ALSO BY MARY ANN WINKOWSKI AND MAUREEN FOLEY
———
The Book of Illumination:
A Novel from the Ghost Files
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Mary Ann Winkowski and Maureen Foley
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Winkowski, Mary Ann.
The ice cradle: a novel from the ghost files / by Mary Ann Winkowski, Maureen Foley.—1st trade paperback ed.
p. cm.—(Ghost files ; 2)
1. Private investigators—Fiction. 2. Clairvoyants—Fiction. I. Foley, Maureen. II. Title.
PS3623.I6627I28 2010
813′.6—dc22 2010002453
eISBN: 978-0-307-45247-4
v3.1
To my husband, Ted,
and our daughters, Amber and Tara.
I love you.
— MAW
For Rob
— MF
Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Chapter One
SATURDAY
IT WASN’T AS warm as I’d hoped. In fact, we were freezing. Back in January, when the director of the Block Island Historical Society had been in touch with me, offering me a week’s work in April, on an island I knew to be, well, somewhere vaguely south of us, drifts of snow three feet high had bordered the sidewalks and buried the gardens and yards of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live with my five-year-old son, Henry. Seven more inches had accumulated during the night, temporarily beautifying the filthy piles of ice, sand, and salt that lined the streets.
As I’d gazed out the window of our second-floor apartment and down at the fluffy white mounds I would soon be shoveling, I didn’t go so far as to dream of tropical drinks with little umbrellas or sunblock scented like Polynesian fruit. But I sure didn’t imagine that come the last week in April, identified on Henry’s school calendar as “spring vacation,” my son and I would be riding the Block Island ferry wearing mittens and scarves and three or four layers under our puffy down jackets.
School had been canceled that day in January, leaving me with a familiar dilemma: I could be a great mom or a not-so-great mom. A great mom would seize the moment and take her child sledding at Fresh Pond, then cheerfully agree to host whomever he wanted to ask back to the house for cocoa and popcorn and grilled cheeses, and a serenely supervised afternoon filled with board games and fort building and tent-tunnel making, using sheets and blankets and all the tables and chairs.
The trouble was, I had work to do, and as a freelance bookbinder working from home, I couldn’t call in sick or take a personal day. Sure, I could just not work, but our financial cushion, never plump in the flushest of times, had recently been getting flatter and flatter.
I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t feel like I was bleeding money, but I hadn’t actually had time to sit down and go through all the bills and receipts. And what was the point of that, anyway? It wouldn’t change the simple reality: I was obviously earning too little and spending too much.
Many single mothers wouldn’t be happy with the agreement I have with Henry’s father, but it suits me just fine. Declan is a Boston cop—a detective, to be precise—and by any measure, a first-class dad. He also happens to be married to someone else: Kelly, from whom he was separated when he and I had our little … thing. They ended up getting back together. I ended up having Henry. Then Dec and Kelly had two girls of their own, Delia and Nell, whom I adore, and with whom Henry now spends lots of time on weekends and vacations. It’s not the simplest of family arrangements, but it’s ours, and it works.
Dec and I had the talk about money before I even took Henry home from the hospital, when we were both overwhelmed and completely in shock. At that moment, he would probably have said yes to anything. But I have my pride. I’m healthy, hardheaded, and college educated. No way did I want to get a check every week. If he could just relieve me of the responsibility for our son’s health insurance and his college education, I told him, I was sure I could handle everything else. And I have.
But the call from Block Island felt like manna from heaven. The man from the Historical Society, who identified himself as Caleb Wilder, had gotten my name from a bookbinder with whom I’d worked the previous fall, Sylvia Cremaldi. The Society had received a modest grant.
“What kind of grant?” I’d asked.
“To create a new collection, based on a set of historical papers.”
“What kind of papers?”
“They have to do with something that happened here about a hundred years ago, a collision at sea.”
“Oh!”
“Between a steamship and a schooner,” he continued. “The Larchmont, the steamer, was making an overnight trip from Providence to New York City in February 1907. There’s disagreement about how many people were aboard—the passenger manifest went down with the ship—but the number was somewhere around a hundred and fifty. She was hit by a schooner, the Harry Knowlton, and sank in fifteen minutes.”
“Wow! What happened to all the people?”
“A lot of them went down with the ship. They were asleep in their berths when the crash happened. The ones who made it up to the deck weren’t much better off: the boat was sinking, they were in the middle of a blizzard, and the seas were vicious. Most of the folks who got into the lifeboats were in their nightclothes, so even if their boats didn’t capsize, they froze to death.”
“That’s terrible. Did anyone survive?”
“Nineteen people. Though many were never the same.”
