Ice-Out

by Mary Casanova

  Jerry rose to his feet and crossed his arms.

  “Turn around, Jerry,” the sheriff ordered. “Hands behind your back.”

  Then he clamped handcuffs around Jerry’s wrists.

  Owen watched—their lives and futures pouring down the drain.

  “There’s one way out of this,” Kranlin said.

  Owen didn’t like the sound of that. There weren’t any good options in a situation like this. He held his breath.

  For once, Jerry didn’t say a word.

  “We know you’re working for Pengler and doing his errands for him, but he’s the one who’s making the real money. Not you boys. You’re just cogs in his well-oiled machine.”

  Owen wanted to protest. After all, Harvey Pengler had just practically forgiven the recent late payment; he’d believed in him and given him a loan to start the business.

  “So here’s your ticket,” the sheriff said. “You boys testify against Pengler, say he sent you on this mission, and you two go back to your lives. He serves time, not you.”

  “But he didn’t send me on this mission,” Jerry said. “I caught wind of this one all on my own. Thought I’d make a little extra money and—”

  “Jerry, shut up,” Owen said. Jerry wasn’t helping them out by handing over his confession on a silver platter.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the sheriff replied. “You can testify just the same. Let Pengler take the credit and blame for this one. We know it’s not your first run for him.”

  “You want us to lie,” Jerry said.

  The small room flickered from the lamp’s single flame, and shadows played off the walls and rafters.

  Owen didn’t like that Pengler hadn’t been completely up front with him about the initial order of autos, but he’d treated Owen fairly enough. Worked with him when Owen had fallen short on his first business payment. He wouldn’t lie about Pengler, no matter which side of the law he was on. It was all so damn complicated. The only thing Owen knew was that he’d made a colossal mistake tonight going out on such a shaky limb for money.

  “Toads,” Jerry said. “You’re asking us to be toads.”

  The sheriff snorted in reply.

  “Yeah, you’d be toads,” Kranlin agreed, “but you’d be free toads, not ones behind bars.”

  “Like I said,” Jerry continued, “we were just cruising the lake. Guys out for a drive.”

  “Too bad you already confessed, Jerry. Too bad for you your drive ended here,” the sheriff said. “Honestly, for your sakes, I’d rather see you keep your noses clean and do the right thing with your lives.”

  The wind picked up from the north, sending a chill down Owen’s sweaty neck and back. With both hands free, Owen did as he was ordered. He lugged crates of booze from the shack to the back of the Whiskey Six—the Studebaker he’d sold to Pengler. With each trip back and forth, he wanted to kick himself. He’d acted so sure that he wouldn’t get involved in bootlegging when he accepted the loan. Dad had been right, more than Owen cared to admit.

  As Owen carried the last crate out of the shack, the deputy followed with the lantern, which illuminated footprints in the snow across the island and away from the shack.

  When Owen loaded the last crate, he looked for the sheriff and Jerry. “Where’d they go?”

  His answer came in the form of bouncing beams of light as the sheriff’s car appeared around the point, headlights on. When it stopped beside the Whiskey Six, Sheriff Vandyke slipped from the driver’s seat, but Jerry remained in the back of the sheriff’s Model T.

  “So you parked on the north side of the island,” Owen said, “and walked the cases over so we wouldn’t see tracks.”

  “That’s right,” the sheriff answered. “Couldn’t give ourselves away. Now, you and Deputy Kranlin will drive to town together, and Jerry will ride with me.” He held out another set of handcuffs. “Owen, turn around.”

  23

  THE THOUGHT OF DRIVING ACROSS THE ICE WITH HANDcuffs suddenly made Owen’s nightmares of going through the ice seem vividly possible. “Please, I’m scared to be handcuffed while we’re crossing the lake. Don’t make us wear them until we get on land, Sheriff. We won’t cause you any trouble. Promise.”

  “Yeah, he’s right!” Jerry hollered, his voice carrying through the sheriff’s open driver’s door.

  “Jerry, you’ll be just fine,” the sheriff replied. “Makes me feel better if you wear ’em. On the other hand, Owen has never caused me trouble.” He put the cuffs away. “Deputy, you keep an eye on Owen while he drives, yes?”

  Kranlin lifted his pistol in agreement.

