What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  Lucinda bit her cheek harder.

  She could never speak to anyone about him. Ever.

  Except to Sally.

  Wherever she was.

  Where could she be so late at night?

  Why was she not here?

  And what was taking her so long to come home?

  Lucinda squeezed her eyes tight and wished as hard as she could for Sally to come home.

  Please, just come home.

  She felt something warm in her palm and looked down to see she had squeezed her hand tight around the piece of soapstone and cut her flesh. Not bad, not deep anyway, it was like a thin paper cut, and it stung as blood seeped from it. But she’d live.

  Things Left Undone

  The door to Jonah and Rebecca’s bedroom was shut.

  “Is it normally shut?” Maurice asked. “We need to establish a baseline of your normal pattern.”

  “We don’t have a pattern,” Jonah said. “It’s a door.”

  Maurice took a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to ease open the bedroom door.

  The bed slowly materialized from the dimness, a ghostly Polaroid image.

  Jonah choked on his breath.

  On Rebecca’s side of the bed—which Maurice must have deduced from the creams and lotions on the bedside table—the comforter and sheets were tousled in a heap. On Jonah’s side—evidenced by the poetry chapbooks, lit mags, the hardbound Poe’s Collected Works, and an empty bottle of beer on the table—the comforter and sheets were undisturbed.

  It was obvious only one person had slept in the bed the previous night; plainer still who that person was.

  And wasn’t.

  Maurice silently observed the room as if he were a museum visitor absorbing a tableau of ancient man. The silence seemed to jab a bony finger at Jonah: Where were you last night?

  Maurice, using the handkerchief, flipped the switch on the wall to the left.

  The room remained dark.

  Jonah sensed an odd aura to the room, something wrong in the room. With the room. He could not pin it down.

  “The ceiling light burned out,” he said. “I haven’t had a chance to fix it.”

  He’d had plenty of time. The bulbs were in the hallway closet five steps behind him. It would take thirty seconds to replace the bulb. Yet for weeks the light had remained dark. It was one of his many daily failings at upkeep that nagged him and exasperated Rebecca. Every time she came into the room at night, she’d hit the switch and—darkness. She’d stay mum, but in the milky hallway light Jonah would spot the infinitesimal flare of her nostrils as she stepped around the bed to click on her bedside lamp. Jonah intended to change the bulb. He just . . . he got immersed in his dissertation after dinner, working maniacally, and forgot. Which was more important: a damned lightbulb or his PhD needed for tenure?

  Maurice stepped deeper into the room. “Where’d you sleep last night?” he said as he clicked on Rebecca’s lamp, using the handkerchief.

  The harshness of the 150-watt bulb Rebecca preferred brutalized Jonah’s eyes. He winced; protozoan spots danced in his vision as Maurice worked a thumb along the inside waistband of his trousers.

  Jonah had slept the night on Sally’s floor, awakened beside her in the morning. After the argument and several more beers he’d checked on Sally, lain on the floor beside her bed to rub her back. He’d fallen asleep, as he had scores of times. As had Rebecca. That he’d slept through the night on the floor was a consequence of his exhaustion from slaving over his dissertation, and the argument.

  Come morning he’d woken and crept out of the dark room, never actually seeing Sally, just a lump of blankets, under which he’d assumed his daughter had slept. Where she had to have slept, because otherwise—

  He shut down the corrupted thought.

  “I slept on top of the covers,” Jonah said, the lie coming to him in an instant of self-preservation, not wanting his sleeping on Sally’s floor to be anything more than the . . . pattern it was. For himself and for Rebecca. “I got done working late and didn’t want to wake Rebecca. The comforter makes me roast anyway. So I slept on top.”

  Maurice stared at him.

  Jonah wondered if the unkind words he’d said to Rebecca had caused her to leave on her own with Sally. Not leave forever. Just for the evening. To cool down. Find perspective. It was more palatable a narrative than others, and his mind snatched the seed of it, let it germinate into plausibility, flourish into certainty. Fact.

