Maurice sighed, hugged his daughter tight. “I wish I could wave a wand and reveal him, or whoever it is, and put an end to all this for everyone.”
No Wand
There would be no wand to wave. Nothing to reveal. No man to find.
There would be no suspect charged. No arrest made. No trial. No conviction. Without bodies there was no murder or proof of a crime.
There was only absence.
And speculation. Brutal scrutiny. Unholy persecution. Unwarranted suspicion. Of Jonah.
After a spell, no TV van or police cruiser parked across the road from his house. No one visited. No one called. He had nothing to live for except the return of his wife and daughter, and with each breath that eventuality grew less likely.
What savings he had were depleted by the end of his first workless year. He’d tried to return to teaching but could not focus. Could not engage. He’d wanted to, wanted to immerse himself in the work he’d loved, distract himself if only for fifty minutes of class a few times a week. But he couldn’t. The questions in his students’ eyes, the curiosity, the suspicion, might have been bearable, and faded with time. They were young. Curiosity and intrigue part of their makeup. But his last day on campus came when he’d dragged himself in early to try to work away from home, and heard, from just outside the door of his shared office, two colleagues in dialogue:
“You think he did it?”
“Let’s just say, he’s a strange bird, that one.”
Jonah had left and never returned.
What money he earned from odd jobs went straight to paying the mortgage and taxes. As torturous as it was to remain in the house, he dared not leave in case they returned. He sold the old Gremlin to pay bills and bought an even older jalopy truck.
All this time, he searched for them, his wife and child, on his own. He wandered every hill and field and ditch and riverbank what seemed a hundred times. He searched in the day and night, all night, calling their names, pleading to the darkness to give his wife and daughter up to him, hoping that in the night’s silence his voice would carry farther and reach them, their voices would carry farther and reach him.
He found only more silence.
He searched for the man in the woods, too, for a sign or clue of him, that he existed. At times in the nighttime woods, Jonah sensed he was being followed in the darkness. By someone who knew something. Someone who had caused all this. No one could be trusted, perhaps even himself. He ranged deeper and deeper into the woods, farther and farther up into the mountains.
On one search he stumbled upon an abandoned miner’s cabin, tucked up in treacherous terrain.
Despite not believing in an entity found in any books written with a man’s hand, he’d done his praying. Prayed for their return. Begged for it. Their safety, at least.
His prayers and pleading and weeping were met with the same response: silence.
He offered himself in their place. Wept for forgiveness for what he could not remember. Pleaded for it not to have been his wife’s hand in this. To spare her memory, he considered confessing to the crime, committed in a spontaneous rage. He would gladly pay for it to save his wife’s name. But he could not lead the police to any bodies.
The money ran out; the mortgage went unpaid. The bank foreclosed. Took ownership. But they’d never sell the house. People did not move to Ivers from other places; people left Ivers for other places. And no one in town would ever buy this tainted home.
He took the yellow dress and coat he’d bought Sally, photos of Rebecca, his books of poetry and science and short stories, and what few other cherished belongings would fit into a trunk and drove the truck up to the Gore and settled into the deserted miner’s cabin, where all he asked for was to be left alone to wait for the miraculous return of his daughter and wife.
Book III
November 6, 2012
25 Years Later
Sweet Ache
Jonah stood on the stoop out in front of the Grain & Feed, his shoulder pressed to the post, worn boots crossed at the ankles as he scraped a wooden match along the rail and touched its flame to his fresh-twisted smoke, inhaling deep and deeper still, eyes closing as though he were dreaming of better times past, though there were no better times past of which to dream and none to come that he knew.
No credit, Lucinda had said when Jonah had asked to put supplies on his tab. Supplies he needed. He only risked venturing off the mountain and into town when it was a matter of need. He had not been to town in nearly a year, only to hear from Lucinda: No, Jonah, sorry.
Sorry. And she’d looked away as if she had not known him. Her dismissive tone stung him deep. Lucinda, of all people. Today, of all days, to reject him, as if he were a stranger, and they did not share a past; as if she’d forgotten what day today was.
