Frozen Sun

by Stan Jones

  “You think it’s her?” Cullars was looking at the initials himself with the glass.

  Active already had the door open, was halfway out when he heard Dennis answer Cullars’ question. “Yeah, Walt, I think you can close your file on Heavenly Doe now.”

  “But that’s a P,” Cullars was saying as Dennis came through the door. “I thought you said her name was Grace Tucker. This says G.P.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Sorry, man,” Dennis said from behind him. “I forgot Cullars was such a doofus. He rolled his unit in a high-speed chase about five years back and got some kind of head injury. That’s why he’s in the basement.”

  Active, elbows on a stack of archive boxes, face to the wall, said nothing.

  “At least we know now, huh?”

  “You think he was right about her being pushed?” Active turned to look at his friend.

  Dennis rubbed his chin. “Hard to say. I heard his instincts were pretty sharp before his accident, but now … well, you see how he is.”

  “Yeah, but he does seem to pick up on stuff, like the woman hanging around in the blizzard that night. Think it was that Angie girl?”

  “Who?”

  Active recounted his conversation at Aurora Bingo with Special Ed.

  Dennis frowned when Active was done, concentrated for a moment. “Who knows? Pretty cold trail if it was this Angie. But I can hook you up with Homicide if you want.”

  “You think they’ll do anything?”

  “Let’s see, this was, what, almost three and a half years ago, victim and suspect both street people, no witnesses, no evidence, no leads. Yeah, I think they’ll do something. They’ll take your information down and file it, just like they did with Cullars.”

  “No thanks, I guess.”

  Dennis shrugged. “Anyway, I gotta get back to work. You gonna be all right?”

  “I’ll be fine. Another afternoon of Peer Instruction Training is just what I need.”

  They started down the hall together. “Wanna do something tonight?” Dennis was a little too casual. “Movie, maybe?”

  Active cut him a sideways glance. “You baby-sitting me now? I said I’ll be fine.”

  Dennis shrugged.

  “Anyway, I need to spend some time with Ed and Carmen or they’ll kick me out,” Active said. “The price of free rent is, you have to spend time with your parents. Remember?”

  Dennis chuckled. “How about Friday, then? The Finest have another hockey game and I think we’re going to need a defenseman. One of our regular guys is pulling some night shifts.” He looked at Active. “This is no bullshit. Really.”

  Active thought the idea of all that whacking and banging and colliding sounded pretty good. No brains required, just speed, reflexes and a manly indifference to pain. “Yeah, sure. What time?”

  “Eight o’clock, Fire Lake Rec Center,” Dennis said.

  “Way out there in Eagle River? Still hard to get ice time, huh?”

  “Yep, same as always. When we play downtown at the Ben Boeke, we have to start at five or six in the morning.

  Active grimaced. “I guess I can make it out to Fire Lake.”

  “We got some extra gear if you can’t find your old stuff,” Dennis said.

  With Christie and Rita in charge, Peer Instruction Training was devoid of tension, drama, or conflict that afternoon, leaving Active’s mind free to prowl back over the past few days.

  What? This was only Wednesday? Was it really only five days since Jason Palmer had called him to Chukchi High to look at the mural of Grace Palmer, five days since Lucy Generous sensed what was in the back of his mind before he did and they got into that huge fight?

  Now it seemed like Grace Palmer had been in his head for years, not days, seemed like he had actually known her, had actually seen her smashing windows along Four Street, advising cops and maybe even a judge to give each other blow jobs, had watched her disrespect the aanas at Aurora Bingo and jab Special Ed in the eye with the red dauber. And now she was gone.

  No, that was stupid. In fact, it was nuts. She had never been there, had tangled with a snowplow three years before he ever heard her name, before he ever saw the silver gleam from the foxlike eyes on the wall at Chukchi High.

  He imagined Grace Palmer windmilling into the path of the rotary snowplow, rolled the image around in his mind to see how much it hurt. Not that much, actually. It wasn’t so hard to let her go, really, and he felt Lucy Generous around him again in a way he hadn’t since … since when? Since the night he went through Grace Palmer’s police files with Dennis Johnson.

