Little Girls(55)

She smiled.

“You know,” he said at one point, “you should really start painting again.”

“I’ve thought about it.”

“Have you?”

“It’s probably no different than your writing. A seed is planted in the center of your brain and something inside you just . . . well, it turns it into something. It wants to come out, wants to break free. It’s like growing a plant.” She thought about her father’s greenhouse, now a desolate tomb hidden deep in the woods beyond the house. This made her think of Sadie Russ, and what happened to her.

“What?” said Ted. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing. My mind’s just wandering, that’s all.”

“How’d that cop get up into that room today? I thought we didn’t have a key for the padlock on the door.”

“We do now. I picked it up earlier today.”

Ted frowned. “Picked it up from whom?”

“Teresa Larosche. She met me in Annapolis this afternoon. You were busy working and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“This woman was your father’s night nurse, right?”

“Yes.” She drank some wine and then added, “I also read the police report filed by the officer who responded to my dad’s death. Turned out it was in with some of David Cushing’s papers after all.” She fabricated this last part because she feared she would sound too paranoid admitting to him that she had contacted the county police and requested the report. It hadn’t seemed paranoid to her at the time—in fact, it had seemed perfectly natural—but now she wasn’t quite sure. “Ted, my father didn’t open the window before he jumped out.”

Based on the expression that came across Ted’s face, she didn’t think he had properly heard her.

“He jumped right through the glass,” she restated. “One of the windows up there is shattered and there’s a big piece of wood covering it up.”

“That’s just horrible,” he said, his voice small. All of a sudden, his eyes had become these furtive little beads that she didn’t quite trust. They looked wholly unfamiliar to her.

“Teresa Larosche said he had been concerned that someone was trying to break into the house at night, that someone was trying to come after him.”

“The guy was probably paranoid about a lot of things.”

“And now that police detective who came by, he took some fingerprints. . . .”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m wondering if my father jumped at all,” she said, “or if maybe someone pushed him.”

Ted leaned back in his chair. He dabbed the corners of his mouth with a cloth napkin, then tossed the napkin on the table. “Someone? You think this Larosche lady pushed him?”

“No.”

“Then who? No one else was in the house.”

“Maybe someone got in.”

“You’re getting that based on what this Larosche woman told you? That your father—who suffered from dementia, don’t forget—thought someone was trying to get him?”

I think the Larosche woman believed it, too, she thought. Toward the end, anyway. He had convinced her of it, I think. Or perhaps poisoned her with the notion of it.

“Maybe it wasn’t the dementia,” she said. “Maybe he was actually aware of something.”

“Aware that someone was trying to kill him,” Ted said flatly. “Honey, that’s silly. Listen to yourself. Don’t you hear how silly that is?”

“If you’re going to jump out of a window, wouldn’t you open it first?”

“Laurie, I wouldn’t jump out a window. See? That’s the difference. Your father wasn’t rational. You can’t infuse logic to an illogical situation. You’ll make yourself mad.”

His words were close enough to what Teresa Larosche had said back at the coffee shop—about being afraid that Myles Brashear’s dementia might seep into her and cause her to go crazy—to cause Laurie’s flesh to grow instantly cold.

“The board over the window is loose,” she went on. “There were nails on the floor, like someone pried them out.”

“See?” Ted beamed. “That explains your noises.”

“Does it? How?”

“It’s the wind blowing against the board. You said yourself it sounded like a door slamming up there.”

It seemed like an impossibly plausible explanation. Yet it didn’t make her feel any better.

“Isn’t it possible that someone could climb onto the roof and get up into that room?” she suggested. She was thinking of the way the tree branches crept out over the roof. All someone would need to do was climb the tree, get on the roof, and push open the loose board—

“No,” he said flatly. “It isn’t possible. And even if someone could do that, the door’s locked. Where would they go? They couldn’t get into the rest of the house.”

“But it’s possible. . . .”

“Darling, no one has been getting into the house. I’ll hammer down that board when we get back to the house tonight,” Ted assured her. He took a sip of his wine and ran his tongue along his teeth. “You know, when my parents died, I thought, wow, I’m a goddamn orphan. I’m just like one of those little street urchins with fingerless gloves and hats that are too big for their heads, like in a Dickens novel. I had no brothers and sisters and I thought, damn, I’m alone. And maybe for a while I really was. But now I’m not. I’ve got you and I’ve got Susan.” He touched her hand across the table—strangely similar to how Liz Rosewood had done when she asked if Laurie minded if she smoked. “You’ve got us, too, Laurie.”