The ancient anger rampaged in him now, a hot magma wanting to rupture from within him, consume and destroy him. It made him feel mean toward the very last person who deserved his rancor. Until she’d sent him out. No credit.
He shook the match and flicked it to the dirt where it trailed a dismal tendril and died. He drew another long pull of smoke, his diaphragm going taut to stoke that delirious lust, the delirium ignited in the brain and piqued in the blood bettered only by the sweet godless filling of lungs gone as black and as foul as sun-rotted meat.
He spat. Picked at a bit of tobacco stuck to his tongue tip. Couldn’t get it. Spat. Clawed at it. His anger besting him. His hands shook from Lucinda’s betrayal. That’s what it was, a betrayal. Never mind the humiliation of being denied credit in front of onlookers who eyed him sideways.
Squatter. Lunatic. Murderer. He heard their thoughts, saw it in their eyes every time he was forced to come into town. He wasn’t deaf. Wasn’t dead. Not yet. After all this time, those who remembered the Disappearance still looked askance, whispered to one another from behind cupped hands. Afraid. That’s what they were, he’d decided. Afraid of his life lived apart from them, and afraid of their own viciousness and suspicion, judgment and self-made calamities. We know what you did. We know.
He heard their thoughts, registered the suspicion in their eyes.
They knew nothing, these people who’d shaped him into a monster stitched together from rumor and breathed to life with fear when he was only an old man now, worn down as river stone, as alone now as he’d been entering this world. He’ll do it again, one day. That’s what Jonah saw in their eyes and heard in their thoughts: He’ll do it again, one day.
What fear could do. He knew better than any of them. How many of them knew a pain that altered the color of your blood from the red of life to the black of death.
A woman in a red wool coat skirted around him now on the stoop and eyed him with the look of one gauging the length of a rabid mongrel’s chain.
“What?” Jonah snarled. “What?”
The woman scurried away like a frightened squirrel.
Jonah flicked his smoke to the dirt where it lay burning.
Let it burn, he thought, his anger, his pain, welling in him.
Let the whole town burn to the ground.
The Gore
Up in the mountains, Jonah tucked his old truck into the woods off the dirt road and hiked up into the Gore; up through the glacier-scored hollow, where he alone dwelled with the few solemn bears that sought their winter retreat in the lightless reek of the talcum mines, amid the gloom of the few colossal hemlocks that had escaped the saw’s tooth and whose monumental size seemed now less majestic for their survival than sorrowful for their scarcity elsewhere.
In a clearing, he knelt, his heart heaving as it did every time he knelt here.
Every day.
He brushed twigs free of the two flat stones he’d set in the hard earth and chiseled crudely with his own hands years ago:
Sally
March 11, 1980-19—
Rebecca
October 15, 1953-19—
He took his cap off and fell still.
A creek trickled ove
r rocks nearby.
He laid his palms on each of the stones, remembering.
He rose with effort, a quick catch in his bad knee, continued on, pushed deeper into the wilds.
Now and again he stopped. Hacked phlegm. His breath rattled like the wind in dried milkweed. What was once done without effort was now an endeavor of will against a body that was ready to quit.
The cabin lay inked in shadows beneath the hemlocks, unseen from the rutted trail running through the undergrowth like a scar.
His head howled and his blood roared as he stepped inside the cabin. He needed to quell his anger, stanch it before it overtook him. He needed to find the one photo of Rebecca he’d taken here, calm himself with her visage.
He rooted for the photo among his bookshelves, tilted from tectonic shifts and made of stacked bricks and old wood planks.
No credit.
He tore through warped drawers and flung papers and nails and dead batteries from them as if he were a bear tearing apart a log, drunk for honey.
Where was her photograph? He’d not looked at it, not dared the anguish, in ages, but now he needed to see it, see her face. See his wife’s face.
He yanked free a drawer. Tipped its debris on the card table and spilled his hands round in the ruins as a miner fingers a tumble of pebbles in search of that hunk of godforsaken gold.
