What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  She sat at the table and spread the drawings out on it. “Look,” she said.

  He stood behind her, his hands resting on the chair back.

  “Crazy kid drawings,” he said.

  “Drawn by Sally. Jonah’s daughter.”

  “I thought this had to do with the missing girl.”

  “Sally’s missing too,” Lucinda said.

  “Sally isn’t missing. Sally’s dead.”

  “Even if she’s dead, she’s still missing. She’s never been found.”

  “Her drawings don’t have squat to do with our missing girl. I hope you don’t think buggy shit like that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have a beer,” he said.

  “Are you kidding, it’s freezing in here.”

  He left the room and came back with two open beer bottles and handed one to her.

  He quaffed half his beer at a go.

  Lucinda didn’t touch her beer. She was exhausted, and her head bogged enough to add to her troubles. “These are ugly pictures,” she said. “The woman and girl. They’re being killed? Tortured? In the night. Sally drew these before she went missing. As if she knew something bad was about to happen.”

  “Kids are fucked up. That’s why I’m never having any.” His voice was cold with certainty.

  He demolished his beer and got another one, half of it gone by the time he returned with it.

  “Drink your beer,” he said.

  Lucinda studied the drawing. “This is of a mother and a girl.”

  “Could be anyone. Any sex.”

  “Sally and her mom vanished. And—” Lucinda nearly told him about the man in the woods, but refrained. She did not want to elicit more sarcasm. Yet she felt a need to share it with someone, to gain perspective. If the man in the woods had been responsible for her friend disappearing twenty-five years ago, and had never been caught, why couldn’t he be the one behind this girl too? Were the two men the same? Was the man in the woods Jonah?

  “You’re talking bogeyman shit,” Kirk said. “Sally disappeared twenty-odd years ago.”

  “Twenty-five. I need to see Jonah about it.”

  “That old coot would just as soon shoot you as have you on his porch after you were such a bitch to him.”

  Lucinda pushed the chair from the table and stood. “Jonah’s not shooting anybody,” she said, though she was no longer certain. “Not me, anyway.”

  “Don’t bet on that.”

  “I want to check on him, anyway.” She wondered again what Jonah had been doing at Ivers Grocery. And the amount of groceries he’d had in his bag. The kind of groceries. Sugared cereal. Pop-Tarts. The thoughts chilled her. She willed herself to keep them at bay, yet they persisted.

  “You’re not his nurse or his mom,” Kirk said. “It’s none of your business.”

  Maybe it is your business, a voice said. Police business.

  “He’s all alone,” she said.

  “He likes to be alone,” Kirk said.

  “No one likes to be alone.”

  “I do.”

  “You’re not alone like he is. I think Jonah was in his house the other night. Someone saw a flashlight from outside. I’m sure it was him.” Except, she wasn’t sure at all. She just didn’t know who else it could be, which meant it could have been anybody. The adult’s tracks could have been a teenager’s. Maybe it was just two kids messing around, a teenage boy and his younger brother. Jonah hadn’t stepped foot in that house for two decades. Why would he bother now?

  Because of the girl.

  The boot print of the child.

  “How do you know it was him?” Kirk said.

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  “Stellar work, Detective. You want to go up to apologize to Jonah, is what it is. You’re a bleeding heart. Finish your beer.”

  “I haven’t started it.”

  “So start it.”

  She made to leave.

  He touched her wrist. The tendons of his own wrist taut, his fingers warm.

  She took her hand away.

  “Have a beer with me,” he said.

  She picked up her beer and chugged it down, slammed the empty bottle on the table, and marched out of the room.

  “Make sure you announce yourself to that old coot,” Kirk shouted, “and don’t get what’s left of what used to be a pretty face shot off when you pay him a visit.”

  Alone

  Dale dozed in his easy chair. Lucinda watched him breathe. His glasses sat crooked on his nose. In his sleep his slack jaw showed signs of going jowly.

  She knelt and touched his wrist. Took off his glasses and set them on the coffee table.

  He awoke, confused.

  “Let’s go to bed,” she said.

  “You smell of beer,” he said.

  “I had one while you were sleeping.”

  He pulled back from her. “We’re out of beer.”

  “I went out for one.”

  “Where? What time is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where?”

  “Come to bed.”

  “You go.”

  Lucinda left him and shuffled down the hall and into the bedroom. She lay on the bed alone, listening to the radiators gurgle. She lay there waiting for him to come to bed. But he did not.

  She did not blame him.

  She wouldn’t come to bed angry either. No, that was untrue. She would. Had before, to Kirk’s bed. She’d choked down her self-worth for him. When angry with Dale, she stayed angry instead of finding every excuse to forgive as she always had for Kirk. Why did she behave in ways that undermined the person she wished to be, believed she was? It was as if there were two different versions of herself.

  When Lucinda awoke at noon after a long night of hectic broken sleep, she knew before she opened her eyes that Dale was gone.

