What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  “In my work,” her dad said, “we need to be as sure as possible. It’s okay either way. Whatever you say. Maybe there was a man, or a boy, but he was just a hunter or hiker and not someone following you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “How did you know he was following you?”

  “That’s what Sally said.”

  “Does she ever make stuff up?”

  “Sometimes. I guess. Yeah. But—”

  “Did she ever act scared?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Did she ever show you drawings, of scary things?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Or tell you she was scared?”

  “She’s always telling scary stories. About the mines and pits. But she isn’t actually scared. She’d tell me if she was.”

  Lucinda thought hard, back to that day they’d peeked over the lip of the pit. All Lucinda had seen through the leaves were work boots and a flash of green pants. Unless the green had been plants or leaves. Which, maybe it was. But. She had seen boots, hadn’t she? She was sure of it. Almost sure. It was more confusing than ever.

  Her dad must have known she was confused, because his voice softened. “Did you think it was a man when you saw what you saw, or did Sally tell you it was a man?”

  “Sally told me. We heard a branch snap. Loud. And I saw it. Them. The boots at least. I swear, Daddy. I’m almost a hundred percent certain.” She wondered if she would have thought the movement in the trees was a man if Sally hadn’t said so. Sally made things up. Sally read so many stories she sometimes seemed to think they were real. It was fun, most of the time. “It was a man,” Lucinda said. “It was.”

  “If a man was following you, why on earth didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you’d find out we were playing by the mines. And I knew how mad you’d get. Are you mad, Daddy?”

  Her dad looked like he was going to cry again. “No, sweetie. Never. I’ll take you up to bed. You want to ride on my shoulders?”

  “Aren’t you going to go look in the pit?”

  “Not in the dark, sweetie.”

  “But she might be there.”

  “Why would she be there now?”

  “To hide. Or if maybe the man in the woods took them there.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m serious, Dad. She might be there!”

  “I’ll check in the daylight. Promise.”

  “But she’d be so scared there at night. And if she’s been there this whole time . . .”

  “She won’t be scared if her mom’s with her.” He tried his best to smile, but he seemed to know it was no use and gave up. “How about that ride on my shoulders?”

  “Yes, please.” She was so tired now. So sleepy. All of it felt like a dream. An icky dream.

  Her dad hoisted her up onto his shoulders with a groan and took her back upstairs and stayed with her in her room until he was sure he was asleep.

  Except she wasn’t asleep. She was pretending.

  Because she knew what she’d seen.

  Almost knew.

  And if Sally was in the pit, she would be scared at night, for real, because the one thing she hated was the dark, even if her mom was with her.

  And if Lucinda’s dad wasn’t going to take Lucinda seriously and go help Sally, that meant it was still up to Lucinda.

  She needed to sneak out, help her friend.

  But her eyelids were so heavy, and soon sleep overtook her.

  Smoke

  Jonah fell off Sally’s bed and slammed his head on the floor as he awoke from a dream in which Sally told him everything was going to be okay, all he had to do was remember her. When he reached to touch her cheek, she’d dissolved into smoke and he’d fallen from the bed.

  A soft knock came from down the hallway, at the front door.

  Jonah wrapped his bathrobe around his naked body and sat up against the bed. He did not wish to answer the door. He did not want to face anyone. Face any more questions and accusations or theories about what he, or worse, his wife, might or might not have done. He could not stomach another bout of interrogations.

  The knock came again.

  Soft. Delicate.

  The knock of a girl.

  He got up and rushed to the door, nearly tripping in his slippers.

  He flung open the front door.

  She stood there, smiling shyly, and Jonah’s heart broke.

  I’m Not Sally

  “Lucinda,” Jonah said. He wrapped his bathrobe tighter and glanced out at the road. No deputy car or TV van was out there yet this morning. “What are you doing here?”

