Little Girl Lost
by Kirsti Mikoda
part 1
The house was old before all the other old houses on the block were built. A prim-looking, almost utilitarian home, its only whimsey was a forest-green trim that ran around each of the three shallow brick stories, and windows boasting a multiplicity of small square panes that let in the light. The third story was no more than a garret, and there was a small balcony jutting from the front of the house on the second floor, the overhang offering a cover of shade for the main door.
By the time Henry Edgell walked up the mossy path to try his new key, the house had been sitting empty for almost a decade. He paused on the front stoop to take in the sheltered neighborhood, with fussed-over lawns and rows of replanted maples lining the road. Richer in history than money, its greatest charm was a quick commute to Philadelphia’s downtown core.
The key turned easily in the tarnished lock; the door swung open soundlessly, revealing a dim interior, where the dust lay thick and soft. Henry took his first step into his new home with painful resignation.
* * *
“You know,” he told his wife Maureen over the phone three weeks later, as he stood at the stove, waiting for a saucepan of water to boil, “sometimes I feel like this house knows I’m just a visitor. Like it’s just waiting to see how long before I’m done pretending.”
There was a stony silence from the other end of the line. Henry knew his wife disliked anthropomorphism, but he had never been able to shake the habit of trying to see humanity in everything. He assumed it was what made him a good furniture maker. Each piece he built became an extension not only of himself, but of the person who would use it.
He considered this house a testament to such ideas, so many hands contributing to the whole. Just yesterday, while cleaning the kitchen cupboards, he had noticed measurements penciled in different positions around the underside of some of the shelves. The numbers were scrawled-in, sharp and messy, a sure hand but without carpentry training. Whoever he was, he hadn’t cut dados or tongue-and-groove joins into the sides of the cabinets but nailed half-inch wooden runners as ledges under each shelf instead.
Better yet, on the underside of one of the lowest shelves, Henry found a different kind of drawing, a flower large and looping, in a child’s hand, angled as if scrawled secretly while sitting on the counter. A father’s carpentry assistant or impatient cooking partner, there was no way to be sure, but unmistakeable proof of a past life.
“I’ve been meeting some of the people who were here before us,” he told Maureen next. “Well, meeting their decorating styles, anyway. I mean, imagine all the people who must have lived and died here before us. Maybe families full of children. I don’t know if it helps or not, thinking there may have been another little girl who lived here. Maybe grew up here into an old woman. You never know.” He could hear Maureen shifting around on the other end of the phone, rattling dishes or something glass near the running sink.
“I’ve almost got the kitchen all done,” he lied. He had very little of anything done, but he wanted her to think he could still achieve something, even if it was as simple as taking care of himself. Which he was also failing. Like the soaring stacks of unopened boxes piled haphazard around the house, most of the mundane habits of caring for himself had been left unexplored.
A normally neat person, prone to impish flourishes of humour, the last year had seen a stop to all that. Today, a single glance in a mirror would reveal that Henry was exhausted and terribly underweight. He needed a shower. His hair was lank, his cheeks hollow and unshaved.
He shook instant coffee into a mug set beside him and sloshed in the boiling water. He found the smell almost nauseating and, instead of drinking it, he leaned against the counter and looked around at the half-unpacked kitchen.
The continued silence on the phone told him that his wife knew his boast to be hollow. Both he and Maureen recognized that Henry’s best and most awesome achievement had been Nancy, their daughter. Everything he did after her birth came back to her, directly or indirectly. He was a punctual swimming lesson and soccer practice chauffeur, an avid front-and-center cheerleader at every dance performance and gymnastics competition. His self-owned cabinetry shop stayed firmly closed every weekend. To Henry, family time was sacrosanct.
When they bought the house early last year, Maureen had joked in her dark way about the money she would spend refurnishing, how sick they were going to be of hard work and each other. But there was a backyard, and a front road mostly free of traffic. One of the rooms upstairs had an adjoining wood-paneled closet big enough for him to build an art room for Nancy, where she could keep all her paints and pastels and display her drawings. He knew she deserved a space bigger and better than the kitchen fridge at their old place. It had seemed like a perfect plan.
Except that his daughter was now dead. She’d been four days shy of her eighth birthday. And here he was, perched on the edge of his kitchen counter at almost midnight, rattling off nonsense to his estranged wife. It was almost ten months since Nancy had been struck and killed by a motorist in an almost empty intersection while she had been walking home from school with her mother. None of the witnesses had even been able to agree on the colour of the car, let alone see the licence plate.
