Little Girls (25 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

T
he 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.

In 1988, Hal Albrecht was laid off from his job at the steel mill. He put on a good face and even fantasized about picking his family up and moving them out of Dundalk and away from Sparrows Point for good. He said he’d like to go to Florida, which is where some older friends of his had relocated after retirement. But Hal hadn’t retired—he’d been laid off in the wake of big changes in the industry. He needed to find another job, just as most of his coworkers needed to find other jobs after facing similar layoffs. Hal did not have a college education—he’d just barely made it through high school—and the job search in 1989, despite economic prosperity for much of the country at that time, was demoralizing. Hillary Albrecht began taking in “homework”—mending dresses, suits, slacks for local neighbors who felt sorry for them—as did their eldest daughter, Caroline. Hal got a job working nights at a 7-Eleven while going on job interviews during the day. On weekends, and because he knew some of the dockhands from his days at the mill, he picked up some hours at the shipyards. It was untaxed pay, under the table as they say, and although it helped put food on their table and while Hal was genuinely grateful, he didn’t know how long he could keep up such a sleep-deprived schedule. As it turned out, he maintained that impossible schedule up until the day his daughter disappeared.

On April 28, 1989, around eleven-thirty in the morning, Hillary Albrecht handed a brown paper bag to her daughter Tanya. It was Hal’s lunch, which he had forgotten to take with him to the shipyard that morning—a corned beef sandwich, a plastic cup of apple sauce, a wedge of apple streusel wrapped in cellophane that Hillary had baked the night before, and a can of Diet Coke. It was not the first time Tanya—or one of the other girls—had to run lunch to their father. The man had become a roving zombie and he had begun to forget a good many things, Hillary knew, and the thought was not without compassion.

“You know the way to go,” Hillary said to Tanya as the girl pulled on her sneakers at the kitchen table, her father’s brown bag lunch balanced in the crook of her lap.

“Yes,” Tanya said, exasperated. They had gone through this a hundred times before. “Be like Dorothy. I remember.”

To “be like Dorothy” meant that once she crossed Kingland Terrace and stepped foot into the industrial park, she was to locate the cement path that had been spray-painted bright yellow—the “yellow brick road”—until she reached the bank of terminals down at the port. To veer off the yellow brick road could be dangerous—there were too many things out there that eagerly awaiting the nimble fingers and tasty toes of a curious young girl.

Hillary watched her daughter lace her sneakers while she cleaned the countertop. Later, when describing to police what her daughter had been wearing, she told them of the sneakers. They were fake Chuck Taylor’s—the Albrechts could not afford real ones—which the kids endearingly referred to behind their parents’ backs as “Fucks.” Before leaving, Tanya offered her mother a sweet smile. Hillary knew her daughter might never be what society considered a “real beauty”—June was the prettiest of the three girls, at least in the traditional sense—but Tanya had a brilliance inside of her that sometimes managed to shine out, usually when you least expected it. Her smile held that brilliance, radiating it across the tiny kitchenette in the Dundalk row house. And although she had no idea why, Hillary forced herself to take a mental snapshot of that smile, impressing it upon her brain the way prehistoric bugs impressed themselves into sediment which, over millennia, fossilized to permanence. It was the last time Hillary Albrecht would see that smile.

The last person on record to see Tanya Albrecht alive was a man named Chester Karski. Karski lived by himself in a one-bedroom flat on the corner of Kingland Terrace and Highpoint Boulevard. His front windows faced Highpoint, which was a crumbling tributary of a roadway through which patches of blond grass sprouted in the summer. His single bedroom window looked out upon the more nicely paved blacktop of Kingland Terrace and the plateau of parking lots of Sparrows Point beyond. This section of Kingland ran beneath an overpass—one of the extensions off the Key Bridge—and even in broad daylight, Karski could see people moving around beneath the shade of the overpass, no doubt up to no good. On this particular afternoon, Karski had been sweeping grit off his front porch when little Tanya Albrecht came walking up the street. She was carrying a brown paper satchel and wore a pleasing little smile on her face. From where he stood on his porch, Karski could hear the girl humming happily to herself while she kicked the occasional pebble out of the road.

“Hi there, Dorothy!” he called to her. “On your way to see the great and powerful Oz?” Chester Karski was in on the yellow brick road game; he had walked it a few times in his life, too, back before he retired from the shipyards.

“Yes, Mr. Karski!” Tanya called back. “My dad forgot his lunch again!”

“You tell him I said hello.”

“I will.”

“And you be careful, darling, crossing that road.”

“I will!” She raised a hand high and waved it back and forth over her head.

Karski returned the gesture. When the girl reached the intersection of Highpoint and Kingland, Karski paused in his sweeping to make sure the girl made it across safely. He did not realize he’d been holding his breath until she reached the opposite side of Kingland. Yet it wasn’t the road Karski worried about. As Tanya crossed beneath the shade of the overpass, Karski went back inside his house, down the hall, and into the bedroom. He peeled the plastic shade away from the window and peered out. Tanya was a speck on the roadway, her shadow stretched out of shape and trailing behind her on the pavement. Karski averted his eyes, peering now into the dark depths beneath the overpass. It was just about noon, still a bit early for the hoodlums to take up residence beneath the overpass, but that didn’t mean some strung-out crackhead hadn’t spent the night down there.
She shouldn’t walk through there on her own. Not at her age. She’s a little bit of a thing.
On this morning, however, Chester Karski could see no one. By all appearances, it seemed the Albrecht girl was alone. It gave Karski much relief.

