Heart of Ice

by Parrish, P. J.

  “You’re leaving tomorrow, right?” Flowers asked, tossing the paper aside.

  “Unless you want me gone now.”

  Flowers leaned back in his chair. “I’ll take your word you did what you had to do with your chief,” he said.

  Louis nodded. “I appreciate that.”

  “So can you give me a few more days?”

  Before Louis could answer, the phone rang. Flowers picked it up, grunted a few words, and hung up. “I have to go take care of something,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Flowers left, leaving the door open.

  Louis sat down in the chair Chapman had been using. From the outer office came the sounds of radio traffic and the laughter of two officers sharing a joke. He started to reach for one of the Chapman folders but pulled over the Kingswood yearbook instead.

  He opened it and began to look for her. So many pretty young faces, smiling into the camera and ready to get on with their lives. And then, there she was.

  The black-and-white missing persons flyer that he had shown to the ferry employees and Edna Coffee hadn’t really registered in his consciousness.

  But the photograph of Julie Chapman in front of him now did. The angles and symmetry that gave Ross Chapman his handsomeness were visible here but softened to beauty. Where Ross Chapman’s hazel eyes telegraphed strength, his sister’s darker ones conveyed vulnerability.

  He hadn’t noticed before, but unlike the other girls Julie wasn’t looking into the camera. It was as if she was afraid the photographer was thinking she wasn’t as pretty as the others.

  A few more days . . .

  Louis looked back up at the map of Michigan on the wall behind Flowers’s desk, focusing on the little dot of Echo Bay. He had promised Joe he would be in Echo Bay tomorrow. It was only a three-hour drive. Would Joe be willing to come to him?

  But what about Rafsky? He didn’t want their past infecting his future with her. He’d have to tell her Rafsky was here, and he’d have to trust her.

  He picked up the phone and dialed Echo Bay.

  14

  The front page of the St. Ignace News was spread out on the table before him. He closed his eyes and put his head in his hands. When he opened his eyes the newspaper was still there. So was she.

  Cooper Lange stared at the black-and-white photograph that dominated the top half of the front page.

  Julie.

  The headline above her photograph was big and black and ugly.

  BONES FOUND IN ISLAND LODGE

  He had been so shocked to see her picture when he opened the paper this morning that he hadn’t even read the story. He read it now, trying to go slow so his reeling mind could absorb the details.

  There weren’t that many. A tourist had found bones in the Twin Pines lodge. Police were calling it a possible homicide. The lodge had been abandoned and boarded up for decades. . . .

  Cooper’s eyes locked on one sentence: “Although a positive identification has not yet been made, sources close to the investigation say police are proceeding on the theory that they may belong to Julie Anne Chapman, who disappeared from her Bloomfield Hills home twenty-one years ago.”

  The photograph pulled him back. She looked exactly the same as he remembered. The same oval face framed by straight black hair and somber dark eyes. If was as if the past twenty-one years had never happened. Or as if she had been frozen in time. Frozen in his mind.

  Cooper rose and went to the coffeemaker. He poured himself a fresh mug and stood at the sink, staring out the window at the flannel-gray fog.

  It felt like the fog was there in his head. It had felt like this for as long as he could remember.

  Like those warm nights with her in the lodge were something he had only imagined. Like that cold day on the ice bridge had never happened. Like those eleven months in Vietnam had been a nightmare and the six months in the VA hospital one big narcotic dream. Like the constant pain in his leg was something his mind made up when he needed an excuse to crawl into himself and die for just a couple of hours.

  “You’re up early.”

  He turned. His father was standing in the doorway. It was just a trick of the gloomy morning light, but for a moment he saw his father as he had that day twenty-one years ago, when they had stood in this very same spot and he had told his father—lied to him— that he was going ice fishing for three days up near Whitefish Bay. The next thing he remembered was his father’s face above him when he woke up in the St. Ignace Hospital, half-dead from hypothermia.

  “You okay? You look a little pale,” his father said.

  “I think I got a bug or something,” Cooper lied.

  His father moved into the kitchen. He glanced at the newspaper, but nothing registered. There was no reason it should. Cooper had never told him why he had been out on the ice bridge that day, never told him about the girl on the island.

  For a second he thought about telling his father all of it now. Telling him, too, that maybe he needed to go to the island and talk to the police.

  “The cold’s coming early this year,” his father said.

  “Yeah.”

  “The storm windows—”

  “I already did them.”

  “I better check the furnace.”

  “I’ll do it, Pop.”

  His father’s eyes lingered on him before he turned to the coffeemaker.

  “Flu’s going around,” his father said. “Maybe you should stay home today. I can go open the bar.”

  Cooper didn’t answer. He moved past his father out of the kitchen. In the bedroom he pulled on a sweater and work boots. He went to his closet, looking for his down vest because he felt the cold so easily these days. As he grabbed the vest his eyes were drawn to the old Converse shoe box on the shelf.

  He pulled it down and sat on the bed.

  There wasn’t much in the box. But then, there had been no reason to add anything for a long time. And even less reason to look at what was there.

