What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  The crowd looked up at her with expectation. Most of the faces she knew. Neighbors and customers. Other faces were foreign. She took note of them. The state police detective who’d charged her with this responsibility, for this quadrant of the search, had told her to keep a keen eye out for suspicious persons and behavior. To her, in this circumstance, everyone was suspicious. She remembered with a chill the looks of suspicion the women had given Jonah in his living room the night Sally had disappeared.

  “You’ve each been given your maps,” she said, her voice sounding strange to her ears, too high pitched. “As well as a description of the girl. She’s roughly seven years old. Brown hair and very distinctive, deep, dark eyes.” Like Sally, she thought. Her eyes are like Sally’s. “She may have a limp. She’s shy and quiet. Speaks very little. It’s not known what she’s wearing, if anything. She’s about forty-three inches tall and fifty pounds. Skinny. Some of you will search along Logger Brook, others in the fields behind the schools, or the woods along Lye Brook and Beaver Meadows. Your map reflects the area you’ll cover, outlined in red. We plan for each area to take five hours.”

  The faces peering up at her glanced down at the maps held in cold hands.

  “We’ll take a lunch break—sandwiches and bottled water and fruit will be provided—then go on. We ask that you choose a partner, someone to stay by you. We’ll work in a line with each other as we go. Stay within arm’s reach of each other and go at the same pace so nothing is overlooked. Those in Logger Brook will be led by me. Those in the school area will be led by the sheriff, and those elsewhere will be led by state troopers Halcomb and Bender, who will speak in more detail in a moment and take over the responsibilities of the entire search, which goes far beyond where we will be looking in our group.”

  Lucinda nodded at the troopers who stood off to her side, hands clasped behind their backs.

  “What are we looking for?” a woman asked.

  Lucinda glanced at the troopers. Trooper Halcomb stepped up, and Lucinda stepped aside.

  “You are looking for everything and anything that at all looks out of place. Clothing. Tracks in the snow. Blood. The girl herself.”

  “Alive?” a man asked.

  “Let’s hope. If you find something, anything, do not disturb it. Do not touch it. Blow the whistle provided you, and the leader will take it from there. Just blow the whistle. That’s it. Do not under any circumstances touch what you find. Any more questions?”

  “You don’t think she’s alive, do you?”

  “I’ve no idea. I hope so.”

  “You think she was taken?”

  “I’m afraid that is the most likely scenario.”

  In Vain

  Lucinda searched with the others. She searched the hills and fields and woods around Logger Brook Wildlife Management Area. The rivers and creeks and swamps. She helped scour the frozen turned fields and tumbled stone walls. She found scraps of filthy clothes, the pink and inert plastic arm of a baby doll, a deer carcass ravaged by vultures, its intestines slopped out across the snow, its guts swollen and fermenting with its own bodily gases. She found rusted license plates and broken lawn furniture, bottles and cans. Every scrap she and the others found of any possible significance was tagged and bagged. They found bones and hair from the corpses of dogs long disappeared, most just off dirt roads where they’d been struck by cars and lived long enough to crawl off into the woods and die alone.

  They found no girl.

  They found no sign of the girl.

  Or whoever had taken her.

  And she had to have been taken.

  Arlene and Lewis’s double-wide was searched and investigated thoroughly by forensics, who found evidence of extreme neglect and emotional and psychological abuse by isolating the girl in the basement. Arlene had confessed that this was Lewis’s way of setting the girl straight when she needed to learn respect. But there’d been no sign that physical violence, at least of the sort to cause external bleeding, had taken place in that house.

  Lucinda slogged through the bogs, picking her way among the alder and poplar of upland woods in grim silence alongside sober-hearted and tired-eyed fathers and mothers who seemed stunned yet also secretly grateful it was not their own child they sought out there in the unforgiving cold. She could see it in their eyes: What if. What if. What if.

  Students searched, glad for the day off, oblivious to the gravity of their task, some older kids that Lucinda had learned from the case-file interviews had mocked the missing girl for being sent to kindergarten in pajamas and sent back home for head lice. Kids who’d called the girl Larva because her face was so pale as to be nearly translucent, and Alien Eyes because her eyes were so otherworldly dark.

  Lucinda found herself on a hillside, walking with others in a line, and realized she was searching Dead Boy Hill, where she and Sally had once, long ago, secretly sledded against their parents’ wishes; the hill where, from her bedroom window twenty-five years prior, she’d watched a search party look for her friend, wishing she could be part of it, wishing she was old enough to join them, to help. Wondering how on earth she, the world and life could possibly go on without Sally. Yet she had gone on without her. Life had, the world had. One sad second at a time. She stopped and looked up across the shallow valley of a stream to her old house, where her father now likely sat in his kitchen chair. She wondered if he was at the window watching her as she had watched him all those years ago, wishing he could be a part of it, help. She could see her old bedroom window, the one from which she’d watched that day as she felt hopeless and helpless about her friend, her mother standing in Lucinda’s bedroom doorway, beleaguered and beaten down by the events, her coat buttoned all wrong. “Where are you,” Lucinda whispered now. “Where are you?” Not sure if she meant Sally, for whom hope had been abandoned so long ago, or Gretel, for whom hope still remained, however slight. Or both girls.

