Little Girls(48)

Now, the room was no more than a narrow shaft with bits of broken glass on the floor and what looked like splotches of dried brown blood on the wood paneling. The window her father had gone through had not been replaced. There was a board nailed over the broken window, not dissimilar to the one used as a covering for the well in the front yard.

Dora and Felix had cleaned the whole house after his death, but they hadn’t cleaned up here. She wondered if it had been left as a crime scene, if the police had forbidden Dora and Teresa from coming up here. But then she thought about what Teresa had said—about putting the lock back in place upon returning to the house so that she would feel safer—and wondered if they had all just forgotten about the room. Maybe on purpose. Or perhaps Dora had no way to access this room once Teresa quit and took off with the padlock key.

Those brownish bloodstains on the floor. . . .The fact that the window looks like it had been broken from the outside instead of on the inside . . .

Had this had happened to someone not suffering from dementia, would the police have investigated further? Could it be that there had been someone else in— No. She wasn’t prepared to go that far.

She looked out the nearest window and beyond the interlocking branches of the trees to the house next door. An image leapt to her mind then—of standing beneath the portico of the old well on the front lawn with Sadie Russ beside her, both girls peering down. The water was black and sightless. Laurie told her it was a wishing well, and if you threw riches into it, the well would grant you any wish you liked. Sadie said she was wrong, and told her it was an evil well, that if you fell down into it you were sucked off to another dimension where there were evil trolls and dogs with many heads. And if you throw someone’s riches down there, Sadie had insisted, grinning as she said it, you can make horrible things happen to them. The memory made Laurie’s skin crawl. She had never again thrown anything down into the well after that day.

From this height, the tops of the large trees that grew up from the old Russ property and leaned over the fence were at eye-level. A few of the thick branches twisted like helixes across the span of space between the fence and the house, and a few of the branches extended out over the roof. None of them reached as far as the belvedere itself, but a good number of sturdy branches hung out over the roof.

She was about to turn and leave when she noticed something on the floor. She went over to it, bent down, and picked it up. It was a carpenter’s nail. She glanced around the floor and saw several more scattered about. She went to the boarded-up window and ran her hand along one edge. Nail heads speed bumped against the tips of her fingers. But there were no bumps along the bottom of the board. She got down on her knees and could see that there were nail holes but no nails. Someone had pried them out and left them scattered about the floor.

She stuck her hand up underneath the bottom section of the board and could feel the ridged sill on the other side. Bits of jagged glass, sharp as guillotine blades, poked up from the frame on the other side of the board. With both hands, she was able to pry the lower half of the board away from the window frame several inches—enough, she realized, for someone small to slip through. Peering behind the board, she could see the triangular teeth of glass jutting up from the windowsill on the other side. When she let the board slap back into place, it made a sharp report that sounded very much like someone slamming a door.





Back in the kitchen, Laurie located Dora Lorton’s phone number on the pad beside the phone and dialed it. It rang several times without answer, and Laurie was just about to hang up when the ringing stopped. Silence simmered in her ear but no one said a word.

“Hello?” said Laurie. She thought she heard someone breathing.

“Who’s this?” It was Dora Lorton’s clipped, businesslike voice.

“Ms. Lorton, this is Laurie Genarro. I hope I’m not disturbing you. Do you have a moment to talk?”

The woman exhaled loudly on the other end of the phone. Laurie thought she heard a TV on in the background. “What is it?”

“I wanted to ask you about the little girl who lives next door,” Laurie said, searching now for a sign of Abigail through the bay windows as she spoke. “Do you know her?”

“There is no little girl who lives next door.”

Laurie thought she had misheard the woman. “The little girl with the long reddish-brown hair. Surely you’ve seen her. She plays in the yard.”

“There is no girl who lives next door,” Dora repeated. “The Rosewoods live next door and they do not have any children.”

“Their last name isn’t Evans?”

“No. There are no families named Evans that I am aware of on Annapolis Road, or anywhere else in the neighborhood, for that matter.”

“Ms. Lorton, a little girl named Abigail Evans—”

“Some months ago there was some trouble with vandals,” Dora said. In the background, the sound of the TV had vanished. Perhaps she had muted it or turned it off. “People’s mailboxes were stolen, windows were broken, and cars were vandalized. It turned out to be teenagers from a few streets over. Perhaps this girl is one of them.”

“No, no, she’s much too young. The girl is Susan’s age, and she—”

“Susan?”

“Yes. My daughter. The girl is ten years old. You’re telling me you know of no such girl?”