  But he did now. He pulled out the black case and cracked it open. He ran a finger over the Purple Heart, closed the case, and set it aside. He barely gave a glance to the faded varsity letter from LaSalle High School but took a long time staring at the Timex watch that had belonged to his grandfather. There were papers that he sifted through quickly, things that he didn’t remember keeping, and the coaster from the New York Bar in Saigon made him remember a night he had tried to forget. At the bottom of the box were the photographs.

  Only a few. Most faded-to-orange Polaroids of bare-chested smiling men with palm trees and tanks in the background. A few of the guys he had worked with on the pipeline and a blurred one of his ex-wife on the beach at San Padre Island. And then . . .

  A black-and-white photograph of a girl with long dark hair and somber eyes. Its edges were curled, its image faded.

  He stared at it for a long time, then turned it over.

  The delicate handwriting had been lost a long time ago in the icy water. Only a few words of what she had written to him remained.

  Love . . . may shatter your dream

  What had happened? The newspaper told him nothing, just that there were bones in the lodge. He closed his eyes against the image in his head.

  Had she frozen to death waiting for him?

  Something tore deep in his chest, and it hurt so bad that for a moment he couldn’t even pull in enough air to breathe.

  He couldn’t even move, because he knew now he wasn’t going to do anything. Any thought he had of helping the police was gone. All he wanted to do now was survive.

  He put the photograph back in the shoe box and stuck the box in the far corner of the closet.

  * * *

  Danny Dancer picked up the Mackinac Island Town Crier. For the tenth or eleventh time today he read the story about Julie Anne Chapman.

  It told him that her bones had been found in the lodge, that she was from Bloomfield Hills and had a brother who was running for the Senate. It told him that the police weren�
��t sure yet that it was her. But he knew it was her.

  He carefully smoothed the newspaper out on the table and concentrated on the photograph. It looked like one of those school pictures, but it was in plain old black-and-white. Not nearly as pretty as the picture of her he had stored in his head.

  Skin glowing gold from the bonfire. Hair black and glossy as a horse’s mane. Eyes like the night sky pricked with stars, filled with love for the boy who worked at the stables.

  Dancer couldn’t remember the boy’s name, and he didn’t care. He couldn’t remember the names of the fudgies or the rich West Bluff kids or even the names of the local kids who worked and played on the island.

  But he remembered what they looked like. He remembered how they spent their days, what they did in the dark, because he watched them summer after summer.

  They let him hang around but never too close. He never got invited up to Fort Holmes, where they went to smoke pot. Never got to share a bottle of Boone’s Farm around a campfire. Never had a chance with a girl on an Indian blanket.

  When he was young things like that hurt, and one day, many winters after Aunt Bitty was gone and he was all alone, he simply gave up watching them. He grew too old, grew too into himself, and stopped talking to anyone except the postal lady, the waitress at Millie’s, or the grocer at Doud’s.

  It was just him and his skulls.

  Until that day he found her, and suddenly the loneliness was gone.

  When was that? He didn’t know. The newspaper said she was here in 1969 and the date on the newspaper said it was now 1990, but a sense of time was something he couldn’t grasp.

  His life passed in seasons. Forests on fire with color. Gray skies and ice-chunked water. Melting drizzles and finally the bloom of the purple lilacs and dahlias as big as white dinner plates.

  Dancer rose from the table and went to the shelves. He picked up the skull from the top.

  “Hello, Julie,” he said softly.

  He slowly ran his fingers over the smooth curve of bone. His eyes were burning, and it felt almost like all those times when the beetles were doing their work and he got too close to the skulls. But this burning was different. It was the burn of panic.

  The newspaper said police had found her in the basement of the lodge. It hadn’t said anything about her skull being missing, but he knew the police would need it to figure out for sure that it was her.

  They would want it back. They would come looking for it.

  Had he been careful enough getting in and out of the lodge? Had the police found the hole that for so many summers had been his secret way in? Had he left fingerprints?

  He had read somewhere that human beings lose eight pounds of skin cells per year. Could they sweep the floors and find him that way?

  Aunt Bitty’s voice was suddenly in his head. Stop being stupid. God gave you a brain, use it.

  She was right. He was being stupid. No one could find him through his skin cells.

  But he couldn’t be sure the postal lady didn’t know that his packages contained skulls. Couldn’t be sure no one had ever seen him crawling into the lodge. Couldn’t be sure someone couldn’t smell the brains.

  He went to the window, held back the curtain, and peered out. The wind was calm and the leaves that sometimes danced across the yard were asleep. He saw a black squirrel on a low-hanging limb. But he saw no humans.

  But they would come.

  He let the curtain fall and went to the kitchen. He opened the cupboard below the sink and pulled out a large shoe box. He took out the hammer and crowbar and carried them to the far corner of the cabin. Dropping to his knees, he carefully pried the nails from two planks and lifted them from the floor.

  It hadn’t been easy carving a hole in the concrete foundation, but he had managed. There was just enough room for him to slip in his fingers and lift the box out. He took it to the table and removed the items—a thick wad of money bound with a rubber band, the gold brooch that Aunt Bitty had always worn to church, her miniature Bible, and a silver ring with two keys on it.