  But now Lucy was back in his mind, warm and smiling. Had he ever known anyone so emotionally open? He remembered their makeup sex after the big fight last Friday … no, between the two big fights really, felt himself stirring there in the Peer Instruction Training classroom and had to cross his legs so as not to embarrass himself.

  He’d get Lucy something nice before he went back up to Chukchi, apologize again if she seemed to need it, he could imagine the homecoming now. Maybe he’d call her tonight, say something a little suggestive, see how she reacted, maybe they’d try phone sex, they’d never done that. He shook his head, took a sip from the Diet Pepsi under his chair, and put the thought away for later.

  So what had it been about, this Grace Palmer thing? Panic, probably. Panic about Lucy Generous, he supposed, though he couldn’t remember exactly why she scared him.

  Marriage? Was that it? Maybe he was scared because he was starting to be able to imagine himself popping the question, not that there was any real doubt about Lucy’s answer.

  Maybe he had fixated on Grace Palmer—beautiful, mysterious, lost and, most important, unattainable—because of his panic at the thought a marriage proposal might be building up inside him like the aurora just starting to flicker in the winter sky. Distracting himself from what he was afraid of by focusing on something he couldn’t have and probably wouldn’t want if he found it, that’s all he had been doing.

  Whatever it had been about, just knowing that Grace Palmer was gone seemed to have ended it. That was why it didn’t hurt as much as he had expected when he thought about how she died. A sad story, sure, a tough thing to tell Jason Palmer when he got back, but not an unusual story on Four Street.

  Carmen Wilhite was on the back deck barbecuing halibut and baking potatoes on the new gas grill when she heard the sliding door open behind her. She turned to see her adopted son stick his head out.

  “It’s after five,” Nathan said. “You want a beer?”

  She looked at her watch. “So it is, and what was I thinking?”

  He grinned, disappeared, and returned in a moment with a Heineken and a frozen mug for her, a Diet Pepsi and a glass of ice for himself. He poured, they drank, he looked at the grill. “Halibut, huh? Nature’s most nearly perfect food.”

  “Isn’t that milk?”

  “Only because no cow ever ate a halibut.”

  She chuckled and studied him as she sipped the icy Heineken. It was the first joke he’d cracked all week. The tension that had closed him up like a fist was gone now, thank goodness.

  She wondered what the blues had been about. Was it the job, maybe, a problem in this computer class that brought him down to Anchorage? A fight with the girlfriend in Chukchi, this Lucy Generous, that Martha had phoned her about but Nathan had not mentioned? Or did it have something to do with this project he and Dennis Johnson had been working on in the evenings, trying to run down Grace Palmer, the lost beauty queen, as a favor to her father up in Chukchi?

  After a certain point in adolescence, sons didn’t talk about anything important with their mothers, especially anything that was bothering them. She knew that. But she had always thought Nathan was reserved beyond what you’d expect of a normal kid, even what you’d expect of an Eskimo kid raised by white people six hundred miles from Eskimo country. He certainly hadn’t opened up about anything so far this week. Maybe he would now.

  “Good day?” she said,
lightly and after considerable thought.

  He sighed. “Yes and no.”

  “Kind of a Zen day, was it?”

  He laughed, but only a little. “We found out Grace Palmer is dead, is all.”

  Carmen probed a halibut filet with the barbecue fork and saw that it was done, though she knew the potatoes had a few minutes to go yet. She transferred the filets to a plate, covered them with foil and set them on the barbecue’s upper grill, where they would stay hot but not cook any more. “That’s too bad. How’d she die?”

  He told her about Grace Palmer’s rendezvous with the municipal snowplow on Four Street three winters ago, how Dennis’s sharp eye had noticed the little dot that was Grace Palmer’s initials, and how he and Dennis had speculated that she was pushed into the snowplow by the hazy figure the driver had seen loom out of the blizzard.

