The Girl on the Stairs

by V. J. Chambers

  “She said her parents would be really disappointed in her,” said Ariel.

  “They did give pretty intense punishments,” said Kristen. “One time, we had a sleepover at my house, and we wanted to watch horror movies. My parents didn’t care. They let us rent whatever we wanted. But then Lola’s parents found out, and they were really pissed. They called my mom and told her off. And then Lola got grounded for like… a really long time.”

  “A month or something,” said Cheryl. “No phone. No Internet.”

  Ariel picked up her drink. She used her straw to stir it around. “I think there might have been more going on. There was that one time she had that bruise.”

  “No way,” said Cheryl, dismissing it. “She told us what happened. She fell when she was going down the stairs and ran into a door knob.”

  Sam tried to picture falling down the stairs into a door knob. He couldn’t quite get the logistics down.

  Ariel shrugged. “It looked to me like it was a hand print. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Sam leaned back. “You think Lola’s parents were abusive?”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Ariel.

  “You realize that gives her a motive, don’t you?” he said.

  Ariel’s face whitened. “No. That’s not what I’m saying. Look I don’t even know.”

  Sam coughed. “You ever have any reason to think that Nick was hurting her?”

  “No,” said Cheryl. “She never said anything like that.”

  “Why?” said Ariel. “Do you think he was? I guess he could have given her that bruise.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Cheryl. “It was a doorknob.”

  *

  Sam pounded on Lola’s hotel room door. “Lola! You in there?”

  The door opened. “Jesus, Sam.”

  “What the hell?”

  She knitted her brows together. “What are you talking about?”

  “Can I come in?”

  She moved aside to let him into the room. Her room was identical to his, but it faced the opposite way.

  He began to pace in front of her bed. “I don’t get it, Lola. You told me your parents were the greatest thing since sliced bread. You told me that Nick never hurt you. But then you send me to talk to people, and they tell me completely different stories. What kind of game are you playing here?”

  Lola folded her arms over her chest. “What did they say to you?”

  “That your parents were really strict. That they grounded you over movies and made you cry when you got a B. Oh, and that you had bruises.”

  Lola looked alarmed. Her voice was quiet. “They said that?”

  “Yes,” said Sam. “They said that. Isn’t that what you wanted them to tell me?”

  She bit down on her lip. “Maybe you should go, Sam.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re not chasing me off. You’re going to give me some straight answers here. Now, what’s the truth? Was Nick a very bad dude who treated you like crap and then killed your parents out of his obsession with you? Or was he really a good dude who killed your parents to try to protect you, because they were abusing you?”

  Lola didn’t say anything.

  Sam stopped pacing. “I know I keep harping on this, but you need to talk to me.”

  Lola crossed the room and sat down on the bed. “You know anything about being abused by your parents, Sam?”

  He sighed. “Does that mean you were?”

  “Did your dad do things?” she said.

  Sam felt her words cut through him. She knew. He walked over to her and grabbed her by the shoulders.

  She didn’t seem the slightest bit worried. She smiled. “What did your daddy do, Sam?”

  “Shut up.” He shook her.

  Her smile faded. “Let go of me, Sam.”

  “What do you know about my dad?” said Sam. “Tell me what you know. Tell me why you would bring that up.”

  She clenched her teeth. “Let go of me.”

  He let go of her. He walked across the room and rested his head against the wall. His entire body was trembling. He guessed that it was possible for someone to dig up lots of information on his past, if they really wanted. There would have been obituaries and news stories about the fire. But he didn’t share that information with anyone. He kept it to himself. He’d never even told Daphne.

  “Did it ever occur to you that it might be painful for me to talk about certain things, Sam?” Lola’s voice quavered.

  He turned around. He still felt angry and shaky.

  “Maybe I tell things the way I wish they were,” she said. “Maybe I don’t like to remember the way things really happened.”

  “You have to stop lying to me.”

  She swallowed. “I know. But I don’t think you realize how hard it is for me to talk about this stuff. It’s just like you don’t want to talk about your dad.”

  Sam looked away. “That’s not the same thing. You don’t understand—”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “You have no idea what my life has been like. You’re clueless.”

  “That’s because you won’t tell me anything.”

  She balled up her hands in fists. She took a shuddering breath. “It’s not easy, Sam. It’s not easy to talk about.”

  He was being hard on her. He normally wasn’t like this. Normally, he soothed. He charmed. He thought of Rachel on the couch in her apartment. His hand on her thigh. Reassuring. Or was it caressing? He shut his eyes.

  Lola had started to sob. “I just can’t come out with all of it. Not at once. I need to have a little bit of time, Sam. I need…” Her tears choked off her words.

  Fuck. What the hell was he doing?

  He went to her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Lola, I’m sorry.”

  She tried to scrub at her tears, but they were coming too fast.

  He wrapped his arms around her.

  She resisted for a second, but then she relaxed, burying her face in his shirt, clutching him.

  He stroked her hair, murmuring that he was sorry over and over again.

