The Ice Cradle

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  “Don’t things always go over budget?”

  “Yeah, sure, and we’ll save money in the long run.”

  “We hope!” Lauren added. “Half the island turned up at the open house. The real old-timers were the ones who stayed the longest, believe it or not. They couldn’t get enough of the new technologies, inspecting the solar panels, checking out all the energy-efficient materials. I was really surprised.”

  “It makes sense, though,” Mark said. “They’re invested in the island, and not just here on the weekends or for a week in the summer. They’ve seen the changes happening over their lifetimes.”

  “To be fair, though,” Lauren said, “everybody cares about the island. There are just different ideas about what we should do, and people worry about the impact on tourism of some of the proposed changes.”

  “What changes?” I asked.

  Lauren shot Mark a look. “There’s an initiative to build an offshore wind farm. Mark’s the head of the committee. The debate’s been pretty spirited.”

  “Spirited?” Mark said.

  “Lively?” Lauren asked.

  “How about ugly?”

  “Energetic,” she declared.

  “Vicious,” he said.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the little ghost. I am able to hear what ghosts are thinking, but they don’t usually think about their own names. The little ghost might have been used to young children being aware of her, but she seemed shocked that I could see her. Henry answered my question before she could recover her composure and speak.

  “Vivi.”

  She had followed us up the stairs and into our room. It was nearly nine o’clock, time for Henry to go to bed, but Vivi showed no sign of being aware that she was expected to leave. I had no one but myself to blame for this, of course, given that I had let her curl up in my lap the previous night.

  “Is that a nickname?” I asked her.

  She stared at me and said nothing. I tried again.

  “What’s your real name?”

  After a pause, she floated over to Henry and whispered in his ear.

  “Viveka,” said Henry.

  “And what’s your last name?”

  She whispered again, and Henry said, “Riegler.”

  “Viveka Riegler,” I said. “That’s a pretty name.”

  She stuck out her tongue.

  “Why are you sticking your tongue out at me?”

  She stuck it out again.

  “Okay, Vivi,” I said, sighing. “I think we’ve all had a very long day. I know Henry’s tired.”

  “No, I’m not,” said Henry.

  “Well, I am, and we all have to get up very early tomorrow. So Vivi, honey, maybe it’s time for you to go back to—”

  I broke off. To where? The hallway? The attic? Her cubby under the stairs? The truth was, I had no idea where this kid went when she wasn’t with us.

  Vivi glared at me, her skinny little arms crossed angrily.

  “Can she sleep over?” Henry asked. “Could you ask her mom?”

  Could I ask her mom? Okay, so this meant that Henry believed Vivi had a mom, either here on the premises or, possibly, reachable by phone. That indicated that Vivi seemed like a normal kid to him, a kid whose mother, like any other parent, would or would not grant permission for a last-minute sleepover. So far, this hadn’t given me any new information.

  “You know,” I said, “I’m not sure tonight’s the best night.”

  Vivi stamped her little foot and scowled at me defiantly.

  “Why not?” Henry whined petulantly. “You said …”

  “I said what?”

  “You said it was vacation.”

  I sighed. “We still have to get up early, honey. You’ve got that car to paint.”

  “Greased Lightnin’,” he said edgily. “We’ll go to sleep right away, I promise.”

  I knew how the night would go. Just as it usually went when Delia and Nell, Henry’s half sisters, ages four and three, spent the night: there would be laughing and whispering followed by tickling and kicking followed by fighting and crying.

  Now I was the one feeling irrational. There was no reason to feel anxious about this little sprite, but I just didn’t like the schizophrenic vibe she was sending off: curling up in my lap one minute and acting devilish and fresh the next.

  Like most children her age, I reminded myself.

  I understood. I did. She was desperate and lonely, and she had finally found a playmate her age, a playmate who could actually see her and talk to her. Not to mention a mother-type person who had let her curl up in her lap.

