Little Girls(41)

The house was quiet upon his return.

Upstairs, Laurie was asleep in the master bedroom. In the dark, Ted stripped off his clothes, considered a shower, then decided against it. He crawled into bed beside Laurie. She stirred and murmured something unintelligible as he draped an arm around her shoulder and started to kiss her neck through the web of her hair.

“Please,” she said quietly.

He rolled on top of her and sought out her mouth with his in the darkness. He kissed her and she kissed him back before turning her head away from him. She smelled warm and like sex. It made his groin ache.

“I can’t,” she whispered, not facing him. “Not in this house. Not in this bed.”

It had been weeks since they’d had sex. Ted groaned and continued kissing down her neck. She was wearing a T-shirt to bed, something she had started doing since the highway incident last year, and again he was struck by a flicker of certainty that she knew about what had happened between him and Marney. If she really did know, would it be better for him to confess it to her? Or was it one of those things that, once spoken aloud, would corrupt everything? Perhaps she could feign ignorance as long as he enabled her to.

“Please,” she said one last time, and set a cold palm against the side of his face.

He rolled over onto his side of the bed, his erection thrusting up beneath the bedsheet like the mast of a sailboat. Sighing, he laced his hands behind his head and stared at the shimmery blue light that came through the side windows and played along the ceiling in geometric surrealism. Shadows of tree limbs danced in the ghostly blue panels.

He hadn’t even realized he had fallen asleep until he awoke sometime later. The house was tomblike in its silence. Rolling over, he found Laurie’s side of the bed empty. He rubbed one hand along the mattress and found that it was cold.

She wasn’t in the bathroom; the door stood open and the light was off. Listening, he could hear not a single sound throughout the house. It’s like floating through space. And on the heels of that thought: Maybe I’m still dreaming.

Naked, he climbed out of bed and went out onto the landing. Peering over the railing, he could see no lights on in any of the rooms downstairs. Around him, the big house creaked like an old whaling ship.

When he had been just a boy, he had suffered from a recurring nightmare where he would wake up in the middle of the night to find the small brownstone where he lived with his family empty. He would scamper to his parents’ bedroom, but there would be no sleeping bodies spooning each other in the bed. Similarly, the family dog—a sloppy-eyed bulldog named Stooge—was gone from his nighttime crate they kept in the kitchen. Young Ted was alone, and in these dreams he would begin screaming for the parents that were no longer in the house, the sloppy-eyed dog that was no longer in his crate. In the real world, the screams would alert his mother, who would rush to his bedside and wake him, then console him against her warm breast. The nightmare had come with unsettling frequency for several months before it simply stopped altogether. (The nightmare would not return to him until years later, when his parents were both killed in an automobile accident, allowing the horrors of the dream to become a waking reality.) That nightmare returned to him now with all the strength and terror he remembered from his childhood. The power of its resurgence was like a shockwave. His palms were sticky with sweat on the railing.

He took a step back and saw Laurie curled up in a ball on the floor of the landing. The sight of her first startled, then terrified him.

“Laurie?”

She jerked her head up from the floor, the movement so quick it caused his heart to leap.

“What are you doing?” he said.

She sat up on her knees and propped one hand against the belvedere door. “I thought I heard something.”

“The noises again?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did it sound like?”

“Like someone trying to get in.” She touched the doorknob. “Someone turning the knob from the other side. And then . . .” Her voice trailed off as she looked at the door.

“And then what?” he prompted.

She pointed toward the ceiling. “Footsteps,” she said. “Up there.”

The distance between them made her face look like a white mask. “It’s an old house. There’s noises,” he told her. “Come back to bed.”

“I’m listening.”

He watched her for perhaps fifteen or twenty seconds before his skin began to tighten in to gooseflesh. He listened, too, but could hear nothing. All of a sudden, his face felt too small for his skull. “You’re freaking me out,” he said. “There’s no one up there. Come back to bed.”

She came.





Chapter 14


The Brickfront was tucked discreetly between two larger shops and was nearly invisible. Laurie drove past it twice before she finally saw it. At noon on a Saturday, it was difficult to find street parking, so she opted for one of the parking garages, parked at the top, took the elevator down, then hustled across the street to the inconspicuous little coffee shop.

It was larger on the inside than Laurie had expected. There were maybe four or five circular tables on the floor, with additional booth seating on a raised platform against one wall that ran the length of the shop. Leather-bound books stood on high shelves and a brick hearth, which looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in ages, took up much of the wall at the back of the coffee shop. Young girls in green aprons rotated between tables to serve lunch orders and refill drinks. Laurie claimed a small booth near the windows and set her purse down on the table. Although the food smelled delicious, when one of the young waitresses came over to the booth, Laurie ordered a cup of coffee and nothing else.