The Little Girl in the Window: A Psychological Thriller Read online

  She stealthily swung out of bed and arranged two pillows horizontally on her mattress, and tucked her sheet around them. Then she opened her window screen, sliding it up slowly. One long, gangly leg stuck out, heel resting on the banged-up lid of a metal garbage can. Maneuvering her way onto the can, she carefully lowered herself to the outdoor patio.

  Closing the screen behind her, she took care to leave a half-inch of space at the bottom so she could slide it back up upon her return.

  In jeans cutoffs, a sleeveless black T-shirt, and sneakers with no socks, she hustled down the sloping backyard of her grandmother’s house toward the woods that buttressed the acre-large property.

  She plucked her little Lumen flashlight out of her back pocket, shining it along the trodden path of brush that led to the country club pool.

  She knew these woods so well she probably didn’t need a flashlight but didn’t want to trip over a raised root. She also hoped the flashlight would ward off any wild animals.

  In these parts roamed mammoth raccoons, fisher cats, wild turkeys, snakes both harmless and deadly, and more and more black bears were making appearances. If she stumbled upon one and scared it, she could end up shredded.

  It took her about five minutes to get to the pool. The path was rusty-red with fallen pine needles, and they were slippery, hence her sneakers. She had to dig her feet sideways so she wouldn’t slide down the mountainous, almost vertical trail. The path was illuminated with the ghostly poles of white birch trees reflecting the glow of the moon.

  Almost every night, as her grandmother slept, Romy found herself sneaking out of her house and scampering down the night woods. Taking up a spying spot behind a massive poplar tree, she’d watch Heath and Misty inside the pool area. Heath must have a set of keys. It was obviously their assignation spot.

  A few weeks ago, their voices and laughter had started wafting all the way up the hillside into Romy’s open bedroom window. She’d sneaked down to investigate, as she was certain it was them. Even though she couldn’t make out any words, she recognized the timbre of Heath’s voice—it called to her as plainly as one songbird calls to another through a forest of trees.

  Romy would spy with a sour churning in her belly as Heath chased Misty around the pool, slapping her shapely ass with his bright orange lifeguard towel. Then they’d get on the pool’s thick blue tarp and slip and slide around for a while.

  By the time they’d snuggle together on one of the long pool chairs, kissing and murmuring and gliding their hands all over each other’s perfect bodies, Romy was too disgusted to continue watching.

  She’d traipse sullenly back up the hillside, woozy with jealousy—even anger. It felt as if a thing that was rightfully hers had been stolen from her. The first time she’d watched them, she had a good, hard cry under her sheets, bewildered by the force and newness of her feelings.

  Romy couldn’t quite remember when the idea came into her head. But she’d spent at least two weeks grappling with it, stamping it down, and when she couldn’t wrestle it into submission, starting the justification process, getting all the details lined up.

  It gave her something to concentrate on besides watching them at the pool, watching how Heath swept the tendrils of Misty’s blue-black hair to one side as he sensuously applied lotion to her golden back while she closed her eyes and smiled dreamily.

  Romy couldn’t stop watching them during the day, couldn’t stop sneaking down to the pool to watch them at night. Because if she stopped watching them, then all hope was lost. Plus, he would be leaving for college soon. It was better to see him with Misty than to not see him at all.

  Yes, what she was about to do was wrong. She was old enough to know that. But it was a small thing, a prank. It would be a memory Romy would have, something to savor and privately grin about.

  That’s all.

  Chapter Four

  Romy skidded down through the woods about nine-thirty p.m. The pool closed at eight p.m. during the summer. She knew Heath and Misty usually arrived about ten p.m.

  Whether they were sneaking out of their homes or not, she didn’t know. At sixteen and eighteen, she assumed the pair had much more freedom than she did. Amazing the difference a year or two can make when you’re young.

  It was a risk leaving earlier than she normally did, as her grandmother was still awake, watching television in the living room, one of her cop shows. Nana loved cop shows. They gave her a sense of safety and order in the world—the bad guys always rounded up in the end, the cops always unequivocally good.

