Little Girls(76)

She went to it, brought it over to the sink. She moved the arms up and down, spilling more gray water into the basin. Gripping the head, she gave it a sharp twist and jerked it sideways until it popped off. It could have been an actual corpse for how rancid the smell was coming out of it. She turned the doll upside down, leaking black sludge into the sink. Something else tumbled out as well, the item she had mistaken for a stone when she initially upended the doll. But it wasn’t a stone. It was a large brass key with the number 58 engraved on it.





Laurie spent the rest of the evening wondering if she was losing her mind. By dinnertime, she suggested they order pizza, telling them she was too tired to cook. Ted pulled a face, but didn’t comment. Susan cheered. When the pizza arrived, they ate in the parlor. Mourning the loss of the Victrola, Ted selected similar music from his iTunes playlist and cranked up the speakers on his laptop. Susan no longer laughed at the old music; she now listened to it with her eyebrows knitted together and her mouth set in an appearance of concentration that showed some hint of approval.

“Could it be true?” Ted said as they were halfway through a Schubert composition. “Has the obstinate young ragazzina actually begun to appreciate the music?”

Susan wrinkled her nose. “It’s just okay,” she said, snapping from her trancelike stare at the computer screen. There was pizza grease at the corners of her mouth.

“I can’t believe they took the phonograph but left the records,” he said. “Do you care if I keep them? Or did you not want them to come back to Hartford with us?”

Laurie blinked and looked at him. She had been in a fog and hadn’t fully been listening. “The records? No, that’s fine. Keep them if you want.” She shrugged. The slice of pizza in the plate on her lap had hardly been touched.

“Are you feeling okay, Laurie?”

“I’m still just a little tired.”

“You should go to bed early tonight.”

“You’re probably right.”

Ted sipped at a lowball glass of amber liquor—more of what he’d been scavenging from the liquor cabinet since their arrival at the house. When he set the glass down, he said, “In all the commotion today, I forgot to tell you that Steve Markham called. The meeting with Fish is set up for Friday afternoon in Manhattan. He’s also got us a meeting right after with the producers to talk about something else I’ve been working on. You know that play about the ex-priest and the prostitute?”

“This Friday?” she said. It was already Tuesday.

“I’ll leave early in the morning and drive back after the meetings. You won’t even have time to miss me.”

“You won’t be too tired? Maybe you should go up the night before.”

He laughed. “Now you sound like Markham.”

“I just don’t want you to blow your opportunity.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” he said.

After dinner, Susan practiced for forty-five minutes on the piano while Ted sat beside her, instructing. Several times he corrected her finger placement on the keys and showed her how to work her thumb under her hand to “glide” to the next key to create a more fluid scale. Restless, Laurie looked in on them every once in a while, though she found it nearly impossible to sit in one place for any sustainable length of time. Several times she went into the kitchen to look at the items Ted had salvaged from the well. Some were laid out on a square of paper towel—the watch, the ring, the diamond earring, and a few other things. Some of the other items that had been more corroded—the brooch, the keys, most of the coins—were soaking in a pot of mineral acids, which Laurie had located in the basement under the stairs among other sundries. Some of the corrosion had come apart, but she could already tell that the image on the face of the brooch was gone for good.

Here they are, Laurie thought, all of Sadie’s evil secrets. What horrible wish did you make on that brooch to punish me and keep me in your grasp, Sadie? What evil thing did you hope for? That my mother would die? How about the gold watch? Were you trying to orphan me, you little monster? Thinking of this now, it astounded Laurie at how calculating and manipulative Sadie Russ had been. She tried to think of Susan behaving in such a fashion—she was just about the same age as Sadie had been when she died—but she found it impossible. There were uncharted depths within her daughter, just as there were in all little girls, Laurie knew, but she did not believe Susan was capable of anything even remotely as wicked. And if Sadie Russ has truly come back as Abigail Evans, to what purpose? To exact some kind of revenge on me? Did she break into this house and murder my father just to lure me back here after all these years? This last thought was outlandish enough to snap her back to reality. Sadie Russ had been dead for almost thirty years. People weren’t reincarnated as other people. Or, if they were, they didn’t look the same, and they certainly didn’t come back seeking revenge. Yet . . . those things Abigail had said to her . . .

For what purpose? To what extent?

When Laurie came back out into the parlor, Ted and Susan were just finishing up a duet of “Camptown Races” on the piano. As the final notes sustained, Ted slung an arm around his daughter and squeezed her. They were both grinning goofily at each other. When they sensed Laurie behind them, they turned around, still grinning.

“Did you hear us, Mom? Pretty good, huh?”