What Remains of Her Read online

  Dedication

  For Meridith, Samantha, and Ethan

  My Loves. My Love.

  Epigraph

  From the moment of birth we begin our slow

  turning toward death. In that time, live. Live.

  —Anonymous

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The Pit

  Book I: November 6, 1987 Crooked

  The Doll

  Awake in the Dark

  The Cost of Fibbing

  Promise

  The Shadow of Beasts

  Shriek

  Evidence?

  The Man in the Woods

  Things Left Undone

  Twisting the Truth

  Book II The Eye Shadow Girls

  Desolation

  Come with Me

  The Unthinkable

  Wishing

  Home Free

  Smoke

  I’m Not Sally

  What Are We Going to Do?

  Sorry

  No Wand

  Book III: November 6, 2012 Sweet Ache

  The Gore

  Useless Facts

  No

  What Have I Done?

  Now You See Her

  All But Forgotten

  What’s Wrong with You?

  Warned

  Over the Rainbow

  Asleep or Awake

  Find Her

  Vanished

  Preparing

  Sally

  Trouble

  The Window

  Crazy Young

  Just a Few More Minutes

  Blind

  Give Her Back

  Nothing You Can Say

  I Live Here

  Only One Option

  Don’t Touch a Thing

  In Vain

  Fire

  Drawings

  The Yellow Dress

  Venom

  One Misstep

  Haunted House

  Puzzle

  Shopping

  Light

  Falling

  Discovery

  No

  Book IV Darkness Coming

  A Knock at the Door

  Nostalgia

  Leave

  The Past Packed Away

  Hiding

  Strange Day

  Footprints

  Alone

  Book V Tonight

  Business

  Same Old Business

  Sick

  Go

  Mine

  Into the Cold

  Too Late

  No Answer

  Home

  Not a Star

  The Truth

  Nothing Remains

  Vultures

  Girl in the Snow

  Down from the Gore

  Deputy Welch

  Tell Me

  Before You

  The Swing

  Rest

  Why?

  Spring

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Eric Rickstad’s What Remains of Her

  Also by Eric Rickstad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The Pit

  The pit lay hidden beneath a bewilderment of wild vines and lush undergrowth, concealed amid the shadows of beeches and hemlock, as cool and damp as a fresh grave.

  The two girls knelt at its edge, peered down.

  Neither girl knew what the pit was for or how it came to be. Neither cared. The pit was theirs; they’d found it fair and square while exploring this part of the woods their parents had forbade them to ever enter. The lure of the woods and pits, and the possible secrets they might reveal, an arrowhead or dinosaur fossil, proved too alluring to resist.

  Toads had fallen into the pit. They squatted sullen in the muck at the bottom as crickets sprang and trilled around them. Other creatures had fallen prey to the pit as well, their frail skeletal remains and desiccated carcasses scattered in the mud.

  In the darkest corner, a knot of baby snakes pulsed and writhed like a malformed heart.

  The girls remained unafraid.

  Together, they could brave whatever peril came.

  They lay on their bellies now, inched backward over the edge of the pit to hang from its lip, fingers clawing into the earthen edge. Their feet dangled, and their bony arms tensed as they hung straight down beside each other, looked into each other’s eyes, whispered one two three, and let go to drop the final few inches with horrified shrieks, as if they were plummeting a thousand feet to their deaths.

  They squealed as cold mud squished between their bare toes and the gamey, milky, reptilian odor of the snakes bloomed around them.

  Their skinny legs stuck out straight as pins as the girls sat at opposite ends of the pit, facing each other, the bottoms of their bare feet pressed against each other as their pink fingers picked away at the earthen walls in search of a remnant mystery of the past. Today, however, there was another mystery to reveal.

  Lucinda’s heart skittered with excitement. She’d waited forever to hear Sally’s secret. “Tell me,” she pleaded as she slapped a mosquito on her cheek, the insect sticking to her skin with a splat of her own warm blood.

  Sally smiled. Her teeth glowed in the murk. A ray of sun lanced down through the thatch of leaves above to light up a lens of Sally’s thick eyeglasses.

  “Can you keep a secret?” Sally whispered.

  What a ding dong question. Of course Lucinda could keep a secret, especially Sally’s secrets. Didn’t they always? That’s what friends were for, to tell each other secrets, and to keep them. And Lucinda and Sally were best friends and would always be best friends. Forever. So of course they told each other everything. And the whole entire reason they even came to the pit was for Sally to tell Lucinda, show Lucinda, the secret. But Sally was teasing. And it drove Lucinda crazy when her friend did that.

  “Tell me,” Lucinda said, “don’t tease.”

  Sally leaned in, still smiling. Except now her smile seemed plastic and freaky, like a smile on a crazed clown doll.

  “Why are you smiling like that?” Lucinda said.

  “You can’t tell, anyone,” Sally whispered.

  “I won’t.”

  “Ever.”

  “I won’t. I said I won’t.”

  “Promise?”

  “Hope to die. Come on.”

  Sally leaned in, cupped a hand around Lucinda’s ear, and whispered the secret.

