What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  Dale sat at the table and looked out the kitchen window at the street as Lucinda walked down the hall to the door to the room where now her father lay confined.

  She inched the door open and peered into the dark room.

  Her father lay on his back in his bed, the rails up at the sides. Three years and more of suffering. Who knew how much was yet to come beyond this life. The balancing for deeds done. He’d never been anything but a good father to her. Never anything but that.

  She shut the door behind her, the room going dark save a gash of hurtful morning sunlight at the bottom of the window shade.

  She could hear his breathing. A wheeze followed by a protracted silence. Another wheeze. High-pitched and frothy, like air drawn through a collapsed straw at the bottom of a nearly empty glass.

  Heeeeeeegh.

  “Dad.”

  She drew closer.

  “Dad.”

  She sat in his bedside chair, her whole life, her past collapsing around her.

  He’d lost weight in the past days.

  Mouth agape as if he’d stopped talking midsentence.

  Let me not ever come to this, Lucinda thought. Let my end come quick, and with mercy and dignity.

  Not this.

  Lucinda leaned close. Kissed her father’s forehead.

  Whatever he’d done, whatever she might discover, he was her father.

  The same man she’d cherished her entire life.

  Yet he wasn’t.

  Cast now in her suspicion, her father gave off an aura before unknown to her. Her nerves crackled with disquiet, as though in his dying state her father’s body was preparing to transform, split open to reveal an alien being within. Grotesque and unfatherly. Unsafe. Above all, a child in a parent’s presence ought to feel safe. Though he lay there feeble, Lucinda did not feel safe. She felt locked in with an evil she could not rid through denial alone. Would never expel from her blood.

  The wheezing and quiet stillness and darkness weighed on her, suffocating.

  She gathered her will and kissed his forehead again.

  A light knock came on the door.

  The door opened a crack.

  “He’s here,” Dale said.

  Not a Star

  In the kitchen, a trooper stood by the door, his hat in hand before him, posture erect and dutiful.

  “Deputy.” He nodded with a professional camaraderie.

  Lucinda returned the nod.

  “What is it we have here?” he said.

  She told him.

  “You’re sure?”

  “No.”

  She took the flashlight from the drawer, her fingers weak with terror.

  She opened the door to the cellar.

  “Down here,” she said.

  She followed the flashlight beam down into the darkness.

  Dale and the trooper followed her lead.

  “Careful,” she said.

  In the cellar, she swam the flashlight beam over the workbench. Screwdrivers and jars of nuts and bolts.

  “There.”

  The beam cut across the cellar to the corner. To the trunk she’d seen when looking for Beverly. The shovel with its broken handle.

  Her mind shrieked: Wake up! Wake up! Run!

  “Under it,” she said.

  She shone the flashlight on the trooper’s and Dale’s faces.

  Her heart beat loud in her head. A breathless claustrophobia pressed in on her.

  “Whose house is this?” the trooper said.

  “My father’s.”

  “I see.”

  Did he see? Could he see what she saw? If so, he could not feel what she felt.

  “I want to look in the trunk. But it’s locked,” she said, noting now the padlock. She shone the flashlight over the workbench, underneath it. Looking among her father’s old tools. “There’s a bolt cutter there.”

  The trooper took the cutter and worked it, the jaws nearly seized with rust.

  He got the padlock bar in the jaws and squeezed down. Twisted the cutter’s jaws. The padlock finally relented and the lock dropped to the wet earth floor.

  “You want to open it?” he said to Lucinda.

  She handed the flashlight to Dale who shone it on the trunk as she lifted its lid.

  Inside the trunk, Lucinda found shoeboxes, stacked as neat as bricks to the top of the trunk.

  Lucinda took a box and opened its lid.

  Photos. Stacked just as carefully as the shoeboxes in the trunk.

  Lucinda picked up a photo. It was of a young teenage girl, of perhaps fourteen. She wore denim Capri pants, flip-flops, and a tank top with a sunflower print on it. Long straight hair parted in the middle. A sixties child.