  “Really? She was murdered?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know. Maybe. But it’s so long ago and that person in the blizzard might as well be dead, too, for all the chance there is of finding her now. Or him. Anyway, it’s APD’s problem, not mine. I know what I need to tell her father, which is all I wanted.”

  He walked over to the grill, lifted the foil off the halibut, and pinched off a bite, then held it between his teeth and blew air in and out of his mouth to cool it off. “Mmmm, iss is guh. You err know err?”

  “What? Don’t talk with your mouth full, especially of hot halibut.”

  He tried again a few moments later, the halibut safely swallowed. “Mmmm, that was good. You ever know her?”

  “Grace Palmer? No, if I’m doing the math right, she would have still been a baby when we moved down here.” She folded down the flap of foil that Nathan had left up. “I think I remember a new school teacher coming to town while we were there. Might have been her dad, all right. And I definitely remember reading about it when a Chukchi girl won the Miss North World contest, but the name didn’t mean anything to me. What a hard, sad little story.”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head and frowned again. “It’ll be a tough thing to tell her father but it’s good to get to the end of it.”

  She poked the barbecue fork into a potato and pulled it out again. It slid easily, no resistance to speak of, and the stuff that came back on the tines looked about right. “I think it’s done. You want to slice up some bread while I do the salad?”

  Nathan picked up the platter of halibut as she transferred the potatoes to a platter of their own. “What about Ed? He’s not eating tonight?”

  “He’s got a field trip to a fire station with his fifth-graders tomorrow. He had a sandwich and then he went back in to get things organized.”

  They went in and busied themselves over the bread and salad, and she decided to push her luck a little. “Martha tells me you’re seeing someone? A Lucy Generous?”

  He shrugged. “I guess.”

  “And she, ah, is she nice?”

  “No, I prefer the meaner ones.”

  Carmen felt herself blush slightly. “Sorry, didn’t mean to pry, but you know how mothers are.”

  “Yep,” he said. “Both of you.”

  “You’re kind of outnumbered, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Then he surprised her by leaning over and kissing her cheek. “But in a good way.”

  She smiled at that, and then he surprised her even more. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I think I might have some news for you two in that department pretty soon.”

  She turned and stared at him. “What news? What department? Are we talking wedding bells here?”

  “Well,” he said with one of his grins, “if I told you now it wouldn’t be news, would it?” And with that he walked over to the table, sat down, and began piling halibut onto his plate.

  She hurried after him with the salad, probed a little more over dinner, got nothing but the grin.

  So she switched gears and they talked about the halibut trip they would take to Homer that weekend. They would replenish the family freezer, she said, maybe even send some back to Chukchi with him.

  He expressed polite enthusiasm, but confessed he was beginning to entertain some doubt that even Homer halibut could compete with Chukchi sheefish, and promised to bring some down the next time he came.

  As he gave her another of his grins, she was thinking she would call Chukchi soon and see if Martha had any idea what this news was. Maybe Nathan had told his birth mother something he wouldn’t tell her.

  After dinner, Active helped Carmen load the dishwasher, then went up to his old room. He checked and was happy to discover his old phone line—the “Teen Line,” as it had been listed in the Anchorage phone book—was still connected.

  That was lucky, he thought. If he got up the nerve to attempt a seduction of Lucy by long distance, Carmen or Ed couldn’t pick up an extension somewhere and accidentally plug into what had equal chances of being the sexiest, or the stupidest, telephone conversation ever conducted under their roof.

  Could he do it? He tried to imagine himself saying, “What are you wearing?” to Lucy but the scene wouldn’t come into focus. He’d either freeze at the crucial moment, or giggle. Or Lucy would laugh out loud at his male foolishness.

  No, it would be safer to call and have a normal conversation, limit it to telling her about Grace Palmer being dead. He would indicate somehow that the Grace Palmer thing had been a crisis point for him and he had now passed it, let that serve in lieu of the apology he felt in a vague way he owed Lucy, but couldn’t think how to frame.

