Thin Ice (21 page)

People want to help you; let them; it’s a sign of good judgment.

I picked up the phone, rose, and unlocked the door.

Cody and cohorts stood on the stoop.

“Knew we’d get you. C’mon, Arden—let’s just have some fun. We promise—”

I held up the phone. “Watch this, you bastard,” I said, and punched in 911.

“This is Arden Munro at Forty Riverview Drive,” I told the dispatcher. “I have prowlers.”

CHAPTER 18

“John, I need help.”

I’d caught him eating lunch. He’d tucked his tie into his shirt while he ate soup at his desk. He wiped his chin with a napkin, then sipped from a bottle of water.

“Why aren’t you in school? And don’t ask me to lie about it if the principal calls.”

“Winter break.”

“What do you want?”

“Some of my money. Mrs. Drummond will be home tomorrow and you can talk about it with her then, but I’m sure if you say it’s okay, she’ll agree. And if you let me have what I need, when it’s gone I promise to stop. Completely.”

“You make about as much sense as these suit papers I’ve been reading.” He tapped a file on his desk with his thumb. “Ten-year-old kid hurt falling off an ATV at his cousin’s, now all the aunts and uncles are suing each other. Georgetown Law School, and this is what I do. What do you need the money for?”

“I want to hire a detective.”

*

“I prefer the term
investigator
,”
Rose Vanaci said. She slipped a thumb under the neckline of her dress and adjusted a bra strap.
“
Detective
is a police title.”

Her secretary knocked and poked her head in. “Milwaukee coroner’s office on line two.” Rose shrugged an apology, then picked up her phone. I gave her some privacy by turning my head and looking out the window. I could see my car parked across the street, just in front of the Superior Bar and Grill. A UPS truck blew down the street and covered my windshield with a back spray of brown-sugar snow.

“So you want me to find your brother?”

I faced her and smiled. “Yes. John Abrahms called you, right?”

“He did. He also told me that you are the only one in the world who believes your brother is alive.”

“There are two in the world who
know
he’s alive: my brother and me.”

“I won’t argue the point. Let’s begin by assuming you’re right.”

I sighed and relaxed in the chair. Okay, even if I had reached the point where I had to pay someone to agree with me, it still felt good to hear:
You’re right.
“Thank you, Ms. Vanaci.”

“Rose, please. You’ll be spilling all the family secrets to me, so we may as well forget formalities. Now, the first thing I need to know is why you want to find him. By leaving, he’s shown he doesn’t want you in his life. That’s harsh, of course, but it’s my role to probe in some tender spots. From what John has told me I understand you have the means and spirit to succeed on your own, Arden, so why pursue him? Why do you want him back?”

“Not sure I do anymore, exactly,” I said slowly, understanding my feelings only as I chose my words. “But I do want to show everyone that they were wrong and I was right; I want apologies from everyone.” She had a tray of paper clips on her desk. I picked one up and bent it open. “It wasn’t such a great life he had, taking care of me, and I understand how maybe he felt smothered. I wish I’d figured that out earlier and said something; maybe he wouldn’t have gone. But even though I know it’s partly my fault that he hated his life, I’m still mad that he jerked us around this way. I want to jerk him back. It’s all mixed up, I guess. One minute I feel sorry for him, then the next I want to kill him.”

“Honest reasons, but mostly negative ones.”

“Okay, here’s a good reason: You bring him back, and right before I kill him, I plan to say, ‘Thank you for my life.’ Better?”

She smiled. “Good enough. John told me there’s no sign of missing money.”

“Seems that way.”

“That makes it easier for us. A person can’t go far or hide deep with no money. If you’re willing to just wait it out, he’ll probably show up on his own.”

“I want to find him.”

“Ooh, that’s a murderous look. I’ve seen it often.”

“Do you do a lot of this?”

“Missing persons are my specialty. Most of my cases are domestic—moms or dads who’ve snatched their own kids.”

“Were you a cop?”

“Fifteen years, Milwaukee Police. Then I put in seven as a fraud investigator for an insurance company. Now I’m my own man.”

Not a man at all, of course, and certainly not what I’d expected. I’d climbed the steps to her second-floor office overlooking the busiest street in Superior expecting to enter a dark, smoky office. Even the name was right: Rose Vanaci—sounded like a tough broad. Instead I found a tastefully decorated suite of rooms and a middle-aged woman groomed for an appearance on the pages of some upscale magazine. Perfectly frosted hair, tailored mauve silk dress, subtle makeup. She even had disarming family pics on the wall. Husband, two kids, grandchildren. Ugly frames, though.