  “Who is that?” Dale asked, training the flashlight beam on the photo.

  Lucinda thumbed through the photos. Faded. Dozens. Scores. Some yellowed by time’s brush. Others mildewed. The oldest photos black and white, square with sharp edges and a glossy finish, bordered by white. The newer color photos fading faster than the black-and-white photos, their edges rounded with dates in one corner. The star of each photo was the same girl as in the first photo, ranging from about the age of five to her midtwenties, the early sixties to late seventies. In most of the photos a young man was with her. Laughing with her. Hugging her. Kissing her cheek. Giving her a piggyback ride. Leaping hand in hand from the covered bridge into the river. Splashing water on each other in the swimming hole. Making the peace sign together. Sitting beside each other on a Ferris wheel. The boy beaming. Always beaming.

  “Do you know these people?” the trooper asked. “Do they mean anything to you?”

  Lucinda handed the shoebox to the trooper and took another box from the trunk. Opened it. The same girl. The same boy. An entire childhood and young adulthood caught in faded snapshots. The girl’s smile effervescent, her eyes startling, hypnotic. Dark. So dark.

  In photos beginning in the early seventies or so, another boy started to appear in the photos with the two of them. A skinny, slight boy who wore grubby, high-water jeans and ill-fitting threadbare shirts.

  His face was hacked over with a red marker.

  Slowly, as the dates of the photos advanced, the first boy’s beaming smile faded, until it was gone, replaced by a smile that was more like a pained wince. A fake smile.

  Lucinda looked inside another box.

  The same. More photos. Hundreds and hundreds of photos.

  She searched through box after box.

  The same three youths.

  Dale took a photo.

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  “Mrs. B.,” Lucinda whispered.

  Dale pointed to the first boy. “But that’s not Jonah.”

  “The other one. The skinny, meek one. His face is marked out with red. That’s Jonah,” Lucinda said.

  The trooper took a photo and looked at it.

  “Who’s Jonah?” he said.

  “My father’s friend.”

  “Who’s the young man kissing her cheek, and splashing, horsing around, the one whose face we see? Who is he?”

  “My father.”

  At the bottom of the last box sat a book. She picked it up. A diary.

  On the inside cover was written in pen: 1987.

  Lucinda flipped through to the last couple entries from late October.

  As she read, a sensation of vertigo overcame her, as if a bottomless pit in the earth had opened up before her and she stood precariously at its edge.

  She dropped the diary. Mrs. B.’s diary.

  Dizzy, Lucinda stared at the depression of earth under the trunk, the one she’d believed was caused by water leaking into the cellar.

  She grabbed hold of a handle at one end and dragged the trunk away. She looked around, grabbed an old shovel, and started to dig at the earth, letting out a cry.

  “Deputy,” the trooper said. He took her arm, then the shovel. “Go sit on the bottom stair there. I’ll manage.”

  Dale helped Lucinda to the stai
rs and sat with her.

  The trooper jabbed the shovel point into the dirt where Lucinda had begun to dig, brought the heel of his boot down hard on it, and scooped earth, tossing it to the side.

  Lucinda closed her eyes, tried to shut out the sound of the rhythmic shoveling; the shooof of the blade sunk into earth, the grunt of the trooper as he lifted and tossed the dirt, the hoomph of the dirt landing softly to the side.

  Shooof. Uuumph. Hoomph.

  Can’t find them. All my fault, her father had said in the kitchen the other morning of Lucinda’s visit.

  Them.

  Failed. All my fault.

  Peace. Find. Before. Devil finds you.

  Lucinda took one of Sally’s drawings out from her jacket pocket.

  Black night with a star.

  Not an evening star.

  A sheriff’s star.

  A badge.

  The Truth

  A shadow fell across Lucinda as she sat at the bottom of the stairs.

  “I got the breakfast sandwiches,” Dot called down from the top of the stairs. “What are you doing sitting down there?”

  Dale turned and looked up at her. “Shhh,” he said.

  “I’ll put them on the counter.”

