In the kitchen, a trooper stood by the door, his hat in hand before him, posture erect and dutiful.
“Deputy.” He nodded with a professional camaraderie.
Lucinda returned the nod.
“What is it we have here?” he said.
She told him.
“You’re sure?”
“No.”
She took the flashlight from the drawer, her fingers weak with terror.
She opened the door to the cellar.
“Down here,” she said.
She followed the flashlight beam down into the darkness.
Dale and the trooper followed her lead.
“Careful,” she said.
In the cellar, she swam the flashlight beam over the workbench. Screwdrivers and jars of nuts and bolts.
“There.”
The beam cut across the cellar to the corner. To the trunk she’d seen when looking for Beverly. The shovel with its broken handle.
Her mind shrieked: Wake up! Wake up! Run!
“Under it,” she said.
She shone the flashlight on the trooper’s and Dale’s faces.
Her heart beat loud in her head. A breathless claustrophobia pressed in on her.
“Whose house is this?” the trooper said.
“My father’s.”
“I see.”
Did he see? Could he see what she saw? If so, he could not feel what she felt.
“I want to look in the trunk. But it’s locked,” she said, noting now the padlock. She shone the flashlight over the workbench, underneath it. Looking among her father’s old tools. “There’s a bolt cutter there.”
The trooper took the cutter and worked it, the jaws nearly seized with rust.
He got the padlock bar in the jaws and squeezed down. Twisted the cutter’s jaws. The padlock finally relented and the lock dropped to the wet earth floor.
“You want to open it?” he said to Lucinda.
She handed the flashlight to Dale who shone it on the trunk as she lifted its lid.
Inside the trunk, Lucinda found shoeboxes, stacked as neat as bricks to the top of the trunk.
Lucinda took a box and opened its lid.
Photos. Stacked just as carefully as the shoeboxes in the trunk.
Lucinda picked up a photo. It was of a young teenage girl, of perhaps fourteen. She wore denim Capri pants, flip-flops, and a tank top with a sunflower print on it. Long straight hair parted in the middle. A sixties child.
“Who is that?” Dale asked, training the flashlight beam on the photo.
Lucinda thumbed through the photos. Faded. Dozens. Scores. Some yellowed by time’s brush. Others mildewed. The oldest photos black and white, square with sharp edges and a glossy finish, bordered by white. The newer color photos fading faster than the black-and-white photos, their edges rounded with dates in one corner. The star of each photo was the same girl as in the first photo, ranging from about the age of five to her midtwenties, the early sixties to late seventies. In most of the photos a young man was with her. Laughing with her. Hugging her. Kissing her cheek. Giving her a piggyback ride. Leaping hand in hand from the covered bridge into the river. Splashing water on each other in the swimming hole. Making the peace sign together. Sitting beside each other on a Ferris wheel. The boy beaming. Always beaming.
“Do you know these people?” the trooper asked. “Do they mean anything to you?”
Lucinda handed the shoebox to the trooper and took another box from the trunk. Opened it. The same girl. The same boy. An entire childhood and young adulthood caught in faded snapshots. The girl’s smile effervescent, her eyes startling, hypnotic. Dark. So dark.
In photos beginning in the early seventies or so, another boy started to appear in the photos with the two of them. A skinny, slight boy who wore grubby, high-water jeans and ill-fitting threadbare shirts.
His face was hacked over with a red marker.
Slowly, as the dates of the photos advanced, the first boy’s beaming smile faded, until it was gone, replaced by a smile that was more like a pained wince. A fake smile.
Lucinda looked inside another box.
The same. More photos. Hundreds and hundreds of photos.
She searched through box after box.
The same three youths.
Dale took a photo.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“Mrs. B.,” Lucinda whispered.
Dale pointed to the first boy. “But that’s not Jonah.”
“The other one. The skinny, meek one. His face is marked out with red. That’s Jonah,” Lucinda said.
The trooper took a photo and looked at it.
“Who’s Jonah?” he said.
“My father’s friend.”
“Who’s the young man kissing her cheek, and splashing, horsing around, the one whose face we see? Who is he?”
“My father.”
At the bottom of the last box sat a book. She picked it up. A diary.
On the inside cover was written in pen: 1987.
Lucinda flipped through to the last couple entries from late October.
As she read, a sensation of vertigo overcame her, as if a bottomless pit in the earth had opened up before her and she stood precariously at its edge.
She dropped the diary. Mrs. B.’s diary.
Dizzy, Lucinda stared at the depression of earth under the trunk, the one she’d believed was caused by water leaking into the cellar.
She grabbed hold of a handle at one end and dragged the trunk away. She looked around, grabbed an old shovel, and started to dig at the earth, letting out a cry.
“Deputy,” the trooper said. He took her arm, then the shovel. “Go sit on the bottom stair there. I’ll manage.”
Dale helped Lucinda to the stairs and sat with her.
The trooper jabbed the shovel point into the dirt where Lucinda had begun to dig, brought the heel of his boot down hard on it, and scooped earth, tossing it to the side.
Lucinda closed her eyes, tried to shut out the sound of the rhythmic shoveling; the shooof of the blade sunk into earth, the grunt of the trooper as he lifted and tossed the dirt, the hoomph of the dirt landing softly to the side.
Shooof. Uuumph. Hoomph.
Can’t find them. All my fault, her father had said in the kitchen the other morning of Lucinda’s visit.
Them.
Failed. All my fault.
Peace. Find. Before. Devil finds you.
Lucinda took one of Sally’s drawings out from her jacket pocket.
Black night with a star.
Not an evening star.
A sheriff’s star.
A badge.