What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  You’re senile, the voice said. Sentimental and superstitious.

  No. This girl, those eyes. Jonah had found her, in a pit. His mind carouseled around one continuous thought. What does it mean?

  Why does it have to mean anything? the voice said. Fool. Give her back.

  He would. But he was hungry, needed coffee, and a few more minutes with her. Just a few. And to give her a gift by which she could remember him. When he turned her over to the authorities, he was going to face an arduous day. Days. He wanted to let these last few minutes soak into his marrow. Enjoy them.

  They’re not yours to enjoy, the voice said.

  He pulled the blanket up to her chin, marveling at her. Then he got out.

  He shut the door with a soft click and stood and watched her through the window. When he was certain she would not stir, he walked into the store.

  Blind

  The woman at the register looked up.

  Her name tag read: marnie. here to help.

  “Morning,” she said.

  Jonah nodded. “Pack of Zigzags and a pouch of Gambler,” he said and picked up a coffeepot beside the counter, poured some coffee into a paper cup, took a sip. It tasted like boiled puddle water, but it was hot.

  He browsed an aisle, took a pack of beef jerky, looked at the price, and put it back. He picked up a can of salted pork and wandered into the next aisle.

  A young man with a bandanna on his head entered the store and shouted, “Marnie. What’s shaking? Gonna get your slut on tonight?”

  Marnie glanced toward Jonah uneasily.

  The young man slapped money on the counter. “That’s for the petrol. See yah tonight, sweet stuff.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe ain’t in my vocab,” the young man said.

  “It’s in mine,” the cashier said.

  As the young man headed out the door, he shouted back, “That’s some crazy-ass shit about that little girl!”

  Jonah watched the young man charge across the lot past Jonah’s truck, hop into an old Firebird, and haul ass out of the lot, tires spitting snow.

  Jonah set the salt pork on the counter. The cashier placed the rolling papers and tobacco beside it.

  “What’s that about a girl?” Jonah said.

  “The one that was abducted,” the cashier said.

  Abducted.

  “The one all over the TV and radio and internet?” the cashier said when Jonah did not immediately show recognition.

  “I don’t have a TV,” Jonah said. He didn’t know what the internet was either, though he’d heard Lucinda speak of it a time or two. He swallowed dryly. He should have put the truck radio on to get a sense of the story, see if there were updates, who the girl was and what her situation had been. Her parents had to be insane with worry, and here he was buying a parting gift.

  “Selfish idiot,” he whispered.

  “What?” said the cashier.

  Of course, the story had to be all over the news. Maybe, he thought, just maybe, when I bring her back I’ll be seen as a savior.

  Never. Abducted. You’re the prime suspect now, the voice said.

  “Abducted?” Jonah said.

  “Right from her window. So they say. Who knows what’s the truth on the tube. You’re smart not to have a TV. I only have this one at work. A bunch of nonsense. Every idiot wanting their voice heard, thinking their opinion is more valid than the next bozo’s. Never mind the idjit opinions and speculation on social media. None of it’s news. And that couple. Who had the girl.”

  “Poor parents.”

  “Foster parents.”

  Foster parents.

  “He’s downright nasty,” the young woman said. “I’ve seen him in here barking at her, the poor little girl, and at his wife. Wife barks her share. In self-defense, from what I’ve seen. Seen him swat at her more than once. Looks at them both as if—”

  Jonah glanced out the window at his truck.

  “How do people like that even get a foster kid?” the cashier said. “And apparently they’ve had a whole slew of them.”

  “She’s not theirs,” Jonah whispered.

  “What?” the cashier said.

  “Nothing.” Was it the girl’s foster parents who had abused her and driven her away or abandoned her? He’d imagined good parents facing the nightmare of their lives. Jonah searched the newspaper rack at the counter.

  “Sold out,” the cashier said. “You know it’s all the buzz when a newspaper sells out these days. So many theories. Experts. Everyone a judge, jury, and executioner. If she wasn’t taken, then maybe they, the nasty foster parents, you know. Maybe they did something. If she run off, she’d have come home by now; it’s too cold to be out there. What’s the world coming to?”

  The world isn’t coming to anything, Jonah thought. The world spins just as it has always spun. Blind to our tortures.

  “Let me ring you up,” the cashier said.

  “Hold it,” Jonah said.

  He hurried down an aisle and eyed a pile of coloring books and crayons and colored pencils. He hesitated. Grabbed a coloring book and flipped through it. Put it down. Grabbed another, paged through it. He felt the cashier’s eyes on him. A coloring book. The parting gift. How would it be perceived by the law? Every action scrutinized. He set the coloring book down and swapped it for a notebook and a pack of crayons. He walked up and set them on the counter.

  “Coloring are we?” the cashier said and cocked an eyebrow.

  “Cheaper than carpenter’s pencils.”

  Jonah glanced out the window at the truck.

  The cashier’s eyes followed his.

  He brought his eyes back to her.

  She rang him up.

  Jonah dug in his pocket for a few grimy bills and handed them over, his palms sweaty as she counted back the change.