  Shooof. Uuumph—

  “I got something,” the trooper said and leaned the shovel against the cellar wall.

  Lucinda stood, Dale at her side.

  They crept over to the excavation site.

  Dale shone the flashlight beam into the hole.

  In the dark earth at the bottom of the hole, white protruded from the wet black earth.

  The trooper reached down with his fingertips to pick away at the earth around. Earthworms wriggled in the dirt. Beetles scuttled.

  “Let me,” Lucinda said.

  The trooper turned to look at Lucinda.

  “Please,” she said.

  The trooper stepped aside.

  Lucinda knelt and with her fingers picked away at the edges to reveal more of the bone. A convex shape materialized, like an overturned bowl.

  The cap of a skull.

  Without the lower mandible.

  “A child’s,” the trooper said from behind her. “I’d guess.”

  Lucinda wilted. Dale righted her. “No,” Lucinda said.

  “We shouldn’t proceed,” the trooper said. “We need to get a forensic team here right away. Follow procedure exactly.” He stared down into the shallow grave. “I have two daughters,” he said.

  They turned to go up the stairs.

  In the doorway at the top of the stairs, Lucinda’s father sat in his wheelchair looking down at them.

  Then he wheeled away.

  Dot was setting out the breakfast sandwiches on the table.

  “Help yourself,” she said.

  “You need to go,” Lucinda said.

  “There’s coffee on,” Dot said. “And—”

  “Ma’am,” the trooper said, “the deputy is right. You need to vacate the premises.”

  “I don’t understand— When should I come back?”

  “We won’t need you to come back,” Lucinda said.

  “But your father?” Dot said.

  “I don’t know how something like this works. Do you know how this works?” Lucinda asked the trooper. “Someone his age? So ill. Months, if not weeks.”

  “I don’t know, Deputy. I don’t know.”

  “Please tell me what’s happening,” Dot said, going pale.

  “Ma’am,” the trooper said, “please, if you’ll just come with me outside.”

  “I have personal belongings here.”

  “We’ll see you get them.” The trooper turned to Lucinda. “I’ll put in the call from the cruiser. Don’t go down there again. We don’t want to disturb anything more than we have, now that we know.”

  Nothing Remains

  Jonah looked around the cabin.

  There was nothing here for him. Had there ever been? He’d sought escape but had escaped nothing. He’d sought a new life but had found only a long quiet death.

  He opened the woodstove door. Embers pulsed in a bed of ash. He poked a kindling stick in the coals, got its tip glowing.

  He lit a cigarette with it.

  Coughed.

  In the corner, he found the can of lantern fuel and unscrewed its cap and walked about the cabin tilting it, kerosene burbling onto the floor behind him.

  He soaked the couch with the fuel.

  Sucked on the cigarette.

  He walked to the door, fuel gurgling behind him. From out on the porch he threw the can into the cabin. He looked up at the sky through the swaying treetops. Vultures rode the draft to circle over the beeches down below.

  He took one long last deep drag on the cigarette.

  It tasted of death.

  He stepped off the porch and flicked the cigarette back into the cabin, as far as he could.

  The fuel lit with a hollow whoooop.

  Exploded.

  He was knocked back by the rush of flames, felt their hot breath scorch his face, the acrid smoke in his nostrils as he retreated to the hemlocks.

  Let the whole cabin burn.

  Let it burn to the ground.

  Vultures

  Malcolm LeFranc saw the smoke rising. Up toward the old man’s place.

  “What in hell, Shirley?” he said, looking out through his truck’s windshield as he drove up to the Gore. His mutt, Shirley, squatted on the truck seat beside him, whining.

  LeFranc parked up off a logging road and got out as Shirley loped behind him. The old man was probably burning his summer’s and fall’s worth of trash before winter grabbed everyone by the balls.

  LeFranc slung his tree-marking sprayer on his back and set off into the woods, picking his way along with familiar ease among the talcum mines and blowdowns.

