The Ice Cradle

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  “Lighthouse?” Gavin said.

  The other man stood up and scowled, as though a foul odor had just reached his nostrils. “No. Why?”

  “The Southeast Lighthouse?”

  Gavin shook his head. I definitely had their attention now.

  “Well, I just assumed—because everyone on the island knows it’s haunted. Isn’t it, Mark?”

  I tried to make my eyes communicate the message: Say yes! I had no idea if Lauren had told him about my paranormal abilities, but I was sure she’d kept her promise not to tell anyone else.

  “Uh, yeah,” Mark said, unconvincingly. “Yeah, it is. Absolutely!” He had a dazed look on his face. He obviously didn’t know where this was going, but he was doing his best.

  “I could take you there if you like,” I offered.

  Gavin looked at Dayne, who shrugged.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Dayne said. “Depending on what we get tonight. But thanks.”

  “Is it open on Sundays?” I asked Mark, stalling for time.

  “It’s not open for tours until after sometime this summer,” he answered. “But we could probably get Chief McGill to unlock it.”

  “Could you?” I asked. “Because it would be a shame for them to miss it, don’t you think?”

  Gavin and Dayne had gone back to their unloading, so I nodded furiously at Mark, hoping to clue him in.

  “It would, yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely!”

  I watched with some amazement the assortment of boxes being unloaded. If I wasn’t going to get Gavin and Dayne to the lighthouse immediately, I wished they’d go indoors as soon as possible. For all I knew, the renegade spirits had a sentry keeping watch, letting them know when the television team arrived.

  “Can I help you carry something?” I asked.

  “No, we’re fine.”

  “Let me help,” I said, grabbing two boxes before anyone could protest. “I’m going in anyway.”

  A half hour later, the equipment was all cabled up and spread out in the room where Henry had watched the Three Stooges. This room had been designated the duo’s base of operations. In the adjoining living area, I was the one playing sentry. I couldn’t allow a ghost near their equipment, even if it meant revealing myself to any spirit that came snooping. I was also trying to figure out what to do, having failed completely in my effort to interest them in a visit to the lighthouse.

  Outside, in the space of two hours, the weather had gone from cool and overcast to cold and misty, and from the look of the funnel clouds on the horizon, a storm was heading our way. Churning whitecaps were visible across the boulevard, and seeing them, I stepped over the line separating feeling on edge from being wildly anxious. How in the name of heaven was I going to pull this off?

  At any moment, Duffield or any of the ghosts planning tonight’s invasion might arrive on the scene and set off the heat and infrared sensors. To maximize the show’s spooky appeal, Gavin and Dayne usually waited for darkness to fall before beginning their movements about a building, but I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for tonight.

  Long before that, any ghost still determined to bring down Mark and Lauren could be here. They could show up at any minute, and the machines in the next room would go off, alerting the Australians. I didn’t even want to imagine it. And to make the situation even more unmanageable, Henry would soon be back underfoot.

  Henry! How was I going to get to the play, with all that was going on? It didn’t start until four, so I still had a little time, but I had to get Dayne and Gavin to the lighthouse soon, because no matter what, I couldn’t not show up for Henry’s play! He’d be crushed! He’d never forgive me, and I’d never forgive myself. Since I might not be taking any money for the work I was doing—I couldn’t, in good conscience, not if my efforts would help defeat the wind farm—the play might end up being the only good thing that came out of this week. Oh, and meeting Bert.

  My anxiety moved toward alarm. I was practically hyperventilating as I imagined myself in the thick of things at the lighthouse as the minute hand clicked around a clock face, heading toward twelve, and four o’clock. What would I do? I had to do something to get this show on the road. Now!

  Then I had my brainstorm. Vivi!

  My original plan had been to keep her out of the way until Sunday morning, when I hoped to convince Emilia to take both children into the white light. How I was going to do this—Emilia was stark raving mad, after all—had yet to be determined. Like much of what I was up to right now, crossing my fingers and making everything up on the fly, this was nothing but a half-baked scheme waiting for a stroke of inspiration. One that might never come.

  But this one had! I looked out the front window to be sure there wasn’t a squadron of phantoms marching right up the front sidewalk. Then I hurried out to the barn. Vivi was sitting on Baden’s lap, and he was in the middle of explaining how the children in his family used to take turns cranking homemade ice cream. Vivi was entranced. They both looked remarkably happy, and given how seldom this could be said of either of them, I hated to break things up. But I had to pull Vivi away. I also gave Baden the nod. It was time to get the ghosts to the lighthouse!

  The first raindrops were falling as Vivi and I walked back to the house. To her credit, she listened carefully as I outlined my idea. I noticed that Lauren and Mark’s car was gone from the driveway, and I hadn’t seen Lauren when I passed through the kitchen. This was probably just as well. I certainly didn’t want them at the lighthouse when everything was happening, and the fewer people I had to explain my actions to, the better.

  Vivi and I entered the living room. I pointed into the adjoining room, where Gavin and Dayne were messing around with their equipment, and Vivi stepped into the space. I immediately heard something that sounded like a Geiger counter start to click, and there was a whining whir. I couldn’t hear what the two of them were saying, but chairs scraped and something fell over and I heard the clicking intensify. It sounded like a frantic scramble in there. Vivi peeked out, and I gestured for her to move slowly, very slowly, into the living room. She approached me one step at a time.

