What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  He looked up at the house now, hands on his hips. Part of his shirt was untucked.

  “Your boyfriend’s here,” Lewis said. “A real cop.”

  “Out,” Lucinda commanded and herded Lewis and Arlene down the hall.

  Lucinda pushed across the lawn toward Kirk, her breath billowing in a cloud, boots squeaking on the snow as she felt Lewis glaring after her, the nape of her neck burning from his gaze. She fought a shudder.

  “You look good,” Kirk said as his eyes slid over Lucinda, the shiver that ran through her a reminder as to why she avoided him and made sure the times she met with him were for official meetings only, with the dispatcher and Vern Ross, the other deputy, present.

  “We have a missing girl,” Lucinda said.

  “Not even a ‘Hello, Kirk, you look good too’?”

  “She’s seven years old,” Lucinda said. “She’s been out since last night.”

  “Okay,” Kirk said.

  He smiled, raising dimples in his stubbled cheeks. The wind tugged at the crop of black hair that peeked out from beneath his sheriff’s cap.

  “They say someone took her,” Lucinda said.

  “What do you say?” He hooked his thumbs in his holster belt, the leather squeaked.

  “I’ve never believed a word they’ve spoken before this,” Lucinda said. “But. Stranger things have happened.”

  “They sure have.” His slate eyes sparked. “Remember—”

  “I’m sure I don’t,” Lucinda said, though she was sure she did. His attitude only reinforced her decision to delete and block his personal numbers on her cell phone.

  Lucinda strode back toward the house, her blood hot in her face despite her distaste for Kirk’s actions.

  Kirk sauntered his way past her, tucking in his shirt. Lucinda followed. “Stay out,” he ordered as he passed Lewis and Arlene. Lewis heeled. At the porch, Kirk jerked his thumb at Lucinda. “You too. I alerted the state police. You should have already done that.”

  “I—”

  “I’ll take it from here and fill the staties in when they get here.”

  Lucinda nodded, her face flushed at being dismissed, and at her own failing to call Kirk out on his sad come-on moments ago. Her anger deepened with her knowing that if she had flirted back, played along, she would not have been left out here, literally in the cold. Kirk would have invited her in with a smile. But if Kirk thought she was going to succumb to his flirtation so she could be involved professionally—or that she’d otherwise obey and stand on the sidelines as punishment for not playing his game—he was mistaken. She would be involved in this case because she would involve herself. She’d find this girl, for the girl’s sake. And for Sally’s. And Jonah’s.

  Kirk entered the double-wide, the storm door slapping shut behind him.

  Lucinda stood out in the yard, composing herself, yet not certain how to proceed.

  “We need to find her, fast,” Lucinda said to the falling snow, out of concern for the girl, and out of a selfish concern for herself too.

  Right then, though, she decided what would benefit her and the case most was to see the person with intimate professional knowledge of such cases, someone who knew her and police work best, even if he was at his least. Her father.

  Crazy Young

  Lucinda parked her Wrangler on the quiet street outside the house and got out. Snowflakes licked her eyelashes and melted, water droplets slid down her face. Hot and itchy from wearing her coat in the car, she unbuttoned her jacket to let the cold air work its way into her. Still, she felt overheated.

  “Okay,” she said and took a deep breath.

  Though her visits to see her father were a daily routine, the visits themselves were anything but routine. Each visit left her fraught with anxiety. She never knew which father might await her: the father with a crisp mind or the father lost to confusion.

  She walked up the gravel drive, past her father’s caregiver’s Corolla, her father’s old truck parked beside it, its tires long flat. Her father would be pained to know his truck tires were flat, and the birdhouse that had hung for countless years from the beech tree in the front yard had fallen to the ground months ago and now lay buried beneath the snow. He’d be upset to learn the front porch steps were caked under snow and had not been shoveled or salted in the meticulous manner he’d seen to for decades. So she never told him of these things, even on those days he knew where he was. Who he was.

