The Ice Maiden (13 page)

The farmhouse seemed much too far away to walk. I wondered what it had been like for a young girl, wounded and bewildered and bleeding, in a dark and unfamiliar place, naked in a cold and driving rain. How long had she wandered before seeing the lights?

I drove Rebecca Pinder back to her home, silhouetted against the big sky, surrounded by drifting clouds and endless sunlit fields. If I had been an artist, I would have liked to paint the scene.

“It must be difficult to leave a home you've lived in for so long,” I said.

“Pshaw,” she said. “Truth is, I can't wait to walk out of this hellhole. Glad we're sellin' it. Nothin' but hard work and heartbreak here. Farmers are screwed. Can't
make a living anymore. Nobody can. The government favors foreign imports, cheap produce from Mexico and South America. They give foreigners a break. And what do we get? Flood and fire, hurricanes, droughts, and tornadoes. Farmers don't stand a chance. If that's what people want, cheap fruit and vegetables from places where the workers pee and poop right in the fields and use dangerous pesticides and fertilizers banned in this country, well, they can be my guest.”

The new owners, the Catholic archdiocese, planned to subdivide the property, she explained, for a retirement complex: a townhouse village with a golf course, an assisted living facility for those unable to maintain their own residences, a nursing home for the sick, and a hospice for the final stage, all in one huge development.

“We're damn lucky,” she said. “We got us a good deal. After all the sweat, all the labor we put into it, this is the end. No more crops will be growin' on this land.”

Another crime scene would be paved over, its ghosts erased from the map, more farmland swallowed by concrete, asphalt, and contrived landscaping, I thought, as the T-Bird lurched down the unpaved track. The two dogs followed me halfway to the main road.

“Wait till you see her,” I said, sotto voce, as we approached apartment 1-A. “She'll either be bundled up like an Eskimo or behind a green rubber mask with what looks like an elephant's trunk. You may freeze to death or cough your brains out in a dust storm. And if the woman speaks at all, it will be about her work. Exclusively. There is nothing else. Zilch. She's always alone, like a recluse. And, oh”—I warned Nazario—“did I neglect to mention that she's probably armed? Most likely with a knife, but it could be anything from a chisel to a sledgehammer to a chain saw. The place is full of power tools.

“This could take time,” I explained, hammering on the wood paneling. There were no sounds of demolition under way or major construction work inside.
“She's probably taking a break,” I said. “Or she's in the freezer.”

He lifted a wary eyebrow.

“I forgot to tell you about the walk-in freezer. Big as the coolers at the morgue. She could stack two, maybe three dozen bodies in there.”

The door inched open. No one seemed to be there until I looked down.

The huge eyes of a small boy, age five or six, gazed up at us.

“Jonathan, remember what we learned? We never open a door until we know who's there.” It was Sunny speaking, a Sunny I hadn't seen before.

Hair long and loose around her shoulders and down her back, she wore a white T-shirt, sleeves rolled up, white Capri pants, and sandals that accentuated her long tanned legs. She had a box of Crayolas in her hand and two little girls clinging to her as though they were attached. She looked beautiful, wholesome, normal. Not at all like the weird recluse I had described.

Nazario gave me a quick puzzled look.

Sunny caught it, taking a startled step back.

“Hi, Sunny,” I said cheerfully. “When you didn't call, we decided to stop by. This is Pete Nazario, from the squad.”

A bigger boy, about ten, and a sad-faced small girl scrutinized us inquisitively from their seats at a worktable. Not a knife, hammer, or razor-sharp tool in sight. Only colored pencils, crayons, and bright-hued children's drawings scattered across the tabletop.

“Hey,” squealed a high-pitched voice. A pixie
peeked from behind the leg of the other worktable. Pink barrettes in frizzy hair, eyes big and dark. I glanced around. Where did all these munchkins come from? How the hell many were there? Not an icicle or speck of dust in sight. Nazario must think I'm crazy, I thought. He smiled at Sunny, then at little Pixie-face.

“Hey, yourself,” he said. “What's your name?”

“Rosie.” The child preened and posed.

“I asked you to call first,” Sunny said, ignoring Nazario, her voice cold.

“Sorry. It's my fault.” Nazario apologized for us. “Didn't know you had company. Look at all this fabulous artwork!”

The children flocked around him as he examined their drawings. He held up a crude picture, crayoned orange palm trees silhouetted against a hot pink sky with a large purple blob in the center. The blob had big round eyes and sported whiskers.

“Excellent!” The detective turned to Sunny. “This must be yours. I knew you were an artist, but they didn't tell me you were this good.”