  Right behind her were Dayne and Gavin, struggling to get their equipment in place. Dayne was holding a video camera on his shoulder and attempting to put on headphones. Gavin was waving two devices around in the air; beeps and clicks and whirs were more and less audible, depending on how close the equipment was to Vivi.

  I looked up from the magazine I had just grabbed from the chair into which I had just plopped.

  “What’s going on?” I asked innocently.

  Gavin didn’t respond. Instead, he looked right into the camera and said, “We’ve just arrived on historic Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island. And we’ve just been surprised by our very first ghost.”

  Probably is your first ghost, I thought meanly.

  I stood up and pretended to be startled as they moved through the living room, then I followed them out the front door. Vivi was walking slowly, as I had instructed, so the instruments would track her progress, and I whispered a quick prayer that she had both the focus and the will to pull this off and lead them all the way to the lighthouse.

  Had there been any traffic to speak of, they would have made for a curious sight, hurrying along the street in the increasingly heavy rain, Gavin aiming his equipment at the air and Dayne attempting to capture everything on video. Vivi was skipping merrily, moving fast—almost too fast. But she did understand what she had to do: stay close enough to all of us that her presence kept the needles and sensors activated. When she noticed that Gavin and Dayne had paused and were looking around in bafflement, she would circle back around and get the sensors dancing again. The role was tailor-made for her and must have fulfilled her deepest fantasy: to be the one with all the power, leading live human adults around by their noses.

  Gavin and Dayne paid no attention to me, so I grabbed an umbrella from the stand beside the door and slipped along behind them quietly, just watching the scene unfold. After a
few minutes, the lighthouse came into view, just as Vivi seemed to be tiring of the parade. Then I saw Baden, approaching us as swiftly as a wave. He took Vivi’s hand, and they stood there in the middle of the street, giving Gavin and Dayne plenty of time to locate them. The detectors went into overdrive when they met the force field surrounding the two spirits, just as I had seen the equipment do on the television show when I could see no ghosts at all. Clearly, Gavin and Dayne knew how to trip these devices for manufactured thrills, but the gizmos also worked in the presence of real ghosts.

  I stumbled on a pothole. The rain was coming down hard now, and I wondered if the camera might actually pick up a ghostly image. It was fairly unlikely, but it sometimes did happen: blurs of white on the edges of the frame, cloudy presences of which the live people in the photograph or film were unaware.

  Soon I found myself wishing that the video could record images, because what awaited us not a hundred yards ahead was a scene, I was sure, unlike any that had ever been broadcast on the series. Even I felt the hairs on the back of my neck begin to prickle. My heart rate picked up at just about the same time that the equipment in Gavin’s hands started to go crazy. I was drenched now and freezing; an icy wind was whipping the waves into froth, and the rain was coming down in sheets.

  The scene before us was like something out of Dante. Everywhere I looked were grim and doleful phantoms, and few were animated, as some had been at the meeting last night. There were nearly two dozen, I guessed, and their dress and general appearance reflected the tortured manner in which each one had died, frozen in the lifeboats, trapped in the berth of a swiftly sinking vessel, cast into the frigid sea, all in the grip of overwhelming terror. Here, this afternoon, as the storm waves crashed against the rocks, sending sprays of mist skyward, they presented themselves silently and stoically as Baden and Vivi led Gavin, Dayne, and me into their very midst.

  First one, then a few, then a number moved toward us, and soon they encircled our little group. I heard a low moan escape from one of the older spirits, a man in a top hat at the back of the group, and it registered on one of the sensors. Dayne had been keeping up a running commentary, pretty much since we’d left the Grand View, but he suddenly went silent as the spirits drew tighter and tighter around us, enclosing us in a little circle about ten feet across.

  “Did you see that?” I said to Gavin, pointing to the sensor that was picking up the sound. I looked up and caught the gazes of a number of the spirits, who were staring at me, just waiting for some kind of cue. “The sensor picked up a sound!”

  Well, that was the cue they needed. They instantly broke out into clamorous wailing and moaning, shrieking and screaming like nobody’s business. Dayne stared at his equipment, unable to believe what the gauges were doing, as the other box he was carrying began to emit a piercing wail and the clicking kicked into what sounded like machine-gun patter. The boxes were practically jumping in his hands, and Gavin looked so pale and was suddenly so motionless that I thought he might be having a stroke.

  “Gavin?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Gavin had squatted down in the mud and was fiddling around with one of the pieces of equipment. Dayne kept the lens focused on the dials and needles while Gavin attempted to describe what was happening. Then, suddenly, Dayne trained his lens on something else. I don’t know if the camera had picked up a shadow or a glow, but he began to walk slowly toward the edge of the breakwater, staring through the lens the whole time.

  “Be careful!” I said when his foot slipped on a slimy rock. I didn’t like what was happening. Some of the spirits were leading Gavin toward the edge where the land dropped off abruptly, and he was now within a few feet of that drop. In three or four more steps, if he didn’t pay attention to where he was walking rather than to the shot he was getting, he would go tumbling onto the craggy boulders below, a drop of at least fifty feet.