Where was her photo? Where had he put it? Why was it not here?
There.
There it was: her photo.
Rebecca.
He picked it up and fell to his knees and stared at her image, faded despite his keeping it stored away to prevent her becoming all the more a ghost.
The scream of blood in his head quieted to the flutter of a moth’s wings. He looked at her face and trembled. So long ago, yet he trembled. Yet he could smell her. Yet he could hear and feel her every breath on him. See her. Still. The sweet ache persisted with the sense that if he turned around he’d find her standing there behind him.
His breathing ebbed as her photo calmed him.
He returned the photo to the drawer and stood so calm among the ruins he’d cast about himself it was as though he’d died in taking in her image, and his stupid soulless body had yet to know enough to fall limp to the wood floor where it belonged.
If only he’d the courage.
Useless Facts
Lucinda stared at the envelope in her tremulous hand, still unable to bring herself to open it, afraid the letter inside might not say what she hoped, the ink of its fateful return address smudged by sweat where her fingers and thumbs had worried it. She’d fielded unfavorable replies so often in years past, she wondered why she’d bothered this time.
A voice startled her.
Lucinda looked up from the envelope as Ed Baines speared a hot dog from the steamer with his jackknife blade and plopped the sorry dog on a paper plate beside a jar of opaque vinegar, in which floated pickled eggs that looked like odd organs left to cure in formaldehyde.
“What’s that?” Lucinda said.
“Jonah, I never seen him so riled,” Ed said. He grabbed a hot dog bun and with his stubbed fingers wedged the dog in it, dribbled relish on the dog, and bit down, half the dog gone with a bite.
Lucinda slipped the envelope under the cash register drawer and set to counting grubby ones and fives from the day’s scratch lotto ticket haul, wetted her thumb between each bill and counted aloud. Recounted. She penciled the lottery tabulation in a leather-bound ledger then packed the bills into a vinyl bag, zipped the bag snug, and slid it back under the cash drawer. She did not want to talk about Jonah. She’d not seen him in going on a year when he’d entered the Grain & Feed earlier. He’d looked poorly, though not as poorly as her father, and she felt sick for turning him away.
She slipped out from behind the counter, a clipboard pressed to her hip, and walked down among an aisle of screws and bolts, nuts and washers, slid out each flat metal drawer. She fished her fingers through the metallic machined pieces that kept the world from flying apart, her lips moving with arithmetic precision. The cool, smooth feel of the bolts and washers slipping between her fingers comforted her. With a pencil stub, she calculated the inventory.
“I feel awful about it,” she said, her voice sounding as injured as her heart felt for wounding Jonah, and, let’s be honest, wounding herself in turn. Refusing him credit was not business, it was personal. For Jonah, and for her. It was shameful.
She tried to blame her behavior on the fact that she’d just discovered the envelope in the mail as she’d spied Jonah and his cart of supplies behind a customer on whom Ed waited. She’d been so fixated on the envelope that she’d hardly glanced at Jonah as she’d said, “No credit, Jonah, sorry.” Dismissed him. “It’s me, Jonah,” he’d said, as if his decline in appearance and hygiene left him unrecognizable to her; as if Jonah, dear Mr. B., could ever be unrecognizable to her. “I know. No, Jonah, sorry,” she’d said as she’d started to peel the envelope open with the edge of her thumbnail.
The look in his eye. She’d betrayed him, the one person he trusted, the only person he spoke to beyond perfunctory communication with other store clerks. He’d stood there stiff with humiliation, smoldering with rage, then stalked out of the store. She’d been cruel. She despised business. The necessity of it. It made her behave in ways against her nature, or what she felt was her nature. Which was why she’d been so anxious when she’d seen the envelope in her mail. Perhaps she would get a reprieve from the Grain & Feed for a spell, if she could arrange it, and if the letter inside the envelope proved heartening.
