What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  No. All of it had to have happened. And now. She was dead. Because of him.

  He needed to explain he’d done what he’d done in order to protect the girl. He would take the consequences. He’d harbored her not out of altruism but out of selfishness. He’d looked for reasons to keep her. Wanted to keep her.

  He drove his truck down out of the mountains, past the old house, to Lucinda’s place. Her Wrangler was not in the drive. He sat in his truck, waiting. When she did not show, he drove off.

  He pulled in front of the Grain & Feed and went in, the cowbell clunking.

  A boy Jonah did not recognize sat behind the counter.

  “How are you this morning?” the boy said.

  “Lucinda around?” Jonah said.

  “Nah.”

  “Know where she is?”

  “I’m just filling in for Mr. Baines. She’s at her house, I guess.”

  “Nope.”

  The boy shrugged.

  “Maybe her father’s place,” the boy said.

  Lucinda’s Wrangler sat parked in front of the house, along with three state trooper cruisers. Something’s happened to Maurice, Jonah thought.

  Though he had not seen Maurice in many years, Jonah knew of Maurice’s failing health.

  Except. If something medical had happened with Maurice, where was the ambulance?

  He buttoned his coat to the top, smoothed the front of it. A nervous flutter in his chest, like the moment he’d been about to confess his love to Rebecca for the first time, knowing it would change everything, the arc of his life, one way or another.

  He went up the walkway and knocked on the door.

  No one came.

  He knocked again.

  The door went unanswered.

  He pounded on it.

  The door opened and Lucinda stood before him.

  “Jonah,” she said, and he saw anguish in her eyes, remembered her as a sweet, sweet girl, the friend of his daughter.

  She looked out past him, up toward the Gore. He knew she saw the smoke from his burning cabin rising in the distance. He needed to tell her about what he’d done, what he’d seen these past days. Tell her the truth, as he knew it.

  “I have to—” he said.

  The torment on her face morphed into compassion.

  Jonah composed himself, tried to hold Lucinda’s gaze. He looked down at his boots. Their leather was worn through at the toes so a dull sheen of steel shone through. His eyes trailed back up her to find her face again.

  “We found them,” she said, her voice that of a frightened girl.

  What Lucinda had prattled on about in the cabin, her believing she knew where Jonah’s wife and daughter were, but not wanting to tell Jonah until she was sure.

  A star but not a star. She had my doll, Lucinda had said.

  The words cleaved him open.

  He thought of Sally’s drawings that Maurice had found. Not a star. A badge. Maurice’s badge. And Jonah knew. Knew what the anguish and compassion in Lucinda’s face meant. Maurice had manipulated Jonah into thinking the drawings might implicate Jonah. Tricked Jonah into destroying evidence, not against Jonah, evidence against Maurice.

  No.

  Yes.

  Jonah waited for the old rage to rear in him, prepared to fight against it. Yet it did not come.

  Instead, he felt calm. To allow his rage to overcome him, to lash out would only shame his wife and daughter. What was there left to lash out at?

  “In the cellar,” Lucinda said.

  Jonah ran his palm down the front of his coat.

  Part of him never wanted to lay eyes on that cellar, to see where his wife and daughter had lain in ignominy all these years, yet another part of him wanted to rush to them, assure them all was well now. They were found and they would never be lost again.

  “The state police are handling it,” she said. “One of them is speaking to my father now. He’s dying. Has been for years.”

  Good, Jonah thought. I’m glad it’s been a long torment.

  “We’re all dying,” he said. “The best we can hope is that no one hurries us toward our death. No one decides for us how and when.”

  He stared at his boots for an eternity.

  No matter what he did or where he went, it would never end. Missing them.

  “I need new boots,” he whispered.

  “Jonah, he’s my father,” Lucinda said. “My father did this.”

  He looked up at her again.

  She was crying. “She was my best friend.”

  This was not Jonah’s pain alone. Her father. Her dearest childhood friend.

  He took her hand in his.

