The Ice Cradle

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  Then there was that little matter of arson. For nauseatingly selfish reasons, I sort of hoped that Frank was right. It was awful to contemplate the possibility that my own self-centeredness had prompted Vivi to act out in childish fury and ignite the blaze. I wondered if anyone had mentioned to Mark the possibility that the fire had been set.

  “I’ve never seen flames that color,” I said, hoping this comment might lead to the subject. “And all that black smoke.”

  “That’s my fault,” said Mark. “I had a couple of cans of gas out there, for the lawn mower and the snowblower. It’s the first thing I thought of when I saw the flames, how stupid I’d been to leave gasoline lying around.”

  “Heck,” said Bert. “Everybody does it. Or worse.”

  Mark shook his head. “I didn’t dare go near them. I was afraid they’d blow up in my face.”

  “Good thinking,” said Bert.

  Lauren gave an exaggerated shiver, obviously imagining what might have been.

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “They both exploded. Didn’t you smell the gas?”

  “I did,” said Bert.

  “Me, too,” said Lauren.

  “There must have been some leakage from those old metal cans,” Mark went on, “because that whole area back there lit right up before the cans exploded. It was just after the trucks got here.”

  “So those bright orange flames came from your cans of gas?” I asked.

  Mark nodded.

  I let out a deflated sigh.

  “Well, the good news,” said Bert, “is that everything can be fixed. Lou Markham and I went around and checked the foundation, and it held up pretty well, all things considered. I don’t know about the stuff you had stored in there …”

  “A lot of it was junk,” said Lauren. “Well, not junk, but things we don’t have room for in here, stuff we just collected over the years. Some of it was nice, definitely, but the reason it was out there was because we didn’t know what to do with it.”

  “So the inn’s completely furnished?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Mark. “I was actually thinking we might have a barn sale this summer and get rid of a lot of that stuff.”

  “Oh you were, were you?” Lauren said.

  “You’re the one who hates clutter,” Mark said. “Fussy little B and Bs with doilies on all the tables.”

  “Mama?” I heard.

  It was Henry. He was standing in the doorway in his footed pajamas. His hair was sticking up in tufts, and he looked like he was about to cry.

  “I woke up,” he said.

  “Oh, honey, come here. I’m sorry. Were you scared?”

  He blinked rapidly in the bright light of the kitchen and looked around in bafflement. I put out my arms, and he padded over to where I was sitting, then crawled into my lap. He didn’t want to admit that he had been unnerved to wake up and find me gone from the room, so he buried his head in my shoulder. I took a deep breath and suddenly felt exhausted.

  I stood up. He was heavy. I wouldn’t be able to carry him this way for much longer.

  “I guess I’ll head up,” I said. “I hope you two can get some sleep.”

  Lauren and Mark nodded. “Thanks for all your help,” Mark said.

  “No problem.”

  Bert stood up. “You need a hand?” he asked.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “But thanks.”

  Bert reached over and laid a hand on Henry’s back. “Sleep tight, sailor,” he said.

  At the sound of his voice, Henry looked up.

  “See you in the morning,” I said to Lauren and Mark.

  “See you—sometime—maybe,” I said to Bert.

  “Good night,” he answered.

  “Where were you?” Henry demanded.

  “Right there in the kitchen, honey. I was just talking to Lauren and Mark.”

  “And Bert,” Henry added.

  I laid him down on his bed, disentangled the covers, and tucked him in. I hoped he would close his eyes and drift right off, but I knew this was unlikely.

  “I didn’t know where you went,” Henry said.

  “You were sound asleep. I didn’t think you’d wake up.”

  “You left me all by myself!” he whined.

  “I was only downstairs. I just had to go down for a minute.”

  “How come?”

  “I had to help Lauren with something.”

  This seemed to satisfy him momentarily. I thought I might be home free.

  “Lauren has a fat tummy,” Henry said.

  “That’s because she’s going to have a baby pretty soon.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You do? How’d you know that?”

  “Mark told me.”

  “When was this?”

  “On the boat.”

  “The boat?” I asked. “What boat?”

  “Bert’s boat.”

  “You went out on Bert’s boat?” My mind raced back to the afternoon. How long had they been gone?

  “No,” said Henry. “We just—walked over the gangplank and—”

  Henry paused. The pauses between his sentences were getting longer and longer.

  “The gangplank,” I said quietly.

  “Uh-huh,” he finally said.

  I waited a long time for him to go on. He was out.

  Chapter Eight

  NOW I WAS the one who couldn’t sleep. There’s nothing more depressing than knowing that in three or four hours, you’re going to have to be up again and functioning for a whole day and evening before you get another chance to lay down your head. But I couldn’t stop replaying the night’s events: waking from my popcorn dream to the crackling noises outside, to the chilling air and the sting of smoke in my eyes, the shocking explosions from inside the barn, and my grateful relief upon hearing the sirens drawing nearer and nearer on the boulevard.

