“I know, but, well, it’s not the same.”
“Why not?”
“Because this is something you make yourself, with your own hands.”
“Yeah, and if you counted the time it takes you, the stuff would cost a thousand dollars a bottle.”
“Well, maybe not that much.”
Allison chuckled, turned off the stove, and picked up her plate.
“You’re not helping,” he told her.
“Ummmm,” Allison replied.
“I get the feeling you’re on her side.”
“Well,” Allison said, “cooking the stuff down was kind of a mess.”
“I can’t believe this,” Don said. “Nobody wants to get out and do anything the old-fashioned way, make anything from scratch.”
The remark was greeted with silence.
Finally Sarah leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “We love you, Daddy, even if you do like to do weird stuff.”
2
The town’s police cruiser was a white four-wheel-drive Jeep Cherokee wagon with police written on its sides in blue letters. Don used it to drop Sarah at the one-story brick building that housed the island’s combination junior and senior high school. Allison worked out of the house, from which she ran her combination real estate and insurance business. It seemed that everything on the island was combined with something else. Coleman’s Pharmacy, for instance, was also the post office, Joe Coleman being both a registered pharmacist and the postmaster. The bank was located in the grocery store, a branch of Citizens Bank of Commerce in Marquette.
Island Avenue was the main drag, a two-lane street lined mainly with white wooden buildings, the First Lutheran Church almost looking out of place with its stone façade. The town gave the appearance of a fishing village, and there actually were a couple of people who eked out a living catching smelt and walleye pike, but Ice Island’s economy could be summed up in one word: summer.
June, July, and August. When the tourists arrived to spend a few weeks away from the heat in Detroit or Milwaukee or Chicago. Businesses that were closed most of the year rented boats, sold fishing equipment, offered weekly and monthly rates on cabins. The fishing was good, the boating was good, the hiking trails through the woods were good, but the thing that made Ice Island what it was was its temperature.
Surrounded by all that cold water in Lake Superior, the island was constantly being air-conditioned. On a hot July day, the temperature might creep up to seventy-five.
Quite a few people owned summer cabins here, so between the influx of part-time residents and the tourists, the island’s population swelled significantly during the summer, which was when most of Don’s law enforcement problems occurred. They were usually nothing serious, mainly things like speeding, minor accidents, or overdue pleasure boaters, but they kept him busy.
The police station was in a white wooden building on Island Avenue. It also served as the town hall and firehouse —another example of the way Ice Islanders liked to combine things. Don pulled through a cut in the snowbank and drove around to the rear of the building, parking by a sign that said police cars only. He’d often wondered about that sign, since it reserved only one parking space and the town owned only one police car.
Stomping the snow off his feet, Don walked down the short wooden-floored hallway that led to his office. Actually it was a space behind a counter with two old wooden desks, his and the one used by Corrine Matthews, the town clerk. Corrine was another combination. She also served as his dispatcher and helped people file complaints when he wasn’t around. Once, when Don was real busy, she even took a report at the scene of a traffic accident.
“Morning, Corrine,” he said, hanging his uniform jacket on the coatrack. The coffeepot sat on a small table against the wall. He poured himself a cup, took it to his desk.
“How do you like this weather?” she asked. “Last week it looked like an early spring, and today it’s January again.” She was a big-boned woman, with red hair turning gray and a face full of freckles. She was wearing light green slacks, a green sweater, and high top shoes with big treads on the soles. Don heard her say once that she ordered most of her clothes from L. L. Bean.
“This is just a front moving through,” he said. “Tomorrow or the next day, it’ll be sunny again.”
She closed the file folder she’d been studying, swiveled her desk chair so that she was facing him. “Hank Bergstrom called a little while ago. Says today’s the day.”
“Think he’s right?”
“Seems a little early. We’re barely into March.”
“Yeah, but Hank’s never off by more than a day or two.”
