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.”