  She tried to blink back her tears but they could not be stopped. “Do you wish to . . . after they’re done, after they take him away . . . just you and them?”

  “I’d like to remember them as they were. Before all this.”

  A state trooper came up behind Lucinda.

  “Deputy,” he said.

  Lucinda turned to address the trooper.

  “We’ll need to speak to you,” the trooper said.

  “Give me a moment,” she said.

  The trooper nodded and walked back toward the kitchen.

  Lucinda turned back to see Jonah was halfway to his truck.

  “Mr. B.,” she said.

  But Mr. B. kept walking, opened the door of his truck, shut himself in the cab, and rested his forehead on the steering wheel.

  Deputy Welch

  Lucinda sat in the kitchen as the troopers performed their tasks, came and went from the cellar carrying plastic bags of evidence. Bones. Scraps of clothing. Photos. The diary.

  She’d sent Dale to get food though she wasn’t hungry and felt she’d never again have an appetite. She’d only wanted time alone, and he’d known that and respected it.

  A trooper stood in the cellar doorway. Lucinda wiped at her runny nose with the back of her hands.

  “We’re done, for the time being,” the trooper said.

  “What happens now?” Lucinda said.

  “We can process him here. Read him his rights, though in his state he may not understand, making it void. Then have him transported to the hospital.” The trooper cleared his throat. “I have other news. That girl, the missing foster girl. She was found.”

  Lucinda let out a long sigh. “Where?”

  “Up in the Gore. If you believe that.”

  “I was just up there.”

  Lucinda shook her head at the tragedy of it.

  Tell Me

  In the living room, her father lifted his shaking hand for her to hold.

  Lucinda sat on the edge of the couch across from him. She did not take his hand.

  He set his hand back down, made a slurping sound with the corner of his mouth.

  The living room was ferociously hot and airless, and Lucinda felt as though she were trapped in a forge.

  She took her smartphone from her pocket, pressed her finger on the record app. She cleared her throat, sat straight, chin up. “This is Town of Ivers Deputy Sheriff Lucinda Welch, recording suspect Maurice Welch, November 12, two thousand twelve, at ten thirty-five a.m., in the home of Maurice Welch.”

  Lucinda looked at the photo behind her father on the wall, of her and Sally on the tire swing, smiling madly.

  “It happened here,” Lucinda said.

  Her father did not speak or nod, but his eyes confirmed the story the bones in the basement told.

  “Please, speak for the record,” Lucinda said.

  “Yes. Here.”

  Lucinda did not need his confirmation. She knew it had happened here, right here in her home. Her friend and her friend’s mother had been killed in this house, her childhood home, and had been down in the cellar all these years while Lucinda had been stricken with sorrow and bewilderment and fear. In the past hour, Lucinda had read enough of the diary—Mrs. B.’s diary—she’d found in the trunk to piece together the background to the days leading to the disappearances. The murde
rs. The motive and the scenario were clear now in her mind, even as they muddied her soul to think of them, to think this of her father. Know this about him.

  “The photos. The faces scratched out, Jonah Baum’s face. Jealousy. All this, from jealousy.”

  Her father shook his head.

  “Speak for the record,” Lucinda said. “Jealousy was the motive.”

  “Yes,” her father said. “And no.”

  “Please, clarify. Was it or not?”

  “Not jealous. Humiliated. She came here. She and her daughter.”

  “Sally. Sally Baum. You can say her name. Sally. And her mother, Rebecca Baum.”

  “Yes. Them.”

  “Why did she come here?”

  “She was upset. Afraid.” His breath whistled.

  “Of what?” Lucinda knew the truth, knew what, who, Rebecca had become afraid of in those last days.

  “Of him. Jonah.” Lucinda’s father sipped air in tiny gasps. Grimaced.

  “The photos. Jonah’s face mauled by a pen. You did that. Yet she was afraid of Jonah?”

  “You know his temper.”

  “Tell the truth.”

  Her father licked his dry, peeling lips. “The truth. She was mine. First. I came from the good family. Me. He. Stole her. She came to me. She was afraid.”