  The side door off the kitchen opened straightaway when Lucinda knocked, and Dot stood before her, smiling. Did Dot ever not smile? Lucinda wondered. No one should smile so much, so loudly; it was unnatural.

  “You know you don’t have to knock, dear,” Dot said.

  “I guess not,” Lucinda said.

  “Yet you always knock.” Dot smiled. “Come in. He’s having a good morning.”

  Lucinda stepped inside the living room of her childhood. Except it wasn’t. Not any longer. She was no longer a girl. A child.

  The room lay shadowed, window shades drawn, lamps unlit. The light of her childhood gone.

  “It’s always so dark in here,” Lucinda said.

  “If I open the shades, he flies into a tizzy. Finds plenty of energy to grouse.”

  “I don’t understand this behavior,” Lucinda said.

  “I don’t know if that’s possible,” Dot said. “Or healthy trying. He’s at a place none of us can understand until we arrive there ourselves.” Dot smiled. Lucinda wondered how Dot could make such a statement when she had not “arrived” in the place she spoke of yet either. Bless Dot and her bromides, but Lucinda resented them and her for trying to make simple what was complex and emotional for Lucinda.

  The house smelled of mothballs and medicine. The air was still and stale, hot as a greenhouse yet so dry it made Lucinda’s skin itch. She shed her jacket and hung it on the coat tree that had stood in the same place for decades. Affixed and dutiful. Lucinda waved her hand in front of her face to move the still air, afraid she might pass out from the heat.

  “You grow used to it, believe it or not,” Dot said. “Runs up the oil bill, to keep it so hot. But I guess that’s neither here nor there.”

  Lucinda stamped melting snow from her boots onto the mat. Same old mat on which she’d stomped her boots ten thousand times, ten thousand years ago. Half her childhood she’d needed to be reminded to wipe her feet, her mother calling out from the kitchen, Don’t tread mud in here, wipe your feet!

  Her mother would not call out today.

  What Lucinda would give to hear her mother call out once more. Hear her voice. Just once more.

  Everything. She’d give everything.

  “You okay?” Dot touched Lucinda’s wrist. Smiling Dot.

  “Sure,” Lucinda said, though she wasn’t. She was unsteady of mind and spirit. The shadow of regret still hung over her for treating Jonah so poorly; she needed her father’s help in matters of this missing girl, though he likely could offer none; and then there was Kirk, and the needing to be in proximity to him if she wanted to work the case. She’d not mention Kirk to her father. He despised Kirk. Lucinda could not fault him that, though she had when she was young.

  Focus on the girl, she thought. And on the new days to come for you.

  “He’s in the kitchen,” Dot said.

  On her way through the living room, Lucinda passed photos of her father and mother, photos obscured by the murk of the room, but whose images remained clear in her mind; her favorite photo of herself and Sally, arms tossed around each other’s shoulders, gap-toothed and hysterical with laughter as they ran a three-legged race. The photo had been taken during the summer they’d found the pit in the woods. Lucinda stepped closer to the wall of photos. The photos were faded from the sunlight that had once filled this room, photos of another time, another life. A world of pigtails and water sprinklers. Barbecues and beaches. Puppies and proms. Braces and birthdays and boyfriends. Much of which Sally had missed.

  The people in the photos stared ou
t at her, eyes pleading for her to free them and let them live again. Please, let us live again as we once were. Young and happy. Alive.

  She needed to find this missing girl, alive.

  She needed to go see Jonah at his cabin and make amends. Extend his credit to him while she still owned the store. She would do both. She would.

  Lucinda looked at a photo of Sally captured in the perpetual act of making a wish just before she blew out candles on a cake. Eyes squeezed so tight, wishing, wishing. She was always wishing. The two of them, always wishing.

  “I can’t,” Lucinda said, startling herself.

  “What, dear?” Dot said.

  “I don’t know,” Lucinda said. She did not know why she’d spoken aloud, to whom she’d spoken, or what it meant.

  Dot squeezed her hand and guided her into the kitchen, which was lit by a fluorescent light above the ancient gas stove.

