Lucinda peered at her face in her Wrangler’s rearview mirror. She looked like she’d been pummeled with a length of firewood. Cheek gashed. The bruised flesh around her eye, purpled and swollen; it glistened like mica. She pressed her finger to it, hissed in pain.
She got out of the Wrangler and scooped snow off the top of her father’s mailbox and pressed it to her tender cheek. The bone ached. The cold snow stung her skin, yet she kept it to her face until it melted. Snow swirled in a dim fan of lamppost light far down the street. If not for the lone pale light from its kitchen window, her father’s house would have been lost to darkness.
Lucinda picked her way up the iced driveway, holding on to the side of the vehicles to make her way without falling.
She knocked on the side kitchen door, heard the skid of a chair backing up from the table, footsteps. The door opened.
“Luce,” Dot said, “I thought— Oh, your face, darling, what happened?”
“It’s nothing.”
“I’ve seen nothing. That’s not it.”
“I fell on the sidewalk.”
“They ought to salt those walks sooner with the taxes we pay. Come in.”
The kitchen was hot from the oven being on and smelled good, of baking dough. Of roast chicken.
Her father sat in the chair in the corner, his chin tucked to his chest. Asleep or dead, it was impossible to tell. It would be the latter soon, for certain.
“Sorry I’m late,” Lucinda said.
“A fall like that. You should be home. Resting. Having a stiff drink with your man. I’d be. Nice you came by at all after such a spill.”
“He’s my father,” Lucinda said. It was true; Lucinda ought to have been here hours ago for her daily visit, and she wanted to be here now; but she’d not come just to visit.
“I hope my own kids come around as much as you do when my clock winds down,” Dot said.
Lucinda sat beside her dozing father, his breath so faint it was a wonder it was enough to keep him alive. Lucinda took a tissue from a box on the table and dabbed drool from his lip.
“He have a good day?” Lucinda asked Dot.
“He did.”
Lucinda touched his cheek lightly with the back of her hand. She took his hand in hers. “Dad,” she said.
Her father lifted his chin. Blinked and looked at her. His eyes brightened. “Lucy,” he said.
“How are you?”
“Just . . . dozing. Happy now. You’re here. Happy to be . . . awake.”
“You want to stay?” Dot said. “I made a chicken potpie for myself. It’s a frozen store-bought. But a good store-bought. Far as that goes.”
“I just want to see him.” Lucinda eyed the cellar door. “Speak to him, in private, if I could.”
Dot nodded and left the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Dad,” Lucinda said. “I need you to look at something. Can you do that?”
“My eyes work okay, today.” He grinned, his face hollowed out, the skull pronounced beneath his skin.
Lucinda slipped her hand in her jacket pocket and took out one of the drawings she’d found in Sally’s room. She held it up to show her father. His fingers squeezed her fingers, tight.
“What is it, Dad?”
“Where—”
“I found these in Sally’s room. There were a bunch.”
“Why did you bring them?”
“I wanted to see what you thought about them. I think she was scared. I think she was scared of the man in the woods, more than she ever told me. I mean. Look at them.”
He didn’t look at them, he looked away.
“Too long ago now,” he whispered, his voice as frail and brittle as his bones.
“It’s not too long ago. It’s never too long ago. And. There’s a missing girl, now. And I think . . .” Lucinda did not know what to think. She had no concrete theories. But the drawings, they set her on edge, set her mind to trying to draw connections. Connections between what? Gretel and Sally? Sally’s mother? “What do you make of these drawings? What would you think if you’d seen them all those years ago?”
“Kid. Imagination.”
“If it was some other kid, maybe. But . . . These were Sally’s.”
“She’s gone.”
“I know. But what would you think if you’d found them then? Would it have made you—”
“I did. Find them.”
“You found these?” Lucinda said.
“Some. Like them.”
“Why didn’t I know about this, why—”
“You were a child.”
“But . . . What did you think, what do you think?”
“They were. Ominous. Gave them to him.”
“To who?”
“Jonah.”
“Jonah knew about these? Why didn’t you keep them, the ones you found, for evidence? I don’t understand? They were evidence.”
Her father worked his tongue as if trying to rid a hair stuck to the roof of his mouth, making a wet clucking sound.
“Why did you let Jonah have them?” Lucinda said.
Her father mumbled, his head wobbling as if the muscles in his neck were too weak to hold it upright.
“Why did you let him have them?” Lucinda pressed.
“Better. That. Way.”
“Why?”