  Lucinda yanked away and pushed herself back, deeper into her corner of the pit, her heart knocking. She looked up at the snarl of branches and vines concealing them, listening, eyes darting, searching. Each noise now, each play of shadows and light in the trees high above a threat that sent a tremor of terror through her bones.

  From above came the sharp snap of a branch.

  Lucinda gasped.

  “Shhh,” Sally said. “He’ll hear us.”

  Book I

  November 6, 1987

  Crooked

  When he first arrived home with a bouquet of black-eyed Susans for Rebecca, and a new yellow dress and coat for Sally, Jonah Baum sensed nothing amiss.

  He called out for his wife and daughter and, upon receiving no reply, assumed Rebecca was out running errands and Sally was at a friend’s house, as was often the case when Jonah returned from teaching his Thursday sessions of transcendental poetry and Gothic lit at Lyndon State.

  A part of him was relieved to be alone. More than a part. He did not wish to face Rebecca. Not yet. And with no one home, he figured he’d get a jump on grading the papers he’d not gotten to while sleeping during his office hours in th
e dingy, windowless space he shared with three other adjuncts.

  If he burrowed deep enough into his work, he reasoned, he might escape the gloom cast over him by his and Rebecca’s altercation the previous night. By the dull rock of ugliness hunkered in his gut, he knew his part was lamentable; he’d overreacted to his suspicions, and when Rebecca came home later he’d have apologizing to do, and he’d gladly do it.

  How much apologizing, he couldn’t say. He’d not seen Rebecca or Sally that morning to gauge mood. With the world still dark, he’d stolen out of his house and into the black cold dawn like a criminal from a crime scene. Whatever Jonah’s level of culpability, the yellow dress and coat Sally had wanted, and the cache of Rebecca’s favorite flowers he’d picked across the road along the river, would carry him through.

  Perhaps, a voice said, Rebecca isn’t home yet because Rebecca does not wish to be home yet.

  Jonah shrugged off the voice and entered the living room, stepped around Sally’s menagerie of stuffed animals, preciously arranged for tea around the scuffed coffee table with a matchbook wedged under one leg to level it.

  Jonah stopped. The watercolor painting of Gore Mountain hung crooked on the wall. Nothing new. The train that rampaged past on the tracks just across the river from their old house saw to that twice a day. Soon after moving here, Rebecca had learned to place her fragile knickknacks at the rear of shelves to keep them from skittering over the edge from the train’s vibration.

  The crooked painting drove Rebecca mad, her outrage so disproportionate to the painting’s affront that Jonah had once teased that the painting and the train were conspiring to undermine her sanity. She’d slapped his arm, hard: Not funny.

  No, it wasn’t.

  Normally, the painting didn’t bother Jonah: if he straightened it, it would only go crooked again later this evening when the train rumbled north. But something about the painting bothered him now, and he straightened it with a blush of satisfaction as disproportionate to the deed as was Rebecca’s ire toward the painting being crooked.

  At the kitchen sink, Jonah filled an empty wine bottle with water and arranged the flowers, most certainly the last blooms of autumn.

  Jonah plunked his backpack and the bag with Sally’s dress and coat on the table, searched the refrigerator for a Rolling Rock. Realizing he must have drunk all his beer the previous night, he unearthed Rebecca’s two four-packs of Bartles & Jaymes, cracked open a bottle, and put half of it down at a go, scowling at its sweetness as he settled in to correct the papers with his blue pen.

  Jonah never used a red pencil to correct papers. As a boy, he’d suffered enough of the shaming red graffiti on his own schoolwork, despite his every earnest effort to focus and study hard, despite his empty stomach, and the bullying exacted on him for his high-water jeans and the hand-me-down shirts two sizes too small that he had to tug down at the back to cover his ass crack and the bruises and scabs from lashings. He’d promised himself that when he grew up he’d never demean kids or dismiss their problems as petty. One never knew how deep the secret pains of others cut.

  Perhaps he was soft to keep promises made as a boy whose every cell had been replaced by new cells so many times in his thirty-three years that a hundred generations of himself now stood between the boy he’d been and the man he was. He was no longer who he’d once been.

  Mercifully.

  The Doll

  Jonah was putting his third wine cooler to shame when he heard the sound from down the hall.

  Had it come from Sally’s room? Was Sally home?

  No. She would have answered when he’d first called out. Unless she’d been playing with her dolls and stuffed animals. Her focus then was so intense it obliterated outside distraction. She’d sit so oblivious in her hermetic imagination it alarmed Jonah, as if she were tuned to an alternative frequency, another realm. Waving a hand in front of her face didn’t awaken her to this world. Only shaking her would revive her from her fugue, a measure Jonah resisted at all costs, though Rebecca had been known to shake her back to the present, to reality.

  Yet surely if Sally were home, Jonah would have heard her holding court with her stuffies.

  So what had he heard? A squeak? No. Not quite. A cry?

  He took his wine cooler and walked down the hall, unsteady as an unaccountable apprehension coiled in his chest.

  At Sally’s bedroom door, his heart twitched. He stared at the sign—sally’s room—scribed with blue crayon in his daughter’s left-handed scrawl.

