Little Dead Girl

Tim drove through the neat Chicago suburb, and the dead girl rode in the back seat.

She was about six years old, chubby and red-haired. Tim never saw her face to face. She only appeared in his rear view mirror. Sometimes in the mirror of a gas station bathroom. Tim would be washing his hands, thinking of nothing at all, and there she would be. That solemn little face, framed by ginger curls. But mostly she rode in his back seat, calm and quiet. A good little girl. Usually she sat still as death, staring straight ahead like a pale statue, but this time she was playing some sort of game with her fingers, twisting them like little pale snakes. She watched her own fingers twist in her lap, as though they moved of their own accord.

Tim turned around in his seat and looked behind him. As usual, there was nothing to see. Just cheap grey interior. He turned back around, looked in his rearview mirror—there she was. It was always the same.

The dealer told me this piece of crap was brand new, he thought for the hundredth time. I bought it new. Lying son of a bitch.

He’d noticed the 173 on the odometer, but the dealer had insisted that it was just from “the guy” driving it from another dealership. Tim should have insisted on a pre-owned-vehicle price rate. He should have walked out of the fucking dealership when that grinning bastard showed him this stupid little cracker box clown car and told him that this was all that the bank had approved. But Tim had been tired, cranky, and nervous about going another week without wheels. He’d accepted the fucking clown car, and to add injury to insult it came with a free dead kid.

“How’s it going back there?” Tim asked, with the fake cheeriness that was the domain of those who have next to no experience talking to children.

The little girl glanced at him and said nothing. She didn’t talk much. “Yes,” “No,” and “Fine” were the sum of her vocabulary. Tim wondered if the kid had been retarded when she was alive. She shouldn’t still be retarded after death. She was all spirit, so she had no brain to be damaged, right?

“Could be worse, I suppose,” Time said aloud, thinking of a road trip he’d once taken with his sister and her brats. “At least you don’t need to stop and pee every two miles.”

The girl still said nothing. Her hair was curly and ginger-orange, and her face was almost porcelain-fair. No freckles. Gingers usually had lots of freckles. Her only signs of nonlife were a single drop of blood below one nostril, and a dark bruise on the upper left side of her face. Her injuries weren’t horrible, not gruesome like in those terrible evil-ghost movies. But they troubled the eye and mind nevertheless. They were so calmly final. Tim couldn’t stop looking at that single drop of dark blood, the blue-black bruise. That’s what death looks like, in the end, he thought. Like nothing much.

“Do you remember how you died?” Tim asked. This wasn’t the first time he’d asked this question, and he wasn’t expecting a response.

“Big white car,” the girl said softly, still playing with her fingers. She watched them intently, like a child watching television. “I saw a big white car, and it got bigger and bigger.”

Her gentle singsong voice sent a chill down Tim’s neck. This was the most he’d ever heard her say, and he wished he hadn’t asked.

Tim wasn’t driving a big car by any stretch, but that meant nothing. To a little girl in the middle of the road, even a SmartCar would look like a Mack Truck.

So what had happened? “The guy” might have hit her while driving it down from that mysterious other dealership. Or… What if the car had been bought once before, and the previous owner had hit the kid shortly after buying it? Couple of days, maybe a week, however long it took to put 170 miles on it. Then he freaked out and brought it back, and the dealer had turned around and re-sold it without thinking twice.

Of course a car that had been involved in a death would have been impounded by the police. But what if it was a hit and run? No witnesses around, so the driver took off. And then returned the car to try to get rid of the evidence. How much damage would a little kid do to a car? Was it something that the dealer would have noticed?

“Did you see the person driving the car?” Tim asked.

“No.”

So much for that. Tim racked his brain for ways to figure out who the girl was and who had killed her. “What town did you live in?” he asked.

“Lake Park,” the girl said. She up looked at him for a moment, studying him, before turning to the window and staring out. Her fingers twisted like white worms in her lap.

Tim was driving through Lake Park right now. His apartment was on the edge of town.

The dealer had lied through his motherfucking teeth. This car hadn’t been driven here from some remote location. Tim’s stomach roiled with anger.

“Do you know your street address?” he asked.

“1112 Hickory Street,” she repeated blandly.

That was about four blocks west of here. Tim considered stopping by the house. But what would he say? “Sorry about your daughter. By the way, she’s been haunting my car for the last month and a half.” They would think he was a lunatic, or some sicko who got off on upsetting bereaved people. At best, they’d slam the door in his face. At worst, he’d have some hard questions to answer at the police station.

Tim kept driving. Unless he could identify the car’s previous owner, there was just no point.

He stopped at a red light, and an idea came. The dealership would have the previous owner’s name on file. Tim could ask for a vehicle history report and get it that way. But the dealer had already lied and said that Tim was the car’s first owner. Tim would have to concoct something to get the guy to tell him the truth.

Or… He could take the car to a mechanic and find out if the car had been involved in an accident. They could figure out all sorts of things by examining the framework of the car, he’d heard. He could also go to the police and find out if there was an unsolved hit and run on their record. It was odd that he hadn’t seen anything like it on the news. Lake Park wasn’t a big town, and a kid getting hit by a car would have made headlines.

He glanced into the rearview mirror. The little girl was staring straight at him, and blood was running out of both nostrils like fresh snot. Tim shivered and looked past her, at the pretty brunette on the crotch-rocket motorcycle behind him. She was wearing a black windbreaker, and her helmet was flame-red, like her motorcycle. Her shirt under the jacket was very loose. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Tim could almost see—

The brunette saw him, smiled, and blipped her horn.

Tim turned around and saw that the light was green. He hit the gas and peeled forward.

The was a little girl crossing the street in front of him.

She had curly red hair and pale, chubby cheeks. Tim didn’t have time to stop. He slammed on his brakes, but it did no good.

She never even looked up. There was a small, terrible thud.

He looked into the rearview mirror. The little girl stared back. Her face was covered with blood, and it was soaking into her dress.

Slowly, she faded away.