  And now the person who had been nice to her last night was turning on her. I was saying no. No to the playmate, no to the sleepover, and no to the shelter and solace she had found in my arms. I was turning her out into the darkness.

  “Vivi,” I said quietly. “Henry’s going to hop in the tub, and maybe you and I can have a little talk.”

  “I don’t like you,” she answered, in a squeaky little voice. “You’re mean.”

  “Henry, honey, go in and run a bath. Go on.”

  “I don’t want to,” he groused.

  “Now!” I snapped, a little more fiercely than I meant to. I startled him. He got right up and went into the bathroom, and I heard the water begin to flow. I also heard him lock the door.

  “Unlock that door,” I called.

  I heard him obey. I also heard him give the door a little kick, but I decided to let that go.

  I wasn’t aware until the moment I opened my mouth that I had changed my mind: I wanted her gone, now! I wanted this much more than I wanted to find out about Henry’s paranormal abilities.

  “Vivi,” I said. “I know you must be really lonesome for your mommy and daddy. I can help you cross over and see them again. Right now. Would you like to do that? We can do it right this minute.”

  “No,” she said, pouting.

  “No?”

  “I want to play with—him. I want to stay here.”

  “Well, you can’t, honey. Your mommy and daddy really miss you, and they’ve been waiting a long, long time to see you. I want you to look over at that door.”

  Vivi refused to turn her head, but I went ahead anyway, confident that she would be mesmerized by the sight of the glowing doorway and would, upon seeing it, instantly change her mind and hurry toward the light.

  I closed my eyes and imagined the light burning warmly and brightly inside me. I pulled the glow upward and outward and opened my eyes, and now the blinding beams of light from the other side were filling the room, and the door to the other side was right there, superimposed on the doorway to the hall. It was less than five feet away from us, just waiting for Vivi to walk through it.

  “Look, honey,” I said. “Everyone you love is right through that door. Look! Look at the light! Go ahead! Maybe you’ll see your mommy. Or your daddy.”

  She wanted to look, I could tell, but she refused to turn her head. I could see how hard she was working to control her own curiosity and longing. But she didn’t like me. She had liked me last night, but now she didn’t, and she wasn’t going to give me the satisfaction of doing anything I asked her to do. Even at the cost of her own happiness.

  “Sweetie,” I said. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. I really and truly am. I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to be lonesome anymore.”

  “Liar!” she said. “You want me to go away.”

  I sighed. It was true. If I could have picked her up bodily, carried her over to the door of white light, and tossed her through it, I would have. But you can’t pick up a ghost.

  “How about we just look?” I suggested. “You don’t have to go through if you don’t want to, but we could just walk over to that door and have a little peek. See who we see.” I winked, hoping my enthusiasm would be infectious.

  It wasn’t.

  Fairly quivering with the effort required to resist my pleas, she shook her head angrily and disappeared. I had no choice but
to close the shining door.

  I don’t know what woke me up.

  I had been having a crazy dream about popping popcorn in my old dorm room. I had poured in too many kernels, and I was watching with horror as the volume of popped corn grew and grew, lifting the lid right off my old Revere Ware pan. And then there was all this noise in the hall; people were shouting, and people outside in the courtyard were yelling, and it was all because I’d been popping the corn on an illegal hot plate. I knew I was going to get busted.

  There was the sound of shattering glass, and I opened my eyes.

  The room was dark, but I could still hear the popping and crackling. I threw off the covers and stumbled over to the other bed, where Henry was sprawled out, sound asleep. I pulled back the heavy damask drapes and peered out in horror.

  The crackling was real. The shouting was real. The sky was an eerie melon color, and I didn’t know whether to stay or flee.

  The barn behind the inn was on fire.