  As Owen started up the Studebaker, he expected they’d head directly back toward shore, but the deputy directed him to the north side of the island and out toward the frozen channel where the water ran deeper . . . the course boaters followed in the summer to avoid submerged rocks and shallows.

  “Hey, we don’t want to go this way,” Owen said. “Trust me, let’s turn around.”

  The deputy laughed. “Think I’m going where you direct me? Keep going. Straight ahead.” He held the pistol a few inches higher.

  “This way—the current runs stronger,” Owen said.

  Deputy Kranlin kept his gun visible. “I said we don’t take your route. You might have friends waiting along the way, making sure your shipment doesn’t run into trouble.”

  “Nobody’s waiting. We got into this mess on our own. But please, you need to hear me on this. On extra-cold nights like tonight, the ice gets brittle on top, but underneath it’s not hard. It’s been softening up for some time, which makes this a dangerous time to be out here,” Owen said, hoping to say something to convince Kranlin, who was new to the county . . . probably hailed from some big city where his biggest worry had been slipping on icy sidewalks.

  “You talk all you want, kid, but we checked the ice a few days ago. It’s plenty solid.”

  Lake ice boomed and groaned.

  “And that doesn’t scare me,” the deputy said. “It’s been doing that all winter long.”

  Owen glanced in his side mirror. The sheriff and Jerry followed, lights bouncing up and down as they traveled between ice ridges and remaining snowbanks and over patches of black ice. Owen was tempted to turn the wheel sharply, or maybe stop suddenly and try to grab the gun from the deputy’s hand. But what good would that do? He’d only get into more trouble. He slowed his pace but kept driving.

  With the next boom, an ear-splitting crack followed. Owen sensed the ice giving way. He grabbed the wheel tighter as the bottom fell out from beneath them, and the car dropped with a jolt.

  “Oh no!” Deputy Kranlin hollered.

  Water poured through Owen’s open window and sloshed on his trousers and onto the floorboards.

  “I can’t swim!” the deputy shouted.

  Owen had only one thought: Get out!

  Climbing out his window, he was met by blood-stopping icy water.

  Water seeped into his clothes and his skin, waterlogging his jacket and trousers, mitts, socks, and long johns.

  Water filled his boots.

  He thrashed, but water weighted him down. The lake dragged him below until his nose was barely above the surface.

  He kicked and paddled for everything he was worth. Inch by inch he pulled himself up and headed toward an edge of ice. Behind him, Kranlin hollered and grabbed the edge of Owen’s jacket, shoulders, neck. The deputy clawed and cried out for his life and, in his panic, pushed Owen under.

  In blackness, Owen gasped, and bitter cold rushed into his lungs. He flailed and slugged and thrashed for something, anything to grab on to, and came up. He sputtered and wheezed, and his lungs ached for air.

  Kranlin’s gloved hand rose from the water.

  Owen grabbed it and the man surfaced. “I can’t swim!” he wailed.

  “Hang on,” Owen said. “Don’t panic.” Then he pulled the deputy to the edge of the ice. “I’ll crawl forward, see if it’ll hold. Hang on to my foot.” He belly-crawled forward, sl
owly, cautiously, across the ice. Beneath them, the ice groaned and complained.

  A sharp crack sounded and traveled under Owen’s belly. He stopped crawling and flattened, distributing his weight as evenly as possible. His teeth started chattering and his body shook.

  But the ice held.

  Again, Owen inched ahead. The only way to go was forward. Not until Owen and the deputy made it a safe distance from the breakthrough did Owen look back.

  Just behind them, the lights of the sheriff’s vehicle flashed on them for a moment, then shifted skyward, as if trying to merge with the northern lights. The Model T, lettered “Koochiching Sheriff” along its doors, was pointed nose up, like a breaching whale. To Owen’s horror, the vehicle sank rear first.

  Ice cracked as it went down.

  Helpless, Owen watched.

  Muffled shouts.

  The driver’s door cracked open just as the vehicle dropped beneath the surface with a whoosh and disappeared.

  Darkness engulfed Owen.

  The truck was gone, but cases of booze floated at the surface, as if mocking their high-minded quick-money scheme.