  Then she pushed him away. Her eye makeup was running down her face. She looked like an urchin, lost and confused. “I need to be alone. You need to leave.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sam lay rigid on the hotel bed . He thought about the fire. Thought about his father standing in the room, flames behind him. The rage filled Sam again—hot and acrid like the fire.

  Sam shut his eyes.

  But that didn’t blot out the images. It made them more vibrant. He could smell the smoke. He could hear his father’s voice.

  He could hear Hannah.

  Damn it. Hannah.

  More images flashed behind his eyelids. Hannah laughing. Hannah unbuttoning the first button on her shirt, her skin creamy underneath. Hannah with her eyes closed.

  Sam sat up in bed.

  He wouldn’t think about this. He didn’t think about this. It was over. It was the past. None of it mattered.

  His phone rang.

  Relieved by the distraction, he picked it up. It was Petra.

  “It’s not too late, is it, Sam?” she said.

  “No.” He lay back on the bed, rubbing his forehead. “It’s fine.”

  “I was calling to tell you that I chatted with Meg Silver today, and she was really excited about the new book.”

  Meg was his editor at MacphersonConnell.

  “That’s good,” said Sam.

  “She said that maybe losing the Rachel Fletcher book was a blessing in disguise. She’s been reading up on all things Lola Ward. She told me she’s giddy to see what you come up with.”

  “Great,” said Sam.

  “You don’t sound happy about it.”

  He sighed. He scooted up on the bed, leaning against the headrest. “I’m happy. I’m just not sure where this book is going. I can’t figure anything out. Lola keeps changing her story, and—”

  “She’s lying to you?”

  “Well, she tell
s me something, and then she sends me to talk to people, and they tell me the exact opposite of what she said. I can’t get a handle on what kind of person Nicholas Todd was. I’ve got suspicions that her parents were abusive. And she makes me feel…” He trailed off in frustration.

  “Oh, God, Sam,” said Petra. “You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?”

  Sam sat straight up, gritting his teeth. “I’m not sleeping with her.”

  “You remember back when you were writing Stolen, and you told me that you were falling in love with Daphne?”

  “I don’t think I called you and told you that, no,” said Sam. He and Petra had a fairly close agent-author relationship, but that didn’t mean he called her up and told her everything that he ever felt.

  “Well, it came up in conversation, then,” said Petra. “I remember, because I told you it was a conflict of interest.”

  “You don’t need to lecture me,” said Sam. “There’s nothing going on with Lola. That’s not the problem.” Of course, there was the fact that Lola unnerved him. He couldn’t predict anything she would say or do, and she was constantly throwing him. He’d think their conversation was going one way, and then she’d do something, and he had to course-correct. She was giving him whiplash.

  “Okay,” said Petra. “If you say so.”

  She didn’t believe him. He could hear it in her voice.

  Petra clucked on the other side of the phone. “So about this abuse business?”

  He was quiet, thinking about what Ariel had said, thinking about the way that Lola had sobbed earlier. “Maybe there’s something to it. But if so, that gives her a motive. That gives her a really good reason for wanting her parents dead. So, maybe she’s hiding that from me, because she doesn’t want me to know that she did it.”

  “It makes her sympathetic, though.”

  “Not really.” Sam massaged the bridge of his nose. “Because if she made Nick kill her parents in order to get away from them, then she abandoned him and let him take the fall for it. She used him.”

  “She doesn’t have a motive for the other murders, though,” said Petra.

  “Right,” said Sam. “I keep forgetting about those. They seem so incidental. Neither of them had any connection to the people they killed on the road. It was like they were just killing people to kill people.”

  “They? So, you think she had something to do with it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Look, it’s not like the Starkweather case,” said Petra. “Unlike Caril Ann Fugate, Lola ran away from Nicholas Todd the second she had a chance. And she called the police. She wanted away from him.”

  “Maybe if I could get her to talk about any of it, I’d have a better handle on things,” he said. “But she shuts down. She says it’s too painful. And anyway, I don’t even know if I can trust anything out of her mouth.”

  “Well, sleeping with her is not going to make that easier, Sam. You’re going to become attached to her, and you’re going to lose any objectivity—”

  “For fuck’s sake, Petra. I’m not sleeping with her.”

  Petra just laughed.

  “She’s not even supposed to be here. I was supposed to get some background here, some local flavor, and then I was supposed to go back and talk to her afterward.”

  “Take things one at a time,” said Petra. “If Lola’s parents were abusive, there were probably signs. People noticed things. People close to the family. Start there.”

  Sam glared down at his bedspread. “There aren’t always signs. Sometimes no one knows.”

  His father’s hand reaching through the flames.

  “Maybe not,” said Petra. “But it wouldn’t hurt to look, would it?”

  *

  But when Sam got moving the next morning, he found himself driving out of Keyser entirely, taking Route 220 out of town and into Maryland. He drove for over a half an hour, past ABL (the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory, an industrial complex that made ammunition for the military or something. One of Sam’s childhood friends’ dads had worked there.) Past strip malls. Past fields of dead winter grass. He wasn’t sure he’d recognize the turn, but he did.

  He turned into the driveway and drove through the trees down to the end.

  And there it was.

  The house.

