Not a ghost. An angel.
The girl.
How had he gotten out here on the porch? He didn’t remember. Couldn’t remember. The ATV. He’d come out to stand guard, protect her. And he’d dozed. Failed her. Why could he not stay awake?
The girl sucked on the corner of the towel he’d given her and nodded at his feet. The rifle had fallen from his lap, with its hammer cocked. It could have gone off. Killed him. Killed her. Could still go off if not lifted carefully.
He eyed the rifle.
She reached for the rifle to help. Her small hand clutching at it. Near the hammer.
“No,” he said.
She reached for it.
“No,” he shouted. “Leave it, damn it.”
She cried out and covered her head with her arms.
“I’m sorry,” Jonah said. “Sorry. It’s dangerous.” He tried to bring calm to his voice. If she’d picked up the rifle before waking him . . .
She sniffled, curled away from him, face hidden.
“It’s okay. You’re not in trouble. Daddy’s not mad. Okay. Just. Don’t touch. I’ll get it, go on in.”
She sucked on the corner of the towel.
He grabbed the rifle, swung the muzzle away from her, eased down the hammer.
What do you think you’re doing? the voice said.
“Who are you?” Jonah said. “Tell me your name.”
The girl looked at her hands.
“You must have a name,” he said. “We all have names.”
She sucked on the towel. Why would she not tell him?
“You must have a name. Pretty one, I bet,” he said.
She stared at him unblinking.
“I have to call you something. I can’t just call you ‘girl.’ That’s silly, right?” Jonah said. “If you won’t tell me your name, we’ll have to pick one. Yes?”
Her dark eyes seemed to take in the question but revealed no answer as she remained voiceless.
“We’ll have to give it thought,” Jonah said. “I had a daughter once, Sally. A long time ago. When I was someone else. She looked so much like you, it’s scary.”
Trouble
Lucinda stood on a ladder taking the measurement of a shelf above the hot dog table when the cowbell above the Grain & Feed’s door clanked.
She turned and saw them: trouble from the hills.
She watched them.
They demanded watching, those two.
Ed, sitting on a stool behind the register, saw them, too, and stood.
But Arlene and Lewis did not go about their usual meandering with eyes glancing at the fish-eye mirrors, shifty hands going to and from their pockets, the way Lucinda’s father had warned her in regard to shoplifters when she was a girl.
Instead, they marched to Lucinda’s ladder.
Lewis looked up, drank in a good full look of Lucinda’s belly where her sweater had ridden up. Lucinda tugged the sweater down and stepped off the ladder to address the couple. Lewis was a short, wiry, grotesque little man with the sallow, jaundiced skin of a lifetime chain smoker. Arlene was scrawnier than he was, yet not frail. Hard. Bone hard.
“My girl,” Arlene blurted to Lucinda. “She’s gone missing. You gotta help us, Deputy.” Arlene gulped down a deep breath, her eyes bright with fear.
Girl. Missing. Lucinda felt her own breath catch.
“Our girl,” Lewis corrected. “Our girl.”
“You gotta find her. That’s your job, you gotta. Someone’s took her,” Arlene said, her breathing sharp now, a pant.
“Slow down,” Lucinda said.
“They took her,” Arlene said.
“And you better goddamn well find her, you’re the deputy, after all,” Lewis insisted, but his voice seemed glassy and practiced to Lucinda’s ear, bereft of empathy.
Ed wandered out from behind the counter.
“Slow down. There must be a reasonable explanation,” Lucinda said, though there did not need to be a reasonable explanation for a young girl to go missing. She knew too well.
“You’re deputy. Do something,” Lewis snorted.
Deputy. It was true. Lucinda was deputy. Part-time deputy. Not even part-time. And that only because her father had been sheriff, and the town had elected her as a write-in candidate for deputy believing she’d wanted the position. Which she had, on the level of her believing everyone had an obligation to perform a civic duty. But she didn’t handle crimes, let alone serious ones, what few instances that there were in Ivers. She handled loose dog cases. Breaking up parties of underage drinkers at the lake. Collecting roadside donations for the fire department on the Fourth of July. Not this. She had no experience with missing persons. No professional experience. Still, she squared her shoulders, alert now to the magnitude of the situation, to the knowledge that this moment would not come again. She had to memorize everything that was said. Had to record it in her mind and had to say the correct words and make the correct decisions.
