Little Girls(75)

After Laurie and Susan lowered the ladder back down the hole, Ted climbed up with his plastic garbage bag dripping foul water onto the lawn. The poor guy was perspiring and smelled awful. Laurie took the bag from him while offering him a conciliatory smile. She felt as though she were on the cusp of some grand discovery, some penultimate revelation. The sensation was not dissimilar to dizzying vertigo.

While Ted hosed himself off in the yard, Laurie took the bag around to the side of the house where she entered the kitchen through the side door. Susan followed close at her heels. Laurie placed the plastic bag on the counter, stopped up the sink’s drain, then dumped the items out into the basin. Susan dragged over a chair, climbed up, and peered down into the sink and at the items it held.

“Pirate treasure,” Susan said, her voice full of awe.

Laurie rinsed off the items beneath a lukewarm spray. The nicer jewelry cleaned up better than the cheap stuff. The gold watch had been her father’s; she remembered stealing it from a little hand-carved box he kept in his study and giving it to Sadie at Sadie’s behest. She hadn’t wanted to do it but Sadie held some power over her. Similarly, she remembered stealing the diamond earrings from her mother’s jewelry box. Sadie had worn them a few times to school but never at home and never around Laurie’s parents. When Laurie had asked for them back—her mother had become frantic trying to locate them throughout the house—Sadie had refused. She had laughed and warned Laurie that she would get the shoe box again. It has flies on it now, Sadie had said of the bloody tampon in the box. Big black flies. And if you tattle on me, I’ll make you put it in your mouth with all those big black flies on it. I’ll make you put it down there, too. Then one day Sadie had stopped wearing the earrings. Only now did Laurie realize where at least one of them had ended up.

Laurie blinked. The power of the memory had been strong and sudden. At her elbow, Susan was staring at her with a mix of apprehension and confusion in her dark eyes. Laurie summoned a smile for her daughter. After some hesitation, Susan offered her one back.

“Where did all this stuff come from, Mom?”

“From years and years of people throwing it down in there,” she said.

“Why would someone throw jewelry down a well?”

“Sometimes people do silly things, Susan.”

“I bet those things have snake poop on them.”

“I’ll bet some of them do,” Laurie said.

The side door banged as Ted came into the kitchen. He had his sneakers in his hands and the cuffs of his jeans rolled up. His hair was wet and slicked back. “That’s some booty, huh, ladies?”

“There was only one earring down there?”

“As far as I could tell. There are some cracks in the mortar and a small drain in the wall. The drain had a mesh covering over it but it was all rusted and there were pieces missing from it. I guess the other earring could have gotten washed away. Not to mention I don’t know how deep that sludge is on the bottom. There could be a triceratops skeleton down there.” He ran a hand through his wet hair, then sniffed the palm and made a face. “You think any of that stuff is worth anything?”

“Some of it, maybe. The diamond. Maybe the gold watch, though I’m sure the works are ruined. It was my father’s.”

“How does a man’s gold watch wind up at the bottom of a well?” When Laurie didn’t respond, he said, “I’m gonna grab a shower.”

With her thumbnail, Laurie attempted to scrape some of the calcification off the face of the brooch. This had also been her mother’s, passed down to her from Laurie’s grandmother. She felt sick to her stomach just holding it.

“I knew it,” said Susan. “I knew we’d find real treasure.”

“Yes.” Laurie set the brooch down on the kitchen counter. “Why don’t you go upstairs and clean yourself up, too?”

“Okay.” Susan hopped down from the chair and scampered off.

Laurie picked up the doll. Water streamed from the seams where its limbs met its body. Its face looked like that of a burn victim, its features melted and indistinct. She turned it upside down and heard what sounded like a stone tumble through its body.

Something crashed in the parlor. Laurie jumped, knocking the earring into the sink. The diamond stud rolled around the basin, though before it could disappear down the drain, Laurie caught it. She set it back on the countertop and then went out in the parlor.

Her father’s urn had been knocked off the fireplace mantel. It lay in pieces at the foot of the hearth, its grayish, powdery contents in a dusty heap in the center of the broken pieces. It looked like a prehistoric egg someone had dropped, its yolk turned to ancient dust.

“Susan?”

But Susan didn’t answer. Laurie crept closer and saw the approximation of a partial footprint in the ashes. When a cool breeze struck her back, she turned around and saw one of the parlor windows was open. She expected to find dusty footprints leading to the window, but there were none. Cold, she shut the window, locked it. Then she swept up the broken bits of urn and her father’s ashes into a dustpan, and dumped them unceremoniously into the kitchen trash.

When she turned around, she found herself staring at the plastic doll on the kitchen counter. It lay facing her, its blank eyes staring right through her. She had dropped it on the counter when she heard the crash from the parlor, but now it looked as though it had been perfectly positioned to watch her from across the room.