  For the moment, Owen didn’t want to move forward for fear of breaking through again. A numbness started to envelop him, almost warming him. His mind downshifted into some low gear. Shock. Disbelief. None of this could be real. He stared into the darkness, unable to move.

  A voice startled him. “I’m here!”

  Owen’s mind jerked into alertness.

  “Jerry! Where are you?”

  “Here!”

  It was the sheriff’s voice.

  “Where is he?” Kranlin asked.

  Owen’s eyes began to adjust. He rose to his hands and knees and scanned the patch of black ice where both vehicles had gone down. Finally, his eyes adjusted to a vague outline of a head and hands, clinging to an edge. The sheriff flung himself forward, but with each effort the ice broke and the sheriff fell back into the water. He surfaced and sputtered, “Help! Need a hold of something!”

  “We’re coming!” the deputy called back, motionless.

  Owen needed something—anything—to help. His fingers were numb, as if they belonged to someone else. He worked off his jacket. He crawled as close as he dared, then he held one sleeve of the jacket and tossed the jacket toward the sheriff. The sheriff grabbed on, and Owen crawled backward, keeping his weight low. Slow, steady, and sure, he pulled against the sheriff’s weight until he was out of the water and sliding on his belly, and eventually crawling away from the hole.

  “Jerry!” Owen called, scanning the otherworldly landscape. “Jerry!” he called over and over.

  He’d surface. If anyone had a thousand lives in him, it was Jerry. Heck, he’d surfaced after the sugar truck disappeared. Owen had been sure he was a goner, but he’d come to the top, ice picks at the ready.

  And then he remembered.

  Jerry was handcuffed.

  24

  THE FIRE CRACKLED WITH LIFESAVING WARMTH IN THE stone hearth. Wrapped in wool blankets pulled from storage closets, Owen huddled with Vandyke and Kranlin beside the flames. They sat as close as possible to the heat without setting themselves on fire, but Owen was still cold to his core. At his back, the air was freezing, so he turned himself bit by bit like a sausage on a stick, heating up one side, then the other.

  At first his teeth chattered as if they’d fly right out of his head, and shivers came in convulsive shudders. But as his body gradually warmed, and minutes or hours passed—he really didn’t have a sense of time—his brain started to emerge from its survival fog.

  He was alive.

  He’d survived. Miraculously.

  And then the horror returned.

  Jerry.

  His friend was entombed at the bottom of the lake.

  Owen felt a knife pain of loss.

  It couldn’t be. Only an hour or two earlier, they were driving under the northern lights, hoping just one whiskey run would solve their problems.

  Baird’s Island was the nearest possible shelter. Soaked and shivering, Owen knew they couldn’t waste a minute out in a bitter wind. They had to get warm before they froze solid. There had been no lights to guide them, but Owen recognized the outline of the island to the west, where he knew Trinity’s cabin waited.

  As they neared the island’s shore, Owen led them a few hundred yards to the square log cabin, boarded up for winter.

  He knew where the key was hidden, just inside the lid of the wood box. Protected from snow and ice, the key was there—thank God.

  He turned the skeleton key and the bolt gave way. Stepping inside, he was overwhelmed by memories of the nights he’d cut his motor, drifted in, and tied his boat to come see Sadie Rose. They’d talked and touched until the sun chased away shadows and he had to leave for the creamery. He’d barely slept during those two weeks, but he’d never felt more alive or happier. He’d surrendered his heart to her then, or as much as he was capable of surrendering. Now he breathed in the cabin air, stuffy with being shut up all winter. His feet were numb. His hands felt like ice blocks. He wanted—more than anything in the world—to sleep.

  And he knew he had to ignore that urge, or it would spell his own death. What he needed to do was to get a fire going—fast—before hypothermia completely overtook his thought process.

  Fumbling in the darkness, he found stick matches above the stone fireplace and struck one against a stone. When it lit, he spotted the copper barrel nearby filled with dry birch logs, cut and split, and ample birch bark.

  His mind wasn’t working right. He was numb, but he forced himself to stay in motion. He started a fire using birch bark beneath crisscrossed logs, but when the draft backfired and filled the room with billows of smoke, he realized he’d forgot to open the chimney flue. He pulled the lever on the hearth, and the chimney drew air. The fire roared to life, bright and hot. The smoke-filled room began to clear as the sheriff and deputy coughed and clustered by the hearth.

