Ice Run: An Alex McKnight Novel (Alex McKnight Mysteries)

by Steve Hamilton

  She didn’t say no. She said, yeah, that would be great. We’ll have to do that sometime. Sometime soon. Maybe after she got some more work done on the house.

  “Soon” never came, until the night the snowstorm hit and I was stuck here in Paradise. So it got postponed another day. Now, finally, maybe I’d find out if this whole thing was real after all. And maybe I didn’t really want to find out.

  That’s the kind of soap opera nonsense that was going through my mind as I finally made my way out to the Soo. I had called her that morning. She said it was a little strange sleeping there in the king-sized bed, listening to the snowstorm. Being a cop didn’t help. If anything, it makes a woman realize all the more how vulnerable she can be. So she never did like staying in hotel rooms by herself. I told her I hoped we could change the arrangements that night. Just saying that out loud, seeing how it sounded, seeing how she responded to it. She told me to hurry up and get over there.

  I had to plow again, of course, so I didn’t get out until after lunchtime. Even then the main roads were still a mess. It took me a good two hours to get there, pounding my way through the new snowdrifts and then crawling along behind one of the county trucks.

  In Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, a six-story building is as big as it gets. That’s how tall the Ojibway Hotel is, looming over everything else on Portage Avenue, right across from the Soo Locks. According to the sign in the lobby, it had been in business since 1927, and it was the only game in town if you wanted some real luxury. It had big red awnings over all the windows on the ground floor, and the dining room was like something out of another era. I always made a point of having lunch there when I was in the city, but I had never spent a night there. Until now.

  As I finally found a place to park between the giant piles of snow, I knew she was up there in one of those rooms, waiting for me. I grabbed my overnight bag and crossed the street, trying very hard not to slip and fall on the hard-packed snow. That would be my luck, to break my leg twenty feet from the front door.

  There was a young man out front, trying to shovel the snow. He looked cold and miserable, and he was wearing a uniform that belonged on an organ-grinder’s monkey. I watched him as I made my way to the door, wondering how long it would take him to split open the back of his red coat.

  He stopped when he saw me coming, and opened the door for me. “Afternoon, sir,” he said.

  “Hell of a day to be shoveling snow in that suit.”

  “We do what we can.”

  I stomped the snow off my feet before I entered the lobby. It was the last place you’d want to track snow in, with all the fancy furniture and the Oriental rug and the display cases showing off the hotel’s long history.

  I didn’t notice the man sitting there in the lobby. Not at first. I went to the desk and said hello to the woman behind it. She asked me if I had seen enough snow for one lifetime and I said that I had. When I asked for Natalie Reynaud’s room, she picked up the phone and called her. I didn’t take that personally, of course. You don’t send a man up to a woman’s room without calling her, no matter how friendly he looks.

  I turned around while I waited. The doorman was still out on the sidewalk, struggling with the snow. The way he was lifting with his back instead of his legs, I knew he’d be sore as hell. It didn’t matter how young he was.

  Then I saw the old man sitting in the lobby. He was in one of the big chairs by the fireplace. He had a nice overcoat on, and it looked like he had a suit and tie on underneath that. He was wearing a hat, an old fedora. You don’t see men wearing hats like that anymore. That’s the first thing I thought. Then I noticed the boots he was wearing. They were like rubber fishing boots, going all the way up to his knees. They didn’t go with the rest of his outfit, but with all the snow, what the hell.

  He was looking at me. He smiled.

  Before I could smile back, the woman gave me the phone.

  “Alex, is that you?”

  “Natalie. I’m in the lobby.”

  “I’m in room 601. Come on up.”

  “The top floor. I’m on my way.”

  I hung up the phone. I thanked the woman at the desk and headed for the elevator. My throat was dry.

  I pressed the elevator button and waited. Then the door opened and I got in. The old man was right behind me.

  I pressed six and asked him which floor he needed.

  “Six is good,” the man said.

  I nodded and looked up at the row of numbers above the door. The door closed. I couldn’t help noticing the man was looking right at me. It’s the one thing you don’t do in an elevator.

  I looked back at him. He smiled again. Up close, I saw he was a little older than I had first thought. He had gray eyes with red rims, and a dark little mustache that had gone too thin. His lips were purple.

  I returned his smile, then looked away. The elevator door closed. He kept looking at me.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Do you like my hat?” he said.

  “Excuse me?” I said, looking at him again.

  “Do you like my hat?”

  I didn’t know what to say. The elevator was moving now. “Yes,” I finally said. “I do.”

  “It’s rather old,” he said. He kept looking me right in the eye. He kept smiling.

  “I figured.”

  “Would you like to know how old my hat is?”

  The elevator came to a stop.

  “No, sir,” I said. “I don’t need to know that.”

  “Very well.”

  The door opened. I got out. Room 601 was just a few steps away, so I didn’t have time to notice that the old man was still standing in the elevator. I was just about to knock, my hand in midair, when I looked back. He had stayed in the elevator, one arm extended to keep the door from closing. He was still smiling. Finally, he gave me a little nod of his head, pulled his arm away, and let the doors close in front of him.