  “Stop!” I called. “Stop!”

  The camera had to have picked up the image of a ghost, for Dayne was so mesmerized by the image in the frame that he had absolutely no idea of the imminent danger he was in.

  I flew to my feet and raced toward him, reaching the parapet just as he stepped off with his right foot and began to tumble obliquely. I caught hold of his left arm as he tumbled, half sideways and half forward, and I was able to keep him from slipping down onto the rocks.

  Not so the camera. It flew off his shoulder and bumped heavily down from rock to rock, landing, finally, in the churning black sea.

  I wish I could share with you the rich, imaginative, and eye-opening string of Australian curses and universally cherished invectives that followed, involving mothers, Australian mammals, personal hygiene habits, and psychiatric diagnoses. The ghosts cheered wildly, inaudible to everyone but me.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  WE WERE BARELY through the opening number of Grease when my cell phone started to vibrate. I felt hugely guilty squeezing past the knees of the performers’ families and friends, but a peek at my phone had told me that it was Dec calling, and I knew that if I didn’t talk to him now, it might be late tonight if not tomorrow before I could. Once he was at work, he often couldn’t return a call for hours. Besides, according to the program, Henry wouldn’t be onstage for a while.

  I caught the call just before it went to voice mail.

  “Dec!”

  “Hey.”

  “How are you?”

  “Fine. Yeah, so—looks like the girl has some history.”

  “What kind of history?”

  “Arson, breaking and entering, destruction of private property. Given the locations and nature of the crimes, she’s probably got some connection with the Oceanic Liberation Front.”

  “What the heck is that?” I asked.

  “You got a computer handy?”

  “No! I’m at Henry’s play! Who are they?”

  “Eco-terrorists. They commit acts of violence against property. Usually arson, but sometimes they sabotage equipment in buildings that are unstaffed. They don’t harm people or animals.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “For political reasons. To stand up for the environment.”

  “They want to burn buildings down?”

  “No, no, it’s … symbolic. They’re trying to make a point. The target represents something that’s a threat to the health of the oceans. Like companies that dump chemicals into streams and rivers, chemicals that eventually wind up in the sea basin.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?” Dec asked.

  “If she wanted to protect the oceans from harm, she’d be in favor of the wind farm.”

  I heard Dec sigh. “Anza, I’m on the clock here—I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes. These are the facts; what they add up to is a different question.”

  “I know, I know. Thanks!”

  “Did you get that license number?”

  “No, sorry. Just one question—should I tell this to the cops down here?”

  “I’ll give them a heads-up.”

  “You will?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thanks, Dec. I really appreciate it.”

  “No problem. See you soon.”

  We hung up. I didn’t feel like crawling back across the aisle to where I’d been sitting, so I took a seat way in the back.

  The sight of Henry in costume gave me a shock. It was not just that his hair was slicked back and the sleeves of his T-shirt were rolled up (that had better not be a real cigarette pack in there!), or that he’d been made to look like a miniature teenager. It was that he had … attitude: hip-swinging, eye-winking attitude. He was a diminutive version of the slick, sly teenager I hoped he would never become.

  Fortunately, this sneering facade dissolved as soon as Henry began to dance. And there was the Ellen I’d heard so much about, in all her shorn and six-year-old insouciance. I had to hand it to them. They might not have followed the beat of the music, and they sure weren’t in sync with all the other
dancers, but their performance was breathtakingly fearless and full of confident bravado. The audience seemed to hold its collective breath; where could this zealous combination of ineptitude and pluck end up, but in disaster?

  It ended in triumph, at least from Henry and Ellen’s point of view. For three or four minutes, for better or worse, they literally stole the show.

  Gavin and Dayne spent the rest of the evening trying to repair their camera, which they were finally able to recover from the lighthouse rocks. They took hair dryers to the innards of some of the other equipment, which, in their zeal not to miss the moment unfolding when Vivi led them out of the house, they’d neglected to protect properly against the rain. They opened all the cases and partially disassembled the internal works, and it was a good thing they did, because we were visited just after seven o’clock by the dogged Mr. Duffield and a ragtag gang of his followers. Had any of the equipment been working and on, our worst fears might have been realized.

  I was sitting in the dining room with the inn’s first actual guests, two retired couples from Ontario who had been on the ferry with Mark, Gavin, and Dayne. As they had originally planned to visit Nantucket and had made an impulsive decision to take in Block Island first, they hadn’t made a room reservation when they fell into conversation with Mark on the boat. That was how they ended up here. And that was why Lauren had been absent when everything was happening with Vivi and the ghost detectives; she’d run out to shop for welcome, but unexpected, guests.

  Duffield, thwarted in his effort to rouse any reaction at all from the distracted Australians, had stormed right into the dining room and bellowed at me. I wasn’t actually eating dinner—Bert and Aitana were coming over later and I was planning to eat with them and our hosts—but one of the guests had gone to Harvard and was anxious to chat with me about Cambridge. I’d agreed to join them for a glass of wine when in marched Duffield.