The Little Girl with a Secret: A Psychological Thriller

Chapter One

T his isn’t what you’re thinking.

These were her fiancé’s first words to her. Interesting. Because what Syra was thinking is that her fiancé was having sex with her best friend. After all, the pair of them were currently naked in the bed that she and her fiancé shared. 

The whole scene was so shocking, so something-out-of-a-movie, that Syra stood in the doorway with her mouth wide open. Her brain, on the verge of exploding, clicked into something that could be described as calm. If it hadn’t… she knew something violent would happen. She’d snatch up that small lamp sitting on the nearby dresser. The lamp was about two feet high and had the perfect base for cracking over someone’s head. She could crack one of their skulls, then the other. 

It would be him first, no doubt about that. Then her. But Syra would get them both. It wouldn’t be a fooling around crack, either.

Her hand still gripped the doorknob. She’d known something was strange, because why would the bedroom door be closed? Her mouth was still wide open. She could only imagine what she looked like—and, actually, she didn’t need to imagine because her eyes flicked to the mirror over the headboard. She kept meaning to move the mirror, because when she and Sam made love, it would rattle against the wall. Had it rattled for him and Catrina? It must have.

While she’d imagined that she looked like the oval-mouthed, hands-on-cheeks shock-emoji, the mirror’s surface reflected back a much more mundane image. As if she hadn’t just stumbled into the most grotesque scene of her life. The mirror showed her looking as if she was casting around for something she needed—her cell phone, say, or her slippers. 

Sure, maybe she was a bit paler than usual. Maybe her black curls were a bit more out of control. Maybe her dark hazel eyes were glassy. Her mouth wasn’t even hanging open as she’d felt certain it was. Perhaps, at some point, she’d closed it.

Sam, the man she was going to marry. Catrina, her best friend.

They didn’t even like each other. 

Sam scrambled to the edge of the bed, his hands up in a relax gesture, the same gesture he used in arguments to get Syra to stop spewing words. Catrina sat in the bed, breasts exposed, looking as if she didn’t know how she found herself in this predicament. Syra noted that Catrina’s breasts were long and heavy, with dark brown areolas.

The betrayal was made worse by knowing what her best friend’s boobs looked like, and that the vision of them would be seared into her memory. Really something she could have done without. Thank god the sheet was wrapped around Catrina’s hips so Syra didn’t have to see what was between her legs.

She was upset… Sam stammered. Crying… I was trying to… console…

It was James, Catrina whined. I checked his texts. I came over to wait for you… then we drank…

It’s not… Sam went on. We didn’t…

No… Catrina added. It wasn’t… not like… it wasn’t like…

Syra closed the door and walked back into the living room. Not speaking would have more impact than anything she could think to say.

Just before she left, she removed her engagement ring and plunked it on an end table.

Chapter Two

Outside, Syra wandered aimlessly, stepping into the street before the light turned and getting honked at by irritated drivers. She kept walking and walking, with no idea where she was going. The thing she’d witnessed took up her brain space to the extent that she could make no decisions, not even about where to walk. She barely processed that her phone, somewhere inside of her tote bag, was ringing and ringing…

A small portion of her mental faculties returned, and she recognized Catrina’s neighborhood. Veering onto a familiar tree-lined street, she walked until she reached a prewar limestone building.

She numbly took her keychain out of a pocket on her tote bag and laboriously hiked up four steep floors. She had Catrina’s key for emergencies, as Catrina had hers.

She had no idea if Catrina was here, if she’d wandered long enough to give her (former) best friend time to get dressed, hop on the subway, and return home. But Catrina would be back at her apartment with Sam, soaking up all the drama. Saying things like What have we done? while furtively reveling in the excitement of it all.

How many times had Syra seen her friend recount some travail of a mutual acquaintance, eyes sparkling excitedly with the recounting of someone who’d been fired, or who’d had a breakup, or who could no longer tough out the city and had moved to the middle of nowhere.

She couldn’t hack it, Catrina would say, self-importantly, shaking her blonde head. She broke her lease and moved back to Iowa. Can you imagine?

Sam. He’d be sitting silently, broodingly. Probably still naked. He could be lazy like that, sometimes not dressing for a full day. He’d be hunched over in that ratty futon that their late cat had left claw marks all over. His dick would be hanging low between his hairy thighs, his finger hitting Syra’s number over and over.

Or perhaps it was Catrina calling. Syra still wouldn’t look at her phone, not even to turn it off. She feared the temptation to answer would be too great. Once she answered and said You fucker or You goddamn whore (the slurs were interchangeable as far as she was concerned), or she whimpered How could you do this to me? then they had the power.