  I stood there for a moment, trying to figure it out. Then I thought, to hell with it. An old man slightly off his nut. Never mind.

  His eyes, though. They were clear. They were focused.

  Never mind, Alex.

  I knocked lightly on the door. Natalie opened it and let me in. She was wearing blue jeans and a red sweater. I had never seen her in red before. “You look great,” I said.

  “Your hair,” she said.

  “Oh God.” I touched it, like I was verifying it was still on my head. “Okay, here’s the thing. The box said it was supposed to look totally natural.”

  “You dyed your hair.”

  “No, no. It wasn’t dye. Come on. It was, what do you call it, a rinse.”

  She came over to me and put her arms around my neck. “You dyed your hair,” she said. “Who’d you do that for, you jackass?”

  I wrapped her up. “The box said—”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. Then she kissed me. Everything seemed to run downstream at that point, right onto the bed. I lifted the red sweater over her arms and then she went to work on my shirt buttons.

  “I wasn’t going to do this,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because. God, Alex. I think we need to slow down a little bit.”

  “Too late.”

  “Why does this happen?” she said. “Every time I see you?”

  She seemed genuinely angry this time. At me or at herself. I didn’t know. I held her down and kissed her hard, and then everything happened again, just like the first time and every other time after that, like there was nothing either of us could do to stop it, even if we wanted to.

  Afterward, as we were both lying there in the tangled-up sheets, I looked out the window and saw the snow falling. “Oh great,” I said. “Just what we need.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is it?”

  “We should talk about this.”

  “So go ahead.”

  “I need
some air first,” she said, sitting up. “Come on, it’s not too late. I want you to show me around.”

  I laughed. “There’s not much to see. Not this time of year.”

  But she was already putting her clothes back on. A few minutes later, we were both downstairs in the lobby, wrapped up tight in our coats, ready for our evening stroll. I looked around for my friend from the elevator, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Oh, there was just a man down here before. He was acting kinda strange.”

  “An old guy, right? All dressed up?”

  “Yeah, did he say something to you, too?”

  “No, I just saw him in the dining room yesterday. When I was having dinner alone. He walked by and tipped his hat to me.”

  “I think he’s got a screw loose.”

  “I’m sure he’s harmless,” she said. “He sort of fits in with the place, doesn’t he? All these old artifacts in the display cases.”

  The young doorman opened the door for us. He still had the shovel, and it looked like he had almost finished the sidewalk. Until this new snow had started falling. Whatever they were paying him, today it wasn’t enough.

  We walked down Portage Avenue, toward the locks. They were closed for the winter, of course, so there were no ships to see. The entire river was frozen now, all the way across to Canada. I told her this street would be busy in the summer, when the shops were open and the tourists were walking around and watching the locks from the observation deck. It was hard to imagine now.

  “What did you tell me?” I said. “That you’ve never been over here before? All those years you were living across the river?”

  “I drove through a couple of times,” she said, “but I never came into town, no. I heard all the stories, though.”

  “What stories?”

  “About Soo Michigan. What a wild town it is. At least, when I was growing up.”

  I looked down the empty street. The snow was falling and the wind was kicking up clouds all along the high snowbanks. Some wild town. At that moment, it was hard to imagine anyone even living here.

  “My grandfather never wanted me to come over here,” she said. “He told me there were gunfights and prostitutes and all sorts of bad stuff going on across the bridge.”

  “I think maybe he watched too many Westerns.”

  “Yeah, well, some Canadians think all of the States is that way.”

  We walked some more. The sun went down. From the end of the street we could see the International Bridge, the lights glowing in the darkness. It started to feel a lot colder.

  We made our way back to the hotel, holding hands like schoolkids. What she had said back in the room, about wanting to talk—I kept waiting for it to happen. But it didn’t. The lights were on outside the hotel and the doorman was there shoveling the snow.

  We went inside with faces red from the cold air and snow all over our shoes. It felt good to sit down in the dining room and to feel the heat thawing us out. The room was elegant, with chandeliers and big windows overlooking the river. On a different night in a different season there would have been ships moving through the locks just outside, great seven-hundred-foot freighters on their way to Lake Huron. But on this night all we could see outside was the snow falling. Endless snow, that’s what this winter had become.

  When we had ordered our food, I noticed the old man again. He was sitting on the other side of the dining room, facing us, with a big cloth dinner napkin tucked into his collar. We were the only three customers in the place. He gave me a tip of his hat.

  “There he is,” I said.

  “Who?” She turned to look and then gave the man a little wave when she saw him.

  “Maybe he’s a ghost,” I said. “He died in this hotel and now he haunts all the guests.”

  She smiled for just a moment, then looked out the window. We were both quiet for a while. Just as she was about to say something, the waitress appeared with a bottle of champagne.

  “Compliments of the gentleman,” she said, setting up a stand with an ice bucket.