  Outside, the cold air and mean bright sunlight stunned him. The world tilted. He looked down the street toward the sheriff’s cruiser parked in front of the old rectory.

  He hurried to the truck, jumped into it with a groan. The girl lay still. When he touched her shoulder, her flesh was as cold as a marble headstone. He drew the blanket tighter up around her and turned the truck’s crank.

  Nothing.

  Shit.

  He looked out the windshield at the store window to see the cashier looking out at him.

  He turned the crank again.

  Nothing.

  Turned it.

  Nothing.

  C’mon.

  The girl moaned in her sleep.

  “Shhh,” Jonah said. “Shhh.”

  He looked up.

  The cashier had the store’s door open and was staring at him.

  Jonah fumbled with the ignition key.

  He turned the crank.

  Nothing.

  He covered the girl with the blanket, trying to minimize his movement. His heart thrummed as fast as a grouse’s drumming wings.

  “You all right?” the cashier shouted and stepped outside of the store.

  Jonah rolled down his window.

  “Yeah,” he said, trying to keep his voice low. He did not want to wake the girl. Could not wake her. “Truck does this. Stubborn.”

  “I can relate,” the cashier said. She came down off the steps toward him.

  He licked his lips and turned the crank. The engine caught and stalled.

  The cashier strode toward him, halfway to him now.

  He turned the crank again. Come on.

  The truck started. Idled.

  “See there,” Jonah said.

  The cashier stopped a few feet away. “Looks like you’re all right.”

  “Looks like,” Jonah said.

  The cashier stared at him, as if committing his face to memory, then turned back inside.

  Give Her Back

  Jonah crept the truck down the street and eased past a crowd of cars parked outside the rectory. State police cruisers; six TV vans. Six times the number of TV vans than twenty-five years ag
o. Where did they all come from? Maybe it had to do with what the cashier had said about online and the internet.

  Jonah spotted Lucinda speaking with the sheriff. Jonah had forgotten she was, technically, a part-time deputy, a position she’d inherited against her will, or so she’d confided in Jonah when she’d first been a write-in candidate. She could have refused the post but hadn’t. A glorified crossing guard, she’d claimed. Whatever happens around here that a deputy is really needed anyway? she’d let slip, her face reddening with mortification as she’d apologized to Jonah for her stupidity. I didn’t mean— she’d said. Of course there are times. Jonah had told her not to fret. If anyone had been affected more deeply by Sally disappearing than Jonah, it was Lucinda. Young people, it was claimed, weathered trauma better than adults because their minds are more malleable and they lack perspective to know the severity and permanence of a situation. But Jonah had witnessed Lucinda’s devastation and bewilderment when she’d finally understood her friend was likely never coming back. Her scars were deep and did not know the bounds of time, despite the good face she put on it now as a young woman. Anger bit into him at the thought of Lucinda sending him from the Grain & Feed.

  As Jonah drove the truck slowly by the crowd, no one paid him any mind.

  The girl moved to sit up on his truck seat. Jonah put his hand on her head. Her scalp was dry and crusted. Scabbed. Lice. Thick with lice.

  He pulled his hand away.

  “Be still,” he said.

  What are you doing? the voice said. Pull over. Drop her off.

  What was he going to do, drop her off in front of reporters and cameras? The recluse suspected of murdering his wife and child twenty-five years ago? Was he just going to open the truck door and say, Here she is, I found her. A girl they believed had been abducted.

  He couldn’t.

  You have to, the voice said.

  Jonah drove past, thinking. His jaw hurt, his mind hurt. What to do, what to do, what to do? He considered dropping her off somewhere safe yet private, without being seen. But what if she could speak and she described him to law enforcement. That was worse, surely.

  Even if he gave her back safely and he was cleared of wrongdoing, he could not return her to those “parents,” to a system that had failed her and would fail her again and again. He knew that system. He knew it.

  At the Grain & Feed he turned the truck around and started back the way he’d come.

  He drove past the crowd and caught a look at a couple engaged with the sheriff. The scabby little man stabbed a finger at the sheriff’s face. The woman shrieked at the sheriff, face distorted.

  With one glance, Jonah knew the man and woman were the girl’s foster parents, knew what they were capable of doing, and why the girl had been in the woods.

  End it here. Now, the voice said. Drop her off, explain the facts. The truth.

  The truth. How had that served him in his past life?

  If she had been lost to good parents, he’d pull over now, speculation and persecution be damned. He’d be ecstatic to give her back to parents with whom he shared a miserable bond of a child missing.

  But to give her back to these people. To this system.

  The woman and man barked and howled at the sheriff, spittle flew from their mouths.

  Jonah pulled the blanket farther up over the girl and drove back through town, past his old house toward the covered bridge.

  The girl jolted awake, sat up, rubbed her eyes with balled fists before Jonah could get a hand on her. She stared past him out his side window.

  “Home,” she said, her voice soft as bird down.

  “You want to go home?” Jonah said.

  You’re mad, a voice said. Take her back to the cabin and it will be the end of you.

  The voice was right. There would be no explaining it, despite how reasonable the argument he made to himself. Once he took her back up to the cabin, he destroyed any legal defense for himself. But this was not about doing what was legal.