Maureen had left him six months later to go live with her mother in Baltimore. Secretly, he was glad. It had been unbearable, her repeated assurances that she had only glanced into her purse for a second to check her phone. More unbearable still became the re-enactments of the movement, with grocery bags, packing boxes full of Nancy’s toys, desperately clutched school uniforms in the midst of being bundled away, all held against her hip, like you do a purse, when you’re digging around for something mundane that is about to become the most important detail of your life.
He helped her pack. He agreed it would only be temporary, even though he knew it wouldn’t be. He told her he didn’t blame her, even though he did. Then, finally alone, he fell apart. All during this the house sat quiet, as it was now, an endless storehouse of secrets waiting to be uncovered. Of height markings on door jambs, taped-up drawer handles to stop tiny fingers’ getting caught in the metal filigree, and childish drawings that he imagined a girl like Nancy doing, even dirty-blonde like Nancy, her face set in innocent concentration as she sketched.
Sometimes, as he lay on the single mattress he had purchased the day after moving in and installed in the small den beside the kitchen, he thought he heard Nancy’s voice. A low whisper in his ear as he was fading into sleep. Or then again he heard her just as he was waking up, as though speaking at a normal volume, just in the next room. Just far enough away that he couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. He was sure it was a child’s voice, and so similar to his own child’s voice it might as well have been her.
Somewhere in Baltimore, Maureen hung up the phone, and it took Henry far too long to notice.
* * *
That night, hours after his wife had hung up, Henry saw the little girl for the first time. Something woke him early, just a few minutes past two a.m. He sat straight up in bed, trying to calm his breathing enough to listen to the silence around him. There was nothing. He heard nothing, no voices, nothing that would necessitate his sudden wakefulness. But something in his mind was urging him out of bed.
He crossed to the door, paused for a moment, throat dry, before he opened it a crack to peek out. The hall was empty. Moonlight from the curtainless front window spilled around the corner of the second-floor stairs and partway down the hall. Henry closed the door and leaned against it, trying to get his anxiety under control. He didn’t know why his heart was racing so fast, but there was something in him that seemed to be driving him irresistibly to go out into the hall.
Taking a deep breath, he reopened his door and stepped out. Still nothing moved. He padded down the empty hall to his front door and checked the deadbolt. It was locked. Peering into the moon-bright front room to his left, he could see nothing but boxes.
He turned and was about the head back down the hall to the kitchen when he caught sight of the little girl. She stood, very still, at the top of the stairs. Henry felt his heart give a single painful throb in his chest at the sight of her. In the dim light, he couldn’t make out her face, or the colour of her hair. She was dressed in something loose, like a nightgown. Her hands hung down at her sides.
“Nancy?” he asked.
The girl turned suddenly and disappeared out of sight into the room at the top of the stairs. Henry pounded up the stairs after her, grabbing the doorknob and tossing the door open before he had time even to register that he had not seen or heard her open it. The room was completely dark, and he scrabbled around on the wall until he found and flipped the light switch and blinked to adjust his eyes. The room was empty, the windows shuttered and dust-covered.
* * *
In the days after seeing the little girl, Henry Edgell found himself contemplating murder. He had the same morbid curiosity as the next man, he assumed, but since that night, he found the subject more and more occupied his mind. Specifically, might someone have murdered her, his midnight visitor?
He began to visit the Philadelphia Department of Records, City Archives, on Spring Garden Street. The air around the squat concrete building was hoppy from the brewery next door. There, he foraged through unending rows of bankers’ boxes, some with handwritten labels, others with stickers. He sifted through vital records for births and deaths, property and building records, starting with deeds of Philadelphia County that went all the way back to 1683. He even thumbed ancient city directories. Nothing gave him any indication that anyone had so much as stubbed their toe on his property in the last eighty years.
All of which left him with a problem. Besides an untimely death within it, Henry had no idea why his house would be haunted. It was possible, of course, that the little girl had all been part of a bad dream, but Henry was sure she wasn’t. He visited the library, where several volumes on the occult and ghostly sightings confirmed very little. He booked a session with an online grief counsellor, who offered nothing at all, save for the suggestion that stress-induced nightmares were the likely culprit.
Henry remained unconvinced. He was sure that he had not returned to sleep after his sighting. And what if she had been real? More real than even he suspected. What if she had been flesh? A midnight visitor of the corporeal kind? The answer remained the same. Real or ectoplasmic, stress-induced hallucination or badly digested bit of cheese, she seemed to have the advantage of familiarity with the terrain. He would simply have to wait and see what happened.
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by Kirsti Mikoda