  And the remains of the garage next to it. It had been years and years, but the burnt out skeleton was still standing. There was a tangle of blackened, charred wood. Vines were growing over it. In the winter sun, they were withered and straw-colored, but he could see that nature was trying to take the place back.

  The house looked empty but intact. There was nothing really wrong with the house. His mother had tried to rent it out when he was younger. She hadn’t been very successful. And she’d never tried to sell it.

  It was isolated, past the outskirts of Cumberland, Maryland, the lone house down a long, twisting driveway.

  Sam tried the door.

  It was locked.

  That was probably just as well.

  He peered into the living room. Their stuff was still there. The couches, the end tables, the lamps. They were covered in a layer of dust, their color faded from persistent sunlight. When they’d left the house, his mother had said she didn’t want to see anything in it ever again.

  “We’ll start fresh, Sammy,” she’d said, holding him close. “It will be like none of this ever happened.”

  That was the only way she could deal with it.

  With the knowledge of what his father had done. What his father was.

  Sam looked at the ruins of the garage, thinking about the flames.

  Thinking about Hannah.

  He shuddered in revulsion.

  And then he got back in his car and drove away, not looking back once.

  *

  It was noon when he made it back to Sabrina Calhoun’s house. He seriously doubted that Sabrina was going to fess up that her own sister had bruised Lola. She had been fairly adamant that Lola was the problem, that she was a cruel, frightening child. Still, maybe she’d know something more. Maybe she could shed light on some of it.

  But Sabrina wasn’t home. He knocked on her door, rang her doorbell, looked in the windows.

  No one was there.

  Sighing, he started to leave the porch.

  There was a woman on the porch next door, sweeping with a broom. She waved at him.

  He waved back.

  “You were here before, weren’t you?” said the woman. “You a cop or something?”

  Sam touched his chest. “Me?”

  “Yeah,” said the woman. “You’re way too nicely dressed to be one of Sabrina’s boyfriends. Only people like you that ever visit her are cops.”

  “Why’s that?” said Sam.

  “Oh, you know, she’s got problems. Wouldn’t even be able to keep that house if it weren’t for the alimony that she gets from her ex-husband. Personally, I wish she’d go. I mean, this is a nice neighborhood, but the kinds of people that go in and out of that house… well, sometimes it worries me.”

  “What kinds of people?” said Sam.

  “I think they’re all on drugs,” said the woman. “I don’t know what kind. Whatever. Sabrina’s always been like this. She bought that house fifteen years ago, and within two years, she was divorced and the court stripped her custody of her kids. Her husband has them, but she was deemed unfit. She never got herself back together.”

  “Wait a second,” said Sam. “If she moved in fifteen years ago, then that’s… thirteen years ago they took away her kids?”

  The woman nodded.

  That meant that when Lola’s parents were murdered, Sabrina had already lost her children. “So, if she wasn’t given custody of her own kids, there’s no way they would have let her take in her sister’s kid?”

  The woman’s eyes widened. “That’s what you’re doing here. It’s about that girl and the murders, isn’t it? Sabrina’s niece? Lola?”

  Sam nodded. “You caught
me. I’m writing a book. The last time I was here, Sabrina told me that she thought Lola was too dangerous to be around her own children and that’s why she didn’t take her in after the murders.”

  The woman snorted. “Well, that’s not true. At all. Sabrina was so out of it, I doubt she really knew her sister was dead. They would never have considered her for custody of a child.”

  “Never, huh?”

  She shook her head. “And that little girl, that Lola? I remember seeing her here a couple of times. She seemed like a nice girl. Her cousins were always pulling fur out of their dog’s coat. The little thing would whine and growl. And I remember seeing her out in the backyard telling them both off about it. She said people who were mean to animals grew up to be killers or something.”

  “Really?” Well, that was an interesting reversal of the story Sabrina had told.

  Of course, there was something oddly chilling about it, too. Why would a little girl know about serial killers and torturing animals?

  He took a step towards the woman, feeling in his pocket for his notepad. “Um, would you mind if I quoted you in my book? If I could get your name, that would be great.”

  The woman rested on her broom. “Really? You want to quote me?” She seemed pleased.

  *

  The old Ward house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in a housing development. It was the second abandoned house that Sam had seen that day, and it was in much worse shape than his own had been. There were two empty lots on either side, but obviously no one had decided to build on them. At one point, it had been an unassuming rancher, a typical family house. There were overgrown bushes in the front that indicated it had even been landscaped.

  Those days were long gone, though. The house had been vandalized on numerous occasions. There was spray paint on the front of the house: Lola Ward should be in jail! The windows had been boarded up. There was trash scattered over the front lawn—beer bottles, old packs of cigarettes.

  Sam had followed Patrick here. Now he got out of his car and shut the door. Patrick was getting out of his too.

  “Well, here it is,” said Patrick.

  Sam peered at the dilapidated house. “Who owns this now?”

  Patrick shrugged. “I don’t know. It was on the market for a while right after the murders, but they couldn’t sell it. Now, the house is in such bad shape, you couldn’t get any money out of it anyway. Anybody wanted to live here, they’d probably have to tear it down and build something new.”