“They took her through the window like they do on the TV. You’re the deputy. I been calling your boyfriend sheriff, and he ain’t nowhere to be found like usual.” Lewis grunted like he’d been gut punched.
“He’s not her boyfriend,” Ed said.
They all looked at Ed, who added, “Not anymore.”
Lucinda took out her cell phone and brought up the app for recording.
“What’re you doing with that thing?” Lewis said, his hot breath foul, the stench of an old damp sock.
“Recording us,” Lucinda said.
“What in hell for?” Lewis said.
“For the record.”
“What record?”
Lucinda did not know if Lewis was demonstrating his habitual, genetic belligerence or was being defensive for a reason. She pressed the red record button on her screen.
“The official record,” she said. “Now. How do you know someone took her?” Her voice was clipped. Official. Assured. Her dad’s sheriff’s voice. It came to her instinctively as she tapped into all the years she’d witnessed her father’s tactics and command. Confidence, or the appearance of it, was essential.
“She’s not in her goddamned room is how. She ain’t anywheres,” Lewis said. “So. What else coulda happened?”
Lucinda could think of many things, the things she’d tried never to think of in regard to Sally. Cruel, debasing things. Everything will be fine, she told herself. This girl will be found safe. She has to be. This cannot happen again. It will not.
“Have you looked for her?” Lucinda said.
“Are we retarded?” Lewis said. “We looked. Everywheres. She’s nowheres.”
“Could she have wandered off maybe, when you weren’t—” Lucinda paused. She needed to select her words with judicious precision. Arlene’s angst appeared genuine. Her nervousness, too; she kept cutting her eyes toward Lewis. Lucinda continued, “Could the girl have slipped away when you were maybe too busy with something else and maybe lost track of time?”
“I guess,” Arlene said.
“Could she have run off?” Lucinda looked at Arlene and ignored Lewis to test his reaction.
“Now why in fuck would she do that?” Lewis said.
“We put her down last night,” Arlene said, her voice flat. Rote. “She was there, then this morning she ain’t.”
“I’m a glorified crossing guard,” Lucinda said, wanting them to underestimate her interest. They seemed circumspect, and this behavior did not sit well with her. She did not trust this couple to come into her store and leave it without trying to steal, and she certainly didn’t trust them with this story. “I’ll call dispatch to get the sheriff to meet us, but let’s the three of us head up there now. We can’t spare a second in this cold if we’re going to find your daughter.”
“Alive?” Arlene said.
At all, Lucinda thought as she went behind the counter and unlocked the safe, removed from it her holstered 9 mm and her badge.
She buckled the holster around her waist and tucked her badge in t
he pocket of her EMS parka she shucked on and zipped.
“You really need that?” Arlene said, eyeing the sidearm.
“We’ll see,” Lucinda said.
The Window
Lucinda shifted her Wrangler into four-wheel drive as she turned the Jeep up Dead Crow Hill; the bare trees bordering the road stood dark and skeletal against the white, virgin snow. Ahead of her, Lewis’s Cobalt whipsawed on the muddied road, rooster tails of slop geysering out behind it to splatter the Wrangler’s windshield.
Lucinda turned on the wipers and windshield fluid as she wondered if Lewis was sending muck onto her Wrangler on purpose. How he lived up here through the winter with a two-wheel-drive car, Lucinda did not know. She snowshoed up this way often. The road came to a dead end another mile past Arlene and Lewis’s place. Beyond that, ancient logging roads served as ski and snowshoe trails when the snow fell. She’d tried her hand at cross-country skiing, but she fell too often and disliked having to trounce uphill with awkward skis splayed in a herringbone fashion that made her feel like a waddling goose. Yet she liked when the skin of her cheeks tingled from the bite and brace of cold fresh air; she liked the bright blue clarity of the sky on a clear, sunny morning following a fresh snowfall. She liked the silence of the woods broken by the sharp crack of branches. She liked when she jumped a hare from where it hid beneath a young spruce to erupt in a squall of snow. So she’d traded skis for snowshoes. The rhythm of legs and arms and poles, in time with her breathing, calmed her. It beat running, which had always pounded her joints and ankles and given her shin splints. And it did not feel like exercise of the kind girlfriends endured, indoors, on a machine, or on a mat. She disliked contortions. She wanted steady forward, fluid movement, through the woods, in the fresh air, through space and time. She longed now for just such an afternoon in the woods to clear her chaotic mind.
