I didn’t understand then—but I do now.
The little man approached. He’d taken everything he’d wanted from the house and entered the dining room with hands out and empty. Even so, Fiona Burke flinched at the sight of him, as if she knew what he was capable of doing with his bare hands.
He wasn’t saying anything. He was only looking. He was looking at me.
“What?” Fiona Burke said. She didn’t stand in front of me or block me with her body or anything, but she leaned ever so slightly in my direction to let her shadow cover me.
“How old is she?” the little man said to her, as if I didn’t understand the language.
“Nine,”
I
answered.
A
slight
exaggeration. Fiona Burke probably had no idea how old I was anyway.
“She’s not going to tell on us,” she was saying. “She won’t call anyone or anything. I made her promise.”
“She knows my face,” the little man said. “She’s looking at me right now.”
“No, she’s not,” Fiona Burke said— though I was. I’d turned from the crook in the wall and was peeking up at him.
His mustache made his upper lip appear to be rotting and his eyes were smaller than natural in his already small head.
While I was looking at him, he was looking at me.
“Maybe she should come along,” the little man said then in an odd voice, like there were unspoken things below the surface, murky and confusing things he couldn’t wait to let out. His voice was betraying him.
“But what would we do with her?”
Fiona Burke joked.
“Don’t worry,” he said in that voice again. “I could think up a few things.”
She
caught
something
in
his
expression and made a strange squeaking sound in her throat. A sound you’d emit only when alone, behind closed doors, where no one else could hear it. I heard it. So did he.
The little man laughed in response.
“She stays here,” Fiona Burke said.
I didn’t know then that she was speaking up for me. Protecting me. I didn’t know a lot of things I know now.
The big man had returned, and there was a new sense of urgency, someone who’d called, somewhere they had to be. The little man became distracted by all of this and it was when his back was turned that Fiona Burke did what she did. She had me by the elbow, and then when I was too slow, she had both my arms and was dragging me out of the dining room and down the hall. She hissed into my ear to stay quiet and then she shoved me into a hall closet.
It was dark and thick with the heady scent of what I’d later discover was wool. The wool was from her parents’
coats, decades’ worth of coats, and there were pointy objects that were the bony prongs of her parents’ umbrellas.
She’d jammed the lock from the outside, or she’d known that the knob would stick. I don’t know. Either way, she’d locked me in.
I couldn’t hear much of what happened outside the wall of coats that confined me in that dark, small space.
When they were near the front door, mere steps from the coat closet, I could hear the little man’s voice—it boomed bigger than you’d expect from his body —slithering under the door and through the layers of wool, causing a cool line of sweat to trickle anxiously beneath my pajama shirt and down my spine.
I would not scream to be let out of the closet, and I was afraid to try the knob again to see if it would turn. I wouldn’t make a sound with him so close. Fiona Burke would come back for me when he wasn’t looking and undo the lock to set me free. She’d do that before she went away in that truck with them. She would.
The little man was asking for me.