Lucinda came in through the kitchen door. When Dale saw her wounded face, he stood up from the table. “What happened?” He reached to touch her.
Lucinda eased away. She did not want to explain her ruined face again, lie again. Fatigue had settled in her bones, confusion cobwebbed her mind. What she needed was to think. She wished now she’d gone to the Grain & Feed or stayed in her Wrangler while she tried to sort out all that had happened, all she’d discovered, and tried to figure out what to do next. What any of it meant. “I’m fine,” she said.
“That’s not fine,” Dale said and touched a fingertip to his own face, as if he’d been wounded too.
“I fell. On the sidewalk.” She did not know why she was lying to him. Or why she had lied to anyone. Except that what had happened at the house was too tangled in her mind to explain clearly. Some kid’s crayon drawings from twenty-five years ago. A talking doll that could not talk. She needed a shower and to get some food in her. A drink.
“This damn town needs to maintain the walks,” Dale said, an edge to his voice. “Keep up with the snow instead of plowing after it falls.”
“That seems to be the consensus,” she said.
She took a jug of milk from the refrigerator, poured milk into a saucepan on the stove, and cranked the burner.
“I can do that for you,” Dale said.
“I need to keep busy.”
“You’ve been busy all day,” Dale said. “Gone all day.”
What was she supposed to tell him, she’d been passed out for hours in Jonah’s home? Who would believe that? And even if he did, he’d pester her with concern.
She snatched a bag of dark chocolate chips from the lazy Susan and spilled a handful into the warming milk. Stirred it with a spoon.
“You get the face checked out?” Dale said.
“No.”
“Then where’ve you been?”
“Working.”
“You said you were knocking off at the Grain & Feed by noon.”
“Working on the missing girl.”
“With Kirk?”
“No.”
The milk crawled up the side of the pot in a hot froth that spilled over the brim to hiss on the burner. Lucinda killed the burner and poured the hot chocolate and sat with the mug at the table.
Dale sat across from her. “You didn’t see him?”
Was he really doing this now? Could he not see the exhaustion on her face, sense her weariness and agitation? “He’s the sheriff. I’m the deputy. But no . . . I didn’t. I probably should have.” She blew on her hot chocolate and peered at Dale. “I looked into a trespassing report. Someone had seen a light in Jonah’s old place.”
She sipped her hot chocolate, let it warm her insides.
“What is it?” Dale said. “What’s upsetting you?”
“I found these drawings. Sally’s. I think. They have to be. I don’t know. I—”
“What is it?”
Dale seemed to want to talk about everything except the acceptance letter and whether she’d sent confirmation. She could hear the questions—Did you send confirmation?—in every silence between his spoken questions. Are you really just taking off for ten months? Kirk would have moved out by now, just for her applying without telling him, keeping secrets and lying by omission. Not that he’d put it so diplomatically, lying by omission. No. He’d just tell her to get screwed for lying.
“What’s upset you?” Dale said.
“Everything,” she said. She felt like sobbing, though she would not allow it. She was like her father that way, would not let anyone see her cry. “Strange things happened today. I can’t talk about them now.”
Dale worked his jaw as if it had locked on him and he was trying to free it. “What was so strange today? You come home with a black eye and tell me everything is bothering you but you can’t talk about it.”
She finished her hot chocolate, rose and washed out her mug at the sink, stared out the window until Dale left the kitchen for the living room. She did not want to take the bait. Dale seemed to want to conflate his anger at her not including him about her application to the Canada dig with his anger or envy toward Kirk.
She took a deep breath and turned around, back to the cupboards, palms planted on the counter edge.
She could see Dale through the kitchen doorway. He sat at his desk, but he wasn’t working on one of his cars. He sat drinking a scotch. He finished what was in his glass and poured another drink.
She sat at the kitchen table and spread out the drawings.
She focused on the one drawing that was entirely black. Was it a night sky? What had Sally envisioned? Was Lucinda reading too much into it? Would the drawings give her a sense of disquiet if they had been drawn by another child, or if Sally had drawn them but never disappeared? Sally had been an odd duck with a bent for dark tales and mysteries. Or was it only because Sally had disappeared that the drawings distressed Lucinda? Wasn’t context everything, though, to a cop, in a criminal case. Context. Motive. What had motivated Sally to draw these?
Lucinda looked at the next drawing, all black except for a sole evening star in the corner. She considered the drawings of stick bodies severed into pieces and smeared with red crayon.
Lucinda might consider the black drawings as Sally being afraid of the dark. It was a common fear. Lucinda was still afraid of the dark, or what she could not see in it.
Maybe that was all that was behind the drawings: Sally had been afraid of the dark, though Lucinda did not remember her being scared of much else. During sleepovers, camped out in a tent in the backyard, Sally told ghost stories. Sally had no fear of the snakes and bugs in the mucky pit. Sally told Lucinda about the man in the woods without any trepidation, told Lucinda about him as if sharing a curious fact, with no fear that he might harm them. So what had compelled her to draw these? Or were the drawings the equivalent of her scary stories, drawn on paper instead of told as narratives? It could be as simple as that.
No. Something had troubled Sally, and she’d hid it from Lucinda, hid her deepest fears from her best friend, and instead she’d drawn these.
Lucinda sighed. She was making too much of a child’s spooky drawings. Chasing ghosts when she had a new girl missing to find.
She wondered who had been in Jonah’s old house, and why.
Had it been Jonah? The tire tracks could have been from Jonah’s truck, or an SUV. But there were two sets of faint tracks in the snow.
An adult’s.
And a child’s.
A question leaped to her mind. Was it possible Jonah had the girl? Gretel had disappeared twenty-five years to the day that Sally had disappeared. The similarities between the two girls, age, size, and those eyes, were frightening.
Had Jonah seen Gretel in town previously and been overwhelmed by the likeness of her to Sally? Or . . .
Or was there something more wicked at work that Lucinda had never entertained: that Jonah had been responsible for his wife and daughter’s disappearance? Lucinda had never doubted him. Even her father had doubted Jonah for a spell; it haunted her father, that he’d doubted his friend.
But if Jonah had taken Gretel, why would he take her to his old house? Why risk it? When would Jonah have even seen her to know she existed? If it were in town, she’d have been with her foster parents. Would he follow them home, then snatch her? He was in town the day she disappeared, a voice said. And in town at night, when Marnie saw the light inside the old place.
It was unimaginable.
Demented.
She refused to believe it.
Still. There were two sets of tracks in the snow outside Jonah’s house.
An adult’s tracks. And a child’s.
Whose were they and why were those two people in Jonah’s old home?
She felt frayed and uneasy.
Lucinda looked at the drawings. She needed to act. She felt helpless in the house trying to reach conclusions and make connections.
She rolled the drawings up, put on her jacket, and slipped out the kitchen door.
Dale now dozed in his armchair, mouth agape. Lucinda wanted to apologize to him for being so short and easily irritated, but it would have to wait.