  Her father gazed at Lucinda from his side of the kitchen table where once he had sat to shine his black work shoes each morning as he left for his rounds as sheriff before he headed to the Grain & Feed. He’d often said the state of a man’s shoes spoke as much about the man as the firmness of his handshake and ability to pay his debts. Now his feet were so tortured by gout that even loose paper slippers pained their tight, swollen flesh. His sunken face was leached to translucence. His breathing whistled through the tubes from his nose to the oxygen tank beside him on the floor.

  Lucinda touched her fingers to the doorframe of the living room, where pencil marks had measured her height over her first seven years. Her mother had been the one to keep track.

  Lucinda kissed his bald and mottled head. “I hear you’re having a good day,” she said, trying to inject good cheer in her voice as she sat in the chair beside him. This, this, was a good day.

  Dot left them to be alone.

  Her father patted Lucinda’s hand and tried to speak, his voice so pale she could not decipher what he said. She leaned in closer.

  “You,” he wheezed. “Tired?”

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  “Worry.” He labored to swallow, smacked his dried lips. “About you.”

  “That’s a good one.”

  “Father. Always. Worries.”

  He smiled. Teeth stained. Lips bloodless. Eyes flat. Dry. Jaundiced.

  “A girl went missing,” Lucinda said and wished she hadn’t. It was her problem, not his, and he was not fit enough today to bring up the sorest of his memories.

  “Murdered,” he mumbled.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Killed.”

  “She’s just missing right now.”

  His eyes fogged.

  Outside, the wind gusted, causing the vent above the stove to flap.

  “I’m helping find her,” Lucinda said. She wanted to ease into asking him about how to handle herself in this situation, what to look out for and what to guard against when working with the public and the state police. “What— I don’t trust the parents. Foster parents.”

  Her father winced. “Can’t find her. Won’t ever—” His trembling fingers worked at his pajama top buttons.

  “We’ll try.”

  “Can’t find them. Failed. All my fault.” His body shook.

  Lucinda did not know why she’d believed her father might be able to help her. Despite the reality of his health, she could not help but think of him as confident and capable, still able to give her advice. It was engrained in her, despite the evidence to the contrary before her. She regretted agitating bad memories of guilt and failure. She placed her hand on his frail hand. “Okay, Dad. Okay.”

  His breath whistled hollow in his chest.

  “I’ll find this girl,” she said.

  He shook his head, weak. “Young. Crazy young. You’re so young.”

  She was losing him. “I worry someone close to her has—”

  “Peace,” he rasped. “Find it.”

  His eyelids fluttered as his head lolled to the side.

  She clasped his hands in hers.

  His eyes opened, dim yet present.

  “I—” She could not continue this thread. It disturbed him too much. “I got a letter,” she found herself saying as she took the letter from her jeans. She unfolded it. “I’ve been accepted, for an internship. I’d about given up I’d applied so many times to so many teams. Maybe they just got sick of me and gave in.”

  He stared at her as if he did not understand the word, intern.

  “It’s volunteer. I’m one of just five amateurs to join the dig, in Newfoundland.”

  “Canada,” her father said. “She’s not in Canada.”

  “Me. I’ll be in Canada. I hope. I have to get word back to them one way or another. Within a week.” She’d planned to email her response, her acceptance, to the Newfoundland Archaeological Society this morning, until the girl had gone missing. The off-site study and preparations for the dig started in a month. The interns were expected to be a part of the entire process, needed to be present from the start. It was a ten-month commitment. She’d need to buy gear and clothing, bring Ed up to speed and train him to take over for her responsibilities, work with the contractor to facilitate the remodeling sooner, or scrap it all for now. Maybe she’d sell the store. She hated even thinking such a thing in her father’s presence. Maybe— She did not know. Damn it, there was too much to keep straight. But she’d need a couple weeks minimum to do all she needed to prepare to leave. And she had yet to tell Dale, who would not be able to join her.

  Above all, there was the girl. If she did not find the girl in time, Lucinda would have to decline the acceptance she’d waited to get for years.

  “Tell me. More,” her father said, his eyes clearing.