  “We’ll find her, have hope,” a woman near Lucinda said, Lucinda not realizing she’d spoken loud enough for anyone to hear her.

  “Hope?” a man beside the woman said as he twirled his whistle around a finger on a string. “In this world.”

  “God works in mysterious ways,” the woman said.

  “He’s mysterious all right, I’ll give him that,” he said.

  “Please,” Lucinda said.

  The man’s scoff upset others around him. “I know how these things work out.”

  “You haven’t seen this one worked out,” the woman said.

  “What do you think we’re going find after she disappeared with no coat or boots in this cold? Think we’re going to find her having a picnic? Think she even left on her own? Someone took her.”

  “Please,” Lucinda said. “Stop it. Or leave.”

  At dusk, the pale winter sun slipping beyond the hills and the snow cast in blue, Lucinda and the citizenry of searchers disassembled with nothing of consequence discovered to reward their bleak work.

  They scuffed back to their cars and trucks parked at the school and along the dirt roads, kicking snow from their boots and blowing into their stiff-fingered hands wanting nothing but to go home. To be home.

  Some waited for their engines to warm, others did not, wanting to depart as fast as they could. All of them were gone before darkness fell, as if they might be trapped there, lost themselves, if they did not flee now, while they could, in what light remained.

  As the troopers headed back to their state barracks and Lucinda made for home, Kirk stepped over to her. “Hold up a minute.”

  “I should get going,” she said.

  “Should, should, should.” Kirk took her by the wrist.

  She looked at his fingers around her wrist. His grip strong. As ever. She pulled away.

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  “That sounds a lot like I’ve got a headache,” he said.

  “Is this how it’s going to be?” she said. “You acting liking this.”

  “I’m not acting.”

 
; “Being like this.”

  “Don’t get pissy.”

  “This is work. You understand. Work. That’s the only reason I’m around you. That’s why, when there is no real work, when it’s day-to-day small-town stuff, and not serious work like this to be done, I am not around you.”

  “Come back to the rectory, we’ll work. Go over things. Have a drink to end a tough day.”

  “The girl is probably dead,” Lucinda said. “I respect that even if you don’t.”

  Fire

  Lucinda stared into the fire as Dale handed her a mug of tea. She let the mug’s warmth seep into her fingers. Her face felt blistered from being in the cold all day. Her soul reduced to embers. They’d found nothing of the girl. No trace. Someone had to have abducted her, just as the parents claimed. She did not believe them, not in her gut, but she had to follow the evidence, or lack thereof, too.

  “Understand what?” Dale said as he sat beside her on the hearth.

  “What?”

  “You just said, ‘I don’t understand.’”

  She’d not realized she’d spoken her thoughts.

  “What don’t you understand?” Dale said.

  She’d been thinking of Kirk. She did not understand him, his need to press, his disregard for professionalism and attempt to take advantage to get close to her, ignite an extinguished ember of attraction.

  “I don’t understand this about the girl,” she said.

  She gazed at the fire. She remembered putting household objects into the fireplace in the old house and lying to her father about it. Perhaps that’s what it came down to with Kirk, a juvenile yet engrained behavior: he liked playing with fire. As naive as she’d been, he had been her boyfriend at sixteen. Except it hadn’t been love, only a tsunami of hormonal urges that mutated into potent emotions and compulsive behavior she’d outgrown, and Kirk had not. “He says if they’re not found right away, odds are almost zero that—”

  “Who says?” Dale said.

  “Kirk.”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “How should I say it?”

  “Should, should, should,” Lucinda murmured. She did not know why, or even if, she was antagonizing Dale. Perhaps it was to do with her letter. She still needed to tell him about it; time would get short. The stress made her feel pent-up and cornered.

  She sipped her tea. It warmed her throat, but by the time it reached her stomach it was cold and of no comfort. “How does a person just disappear?” Lucinda said.

  “She’ll turn up. She’s somewhere,” Dale said.

  “The snow. It covered everything. Wiped it clean. I felt so guilty today. Or not guilty. I don’t know. Strange. Weird. At moments, out there, searching for Gretel today, I kept thinking of Sally.”

  “Normal enough.”

  “It distracted me from my job.”

  “It will probably help you do your job in the long run. Your concern, your attachment to both cases.”

  “I kept imagining I was the one to find her, safe. Gretel. I imagined I was the savior. It felt wrong, to fantasize about being the heroine instead of just finding the girl and—”

  “It’s human nature. It’s in our DNA to—”

  “Don’t sum it up. I’m trying to tell you how I felt.”

  He sighed. It reminded her of the sound a dog made when it had been scolded. Why was she thinking such thoughts about Dale? They dismayed her. Were unlike her. She did not feel this way about him, so why was she thinking this way about him? She reached in her pocket. Peeked at the letter.

  A log on the fire toppled, a cyclone of sparks sucked up the chimney.

  “Here the girl is, missing,” Lucinda said. “Or God knows what. And I’m thinking about what it means to me. Envisioning me as a hero. It seemed cruel.”