  Book V

  Tonight

  “We go tonight,” Jonah said, his voice weak, hoarse, his throat rasped raw. He’d tried to eat that morning but could not even keep down a piece of bread. His legs felt watery and his head clouded, but he planned to leave tonight. He’d time it so they’d head out for the truck in the late afternoon, at dusk, and be driving in the dark. He did not dare enter town in the light. “Tonight. We start again.”

  “Home,” she said.

  “Wherever we go, that’s our home.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head.

  No one will harm or take you away again.

  My child.

  Business

  Lucinda shuffled into the kitchen exhausted, the yeastiness of beer a paste on her furred tongue. She sipped a glass of water and slushed the water around in her mouth and spat it out in the sink.

  She called Dale’s real estate office, but Dale hadn’t been in. She wondered if he would come home today. Or at all. She wondered if she’d come home if she were him. Suspicion was often worse than knowing. More painful. Jealousy’s dark imaginings. She lay on the couch, studying the drawings, trying to discern connections before she headed up to see Jonah.

  The phone rang. Lucinda shouted, startled awake.

  She’d fallen asleep. She felt drugged and addled.

  “Hey,” she said, “where are you? I—”

  “Wherever you want me to be.”

  “Kirk?”

  “Your one and only.”

  Lucinda had thought it was Dale calling. She was going to say she wanted to apologize.

  “Why are you calling my home number?” she said.

  “Business,” Kirk said. “Come to the office. I’ll show you.”

  She looked around the empty place. She glanced at the clock on the wall. 2:31.

  “You and the beau have a spat?” Kirk said.

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you know where he is then?”

  “I’m not his mother. He’s probably at work.”

  “Come over. We’ve got business.”

  “Business,”
she said.

  Outside, the tire tracks from Dale’s car where he’d backed up far earlier that day were wiped clean by newly falling snow.

  Same Old Business

  Lucinda shucked her hat from her head and clomped down the rectory corridor, her rubber Mucks shedding clods of slush from their lugged soles.

  She found Kirk with his feet up on the desk.

  “What business?” she said.

  He lifted a beer can from his lap.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “Judas maybe.”

  Lucinda turned to leave.

  “Hold up,” Kirk said and swung his feet to the floor.

  “What?” Lucinda said. “If you have business, what is it? Spit it out.”

  “Personal business.” He stood. “Unfinished business.”

  What a fool she was.

  “I mean real business,” she said.

  “This is real as it gets. The way you let me touch your wrist.”

  “I didn’t let you do anything. I’m leaving,” she said, ice in her voice.

  He reached for her, got her wrist.

  She yanked away. He grabbed tighter.

  A button on her coat sleeve popped off and spun on the floor.

  Kirk stared at her. His eyes deadened with a cold meanness. She’d forgotten it, the meanness. She remembered it now. His words used for cruelty. Strength wielded for intimidation, bravado masking weakness.

  “Relax,” he said.

  “I am relaxed,” she said, though her heartbeat crashed in her chest, her ire steaming.

  “Good,” he said. Smiling. A fake smile. If he had a real one at all. He tapped his badge with his fingertip. “You don’t want to make the sheriff take out his handcuffs.”

  He reached for her wrist.

  She spun, yanked free, and drove the heel of her palm into his nose.

  He staggered back, clutched his nose, blood leaking.

  Sick

  Lucinda drove toward home as fast as the road permitted. She needed to get up to Jonah’s, but the snowfall was worsening each second. By the time she got up into the Gore, dark would be gathering, the snow piling up in the mountains. She’d need real snow boots and a good flashlight. And your handgun, the voice said as she yanked the Wrangler into the drive to almost smash into Dale’s Ford Tempo. He was home. She’d never been so relieved to see his homogenous heap.

  She jumped out of the Wrangler, her boots slipping on the drive. Her arms pinwheeled and she clutched her side-view mirror and balanced herself. She ran her hand along the Tempo as she trudged along it up the drive.

  She entered the kitchen and called out, “Dale?”

  No answer came.

  Was he in the bedroom?

  Packing?

  She trod into the living room where Dale sat at his desk, absorbed in using tweezers to set a seat in the cockpit of the 1930s Tether.

  He’d lit a fire in the fireplace. The warmth from it radiated in the room and the orange glow from the flames jigged on the walls and floor. Dale sipped scotch from a tumbler, the amber liquid shimmering and swirling.

  “Hey,” Lucinda said, winded.

  Dale drank down his scotch. “Hey.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “About?”

  “Last night.”

  “I’m over it.”

  “I thought—”

  “What?” he said and worked his tongue around the inside of his mouth, savored the smoky brined aftertaste of the scotch, the mellow numbness at the tongue, Lucinda knew. At times, he spoke about and described scotch as if he were an art critic deconstructing a Rembrandt; he narrated as he drank. Normally, Lucinda was apathetic toward his fervor for scotch, if not amused. Right then, she found it endearing. Sweet. He brought up the bottle at his feet and poured a good measure, held the glass to the lamplight. “What’d you think?”

  “I thought you’d left,” she said.

  “I did.”

  “And you’re back.”