  At least it would be an improvement over their other two conversations since he had come to Anchorage. Those had consisted principally of Lucy saying, “Did you find her?” followed by him saying “No,” followed by Lucy saying “You still looking? Well, good luck,” and hanging up.

  He sat down at his old desk and saw beside the phone the stack of police files on Grace Palmer that Dennis Johnson had dug up. He had dropped them there two nights earlier, after the records crawl at APD, and now the folders were scattered all over the desk, except for two that had slid onto the floor. He scooped them back into a stack and secured it with a big rubber band he found in a desk drawer. Then he put it on top of his briefcase, next to the bed.

  The desk finally clear, he picked up the phone and dialed Lucy’s grandmother’s number in Chukchi. It wasn’t Lucy who answered, but Pauline Generous, which certainly put an end to any thoughts of phone sex with Lucy.

  Before he could ask to speak to her, the old lady said exactly the same thing her granddaughter had been saying all week.

  “You find that Gracie Palmer yet?”

  He debated telling Pauline what he had learned, but decided against it. He didn’t want Jason or Ida Palmer hearing of their daughter’s death through the river of gossip that coursed constantly through Chukchi’s streets. Lucy could probably keep the secret, at least for a few days, but Pauline wouldn’t be able to stay quiet about it more than ten minutes once she sat down with the other aanas at the Chukchi Senior Center for her daily session of snerts, the incomprehensible card game that didn’t seem to be played anywhere but Chukchi and the villages around it.

  “No, I didn’t find her,” he said. “But I gave up. I’m all done.”

  The old lady harrumphed. “Good thing, too. You looking for Lucy? She’s over your place, defrosting your refrigerator, I think.”

  He thanked her and hung up, thinking to himself he might have a chance at the phone-sex thing, after all. What was it Lucy had said when he ripped her panties off during the makeup sex a week earlier? That she wouldn’t wear any the next time she came over?

  Could he ring her up at the bachelor cabin and say, “Are you wearing what you’re supposed to be wearing when you come over to my place?” Yeah, he thought maybe he could do that. He’d get the words out, see if she got on the same wavelength, and let nature take its course. Or not.

  He walked over and locked the door to his room, walked back to the desk and was reaching for the phone when it rang. He stare
d at it in surprise, trying to think as he picked it up why somebody would be calling the old teen line.

  “Hey, buddy, this number still works, huh?”

  “Geez, Dennis, you must be the only person on earth who still knows it.”

  “Yep, flypaper for a brain, that’s me. You got a minute?”

  “I guess.” Active hoped against hope it really would be only a minute, so he could reinitiate his seduction plot on the unsuspecting Lucy.

  “I was thinking I might drop over and get those files from you, take them back in tomorrow.”

  “Now? You want to come over tonight? Why don’t I run them over at lunch tomorrow? Or you can come get them at the hotel.”

  “Um, well, I, ah …”

  “What?”

  There was a long silence on the line. “You sure you want to hear about this?”

  “What?

  Dennis sighed. “You remember I was supposed to talk to the guy at the Creekview?”

  Active searched his memory for a moment. “Oh, yeah, the flophouse where Grace Palmer was getting her Oil Dividend.”

  “Right. Well, I missed the manager the other day but he called me this afternoon. And he remembered her. She actually did live there for a while, it wasn’t just a mail drop.”

  Why was Dennis bothering him with this? Either way, the late Grace Palmer was just a file about to be closed in Walt Cullars’ basement office. “So?”

  “So you remember the two women who supposedly lived there with her? One of ‘em actually did, according to the manager.”

  Active was getting an uneasy feeling now, something about the roommates tugging at his mind. Shaneesha Prather, that was one, but the other one - -

  “Angelina Ramos,” Dennis said.

  “Angie,” Active said. “That Angie girl Special Ed told me about.”

  “That’s my guess,” Dennis said.

  “So what is Ramos, Mexican?”