  I looked back over at the old man. He was drinking something now. He raised his glass to us.

  “Who is he?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” the waitress said, pulling the cork. “I’ve never seen him before. But he sort of goes with the place, doesn’t he? This hotel was built in 1927, you know.”

  When she had poured two glasses, Natalie picked hers up and raised it to the man across the room. He tipped his hat again.

  “Veuve Clicquot,” she said, taking a sip. “This is the good stuff.”

  “Yeah,” I said, with a little edge. “We’ll have to go thank him.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Ah, it’s nothing. Like you say, he’s probably harmless.”

  We drank the champagne until the waitress brought our dinners. The wind kicked up and rattled the big windows so hard we could feel it in our bones. But it was warm inside, and a full bottle of champagne was making everything look soft in the light from the chandeliers. Natalie was a little too beautiful to be true, her green eyes sparkling. The whole night seemed a little unreal.

  When I looked over a few minutes later, the old man was gone.

  “Guess our friend called it a night,” I said.

  “I hope he’s not going outside.”

  “He’s a ghost, remember? Ghosts don’t get cold.”

  That’s the line that would stay with me. That’s the line I’d remember the next day, when we would find out what had happened. At that very moment, the two of us sitting there in the dining room, finishing the last of the champagne, the old man was out there. He had left the hotel. He had walked down Portage Avenue. He had taken a right onto Ashmun, and had made his way south, walking on the street lined with snowbanks and dark empty buildings on each side. It was snowing harder. He must have been walking slowly. He crossed the little bridge, over the frozen canal that cut off the downtown from the rest of Sault Ste. Marie. He made it as far as the bookstore on the right side of the road.

  Was he already freezing at that moment, when I made my bad joke about ghosts not getting cold? I’ve been there myself. I know how it feels. You’re disoriented, you start talking to yourself. Things from your past come back to you. You can’t walk straight. Then finally, the ultimate irony. Or maybe the ultimate mercy. You don’t feel cold anymore. You don’t feel anything at all.

  But, of course, we didn’t know. We hadn’t gone back to the elevator yet, feeling happy and full after the big meal, and still a little lightheaded from the champagne. We hadn’t kissed in the elevator and held tight to each other. We hadn’t seen the present he had left for us, on the floor in front of room 601.

  I hadn’t gone back down to the lobby yet, looking for him, or asked the woman at the front desk if she had seen him. I hadn’t looked for the doorman, or gone outside myself with no coat on, to look up and down the street for some sign of the old man.

  We didn’t know he was out there, the snow covering him at that very moment. Or that the snowplow would run over his frozen body early the next morning, nearly cutting him in half.

  Ghosts don’t get cold. I said it, and then we finished our dinner and went upstairs. The thing was sitting there on the hallway carpet, right in front of the door. The door he had seen me go to. Whatever it was, it was covered by the big dinner napkin he’d had tucked into his collar.

  I pulled the napkin off. Underneath was a hat, upside down, filled with ice and snow.

  The man had apparently gone out to the sidewalk, filled his hat to the brim, and then brought it back inside to leave it here by the door. The ice and snow were already starting to melt and leak through the material, a dark stain spreading onto the carpet.

  “What the hell,” I said. I bent down and picked it up.

  “That’s the hat he was wearing, right? The old man downstairs?”

  “It is. But why?”

  “Wait a minute,” she sai
d. “Is there something else inside there?”

  She was right. I reached into the frozen mess and pulled out a piece of paper. It was the hotel stationery, and there were five words written in capital letters with an unsteady hand.

  “What does it say?” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. I just turned the piece of paper around and showed it to her.

  I KNOW WHO YOU ARE !

  Chapter Four

  I took the hat with me to Jackie’s place the next day. I had come home that morning to plow the road again, having spent the night with Natalie on a strange hotel bed, after finding the hat with the ice and snow in it, along with the note, after going downstairs to look for the old man and then going out into the snowy night. I had come back to the room and we had talked about it.

  “Are you sure you’ve never seen him before?” she had asked.

  “I’m positive,” I said. “I don’t know the man.”

  “Well, he didn’t leave it for me. I told you, I’ve never even been in this town before.”

  “He might be confused,” I said. “Hell, maybe he has Alzheimer’s. That’s another reason to find him.”

  So I had gone downstairs again. Nobody had seen the man, or even knew who he was. There was no sign of the doorman, either. The woman at the desk seemed to think he had gone out to look for the man. But she wasn’t sure.

  I came back upstairs and found Natalie already in bed. When I lay down next to her, she told me she was feeling a little strange. “Just being here,” she had said. “In this place. It feels like it’s so far away from home.”

  I couldn’t blame her. “Do you want to leave?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to leave.” Then she proved it to me. The streetlamp below our window cast a dim light on the ceiling, just enough for me to see her face as we came together. It felt different this time, whether it was just the place and the circumstances I couldn’t say.

  The next morning, we left the hotel early, going our separate ways. I didn’t even check out at the desk. I just took the bill that had been slid under the door and left.