“I can’t just let him keep charging and never paying. Can I?” Lucinda said, cringing at her attempt to justify her actions. She could afford it; it wouldn’t have killed her or her meager bottom line to help Jonah. Of all people. That counted. He counted. Still, there came a point, didn’t there, when business was business and enough was enough? The store was not a gold mine. More a money pit. Changes needed to be made if it were to even survive. Still.
“Can I just let him keep charging?” she repeated.
Ed shrugged.
Lucinda swung the clipboard toward the front corner of the store to the side of where she stood. “I’m gonna bust out that wall,” she said. “Clear out this front area, put in a bay window. Give customers a place to sit with their coffee. Maybe get a rack of bestsellers. Paperbacks. Wi-Fi for the iPad crew. I need cash flow for that,” she said, though the plans might now, perhaps, be rendered moot by the news in the envelope.
“Good luck with Wi-Fi here, Sisyphus.”
Ed, Mr. Hyperbole. It was only Wi-Fi; how hard could it be to get up here in the shadow of Gore Mountain? “People like that,” she said. “Just to sit. Drink coffee. Read. Let the sun on their face through the bay window. Offer up maple syrup and aged cheddar.” She liked it, when she had time. It had been ages since she’d just sat and read for pure pleasure. Her only reading of late was for her archaeology classes at Lyndon State, classes in which she’d felt as conspicuous among the nineteen-year-old students as a plastic fork in an Ice Age excavation site. Much as she enjoyed the class’s introductory texts, she already knew most of the history, techniques, and biographies on the syllabus and probably could have taught the class herself based on her private studies over the years; she’d certainly offer a wider breadth of texts than the classes offered, which consisted of texts written about men by men with names such as Arthur and Rudolph and Oscar. Famous male archaeologists, no doubt, men she respected, even revered, and whose work and contributions to the field were legend and undeniable. Still, she’d hoped in a college-level class to read more than brief mention of pioneer Kathleen Kenyon, and of Mary Leakey—the first person to discover the hominid Proconsul skull of an ape ancestral to humans, and the Zinjanthropus boisei skull—who was relegated to a few brief paragraphs and referred to as the wife of Louis Leakey. Why was no man ever referred to as the husband of . . . ? Lucinda wondered.
Still, Lucinda felt fortunate. If she were
not obligated to read for her classes, she’d not be reading at all. Her time for herself had dwindled these past months in proportion to her father’s deteriorating health, her need to be there for him. The time she gave him strained her time elsewhere, here, and at home with Dale. She wondered how she would be able to leave her father if the letter said what she hoped it said. She wondered what Dale would have to say about the letter too. She’d kept him in the dark about applying. For good reason it had seemed.
“Coming to that, is it?” Ed said, startling her. “Maple syrup and cheddar cheese.”
He swung his hand toward the far wall and said, “Bring in some biscotti and croissants and whatnot while you’re at it. Hazelnut coffee. The fancy stuff. Might’s well go whole hog. Just don’t get rid of these good dogs.” He popped the rest of the hot dog in his mouth and burped, thumbed a dollop of relish from the corner of his mouth, prepared a second hot dog. “Jonah sure was hot.”
Lucinda wished Ed would let it go about Jonah.
“Why he needs supplies for a new shed way up in there is beyond me,” Lucinda said. “He’s too unwell to be up there alone. He should just move down to town. Where it’s safe. That’s what I say.”
“Jonah doesn’t care what you say. What anyone says,” Ed said. “I were him I would never step foot in this town. Would have set off for Alaska years ago. Now there’s a state for such a man. And it’s not a shed he wants to build. It’s a smokehouse.”
“Shed. Smokehouse,” Lucinda said. “He’s got his old house right in town. Rough as it is. He could squat there as easily as in the Gore, no one would say a word.” All these years later, and Lucinda refused to look at, did not dare to look at, Jonah’s old house, whenever she drove by it; yet, here she was expecting Jonah to live there.
“I doubt he wants to step foot in that place ever again. Which is why he hasn’t,” Ed said.
What Remains of Her Page 9
