Little Girls(80)

“You have a young daughter, don’t you?”

“Yes. Susan.”

“Very dangerous to keep this open like that,” said the woman. “You should shut it up.”

“We had a lid on it until yesterday. . . .” Laurie waved a hand over the plank of wood and clumps of bricks that lay strewn about in the grass beside the well.

The woman winced and turned her head away from the well’s opening. “Smells like death down there, dear. It would be a smart idea to put the lid back on.”

“Yes. Okay.”

A smile suddenly creased the old woman’s face. Her teeth looked like coffee beans. “I’ll let you know how the china sells,” said the woman. She was taking it on consignment and hadn’t paid anything for it upfront.

“Thank you,” said Laurie. She realized the woman only had her father’s phone number and address, but she didn’t give the woman her cell number or contact info for the house in Hartford. I don’t care if that china sells for a billion dollars, she thought. Once I leave here, I want to cut all ties and not look back. Leave no tethers behind.

“Good day,” said the woman. She waddled to her car—a Ford Escort whose backseat was crammed with boxes—and drove away.

Laurie looked back down into the well. It had begun to fill back up with water, a cruddy brown soup ringed with frothy white bubbles. And it did smell like death—a rancid, raw sewage odor that stung her nose. Feeling cold, Laurie bent and replaced the cover on the well, setting the bricks down around the perimeter to secure it. When she was done, she went around the side of the house to check on Susan. The girl was playing by herself with some Barbie dolls, kneeling in the tall grass. Daisies bloomed all around her and Laurie suddenly wished she had brought her painting supplies. It would take her mind off things.

Back in the house, Laurie gathered up the broken picture frame and the folded photograph and set them both down on the piano top beside Ted’s beloved liquor bottles. She contemplated dumping the remaining liquor out in the sink, the ancient bottles in the trash, then decided against it. There was a brownish watermark on the back of the old photo—a perfect stamped circle. She fingered it, then unfolded the photo. Her eyes were drawn to the same things as before—the three men standing before a row of garages while, in the background, the smokestacks of the mill rose up into a monochromatic sky. But then she noticed something she hadn’t before . . . or, rather, she attributed more meaning to what she had previously seen. Maybe it was coincidental. Maybe it meant nothing at all. She couldn’t tell for sure . . . yet her eyes were drawn to it nonetheless....

The garage doors were all numbered—big numbers stenciled on the corrugated metal doors in white paint. There were seven garage doors depicted here, the numbers on the bay doors ascending until they disappeared off the edge of the photograph. The door on the far right was cut in half by the frayed edge of the photo, but she could still make out the number painted on it, just as clearly as she could make out the chunky padlock on the door’s handle. The number on the door matched the number engraved on the key she had found in the body of the baby doll. Fifty-eight.





She waited until after dinner to leave. There were a few reasons for this. To begin with, she didn’t want to get caught in rush hour traffic along the Key Bridge, and although Derrick Rosewood had mentioned that much of Sparrows Point was an empty wasteland, she didn’t want to run into anyone working out there who might question her trespass. Also, she feared she might look like a lunatic sprinting out of the house the second Ted came home from his run. More than that, she didn’t want to make it look like she was fleeing from him; she didn’t want him to think she was being a coward. So she went about the rest of the day like someone who had been granted a peek into the future on the pretense that she couldn’t share what she had seen with anyone else. Susan was back to her old self—children have short memories—but Ted had been cold to her since their argument last night. She found herself wanting to hate him, but she was only capable of hating herself.

After dinner, Ted and Susan settled together on the sofa to watch a DVD. Laurie pinched the car keys from the kitchen counter and told them she was going out for a while. On his third drink of the evening, Ted had given up trying to rationalize with her. His response was merely an acknowledging nod of his head to show that he had heard her.





Chapter 25


Laurie took 695 East and found herself encroaching on the tail end of rush hour. At one point, she pulled onto the shoulder of the road and cried into a wad of tissues. The spell lasted just a few minutes, but when she finished she was completely exhausted. All her strength had been siphoned from her.

It was already a quarter to eight when she got off at the Sparrows Point exit. Beyond the raised concrete ramps of the beltway, sunlight speared through the trees and between the row homes as the sun sank slowly on the far side of the Chesapeake. The commercial shopping centers, restaurants, and housing developments that had flanked various portions of the beltway had vanished; she was now surrounded by sloping gravel pits, cyclone fences, and the occasional bulldozer tucked beneath an exit ramp like a slumbering dragon.

The road narrowed to a single lane. To her right, behind a chain-link fence capped in concertina wire, stood a single-story concrete building with unmarked white trucks in the parking lot. The only sign was a blinking red neon notice behind a panel of smoked glass that read DEPOT CLOSED.