He closed his eyes, his jaw muscle pulsed. Drool leaked from the corner of his mouth. His fingers slackened from around her own fingers, his hand falling into his lap, and he fell into a doze.
“Damn it,” Lucinda said. “Damn it.”
Dot cleared her throat behind Lucinda.
“Everything all right?”
No, everything was not all right. Nothing was right at all. It was not all right that after twenty-five years someone had been in Jonah’s house. An adult and a child. It was not all right that Sally had drawn such violent, disturbing images. It was not all right that a new girl was missing, the date of her disappearance coinciding with that of Sally and her mother. It was not all right that her father had not logged Sally’s drawings as evidence. It was not all right that Lucinda was hearing dolls speak and keeping Dale in the dark. “Everything’s fine,” Lucinda said.
“Could have fooled me.”
“I had a doll once,” Lucinda said. “Beverly. I never let her out of my sight. I took her everywhere. I cried whenever my mom washed her. Afraid she’d drown. Needed her with me at all times. Now I have no idea where she is. I lost her at some point. You love something so much and can’t live without it and then one day you don’t even know what became of it. How’s that happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think she’s in the basement. Or the attic. I thought I’d look. I’m feeling . . . I don’t know. Nostalgic. You haven’t come across a doll, have you?”
“Never been in the cellar or the attic.”
“You wouldn’t mind if I looked?” Lucinda said.
“It’s your house,” Dot said.
It was absurd to ask. Yet, technically, the house was not Lucinda’s house. Not yet. It was her father’s house. She’d only grown up in it. “It’s silly. It’s just . . . Something happened today. I saw a doll that looked so much like mine. Like Beverly. It shook me. It’s made me sentimental. I feel badly that I don’t know where she is. Like I’ve let down the little girl I once was. And—” It sounded ridiculous, but it was true. Yet only in part. Looking for the doll was also a ruse. If her father had let Jonah keep the drawings, possible evidence to at least establish Sally’s state of mind, what else might he have kept out of the light to protect his friend? She wondered if he kept files or other evidence in the house no one else knew about. Looking for Beverly might be a waste of time, but searching for old files or evidence of her father’s was not.
“It’s not silly,” Dot said. “Our pasts are important.”
Lucinda patted her father’s hand and stood. She kissed his forehead then tried the cellar door. The deadbolt was locked. She went to the cupboard and rummaged until she found a brass key and unlocked the door.
The hinges creaked as she opened the door, and a fungal odor rose as from a shut tomb.
Lucinda tried the light switch but no light came on.
She dug a flashlight from the drawer and covered her nose and held the stairway rail as she slowly descended into the cellar.
The flashlight beam glowed weakly.
The stairs moaned.
At the bottom of the stairs, she looked back. The doorway seemed miniature and far away, the meager light from the kitchen dying halfway down the stairs.
She shone the light around the cellar, a tighter space than she remembered, the ceiling so low she was forced to duck. Cobwebs clotted the beams and pipes above her head, and a cold dampness stuck to her skin as her boots sank into muck, the dirt floor reduced to a swamp from water leaking in from the stone foundation. She sneezed in the fetid air, her body trying to expel the mold spores. She stepped to a bowed shelf, mud water sloshing at her boots. On the shelf sat a few boxes, cardboard wilted decomposing from dampness. An old lamp and an iron stuck out from one box. One box was marked board games, another glassware.
Lucinda poked around from box to box. Bric-a-brac. Junk. No stuffed animals or dolls. Or files. A noise in the corner made her jump and swing the light toward it. Nothing. Darkness. Dirt. Mud.
She shone the light on the workbench. Her father’s place of escape. She twirled the handle of the workbench vise, remembering the night she’d come down to find him, so upset for his friend, and at his failure to help him or solve the case. How awful, to balance friendship and official duties.
Her father had stopped coming down here years ago, lost interest in his birdhouses.
Lucinda spun the handle of the vise. Socket wrenches and chisels, jars of rusted screws and nails, caked in dust, cluttered the workbench. Lucinda opened a drawer. Bins of nails. Brads and nuts. A staple gun. No Beverly. No files.
In the far, dark corner, a mouse skittered out from under an ancient trunk that sat rotting in a depression of pooled water. The mouse squeezed into a crack in the foundation wall. From behind Lucinda rose a roar. She shrieked and dropped the flashlight and tripped her way up the stairs, heart beating in her throat.
“What is it, dear?” Dot said.
Lucinda waited for her breathing to calm. Then, smiling, feeling foolish, said, “Just the furnace kicking on.”
“Find your doll?” Dot said.
“I’ll check the attic.”