Little Girls(66)

Back in the kitchen, Laurie could hear the murmurs of conversation out on the porch. She peeked through the partially curtained window over the sink and saw Susan still curled up on her father’s lap. Laurie crossed into the hallway and paused at the bottom of the stairwell. The stairs were covered in a woven runner of oriental design and there were crooked little picture frames going up the wall. The house was smaller than her father’s, and there were only two bedrooms at the top of the stairs. Only one of the bedroom doors stood open. Laurie peered in, saw the queen bed outfitted in a hideous floral spread, and knew it was the master bedroom. She turned and approached the closed bedroom door at the opposite end of the hall, peering into a darkened bathroom along the way. Clutching the knob, she expected to find it locked, but it wasn’t. She turned the knob and went inside.

The Rosewoods had done their best to make the room homey: There were dolls and stuffed animals on the bed, toys on the floor, a small television on a refurbished dresser, drawings taped to one wall, and various arts and crafts atop a cramped little desk in one corner of the room. Laurie took a deep breath and could smell cleaning products and faint perfume. Was there the scent of dirt hidden beneath those other smells? She thought that there was.

That’s because this used to be Sadie’s bedroom, she thought. I can still smell that girl beneath all this newness.

She went to the desk and picked up various art projects. At first glance, there was nothing unusual about any of them—a shoe-box diorama, a few crayon drawings, a sock puppet with Ping-Pong balls for eyes and bright yellow yarn for hair, what appeared to be stories or poems printed out in a child’s swollen, bubbly handwriting. Had she not been searching for deeper meaning in the items themselves, she might have missed it, passing off the art projects and looping vowels as a preadolescent’s unremarkable juvenilia. But it wasn’t. The swollen loops of her handwriting made it look like each individual letter was a cell engorged with disease. Smudgy fingerprints had been embossed like wax stamps at the corners of each page. The shoe-box diorama depicted a crudely drawn family, their clothing colorful and done in great detail while none of them had any faces. Laurie picked up one of the drawings. It was of trees, done in crayon, with green curlicues for leaves and forked trunks like upside-down peace signs. Printed in pencil across the trunk of one tree, in all capitals, was the word FUCK. Laurie let the paper flutter to the desktop. She picked up the sock puppet. A bright red crayon had been used to emboss pupils on the sock puppet’s Ping-Pong ball eyes. Laurie brushed a thumb across one eyeball and flakes of red wax rained down on the desktop. The sock itself smelled awful, like industrial cleanser. It stung her eyes and she quickly dropped it.

“What are you doing in here?”

Laurie whirled around, a scream ratcheted midway up her throat. Abigail stood in the doorway, her small white face expressionless except for a fiery simmer behind her eyes. She took two steps into the room, her gaze still locked on Laurie. “This is where I sleep,” said the girl. “But this isn’t really my room. It’s just where they let me stay.”

Laurie realized her hands had involuntarily clenched into fists, and she slowly relaxed them now.

“This is just where they put me down,” Abigail went on. She sat on the edge of the bed and rattled her friendship bracelet—the one that Susan had made for her.

“Earlier today, you said you had a secret,” Laurie said. “Tell me what it is.”

“You should guess,” said Abigail. “I think you know it.”

“We need to stop playing these games now,” Laurie said.

Abigail’s mouth unhinged and a small pink tongue darted out and moistened her lower lip. The plastic beads of the friendship bracelet sparkled. “Did you see my drawings?”

“You’re not Abigail Evans at all,” Laurie said. She felt herself trembling. “Your name’s Sadie Russ.”

“Who do you want to be?”

“This isn’t a game,” Laurie said. “I’m not playing a game with you. I know who you are.”

Abigail swung her feet back and forth. There were socks and a single black shoe under the bed. “What games do you like?”

“I don’t like games.”

“No games?”

“No. You did something to my father, didn’t you? You were in his house. You’ve been in there recently, too, haven’t you?”

“My favorite is hide-and-go-seek. Do you know that one?”

“I don’t want to talk about games. We’re done pretending now.”

“Sure. Do you like my drawings?”

“Please stop.”

Abigail frowned, but there was a devil’s trickery embedded within the expression. “You didn’t even look at them.”

Not wanting to turn her back on the girl, Laurie backed up against one wall so she could look at the drawings while keeping Abigail in her periphery. The drawings were rudimentary renditions of horses with too many legs, people with the wrong number of eyes in their eggplant-shaped heads, houses that looked like pyramids with windows.

“No,” said Abigail. “You’re looking at the wrong ones.”

“Which ones?”

“Lower. The ones on the bottom. Those are the good ones.”

“These are—”

Her voice died in her throat. She was looking now at the bottom row of drawings, and noticed that half of these drawings were of the same multiwindowed breadbox surrounded by some hastily drawn trees. The other drawings were of great looping gyres done up in many colors—circles, spheres, funnels that spiraled off into infinity.