  But that night, Romy feigned a stomachache, saying she wanted to go to bed early. If her grandmother decided to check on her by opening the bedroom door, she would see a body shape under the sheet and (hopefully) assume the mound was a sleeping Romy.

  It never occurred to Romy what she would say if her grandmother caught on. She was too young for that kind of predetermined fabrication.

  Tonight, it was silent when she arrived at the pool. She crouched behind the wide poplar and reconnoitered. A few of the pool house lights were on and between that and the nearly full moon, Romy had a decent view of the surroundings.

  The pair wasn’t there yet but would arrive any minute. She had to be quick.

  Slipping through the kinked metal bars as she normally did, she scampered to the first corner of the pool, her heart pounding in her chest.

  She crouched down and grasped the thick steel hook fastening one corner of the tarp to a bolt in the platform, and flicked the lever back. The tarp was heavy and, at first, she wasn’t sure she would be able to get the hook off the bolt but after yanking hard, so hard her shoulder popped slightly, she released it and watched as one corner of the tarp sank a few inches below the water.

  She ran back to the opening in the fence, turned sideways, and slithered out. She wended through the trees to the first curve of the hillside, her usual spying spot. Then she sat, breathing heavily, not from the effort, but from nerves.

  In fact, she was so nervous, she couldn’t comprehend why she’d set her mind upon this, why the thought of seeing them plummet into the water had fixed in her brain until it had become something she had to accomplish or go mad. How this idea had gone from distant and amorphous to banging insistently on the interior of her skull. Do it, do it, do it, do it.

  Heath was a swimmer. He was a human fish. Getting dumped in the pool wouldn’t bother him in the slightest but Romy had never seen Misty in the water except on the shallow end, where she’d delicately swish around, the water never rising above her thighs. She never joined her friends, who were making noisy cannonballs off the diving board.

  Romy suspected that Misty didn’t want to get her beautiful wavy blue-black hair wet, didn’t want to get her perfect face wet, with that shiny pink gloss on her juicy lips. Maybe she wouldn’t be so pretty all wet—those glossy waves would turn scraggly or even frizzy. Would Heath love Misty as much if she didn’t look so perfect?

  Romy heard Heath’s hormonal arrival hoot. Then Misty’s delighted feminine cawing. The couple did not drive to the pool, they biked from their nearby homes. Romy knew there was no way they could see her in the gloom of the forest but her heart pounded and she crept farther behind the poplar, tall and wide as a sequoia. She grasped her bare knees, smelling her own earthy child-skin.

  “I can’t believe it!” Heath shouted, thrusting his arms up in the air. He twirled, kind of a victory twirl.

  “You’re not mad?” Misty asked as she walked towards the woods-side of the pool. Her melodious voice was closer and clearer than Romy had ever heard it.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  He took off his white, glowing T-shirt, chucked it onto a nearby chair, then merged with Misty, spinning her a couple of times. She laughed loudly, and Heath hushed her.

  “We should be quieter,” he said.

  The couple sat on pool chairs, undressing. Romy had the urgent need to hear everything they were saying. Biting her lower lip, she edged stealthily down the sloped hill and ducked behind another wide tree. She couldn’t have been more than fifty feet from them.

  “What about Georgetown?” Misty asked.

  “Well, everything is paid for. The dorm, books, deposit. Everything. Orientation is next week.”

  “Oh, no. What do we do?”

  “We have to make it work. Either you come with me or stay here and I come up every weekend.”

  “There are options. I could get an abortion. I don’t want to, though.”

  Romy felt her eyes go large and wide. She froze with her fingers pressed up to her mouth, trying not to breathe loudly.

  Heath bent over to kiss Misty. “No, neither do I. I mean, I’d thought we were careful…”

  “It happens. It’s not one hundred percent.”

  “Yeah. I guess I didn’t know that.”

  “Me neither. Mom is going to kill me. Dad, he’ll understand, I think. Nothing gets him upset. It’s Mom… ugh.”