Hank Bergstrom was an old guy who rented boats and fishing equipment during the summer and spent the rest of the year watching TV on his satellite dish. Although he’d been furious when Showtime and HBO and some of the other networks started scrambling their signals, he’d finally calmed down, concluding that there were still nearly a hundred unscrambled channels he could pull in. He also made a yearly prediction about when the Split would occur. Said he could tell by the vibrations in his basement. The way he explained it, the ice was under pressure just like the continental plates that pushed together at an earthquake fault. When the pressure was great enough, the ice cracked, releasing energy in a sort of mini-earthquake, which he could feel in his basement. The intensity of the vibrations told him when the Split was coming.
They were still discussing the likelihood of the Split coming early this year when the phone rang. Don answered it.
“Don, it’s me, Tim Landers.” He sounded out of breath. “I found something at a cabin off Forest Road. You better get out there.”
“Wait a minute, Tim. What cabin?”
“The one with the red roof … uh, the one owned by what’s-their-names.” He was clearly distraught, having trouble thinking straight. “The ones from that rich suburb outside Detroit.”
“The Abelsons?”
“Yes, that’s them, the Abelsons.”
“What’s wrong at their cabin?”
“There’s a dead man inside.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I can see him through the window. There’s a knife sticking out of his gut.”
3
The road to the Abelsons’ cabin was passable, but just barely. Because none of the cabins in the area were occupied during the winter, the road was only half-heartedly cleared and almost never salted. Occasionally people going ice fishing off Arrowhead Point came this way, but that was about it. Don’s Cherokee was bouncing and sliding over thickly packed snow that had turned slushy during last week’s warm spell and now was frozen, all ruts and dips and slick spots. The road wound through thick woods, the trees nothing but stalks now, naked without their leaves.
Wearing a red-and-black-checked jacket, Tim Landers was standing beside his blue Toyota 4x4, which was parked at the side of the road. There was no cut in the snowbank where the Abelsons’ drive met the road, so this was as close as you could get in a car. Landers’s pickup was parked directly behind a brown Chevy Blazer with Minnesota plates. The Blazer was nosed into the snowbank.
Over his radio, Don said, “I’m ten-ninety-seven at the Abelson place. Can you run a plate for me, Corrine?”
“Ten-four.”
Don gave her the tag number of the Blazer. Getting out of the car, he walked over to where Tim Landers was still leaning against his truck. The old man was using the hood of his coat to keep his ears warm. He was one of those extremely fair-skinned people whose natural pallor was that of someone who was bedridden, although the cold air had given his face a bit of a flush. He had a drinker’s nose, full of little red blood vessels, but Don had never known him to be a boozer. Landers was probably in his early seventies. His face was covered with about three days’ growth of snow-white whiskers.
“I was on my way over to Arrowhead Point to talk to Todd Vorhees,” Landers said. “His wife told me he’s ice fishing out there today. I stopped when I
saw this Blazer here all by itself. I looked around and didn’t see any sign of anyone, and then I saw the holes in the snowbank where somebody had climbed over it. I climbed up on top of the bank, and I could see that the tracks went directly to the Abelsons’ cabin. So—”
“How many sets of tracks were there?”
“You mean how many people had gone in there? Just one. One set of tracks going in, none coming out. And I knew there wasn’t supposed to be anybody at the Abelson place, so I went in to see what was going on.”
“Shouldn’t have done that, Tim.”
“Why not?”
“If somebody’d been burglarizing the place, and you’d caught them at it, you could have got hurt.”
Landers frowned. “Never thought of that.”
“Let’s go see what you found.”
The two men climbed over the snowbank. The snow on the other side of it had a thick crust because of the warm spell, but not thick enough to support a man’s weight, so every other step or so you suddenly sank in up to your knees. Fortunately the cabin was only about fifty feet from the road.
“The tracks went to the front door, then around to the back of the house,” Landers said. “But instead of following them, I went right up to that side window there and peeked in.”