  One place he had not called to track down Rebecca: the Savoy Cinema. Sally and Rebecca adored movies; perhaps that’s where they were. Perhaps Rebecca had taken Sally to a movie to cool down. If so, they weren’t in peril. They were safe. That was all that mattered. He thought about telling Maurice, yes, we argued. And, now that he thought about it, that was why his wife and daughter were gone: Rebecca is taking time out with Sally to recalibrate. They’ve gone to the movies. They’ll be through the door any second. You can go. Call off the search. Leave me to welcome my wife and child back with gratitude and humility, and in the privacy we all deserve. No need to humiliate me more than I already am.

  Jonah opened his mouth to speak, and would have, except Maurice, who stood at the opened closet door, looked back over his shoulder at Maurice, face fraught, and said, “What the hell is this?”

  Twisting the Truth

  “I told you,” Jonah said to the state police detective who sat across from him at the kitchen table. “And him.” He nodded at Maurice who leaned against the counter behind the detective.

  Maurice seemed to be taking the detective’s blunt manner in stride, and more than once he had given Jonah a look: It’s formality, humor him so we can find the girls safe sooner rather than later.

  “Tell me again. Why the rifle the sheriff found in your closet was recently fired.” The detective, wiry and anemic, pencil-scratch mustache and an odor of wet suede about him, jotted in his pad.

  “I was sighting it in,” Jonah said. “Deer season starts soon.”

  “Avid deer hunter, are you?” the detective said.

  Maurice cut a doubtful look at Jonah.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Jonah said.

  “What would you say?” the detective said. “Not many people take up hunting in adulthood.”

  “I just took it back up. I hunted as a kid.” Jonah nodded to Maurice. “He can attest to that.”

  Maurice nodded, face grim.

  “And you just decided to take it up again on a whim?” the detective said.

  “I don’t do much on whims,” Jonah said.

  “Hmmm,” the detective said.

  Jonah’s every word, every action, seemed a mark against him. All of it suspicious. One of a thousand cuts. “I felt that old urge, and, frankly, free meat in the freezer never hurts with the cost of groceries these days.”

  “So you have money troubles?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  The detective scribbled a note. “And the head wound?” He tapped his pen against his own forehead.

  “As I told Maurice, I got up too fast, lost my balance, and hit my head.”

  “And the dented wall in your daughter’s bedroom?”

  A cop strolled past the kitchen doorway toward the front door lugging a hard case. He’d been dusting the house for fingerprints. Insane. No stranger had taken anyone by force from the house. Nothing was out of sorts, if you dismissed the hole in the wall, the knocked-over chair, and Jonah’s head. All easily explained, as Jonah had done twice already to Maurice and to the detective. But the detective did not seem to take Jonah at his word.

  “Sir? The hole in the wall of your daughter’s room?”

  “The floors are old, you can drop a marble in the middle of any room and it rolls to the corner. The doors catch so you have to push with force. I pushed too hard and the door got away from me. I explained all this.”

  “You must have pushed pretty hard.”

  “The door got away from me.” Even as he said it, a
part of Jonah started to doubt if that was how it happened. If he was remembering it wrong. It all seemed long ago. His head shrieked with pain; he needed aspirin but was afraid if he took some he’d be asked why he needed it, why he had a headache, as if it wasn’t obvious.

  He eyed the cigarette pack pressing from the inside of the pocket of the detective’s white shirt. The shirt was wrinkled and its neck had what TV commercials called Ring Around the Collar, which sounded like a child’s playground game to Jonah. The detective’s ring finger was bare. If the detective wasn’t married and had no kids, how could he possibly understand Jonah’s disorientation and anxiety?

  “When are you going to start looking for my wife and daughter?” Jonah asked.

  “We are as we speak,” the detective said.

  “I’ve called neighbors,” Maurice said. “We’ll put together searches, starting tonight. However long it takes. It won’t take long. People are lined up to help, Jonah.”

  He came around behind Jonah, hovered protectively, faced the detective. “We done here?”