  Chapter Seven

  I DRESSED AS QUICKLY as I could. I was torn about whether to wake Henry, who hadn’t been roused by the sounds and light in back of the house. I wanted to help Lauren and Mark if I could, and that would be hard with a five-year-old in the mix. On the other hand, I didn’t want Henry to be terrified if he woke up alone in the room and opened the curtains to discover the barn in flames. Factoring in how soundly he usually sleeps, I decided to take my chances. I slipped into my jeans and boots and pulled a sweater over my head, then closed the drapes tightly and tiptoed into the hall. There, I broke into a run.

  Vivi. It was all I could think. Furious at being banished from our room, I theorized, she had found a way to focus her anger on the decrepit old wiring in the barn, sending enough energy frizzing through a frayed antique tangle to cause sparking. That’s all it would have taken, really. I’d seen the barn’s interior a few hours earlier, when Henry and Mark had been scaling the fish, and it abounded with the usual clutter found in most people’s basements and garages: firewood, half-empty cans of paint, doors removed from their original locations, furniture awaiting refinishing or repair.

  Plans for restoring the hundred-year-old barn had fallen by the wayside as the costs of renovating the inn had skyrocketed, Lauren and Mark had told me over dinner. They’d had to settle, temporarily, for installing a new set of doors and freshening the clapboards with a new coat of paint.

  Now, the stained oak doors stood open on their hinges. Mark and a couple of men who had arrived on the scene were using garden hoses and buckets of water to try to keep the flames from spreading. It didn’t take a trained observer to perceive that the blaze was getting away from them.

  “Where’s the fire department?” I asked Lauren, who was pacing in her bathrobe on the grass behind the house. For an instant, I wondered if there was a fire department.

  “On their way,” she said, just as I heard the first sirens in the distance. “It’s all volunteers. They have to get to the station from their homes.”

  I put my arm around her. She was shivering. I know that pregnancy doesn’t make a woman frail or ill, but I still didn’t feel that Lauren should be out here in her bare feet, breathing in all the smoke.

  “You should go inside,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Really. Think of the baby. There’s nothing you can do out here.”

  She shook her head firmly.

  I broke away and moved toward the barn, and as I reached its doors, I could see flames beginning to lick up three of the four interior walls. The men seemed to have tapped all the water sources, so I ducked inside the barn, hoping I could save some objects by pulling them out onto the grass.

  “No!” Mark shouted, seeing me. “Get out!”

  “I’m fine.” I grabbed a chair by its arms and hurried it out to the side lawn. Over the next few minutes, I was able to pull or push out five more chairs, a snowblower, a lawn mower, three tables—one of which weighed a ton—two bicycles, and half a dozen huge, expensive-looking ceramic pots. These I had to roll.

  When the firefighters arrived in two trucks, tapped a hydrant, and brought in the heavy hoses, we were all ordered to get back. Mark crossed the grass, stood behind Lauren, and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. The other men drifted into the clusters of horrified neighbors who had gathered at the edges of the property.

  I retreated to the back steps but had to move a short time later, when the firefighters decided to hose down the stairs and the exterior of the inn. This seemed overly cautious to me. I highly doubted that a stray spark, having jumped a distance of some three hundred feet, would have been hot enough to set the inn on fire, but what did I know? I scooted out of the way and joined an older couple lingering on the far lawn by a hedge of hydrangea bushes.

  “Terrible,” I said.

  “Awful,” said the woman, who was wearing a pink flowered nightgown under her trench coat. “I heard a whole string of explosions. Woke me right up. Course I don’t sleep much. Bing bing bing bing! That’s what it sounded like.”

  “Spray cans,” mumbled the man.

  “What?” the woman asked. She nodded at me and said, “I’m Mina Hansen. We live over there.” Mina pointed to a shingled cottage tucked back behind the barn. Unlike the back steps, the cottage appeared to be well within reach of a stray spark, and I wondered why the firefighters weren’t turning their hoses in that direction.

  “Aerosol cans going off,” said the man.

  “I’m Anza O’Malley,” I offered. “I’m a guest here.”

  “You think that’s what exploded?” Mina asked. For my benefit she added, “This is my husband, Frank.”