She’d be having none of that today.
She pulled the Wrangler into a yard behind Lewis and got out in front of a double-wide stripped of its siding, particleboard exposed beneath loose flaps of black Tyvek paper that snapped in a gust of wind like fantastic bat wings. The fresh snow in the yard was as smooth as cake icing; not so much as a mouse track marred it, though here and there slats of the vinyl siding jutted up from under the snow.
Lucinda wiped at her dripping nose with the back of her hand. The cold morning air needled her face. Branches clattered in the wind as snow filtered down through the trees in silence. Arlene shuffled near Lucinda, arms wrapped around herself, her jacket too thin for the cold. Lucinda was struck with a sudden pang of sympathy for Arlene. The woman who, until now, Lucinda had frankly dismissed as trouble from the hills appeared genuinely distraught and, Lucinda saw as Arlene gnawed her bottom lip and stole nervous glances at her husband, afraid too. Lucinda had an urge to put an arm around Arlene and console her and tell her all would be okay. Except Lucinda could not do that. She was here to investigate a possible crime. A serious crime. Not here as a citizen or a neighbor. And, until cleared, Arlene and Lewis were suspects, just as Jonah had once been a suspect, was still a suspect to many people in town.
Twenty-five years to the day, Lucinda thought, and a girl goes missing. Lucinda wondered if the girl, like Sally, had disappeared for good. Had she been taken, or run off, or had Lewis and Arlene done something and were trying to cover up their crime by calling Lucinda out here? Lucinda did not know which scenario most benefited the girl. A child alone in the woods in this cold, overnight, would come to a slow, grim end. Lucinda shoved the thought from her mind. The missing girl deserved Lucinda’s resolve and focus. Lucinda needed to be attuned, see with clear eyes and think with a sharp mind, listen with attentiveness and suspicion. She knew from her father’s experience with Sally and Mrs. B. the toll such cases exacted from the parties involved. She had one aspect going for her in a way her father had not: she knew to brace herself for the possibility of this case not going well, the girl never being found, even as she told herself, You will find this girl. You must find her. Alive.
“I thought you said you looked everywhere for her,” Lucinda said, looking Lewis straight in the eye.
He glanced at Arlene. “We did.”
“There’s no tracks in the snow.”
Lewis licked his mustache. “I meant everywhere inside, not everywhere in the world. And, yeah, there ain’t no tracks, so that means she was took before the snow flew, or during it.”
Could be, Lucinda thought. Or not.
“We yelled a bunch for her, but never heard nothing,” Arlene said.
“Which window is hers?” Lucinda said.
Lewis pointed. “That one there.”
Lucinda took out her cell phone. One bar. She dialed Kirk’s work cell. She’d deleted his home and personal cell numbers long ago, though they were still etched in her memory. She’d called dispatch twice to try to get word to him, to no avail. When his voice mail picked up, Lucinda said, “It’s Lucinda. Same message as earlier. Wherever you are. Get to Lewis and Arlene Driscoll’s place on Dead Crow Hill, as soon as you get this. We got a missing child.” She wondered if she should call in the state police. She thought about it. But it’d take a half hour at least for them to get up here, if a cruiser was even in the region. No. She’d take a look first. Time was paramount.
“Stay put,” she said to Lewis.
“It’s my house,” Lewis protested.
“Stay,” she said again.
“What am I, a dog?” Lewis said.
“Come with me, please,” Lucinda said to Arlene.
The double-wide stank of cigarette smoke and of rancid milk. The stench of lives unkempt.