“And how does this—what does this have to do with Block Island?”
“The Larchmont sank just a few miles from here. A couple of the lifeboats reached us by morning, and the island became the center of the search-and-rescue mission. But there weren’t many people to rescue. A few of the bodies washed up on shore the next day, and fishing boats picked up twenty or so more, but the tide carried most of the victims out to sea. All in all, it was a fairly big event for a fairly small island.”
“I’ll say.”
Caleb went on to describe the nature and scale of the project and the salary t
hey were able to offer me, a sum that struck me as more than fair. But he, or someone else, must have thought the pot needed sweetening, given that they were under a very tight deadline to get the work completed. For reasons he didn’t explain, the money would not be available until April first, the volumes needed to be bound, and a new website, which someone else was going to design and launch, needed to be up and running by sometime this summer. So I was going to be housed free of charge at a Victorian inn that was under new ownership, a place right on the water called the Grand View Hotel. Meals were included. And all expenses.
“It sounds fabulous,” I said. “I’d love to do it.”
“Terrific!” cried Caleb. “Wonderful! Now if I could just get some—”
“But you see,” I added, interrupting. “It’s a little hard for me to travel. I have a son who’s five. It’s just the two of us.”
“Could you bring him?” asked Caleb.
“Well, I could, but I wouldn’t get much work done.”
Caleb laughed. “I know the feeling. My daughters are eight and six. Does he have a spring vacation?”
“I think so,” I said, “but I’m not sure which week.”
“If he’s on vacation the same week our kids are, the Block Island School runs a full-day drama camp—from nine to six.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. They do a musical every year. I hear this year it’s Grease.”
“He’d love it!”
So that’s how, on a Saturday in April, Henry and I happened to be making a bone-chilling journey across Block Island Sound. We’d been warmer that day back in January, when, entirely pleased with myself for coming up with eight thousand dollars’ worth of work (well, all right, saying yes to eight thousand dollars’ worth of work), I blew off the day and took Henry sledding. We brought a pack of people home with us, kids and parents, ten or eleven in all. We got pizzas and movies and beer for the grown-ups, and it was great, even if it did take me three days to get the apartment back to normal.
So in the end, at least that day, I got to be a pretty fair mom. So much of it depends on luck.
It was just too cold to stay up on the deck, so we went inside to the snack bar. I was glad that the trip to the island only took an hour, because I couldn’t stop thinking of all those people on a boat much like this one, turned out onto the seas in frigid weather. Inside, I tried to talk Henry into having a cup of chili, but he wanted an ice cream bar. I guess that’s one of the differences between being five and being twenty-nine: at five, freezing temperatures don’t keep you from wanting ice cream.
It being early in the season, there weren’t many people on the ferry. There were several ghosts, though, and the one who caught my attention was the dim and faded spirit of an old man, dressed as though he’d spent his earthly days at sea. He wore hip-high waders and an oilskin jacket and cap, and he stood near the captain’s booth, his eyes trained on the horizon. At one point, he glanced back at Henry and me, but I didn’t make eye contact. I couldn’t get through my day if I made myself and my abilities known to every ghost who crossed my path. It would be like stopping every stranger you met on the street and offering to help them with their personal problems—and having them accept. Shortly, the old spirit returned his gaze to the sea, assuming that I, like every other living person he’d come across since he’d passed out of this life, could neither see, nor hear, nor communicate with him.
How wrong he was.
I can see ghosts and talk to them, and I guess I always could. Earthbound spirits, the kind I can see and speak with, are the ghosts of people who have died, but who haven’t been able to take their final leave of people, places, or objects they loved in life. Some spirits have special missions to which they’re devoted that keep them here in the land of the living: victims of violent crime who want their attackers caught, or parents of young children who just can’t bear to walk through that shining doorway and leave their babies behind.
Sometimes I try to think back to when I was really little, and to figure out which of the people in my earliest memories were ghosts rather than living human beings. Some of them certainly were, in those years before Nona, my grandmother, realized that I had inherited her ability to communicate with the departed.
I was four years old when she figured it out. It was an afternoon in June, and I was waiting for my father to come pick me up from my grandmother’s house. My mother had died when I was a baby. Pushing me in a stroller, she’d stepped off a curb near my grandmother’s house and a car had come out of nowhere, driven by a guy who’d just left a bar across town. In her last act on earth, she pushed me out of the path of the car, or I would probably have died with her.
My father raised me and my brothers, Joe and Jay. He was a champ, Dad was; born in Ireland, he believed in getting on with things. But I think he felt more comfortable hanging out with the boys, so I spent a lot of time with my mother’s mother. Having a little girl around probably helped her, too. When my mother died, Nona lost her only child.
