Heart of Ice

14

The front page of the St. Ignace News was spread out on the table before him. He closed his eyes and put his head in his hands. When he opened his eyes the newspaper was still there. So was she.

Cooper Lange stared at the black-and-white photograph that dominated the top half of the front page.

Julie.

The headline above her photograph was big and black and ugly.

BONES FOUND IN ISLAND LODGE

He had been so shocked to see her picture when he opened the paper this morning that he hadn’t even read the story. He read it now, trying to go slow so his reeling mind could absorb the details.

There weren’t that many. A tourist had found bones in the Twin Pines lodge. Police were calling it a possible homicide. The lodge had been abandoned and boarded up for decades. .

Cooper’s eyes locked on one sentence: “Although a positive identification has not yet been made, sources close to the investigation say police are proceeding on the theory that they may belong to Julie Anne Chapman, who disappeared from her Bloomfield Hills home twenty-one years ago.”

The photograph pulled him back. She looked exactly the same as he remembered. The same oval face framed by straight black hair and somber dark eyes. If was as if the past twenty-one years had never happened. Or as if she had been frozen in time. Frozen in his mind.

Cooper rose and went to the coffeemaker. He poured himself a fresh mug and stood at the sink, staring out the window at the flannel-gray fog.

It felt like the fog was there in his head. It had felt like this for as long as he could remember.

Like those warm nights with her in the lodge were something he had only imagined. Like that cold day on the ice bridge had never happened. Like those eleven months in Vietnam had been a nightmare and the six months in the VA hospital one big narcotic dream. Like the constant pain in his leg was something his mind made up when he needed an excuse to crawl into himself and die for just a couple of hours.

“You’re up early.”

He turned. His father was standing in the doorway. It was just a trick of the gloomy morning light, but for a moment he saw his father as he had that day twenty-one years ago, when they had stood in this very same spot and he had told his father-lied to him- that he was going ice fishing for three days up near Whitefish Bay. The next thing he remembered was his father’s face above him when he woke up in the St. Ignace Hospital, half-dead from hypothermia.

“You okay? You look a little pale,” his father said.

“I think I got a bug or something,” Cooper lied.

His father moved into the kitchen. He glanced at the newspaper, but nothing registered. There was no reason it should. Cooper had never told him why he had been out on the ice bridge that day, never told him about the girl on the island.

For a second he thought about telling his father all of it now. Telling him, too, that maybe he needed to go to the island and talk to the police.

“The cold’s coming early this year,” his father said.

“Yeah.”

“The storm windows-”

“I already did them.”

“I better check the furnace.”

“I’ll do it, Pop.”

His father’s eyes lingered on him before he turned to the coffeemaker.

“Flu’s going around,” his father said. “Maybe you should stay home today. I can go open the bar.”

Cooper didn’t answer. He moved past his father out of the kitchen. In the bedroom he pulled on a sweater and work boots. He went to his closet, looking for his down vest because he felt the cold so easily these days. As he grabbed the vest his eyes were drawn to the old Converse shoe box on the shelf.

He pulled it down and sat on the bed.

There wasn’t much in the box. But then, there had been no reason to add anything for a long time. And even less reason to look at what was there.

But he did now. He pulled out the black case and cracked it open. He ran a finger over the Purple Heart, closed the case, and set it aside. He barely gave a glance to the faded varsity letter from LaSalle High School but took a long time staring at the Timex watch that had belonged to his grandfather. There were papers that he sifted through quickly, things that he didn’t remember keeping, and the coaster from the New York Bar in Saigon made him remember a night he had tried to forget. At the bottom of the box were the photographs.

Only a few. Most faded-to-orange Polaroids of bare-chested smiling men with palm trees and tanks in the background. A few of the guys he had worked with on the pipeline and a blurred one of his ex-wife on the beach at San Padre Island. And then. .

A black-and-white photograph of a girl with long dark hair and somber eyes. Its edges were curled, its image faded.

He stared at it for a long time, then turned it over.

The delicate handwriting had been lost a long time ago in the icy water. Only a few words of what she had written to him remained.

Love. . may shatter your dream

What had happened? The newspaper told him nothing, just that there were bones in the lodge. He closed his eyes against the image in his head.

Had she frozen to death waiting for him?

Something tore deep in his chest, and it hurt so bad that for a moment he couldn’t even pull in enough air to breathe.

He couldn’t even move, because he knew now he wasn’t going to do anything. Any thought he had of helping the police was gone. All he wanted to do now was survive.

He put the photograph back in the shoe box and stuck the box in the far corner of the closet.

* * *

Danny Dancer picked up the Mackinac Island Town Crier. For the tenth or eleventh time today he read the story about Julie Anne Chapman.

It told him that her bones had been found in the lodge, that she was from Bloomfield Hills and had a brother who was running for the Senate. It told him that the police weren’t sure yet that it was her. But he knew it was her.

He carefully smoothed the newspaper out on the table and concentrated on the photograph. It looked like one of those school pictures, but it was in plain old black-and-white. Not nearly as pretty as the picture of her he had stored in his head.

