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.”