Anyway, I remember the afternoon perfectly. Nona was in the kitchen making sauce, and I had the contents of her button box spread out on the dining room table. I loved to play with that box. It was filled with hundreds of buttons: new leather ones still attached to cardboard; loose sets with lavender and pink rhinestones; light yellow buttons of real bone, which made me feel a little shivery and odd as I turned them over and over in my palm.
That was when the man appeared, when I was looking at the bone buttons and wondering what kind of animals they had come from.
“Hello, there,” he said, in a language that was not English, but that I could understand perfectly anyway.
I looked up. Where had he come from? I hadn’t heard the door open or close. I hadn’t heard Nona talking to anyone. He looked gray and shadowy, so I knew that he was one of those people, that other category of being I had seen and spoken with all my life.
He and I didn’t converse out loud. I could hear what he was thinking, and he could hear my thoughts, and it felt perfectly normal for us to communicate in silence. The way I understood it, there were people you spoke with and people you thought with. It was how the world worked, one of those crazy things a kid just had to accept, like daylight and darkness alternating, and the necessity of brushing your teeth before bed. As any child would, I assumed that everyone interacted with two categories of beings: regular people like me and Nona and Dad, and Joe and Jay, and those other ones, the ones you could almost see through.
Toward the end of our exchange, I must have spoken out loud. I remember him asking me if I knew how to play any songs on Nona’s piano. I told him that I could play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” but that what I really wanted was a trumpet.
“What?” Nona called from the kitchen.
“A trumpet,” I yelled back, sifting through the box to see if I could find the eighth bone button that would complete the set.
“What about a trumpet?” Nona responded.
“I want one,” I hollered.
I heard one of Nona’s little laughs, the one that meant, Dream on.
At this, the man smiled, but at the sound of her footsteps clicking across the kitchen floor, he faded into the air. When Nona appeared at the doorway, I did what the man had asked me to do: I told my grandmother that Vinny had come to say good-bye.
“Vinny?” Nona said. “What are you talking about?”
“Vinny,” I said. I was already annoyed with her about her attitude toward the trumpet, and now she was making me repeat myself. “From Italy.”
Nona wiped her hands on her apron and sat down.
“Vinny was here?” she whispered.
That seemed so obvious, I didn’t respond right away. Where was that last button?
Nona pulled the box away.
“Hey!” I said, pulling it back.
“Anza!” she said sharply. “Look at me!”
She only used that tone of voice when she really meant business. I slumped down
in my chair.
“What?” I said.
“What did Vinny say?” she asked me quietly.
“He said you were his favorite girl. He said—Lola made it to age sixteen. Who’s Lola?”
“A puppy,” whispered Nona, her eyes now looking the way they looked whenever we talked about my mother.
A little while later, when I was still watching out the window for Dad, a phone call came from her cousin in Palermo, confirming what Nona already knew: Vinny Sottosanto, the love of my grandmother’s teenage life, whom she had not been allowed to marry, had died earlier that afternoon of a massive stroke.
I didn’t know a lot about death, but I knew more than most four-year-olds. I knew for sure than when a person was gone, she was gone.
“But he was here,” I said. “I talked to him.”
“He was,” my grandmother said. “You did.”
Chapter Two
A THIN SWATH OF damp, russet sand lay to the right of the Old Harbor ferry landing, across the road and just up the boulevard from the Grand View Hotel. Henry couldn’t wait to get across the parking lot and down onto the “beach,” so he ran off ahead while I took a deep breath and gazed around at the quiet loveliness of the island. I felt as though we had not so much ridden a ferry to a vacation destination as transported ourselves back a few decades, if not a century. The streets were nearly empty; an old red pickup was the only vehicle on the road. I heard, far off, the low sounds of a radio playing some kind of dinnertime jazz, the sort that went along with Manhattans and taffeta dresses. I could well believe that here, people painting walls and building bookcases might listen to music like that, and not the sordid invective of AM talk-radio shock jocks.
The sky was the dim blue of a robin’s egg. I looked back out across the expanse of churning indigo that we had just crossed and offered up a little whisper of gratitude to the Man, or Woman, upstairs. Clouds were scuttering across the line of the horizon as though chased by fierce and invisible breezes. The sight brought to mind an illustration I remembered from childhood, from a book I had of Aesop’s fables. The Wind—in that picture, locked in an epic battle with the Sun—looked just like Santa Claus, with white curls and a beard and huge cheeks puffed out like a tuba player’s. Gales of blustery force curled out in swirls from his angry lips.
The Ice Cradle Page 1