  The snow rose shin deep where it drifted in clear-cuts, yet there was scarcely any at all beneath the biggest beasts of trees. The real lumber. Moneymakers. Two hundred feet tall, two hundred years old. Thousands of board feet per trunk. At each colossal tree, LeFranc was pained to spray an orange X. Trees to be spared. Much as he’d love the money they’d bring, the deal with the feds in order to log the younger trees was to keep these behemoths standing. A trade-off to get at fifteen hundred acres of fifty-year-old trees.

  He sprayed an X on a trunk. Kept on.

  Up ahead, Shirley barked.

  LeFranc smelled the smoke from the old man’s burn pile.

  Shirley barked.

  The logger moved deeper in the woods, working down toward the beeches to mark the stray spruce.

  Shirley barked and whined.

  Ahead, ravens called in their garrulous gravel voices, and he heard the whuuuumph whuuuumph of massive beating wings of vultures lifting off the ground. Glimpsed black bodies stark against the white world. They lifted up off into the trees and sat in the top branches of the beeches clumsy-footed off the ground, gawking down on Shirley, who barked and barked.

  “Hey, girl,” LeFranc called. “Come on.”

  Shirley kept barking.

  Barking at something.

  No getting her away, except to go yank her and get her on a leash.

  “Shhh, girl, shhh,” he said, taking the leash out of his coat pocket.

  He stooped over to hook the leash onto her collar.

  She growled and bared her teeth.

  “Easy, what’s—”

  He saw it.

  In the snow, next to a pit.

  A leg.

  A tiny leg.

  Half buried under the snow.

  Shirley nipped at him.

  LeFranc grabbed her by the scruff. “Lie down! Lie down and be quiet.”

  Shirley hunkered in the snow.

  “Sorry, girl. Just. Be good.”

  He looked into the pit.

  It was a leg all right.

  LeFranc dug around in the snow.

  Uncovered a shoulder.

  A face.

  A girl
’s face.

  The missing girl.

  Girl in the Snow

  Jonah called out in the wild woods; he expected no voice to call back and none did.

  Finally, he collapsed in the snow.

  He lay on his back, staring up at the branches swimming on the breeze above him. The blue sky beyond.

  He closed his eyes.

  And heard it.

  The bark of a dog. Muffled by snow and trees. But not far off. Not if he could hear it.

  He tried to get up. Couldn’t.

  Tried again, shifting to his side.

  He took hold of a tree branch and pulled. Got to his knees. Rested.

  A voice now too.

  The barking came again.

  He used a stick as a cane and lurched toward the voices of the man and dog.

  Near the beeches, he leaned against a boulder that had calved away from a cliff high above him.

  The voice rose. The bark sounded. Clear. Sharp.

  He picked his way, from tree to tree.

  Stopped.

  There.

  Movement.

  Just ahead.

  Close.

  He dipped his head to better see through the whips.

  A man. Malcolm LeFranc. And a dog. LeFranc knelt, looking at something, his face a mask of horror.

  At LeFranc’s knees lay a yellow coat.

  She was still as a doll. Still as the dead.

  A movement in the trees near LeFranc caught Jonah’s eye and he glanced to see the vultures and ravens looking on from their perch in the branches. Waiting their turn.

  He backed away and fled down through the trees, mindless, racked with pain.

  Down from the Gore

  Jonah limped out of the woods, got the truck running, and worked his bare hands at the heater vent waiting for the ache of life to return to his fingers.

  He needed to find Lucinda. Explain his story. He. What? It confused him, the past days. He’d seen LeFranc kneeling beside her and known she was dead. Because of him. Or was it because of him? Had it even happened, his bringing her to the cabin?

  Had he shot her and found her dead a week ago and left her there and slipped into a hallucination? Out of a desperate need for a second chance, had he dreamed of saving her and protecting her? Or had he lived all that he imagined the past days? He’d seen the yellow coat. Hadn’t he? How could she get the yellow coat if she’d not been in the cabin? Perhaps it wasn’t the same coat. Or perhaps he was imagining that too.