  “Take off your clothes,” Owen said, jumping to his feet.

  “Hell I will,” Kranlin said.

  “Suit yourself,” Owen said, as he shrugged off his shirt and pants, long johns and socks. Then he wrapped himself in a striped wool blanket and huddled by the fire.

  “He’s right,” the sheriff said, speaking slower than usual. “Wet clothes. Keep in cold.”

  Before long, the deputy and sheriff stripped off wet clothes and cocooned themselves in blankets.

  Owen gradually warmed.

  The fire illuminated Trinity’s easel and oil paintings of flowers, of her family, of herself. He knew Baird’s Island—two islands, like an hourglass, joined by a strip of sand beach. Trinity’s cabin was on the southern half, and a main lodge and cabins graced the northern half. He’d made countless dairy deliveries by boat, visiting with Mr. and Mrs. Baird, with Trinity, and with Sadie Rose when she’d abruptly left the Worthingtons and headed out on her own with barely a dime. She’d managed to go under a different name and find work at Kettle Falls, not as one of the working madams, but doing maid work—until Senator Worthington got wind of her whereabouts and tried to track her down, but Owen gave her a lift to this island to stay with Trinity.

  Warming up in Trinity’s familiar cabin, in this amber patch of necessary warmth with Kranlin and Vandyke—with Jerry gone—was a bad dream from which he’d soon wake up.

  His mind drifted half in and out of sleep. Thoughts of Jerry struck in powerful waves. Tears filled his eyes and poured down his cheeks. He couldn’t stop them. Didn’t have the will to stop them. His friend was gone. Not just a close call this time, not an amazing recovery from another dire situation from which Jerry would escape.

  This time was different.

  “Why did you have to handcuff him?” he cried out.

  Neither the sheriff nor the deputy responded. They both stared into the fire, huddled in their wool blankets, almost as if no one had spoken. It was a nightmare . . . one he may never forget. Here they were, stripped nea
rly to their skin, beneath blankets to stay alive, at the mercy of a flame lapping at a few logs. Without the fire, they’d be dead. Their last breaths would have frozen on the wind. But because of a simple shelter and a simple fire, they might survive.

  Because of simple handcuffs, Jerry was dead.

  Owen imagined him, struggling as the sheriff’s Model T went down, filling with ice-cold water that rose over Jerry’s mouth and nose, trapping him as he dropped inch by inch, foot by foot, beneath the surface. And the moment Jerry might have called out, might have gasped for breath, his lungs would have been met by an intake of deadly cold water, closing off his lungs forever.

  “He was . . . ,” Owen began, dropping his head to his blanket. And then he began to sob. His shudders turned to a wail that he couldn’t contain or hold back, and in that instant, he understood the howl of the lone wolf, rising with such melancholy on the air. At his very being, Owen understood. He ached. He hurt at his core for the presence of his friend. For his father. The wail was primal, calling from somewhere so deep in his being that it seemed to come from someone else.

  He seized a breath.

  He got control.

  He pressed his fists to his eyes.

  He lay down on his side, tucked into a blanketed ball before the fire, and let sleep and silence overtake him.

  He turned from the cold, remembering.

  He turned toward the warmth, and dreamed.

  It was summer, warm, balmy, heavily scented with pine and blossoms. And Sadie Rose was pressed into him, murmuring, kissing his earlobe. They were at a place of their own, a little cottage overlooking the water, and Sadie was talking about someday how she’d love to have a pet elephant, just like the baby elephant she’d seen at the circus in Ranier, but Owen wasn’t sure where they’d keep it. It would grow and get quite big. That’s what he was trying to tell her. And then, Trinity showed up, saying she needed to paint in their cottage, that if she couldn’t paint she would die. And so they let her paint a portrait in the corner, and she promised not to be in the way, and she painted and painted and painted. And when Owen finally was permitted to look at what she’d accomplished, she turned and smiled, and moved out of the way. And there it was, a portrait of Jerry. “Because he was your friend,” Trinity said, her blonde hair cut short, giving her a fashionable air, but her eyes filled with understanding, of knowing, that this portrait would bring solace, as well as sadness for Owen.