The Ice Maiden (12 page)

“In spite of the bad dreams, in spite of everything, I did it all, whatever they asked. It was so hard.” Her hands kneaded one another, eyes pleading for understanding. “But it was even harder when I wasn't with the police. Facing Ricky's parents was worse. And my parents. I worked with the investigators for more than a year. Finally I realized that I had to try to live, if they would only let me. All I remember is looking up at the sky and begging God….”

She paced the room still clutching her arms as though cold. “It's not that the police officers weren't decent, good people,” she said quietly. “They thought the murderers might come back to eliminate the only witness. Me. Some nights I would lie there and wish they would. A young policewoman stayed with me, trying to help me remember. She was like a big sister. We really became attached. And I know how much Detective Burch cared. But eventually you have to leave the trauma behind, along with the detectives who are part of that trauma. How can you heal when they keep making you relive that terrible night? You understand?”

She sat on the stool across from me again, her expression earnest.

“They were part of what I had to leave behind in order to go on, to have a life. The time finally came when I never wanted to see any of them again.”

“I hear you,” I said. “But don't you think putting those men away for good would stop the nightmares, the bad dreams? I've seen it happen many times.”

“But, Britt, what I'm trying to tell you is that I'm well now. I'm good. Doing what I love. I don't
have
bad dreams. You want to know what I dream about every night?”

She told me, hands folded on the small table, blue eyes aglow, features serene.

“I dream about seeing incredible sculptures. I dream about visiting Mayan ruins, seeing ancient works. I dream about Michelangelo.” She paused. “Oh, my God, Britt. Can you imagine what he could have done with a pneumatic hammer?”

“You've grown up,” I persisted. “You're strong
enough to look back on it all from a distance. There's nothing to be afraid of.”

“Yes, there is,” she said softly. “I like my dreams now. I don't want the old ones coming back.”

“You wouldn't even have to see the same faces. The Cold Case Squad detectives weren't even cops when it happened. Why not talk to them? Once. See how you feel.”

“I'll think about it,” she said, seeing me to the door, her expression frozen, eyes already distant. “I'll call you.”

As I tried to brush the dust off my clothes outside her apartment, I thought, Sure, she'll call me—the day hell freezes over.

“Can't blame 'er,” Burch muttered gruffly as I sat at his desk and described my visit with Sunny. “You gave it your best shot. How about going back over there tomorrow, take one of my guys, whichever one is available, introduce 'im to Sunny, and see what happens. Worst she can do is slam the door on 'im.”

“Okay,” I said, watching a Kodak moment taking place behind the glass walls of K. C. Riley's office. She pored over papers, McDonald leaning over her shoulder. I blinked and looked away.

“Got it bad, huh?” Burch said.

“No way.” I feigned surprise. “She's not my type.”

He guffawed. “Come on, Britt. I've been there myself and it's a bitch.”

Like hell. Who is he kidding? I thought, married to his high school sweetheart all these years. It made me un
easy that he'd noticed. Cops are notorious gossips, and station-house rumors fly faster than speeding bullets.

I left Burch busy on the phone, hating myself for deliberately timing my departure with McDonald's. He was on the elevator, door closing. He saw me and hit the button, just in time.

“Thanks.” I stepped primly aboard. “I forgot what fast reflexes you have.”

“How's the story coming?” He stood against the far wall watching me. What the hell was his body language saying?

“Still reporting,” I said.

“I'm jealous. Those Cold Case guys are monopolizing your time.” Was he teasing?

“Surprised you noticed. I thought you were too busy breathing in K. C. Riley's ear.”

He reacted, then grinned. “So we're both jealous. Well, a little jealousy is only human.”

“But not always attractive.” I sighed.

Was the magnetic pull I felt one-sided? Was the sizzle still there for him too? I wondered, as we descended in silence.

“They say the best way to love anything is to know you might lose it,” he finally said. He'd stopped smiling.

“Pretty profound for a cop,” I said softly.

The door opened too soon, spilling us out into the busy lobby. I wanted to continue, to ride up and down for a while, to prolong this conversation.

“I have a meeting,” he said reluctantly.

“So do I.”

We exchanged hot looks, then parted. As usual.

 

I drove south to the scene of the abduction. But even the address was gone, obliterated by a new manmade lake surrounded by a sprawling industrial complex. It was as though the ice-cream shop had never existed.

I continued past the Parrot Jungle, the Orchid Jungle, then west past the Metrozoo, lost in thought about McDonald, love and life, and how brief everything can be. If life were fair, Ricky Lee Chance would be alive, a grown man now. What if the
Sunshine Princess
hadn't stalled that night on the Intracoastal? What if Sunny's parents hadn't let the teenagers drive on ahead? What if the ice-cream store had shuttered early on Christmas Eve like most places? Minor events and seemingly insignificant decisions, weaving together to intersect life with sudden death, always haunt me.