She didn't smile, not even when little Pixie-face, literally spinning with excitement, screamed, “No! No! I did it! It's mine! It's mine!”

“Lookit mine! Lookit mine!” the other kids chorused.

“We were just leaving,” Sunny said.

“To see manatees!” shouted the child who had opened the door.

“Not you. You're not going. You in trouble,” the bigger boy said with authority.

The smaller boy's face crumpled. Sunny didn't look
much happier. “Now, Carlos,” she said softly, “of course we wouldn't go without Jonathan.”

“You're all so lucky.” Nazario turned to me. “We love manatees too, don't we?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “They're so cool.”

“Can you eat them?” the smaller boy said.

“No!” everyone else cried.

“Sea cows are our friends,” Sunny told them. “We have to help save the manatees. Remember the book we read?”

“Can you come with us?” Rosie coyly asked the detective.

“We'd love to, if we're invited.” Nazario looked hopefully at Sunny.

“Yes, yes!” the children cried.

“We can help,” I offered. “I'm sure you have your hands full.”

Sunny shrugged reluctantly.

“Great!” Nazario boomed, as though she had welcomed the idea.

“Everybody goes to the bathroom before we leave,” Sunny told the children. “No, no. One at a time, not all together. That's right, let Jonathan go first.”

“But I don't have to,” the boy protested.

“All right, let the girls go first. But Jonathan,” she whispered, “remember last time? Just go in there for a minute and try before we leave. Okay?”

“Where are we headed?” Nazario said, as the children got their things together.

“The Seaquarium,” Sunny said frostily, without looking at him. The children, she explained, were from a South Beach shelter for battered women. Another
volunteer, a former ballerina, taught them dance steps and took them to performances. A local writer read to them and helped them write stories and poems. Sunny was introducing them to art.

“You'd be surprised how many of these kids miss the normal cultural activities most children are exposed to,” Sunny said softly. “Their mothers are busy just surviving.”

 

We were rolling across the Rickenbacker Causeway in Sunny's eight-year-old van, the kids all strapped in and singing “Over the River and Through the Woods.” I wished my editors could see me. I love this job, I thought. I never know what the day will hold. I might find myself at an inner-city murder scene, aboard a police helicopter whirling high above the bay, clinging to the back of an airboat skimming across the saw grass headed for an Everglades plane-crash site—or in a van full of happy children bound for discovery and adventure. The earlier scenarios were more usual for me. Was this a glimpse into how normal people lived? No, I thought. Sunny was damaged. These kids had probably already seen more strife and violence than many people do in a lifetime. And though Nazario seemed to be enjoying himself, this was certainly out of the ordinary for a homicide investigator. We were all outsiders, our noses up against the glass, wistfully seeking glimpses of real life.

I caught an occasional puzzled look from Nazario, but he sang along, learning lyrics from the children, pointing out rare palms, gliding pelicans, and out-of-
state license tags. But mostly he looked at Sunny like a puppy coveting a bone.

The kids clamored to see who would spot the Seaquarium's distinctive round dome first. This was their second visit. Last week's was fun. Today's would focus on manatees. Later, in Sunny's studio, they would fashion manatees out of quick-drying clay, paint them with acrylics, and bake them.

“We're working with a new clay that bakes at three hundred fifty degrees in your own home oven,” Sunny said.

Carlos, the oldest, age ten, held the exalted post of Sunny's assistant, age apparently his sole qualification. The sad-faced girl was his little sister, Pilar. The other two girls were sisters, ages five and six.

We navigated the turnstiles holding hands, then clustered around the huge manatee tank. Several gentle thousand-pound sea cows were in residence, one a mother with her calf. The unique white patterns, visible on the backs of all, were deep scars, cuts, and gashes from boat propellers. The endangered slow-moving vegetarians munch aquatic plants in shallow waters where they are unable to avoid speeding watercraft.

“I wouldn't want to be a manatee,” Rosie said. “They don't have arms.”

“How can they hug?” Pilar asked. “Do they kiss?”

“That's what they're doing now,” Sunny said, as the mother nuzzled her calf with a whiskery snout.

“If the state would only enforce boating regulations,” Nazario added, “manatees could coexist with people.”

I resolved to take Onnie's son, Darryl, to the Seaquarium soon. I wished he were with us today. These children were learning more than just art.

“Are daddy manatees bullies?” Rosie wanted to know.

“No, sweetheart,” Sunny said, her hand on the child's shoulder. “They just like to swim in warm water and nibble on plants. We're their worst enemies.”

“Right,” Nazario said. “All these manatees were injured, but good people rescued them, and when they're well enough they'll go back to their old homes in the wild.”