  “No,” the detective said. He stared at Jonah. “Where’d you sleep last night?”

  Jonah had already lied to Maurice, because where he’d slept and why were private affairs. There was a difference between privacy and secrecy. He was not hiding wrongdoing. “On my bed.”

  “The arrangement of the sheets—”

  “On the bed,” Jonah said. “Not in it.” Did this detective not hear? Was he not aware of words having precise meaning? God, the detective was like one of Jonah’s freshman students. “I came to bed late and did not want to wake my wife. So I slept on top.”

  The detective jotted a note.

  “Now are we done?” Maurice said.

  The detective looked at Jonah. “If you want to clarify anything—”

  “Like what?” Jonah said, no longer able to brook the insinuations. “What would I want to clarify?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Disagreements. Anything that would make us think perhaps”—his eyes drifted to Maurice and back to Jonah—“your wife has left with your daughter of her own accord.”

  A theory that had just earlier comforted Jonah now sounded ominous coming from this detective. Jonah wanted to hoist himself up and tell the detective off, but Maurice put a hand on Jonah’s shoulder and said, “I think he’s cooperated fully and could stand the benefit of the doubt here.”

  “You’re a sheriff, not his attorney,” the detective said.

  “I’ve known him all my life. I can vouch for him.”

  “Vouch? You’re not elected sheriff to vouch for anyone. This isn’t membership to a country club we’re talking about here.” He jerked his head for Maurice to follow him to the living room.

  The two men stood near the couch, where Lucinda sat gaping as the detective hatcheted the edge of one palm into the open palm of his other hand to drive home a point. His mouth twisted out words Jonah could not decode. When he finished his remonstration, Maurice nodded compliance, head bowed. Jonah had never seen Maurice come to heel so readily and with such abject defeat.

  The detective clapped Maurice on the shoulder, glanced at Jonah without acknowledging his presence, and departed out the door.

  Maurice, his back to Jonah, looked down at his shoes, flexed his fingers at his sides. He turned and walked back into the kitchen, collapsed in the chair opposite Jonah, shed his sheriff’s cap, and scratched his head above his ear where premature silver glinted against his black crop of hair.

  He looked vanquished. He gazed at the ceiling, as if unable or afraid to look Jonah in the eye. Dark bruises marred the flesh beneath eyes extinguished of their innate, alert confidence. He looked as if he might weep, something Jonah had never seen him do. “Sometimes,” he whispered, “this job . . . That detective has zero official authority over me. Still, state police treat me like a mutt to muzzle and chain to a tree.”

  This glimpse at Maurice’s feelings of inadequacy were similar to those Jonah felt toward tenured PhDs at Lyndon State.

  “I appreciate you going to bat for me,” Jonah said. “Vouching. I—”

  Maurice waved him off, looked at him square again, and shook his dourness with the act of donning his sheriff’s cap. “It won’t mean squat if we don’t find Rebecca and Sally. Things like this. From what I studied back at the academy while you were wooing the It Girl with your poetry, an unsolved missing persons case can stick to a man. Never go away.”

  “We’ll find them. Right?”

  “Right.”

  With a deadening heart, Jonah wondered if he believed this, that they’d find Rebecca and Sally safe; and he understood that whatever was about to happen in the days ahead, even if Rebecca and Sally walked through the door in the next minute, the life he’d built up was about to be torn down, as he’d always known one day it would be.

  And it was all his fault.

  Book II

  The Eye Shadow Girls

  All of a sudden, grown-ups were everywhere, raising a racket as if there was a party going on, except to Lucinda their faces looked all wrong for a party, too sad and stunned and fretting, and they spoke too fast, as if they all had the most important thing to say, yet no one was listening to anyone.

  From the couch, where she sat crushed between two doughy women sour with BO, Lucinda spied her dad through the kitchen doorway. He stood stooped over the kitchen table, shaking his head, hands planted on either side of a gigantic map he’d spread out and kept from rolling up on itself by setting a Campbell soup can at each corner. He jabbed a stout finger at the map and stared up at each of the three men in green jackets, state police, Lucinda knew, who stood around him, his eyes big, like, Listen up. This is Important.