  “Where else was I going to go in that mess outside?” he said. “I didn’t expect even to be gone long as I was. I went out to Kale’s Auto to see about finally getting the snow tires on the Tempo, and they were packed since all the other jokers who waited for the snow to fly were lined up in there with me; so that took a lot longer than I thought, and by then I was hungry, so I stopped in at the Burger Barn and had a burger and onion rings and got to gabbing with a few folks and well”—he shrugged—“it was about time to get back home by then. So here I am.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re a good man or just dim,” she said.

  “Dim,” he said and sipped his scotch.

  Lucinda stood in front of him, looking into his face. “Why haven’t you mentioned Canada. Asked more about it? Been angry?”

  “I am angry. But. What’s to ask? You’ll tell me when you’ve decided. I hope.”

  “It’s ten months,” Lucinda said.

  “True.”

  “A long time.”

  “I lived thirty-three years before ever knowing you existed. We’ll manage.”

  She eyed his scotch, slipped his glass from his grip, and took a sip. It tasted of peat and stung her tongue, then smoothed at the back of the throat. She shimmered, a liquid warmth in her veins. She needed to get going, to see Jonah, but the warmth of the fire, and the scotch, lulled her. It had been days since she’d known calm. She finished the drink. A vaporous glow bloomed in the brain.

  She reached into her coat pocket and took out her deputy’s badge. The button from her father’s uniform box fell out with it. She set the button on Dale’s desk and pinned the badge to his chest. “You are hereby deputized for putting up with me.” She breathed on the badge and buffed it with her shirtsleeve.

  “What’s this?” Dale said, holding up the button.

  The scotch was loosening her, swimming in her bloodstream. She peered at the button. “It was in my father’s trunk when—”

  She stopped. Blinked.

  She plucked the button from Dale’s fingers and stood with it. Stunned.

  She gazed at the button, then at the badge pinned to Dale’s chest. “No,” she said. She staggered into the kitchen, bewildered. At the sink, she splashed cold water on her face, but the rush of heat pushing through her was too much and she fought the urge to be sick.

  Dale put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I have to go, right now,” she said.

  “What is this? Go where?”

  “Jonah’s.”

  “You can’t go up there now in the snow, it’ll be dark soon.”

  She plucked the badge from his chest and set it and the button down on the table, a sick feeling writhing in her gut like a knot of baby snakes. She vomited in the sink, wiped her mouth with a sleeve, and spat. “No,” she said.

  “What the hell is going on?” Dale said.

  “I have to go.”

  “You’re not going anywhere like this.”

  “You drive then. Grab headlamps. I need to go. Now.”

  “Me drive? I’ve had too much scotch.”

  But she was already going for the door.

  Go

  Out in the Wrangler, Lucinda sat in the passenger seat, the badge and button in her lap. She reached over and shoved her key into the Wrangler’s ignition as Dale slung open the driver’s door. “What is this?”

  “Drive. To Jonah’s house first.”

  “That old haunted place?” Dale said.

  “Get in, let’s go.”

  Dale hopped in and fired up the Wrangler, backed up fast and headed out of town on Main Street, toward One Dollar Bridge. The snow hurtled at them now, collected on the windshield even as the wipers slapped at their highest speed.

  Mine

  The Wrangler pulled into the yard in a squall of snow so chaotic and furious it obliterated from sight the house that sat just a few yards away. For a second, Lucinda was struck with an odd, eerie sensation that the house was not there behind the fury of snow, did not exist any
longer, had vanished in time, or had never existed at all, or she had never existed. Did not exist right then, in that moment, but was living someone else’s dream.

  The wind rocked the Wrangler, breaking the dark spell that had gripped Lucinda.

  Lucinda tried to open her passenger door, but it resisted against a howl of wind. She leaned into the door to try to force it open, as if it were in league with, or under the spell of, the house in trying to keep her from going inside to investigate her suspicion.

  As if to disprove her mad thought of the house and wind conspiring against her, the wind flagged and the door opened in a wild sweep and she fell out onto the ground. She got to her feet as Dale came around to her. Dusk was approaching. The house would be dark with shadows inside. Lucinda strapped on her headlamp.

  In the gathering storm, the house lost in a cyclone of snow, they pushed their way toward the house and onto the porch.

  Lucinda remembered the night her father had brought her here, the last night she’d ever been in the house as a child. How she’d expected Sally to be home but had also been nagged by a feeling of unease while on the porch waiting for Mr. B. to answer her father’s knock, and then again on the couch wondering where Sally was and why she, Lucinda, had been told to stay put.

  Lucinda opened the door.

  “What are we doing here?” Dale said.

  “I want to be sure,” she said, but what she really wanted was to be proved wrong.

  She crept inside the house, Dale trailing her, his boozy breath at her neck.

  “God,” Dale said, gagging. “This place.”

  Lucinda turned on her headlamp. The bulb leaked a drab yellow pulse of light. A pair of silver eyes shone from the couch as a rat slunk away, its naked tail dragging behind it. Lucinda picked her way across the living room and down the hall and entered Sally’s bedroom.