Magazines—Entertainment Weekly, People, Us, Guns & Ammo, Survivalist—lay scattered among a litter of soda cans and potato chip bags and cigarette butts snubbed out in pie plates and coffee mugs.
The mounted head of a bobcat stared down from the paneled walls, the taxidermy work so tragic the animal’s bared teeth looked pathetic and comical instead of fierce.
A flat-screen TV the size of a garage door overwhelmed the room from the wall opposite.
“Where’s her room?” Lucinda said.
Arlene rubbed her snubbed nose with the palm of her hand then jabbed her chin toward the narrow hallway. “Last on the left.”
“Stay here, please,” Lucinda said.
Lucinda crept down the hall as her skin pricked with an appreciable drop in air temperature. A cold draft. A breeze. She stood in the bedroom doorway. One dirty twin mattress draped by a dirtier gray blanket atop it lay askew on the floor. Clothes heaped and scattered. Not a toy in sight. Not a pillow. Self-disgust quivered through Lucinda as she remembered the legion of stuffed animals and dolls she and Sally had owned as girls, and how both she and Sally had constantly teased for more. They’d acted so deprived and neglected. Normal girls part of decent working-class families, having no perspective of or respect for the luxuries of ordinary life, of real poverty. A sour reek rose in Lucinda’s nose. The window was cracked open, a skim of snow drifted on its sill. Water puddled on the floor.
Arlene stepped behind Lucinda. “You can’t be here,” Lucinda said. “Go back to the living room.”
“That there’s the window she was took from,” Arlene said.
Lucinda stepped into the room.
Arlene made to follow.
“You need to stay out,” Lucinda said. “This is a crime scene.” If Kirk didn’t show in the next five minutes, she’d call the state police. Perhaps she should have called them straightaway. Perhaps she’d made a mistake. This was not in her purview. She’d never handled anything close to this professionally, and her mind kept tripping back to memories of Sally’s empty bedroom the night of her disappearance. She closed her eyes to clear her thoughts, opened them, focused again on the present. She stepped to the open window. Arlene remained in the doorway. “Have you touched anything, the window or sill?” she whispered over her shoulder, not sure why she was whispering.
“No,” Arlene sa
id, her voice meek.
“Was it like this when you found it?”
“Damn right,” Lewis’s voice said. Lucinda turned as Lewis stepped into the room, his chin thrust out and chest puffed up, as much as it could be at least.
“Get back in the hall,” Lucinda said.
Lewis ignored her. “You can see it’s too high for a squirt like her to get out of herself,” he said.
“Step back in the hall,” Lucinda said. “In fact, I need you to leave the premises entirely.”
“It’s my house,” Lewis said.
She stared at Lewis, his eyes feral, jumpy. Lucinda feared what she might find in this house; if it was anything as mean and nasty as what she saw in his eyes, she was not sure she’d be able to bear it, braced for horror or not. “It’s not your house anymore,” she said.
“The hell it ain’t.”
“It’s a crime scene. My crime scene. You leave now or I arrest you for interfering with the duties of a law enforcement officer. For starters. How’d that be?” Lucinda set a palm on the butt of her 9 mm, her heart kicking as she steadied her breath and her eye.
Lewis fished a toothpick from his shirt pocket and stabbed it between two foul teeth. He elbowed Arlene in the ribs behind him as he stepped back into the hall and spread his stubby arms wide, dramatic. “How’s this? This okay?”
“You’re still in part of my crime scene,” Lucinda said. She looked around at the floor, deciding to prod Lewis. “Any toys missing?”
“We look like we’re made of money?” Lewis said.
Lucinda thought about the gargantuan TV in the other room.
“You didn’t hear anything?” she said.
“Like?” Lewis said.
“Like anything. The window opening. Like your daughter crying. Or screaming.”
“If I’d a heard screaming,” Lewis said, “you’d be looking at the asshole’s body shot dead on the floor instead of an open window.”
A car pulled up outside.
Lucinda looked out the window to see Kirk unfold himself from his cruiser, situate his sheriff’s hat atop his wave of hair, and affix the strap under his jaw as he looked at his reflection in his cruiser’s window.
What Remains of Her Page 13
