Heart of Ice

Chapter Three

The drive from town to Spokane was monotonous under the best of circumstances. The two-lane highway was frosted with gray snow that resembled concrete in texture, color, and, if the night’s freeze was deep enough, strength. An APB had been put out by Gloria, indicating a pregnant young woman was missing from Cherrystone. The local paper and a Spokane radio station with a pretty good police-beat reporter had already called.

Every day in Cherrystone was a slow news day.

Emily Kenyon told her deputy that she wanted to check out the stores that Mitch Crawford said his wife had frequented. She wanted to do something that felt like real police work again.

“I’ve been stuck behind a desk or at a banquet table for months,” she said. “I’d like to play cop while I still remember how. You hold down the fort and start checking out where else she might have gone. Hit up her neighbors, too.”

Jason wasn’t disappointed in the least. He had a home-cooked dinner waiting after work and he figured that Mandy Crawford was ticked off at her husband and would turn up before the end of the day.

“Got it,” he said. “The guy is an ass. If he treats his wife like he treats his dealership secretary, I’d have left him, too. Pregnant or not.”

Emily started for the door. “We’re in sync. I’ll run up to Spokane and see if anyone saw her yesterday.”

The saleswoman behind the counter at Chelsea’s Natural Baby probably hadn’t eaten a full meal in five years. Her gaunt visage was a sharp contrast to the lovely photographs of pink-cheeked babies and their madonna-esque mothers in designer clothes that ran along the back wall of the boutique. She had black hair that she wore swept back, held in place with an impossibly large tortoiseshell clip. Her skin was pale, almost the color of chalk. Her nails, blood red.

Emily approached her and she snapped her cell phone shut.

“I’m Caprice. Are you shopping for a grandbaby?”

Emily shook her head and wondered how bad she looked. Not that bad.

“I’m Emily Kenyon, Cherrystone Sheriff. I’m not a grandmother, thank you. I’m here on business.”

Caprice had small birdlike eyes that she tried to make look larger by applying bold strokes of black eyeliner. She glanced at Emily and then away across the store at a teenage girl who entered from the main mall entrance.

She gathered her lips in a puckered frown. “Sorry. How can I help you, Sheriff Kenyon?”

Emily held out a photograph from the county’s security badging office. In it, Mandy’s hair was a little longer, and her face a little thinner than when she’d last been seen. She set it on the counter and waited.

Caprice looked down at the image. Recognition came quickly. “She’s bigger now. Yes, she’s a customer. A good one with negligible taste, but charge cards with plenty of room. Amanda Crawford is her name.”

Caprice had insulted Mandy, but at least she had a good memory.

“Thank you. When did you see her last?”

“It’s been awhile. Not for a couple of weeks. I can check our records, if you want to wait a moment. I’m the manager here.”

Chimes sounded that indicated another shopper had entered and Caprice looked a little distracted as she kept her eyes on the teenager who started hovering by a hanging garden of baby dresses.

“Dior,” she said, whispering. “I have to watch that girl. You wouldn’t believe the number of shoplifters we get in here. Having a baby apparently means being a thief for some of these younger ones.”

Emily nodded, not because she believed for one minute what Caprice was saying, but because Caprice was the type of woman who needed to deride every person that came into her shop.

“Maybe you can arrest her if she steals something,” Caprice went on. “You know the type. Pregnant and stupid. Or stupid and pregnant.” When the shop manager took a breath, Emily steered the conversation back to Mandy.

“About Mrs. Crawford. Are you sure it has been a couple of weeks? You didn’t see her here yesterday?”

She let out a sigh. “I’m sure. Yesterday was slow. I could have used a new mom with a decent credit limit. I had a shipment of pink blankets from Paris that she would have liked—or that I could have sold her, anyway.” She laughed, like she was trying to be facetious. Emily knew better.

“She was going to have a girl?” Emily asked.

“Pink and lavender, that’s all she wanted to see.”

Emily thanked her and went down the mall to the Baby Gap.

No one had seen Mandy there, either. It was likely Mitch Crawford’s wife had disappeared before she ever made it to Spokane.

As Emily departed the mall, she wondered why a dour hard-liner like Caprice felt a need to run a place in which she loathed her clientele. What happened to the women who worked in such shops and radiated the joy of motherhood? Mandy wasn’t a missing woman to Caprice, but a missing customer.

Emily scoured the parking lot for her car. As she walked across the lot, she couldn’t help but think of her time in places like Chelsea’s when she was a young mother looking for the perfect little dress for the daughter who ultimately would always be the center of her life. She favored mint and lavender for her daughter, no pinks whatsoever. She wanted her to be the pretty little girl, Daddy’s Girl, as she’d been, but strong, too. She carried a bittersweet image of those early years with David and Jenna. He’d been the young, handsome intern and their baby had been a delightful surprise. In the beginning, as she worked her schedule as a Seattle Police detective around a new baby and a husband who was always at the hospital, she’d held out hope that easier times would come. All young couples struggle in the beginning.

Emily sat in her car, taking in the flood of memories. She watched a woman and her three children climb into the gleaming silver of their brand-new SUV. The car was expensive. More than fifty thousand dollars, she thought. She wondered if the husband part of that family’s equation was more welcoming of the children than David had been of Jenna.

David Kenyon could not take the spontaneity, the uncertainty that comes with a free-willed child. At the hospital, he was God; in control of the very lives of his patients. At home, he was a husband and a father. He couldn’t make the tiny pieces of a real, dynamic life fit in his ordered, unyielding world of medical emergencies. He couldn’t understand why Emily had wanted to catch the killer, put the baby rapist in prison, and stop the murder plot of an old man’s greedy family.

But most of all, he could never understand why Jenna had to come first.

She’d loved David so much back then. Deeply so. She’d seen his need to keep things ordered and under control as central to who he was as a doctor. But she had needs, too. Her life was about being a mother, a wife, a cop. She saw no shame in those ambitions, in that order.

She turned the key in the car and pulled into light traffic.