Don followed him to the window and, cupping his hands around his eyes, looked into the cabin. A man lay on the floor. A large knife was protruding from his abdomen.
“You sure you only saw one set of tracks?” Don asked.
“Of course I’m sure. The way this snow is, how could I miss another set of tracks?”
“I guess you couldn’t.”
The cabins on Ice Island were all made of wood; other than that, there was no uniformity to their appearance. This particular one was made of logs with cement chinking. It was large as summer cabins went, and well made. Some of them were only slightly classier than tarpaper shacks. Don knew guys who kept them that way on purpose, so they could come up and go fishing with their buddies, and the wife and kids wouldn’t want to come along.
Stepping onto the cabin’s snow-covered porch, Don tried the front door, which was locked. He followed the tracks in the snow around to the rear of the cabin, where a window pane had been broken out. Landers accompanied him.
“Guess this is how he got in,” the old man said, expressing the obvious.
Don raised the window. “I’d like you to wait out here, if you wouldn’t mind,” Don said.
Landers nodded. “Don’t want to have too many people messing up the evidence. I can see that.”
Don climbed into the cabin, finding himself in a bedroom. It was a spacious room with a queen-size bed and furniture that looked new, bought especially for the cabin. That was unusual. Ordinarily people furnished their summer places with stuff from the attic or the church junk sale. The husband was a big-time executive in Detroit, worked for some company that supplied parts to the auto industry. He’d spend a couple of weeks here each summer, but the wife and kids usually spent the entire three months.
Don moved out of the bedroom and into a short hallway. The floors throughout the place were pine. They creaked under his weight. He passed another bedroom, this one with bunk beds for the kids. The bathroom had a tub with a shower. The kitchen was large and modern, with a big refrigerator-freezer and even a dishwasher. Clearly the Abelsons didn’t like to spend their summers roughing it.
The body was in the living room. The guy was about thirty-five, dark-haired, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. The shirt had been unbuttoned, and his T-shirt had been pushed up where the knife protruded from his stomach. It was a kitchen knife, the type you saw chefs use on TV, chopping up vegetables so fast the blade was a blur.
Don squatted by the body, studying the knife. It had been plunged into the guy so deeply it had nearly gone all the way through him. And it wasn’t a simple stabbing. The knife had been worked upward, toward the guy’s chin, leaving a six-inch-long gash. The blood flowing from the wound had run down both sides of his stomach and onto the floor, where it had puddled and frozen into red ice.
Getting up, Don went into the kitchen and examined the knives in the wooden block on the counter. They had the same black handles as the one sticking out of the dead man. One slot in the wooden block was empty, the largest one, where the chef’s knife should have been.
Returning to the living room, he picked up the dead man’s jacket, which had been tossed on the couch. Going through the pockets, he found nothing but a matchbook from a motel in Liberal, Kansas. He patted down the corpse, finding no weapons, nothing in the shirt pockets or the front pants pockets. He tried to lift the body. It resisted because some of the dead man’s clothing was frozen to the floor, but it finally pulled free, small pieces of red ice popping loose, tinkling as they landed on the pine floorboards. The body itself was frozen solid, a man-shaped chunk of ice. The man had no gun at the small of his back. Nor did he have a wallet.
Letting his eyes travel around the living room, Don took in the expensive couch, the console color TV set, the paintings on the walls. It amazed him that people would leave all these goodies unattended like this, but then the Abelsons probably had so much money that the cost of something like a console color TV was nothing. The whole damn cabin was probably nothing.
Don wondered whether he’d like living like that and found he really didn’t know. It sounded nice, on the surface, but everything had a price. Maybe Mr. Abelson would have a stroke at forty-five, or maybe he had ulcers from worrying that the market would crash and he’d lose it all, or that his company would go belly-up because Lee Iacocca would decide to let the Koreans make the parts now manufactured by Abelson. Maybe Mrs. Abelson was an alcoholic after going to all those cocktail parties. Maybe their kids were supporting hundred-dollar-a-day coke habits. And maybe Don was full of shit, but he didn’t think so. He thought somehow the Abelsons were paying the price of having all that money.