  “I know damn well it is,” said Frank.

  “Frank was a volunteer firefighter for thirty-one years,” explained Mina.

  “Thirty-two,” he corrected.

  “He just retired last year.”

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” Frank went on. “There’s something fishy about this fire.”

  Yeah, no kidding, I thought. “You think it could have been—electrical? The wiring out there must be pretty old.”

  “Electrical fires don’t usually start by themselves,” Frank explained.

  It might have had a little help, I thought.

  “Not in the middle of the night, anyway,” he continued. “Not when everything’s turned off. Now, if you left your clothes dryer running, say you turned it on before you went to bed, and you had a big backup of lint in there …”

  “I’m good about lint,” I answered reflexively and immediately wondered why in the world I had said it. And just as quickly I realized that Frank reminded me a lot of my dad, who’d always been a bear about dryer lint.

  “You’ve got to clean the screen off every time,” Frank said, before a crash and some shouts drew our attention back to the barn. Something had happened inside. Something had fallen or broken. Nevertheless, the men and two women handling the hoses seemed to be getting the fire under control.

  “You smell anything?” asked Frank.

  Mina shook her head. I mostly smelled smoke, but I took another deep breath.

  “Gasoline?” I asked.

  Frank nodded and set off along the line of bushes. He motioned for us to follow and we did, moving deeper into the lot until Frank paused under one of the pear trees. From our new position, we had a clear view into the barn.

  “See how orange those flames are?” he asked. “See that black, black smoke?”

  He was right. The flames were the color of tangerines, not the washed-out yellow of fireplace blazes. And the smoke was pluming up and out in big black clouds.

  “What would cause that?” I asked.

  “Accelerants,” he replied. “No question.”

  “You think the fire was set?” Mina whispered.

  “Not a doubt in my mind,” said Frank.

  It was nearly three in the morning. Henry was still asleep, and since the trucks and the neighbors had all departed, and the lapping of the waves was
the only sound in the air, it seemed likely that he would slumber on until daybreak.

  I had finally gotten Lauren to come inside, and now she sat wrapped in an afghan at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of chamomile tea. Mark had cracked open a beer, not undeserved under the circumstances, I thought, but after taking one sip, he left it sitting untouched on the table. One of Mark’s closest friends, the fisherman who’d caught the bass we’d had for dinner, had arrived in his pickup just as the hoses were being drained and the bystanders were dispersing. The wife of one of the volunteer firefighters had alerted him to the alarm, knowing that he was close to Lauren and Mark. Alberto Azevedo, who went by Bert, had now joined us in the kitchen for the gloomy postmortem.

  Bert asked for tea rather than beer, which surprised me, given that he was all decked out in bulky sweaters and heavyweight canvas. He definitely struck me as a beer guy. With his curly black hair and sunburned good looks, he could have walked right out of one of those offensive high-fashion spreads in which a supermodel is posed in a far-flung location among exotic “natives” in their actual clothes, or lack of them.

  How do they get away with those ads? I wondered as I plopped a peppermint tea bag into a stoneware mug and poured in boiling water. What were we supposed to make of a woman dressed, or semi-undressed, for the red carpet, mugging for the camera before a council of Zulu warriors or from the deck of a wind-tossed fishing boat?

  “Thanks,” said Bert.

  I nodded and sat back down. Why in the world was I thinking of Bert on the deck of a wind-tossed fishing boat with a woman in a state of elegant undress? This was in such poor taste. Lauren and Mark’s barn had practically burned down.

  “At least no one was hurt,” said Mark.

  “That’s all that really matters,” said Lauren.

  It was one of those bland, soothing things that people always say, and it was true, of course. But it wasn’t completely true. Other things did matter. They mattered a lot. Like how much the repairs would cost and how much damage the old structure had sustained. Precious objects were now soaked and sooty, and no one had a clue as to where Frances had gone. They hadn’t found the remains of the portly old feline, thank goodness, but who knew what daylight would reveal?