  This was right. For her.

  For you, you mean.

  They would not stay at the cabin. They would go back so he could regroup, figure out what to do next, where to go next.

  “Home,” she said.

  “Lie back down,” he said. “Rest.”

  She looked out his window.

  “You want to go back?” he said. “To your foster parents?”

  She shook her head furiously. No.

  “You want to be with me?” he said.

  Whatever her answer he’d abide.

  She nodded. “Home,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  And he knew then that upon buying the crayons he’d never intended to give her back.

  Nothing You Can Say

  Lucinda had never liked the old rectory, now serving as temporary sheriff’s office. The place smelled of candle wax and furniture polish, and despite its vast windows that spanned from floor to ceiling, shadows lurked, as if the dark woodwork itself swallowed up the room’s natural light.

  Lucinda walked into what had once been the old parlor, now the sheriff’s makeshift office, to find Kirk with his feet up on his desk.

  Lucinda’s father would never have taken such a lax posture working such a case, or no case at all. A man with his feet on his desk was a man too smug for his job, a man beneath his station.

  Kirk gnawed at a Lucky Spot breakfast sandwich, same as he’d eaten each morning going back sixteen years to when he and Lucinda had dated, the first time around.

  They were good sandwiches. Joe at the Lucky Spot slathered his homemade biscuits with maple syrup then griddled them. Used a thick wedge of aged cheddar. Bacon from hogs raised at High Meadows farm. Eggs. Gooey yolks as orange as an Indian paintbrush petal. But to eat one every day proved an appetite unchecked, an adolescence never outgrown.

  Kirk sucked yolk from his thumb.

  The sandwiches were the first food Lucinda and Kirk had shared after she’d given herself to him. She despised the term, given herself, but that’s how it had felt. She’d succumbed. Her first boy. The only boy, she’d thought, dreamily envisioning a future with him.

  They’d sat at a booth at the Lucky Spot and shared a breakfast sandwich. Not saying a word, relishing the secrecy of what they’d just shared in the empty apartment above the hardware store Kirk had been painting before the next tenants moved into it. When their eyes met, he’d smiled an easy and unguarded smile. A kind smile. And she’d believed she’d tapped into a part of him no one else got to see. The real Kirk. She’d felt giddy with pleasure for drawing this side out of the Tough Boy, proving his toughness was an act masking a soft side she alone had the power to conjure.

  Kirk looked at her now and licked his fingers. Smiled. That smile. The devil in it.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “I’m the deputy sheriff.”

  Kirk sniffed, licked at yolk at the corner of his mouth. “What do you plan on doing? You don’t have any experience in this sort of thing.”

  “More than you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Sally.”

  “I mean legal. The law. Investigation. You can’t be nosing around and certainly can’t be going out to crime scenes on your own.”

  Nosing around. Christ. It was his MO, though, and it did not surprise or anger her; it was as expected from him as a grunt was from a hog. His nonchalance, however—this infuriated her. His indifference to the urgency and seriousness of the missing girl was inexcusable. He should have been up on his feet coordinating, delegating, investigating.

  “I was at the crime scene because you were unreachable. When you’re supposed to be reachable at all times. The parents tried to locate you.”

  “I was on a call. I got to their place quick enough. You, though, you shouldn’t have gone inside the place, you could have contaminated it.”

  Lucinda bit her tongue as Kirk reached in the bag and took out a sandwich.

  “Remember thes
e?” He smiled. All the hardness in his face melted like winter ice on a spring day.

  “What are you doing in here like this?” Lucinda glanced at his boots propped up on the desk.

  “Mentally preparing for the press waiting in the other room,” he said and set his feet on the floor. Slid the sandwich across the table toward her. “One won’t kill you.”

  She poured a cup of weak black coffee into a Styrofoam cup. Kirk got up and stood too close to her.

  She moved away.

  “Child Welfare’ll be here pronto,” he said. “I can hand that over. Think you can handle it? I need to put heads together with the troopers on the search and the real investigation. You can do background.”

  Background.

  “I thought you’d handle the press and I would support the state police with searches,” Lucinda said.

  “Don’t throw a tizzy. You will help. But I can handle these two things at once.”

  Lucinda glanced through the doorway at reporters and camera operators talking and prepping for questions in the adjacent room.

  “I’ll handle Child Welfare,” Lucinda said. “Then help with search coordination. I can handle two things at once too.”

  “I knew you’d see it my way.” Kirk winked at her on his way into the other room.

  Lucinda did not know what to expect or what to ask the Child Welfare liaison. Her only experience with foster care was her own personal experience. Her parents had been her sole foster parents since she was five days old and adopted her at five years old. They were her true parents, no one else, and she was fortunate to have their love and kindness, could not relate to the experiences some children in the foster system endured.

  She wanted to do her utmost in the meeting with Child Welfare, do whatever was asked of her role as deputy, even if it was Kirk manipulating her with his authority. Her father had always said respect the chain of command, if not the commander.

  She’d abide by that, for as long as she was able anyway. This was not 1987. She was not her father. And her father had never had to report to the likes of Kirk. If he had, he may have made an exception to his mantra.