Little Girls(45)

The waitress came over to refill their coffees. Laurie found she was thankful for the brief interruption. She had begun to sweat under her arms.

“After he was content with the doors being locked,” Teresa went on after a while, “he would sometimes stare at the ceiling. Just randomly, you know? He reminded me of my father when he would do that. I grew up in Havre de Grace, in a big old farmhouse, and one fall a family of raccoons took up residence in our attic. The noises they made were tremendous—you wouldn’t think raccoons could make so much noise—and we didn’t know what was going on at first. Finally, my dad went up there and chased them out. He found the hole they’d come in through and boarded that up, too. That kept them out for good, but my dad spent the rest of that year periodically peering up at the ceiling, his head cocked like an old hunting dog, as if in anticipation of some noise the rest of us couldn’t hear.”

“Did my father ever say what noises he was hearing?”

“Dry creaking noises. Like attic beams settling.”

“That’s how he described them?”

“No, he never told me what they sounded like to him. I never asked.”

“Then how do you know what they sounded like?”

“Because I heard them, too,” Teresa said.

“Oh.” Laurie blinked. “So . . . then they were real noises. . . .”

“Yeah. I mean, I thought it was just the house settling . . . but the way your father looked up at the ceiling when he heard it . . .” She shook her head, as if to rid it of the memory. “Like I said before, I was beginning to wonder if I wasn’t losing my mind in that place. I figured if he stayed just one step ahead of me—forgive me for how I say this, but I kept thinking that if he stayed just one step ahead of me on the crazy scale—then I might be able to see the full-fledged insanity coming before it got me.” She hung her head. “I’m sorry. That sounds horrible. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You did, but that’s okay. You’re being honest with me and I appreciate it. Please go on.”

“Then one night he lost all interest in the side door, and turned all his focus on that narrow little door in the upstairs hallway. It leads to that strange little room upstairs on the roof. You know what I’m talking about?”

Laurie didn’t answer. Suddenly, she was looking at Teresa Larosche from the wrong end of a telescope. Her flesh prickled.

“Mrs. Genarro? You okay?”

“Yes.” Her mouth was dry. “Please, go on.”

“Well, he became paranoid that someone was up there, or maybe trying to get into the house from up there. A few times I wanted to take him up there and show him that wasn’t the case, but he refused to go. I went up there by myself a couple of times just to show him there was nothing there.”

“Did you . . . did you ever find anything up there?”

“No. Of course, I didn’t. It was just an empty room. Very creepy, but there was nothing there.”

Some teenagers burst into the coffee shop on a wave of raucous laughter, startling Laurie. She hadn’t realized how low they had been talking until just then. Laurie watched the teenagers—there were four of them—go to the counter and take a long time placing their orders. Even the young waitresses in the green aprons looked irritated.

“Downtown sucks in the summer,” Teresa commented. “Every idiot and their mother comes down here and ruins the place.”

One of the teenagers was handed a paper cup. He took it over to a counter on which stood several insulated drums of flavored coffee. He hummed loudly as he peered at all the labels on the pots, then spilled some coffee on the floor when he went to fill his paper cup.

“Anyway,” Teresa continued, digging around in her purse now, “that’s how that door came to be locked.” She set a small silver key on the table and slid it over to Laurie.

“So the lock wasn’t put on the door to prevent my father from going up there . . .”

Teresa shook her head. Her expression was grave. “It was to prevent someone from coming down,” she said. “To stop them from getting into the house. Your father was convinced someone would get in if the door wasn’t locked—that someone was trying to get in.”

“But the police report said—”

“I tried explaining it to the police, but they didn’t understand. Police don’t like things like dementia or Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia—anything that muddies up the waters of logical thought. They can’t make sense of things that aren’t logical.”

Laurie let this sink in. At the coffee station, the coffee-spiller was joined by his three friends, each of who seemed incapable of reading the labels on the coffee drums quietly and to themselves. Behind the counter, someone dropped a plate and the teenagers cheered. Heads throughout the place swiveled in their direction. Once the four teenagers left and the place quieted down, Laurie turned her attention back to Teresa Larosche.

“What did my father think would happen to him if this . . . person . . . actually got in?”

Teresa’s mouth unhinged the slightest bit, though for a moment she didn’t speak. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I have no idea. I don’t even know if he believed it was a person.” Teresa seemed to consider this last point.