Little Girls(93)

Teresa hung her head again. The part in her scalp looked very pink.

“How did you do it?”

“I told you the door was unlocked, but I didn’t know how it had gotten that way. Well, that’s not true. I unlocked it. He swore someone was up there, trying to get in. At first he wanted the door locked to keep them out, but then he wanted to go up there and confront whoever it was. That’s when I really started to get scared. I thought I heard someone up there, too. So I left the door unlocked. In the night, he got out of bed and went up there. He began screaming. Then crying. I went up and he was there, naked, shouting at the walls. Tears were coming down his face. He had . . . there was . . . my God, this huge f*cking erection. And he had taken a . . . um, he’d defecated on the floor, too. And then I couldn’t be sure if he was crying or laughing.

“When he saw me, he called me someone else’s name. I could feel his sickness crawling around in my brain. He had a sickness in him, just like my old man had his own sickness. Those things poison a person. Well, I was done being poisoned.”

Teresa looked up at her. The young woman’s face had gone slack.

“He pointed to the broken window, said that’s how they’d been getting in the house. He had cut himself on the glass, too, and was bleeding all over the rug.”

“So, wait,” Laurie said. “The window was already broken?”

Teresa nodded. “He was so big. I kept shoving him backward, I guess to keep him away from me, but also to shut him up, shut him up, shut him up. I thought the only way to stop the poison from going through my veins was to shut him up.”

She spoke those final three words through clenched teeth.

“So you pushed him out the window.”

“To shut him up,” Teresa said, her voice now a whisper.

“What name did he call you?” Laurie asked, wondering if she would actually say Sadie or Abigail, but knowing that it would be the same name her father had mistakenly called her during their last phone call—Tanya. But it wasn’t Tanya’s name, either.

“It was your name, Mrs. Genarro,” Teresa said. “It was Laurie.”





Susan complained about stomach pains the whole ride back to the house. This time, they were chauffeured by a uniformed officer in a squad car. Laurie and Susan both sat in the back behind a mesh cage like animals. The officer said nothing until he got lost and had to ask for directions to Annapolis Road. When they arrived home, Laurie located some Tums with her toiletries and gave two to Susan.

“Blech,” Susan bemoaned. “Tastes like chalk.”

“Why don’t you go lie down and I’ll call you when dinner’s ready?”

“What’s for dinner?”

“How about spaghetti?”

“Okay.”

Once Susan had gone upstairs, Laurie poured herself a stiff drink from the remaining bottles on the piano. It tasted like turpentine and she nearly gagged. She thought about the events of the past couple of weeks . . . and found she was wrapped in a blanket of unease concerning the status of her own sanity. This hadn’t been some ghost story. There was no menacing presence haunting her and pointing out clues. There was no Hateful Beast, no Vengeance. Her father had been murdered by Teresa Larosche. Perhaps the only ghosts in this tale were the ones that plagued her father’s deteriorating and guilt-ridden mind as well as the ones that no doubt populated Teresa Larosche’s nightmares. She had believed in the return of a vengeful spirit the way small children believe in Santa Claus. What did that say about her sanity?

Ted is right. I need to get out of this house.

In the kitchen, Laurie dialed Harmony Simmons’s number. She got the realtor’s voice mail, left a message, and hung up.





She was halfway through cooking dinner when Susan appeared in the kitchen doorway, sobbing. Laurie hurried over to the girl.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“Blood,” Susan whimpered. “It’s really true!”

At first, Laurie didn’t understand. But then she did, and she smiled warmly and hugged the girl. Susan’s arms hung limply at her sides while she moaned into her mother’s hair.

“It’s not so bad,” Laurie said. “Come on. Let’s get you upstairs and cleaned up.”

While Susan soaked in the bathtub, Laurie found some Tampax pads in her purse. She explained to Susan how to use them.

“I don’t like it,” Susan grumbled. She had filled the tub with bubbles and there were some in her hair. “I don’t want it.”

“It happens to every little girl when they become a woman.” For whatever reason, this made her think of Teresa Larosche, and how she had looked sitting in that jail cell, no jewelry on her fingers, no makeup on her face, no laces in her sneakers. She was once a little girl, too. What horrors did she face at the hand of her own father? The world, she knew suddenly, was full of innocent little girls turned mad.

“Are you angry about it?” Susan asked.

“Are you kidding? No, hon. What’s to be angry about?”

“I don’t know.”

“I guess I’m just a little surprised. It’s happened so early.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re still pretty young.”