  I am not normally troubled by insomnia, but like most people, I have an uneasy night every now and then. It usually has to do with managing to forget somehow that drinking caffeinated tea or coffee after four in the afternoon always keeps me up. So I’ve read with interest those articles that list what doesn’t help when you are wide awake in the middle of the night: continuing to toss and turn and hope for the best, glancing at the clock every two seconds and worrying about how you’re ever going to get through the next day. The experts advise getting up, changing rooms, reading for a while. Since I didn’t want to risk waking Henry again by turning on the light, I decided I’d slip downstairs and sit on the front porch for a bit. I hoped that the sound of the ocean might calm my restlessness.

  I also thought there was a chance that Vivi might be ghosting around somewhere. Admittedly, we hadn’t parted on the warmest of terms, but if she was desperate and reckless enough to wreak this kind of damage, who knew what else she was capable of doing? I had to find that devilish little minx and have a chat with her.

  It wasn’t Vivi I encountered on the porch, though; it was Baden Riegler. He appeared on the front steps just moments after I sat down in one of the rockers.

  “Hello,” he said. “It is very late.”

  “I can’t sleep,” I replied.

  “I am not surprised. Come. Let us walk.”

  I’d been about to suggest something similar, in case I wasn’t the only one still awake. That’s all I needed right now: to have to explain to Lauren or Mark why I was carrying on a conversation out here in the middle of the night with—no one. They’d had enough drama for one night.

  “I can’t go far,” I whispered. “My little boy’s asleep upstairs.”

  “Shall we walk by the water?” Baden asked.

  “It’s too cold,” I said. “Let’s go over there.”

  Baden nodded and followed me to the side yard, where two Adirondack chairs had been placed under one of the apple trees. We sat down.

  “Were you here for the fire?” I asked.

  Baden nodded gravely.

  “Do you know how i
t started?”

  “Yes,” he said politely. “But I’m still very surprised—”

  “That I can see you and talk to you?”

  “It is strange, no? Most extraordinary.”

  “I’m used to it. I’ve always been able to see and talk to spirits. But to tell you the truth, you seem a little different from most.”

  “In what way, may I ask?”

  “You’re very calm.”

  “Oh, no. No, I assure you.”

  “Well, you seem it. Most spirits are more demanding. There’s something they want very much and it’s all they can think about.”

  Baden smiled. “It is the way I was raised, perhaps; not to show everything I am feeling. To keep private what is personal.”

  I nodded. “It’s refreshing. Though I suppose that means it would be impolite of me to ask you a personal question.”

  “Not at all. Though I may choose not to answer.”

  I smiled and nodded. “Of course. It’s just that, if I knew more, I might be able to help you.”

  “Help me to do what?”

  “To cross over.”

  “To cross over to what?”

  “Well, I don’t know, to tell you the truth. I see a white light, but I can’t see into it, and I have no idea what is or isn’t on the other side of it. I probably won’t know until it’s my own time to go, but a lot of people think it’s God. On the other side.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t believe in God,” Baden said.

  “Fair enough,” I responded. “Then let me put it this way. Most spirits I’ve met really want to enter the light. You’ve seen it, I assume.”

  “Yes, I did. Long ago.”

  “And you—didn’t want to enter it?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t entirely believe him. The light was a powerful and compelling force for every single spirit I had ever encountered, whether they thought of “God” as Jesus on the cross or the old man in the white beard or four-armed Lakshmi or, more simply, the concepts of love or oneness with the universe. As far as I could tell, their personal preconceptions about God’s existence didn’t seem to matter. As soon as I was able to help them solve the problems that had stranded them in time and space, ghosts could hardly wait to go through that shining white door.

  Baden took a deep breath. “I had my own reasons, which I prefer to keep private, for not wanting to, as you say, ‘cross over’ when I could. But there’s something else that concerns me now. Something very troubling, and that I will share with you. But first, may I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you see all spirits?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know, now, would I? I see the spirits I see, but there very well could be spirits that I’m not able to see. But if I’m not able to see them, how would I know I’m not seeing them?”

  A twinkle appeared in Baden’s eyes. It seemed I had pegged him correctly as the sort of person who liked to play linguistic games and to parse the meanings of the most casual comments, things people said primarily to be polite or amiable.

  “Be that as it may,” he went on, “you are aware that there are dozens and dozens of beings like me all over this island and near the spot where we found ourselves. That night.”

  “Where the ship went down, you mean?”

  He nodded tentatively. In one other way, Baden was unlike many of the other ghosts I’ve known, nearly all of whom were acutely aware of the circumstances under which they had died. I suspected that Baden’s uncertainty had to do with the Larchmont’s having sunk in the middle of the night, when he and most of the people on board were asleep. They’d awakened into their ghostly incarnations, not sure what had actually happened to them. It probably felt as though they were trapped in a dream, a dream from which they could never awaken.

  “I’ve seen them,” I said. “They’re everywhere.” When Henry and I had walked to the lighthouse and the Mohegan Bluffs, I had seen dozens of disoriented and despairing souls wandering uncomprehendingly through their eternal night.