  The men nodded as Mr. B. walked in circles behind them, smoking a cigarette. Lucinda had never seen him smoke, and figured it was because he never had smoked, not because he tried to hide the habit, as Lucinda’s mom did. He pinched the cigarette as if it were an insect that might spring away, and he waved smoke from his face and winced. He was a funny man. He made Lucinda laugh, and Sally roll her eyes. But he didn’t look funny now, so Lucinda couldn’t laugh, even inside herself, secretly, like she normally did at grown-ups.

  Lucinda recognized faces of grown-ups from town, many smoked cigarettes, without wincing, the ceiling fogged behind a hovering shroud of smoke. None of the grown-ups noticed her. She felt if she jumped up on the couch and shouted Where is Sally? no one would hear her, and no one would answer her. And Lucinda wanted an answer.

  Everyone was here because Sally wasn’t here. Sally’s mom wasn’t either. And nobody knew where they were. They were just—gone. Except everyone was acting like if they didn’t find them this very second, they never would find them. Which of course was the stupidest thing. Mrs. B. was a grown-up. So she knew where she and Sally were. Of course she did. There was no need to get hysterical, a word Lucinda’s dad used when Lucinda’s mom was mad, which only made Lucinda’s mom madder.

  More grown-ups jostled into the house, flashlights grasped in tense hands. Even Lucinda’s mom was here, though she stuck with the other women, and drank ginger ale from a can to settle her upset stomach.

  Lucinda’s palm smarted where she’d sliced it on the stone. The cut wasn’t bleeding anymore, but Lucinda sucked at the flap of skin because it felt good.

  The people who came and went left the front door open, and the house grew cold with the autumn air. Some women had a busy shine in their eyes, as if they were glad to have something important to do.

  It was the same look the mean fifth-grade girls got when bossing around Lucinda and Sally at bake sales. The Eye Shadow Girls who were forever brushing their curling-ironed hair and glossing their lips with Bonnie Bell. Always bragging. Their smiles too sugary. When the Eye Shadow Girls caught Sally and Lucinda giggling and putting their fingers down their throats, pretending to gag at them, the Eye Shadow Girls would screech: “This is important! Homemade baked goods only at our sales.” Brownies from a box would s
poil it all. Except that’s the only kind of brownie Sally and Lucinda ever brought. And everyone loved them; they sold out fastest and, boy, did that make the Eye Shadow Girls even madder. Which only made Sally and Lucinda giggle more. Because. Well. It was fun to make the Eye Shadow Girls mad. Because they were so mean and they deserved it.

  Lucinda had asked her mom why the girls were so mean, and her mom had said they were jealous. What a fib! The Eye Shadow Girls weren’t jealous of Lucinda and her buck teeth and her freckles that looked like someone had splattered her face with mud puddle water, and her knobby nose to match her knobby knees and her knobby elbows, and her ribs showing like an old washboard, and her dull straight brown hair. She got why maybe older girls would be jealous of Sally, with her dark, phantom eyes like she was looking at you from another planet or some other time, long ago. Like she was a different creature. Sally had an odd-duck, yet lovely face. And was so tiny. The tiniest girl in her class, by a ton. But she didn’t look sick and weak, like that deaf boy in the special class. She was tough. If any of the big girls were ever jealous of Lucinda, it was because she was friends with Sally. Maybe the Eye Shadow Girls had ESP and could read her and Sally’s minds, and knew about their plans, and that’s what made them jealous and mean, because they knew Sally and Lucinda were best friends for real and were going to be best friends for real, always. Not fakes, like the Eye Shadow Girls. Lucinda and Sally knew they were going to have lockers next to each other in junior high. Knew they were going to be archaeologists, or those scientists who found dinosaur fossils. They’d love to be the first to ever find dinosaur bones in Vermont. Or bones or artifacts of some lost people. Girls could do anything. If they worked like twice as hard as boys.