  He picked up the skull and started to put it in the empty box but hesitated. His eyes scanned the room, finally finding what he needed. He went to the corner, stood on his bed, and carefully took the fox pelt off the wall, bringing it back to the table.

  He wrapped the pelt around the skull. After putting the wad of money, brooch, keys, and Bible back in the box, he gently set the wrapped skull inside. When the box was back in the hole, he replaced the boards, making sure every nail went back into its original hole so the police wouldn’t notice they had ever been removed.

  But hiding her was not enough.

  He took the hammer and some nails outside to the shed. Inside he stopped to look around, at the old Tondix lawn mower, the broken rake, coils of discarded rope, and a heap of corroded beaver traps.

  Aunt Bitty would be sad to see how he had let the place go, but she hadn’t left him much money to keep it up. Hadn’t left him anything but this three-room cabin that he was born in and her wisdom: Don’t act stupid. Don’t eat rare meat. Don’t kill daddy longlegs because it makes it rain.

  With a sigh he whispered a promise to Aunt Bitty to get the place in shape and went back to his work.

  He dragged the shutters from the shed and started boarding up the cabin windows. He was sweating hard by the time he went back inside and put the tools under the sink.

  It was past three when he put the rabbit into the boiling mixture of water, potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and Night Train Express wine.

  While his dinner was cooking he stripped and washed himself at the sink. Dressed in clean overalls, a flannel shirt, and a double pair of red-heeled socks, he sorted through the mail. There was a new skull order, but he set it aside.

  Business had to wait, he decided. The next few days, maybe even the next few years, would be devoted to protecting Julie Anne Chapman.

  Danny Dancer got his rifle from the closet and positioned a chair to face the front door. He sat down, covered his legs with one of Aunt Bitty’s afghans, and laid the rifle across his knees. With the smell of stewing rabbit in his nose he closed his eyes and waited for the sound of footsteps in the leaves.

  15

  She wasn’t afraid of many things. Bugs hadn’t bothered her when she was a kid and busting crackheads hadn’t bothered her when she was a cop in Miami. But being in a boat on open water—that had always scared the hell out of her.

  When Louis called and asked her to come to the island, Joe didn’t tell him she was afraid to get on a ferry.

  But she did tell that she wasn’t afraid to see Norm Rafsky.

  Not that she hadn’t been shocked when Louis told her Rafsky was on the island. It took half a bottle of wine to sort out her memories of Rafsky and the case they had worked together. She had no romantic feelings for him. But she couldn’t deny she still cared about what had happened to him in the last fifteen years.

  Fifteen years. . . . Did he still hate her?

  The grinding engine noise stopped. She stood up, shook out her clenched hands, and picked up her bag. There was no one on the docks. Then she saw Louis at the far end, standing by the gift shop to stay out of the cold wind.

  For a moment she couldn’t move. Because she also hadn’t told him the other thing—that after nineteen months of a long-distance relationship capped by an argument last Christmas, she was afraid it might be too late to fix things.

  He spotted her and waved.

  She started toward him. God, he was holding flowers. Her heart was suddenly hammering, and she had the stupid thought that she should have paid Donnie extra to put a few streaks in her hair. Or bought new underwear or painted her toenails.

  Louis put his arms around her. She buried her face in his shoulder and closed her eyes. Finally she pulled back.

  “I made it,” she said.

  “I was getting worried. You said you were coming in on the three o’clock ferry,” he said.

  “I know. I missed it.” Becaus
e she had been too chickenshit to get on.

  Louis took her face in his hands and kissed her. His hands were like ice. His lips were warm. She realized he was wearing only jeans and a hooded sweatshirt emblazoned with MACKINAC ISLAND.

  “You waited out here in the cold for the last hour?” she asked.

  “I found something to do.” He held out the flowers. “I wanted to get you roses, but there’s no florist on the island. There are, however, a lot of really nice gardens.”

  She laughed and took the flowers. “I’m surprised you didn’t get arrested.”

  “I’ve got juice here,” he said, smiling. He picked up her bag. “Just wait until you see the hotel.”

  As they started down Main Street, a strange silence took hold.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “This sounds serious,” Louis said.

  “Rafsky. How is he?”

  Louis hesitated. “I don’t know the guy, Joe.”

  “You know what I told you about him.”

  Louis let a few moments pass before he spoke. “He seems bitter.”

  She wanted to ask more but decided to let it go. It didn’t matter; she would see for herself soon enough. There was going to be no way to avoid seeing Rafsky, and if they were ever going to bridge the chasm between them she was going to have to be the one to reach out.

  When Louis led her to the porch of the Potawatomi she gave him a wry smile. “The Grand Hotel looks a lot bigger in the photographs,” she said.

  “It’s closed,” Louis said. “This is the only place open on the island. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. I told you, my coming here is better than your coming to Echo Bay. At least here my officers won’t bother me.”

  At the front desk she trailed behind holding the flowers as Louis talked to the clerk. The small lobby had fake wood paneling, a brick fireplace, and royal blue carpeting, with well-worn plaid furniture. But it was spanking clean and reminded her a little of her family’s old house on Rumson Road back in Cleveland Heights.