  “And what happened?” Lucinda steeled herself against the words this man was saying. The lies. This father who’d had a lovely wife and adopted daughter he never treated as anything but his own, with love and tenderness. What had he thought, that he’d just leave Lucinda and her mother, run off to some fairy-tale life? Abandon them and . . . what?

  He gritted his teeth, strained to breathe. “You judge. But. You. Kirk. You are always tempted to go back. I see it.”

  “You don’t see anything.” How dare he use her as means to justify what he’d done. Her father was manipulating her. She felt it in her belly like the twist of a knife, his lying about the specifics. Shading the truth. She was certain. When did it stop, her being manipulated by men, however calculated and selfish, or unconscious and well intentioned, their attempts?

  Her father hacked up phlegm on the cuff of his pajama top, phlegm tainted with blood.

  “What did you do to them? What did you do to my friend?”

  “She feared what he might do.” His voice splintered.

  “She did,” Lucinda said. Just not the way you want me to believe it. “Go on.”

  “I told her. Stay. I’d take care of her. She got—”

  “What?”

  “Hysterical.”

  “Oh, hysterical.” Lucinda felt numbed with disbelief, disembodied, and her voice seemed to come from somewhere, someone else.

  “She was off her meds,” her father said. “She could get . . . She swung at me. I—defended. A man can’t.”

  And what did you do to make her swing at you? Lucinda thought.

  “I grabbed a knife.”

  Lucinda could barely find the breath to speak. She felt weak, and so tired. Vanquished. “Sally? What’d you do to my friend?”

  “You don’t”—he coughed, hacked up phlegm—“want to know.”

  “The law wants to know. It needs to know who and how and why.”

  Her father bit his lower lip, drawing blood. He licked at the bead of blood, put a frail fingertip to it. “She started crying. Crazy. Like her mother.”

  “A girl. Crazy.”

  “No control.”

  Lucinda could imagine Sally frenzied, from terror. Lucinda could bear no more. She stood.

  “Accident,” her father pleaded, desperate. “That’s the truth.”

  “Lies,” Lucinda said. “Sally’s mom was not afraid of Jonah. Not in the way you make it seem. You’d begun to hound her.”

  “Not true, I—”

  “I read it in her own words in the diary from the trunk. The diary you stole. You went back to her house and took it. Where was it?”

  “Nightstand.”

  “Why’d you keep it?”

  “It was hers. Her thoughts. Her handwriting.”

  “Why, after so many years, did you start to hound her? Obsess over her? You were friends. You and her and Jonah. And Mom. All of you. Why?”

  Her father closed his eyes as if mulling options for answering the question. He opened his eyes.

  “Sometimes. An itch. Can’t ignore anymore. You scratch. It helps. But. Then. You scratch and scratch and scratch.” He shook his head, drool shining on his chin. “It gets raw. Starts to bleed. Fester. Becomes a sore.”

  “She came here once to reason with you to leave her be,” Lucinda said. “Told you to stop. But you made wild threats and spouted terrible things. That Sally should have been your daughter. Your natural daughter. The real daughter you should have had.” Lucinda’s voice trailed as her words skewered her.

  “That’s not. I didn’t. Mean that. I was—”

  “But you backed off that time because Sally had stopped by to see me, let herself in without knocking, as we always did. I wasn’t home and neither was Mom, and Sally heard you saying awful things to Mrs. B. before either of you heard her crying in the living room. That’s why Sally drew those pictures. Because of your ugliness. Because of how much your threats to her mom scared her. Sally and Rebecca were both afraid of you.”

  “Yes,” her father said.