If she didn’t speak to them, she had the power.

Passing a garbage can—not the stinky, overflowing wire ones of her less affluent neighborhood, buzzing with wasps and picked at by pigeons, but the fat, clean, tall lidded ones provided to Catrina’s brownstone-flanked neighborhood—Syra wrapped her palm around her phone.

Before she was conscious of what she was doing, she’d dropped the phone inside the receptacle. The horrid pair of them were now where they belonged: in the trash. Then she registered that a chain locked the lid to the base. She wouldn’t be able to retrieve whatever she’d put inside—which, in this case, was her cell phone.

The reality of what she’d done hit her.

You could have changed your number, moron!

But no. She didn’t have the brain power to do anything. Certainly not to find her cell provider’s nearest store (who was her cell provider?), then sit there for an hour or more, answering a dozen questions: ID, password, social security number. She wouldn’t be able to answer the secret questions they would ask her. What was the first concert she’d ever attended? What was the model of her first car? She knew none of it, didn’t know her own history.

You could have blocked them. BLOCKED THEM. So easy, just hit the Block this caller option. How had that completely slipped her mind? 

This was shock, she realized. What do they call it? Shellshock.

You’re in shellshock, a doctor would have said if this was a television show. She didn’t know shellshock was for stuff like this—betrayals of the heart. She’d thought it was only for soldiers who had a hand grenade tossed at them. She had the sudden need to get off the street because this thick mental fog meant she was a danger to herself or others.

Opening Catrina’s apartment door, Buster, a saucer-eyed pug of indeterminate age, wiggled over to her, soft folds of fur rippling.

Syra often took him for walks when Catrina was working late (Working late! Now she knew what they were really doing while Syra made dinner for Sam or walked Catrina’s fucking dog), so Buster bobbed up and down in anticipation. She clipped on his leash and grabbed his plush carrier from the top of the shoe rack behind Catrina’s front door, where she knew the carrier was kept. 

Syra knew where nearly everything in the apartment was kept, as she’d been over here hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. By herself. Then with Sam.

Sam. Whom Catrina didn’t even like.

You could do better, that’s all I’m saying.

Sure. Now she knew why Catrina periodically informed her that she could do better. 

Syra walked out the door with Buster at the end of the leash, the soft carrier slung over her shoulder. She didn’t bother to lock the door and wasn’t even sure she’d closed it.

On the sidewalk, she looked around, at a loss. Which way was the subway? She’d have to buy a card as she’d dumped her phone into the trash. Why had she done that? How was she supposed to call a car? Did she have her wallet? Did she have money?

Suddenly, there was a sickening, inescapable surge in her gut. She crouched down by Buster and vomited onto the sidewalk, one palm digging into the dirty, scratchy pavement, the other clutching his leash.

Chapter Three

It was a woman who stopped to help her. Of course. Men generally only stopped to help if you were looking attractive and they thought there was something they could get out of it.

The woman was about her age but had a child with her. The child looked to be five or six, on a kick scooter, her big eyes staring up from under her helmet as her mother said things like, Can I walk you somewhere? Should I call 911?

In the end, the woman called a car service and stood with Syra until it showed up a few minutes later. Syra confirmed that the driver would allow Buster (in his carrier) to accompany her. She pressed a twenty-dollar bill into the woman’s hands because the woman didn’t want to take it.

The woman said that she hoped Syra would realize she was better off without them. Syra didn’t remember telling the woman about Sam and Catrina, so it came as a surprise that the woman seemed to know about them. The helmeted child smiled shyly and said Mommy? in a bewildered fashion. Syra wondered if the girl understood what Syra was talking about—if the little girl understood infidelity. Had Syra just unwittingly introduced her to this concept?

In the backseat of the car, Syra stared at Catrina’s passing neighborhood and thought, How could they have done this to me—both of them? Both.

Not one of them, at the moment, had the determination to say, Let’s not do this to Syra. We love her. She loves us. Or, if we’re going to do this, let’s at least not do it in her bed, where she might come home from work early because the internet was down at her office. Let’s not do it on the day we’re all supposed to leave on a long weekend trip that she’d planned for us. Let’s do it some other time, like never.

At Penn Station, she waited at the train ticket window, something she hadn’t done in ages because she always bought her tickets online. But now, of course, she had no phone, and she didn’t know if Buster could get on the train.

Told by the woman at the window that the dog could get on the train so long as he stayed in his carrier, Syra was charged an extra thirty-five dollars. She had to return to the window twice to ask the gate number because it kept slipping right out of her head.