  “I miss her,” she said. Her tiny voice quaked. She was on the edge of tears. Jonah’s own grief now seemed a frivolous indulgence in the face of the girl’s anguish. How cruel these days must have been for Lucinda, whom Jonah had all but forgotten existed.

  “Can I come in, Mr. B.?” Lucinda said, chewing her hair.

  “I don’t know. I—” He felt nervous bringing her into his home. The place was a wreck with laundry and stale food and strewn newspapers.

  “I have to tell you something,” she said.

  “Let’s sit out here on the porch swing,” he offered.

  The morning air was brisk, but it did little to wake his slumbering and befuddled mind, the dream of Sally lingering. The morning’s glary, soupy gray light seemed to alter his depth perception.

  Jonah and Lucinda sat on the swing, each at opposite ends. Her feet did not quite reach the porch floor.

  A woodpecker flitted toward the three trees Jonah and Rebecca had planted when Sally was born, a tree each for Sally, Jonah, and Rebecca.

  “Did you get off the school bus here?” Jonah said.

  “There is no school today.”

  “What day is it?”

  “Wednesday, Mr. B.,” Lucinda said, giving him a queer look: You’re so silly. She glanced at his bathrobe. “Wednesday afternoon.”

  “But there’s no school?”

  “School is closed because people are searching.”

  “Oh. Of course it is. Of course they are.” Strange. He’d thought somehow it was Sunday morning.

  Lucinda stretched her legs from the very edge of the swing and pushed with her tiptoes to rock it, then sat back.

  “Sally saw a man in the woods,” Lucinda announced.

  Jonah jolted, turned to stare at her. His heart thundered.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “We both saw him, Sally and me,” she said. “In the woods. I know we weren’t supposed to be there. But—”

  “What are you saying? The woods? A man in the woods? What man? Who? Tell me. Please, you need to tell me.” Somehow he’d moved closer to her without realizing it and now found her frail shoulders clutched in his hands. She glanced at his hands, winced. He loosened his grip and got up, knelt to look her face-to-face. “You need to tell me,” he said. “And your dad. Everything.” A man in the woods, following the girls. This had to be linked to the disappearances, didn’t it? This was the suspect they needed. The person to find. He needed to know where his wife and daughter were. He needed to know if they’d been taken, or—he needed to know why and how they’d disappeared. Who was to blame.

  “I did tell my dad,” the girl said, “but I don’t think he believes me.”

  “I believe you. All that matters is that I believe you.”

  “I can tell you believe me. I thought you might want to come with me to see her.”

  “See her?”

  “Sally, in the pit.”

  Jonah stood, light-headed; his head swam and his heart skittered, seemed about to give out. “What pit? Sally, what are you talking about?”

  “I’m not Sally, Mr. B., I’m Lucinda.”

  “Lucinda, right. I know. I know. Lucinda.”

  “Me and Sally found it. The pit. Near some of the old mines.”

  “But what man? You’ve got to tell me, what man?” Jonah loomed over the girl. Why had he not been told about this? W
hy had Lucinda kept this from him? Why was he always in the dark, goddamn it, why hadn’t Maurice informed him of this development? “When did you tell your daddy?” he said.

  “Last night.”

  “Okay.” Jonah needed to call Maurice right now and find out if there was anything to this. “Tell me more about the man.”

  “I never saw his face, or much except for his boots, or what I thought were his boots. They must have been. I heard a branch snap. I saw boots. But Sally, she saw him a couple times when she was in the woods alone. It was our secret. He was. And the pit. We knew we’d be in big trouble for being in the Big Woods.” Lucinda continued to prattle on about the man, or what she thought was a man. With each passing second she seemed less and less certain of what she saw, and Jonah needed her to be sure. Certain. Absolutely certain.

  “I’m going now,” Lucinda said, hoisting up her backpack. “I packed cheese and crackers and brought a thermos of milk. You want to come find Sally with me?”