  Jonah suddenly missed his daughter and wife profoundly and longed for them to be home, now, right now; all three of them together.

  He put his hand on the doorknob. The old house’s antique glass knobs were among the intricacies that had sold him and Rebecca on the house. Some intricacies, however, had worn thin; what had seemed “antique” had proved old and in disrepair. The beloved leaded windows were sieves for drafts, and most cold nights now Jonah lay awake listening to his paltry savings bleed dry as the furnace groaned without relent or mercy.

  Jonah clutched the doorknob, and since the door stuck in cold weather, he shoved a shoulder into it.

  Losing his grip, he stumbled into the room as the door slammed against the wall.

  Sally was not here. Everything seemed as it should: Sally’s rock and mineral collection lay scattered on the floor among scraps of paper on which Sally had scrawled the names and traits of each mineral and rock. The dog-eared National Geographic magazines whose pictorials Sally had obsessed over of late—one cover featuring King Tut, another skeletal remains from Mt. Vesuvius, and a third of arrowheads and spearheads—lay splayed open in a toss of sheets on her new, big-girl bed. The cost of the bed had forced a rift between Jonah and Rebecca, who’d argued for a secondhand bed. Jonah, however, had insisted his daughter have what he’d never had as a child.

  Jonah sat on the bed and picked up the National Geographic that slid to the floor, the headline beside the cover photo of the unearthed skeleton reading: the dead do tell tales at vesuvius. He set it aside and eyed a stuffie in a tangle of sheets, Ed the elephant. Sally adored her stuffed animals, though lately she’d lobbied for a puppy. Rebecca had explained that maybe when, if, Daddy was tenured, they might be able to get one. Sally had whined until Jonah had said maybe, if Sally were very good, they could find a way to get a puppy.

  Rebecca had called him a pushover, said he spoiled her. You spoil her. Said false promises were unhealthy. Perhaps. But there were worse things one could do to their child. Much worse. Jonah knew.

  Jonah sighed, exhausted from forever having to choose between his family’s present wants and future needs. No matter which he chose, the other suffered, with no end to the financial strain. He picked up Ed the elephant. “A puppy shouldn’t be a luxury, should it?” he asked Ed.

  Ed remained mum.

  Jonah stood.

  Ed tumbled to the floor.

  Children’s books populated the shelves above the bed. Jonah took down Blueberries for Sal. He’d bought it five months before Sally was born, so ready to be a father; yet so apprehensive, with no model on which to base the role.

  Rebecca had said, Do the exact opposite of what was done to you, and you’ll be father of the year.

  As he turned to leave the room, Jonah twisted his ankle cruelly on a doll. He heard and felt the pop of a ligament, and a wild anger reared in him as his mind flashed to calculate how much a sprained ankle would cost in medical fees.

  He jammed Blueberries for Sal back in place, the jacket ripping, and snatched the offending doll and hurled it into the corner.

  The doll struck the wall and emitted a meek baby’s cry. Was that the sound that lured me to the room? he wondered.

  A zoo of stuffed animals crowded his feet. He kicked all of them, including Ed the elephant, into the corner as a mean, unbidden thought scorched his brain: Spoiled. A spoiled brat who begs for a puppy she knows I can’t afford. If she only knew how—

  Jonah tried to harness the forbi
dding thoughts that, when he was under duress, sprang into his mind and, when spoken, threatened the life he’d built: that fragile curio left too close to the shelf edge.

  He picked up the stuffed animals, and weak with indignity, rearranged them with care on the chair, thankful his daughter’s playthings could never reveal his abuse.

  Awake in the Dark

  Jonah awoke at the table with a shudder, as if from a Van Winklean sleep. The whole house vibrated as the train thundered past outside. Shadows crawled out from the corners to shroud the kitchen in a smoky darkness. Drooling, his mind muddy, he looked up, surrounded by empty wine cooler bottles, head bludgeoned by cheap booze.

  He sat up in the ghostly gloam, perplexed. The kitchen seemed a cold, mysterious, spectral approximation of his house with none of the warmth of home.

  What time was it?

  He shoved his chair back to stand and lost his balance, cracked his head on the stove handle as he crashed to the floor.

  He lay there, bewildered. The plastic owl clock on the wall, with its glowing, shifty eyes meant to be comical, but which now seemed grotesque, showed 6:32. The second hand ticked ominously with the loud metallic snap of a revolver’s hammer being cocked over and over again.

  It couldn’t be 6:32.

  Rebecca and Sally should have been home two hours ago. Wherever they were, they were together. If Sally had been at a friend’s house, she’d have walked home before dark. She didn’t like the dark. Who did? And if she’d been invited for dinner, she’d have called. So she had to be with Rebecca.

  Jonah stood, knocking over the chair.

  Favoring his injured ankle, he limped to the living room window and pulled back the curtain as though his daughter and wife might be standing out on the front lawn, locked out of the house and waiting mutely for him to let them in.

  They were not.

  The 1979 Gremlin with the dented fender he’d never had repaired—keeping the insurance check to buy Sally clothes—was parked where he’d left it.