The realization that she was like a helpless infant without her phone began to sink in. How much of our lives are contained in that thin, little piece of technology. But Syra remembered the rental home’s address because it was one of those easy-to-remember, quaint addresses.

10 Scenic Way.

Even in her shellshock, she couldn’t forget that. The simplicity, the obviousness of the street name is partly what had drawn her to the home. And the name of the home itself: The Hansel and Gretel House. Even if she’d forgotten the address, she probably would find someone who knew the house thanks to its quaint name.

She was betting there’d be taxis at the train station. If there weren’t, she’d find a kind stranger (there were bound to be more of them in the country than in Brooklyn, and hadn’t she found one in Brooklyn?) who would call her a cab.

She’d tell the driver, 10 Scenic Way. The Hansel and Gretel House.

Staring out the train window, she watched as the graffiti-scarred tunnels, smoke stacks, power stations, and steel grids of the city gave way to the yellow-toned tract homes of suburbia, then to endless rows of bushy pines and tangles of green, green, so much green.

Finally, the train moved into vistas so unlike anything she’d seen before. Long, wide, open space. Green and gold rolling out endlessly.

The brilliant palette began to penetrate her shellshock. The long stalks of emerald-green corn, the plains of yellow-gold wheat, the silver silos, large red and white barns—it all reached in, like a fist, and gave her insides a jolt. A jolt of excitement.

And something like fear.

Chapter Four

For several moments, she remembered none of it, and life was fine. Then it trickled in, behind the reddish hues of her closed eyelids, tones growing brighter as sunrise seeped into the room.

Then all at once, she remembered. Sam and Catrina. In bed together.

A wail of anguish escaped from her mouth. She was overwhelmed with emotional pain of the magnitude she’d never experienced and wasn’t sure she could survive.

Then there was an insistent, small-sounding arf arf arf. She remembered that she’d stolen Buster, Catrina’s dog. The strange, agonized, not-her-at-all sounds coming from her must be upsetting him. She stuffed one palm over her mouth, her cheek squished into pillows she didn’t recognize.

This went on until she was able to drag down enough deep breaths that the wailing subsided. She peeled open her eyes and woozily sat up, looking for Buster, her head raw with a wine hangover. The pug stood at the side of the bed, hopping frantically, unable to get his eggroll body up on the bed, apparently worried for her. Or no. He probably had to pee.

Syra had no idea what time it was, but felt it must be early morning. She pulled on the clothes she’d arrived in—black yoga leggings and a ribbed, royal blue cotton t-shirt—and staggered out of the bedroom, trying to remember where she’d placed Buster’s leash. Why hadn’t she grabbed a few things before she’d fled Brooklyn? A couple of shirts? A pair of shorts? Fresh underwear? A toothbrush?

She wobbled down a staircase that creaked underfoot and came upon a large entryway. Buster’s leash was hanging on wall pegs by the front door.

Come on, Bus, she grumbled, clipping his leash and stepping into a spectacularly green front yard with flagstones in various patterns. Stone steps led up to what she barely remembered was a thin road threading through thick green forest, dripping with pine and willow trees.

The house had two stories, its bottom half stone, its upper half dark wood panels, and a gray-shingled roof. The muntin windows were tiny—six on the first floor, four on the second, with pointed gables. Exactly what you’d expect something called The Hansel and Gretel House to look like.

Yesterday, after arriving at the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania train stop, she’d wandered outside and, sure enough, saw a few taxis. The trip to the cottage took maybe half an hour. Along the way, there were several moments of panic as she tried to recall the message she’d received through the home share app a few days before, telling her the code for the door. She was fairly certain it was the last four digits of her phone number. If worse came to worse, she’d ask the driver to bring her to a hotel—any hotel.

Luckily, the code had worked. The inside of the cottage was so adorable—everything vintage, wooden, and soothingly simple—that her heart began a pleasantly accelerated patter despite being broken in half.

Two bedrooms upstairs, low-ceilinged with carriage beds, antique dressers, and frilly curtains. Downstairs, a large living room, a screened-in porch, and a kitchen with modern appliances. To her unending gratitude, on the counter was a wine-rack holding six bottles of wine. An attached handwritten note read, Help yourself.

First, she took Buster for a short walk down the street, marveling at the thickness of the woods, almost as if it were a jungle, and let him do his business. With no bags to pick up his waste, she’d kicked brush over it, then returned to the house to settle in and get thoroughly smashed.

After two glasses of rich red, she wished she had her phone so she could call them. First Sam. She’d tell him he was an absolute piece of shit and why couldn’t he have chosen a different woman, any other woman?