Skin glowing gold from the bonfire. Hair black and glossy as a horse’s mane. Eyes like the night sky pricked with stars, filled with love for the boy who worked at the stables.

Dancer couldn’t remember the boy’s name, and he didn’t care. He couldn’t remember the names of the fudgies or the rich West Bluff kids or even the names of the local kids who worked and played on the island.

But he remembered what they looked like. He remembered how they spent their days, what they did in the dark, because he watched them summer after summer.

They let him hang around but never too close. He never got invited up to Fort Holmes, where they went to smoke pot. Never got to share a bottle of Boone’s Farm around a campfire. Never had a chance with a girl on an Indian blanket.

When he was young things like that hurt, and one day, many winters after Aunt Bitty was gone and he was all alone, he simply gave up watching them. He grew too old, grew too into himself, and stopped talking to anyone except the postal lady, the waitress at Millie’s, or the grocer at Doud’s.

It was just him and his skulls.

Until that day he found her, and suddenly the loneliness was gone.

When was that? He didn’t know. The newspaper said she was here in 1969 and the date on the newspaper said it was now 1990, but a sense of time was something he couldn’t grasp.

His life passed in seasons. Forests on fire with color. Gray skies and ice-chunked water. Melting drizzles and finally the bloom of the purple lilacs and dahlias as big as white dinner plates.

Dancer rose from the table and went to the shelves. He picked up the skull from the top.

“Hello, Julie,” he said softly.

He slowly ran his fingers over the smooth curve of bone. His eyes were burning, and it felt almost like all those times when the beetles were doing their work and he got too close to the skulls. But this burning was different. It was the burn of panic.

The newspaper said police had found her in the basement of the lodge. It hadn’t said anything about her skull being missing, but he knew the police would need it to figure out for sure that it was her.

They would want it back. They would come looking for it.

Had he been careful enough getting in and out of the lodge? Had the police found the hole that for so many summers had been his secret way in? Had he left fingerprints?

He had read somewhere that human beings lose eight pounds of skin cells per year. Could they sweep the floors and find him that way?

Aunt Bitty’s voice was suddenly in his head. Stop being stupid. God gave you a brain, use it.

She was right. He was being stupid. No one could find him through his skin cells.

But he couldn’t be sure the postal lady didn’t know that his packages contained skulls. Couldn’t be sure no one had ever seen him crawling into the lodge. Couldn’t be sure someone couldn’t smell the brains.

He went to the window, held back the curtain, and peered out. The wind was calm and the leaves that sometimes danced across the yard were asleep. He saw a black squirrel on a low-hanging limb. But he saw no humans.

But they would come.

He let the curtain fall and went to the kitchen. He opened the cupboard below the sink and pulled out a large shoe box. He took out the hammer and crowbar and carried them to the far corner of the cabin. Dropping to his knees, he carefully pried the nails from two planks and lifted them from the floor.

It hadn’t been easy carving a hole in the concrete foundation, but he had managed. There was just enough room for him to slip in his fingers and lift the box out. He took it to the table and removed the items-a thick wad of money bound with a rubber band, the gold brooch that Aunt Bitty had always worn to church, her miniature Bible, and a silver ring with two keys on it.

He picked up the skull and started to put it in the empty box but hesitated. His eyes scanned the room, finally finding what he needed. He went to the corner, stood on his bed, and carefully took the fox pelt off the wall, bringing it back to the table.

He wrapped the pelt around the skull. After putting the wad of money, brooch, keys, and Bible back in the box, he gently set the wrapped skull inside. When the box was back in the hole, he replaced the boards, making sure every nail went back into its original hole so the police wouldn’t notice they had ever been removed.

But hiding her was not enough.

He took the hammer and some nails outside to the shed. Inside he stopped to look around, at the old Tondix lawn mower, the broken rake, coils of discarded rope, and a heap of corroded beaver traps.

Aunt Bitty would be sad to see how he had let the place go, but she hadn’t left him much money to keep it up. Hadn’t left him anything but this three-room cabin that he was born in and her wisdom: Don’t act stupid. Don’t eat rare meat. Don’t kill daddy longlegs because it makes it rain.

With a sigh he whispered a promise to Aunt Bitty to get the place in shape and went back to his work.

He dragged the shutters from the shed and started boarding up the cabin windows. He was sweating hard by the time he went back inside and put the tools under the sink.

It was past three when he put the rabbit into the boiling mixture of water, potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and Night Train Express wine.

While his dinner was cooking he stripped and washed himself at the sink. Dressed in clean overalls, a flannel shirt, and a double pair of red-heeled socks, he sorted through the mail. There was a new skull order, but he set it aside.

Business had to wait, he decided. The next few days, maybe even the next few years, would be devoted to protecting Julie Anne Chapman.

Danny Dancer got his rifle from the closet and positioned a chair to face the front door. He sat down, covered his legs with one of Aunt Bitty’s afghans, and laid the rifle across his knees. With the smell of stewing rabbit in his nose he closed his eyes and waited for the sound of footsteps in the leaves.