What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  On the second floor, the air was still and dead. The heat volcanic. Sweat sprouted on her forehead. The path in the rug continued down the center of the hallway.

  Lucinda nearly tripped on the top stair tread. Still loose, to this day.

  She looked back down the stairs.

  Ten stairs.

  Lucinda shuddered. She saw her mother now, heaped at the bottom of the stairs. Her father kneeling beside her, weeping as he looked up at Lucinda, aghast with fear. Those who did not believe in the soul had not been beside a body whose life had just departed. Lucinda had just been with her mother an hour earlier at bedtime, laughing in the bathroom as they’d brushed their teeth together.

  That is not my mother at the bottom of the stairs, she’d thought. That was not her father, that frightened man who had already started to slip away from the living world after failing to find his friend’s wife and daughter, or the person behind their disappearance, and now would disappear more every day, retreat to a place in his mind where no one could reach him.

  Lucinda wandered down the hall; her wounded face pulsed with pain.

  She stood in her parents’ old bedroom.

  She’d not been in it for decades.

  It was as it had been. Immaculate, tidy. The dark wood floors shone as if freshly shellacked. Pristine white doilies adorned the polished dresser and nightstands. On the wall beside the bureau mirror hung a calendar from Ivers Insurance, the page revealing the image of two kittens tousling a ball of yarn. March 1989. Month of her mother’s death.

  Lucinda opened the closet door. The scent of old wool irritated her nose, made it itch, yet there was none of the expected astringent odor of mothballs. Each of her mother’s winter coats hung from its own hanger, each equally spaced from the other, and bagged in a dry cleaner’s clear garment plastic. Lucinda looked at one of the dry cleaner tags. Its date just two weeks ago. Dot saw to it. Scarves and mittens, folded with meticulous precision, sat in a neat stack on a wire rack.

  From the closet ceiling hung a string with a ring on the end.

  Lucinda pulled it.

  A collapsible attic stairway unfolded with the complaint of unused springs.

  Icy air seeped down from a draft above as Lucinda climbed the stairs into the attic, shivering at the cold. She reached around in the dark, pulled a string. A lightbulb pulsed and flickered, lit the attic, her breath visible in the cold.

  The wind shrieked in the eaves sounding like the cry of a wounded animal.

  At the far gable end of the attic, boxes were stacked atop one another in a haphazard fashion, not the work of Dot. The jagged sharp points of rusted nails poked through the plywood roof just above her head, and a ribwork of joists with wide spans between them ran from Lucinda to the boxes. Beds of pink fiberglass insulation lay between the joists atop Sheetrock that Lucinda’s foot, Lucinda herself, could easily crash through if she put too much weight on it. She would need to tread with care.

  Lucinda ducked beneath the ominous nails and picked her way down the attic, clutched the beams above her to keep her balance as she stepped over each expanse of insulation, from one joist to the next. At the boxes, she stooped, balancing herself on her heels, and read the black marker on the sides of the boxes. More of the same, eras packed away, clothes and games, tools and dishes, the indelible turned untenable. She checked each box, searched for files and for Beverly. She found neither.

  She came to a box marked stuffed animals.

  She took a deep breath. She opened the flaps and peered inside. There lay Boo Boo Kitty. An oddly flat cat with blue matted fur and yellow plastic eyes. Lucinda took it out and smelled it. It smelled as she remembered, an odor of milk and baby blanket. She held it to her, set it aside, and rummaged through the box to find Ducky, Stiff Piggy, Lil Lamb. The sight of each triggered a melancholic ache.

  She picked up a small stuffed bear she did not recognize, flooded with shame for having forgotten what the bear had meant to her. If it were here in this box, the bear must have meant something to her at one time, yet she could not recall.

  She found no Baby Beverly.

  She placed the animals gently in the box and left the flaps open, not wanting to shut her stuffed animals away entirely. Stooping under the rafters, she spied a box marked toys.