Then Catrina. She’d tell her (former) best friend that Buster wasn’t coming back any time soon. After the dog had swallowed a ball of tinfoil in the park, Syra had paid for his emergency room visit—almost one thousand dollars. Presented with the exorbitant bill, Catrina had called Syra blubbering. Dutiful and ignorant friend that she was, Syra had agreed to foot the charges since Catrina had hit all her credit card limits.

You’ll get your dog back when you repay me, bitch, she’d say on the phone. If she had one. Well, there was a phone. A black, plastic rotary-dial one sitting forlornly on a cherrywood table in the front hallway. But Syra had no idea what Sam’s or Catrina’s phone numbers were. She remembered that Sam’s number had a one and a nine in it, but that’s all she could remember. The perils of automated dialing.

The only phone number she had memorized was her mother’s, but she couldn’t call her. Not yet. It was all too excruciatingly embarrassing. How was she going to tell her mother that the wedding was off?

Syra’s parents had one of those strange and rare fairytale marriages. They’d been together since high school and she’d hardly heard them have the slightest tiff about anything. Secretly, she felt this doomed her chances at a great marriage. How was any marriage of hers going to live up to the one her parents had?

She was embarrassed when her friends would come over to her childhood home and say something like, Wow, your mom bats her eyelashes at your dad like she’s just met him or Your dad looks at your mom like he’s not married to her, like she’s a girl he has a crush on. Why couldn’t they hate or ignore each other like normal parents?

She’d also always had the dispiriting idea that they’d had her because they felt that’s what married people did—have children. They’d always given her everything parents are supposed to—food, clothing, shelter. She’d had a respectable education, grew up in a relatively safe area, had toys, books, spending money.

But she couldn’t remember ever having an intimate talk with either one of them. Couldn’t remember either one ever showing much interest in anything she was doing. Except for her upcoming wedding. The one she’d have to cancel.

She’d met Sam on a dating app, and found him to be average in the way her father was—not too exciting, not too good-looking, and even, dare she admit it, not too intelligent—but, overall, a good, solid man. And, more importantly, a man willing to commit to her (try finding that in New York City).

He wasn’t perfect. He got frustrated easily, and would rail against unseen forces that were apparently conspiring to deprive him of the life he was meant to live—primarily one of financial success. But just when one of these faults of his would begin to convince her they weren’t a good match, he’d do something so touching that she would recommit herself.

Like the weekend they’d gone to Boston to meet some of his college buddies and she’d fallen sick with the flu. Despite Sam’s buddies urging him to go bar hopping, he’d refused, and spent all weekend tending to Syra, buying her orange juice and vitamins, boiling her tea, until she was well enough to get back on the train.

Eventually, she’d accepted that he was a flawed man—and weren’t we all flawed?—but one who wouldn’t hurt her. Not deliberately.

How could she have been so disastrously wrong about him?

She’d wandered around the Hansel and Gretel House, sinking deeper into an inebriated stupor. At some point, she’d undressed and passed out on one of the upstairs carriage beds.

Bringing Buster back into the house, she sat on the screened-in porch for at least an hour, hardly able to move, head throbbing, stomach feeling split in two.

What had she been thinking, running off to Pennsylvania? Stealing Buster? Throwing out her phone? The tossing out of her phone was the worst part. How did she think that would punish them?

Now, she was stuck with no food, no transportation, and with a dog who hadn’t eaten for a day and must be starving. Hunger was beginning to assail her as well, her sore gut bubbling with growls. If she didn’t get food soon, it would be too late, as she assumed most stores in the country closed at an early hour.

With no phone to summon a car lift, the only thing to do was to put Buster on the leash and start walking. On the way to the cottage, the taxi had wended up and up a small mountain. She was deep in the forest, but she recalled that when the taxi had been on a main road, it had passed a small strip of stores. If she walked long enough, she’d find it.

The original plan had been that Catrina’s boyfriend, James, who had a car, would drive them all down to Lancaster County—to a rural town called Prairie. Though he didn’t know where he’d be driving. This weekend was supposed to be a surprise for everyone except Syra, who had booked their getaway.

James was a busy corporate lawyer (no matter how many times he explained what he did, Syra still couldn’t quite grasp the intricacies). Catrina and Sam were (supposedly) working on a start-up that they were set to launch any day. Sam had been a stockbroker for ten years and Catrina a senior editor at a popular financial news site. But both had been laid off last year.

That’s when the pair had started working together, using their combined knowledge of the market and their contacts to