  “I better call your dad first. Is he out searching or—”

  “No.” Lucinda shot up. The swing rocked and caught her in the knees, knocked her down. She popped up, face pinched with a child’s obstinacy. “He thinks I made it up. I know he does.”

  “You stay here,” Jonah said and marched inside to use the phone. As he dialed the phone, he glanced out the kitchen window to see Lucinda darting out of the driveway and into the road, beelining for One Dollar Bridge.

  What Are We Going to Do?

  Jonah hung up the phone, tugged on his barn boots, cinched his bathrobe belt tight, and chased after Lucinda.

  Lucinda had fled across One Dollar Bridge and was almost out of sight where the road began a steep climb toward the Gore, toward paper company wilderness, and the old talcum mines.

  Running, Jonah cried out after her.

  Lucinda charged onward, clumsy in her boots but faster than Jonah, who was winded, what scant energy he had left from his days of grief flagging rapidly.

  Up ahead, Lucinda dodged off the road, into the woods. With the snow, however, there was no way for her to escape. Jonah could easily track her.

  He trudged up and up the road and found her tracks and began to follow them into the woods.

  The woods were dark and still beneath the ancient hemlock and spruce. But Jonah had been wrong. Tracking Lucinda would not be easy.

  Snow was scarce beneath the old conifers, most of it heaped on the massive bows above him. It took Jonah a while to find Lucinda’s slight tracks in the skiff of snow, and he was slowed by having to go around a labyrinth of blowdowns that the girl was small enough to pick her way through and out the other side. Up and up she climbed, like a nimble cat.

  Yet for Jonah, the going was slow, arduous, and the cold air needled his lungs.

  He tracked her for what seemed an hour, the frigid air stinging his bare skin beneath his robe. Lucinda’s tracks were angling toward the old mine shafts and he feared for her, and for himself.

  He stopped now and again to hear nothing save the wheeze of his lungs. Several times, he lost her trail and had to backtrack. Gasping, he rested against a hemlock. He considered heading back, getting Maurice. But he’d gone too deep into the woods, and pushed on.

  Up ahead, she cried out.

  Jonah tried to pick up his pace.

  A snowshoe hare sprang from beneath a young fir and loped away in a whirl of snow.

  Jonah pitched forward, the snow deeper, Lucinda’s tracks easier to follow.

  She cried out again.

  She was close. Very close.

  He searched the woods, tracked her prints in the snow until they brought him to a snarl of impenetrable branches.

  He started to go around when she called out again.

  She was in among the tangle.

  Beneath it.

  Jesus.

  “Here,” she whimpered.

  Jonah yanked away brush to reveal a pit in the earth.

  He knelt and held his hand down for her.

  “I’m okay. Snow crashed down my stupid neck and I screamed,” she said. “It’s cold! This is where we were when we saw him.”

  “Come out of there,” he said.

  The look on her face grew guarded. “You come down, I’ll show you. He was in the bushes. But . . . It’s so different in the snow. Nothing looks the same. It’s like another world.”

  “Sally, please. Come on out of there. Okay. Stop this.”

  “I’m not Sally, Mr. B., I’m Lucinda.”

  “I know. I know.”

  The wind kicked up and snow cascaded from the branches onto Lucinda’s face. She cried out, wiping at snow and spitting. She began to sob and held up her hand to him.

  Jonah reached down and helped her out, then collapsed beside the pit.

  Lucinda sat down beside him, sniffling. He slung his arm around her, drew her close. He shivered, his bathrobe damp from melting snow, his skin cold, nearly numb. What could he do to help this poor girl? What could he say to salve her wounded heart when he could barely get out of bed or bring himself to eat more than bread that had gone stale? When would any of this end?

  Lucinda huddled closer. “I thought for sure—” She sniffled. “I’m so stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid,” Jonah said. “You’re sad.” Sad and desperate, like me. Like all of us. Desperate to return to the lives we had.

  “Is she ever coming home?” Lucinda wiped her nose on her coat sleeve.