  In it sat a wooden hound dog with a plastic pull leash and felt ears. Snoop ’n Sniff. A xylophone. She tapped a finger on its key and a note rose high and tinny and fell away. A Chatter phone. Stacks of Mad Lib booklets. No Beverly. Lucinda’s back began to ache.

  The last box was marked uniform.

  Lucinda placed a palm on it, feeling her breathing catch.

  She peeled back the box flaps. A millipede slithered out from the box.

  Inside lay her father’s old sheriff’s uniform, a rigid khaki sheriff’s hat atop it. The shirt of the same khaki, pressed and folded crisp, badge pinned to the pocket. The uniform had defined her father. Whenever he worked at the Grain & Feed, particularly Sundays, and wore a flannel shirt and green Dickies, he’d looked odd, out of sorts, his behavior too loose, volatile. His measured voice grew boisterous, and it pitched and swung in sudden ways. It was as if the uniform had kept him contained. In control.

  She held the shirt up before her. A broad-shouldered shirt that would swallow his now scarecrow body. Above the badge and shirt pocket, her father’s named stitched from stout green thread. She set the shirt beside her and lifted out the pants, made of the same smooth khaki as the shirt, with black piping running down the outer seam of each leg. A button fell from the pants pocket, one her father had likely sewn on the shirt himself after her mother had passed.

  She tucked it in her coat pocket, folded the pants and shirt, and placed them in the box. Put the hat on top of them. She took a last long look and folded the box flaps shut.

  She did not want to be here any longer. The house upset her. Her failing father upset her. The end of things. A closing in of his mortality, and her own. Each breath burned in her lungs, and her eyes wept, an allergic reaction to the fiberglass insulation.

  Lucinda hurried to the stairs and took them two at a time.

  Driving down Main Street she saw the lights were still on inside the rectory. She slowed her Wrangler down and pulled over across the street, killed the engine.

  She watched the rectory. She pondered telling Kirk about the drawings, about people being in Jonah’s house. She needed to abide by the law, the process. Yet she imagined how Kirk might react to her developments. Scoff. She could just see, through the parlor window, the back of his head where he sat in the chair. He rose and left the room and returned. Likely to get a beer. He sat again.

  Lucinda shivered.

  The Wrangler had grown cold as an icebox.

  She watched the parlor window for some time then started up the Wrangler and headed home.

  Hiding

  Jonah stepped behind the trunk to see if she had hidden there. She hadn’t.

  He went to the window.

  It was shut. She couldn’t have just left the room without him hearing her.

  But the room was empty, and there was no place to hide. Except.

  Jonah threw open the trunk lid.

  Clothes. Only clothes.

  She had to be here. Had to.

  She’d be suffocated if she was. Dead.

  He tossed clothes behind him, crazed, the trunk seeming bottomless. How could she not be here? Had he dreamed her? Had she been a manifestation conjured in some fever fit when he’d been bitten by a spider, and time had been confused?

  How—

  There. He thought he sensed movement beneath the clothes and flung more of them out of the trunk. There. On the bottom. Hunkered. Hiding.

  Curled up fetal and unmoving.

  “Sally,” he said.

  What had he done, leaving her here alone?

  She didn’t move.

  He shook her. Hard.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey.”

  Slowly, she turned her face u
p at him and smiled.

  “I went away,” she said. “I was far away.”

  “You were here. Hiding,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I went away.”

  Strange Day

  Lucinda came in through the kitchen door. When Dale saw her wounded face, he stood up from the table. “What happened?” He reached to touch her.

  Lucinda eased away. She did not want to explain her ruined face again, lie again. Fatigue had settled in her bones, confusion cobwebbed her mind. What she needed was to think. She wished now she’d gone to the Grain & Feed or stayed in her Wrangler while she tried to sort out all that had happened, all she’d discovered, and tried to figure out what to do next. What any of it meant. “I’m fine,” she said.

  “That’s not fine,” Dale said and touched a fingertip to his own face, as if he’d been wounded too.

  “I fell. On the sidewalk.” She did not know why she was lying to him. Or why she had lied to anyone. Except that what had happened at the house was too tangled in her mind to explain clearly. Some kid’s crayon drawings from twenty-five years ago. A talking doll that could not talk. She needed a shower and to get some food in her. A drink.