Because of the traffic, it took another twenty-five minutes to reach farm country. On that dark Christmas Eve fourteen years ago, the drive would have taken less time, but it still would have been an eternity in which to be terrified. With two abducted teenagers held at gunpoint in their van, the killers probably drove carefully, well within the speed limit.

Soon I was passing rustic roadside stands offering sweet corn, eggplants, and pyramids of fat red vine-ripened tomatoes fresh off the farm.

I finally located the right mailbox and turned onto a rutted unpaved road through the fields. The bumpy ride branched off in several places: One led to an old barn, another disappeared into vast fields, the third took me to the house.

The roof had been repaired with mismatched shin
gles and the front porch sagged. A yellow and green John Deere tractor and an ancient gray Chevy pickup were parked alongside. Half a dozen empty barrels stood lined up like soldiers on the wide wraparound porch. Two dogs, a big yellow Lab and a German shepherd mix, came tearing around the side of the house barking furiously, loving the raucous sounds of their own voices, tails wagging madly. I would have stepped out, but they were young and large and they propelled themselves off the ground like missiles, hurling themselves at the side of my car, bouncing off the hood out of sheer exuberance.

I'd decided to wait until they wore themselves out when a raspy voice began to shout. A tall figure had appeared behind the front-door screen. “Tigger! Bear! Git down! Stop it! You crazy critters! You hear me? Go lie down! Lie down!”

They continued their assault with gleeful abandon, thudding off my car, with occasional guilty glances over their shoulders at the woman. But as she continued to shout, they slowly simmered down. Finally, they just stood panting in the heat, pink tongues lolling.

I exited the car gingerly, one eye on the dogs, the other on the woman, who had pushed open the screen door. Nearly six feet tall and rangy, with a wiry, too-curly salt-and-pepper permanent, she wore a shapeless cotton housedress, stockings rolled down to mid calf, and sneakers.

The dogs followed curiously as I approached the porch. I patted the yellow Lab.

“Don't mind them, they's all bark,” she called. “Kin I help you?”

“Mrs. Pinder?”

She nodded and I handed my card up to her, introducing myself. She held a section of newspaper, a good sign. I twisted my neck to confirm, with a touch of pride, that it was the
News'
s local page. A subscriber. Perhaps she'd just been reading one of my stories.

“Thought you were from the real estate company,” she said. “What kin I do for you?”

The dogs padded happily up the porch steps after me.

“Weren't you the one who called the police when two teenagers were shot and left for dead in a field a long time ago? On Christmas Eve? Do you remember?”

Her expression changed, face somber. “I'll remember that night till the day I die.”

She held the creaky screen door open and I followed her inside. “Excuse the mess,” she said. “Me and my husband been here thirty-four years, my husband's family afore that. This was his father's place originally. We're fixing to move out soon, a job I wouldn't wish on anybody. I was just packing the good china.”

I saw she hadn't been reading the newspaper after all. She was using it to wrap the dishes she was packing into two wooden barrels like those waiting on the front porch. A stack of newspapers sat on the wood floor in front of a half-empty china cabinet.

“We don't close till next month, but there's too much to do. Can't leave it all for the last minute.” She led me into the living room, where old-fashioned Bermuda-style shutters blocked out the sun.

“Didn't know anybody else still remembered.”

She sat, her feet resting on an old-fashioned footstool. Her ankles looked swollen.

“That poor young girl still livin'?”

“She's an artist now, a sculptor.”

“Praise be to God. Night she left here in that there ambulance, I thought she'd never live to see another day.”

“I'm writing a Sunday magazine story about some homicide detectives who are working new leads in the case.”

“After all these years?”

I nodded. “They think a man who was killed recently might have been one of them, a second suspect is in prison, and they're attempting to identify the others.”

“They should hang them,” she said abruptly. “By the neck, until they are dead.”

“Sounds fair to me.” I opened my notebook. “I'd like to talk to you about that night.”

“I believe I still have it all here, somewheres in the sideboard.” She struggled to her feet. She opened one drawer, then another, sorting through tablecloths, napkins, and place mats, and then lifted a cardboard box out of the bottom drawer. “Knew it hadda be here somewheres. Good you came today, probably woulda thrown it out when I started the packing in here.”

She sat heavily on the couch next to me and lifted the lid. The box on her ample lap was full of musty old news clippings. Most I had read in the
News
files, but these were in their original state, photos and headlines still attached, yellowed newsprint jagged and crumbling at the edges. A few were stories from other papers that I hadn't seen.

“Who's this?” I asked, studying a picture that accompanied one story.

“That there,” she said, pointing, “is my husband. It
was after sunup then. All the police and their people were here, and reporters had started showing up. After a while when they got too pushy, the cops got tired of it and pushed 'em back to where they couldn't take pictures. But reporters, they don't take no for an answer. Don'tcha know, some of them came back by helicopter, started shooting pictures from the sky. Nothing the police could do about that.”