  “It’s prestigious. Exciting. There’s no way of knowing if the dig will pay out, but the site may contain the remains, or at least artifacts, of Vikings. It may be the first evidence ever of Vikings being established so far south and west in North America. It’d be a historic find. Even if we find nothing, no artifacts or remains, it’d be an experience of a lifetime. Sally would have loved this. Maybe even more than me.”

  Her father took her hand in his, his flesh cold, the skin cracked and calloused.

  “Find peace,” he said.

  She squeezed his hand.

  “Before. Devil finds you,” he said.

  “He’s slipping,” Dot said. She’d entered the kitchen quietly. “He’s been talking of God and the devil lately.”

  “What does it mean?” Lucinda said.

  “Nothing. They all do it. When the end nears. We all do it.”

  Just a Few More Minutes

  Jonah eased the truck down the old mountain road, the girl curled up under a blanket beside him on the bench seat. He’d wrapped her in an old shirt of his, unable to bring himself to look in the old trunk for the yellow dress.

  No one had been on the road yet, and the unmarred snow lay as pristine as it had fallen.

  High above, turkey vultures carved circles in the sky.

  As he descended down from the Gore, Jonah fished a cigarette from his jacket pocket, pushed the lighter into the truck’s dash.

  A deer leaped in front of the truck. Jonah pumped the brakes. The girl did not budge as the deer, a yearling buck, stood in the middle of the road staring at the truck. Its coat was winter dark; its hot, living breath steamed in the frigid air as it tapped a front hoof, shivered so it shed water in a rain of silver droplets, then loped into the trees. Gone, a ghost.

  The lighter popped from the dash.

  Jonah lit his cigarette. The glowing coils of the lighter warmed his face, the tobacco crackling as he inhaled. He let the smoke leak from his mouth and nose as he started on down the road again.

  The girl sneezed in her sleep.

  Jonah cranked his window down and flicked the cigarette out into the snow.

  The river valley lay in front of him, fields blanketed with snow. Silver maples and alders clumped at the riverbank, branches
coated in a skin of ice so dazzling the branches appeared crafted of blown glass.

  Decrepit barns sat out in the snowed fields, boards blasted pewter by generations of wind and rain and snow. Woodsmoke uncoiled from chimneys and hung low in the valley as cows stood out in the fields, their dumb gazes following the motion of the truck as they worked their cud.

  Coming to One Dollar Bridge, Jonah slowed the truck. A weatherworn sign was nailed to the bridge brow: $1 fine for traveling faster than a walk on bridge.

  The truck trundled onto the bridge, the world going dark.

  The girl whimpered. Jonah put a hand on her shoulder. So many nights Sally had endured ear infections and colds, and he’d taken his turn rocking her, doing his best to soothe her, though it never felt like it was enough.

  The truck bounced over railroad tracks as the snowy dirt road turned to plowed pavement. Jonah parked on the side of the road for a moment, where once a state trooper cruiser and TV crew van had parked. He looked at his old house. He’d not been inside it for twenty-five years. No one had, far as he knew.

  A town plow charged up the road, its yellow lights busy, sand fanning behind it as snow flew from the blade.

  A sheriff’s cruiser pulled to the stop sign on a side street, a block down from Jonah, then pulled onto Main Street and headed away from him, toward the old rectory that served as the sheriff’s office. Jonah waited to see if the cruiser would swing back his way.

  It didn’t.

  Nerves calmed, Jonah pulled down the street a few blocks and drove into the Gas-n-Go parking lot, parked at the side of the building. He knew he should take the girl to the sheriff immediately. But he wanted to get something for her. A gift. What would it hurt? He knew they’d ask, You stopped at the Gas-n-Go? Why would you do that?

  Because he was hungry. And because. Well. He didn’t want to give the girl up just yet. He couldn’t tell them this. He couldn’t tell them that he could barely stand to part with her. She’d found him for a reason. He felt it. He knew it. But who would understand that? He didn’t understand it himself. He was not certain he even believed it, or just wanted to believe it.