  “They are very unhappy,” Baden said.

  I nodded.

  “And not for the reason you think,” he went on.

  “Oh?”

  Baden nodded and let out a long sigh. He seemed to be choosing his words carefully.

  “There is a movement on the island,” he finally said, “to install what people are calling a wind farm.” Baden gestured out to sea. “Out there in the banks.”

  “I heard that, yes. I think it’s a great idea.”

  “It may or may not be. That’s of no concern to me.”

  I felt myself getting a little irritated. “Then what is?” I asked. I didn’t mean to sound snappy, but I must have, because Baden appeared startled.

  “My family. My family is all that matters to me. I have watched my brother’s great-grandson and his wife work night and day to repair this precious building, into which my brother poured his soul. But many of the spirits are furious with the boy.”

  “The boy? You mean Mark?”

  Baden nodded. “They are conspiring to drive them both off the island. Mark and his wife.”

  I was suddenly wide awake. It was as though someone had doused me with a bucket of freezing water. “What?” I said. “But why?”

  “He is determined to see the wind farm built. But the engineers have chosen the very area where the boat went down. If those windmills are erected, they will drill deep into the ocean floor. They will destroy the final resting places of everyone who went down with the ship.”

  It took me a moment to absorb what Baden had said, and when I did, I practically shuddered.

  This was bad. This was very bad.

  I remembered reading about the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir, a man-made lake that holds Boston’s water supply. Dams had been built and four towns evacuated and razed in the 1930s to create the basin for the water, billions of gallons of it, but before they let in one drop, the engineers moved the cemeteries. Thirty-four of them. Six thousand graves. I’ve never forgotten those numbers.

  Burial grounds are sacred. Granted, the undersea wreckage of the Larchmont wasn’t your average cemetery, but it was the only cemetery those poor souls had, and it deserved as much protection as that afforded Native American burial grounds, churchyards filled with unnamed slaves, and the mass graves of anonymous victims of genocide and famine.

  “You said they’re conspiring,” I went on tentatively.

  “Yes. Certain parties are aware that there is a television person coming to the inn.”

  “By parties, you mean ghosts, spirits.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re talking about the TV crew, the guys from Australia. The ‘ghost detectives.’ ”

  “I am.”

  I was beginning to catch on. Because Mark was publicly leading the wind farm initiative, the ghosts had identified him as the person on the island to target, the man responsible for the impending destruction of their communal graveyard. They hoped to defeat the wind farm proposal, and they planned to do that by driving away the man they perceived to be leading the effort.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “They know the ghost detectives are coming and they’re going to put on a real show. Haunt the daylights out of the inn.”

  “You’re very astute,” said Baden.

  “So the Grand View will come off on national television as not just haunted, but …”

  Baden was nodding.

  My mind raced ahead to envision all the things a few dozen angry, disruptive spirits could do to set off electromagnetic field meters and infrared thermometers and all the recording gizmos and wireless doodads that these Australian opportunists employed on camera. Heck, these guys found ghosts where there weren’t any! I could only imagine the red lights that would blink and the sensors that would shriek if there actually were a few dozen spirits in the house.

  And I had been worried about Vivi’s being on the premises! Suddenly, Vivi seemed like a relatively small proble
m to have.

  Then again, maybe not.

  “Wow,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Indeed,” answered the ghost.

  I couldn’t decide whether it was worth going to bed. It was nearly five o’clock now, and a thin, pale line of pink had just appeared on the horizon. The firmament above me was still slate blue, and in it, a couple of stars were shining so brightly that I thought they had to be planets. But closer to the line separating sea from sky, I began to make out tufts of violet clouds and the barest streaks of lemony light.

  I hadn’t seen a sunrise in years. The clouds, lit from underneath, from back behind the curve of the earth, were like lavender cotton candy, torn into clumps and shreds and tinged with outlines of pink. The sky behind them was streaked with shades of melon and peach, and slashes of bisque and pale turquoise portended the sky of day. The ocean, reflecting the light from above, was eerily calm and more salmon than blue. The outlines of several fishing boats were silhouetted blackly against the glowing sky.

  I took a deep breath. The air, while cool and damp, carried the slightest note of hyacinth. Soon, at least back in Cambridge, it would be heavy with the fragrances of lilacs and lilies of the valley and apple blossoms, all of them, this morning, still enclosed in tight green fists of buds.

  I had to remember to pay attention. So longingly awaited through the hard, flinty chill of January and the blizzards of February, through the slush and mud of March and the drizzling weeks of April, the blossoms and their hypnotizing scents came and went in a matter of days. You could easily miss them altogether, these quiet, precious rewards for having endured the winter.

  As the light grew and gathered around me, I vowed to take Henry to the hilly woods around Fresh Pond, carpeted by millions of lilies of the valley, or maybe to the Arnold Arboretum for the blooming of the lilacs. There was an awful lot of beauty to be seen in the world, if you only remembered to look.