  He looked out over the pool, then back at her. “Nah. Your mom likes me. Besides, I’m going to be a lawyer, I’ll be making piles of money.”

  Romy felt a stab of disappointment. Why, with her, had he acted like he didn’t want to go to law school? That he was creative and wanted to write books… with her? That money didn’t mean anything to him?

  This was her first real indication that people could have distinct and opposing sides to them—an awakening she didn’t welcome.

  Heath disappeared and Romy realized he’d gone down to the pool’s platform. Was he… on his knees?

  “Will you marry me, Misty Glass?”

  “Yes!” she squeaked without any hesitation, and the silhouettes of their bodies merged into one.

  Romy was sickened, devastated. He was lost to her. The couple was going to
get married. He would be a lawyer, making piles of money, working in a skyscraper. He and Misty would live in a McMansion, have a horde of children.

  Vague and dreamlike as Romy’s imagined artistic future with Heath had been, it had also been sharply real and specific. She felt the loss of that imagined future as keenly as if it had been promised to her.

  But how foolish, how infantile she’d been. He was a man, with a man’s needs and wants. Romy had to admit she couldn’t fulfill those needs and wants. She barely understood what sex was. Of course, she knew what it was, she wasn’t completely stupid, but she also knew she wasn’t ready to have it, not even with Heath.

  The pair moved towards the pool. Romy remembered why she was crouched in the moonlit woods, what she’d stolen down here to do. How she’d unlatched one corner of the tarp and the couple was about to slide on it as they normally did and…

  Misty was pregnant.

  Suddenly, it didn’t seem funny to send a pregnant woman plunging into the cold depths of the pool. An ominous sensation rippled through her. She thought about calling out to them. She could pretend she was taking a walk and happened to see them.

  But who would believe that? She was a child down in the woods past bedtime. They’d know she’d sneaked out; they’d know she was the one who’d untethered the tarp.

  In Romy’s adolescent imagination, that meant they’d know what a stupid and mortifying crush she had on Heath—and they would laugh about it in private, make fun of her. Maybe they’d even hate her and spread rumors about her around town. She had a hard enough time fitting in.

  So, she did nothing but watch. Her hope was that Heath would go first on the tarp and, upon realizing one side was unlatched, alert Misty not to step on it.

  But instead, Romy heard a faint jingle. Heath said, “Hold up” and ambled to the small outdoor changing station. It appeared to Romy as if he moved in slow motion.

  Misty stood looking after him as he disappeared into the wooden, white-painted changing station. She stood, with her head turned, for what seemed a long time. Then she quickly turned back around and stepped off the side of the pool.

  Romy couldn’t see what was happening. Misty had gone down behind the pool rim, below Romy’s line of vision. Her breath quickened and she felt queasy and cold. She heard what sounded like several small splashes in quick succession.

  Where was Heath? Where had he gone? What was happening? Romy wanted to yell out, to call for Heath, but she couldn’t speak or move.

  Then Heath was sprinting towards the pool, fast as a panther, his bare feet slap slap slapping on the pavement. It knifed Romy dead in the heart that Misty couldn’t swim and she was in the deep end. Romy knew it with a certainty that was ancient and primal.

  Romy was moving, moving as if in the water herself but being continually tugged back, and back, and back into danger. It all started to dissolve—the crunch of her shoes on the trail, her heavy breathing, the air coursing into her open mouth and down into her heaving lungs—everything became quieter and quieter, fading out like the end of a song.

  Only one sound remained—animal-like wails chasing her up the hill, the otherworldly cries at her back as Heath tried to save Misty who, Romy knew, had become entangled in the tarp and drowned.

  Chapter Five

  Now

  “If it isn’t Miss Talent.”

  His smile was warm. All of him was more attractive than she remembered even in her fevered imagination and in the photos on social media she’d failed to stop checking out over the years.

  Those eyes she remembered so well, the blue you’d see on old china patterns, a rare, sublime kind of blue. And they looked at her approvingly, in a way they had not looked at her when she was a child.