  “This damn town needs to maintain the walks,” Dale said, an edge to his voice. “Keep up with the snow instead of plowing after it falls.”

  “That seems to be the consensus,” she said.

  She took a jug of milk from the refrigerator, poured milk into a saucepan on the stove, and cranked the burner.

  “I can do that for you,” Dale said.

  “I need to keep busy.”

  “You’ve been busy all day,” Dale said. “Gone all day.”

  What was she supposed to tell him, she’d been passed out for hours in Jonah’s home? Who would believe that? And even if he did, he’d pester her with concern.

  She snatched a bag of dark chocolate chips from the lazy Susan and spilled a handful into the warming milk. Stirred it with a spoon.

  “You get the face checked out?” Dale said.

  “No.”

  “Then where’ve you been?”

  “Working.”

  “You said you were knocking off at the Grain & Feed by noon.”

  “Working on the missing girl.”

  “With Kirk?”

  “No.”

  The milk crawled up the side of the pot in a hot froth that spilled over the brim to hiss on the burner. Lucinda killed the burner and poured the hot chocolate and sat with the mug at the table.

  Dale sat across from her. “You didn’t see him?”

  Was he really doing this now? Could he not see the exhaustion on her face, sense her weariness and agitation? “He’s the sheriff. I’m the deputy. But no . . . I didn’t. I probably should have.” She blew on her hot chocolate and peered at Dale. “I looked into a trespassing report. Someone had seen a light in Jonah’s old place.”

  She sipped her hot chocolate, let it warm her insides.

  “What is it?” Dale said. “What’s upsetting you?”

  “I found these drawings. Sally’s. I think. They have to be. I don’t know. I—”

  “What is it?”

  Dale seemed to want to talk about everything except the acceptance letter and whether she’d sent confirmation. She could hear the questions—Did you send confirmation?—in every silence between his spoken questions. Are you really just taking off for ten months? Kirk would have moved out by now, just for her applying without telling him, keeping secrets and lying by omission. Not that he’d put it so diplomatically, lying by omission. No. He’d just tell her to get screwed for lying.

  “What’s upset you?” Dale said.

  “Everything,” she said. She felt like sobbing, though she would not allow it. She was like her father that way, would not let anyone see her cry. “Strange things happened today. I can’t talk about them now.”

  Dale worked his jaw as if it had locked on him and he was trying to free it. “What was so strange today? You come home with a black eye and tell me everything is bothering you but you can’t talk about it.”

  She finished her hot chocolate, rose and washed out her mug at the sink, stared out the window until Dale left the kitchen for the living room. She did not want to take the bait. Dale seemed to want to conflate his anger at her not including him about her application to the Canada dig with his anger or envy toward Kirk.

  She took a deep breath and turned around, back to the cupboards, palms planted on the counter edge.

  She could see Dale through the kitchen doorway. He sat at his desk, but he wasn’t working on one of his cars. He sat drinking a scotch. He finished what was in his glass and poured another drink.

  She sat at the kitchen table and spread out the drawings.

  She focused on the one drawing that was entirely black. Was it a night sky? What had Sally envisioned? Was Lucinda reading too much into it? Would the drawings give her a sense of disquiet if they had been drawn by another child, or if Sally had drawn them but never disappeared? Sally had been an odd duck with a bent for dark tales and mysteries. Or was it only because Sally had disappeared that the drawings distressed Lucinda? Wasn’t context everything, though, to a cop, in a criminal case. Context. Motive. What had motivated Sally to draw these?

  Lucinda looked at the next drawing, all black except for a sole evening star in the corner. She considered the drawings of stick bodies severed into pieces and smeared with red crayon.

  Lucinda might consider the black drawings as Sally being afraid of the dark. It was a common fear. Lucinda was still afraid of the dark, or what she could not see in it.

