Heart of Ice

Chapter Twenty-four

Jack Fletcher had left his youngest son’s tackle box in the trunk. All bundled in heavy coats, hats, and gloves, Jack and his kids had made it halfway down the path toward Miller’s Marsh Pond. There, ice fishing was the order of the afternoon in the days after Christmas. Damn, the weather had likely ruined this year’s outing. A seesawing patch of weather had brought a thaw and then another hard freeze—it was an unusual occurrence that the big-city weatherman liked to call “Pineapple Express” to indicate that the genesis of the storm had come from Hawaii. It meant a lot of rain on the western part of the state and snow on the eastern region, including Cherrystone. This season, the Pineapple Express blew through with a hot breath that drove temps up to 55 degrees for forty-eight hours.

And now it was back down below freezing. New snow was coming that evening and winter was headed back with a vengeance.

“Watch the boys, Stacy,” Jack told his daughter, a fittingly sullen girl of fourteen. “I’m going back to the car to get Brandon’s tackle.”

“You always leave the boys with me,” she said. “You ought to pay me, Dad. I’m the live-in sitter around here.”

Jack pretended not to hear her rant about watching her younger brothers, Brandon and Kevin. He’d thought of asking Stacy to get the tackle back at the car, but he knew she’d complain about that, too.

“You use me like a slave, Dad!”

The Fletchers had packed up early that morning for their annual post-Christmas fishing trip, just to the west of Cherrystone. It was Dad’s time with the kids. His ex-wife, Sherry, had a new beau and between the holidays the pair headed off for a vacation in Hawaii. Jack was Mr. Mom just then and he didn’t mind it one bit. He knew that cold weather would come back in a flash and that day might be the very last one before rain, snow, and bundle-up weather. Jack had black curly hair he fluffed up to camouflage a receding hairline. He had a stocking cap, leaving his curls as fringe.

He made his way down the path toward the car. Only one other car was parked in the lot, indicating to him that the place would pretty much be all theirs that day. He smiled. Jack Fletcher’s silver Prius gleamed in the winter sun, screaming out loud to the world that he loved the earth.

He pressed the trunk key into the lock, and it popped open. He stared into the blackness below and his heart sank.

“What the?”

He moved a blanket, just in case. But it was obvious. The box was gone. He’d left it at home on the kitchen counter.

“This is the kind of day I’m having,” he said, closing the lid. “Stacy’s going to blame me for this.”

As he slammed down the trunk, he heard a scream.

“Dad!”

It was Stacy’s voice. He turned around and looked for his daughter.

“Dad! Come here quick!”

Jack squinted into the sun, the light blinding him with the shimmer of gold off the icy surface of the water.

Something was wrong.

“Stacy! Kevin! Brandon!” He called out. “I’m coming.” He started running to the spot where he left his children, but they weren’t there. Instead, about fifty yards away, he saw them huddled at the edge. The sun wrapped them in a halo of light.

Were all three there?

“What is it? Brandon? Kevin?”

“We’re fine, Dad,” Stacy said, her voice breaking, as she turned around to face her father. “Oh, Dad!” She lunged for him, and he gladly held her. At that instant Stacy was no longer a flippant teenager. In the time it took for her father to go to the car, she was once more a little girl. A scared little girl.

“What is it, honey?” he asked.

She started to cry and pointed to a spot about ten yards from shore.

Partially cemented in the cracking ice among the degraded greenery of a winter-dead patch of aquatic plants was the swollen figure of a child, a teenager. It appeared she’d been wrapped in a dark blue blanket, maybe a sleeping bag. She was facedown in the water, her hair swirling like a halo on the re-frozen surface. Her ice-sheathed skin looked waxy and white. He didn’t like what he was seeing, but Jack craned his neck to get a closer view.

No, it wasn’t a child, but a woman. He could see a wristwatch and wedding band.

The boys just stood there, their eyes fastened on the corpse.

“Want me to poke her with a stick?” It was Kevin, the eight-year-old, whose mother once caught him eating canned dog food off the broken end of a hula hoop—with his older brother, Brandon, urging him on.

“I’ll get a stick for you,” Brandon said.

Pinpricks of sweat beaded on Jack’s brow. He gently pulled his kids away.

“No stick. Let’s go back to the car,” he said. “I need to call the sheriff.”

It was almost dark when Emily Kenyon and Jason Howard, along with two patrol officers, arrived at Miller’s Marsh Pond.

His kids in a warm cruiser with a patrol officer, Jack Fletcher led the sheriff and her deputy to the body, half frozen, facedown in a sheath of ice and snow.

“How are your children?” Emily asked. “It must have been quite a fright for them.”

“It was, but they’ll be OK. I think my oldest—the girl, Stacy—is the most shook up over this. The boys wanted to prod the body with a stick to see if it was a doll or something.”

“Not a doll, that’s for sure,” Emily said, as she bent closer to the still-frozen edge. She saw the watch and the ring on the hand that was curled slightly upward. She could see that the woman was likely clad in jeans or a different, softer fabric. Through the layer of ice that covered the torso like a shield, she could make out a bra and the fragments of a torn blouse.

It had to be her.

“Mr. Fletcher,” she said, “we’ll need to get a statement from you. But we don’t need it tonight. Take your kids home and come down to the station tomorrow, first thing. Can you work that out?”

“Thank you. I appreciate that. We came here for a memorable day, you know, a tradition with Dad. A day that we’d remember.”

Emily knew where he was going and her heart went out to the children. “They’ll never forget what they saw and I’m sorry for that. They’ll always remember how their dad kept his cool and called the police, just like he should.”

He smiled. “Hope so.”

Emily turned her gaze toward her earnest deputy.

“Let’s cordon off the area, Jason. Spokane crime scene techs are on their way, but this dead girl’s not going anywhere. We’re going to have to chip her out and that’ll take time and daylight.”

Emily didn’t say so to Jason and he didn’t say it to her. But as they stood there watching Jack Fletcher and his family drive away, both had a pretty good idea whose body they just found. Even without the face, the long swirls of reddish blond hair were a big indicator, but there was something else that both of them had seen. The waistband on the trousers was elastic.

The dead body was wearing maternity pants.

It had to be Mandy Crawford.

The two Spokane crime techs set up a string grid that ran from the path by the shoreline to about four yards past the dead body in the ice. It was painstaking work and the wind nipped hard at their unprotected faces. They ran infrared lights over the soil, looking for anything out of the ordinary. The snow had come and gone, so it wasn’t likely that any trace could be found, but the two women who’d come down to process the scene for Cherrystone left not one single inch undisturbed.