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 said, 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.
He looked up at the house now, hands on his hips. Part of his shirt was untucked.
“Your boyfriend’s here,” Lewis said. “A real cop.”
“Out,” Lucinda commanded and herded Lewis and Arlene down the hall.
Lucinda pushed across the lawn toward Kirk, her breath billowing in a cloud, boots squeaking on the snow as she felt Lewis glaring after her, the nape of her neck burning from his gaze. She fought a shudder.
“You look good,” Kirk said as his eyes slid over Lucinda, the shiver that ran through her a reminder as to why she avoided him and made sure the times she met with him were for official meetings only, with the dispatcher and Vern Ross, the other deputy, present.
“We have a missing girl,” Lucinda said.
“Not even a ‘Hello, Kirk, you look good too’?”
“She’s seven years old,” Lucinda said. “She’s been out since last night.”
“Okay,” Kirk said.
He smiled, raising dimples in his stubbled cheeks. The wind tugged at the crop of black hair that peeked out from beneath his sheriff’s cap.
“They say someone took her,” Lucinda said.
“What do you say?” He hooked his thumbs in his holster belt, the leather squeaked.
“I’ve never believed a word they’ve spoken before this,” Lucinda said. “But. Stranger things have happened.”
“They sure have.” His slate eyes sparked. “Remember—”
“I’m sure I don’t,” Lucinda said, though she was sure she did. His attitude only reinforced her decision to delete and block his personal numbers on her cell phone.
Lucinda strode back toward the house, her blood hot in her face despite her distaste for Kirk’s actions.
Kirk sauntered his way past her, tucking in his shirt. Lucinda followed. “Stay out,” he ordered as he passed Lewis and Arlene. Lewis heeled. At the porch, Kirk jerked his thumb at Lucinda. “You too. I alerted the state police. You should have already done that.”
“I—”
“I’ll take it from here and fill the staties in when they get here.”
Lucinda nodded, her face flushed at being dismissed, and at her own failing to call Kirk out on his sad come-on moments ago. Her anger deepened with her knowing that if she had flirted back, played along, she would not have been left out here, literally in the cold. Kirk would have invited her in with a smile. But if Kirk thought she was going to succumb to his flirtation so she could be involved professionally—or that she’d otherwise obey and stand on the sidelines as punishment for not playing his game—he was mistaken. She would be involved in this case because she would involve herself. She’d find this girl, for the girl’s sake. And for Sally’s. And Jonah’s.
Kirk entered the double-wide, the storm door slapping shut behind him.
Lucinda stood out in the yard, composing herself, yet not certain how to proceed.
“We need to find her, fast,” Lucinda said to the falling snow, out of concern for the girl, and out of a selfish concern for herself too.
Right then, though, she decided what would benefit her and the case most was to see the person with intimate professional knowledge of such cases, someone who knew her and police work best, even if he was at his least. Her father.