The Wrangler pulled into the yard in a squall of snow so chaotic and furious it obliterated from sight the house that sat just a few yards away. For a second, Lucinda was struck with an odd, eerie sensation that the house was not there behind the fury of snow, did not exist any longer, had vanished in time, or had never existed at all, or she had never existed. Did not exist right then, in that moment, but was living someone else’s dream.
The wind rocked the Wrangler, breaking the dark spell that had gripped Lucinda.
Lucinda tried to open her passenger door, but it resisted against a howl of wind. She leaned into the door to try to force it open, as if it were in league with, or under the spell of, the house in trying to keep her from going inside to investigate her suspicion.
As if to disprove her mad thought of the house and wind conspiring against her, the wind flagged and the door opened in a wild sweep and she fell out onto the ground. She got to her feet as Dale came around to her. Dusk was approaching. The house would be dark with shadows inside. Lucinda strapped on her headlamp.
In the gathering storm, the house lost in a cyclone of snow, they pushed their way toward the house and onto the porch.
Lucinda remembered the night her father had brought her here, the last night she’d ever been in the house as a child. How she’d expected Sally to be home but had also been nagged by a feeling of unease while on the porch waiting for Mr. B. to answer her father’s knock, and then again on the couch wondering where Sally was and why she, Lucinda, had been told to stay put.
Lucinda opened the door.
“What are we doing here?” Dale said.
“I want to be sure,” she said, but what she really wanted was to be proved wrong.
She crept inside the house, Dale trailing her, his boozy breath at her neck.
“God,” Dale said, gagging. “This place.”
Lucinda turned on her headlamp. The bulb leaked a drab yellow pulse of light. A pair of silver eyes shone from the couch as a rat slunk away, its naked tail dragging behind it. Lucinda picked her way across the living room and down the hall and entered Sally’s bedroom.
The doll lay on the floor where Lucinda had left it.
Lucinda knelt and picked it up, set it on the desk.
She could hear Dale breathing behind her in the doorway as she pulled the badge and button from her coat pocket and set them beside the doll, pulled out the drawings and unfolded them on the desk.
“What is it?” Dale said. Lucinda glanced at him to see he held the doorframe for balance, then turned her attention back to the doll and the other artifacts. She studied the drawing of the stick girl with one button eye and one red X for an eye.
She looked at the rag doll.
One button for an eye.
The other eye: A red x of thread.
A button missing.
She took out the button that had fallen out of the pants of her father’s uniform.
Compared it to the button eye on the doll.
“It’s not like mine,” she whispered.
She turned to Dale.
“It is mine.” She shook the doll at Dale, its stuffing flying from where earlier she’d ripped it open. “This is my doll. Beverly.” Lucinda fought back a sob; it’d do her no good now to let emotion overwhelm her. “Not hers. Mine. The button. And the evening star in Sally’s black crayon drawing. It’s not a star. I need to get to Jonah. Tell him. I know.”
“You’re not making any sense. You need to calm down. Wait till tomorrow.”
“This is not waiting until tomorrow. It’s waited twenty-five years.”