Little Girls(84)

She turned the next page and found a drawing of two little girls. The drawing was crude—just a few levels above stick figures—but she knew the girls in the drawing as sure as she’d recognize her own reflection. One of the girls was her, the sandy hair made with jagged scribbles, the eyes too far apart on the circular head, the clothes sensible and drab. The other girl was Sadie. Sadie’s hair had been done with both a brown and red crayon, blended to create a luxurious russet color. Sadie’s dress was a blue-and-white checkerboard pattern. It was the same dress Abigail Evans had been wearing when Laurie first saw the girl running across the backyard.

Laurie turned the page, but there were no more drawings. If this was what she had been meant to find, its significance was lost on her. Just as she was about to close the scrapbook and slide it back onto the shelf, she realized that there was a manila envelope clipped to the inside back cover. She unfastened the clip, her fumbling fingers carving streaks through the layer of dust that coated the envelope. It was sealed, so she tore it open. A plume of dust wafted out.

She shook the items out onto the cover of the album—a series of photographs of various sizes, some taken with a Polaroid camera, others developed into eight-by-ten glossies, though these had dulled considerably with age. The photo that landed on top appeared to be a candid shot of a young girl, perhaps five or six years old, perched on a bench in a park or playground. The girl wasn’t looking at the camera—her head was turned away so that her face was in profile—and something about the composition of the shot made Laurie uncomfortable. She did not recognize the girl in the photo . . . yet the cheap plastic doll the girl held in her lap was readily identifiable, even if all its features were now melted away, its nude plastic body veined with mold.

Laurie sifted through the other photos and found a similar theme in each of them—candid shots of little girls. They played in sandboxes, they climbed trees, they bounced up and down on seesaws. There were close to fifty photographs in all, many of the girls appearing in several photos. What was even more disturbing was that in these reappearances the girls were wearing different clothes, had their hair done up in a different fashion than the picture before. They weren’t taken on the same day.

She began to feel ill. Hastily, she swiped the photos back into the envelope and was about to stick the envelop back inside the scrapbook, when her elbow struck one of the tin cans on the shelf. It fell over and rolled to the floor. The sound it made as it struck the cement was like a gunshot. She peered over the sheeted machine parts and saw the can roll in a half circle along the floor before it came to rest beside a faded tarp bound with rope. Laurie squeezed between the sheet-covered machine parts and kicked the can out of the way. The light from the key fob caught a constellation of mouse turds arcing across the concrete floor. Laurie bent down and pressed on the tarp. It crinkled but gave little resistance. Whatever was beneath it was soft.

The ropes were thick, but mice had been to work on them for some time, and they were held together by mere strands in places. Laurie used the Volvo’s ignition key to saw through the remaining fibers. She tossed the ropes away, lifted one corner of the tarp, and directed the small beam of light beneath it.

More mouse droppings, dead crickets—the big striped ones with the arched backs that Ted called super crickets, or “sprick-ets” for short—and dried patches of what looked like motor oil littered the floor. When something shifted beneath the tarp, Laurie froze. It’s just a mouse, it’s just a mouse, it’s just a— A fat brown mouse scurried out from under the tarp, darted toward the tin can, then continued on toward the dark web of shadows behind the shelving unit. Watching it scurry away, Laurie felt herself breathe again. She turned back to the tarp and found a layer of quilts underneath. They were black with mold and stank like death.

She stood and took a step back. One of the ropes had gotten tangled around her right ankle, and when she took another step, she pulled the rope and another section of tarp with her. At first, the thing that was revealed looked like the twisted root of a tree jutting out between the bundles of quilts. When Laurie realized it was the skeletonized hand of a human being, she cried out.





PART III

IN THE HOUSE OF MANY WINDOWS:

Sadie





Chapter 26


The girl’s name was Tanya Albrecht, and she was eleven years old when she disappeared in 1989. School photographs showed a pretty but shy child, her plain brown hair done up in pigtails while owlish glasses exaggerated the largeness of her gray eyes. She wore braces. In two separate school photos taken a year apart, Tanya Albrecht wore the same floral-print dress with the rumpled lace collar. Her family did not have much money.

She was the third child in a family of five. Her father, Hal Albrecht, worked at one of the mills in Sparrows Point, and her mother, Hillary, had her hands full with the children. They lived in a row home in Dundalk, where the playgrounds were nothing but asphalt prison yards and the nearest elementary school had been repeatedly defaced by vandals. Their tiny row house had bars on the windows and Hal Albrecht had put up a BEWARE OF DOG sign on both the front and back doors, even though the Albrechts did not have a dog.

When she was nine, Tanya Albrecht had fallen out of a tree while trying to retrieve a Frisbee that had gotten snared in the branches. She broke her arm in two places. Had she been older, doctors would have mended the injury with metal plates and screws, but since Tanya was just nine years old and still growing, they hadn’t wanted to impede the bones’ growth. Tanya’s arm was set in a cast that went from the base of her fingers all the way up to her shoulder, and she stayed in that cast for nearly four months. After it healed, she often complained to her father that the arm was sore, particularly on cold and rainy days, but she never seemed depressed about it. Aside from her inherent shyness, Tanya was no different than any other girl her age. She joined a Brownie troop with her sister June and they sold cookies door-to-door throughout the rundown Dundalk neighborhood to earn badges for her brown sash. Her grades were average and she had a few friends who would sometimes ride the school bus home with her so they could play in the Albrechts’ postage-stamp backyard, or across the street in the salvage yards. The salvage yards were off limits to kids, secured behind twenty-foot chain-link fences adorned with signs warning that ALL TESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED! These signs, which were riddled with bullet holes, didn’t keep out the neighborhood kids—and a few of the neighborhood drunks, too—and there were plenty of interesting things to find while hunting around the salvage yards. When Tanya disappeared in the spring of 1989, the salvage yards were the first place local cops went to search for her body.