  “You backed down that first time to calm Sally. So Sally wouldn’t tell me. Or her dad. You gave Sally my doll to calm her and she took her home. Baby Beverly. You swore Sally to secrecy. Her mom swore her to secrecy. Because she knew Jonah’s temper. She was afraid of it, not at it being directed at her. But at you. He was suspicious she was seeing someone. His suspicions were taking their toll on them. She swore she wasn’t seeing anyone, there was no one for her except Jonah. And it was true. She wrote that in her diary. There was no one else. Despite their problems. But he wasn’t convinced, he knew something was off, wrong, felt her tension and secrecy. Because it existed, just not the way he imagined. She couldn’t come clean, she couldn’t tell him it was you. Bothering her. She feared what he’d do and knew it would crush him. She hoped she could get you to see reason.”

  “Love knows no reason,” her father whispered.

  Lucinda tried to ignore the lacerating, delusional words.

  “When Mrs. B. found Sally’s drawings, and forced Sally to tell her about a man in the woods, Mrs. B. came back the morning Jonah left early for campus,” Lucinda said. “She brought Sally. I don’t know why. Maybe she thought you’d see the damage you were doing if you saw Sally’s face. Maybe it was to have a witness there to keep you in check. Maybe because Sally had been feeling sick the day before and was sick that morning. But you were the one who followed Sally in the woods. Her and me. Do I have that right?”

  He swallowed, winced, as if swallowing shards of glass. “Yes,” he said. “But—”

  “But what?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “And Mom, falling down the stairs. Was that an accident?”

  “You,” he barked, his voice so much louder than she’d heard it in years it made her jump. “How dare you.”

  Lucinda turned to leave.

  “You’re my daughter,” her father gasped. “No one else. I was mad. When I said that. I was—”

  “I’m not here in the capacity of your daughter. I’m here in the capacity of a deputy sheriff. The state police will handle you from here.”

  “I want . . . to see him. Jonah.”

  She spun on him. “Why? To hurt him even more?”

  “To tell him the truth. Myself. To his face.”

  Before You

  Jonah stood in the dark living room, remembering times when the house was lit and vibrant, raucous with the two daughters’ laughs and screams, his and Rebecca’s and Maurice and Julia’s voices, the fire roaring in the fireplace, its heat warming and its light inviting.

  Before him, in the shadows, slumped in a wheelchair and peering up at him, sat the man who had be
en his friend.

  “You confessed,” Jonah said.

  “Yes,” Maurice said. “And. No.”

  Maurice shook his head, his eyes glassy, pupils seeming to float. “I confessed. But did not tell the truth.”

  Jonah longed to sit. He felt fragile on his legs, yet wanted to remain standing, looking down on this man.

  “Sit,” Maurice said.

  Jonah refused. He was not sitting for this man as he had at his own kitchen table so many years ago.

  “I lied. To Lucy,” Maurice said. “I— Loved Rebecca.”

  “I don’t want to hear this,” Jonah said and started to leave.

  “We both loved her.” Maurice sucked in a thin unwell breath. “You. Me. You know that. I didn’t hurt Rebecca. I . . . Sally . . . She was starting to look.” He swallowed, smacked his dry lips. “So much like her, when Rebecca and I first met as kids. When it was just. Rebecca and me. Before you.”

  “Stop.”

  “Never hurt her. Sally. Or Rebecca. I—” He shut his eyes, clacked his teeth together. “I bothered her. Scared her. Both of them. I’m sorry. My fault. But—”

  Jonah tried to control his breathing, stem the anger that made him quake. “You’re sorry because the truth is out.”

  “It’s not out. The real truth. It would kill Lucinda.”

  Maurice struggled to sit up straight, look Jonah in the eye. “Rebecca came here. Threatened to tell you about my . . . behavior. I got. Mad. Said things. When you won her over. Betrayed me when I was at academy.”

  “You were not together. Not an item. Ever. You were friends.”

  “But you knew. You knew how I felt.”

  “She didn’t feel that way.”

  “It killed me. You knew. I told you. It killed me. And you. While I was away. I kept thinking. She’d see you. The real you.” He gasped for breath, wheezed. “Sooner or later. See the violent boy inside, fear you. Come back to me. I waited. Time passed. She never saw that violent boy, never feared you. He was dead. She killed him.”