  “I don’t know. I hope so,” Jonah said, peering around the dim woods.

  “Why did this happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “No. It’s not. It’s cruel.”

  He pulled her tighter to him.

  “What are we gonna do without her, Mr. B.?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  She peeked up at him. “I’m never going to give up. I’ll look forever and I will never ever stop. And never ever forget her. Ever.”

  “Of course not.” He wiped a tear from her cheek. He needed to shuck off the negative thoughts, for her sake. “Hey. Enough doom and gloom. She could be back at the house right now while we’re sitting here being stupid and mopey, right?”

  “You really think so?” Lucinda chirped.

  “Why not?” he said, and believed it for a heartbeat before despair returned.

  She hugged him just as terrible pain exploded at the base of his neck and he collapsed on his back.

  He looked up just in time to take a fist to his face.

  Sorry

  Lucinda shrieked.

  Jonah felt himself jerked to the cold snow by the collar of his bathrobe, the robe falling open, his vision obliterated by snow and by blood gushing from his cut eyebrow.

  “What are you doing?” a man’s voice bellowed. “What are you doing?”

  Jonah struggled to sit up, wiped the blood and snow from his eyes, pulled his robe closed with his numb hands.

  The man towered over him.

  Maurice. Glowering. Taut with menace. “What are you doing with my daughter?”

  “She—”

  “What are you doing here, Daddy?” Lucinda said.

  “Getting you. You took off and I asked around and someone told me they’d seen you by his house. But you weren’t there and neither was he—” He took a labored breath, sweating, shaking with anger and fear, hands on his hips. “I was looking around the yard and an old woman walking by said she’d seen you run from the house, looking scared. And he”—Maurice glared at Jonah—“was chasing you in his robe.”

  “Maurice—” Jonah began.

  “Shut up. I’m talking to my daughter.” Maurice addressed Lucinda. “What’d he do to scare you?”

  “Nothing, Daddy. I wanted to show him the pit, but he didn’t want me to. He went to call you instead, to come get me. But I ran off. And he chased after me because he was worried about me going into the woods alone.”

  “He didn’t scare you? Or hurt you?”
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  “Daddy. It’s Mr. B. He would never hurt me. He’s our friend.”

  “Why did you want him to come here?”

  “You didn’t believe me, that Sally might be here. You wouldn’t come.”

  “Sweetie.” Maurice went to his knees and held his daughter’s cheeks in his palms. “Of course I believed you. I came here at daylight, before the new snow fell. There’s nothing here, sweetie. No sign of whoever or whatever you saw. It will be hard to figure out who it was if you didn’t see a face, if it had anything to do with any of this at all. But if it does, Daddy’ll find out. I will find out.”

  Maurice stared at Jonah on the ground. Then held out his hand. Jonah took it and got up, brushing snow from his tangled bathrobe, hugging it around him and tying the belt tight. He could barely feel his legs they were so stung with cold.

  Maurice looked off into the woods, shaking his head. “This whole damned thing. What a damned mess.”

  “Daddy, those are bad words,” Lucinda chimed.

  Maurice patted his daughter on the head, tucked her close to him as she hugged him. The act pained Jonah to see. He’d have swapped the rest of his life for one more hug from his daughter. Maurice looked at Jonah. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Not just about this. I never took the time to say I’m sorry. For what’s happened. The girls disappearing and me pressing you for answers, truths that don’t matter a lick in the scheme of things. I know you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “This man the girls saw, we need to follow up on it,” Jonah said. “He’s got to be—”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “It’s something. We can’t just dismiss it. We wanted theories. Now we have one. Until we can prove otherwise, I believe it. We need to believe it, look into it; the police, you, need to follow up.”

  “We’ve got nothing, even if he is real. A pair of brown boots. Green pants. It eliminates no one.”

  “We have to try.”

  “I will. I will. I promise.”

  “He exists,” Lucinda said. “And he’s still out there.”