Tanya never made it to the bank of terminals down by the port. In fact, there was no evidence Tanya ever crossed onto the factory grounds. Had the overpass not been there, and had Chester Karski kept watching out his bedroom window, he might have seen what had happened to the girl. But the overpass
was
there, and by the time Tanya Albrecht had encountered her abductor, Charles Karski was making himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch.

After an hour had passed without Tanya’s return, Hillary went out onto the porch and peered down Kingland Terrace toward the intersection of Kingland and Highpoint. She saw no sign of her daughter, although this did not worry her. It wasn’t unusual for one of the girls to spend the lunch hour with their father before heading home. But when another hour ticked by, Hillary began to worry. Again, she went out onto the porch and looked toward the intersection. Again, there was no sign of Tanya. This was when panic set in. Even if the girl had decided to share her father’s lunch, she should have been back by now.

Hillary called Merle Daniels, who rode dispatch in the shipyard’s front office. Yeah, Hal was still on the docks. No, he hadn’t seen Tanya come through. Sure, he supposed Tanya could have gotten through without him noticing—“It ain’t like I’m Saint Peter keeping guard over the Pearly Gates, Mrs. A,” he said—and promised he’d check with Hal and call her right back.

When the phone rang five minutes later, it wasn’t Merle Daniels, but Hal himself. “No, I worked through lunch and never saw her,” he said. “What time did she leave the house?”

Hillary told him.

“Maybe she cut a detour over to the Barrows’ place,” Hal suggested, though his own voice did not sound very hopeful. Tanya was friends with Jennifer and Anne Barrow.

“Maybe,” Hillary said, twisting the phone cord around her index finger. The silence that followed this comment hung between both of them like the aftermath of some tremendous explosion. “I think—”

“Call the Barrows,” Hal said. “If she ain’t there, let me know, and I’ll come home.”

Tanya wasn’t at the Barrows’ house. Gloria Barrow answered the phone and advised that she hadn’t seen Tanya all morning, and that her own two girls were up in their bedroom playing Chutes and Ladders. Hillary thanked Gloria, hung up the phone, and once again found her talking to Merle Daniels in the dispatch office. This time, even Merle sounded unnerved. “I’m sure she’s fine, Mrs. A,” he promised her, though Hillary thought she sensed a different truth in his voice.

Hal arrived home ten minutes later. By this time, the two other Albrecht daughters were standing with their mother on the porch while, in the kitchen, the two Albrecht boys ate late lunches of tuna fish sandwiches and chocolate milk. Hal drove around the neighborhood in his Ford pickup, cruising down every dead-end street and alleyway. He must have crossed over Kingland Terrace five or six times. Once he reached the old railroad tracks, it felt like his stomach was full of live snakes. He didn’t want to head home; he thought heading home would be akin to accepting this horrible reality, and he didn’t want to accept it. Yet he knew the police would have to be called. Had it been one of his older daughters, he might have neglected to call the cops, choosing to wait for his daughter’s return in a folding chair on the front porch, a Camel smoldering between his lips, a switch from the birch tree out back in his hands. Hell, June and Caroline missed their curfew three nights out of the week on average, and couldn’t be counted on to show up for dinner without rolling through some tall tale about why they were late. Tanya, on the other hand, was never late. She respected her curfews—she respected her
parents
—and she was not apt to get caught up along the way like her sisters. Which was why Hal Albrecht had a very bad feeling when he ultimately turned the pickup truck around and headed back toward Highpoint Boulevard.

His bad feeling only increased when, halfway down Montclair Street, he saw a crumpled brown paper bag on the side of the road. Hal pulled over, got out of the truck, and picked up the bag. He opened it. Had it not been for the block of apple streusel wrapped in cellophane that Hillary had baked the night before, he might not have broken into a full-fledged panic.

The cops arrived at the Albrecht house at approximately 3:45
P.M
. Hillary gave the officers a description of the clothes Tanya had been wearing while Caroline hunted for some recent photos of the girl. The officers took a lot of notes then radioed in for assistance. Caroline turned over a few school photos of Tanya to the officers. Since this was a time before AMBER Alerts, the best the officers could do was issue a BOLO through dispatch with the girl’s descriptors. When a second patrol car showed up, rack lights flashing, the officers took to the streets. Hal got back into his pickup truck, along with Tom Murray and Will Williams, and resumed his own search. A few of the other neighbors began walking through the neighborhood, which was not a particularly good neighborhood to walk through after the sun went down. Two more officers went door-to-door, asking residents if they had seen Tanya Albrecht that afternoon. The officers only got one confirmed sighting, from Chester Karski. In the days that followed, Karski would be the closest thing the county police had to a suspect in the disappearance. Karski knew they were suspicious of him, but he also knew that he had done nothing wrong. If it took subjecting himself to the cops’ redundant questioning in order to put them back on the right track and find Tanya Albrecht, so be it. He was interrogated—
interviewed,
the police detectives called it, always a friendly smile on their face—three times. The third time, Karski brought his rabbi with him, a wizened relic in a black tunic who spoke with a heavy Polish accent. Throughout the
interview,
the rabbi said nothing. Karski was amiable enough, answering all of their questions . . . or at least the ones he was able to answer. Yes, he had seen the Albrecht girl earlier that day. Yes, he had spoken to her. Yes, she had spoken back. No, the Albrecht girl had never been in his home. Yes, the police were more than welcome to search his one-bedroom flat. No, they wouldn’t even need a warrant—he would give them permission. When the interview was over, Karski left without a word, feeling the worse for wear. His rabbi followed him out, saying, “Shalom” to the detectives as he went.