Little Girls(83)

It’s my overworked imagination. That’s all.

She hoped.

On the far side of the building, the numbers on the doors jumped from 32 to 45. This was just fine with Laurie, since the muscles in her legs were beginning to ache. Overhead, the looming smokestacks had once again assembled themselves into position so that they looked just like their counterparts in the old photograph. Laurie felt something flutter at the back of her throat. She walked across metal steam grates—she could hear industrial pumps working far down below, reminding her of the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine—and passed through an assemblage of concrete bollards before she found the door she had been searching for.

Garage 58 was no different than all the others, with one exception—the padlock looked newer. The other padlocks she had seen had been great hulking blocks of rust that probably wouldn’t open to any key in the known universe. While the padlock on 58 had suffered from some exposure to the elements, there was still some shine to it. Laurie felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. At that instant, she knew with certainty that the key in her pocket was not the key meant to fit this lock.

Regardless, she took the key from her pocket, slipped it into the padlock . . . and turned it.

The lock popped open.

It was the kind of door that slid open from left to right on a track. The track was corroded and uncooperative. And Laurie had been right—the door was heavy, but she was able to pry it partway open by administering incremental jerks on the handle. She stopped when the muscles in her arms felt like rubber. The door had opened only about a foot and a half. It was enough for her to squeeze through, even though the thought of doing so made her heart beat faster. Lightheadedness overtook her. When a cargo ship unleashed a bleat on an air horn far out on the bay, she nearly leapt out of her skin.

Once she had sufficiently calmed down, she turned back to the foot-and-a-half opening. The darkness inside was nearly a solid thing. Silently, she cursed herself for forgetting to bring a flashlight. What had she suspected, anyway? But then she remembered the fob on her keychain, the one she had gotten a few years ago from First National Bank of Hartford. It was a whistle—Ted called it a rape whistle—equipped with a tiny LED lightbulb. She fished the keys from her pocket and pressed the button that activated the light. She couldn’t remember the last time she had used the light and she had never changed the battery, so she was fairly surprised when the light blinked on and carved a pencil-thin path through the opening in the garage door.

She squeezed through the opening and moved the miniscule beam of light around. The room itself was not much wider than the door. It was maybe twenty feet deep, though she couldn’t tell for sure due to the amount of clutter in the place. Boxes and wooden crates were stacked nearly to the ceiling. Amputated machine parts lay strewn about like the bones of dinosaurs. Musty sheets made shapes in the gloom, causing her to guess at the items beneath. The whole garage stank of grease; she could actually taste it at the back of her throat.

I have no idea what I’m looking for....

Had the key not worked—had it not fit the lock—she could have turned around and gone home, satisfied that this had all been one big conspiracy in her head, and that she was imagining everything. There would have been comfort in such a notion, even though it simultaneously put her sanity on the firing line.

She ran a hand along the wall, found the light switch, toggled it. Nothing happened.

Of course.

Her sneakers scuffed along the cement floor as she approached the nearest stack of boxes. The cardboard was brittle and shimmered behind a gauzy veil of cobwebs. When she opened the flaps of the top box, a spider the size of a silver dollar scuttled out and dropped to the floor. Laurie shrieked, her keychain jangling. The spider darted between the slats in a crate and Laurie toed the crate off to one side, grimacing.

The box was filled with tools. The boxes on either side of it were filled with stacks of papers so old that the pages were as brittle as autumn leaves and the print had all but vanished. She spent the next twenty minutes peering inside containers, lifting the lids off wooden crates, and getting on her hands and knees to gaze beneath sheet-covered antiquities. Nothing she found struck her as out of place. After a bit, she went by the opening in the door where the night air cooled her. She coughed into one cupped hand and it felt like she’d purged her lungs of a clot of sawdust.

There was a dusty leather album wedged between several rusty aluminum paint cans. The album itself wouldn’t have garnered her attention had she not made out the clear but faded name running down the spine—LAURIE. She felt something flutter in her chest. As she approached it, the light shook. She remembered the album from her youth. The pages were construction paper on which she had drawn her earliest pictures. It had been her first art book, and when she and her mother had moved out of the house on Annapolis Road, Laurie had thought it was lost forever.

Why is it here and not in the house? And then on the heels of that, she thought, Is this what I was meant to find out here?

She pried it off the shelf amidst a plume of dust. There were orange rust stains on both the front and back covers. Propping the album on one of the sheeted monstrosities, she opened the cover. The drawing on the first page was of a family—a father, a mother, a little girl. Big ear-to-ear smiles spread across all their faces. In the background was a house with a belvedere on the roof. The next few pages showed similar drawings. Then there came a parade of animals—sheep, cows, dogs, pigs, mice, horses. Ponies, she corrected her adult self. Those aren’t horses, they’re ponies. The clumsy print at the bottom of the page said LAURIE, AGE: 7. It’s true—I’ve stepped through a time warp. Hello, Alice, welcome to the rabbit hole.