  “You’re not cruel, you’re—”

  “Ask Jonah how cruel I can be. I need to get up there, to his cabin and apologize.”

  “What are you fidgeting with?” Dale said.

  “Hmmm?” Lucinda said.

  “In your pocket, you keep fidgeting with something.”

  She’d worn the letter at its creases so much it was going to fall apart.

  “Nothing,” Lucinda said.

  “What’s the nothing that you can’t stop peeking at?”

  “It’s—” She was going to say private, but there was no such thing, or shouldn’t have been, when you were planning to get engaged. Yet she was not so naive to believe Dale or any other person did not have private thoughts, failings and doubts they kept to themselves.

  “Whatever the bad news is in that letter, you’ve worn it on your face since you got it,” Dale said.

  “Bad news?” She laughed. “Quite the intuition you have there.”

  “Quite the secretive way you have of peeking at a letter that’s all but lighting your pocket on fire. And I’m not the one with the grim face because of it.”

  “It’s not because of the letter,” Lucinda said. “Or, it wasn’t.”

  She fished the letter out and unfolded it and handed it to him.

  Dale read it, his face inscrutable. He’d make a good criminal, Lucinda thought, with that poker face and ability to keep calm in tense situations. He looked up from the letter. “Vikings?” he said.

  “Maybe. Most of these types of digs—”

  “You must be thrilled.”

  “I am. I was.” She took the letter back from him. “I’m not sure what to do.”

  “Accept it.”

  “I want to, I was going to email my confirmation of commitment as soon as I got it, but I wanted to talk to you first, and then the girl went missing. I can’t leave until I find this girl, one way or another.”

  “Kirk can handle it. Well. Maybe not. But the state police detectives can, and—”

  “I won’t feel right. Abandoning the case. Abandoning her. And she disappeared twenty-five years to the day Sally disappeared.”

  “You think they’re linked?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did you want to talk to me about the acceptance?” Dale said. “You must have applied with the expectation to go if you got accepted.”

  “I didn’t expect to get selected. I submitted a bunch of applications before I met you and before my dad got real bad. All of them rejected me.”

  “This one didn’t. So. Send your confirmation. Find the girl. Then take a break for a bit. You’ll need it.”

  “It’s not exactly for a bit.”

  “You could use a few weeks off. Slaving six days a week at the store, you deserve—”

  “It’s not weeks. It’s months.”

  Dale scratched his cheek. “As in? Two?”

  Lucinda shook her head.

  “Three?” Dale said.

  “Ten.”

  “Some of it must be remote, off-site,” Dale said. “You participate from here, with Skype or—”

  “It’s all up there, in Canada. I’d leave in less than two weeks.”

  Dale stood and walked to his desk, picked up the BB Korn replica, turned it in his hands pretending to be taken with a detail. “Not something you can do quickly or from a desk,” he said. “Digging up bones.”

  “If there are any to dig.”

  “Did you apply for this before or after I moved in here?”

  “After.”

  Drawings

  Jonah needed to keep the girl busy while he shaved and washed before leaving. Once they got on the road, he could not be disheveled, filthy, and stinking. It would draw attention. He’d need to blend in, and he’d need to get rid of his truck as soon as they made it to another state. He didn’t know how he could do that with no real money. He had access to the life insurance money. It had sat in his bank account for the past eighteen years. He did not know how much. Plenty. But he did not want to touch it. Swore he’d never touch a penny, not for anything. Yet he could never have imagined this scenario. He wondered if he could withdraw some of the money and leave
town while the girl was believed abducted, without raising suspicions. How soon before he was tracked?

  Jonah set the crayons and notebook on the table in front of the girl. “I bought them for you. As a parting gift. But we won’t be parting now. We’ll be departing. You like them?”

  She nodded.

  “I was going to get you a coloring book. An old man getting a coloring book. Can you imagine what people would say? Sixteen colors in that box. That’s a lot more than I ever had. You color while I wash up, then we’ll go.”

  She fiddled with the crayon box.

  He spilled the crayons out on the table and spread them around. “All yours,” he said. Go on, he thought. Have fun.

  She picked up the yellow crayon. Set it down. Picked up a purple crayon. Set it down. As deliberate as ever with her artistic decisions.

  She picked up the red crayon and held it. Touched it to the paper.

  “I’m just going to be right in there.” He pointed at the door to the back room.

  She drew a line with her red crayon.

  “Okay then,” he said, relieved. He picked up a bucket of soap water and a washcloth.

  In the small back room, he levered his suspenders down off his shoulders and pulled his wool sweater over his head, hair crackling with static. He removed his flannel shirt and a T-shirt yellowed at the pits, thin with wear. He bent with a grimace and took off his boots, wool socks, pants, and long johns.

  His stench rippled off of his pale, sagged flesh.

  He scrubbed and rinsed until the bucket water turned foul. He toweled off and dressed, his T-shirt so rank he left it on the floor. The long johns too.

  He looked down at the trunk. He’d not opened it, or even been in this room, for twenty-five years.