  She wasn’t completely surprised at his look. She’d grown pretty over the years. Not gorgeous, but an elfin pretty that certain types of men, especially artistic ones, responded to. But she hadn’t been certain Heath would look at her like that, as she knew she wasn’t his type.

  “Hello yourself, Heath Asher. Congratulations on the book.”

  She held out her copy for him, unabashedly examining him as he kept his head down, signing. At thirty years old, he’d grown into his lankiness and exuded the casual magnetism of a man who knew he appealed to both sexes, a man to be bedded or befriended or both.

  He had no idea he’d been sporadically conversing via email with Romy for three years, as she was his cover designer. He had a three-book romance series called For the Love of Missy published by a small—microscopic, really, with only a handful of authors—press. So small that Heath had to retain his own cover designer.

  Thanks to Heath’s PayPal information, Romy—whose design service was known as Golden-Eye—had quickly deduced that romance author “Helen Asher” was actually Heath Asher.

  She’d been dumbfounded at the coincidence and couldn’t bring herself to tell him who she was, though it was astonishing that his teenage declaration that they should collaborate on a book had come true.

  Heath also had no idea that Romy had then started buying copies of his books, keeping his rank afloat. (The copies went into free little libraries all over the city.) Until she walked into the Court Street bookshop in Brooklyn, she had no idea how much she’d been keeping his rank afloat, because there were only about a dozen people scattered in the metal folding chairs in front of the dais. The sizable number of empty chairs gawping at her made her feel uncomfortable for him.

  After his reading and question-and-answer session, about half the audience—all of six women—lined up for him to sign their books, Romy bringing up the rear. The women, all forty and up, didn’t seem to mind that “Helen” was a man. Given that he was a young, attractive man, the starry look in their eyes and eager lilt in their voices as they received his John Hancock indicated they preferred it.

  He signed Romy’s inside cover of Missy’s Wedding (following Missy’s Courtship and Missy’s Engagement), “To Romy—Here’s to escaping Glass Town!” Then he closed the book and looked up at her. She tried not to blush but felt heat pulsing under her skin.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said, grinning wryly. “You and the other two people.”

  “Oh no. There were more than that. At least three.” She grinned back. “Well…” She hesitated. “Maybe it’s that virus thing.”

  All winter the virus had been something happening in far-off countries, one of those things that had nothing to do with being in current-day America, like mass famine or civil war. But then it had started to roll towards the country like a giant wave, first engulfing Asia, and last she’d heard, washing up on the West Coast.

  So far as anyone knew, it wasn’t in New York, but people were getting jittery, conversation turning to the virus. If it was on the West Coast, how long before it was here, on the East Coast? No one said, Maybe it’s here now. But perhaps Heath’s poor turnout wasn’t merely a sign that Helen Asher’s romance series was dismally unpopular.

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said, seeming both doubtful and grateful for her attempt to soothe his ego. “This is my first signing, so… My publisher thought Helen should come out of the shadows, that it might perk up sales. Besides, I felt weird letting people think I was a woman.”

  “I can’t wait to read it.”

  Not true. She couldn’t bring herself to read his books, as she’d quickly realized that “Missy” was a surrogate for Misty Glass. The fact that Heath had emailed Golden-Eye an actual photo of Misty and requested that she use a cover model who resembled his dead high school girlfriend was more than enough to clue her in.

  “Well…” Romy said, looking around awkwardly. The bookstore was empty except for an employee who was eyeing them impatiently. “It was nice seeing you again.”

  “Come on, Miss Talent, you’re not going to bail on me, are you? Want to grab a drink?”

  The Irish pub across the street from the bookstore was packed. So much for the theory that people were staying home because of the virus. Perhaps everyone thought alcohol consumption was the best way to deal with the surreal turn the world had taken.

  Heath paid for Romy’s glass of bitter white wine and his pint of ale, and they headed to a back table. The bar was dark and stale-smelling.