Sure, I thought. Until the next drunk or hopped-up speed-crazed boater runs them down. My heart ached for the slow, lumbering sea creatures.

“How do they get hurt?” Rosie said.

“Boat propellers cut them,” Sunny said, “and sometimes they get crushed in floodgates or in the locks of drainage canals.”

“Or poisoned when people throw trash in the water,” I said. “Careless people leave fishing lines, hooks, and plastic bags floating among the plants manatees eat.”

Sunny nodded. “That's why we never ever throw garbage in the water,” she said.

“Did you know that early sailors and explorers thought manatees were mermaids?” Nazario said.

Carlos hooted skeptically. “They must have needed glasses.”

“Maybe they did.” The detective shrugged. “Or maybe they'd just been at sea too long.”

“They never saw
The Little Mermaid,
” Rosie said, stretching into a ballet pose.

“Can we pet them?” Jonathan asked.

“No,” Sunny said. “We mustn't pet or feed them because they'll lose their natural fear of us and be more likely to be hurt later.”

“Why are they that color?” Rosie grimaced. “I'm painting mine pink.”

Jonathan suddenly grabbed his crotch and demanded a bathroom—
now!
—and Nazario hustled him off to the men's room.

Sunny watched in alarm. “Is he…I'm responsible. Their mothers all sign releases.”

“For God's sake, Sunny,” I said, “the man's a police officer, one of the good guys.”

Still, she looked as relieved as Jonathan when the two rejoined us minutes later.

“You ever notice,” Nazario said later, as Rosie interrupted her ballet stretches to comfort Jonathan, now whimpering over some imagined slight, “how little girls are born knowing what they're supposed to do—”

“But little boys
never
know what they're supposed to do,” I said, finishing his sentence.

Sunny was quiet until we were ready to leave the manatee tank.

“Take a good look,” she told the children. “Remember what they look like, because by the time you grow up there might not be manatees anymore.”

She sure knew how to take sunshine out of a day, I thought.

 

During the drive back, Nazario spun the children a story about his adventures with a volunteer rescue team on a mission to save an injured manatee in the Alligator Hole River on the south coast of Jamaica. Despite dense tropical vegetation, hidden caves along the riverbanks, and hordes of nesting Jamaican crocodiles, they succeeded in hoisting the 900-pound manatee out of the river onto a specially designed stretcher.

“Did you come from Cuba too?” Carlos asked Nazario.

“Sí,”
the detective said, nodding. “A long time ago. I was five years old, smaller than your little sister.”

“Did your
mami
and
papi
bring you?” Rosie asked.

“Nope. I came to Miami all by myself.”

“No way,” Carlos said.

“Oh,
sí, amigo,
” Nazario said. “My parents sent me on a plane. They were going to follow later but they couldn't, because of Fidel. So here I was in Miami, all alone. Lots of parents sent their children then. They called it Operation Peter Pan.”

“When did you see your
mami
and
papi
again?” Rosie asked, as Sunny steered the van into northbound traffic.

“I never did.”

“Never? Who did you live with?” Carlos asked.

“Lots of families. The church put me in foster homes up in New Jersey for a while. Then they sent me back here and I stayed with some other people.”

“Why wouldn't Castro let them out?” Sunny asked, speaking directly to Nazario for the first time.

“My dad wound up in prison, a political prisoner. My mom wouldn't leave Cuba without him. She died
waiting for his release. So did he, still in prison, a few years later.”

“Castro killed my father too,” I said. “A firing squad.”

“It must have been frightening,” Sunny said, “to be a little child, alone in a foreign country, orphaned.”

He shrugged, expression nonchalant. “It was tough in the beginning. I spoke no English and they kept placing me with families who spoke no Spanish. After my parents, I missed the food the most. I can't complain.” He turned to Carlos. “So,
amigo,
I hear you went to the ballet last week. How'd you like it?”

“I can't complain.” The boy shrugged, mirroring the detective's nonchalant expression. “It would've been okay, if it wasn't for all that dancing.”

“I hope they have Mickey Mouse next time,” his little sister said.

Rosie skipped, holding tight to Nazario's hand, as we trooped across the lobby to Sunny's studio. She must have thought we'd never leave. She'd planned to fix soup and sandwiches while the children worked on their clay models.

Instead, Nazario ordered pizza.

“Sunny?” Jonathan looked up from his shapeless blob of clay.

“Yes?”

“Can I have a kiss?”

“Of course.” She kissed his cheek.

Smiling sweetly, Rosie looked up from her hot-pink manatee, dripping paintbrush in hand. “Sunny?”

“Yes, sweetheart?” She turned her good ear toward the child.