The news photo, shot by one of the competition, showed half a dozen crime scene trucks and police vehicles. In the foreground, a younger Craig Burch and a South District police lieutenant were deep in conversation with a man wearing a baseball cap, windbreaker, and jeans. Clyde Pinder was sharp-featured, with a prominent nose and chin. He wore glasses, and his raised right arm pointed toward some far-off object beyond camera range. The eyes of the two cops followed his gesture.

“We go to bed early,” she said. “Planned to load up the truck early next morning. Had a fresh ham, a Key lime pie, and a couple of jars of my mango chutney. Taking it to my sister's in Florida City for Christmas day. I thought it was the storm that woke me up. A real gully washer, it come on with no warning, just teeming, pounding on that roof, which needed fixin' at the time. Clyde was dead to the world, so I got out of bed to close the windows and set a pan under a leak in the upstairs hall. The squall was comin' out of the east, hammering right acrost the fields, through the screens, gettin' the floor all wet. That was when I heard the moans. It was eerie. I thought it was the wind. You know how sometimes the wind has a voice?”

I nodded, recalling fierce tropical storms I had heard, their voices ranging from the deep bass rumble of a freight train to the high-pitched wail of a screaming woman.

“But this time it had words to it. Half asleep, going on back to bed, I stopped to listen. It was saying
Help me, oh, God, please, help me.
Then it faded. I opened the window again, to listen. Rain hitting me in the face, spraying cold water on my bare feet, and I didn't hear nothing but the storm. But when I started to close the window again, the wind said
Please. Don't let me die.

“I run down those stairs like a crazy woman, barefooted, in my nightgown, throwed open the front door, and she was laying there at the foot of the steps. Naked as the day she was born, half drowned, facedown, had long hair, one hand pressed to a bloody hole in the side of her head. I just blinked for a minute. I couldn't believe she was real. We had an old collie then, name of Lady. Used to be a good watchdog, but she never barked that night. The dog was just standing there beside her like a ghost, whimpering in the rain.

“I run down the front steps, scared to touch her, scared that somebody hurt her and was still hiding out there in the dark somewheres. But I couldn't leave her laying facedown in the rain. So I drug her up the steps onto the porch and into the front room, threw an afghan over her, dialed 911, and started screaming for Clyde. About then she started shaking, teeth chattering, like she was having a fit. Blood and water was streaming out of her hair onto my clean floor. I thought she was dying. She looked so young.

“Clyde couldn't believe what he was seeing when
he come down those stairs. Thought he'd have a stroke and I'd have two dead bodies on my hands. She stopped shaking, started talking 'bout a boy named Ricky. Said he was out there, hurt. Needed help. I held a dish towel to her head, trying to stop the bleeding, telling her to hang on, the ambulance was coming and yelled for Clyde to get his ass on out there, somebody else had got hurt too. He pulled on his pants and a yeller rain slicker, got his shotgun, put the big spotlight on the truck, and run on out to look.

“Young policeman got here first. He was radioing for them to put a rush on that ambulance, when Clyde got back, white as ashes. Said he found a boy, but he was dead. Next thing you know the whole front yard looked like a carnival, full of flashing red and blue lights.

“They carried her off in the ambulance, that young cop holding on to her hand. Had a notebook like yours on his knee. Never saw her again. Detective brought my afghan back next day, had blood on it. I couldn't bring myself to look at it, finally threw it in the trash. Thing took me half a year to make.”

She paused. “The mother wrote me a nice note later, to thank me for helping her daughter. Are the parents still living?”

“Up in Broward County,” I said.

“The girl must be growed up by now. Did she ever marry, have children of her own?”

“She lives in Miami Beach. Not married.”

“And she's okay, up here?” She tapped a thick fore-finger to her temple.

“Fine,” I assured her. “The shooting cost her the hearing in one ear, but that's all that's noticeable.”

“Amazin',” she said, in disbelief. “A miracle from God she ever found this place. It's pitch black out here at night. Ordinarily the whole house would be dark. It was raining, no stars, but, you see, I had a little Christmas tree up in the front window, had sparkly lights blinking on and off. It was Christmas Eve. Only time I let the tree lights burn all night. She was lucky.”

“To survive,” I said. “But if she'd been really lucky it wouldn't have happened.”

She showed me where Ricky's body was found. Rebecca Pinder sat in my T-Bird, directing me, as the dogs barked madly and scrambled after us.

The field itself, with its tidy and uniform rows of plants, looked no different from all the others, apparently chosen by the killers only for its proximity to the unpaved road that ran by it. I stood out there for a time, imagining what it had been like, remembering what Burch had told me about his visits there in the dark.