Little Girls(47)

“Did you want another refill, ma’am?” said the young waitress as she appeared beside the table. She held a stainless-steel carafe in one hand.

“Yes, please. Thank you.”

The girl refilled the coffee and Laurie asked for a lunch menu. By the time the girl returned with the menu, several minutes had passed. Laurie looked up and out the window to the street. She could no longer see Teresa Larosche leaning against the building, smoking. Laurie got up and went out the front door. She looked up and down Main Street, but it was a futile search. Teresa Larosche was gone.





Chapter 15


Ted was in the parlor scribbling notes in the margins of the John Fish novel when Laurie returned home. A bottle of Cherry Heering liqueur stood on the table beside a stack of Ted’s papers. Pagliacci played on the Victrola.

“Where’s Susan?” she asked.

“Upstairs.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “Goddamn it, I’d say this is like trying to condense the Bible down to one hundred pages, but I wouldn’t want to gift John Fish with the literary comparison.”

“Do you smell something funny?”

“Funny like what?” he said, not looking up at her.

“I don’t know. It just smells bad in here.”

“So open some windows and air the place out.”

She went upstairs and found Susan lying on her bed reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

“Everything okay, pumpkin seed?”

Susan eyed her from over the top of her book. “Hi.”

“Did you want lunch?”

“I already ate.”

“What’d you eat?”

“Peanut butter and jelly.”

“Did Daddy make it for you?”

“I made it myself.”

Laurie smiled at the girl but Susan’s concentration was wholly on her book. For a moment, Laurie was reminded of Susan’s first day of preschool, and how Laurie had walked her into the classroom while tightly gripping the girl’s hand, reluctant to relinquish her into the throng of children. It had taken more strength to let her go than to hold on to her.

“I saw your little friend Abigail the other day,” Laurie said.

“Oh.”

“Have you ever been over to her house?”

“No.”

“Have you ever met her parents?”

“No.”

Laurie felt her left eyelid twitch. “Do you like Abigail?” Susan shrugged. “She’s okay.”

“What kind of games do you play?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she tell you to take granddad’s cuff links from the study?”

Susan’s eyes swept up to meet Laurie’s from over the top of her book. Laurie didn’t like the sudden change of expression on her daughter’s face.

Smoothing Susan’s hair out of her eyes, Laurie said, “Does she sometimes tell you to take things out of the house and bring them to her?”

“I didn’t take anything out of the house.” Susan’s soulful eyes hung on her mother’s. They were Ted’s eyes now.

Then who did? Who came into this house and took them? And where is the missing one?

Hurt, Laurie sighed. She couldn’t help but feel that if it had been Ted who had initially confronted Susan, she wouldn’t have lied to him. Because Laurie was the disciplinarian, she had earned herself a modicum of distrust in her daughter’s eyes. Not for the first time, Laurie wished she could just shirk the responsibility of parenthood and simply embrace her daughter, love and laugh with her, and not get caught up in worrying about her.

“Okay,” Laurie said at last. “Never mind.” She leaned in and kissed the girl’s forehead.

Out in the hall, she slipped the silver key Teresa Larosche had given her from her pocket and approached the locked belvedere door. It was silly, but she suddenly heard Teresa speak up in her head: I guess your father just got to me. Scared me, you know? Like that movie about the crazy guy who turns the psychiatrist crazy, too.

The little silver key fit the padlock perfectly. She turned it and the lock popped open. The door squeaked and inched toward her, as if some presence on the other side was gently pushing on it. Laurie removed the padlock from the eyelet, flipped over the clasp, and pulled the door open. A set of unpainted wooden stairs—steeper than regular stairs—appeared before her. There had once been a handrail, but that was gone now. The walls were paneled in dark wood, just as they had been when she was a child and had lived here. As a young girl, she had been forbidden to enter the belvedere. Her father had said it was unsafe and her mother had silently agreed. Now, climbing those stairs, she was overcome by a strange sense of rebellion even after all these years.

The staircase entered the belvedere through a rectangular cutout in the floor. There was a half-wall here, to which the upper part of the banister had once been bolted. As Laurie came up through the floor, her first thought was that the room was much smaller than she had remembered it. Despite being forbidden to tread up here in her youth, she had still on occasion snuck up. A few times she had even taken Sadie up here, though those instances were usually at Sadie’s behest. Sadie had thought of the room as a crow’s nest, like on an old pirate ship, and she had taken sinister pleasure in surveying the neighborhood from such a vantage, unobserved. Laurie’s memory of the room was of an expansive four-sided chamber with a large pane of glass on every wall, nearly floor-to-ceiling. From this vantage, one was able to achieve a full 360-degree view of the surrounding area. Facing front, it was possible to follow the curving driveway down to the ribbon of blacktop that was Annapolis Road. At the rear, the tree line looked stunted and it was possible to make out the tree-studded bank on the opposite side of the Severn River.