  Maybe that was all that was behind the drawings: Sally had been afraid of the dark, though Lucinda did not remember her being scared of much else. During sleepovers, camped out in a tent in the backyard, Sally told ghost stories. Sally had no fear of the snakes and bugs in the mucky pit. Sally told Lucinda about the man in the woods without any trepidation, told Lucinda about him as if sharing a curious fact, with no fear that he might harm them. So what had compelled her to draw these? Or were the drawings the equivalent of her scary stories, drawn on paper instead of told as narratives? It could be as simple as that.

  No. Something had troubled Sally, and she’d hid it from Lucinda, hid her deepest fears from her best friend, and instead she’d drawn these.

  Lucinda sighed. She was making too much of a child’s spooky drawings. Chasing ghosts when she had a new girl missing to find.

  She wondered who had been in Jonah’s old house, and why.

  Had it been Jonah? The tire tracks could have been from Jonah’s truck, or an SUV. But there were two sets of faint tracks in the snow.

  An adult’s.

  And a child’s.

  A question leaped to her mind. Was it possible Jonah had the girl? Gretel had disappeared twenty-five years to the day that Sally had disappeared. The similarities between the two girls, age, size, and those eyes, were frightening.

  Had Jonah seen Gretel in town previously and been overwhelmed by the likeness of her to Sally? Or . . .

  Or was there something more wicked at work that Lucinda had never entertained: that Jonah had been responsible for his wife and daughter’s disappearance? Lucinda had never doubted him. Even her father had doubted Jonah for a spell; it haunted her father, that he’d doubted his friend.

  But if Jonah had taken Gretel, why would he take her to his old house? Why risk it? When would Jonah have even seen her to know she existed? If it were in town, she’d have been with her foster parents. Would he follow them home, then snatch her? He was in town the day she disappeared, a voice said. And in town at night, when Marnie saw the light inside the old place.

  It was unimaginable.

  Demented.

  She refused to believe it.

  Still. There were two sets of tracks in the snow outside Jonah’s house.

  An adult’s tracks. And a child’s.

  Whose were they and why were those two people in Jonah’s old home?
r />   She felt frayed and uneasy.

  Lucinda looked at the drawings. She needed to act. She felt helpless in the house trying to reach conclusions and make connections.

  She rolled the drawings up, put on her jacket, and slipped out the kitchen door.

  Dale now dozed in his armchair, mouth agape. Lucinda wanted to apologize to him for being so short and easily irritated, but it would have to wait.

  Footprints

  Lucinda got out of the Wrangler and stood in the dark cold night. She did not want to go inside to see Kirk. She did not want to feed his ego with the satisfaction that she sought his insights; whether he actually had any or not would be moot to him. But he was the sheriff, and she was stuck with him, for now.

  With the drawings in hand, she walked up the snowed steps. She knocked on the rectory door as she opened it and let herself inside. Even with her coat on and coming from outside, Lucinda felt the chill of the place edge into her, making her shiver. She was surprised she could not see her breath. She wondered if the furnace was on the blink.

  She passed two rooms, in which easels still stood, maps of the surrounding woods propped on them. No one was about. The search was over. Already. After just a couple days. It did not seem possible that the matter was now in the hands of the state police, and the town was settling back into its routine when the search for Sally, and the disruption of routine, the calamity of it all, had seemed to go on for weeks. Lucinda wondered if she was exaggerating the timeline in her memory or had exaggerated it then. Or if the search for Sally and her mother had actually gone on far longer because Sally and her mother were from a respectable family, and the sheriff had been their friend.

  She found Kirk sunk low in his chair watching TV, beer propped on his lap.

  “I have something you need to see,” she said.

  “Ah. Finally.”

  She brandished the drawings. “I need your input.”

  He stood. “What happened to your face? You look like shit.”

  “I fell on the sidewalk.”

  “Liar.” He nailed it. He knew she was lying and said so, straight out. The others had probably known she was lying, too, but none called her out on it. No one told it like it was. Straight. He called her out, then dropped it. Didn’t prod or try to make her feel better because he knew he couldn’t, knew that her feeling better was up to her.