He pushed the Abelsons from his thoughts. He’d been thinking about them just to get his mind off the body on the floor, let his thoughts settle. Now he reconsidered everything he’d learned so far, and he still came to the same conclusion. There was only one explanation for what had happened here, even if it was crazy—absolutely fucking crazy.
Unlocking the front door, he stepped out onto the porch. Landers was waiting for him. “Come on,” Don said, and the two of them went back to the road. Don looked into the Blazer, seeing that the keys were still in the ignition. He’d have to look through the car, but that could wait.
Climbing into his Cherokee, he picked up the two-way radio microphone. “Unit one to Ice Island.”
“Go ahead,” Corrine said.
“You run that plate?”
“Ten-four. It’s ten-seventy-five out of Minnesota.” Corrine loved to use the ten codes. With just the two of them using the radio and no one caring enough to listen in, it was probably unnecessary, but Don saw no reason to spoil her fun. Ten-seventy-five meant a stolen car.
“When was it reported stolen?” he asked.
“Two days ago in Duluth.”
“Ten-four, Corrine. Thanks.”
“You got a signal one out there?” she asked, her curiosity getting the best of her. Signal one meant homicide.
“I got a DOA. I’ll tell you the details later.”
Getting out of the car, Don found Landers standing there, eyeing him expectantly, wanting to hear Don’s explanation for all this. When Don didn’t offer one, the old man said, “Got any ideas yet who killed him?”
“Tim, there was only one set of tracks.”
Landers considered that. “You mean he did it to himself … did that to himself?”
“He was the only one there.”
Landers let it sink in for a moment, then he said, “It’s like the Japanese used to do, the samurai. They’d commit suicide by cutting out their guts. Did you know that?”
Don didn’t answer.
“I learned about it by watching Shogun. I saw a
rerun of the whole series last week over at Hank Bergstrom’s—on one of those satellite channels he gets. Even with scrambling he still gets over a hundred channels on his satellite dish, you know. But you know what?”
“What?” Don asked absently. He was wondering why anyone would steal a car in Duluth, drive all the way to Ice Island, then commit such a bizarre suicide in the Abelsons’ cabin.
“When the samurai did it, they had a guy standing by with a sword to chop off their heads, because the pain would be so bad that a guy could only stand it for a few seconds.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, this guy didn’t have anybody like that. How the hell could he give himself so much pain? I mean, there are a lot easier ways to commit suicide. Why didn’t he use one of them?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question,” Don said.
He’d been asking himself a lot of other questions, too. Something, some instinctive part of himself, was feeling real uneasy about all this. He had the feeling he was knee-deep in shit and slowly sinking, and he had absolutely no idea why he felt that way.
Two
1
It was early afternoon before Don got back to the police station. He had to photograph the scene of the suicide, fingerprint the dead man, dust the handle of the knife protruding from his belly, and arrange for an ambulance from the mainland to pick up the body and take it to Marquette for autopsy. He also had to get Phil Deemis at the Shell station to come out with his wrecker and tow the stolen Blazer to the parking lot behind the station, which served as the impound area.
After a quick stop at home for a ham sandwich, Don set about doing all the paperwork that went along with something like this. He had to type up a report, a copy of which had to be sent to the coroner. The Duluth police had to be notified concerning the recovery of the stolen Blazer. And since the dead man was a John Doe, Don would have to send a copy of his prints to the FBI.
Meanwhile, Corrine Matthews was taking phone calls from Ice Islanders curious to know about the man who’d broken into the Abelsons’ cabin and committed suicide with a kitchen knife. Tim Landers had undoubtedly told everyone he saw about it. Not much happened in a place like this, so something as bizarre as a guy trying to eviscerate himself with a chef’s knife was grist for the gossip mill.
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