Lucinda stalked down the snowed sidewalk, face flushed, bare hands jammed in her jacket pockets. She stopped fast at the sight of a face staring at her. For a second, Lucinda had thought the photo on the Missing Person tacked to the telephone pole was of Sally. Those dark eyes, the paper wet from snow, cried black ink down the image of the girl’s face. It was not Sally. It was Gretel. But, the resemblance. That odd, sweet face. It betrayed none of the abuse inflicted upon the girl, as if she knew that to betray it would bring more upon her. And those eyes. So dark. We’ll never find her, Lucinda thought. Not alive. Not now. “Whoever did this to you, whoever has taken you,” Lucinda whispered. “I’ll make sure they pay for it.”
She hurried onward. Snow drifted down silent from dark, smoky clouds as if it were the ashen fallout of a forest fire. The morning light was sleepy. A gaggle of boys stalked the sidewalk, launched snowballs at a stop sign, making a competition of it. You’d never see girls do that, Lucinda thought. A girl’s inclination toward competition was more subtle but perhaps more vicious too. For the first time in years, Lucinda thought of Betty Lansing, the meanest of the Eye Shadow Girls who had taunted and frightened Lucinda and Sally. What had become of her? Not long after Sally’s disappearance, the girl and her family disappeared, too, not like Sally and her mom had, but moved out of state somewhere, and Lucinda had never seen Betty again.
A truck from High Meadow’s dairy backed up into the side street to the loading dock of Ivers Grocery. Lucinda remembered milk and eggs left in the milk box on the porch. Gone now. That personal touch. Vehicles eased up and down the street, slush shooshing. Wipers thwacking. Pickup trucks. Tradesmen.
As she passed Rosie’s Hardware, Edsel, the owner, nearly knocked her over as he trundled a dolly loaded down with sacks of ice salt.
“Sorry there, Luce,” he said. Jowls rubbery as a St. Bernard’s. “Gotta get the salt out for the customers. Town oughtta salt the walks better. But I can’t complain. Selling this stuff like water in the desert.”
Lucinda passed the Lucky Spot, the place mobbed, vehicles parked out front, idling, wisps of exhaust trickling from shivering tailpipes.
She crossed Railroad Street and kept going until the sidewalk ended.
At One Dollar Bridge, she stared across the street at the old house. In the covered bridge’s rafters pigeons purred. Their droppings spattered the old boards. She looked down at the stream running under the bridge. Clear. Cold.
She looked for trout finning, as she’d done with her father as a girl, but her eyes were unpracticed and she could not see any trout. In the summer, kids jumped from the bridge roof into the deep water. She’d done it. It had always been done and seemed it would always be done. She looked for a moment longer for a trout and crossed the street, stood in front of the old house.
She’d not been in there since she’d sat on the swing with Jonah the day she’d run off to the pit, so long ago.
Stunted maple tree seedlings sprouted from the moss she knew carpeted the roof beneath the snow. The chimney was cratered where bricks and chinking had loosened and fallen out over the years. A tree lay dead on the lawn. How much effort went into the upkeep of life. The work it took just to maintain. She walked up the driveway, the asphalt in rutted upheaval from decades of freeze and frost and thaw, freeze and frost and thaw.
She stopped and stared at tire tracks, nearly erased by new snow. The tracks led from the driveway around to the back of the shed.
She followed the tracks to where a vehicle had parked.
A wide vehicle. A truck? SUV? Someone had been here.
Lucinda circled the area where the truck had parked. Boot tracks, reduced to indistinct depressions under the fresh snow, led from where the vehicle had parked to the house.
Lucinda followed the drifted tracks to the front steps. One track was definitely that of a child. Another track an adult’s. Squatters? she wondered, with the cold coming? No. The house, as far as she knew, had not been disturbed all these years. She only knew one squatter. And he was up in the hills. She tried the knob, surprised to find it unlocked. She let herself in, as she had so often, so many years ago as a girl, when she was yet untainted by the world’s wickedness.
My God.
Her breath left her at the ammoniac stench of animal urine.
Every toy, every glass and magazine sat right where it had been that last night, the place in decrepitude now from time’s passing, slow and steady and unstoppable.
Animals had laid waste to the place; feces soiled the carpet and wood floors.
Decades of sunlight washing through the windows had leached color from the wallpaper and furniture, now gone a ghostly pale.
Lucinda tried to breathe, coughed in the dry dust of the place. She’d have sat down in the couch to gather herself as the crush of memories stampeded her, but the couch was befouled with clots of animal hair and scat, and it reeked of piss and musk.
In the kitchen, three place settings sat on the Formica tabletop, each plate still waiting to be used.
Lucinda could almost hear Sally squealing with glee from her room: Is that Lucinda at the door, Mommy! Let her in! Let her in!
Lucinda trailed down a hall littered with peeled wallpaper and animal scat and came to stand at a closed door. The faded sign: sally’s room.
Lucinda opened the door. The room lay as quiet and still as a held breath. She shuddered and felt nearly overcome with an urge to flee. Her presence seemed a violation of a place sacrosanct. Unease settled in her bones.
A pile of stuffed animals lay heaped in the corner, the creatures reduced to scraps of fur and puffs of stuffing, real animals having cannibalized their faux kin.
She knelt by the animals, overcome with sorrow. Sally would be distraught to see her animals in such a pitiful, unloved state. Lucinda picked up a doll, one of its button eyes missing. “Baby Beverly?” she whispered. It reminded her of her own Baby Beverly. Except her Beverly had both eyes. How she’d cherished Beverly. She’d taken her everywhere so she would not be alone and afraid. Where was she now? Packed away. In a box, likely. In a dark lonely attic or basement. Lucinda could not even say where her doll was, if she even existed anymore; yet she had a desire to see her again, as strong a desire to find her old, childhood doll as she had to find this missing girl.
She looked at a photo on the desk, the doll dangling by its pigtails from her fingers. The photo was of Sally. A school photo. Lucinda blew dust off it, an archaeologist piecing together past civilizations. Those eyes. So dark yet bright, it seemed a sacrilege they could ever be extinguished from the world. Life in them. Not just Sally’s. Life itself. Wanting out. Filling you with itself.
Lucinda set the picture down and looked at a cork bulletin board, coloring book pages pinned to it, as pale now as Lucinda’s father’s sickly skin.
She pulled a thumbtack out of the board to free a page. A giraffe, its purple body and yellow mane faded.
Stopped.
She stared at the bulletin board, the coloring-book page falling from her hand.
“What the fuck,” she whispered.