“John said you’d done a little searching on your own. What have you done?”

My efforts seemed pretty pathetic now. “I put up missing-guy posters, ran an ad locally, checked a few car and mailbox rentals, snooped through his drawers and computer files.”

“And found…?”

“Nothing. No dirty pictures, no leather underwear, no secret life. Even the computer folders were cleaned up. There was nothing except a hint that he was interested in taking up skydiving. What will you do to find him?”

“Pretty much what you’ve been doing, but I’ll use a wider net. I’ll make a lot of phone calls and fax out a lot of pictures. I’ll contact motor vehicle departments and I’ll buy lots of mailing lists to look for new subscribers fitting his profile. If he’s alive I’ll find him, and chances are I’ll never leave my office.”

“Never?”

“Well, I’ll go home at night and play wife and grandmother. Do you have a picture of your brother?”

I handed her the flyer and Jace’s morphed photo. “Before and after shaving. The flyer photo is real. The other one was done on a computer to show what he’d look like without a beard. A friend did it for me. I think it’s probably pretty good.”

“It’s wonderful. Could be very helpful. Now, I need one more thing from you.”

“Yes?”

“Tell me everything about yourself and Scott and your parents.”

“But that’s another reason I want to find him. I don’t know everything. At times, I feel like I don’t know anything at all.”

CHAPTER 19

“Three thousand bucks?” Kady dropped her spoon and stared. “They’re letting you spend that much money on a detective?”

“She prefers to be called an investigator. You have yogurt on your chin.”

“And my mother agreed to this?”

“Yup. There’s a time limit and a money limit, but she and John agreed. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you.”

“Stuff about being your guardian she thinks is confidential. I had no idea. Three thousand. I’ve been going to every civic group in the county begging on my knees for scholarship money and you’re spending three grand to find a corpse. Why don’t you just burn it? Or give it away to one of these jerks.” She lifted her arm and motioned behind her, where most of the cafeteria population was looking in our direction.

Cody saw me, sneered, bit down on a sandwich.

“Most everyone in this room would blow it on a party,” I said.

“Three thousand,” she whispered. Stunned.

*

We had a sixth-hour pep fest to kick off the start of hockey playoffs. The Penokee Panthers went 9-12 during the regular season, but they’d won their last eight straight and the gym was raucous with hopeful fans. Kady was student council president and usually led the pep talks, but today she turned it over to one of the players and took a chair onstage by the team. While he gave a funny talk about Penokee’s hockey tradition, she looked over the audience until she found me. She stared.

I waved and made a face. She didn’t respond, didn’t even look away. Easy to read her mind: Three thousand bucks.

We were dismissed from the assembly and I went straight to the library for study hall. I was nearly caught up on missing assignments and had even started reading history again. More accurately, I was reading it for the first time. Maybe, just maybe, if I was caught up and promised to be a good girl, Ms. Penny would let me rejoin her class and I could avoid summer school, an earthly form of hell if there ever was one.

I was hunched over a table with eyes glued to a text when Kady entered the library, paused by my table, then went to one of the computers. I watched as she logged on to the Internet server and started typing. After a couple of minutes I got bored and returned to the fascinating facts about royal marriage patterns in nineteenth-century Europe.

I was packing my bag when the bell rang. Kady stood at the printer, waiting as it churned out a few pages. She placed them in a folder and put that into her backpack.

“Want a ride home?” It was routine, of course, but I needed a safe subject for conversation.

“Thanks. Jean said to tell you she’s staying late. Editorial deadline. I need to go to my locker. Meet you at the car.”

Routine, again. But there was nothing ordinary about the papers she handed me as she got out when we reached my house. “What’s this?” I asked.

“Just some stuff I found in the U medical library.”

I frowned. We had full access to all University of Wisconsin libraries through school, but the medical library?

“At the risk of ruining our friendship, I’ve decided that I have to be the one who gets you to face facts.”

“Facts?”

She wiped snow off the roof of the car with her coat sleeve. “Scott’s dead.” She nodded toward the folder I was holding. “That’s what the investigator should be looking for. That’s what he looks like.” She turned and crossed the street toward home.

I closed the garage door and went in the house. I laid the folder on the kitchen counter and turned on the lights. I nudged up the temp on the thermostat and hung up my coat. I made a sandwich and poured some milk. I opened the folder, looked at the top sheet, and nearly lost all the food from a lifetime of overeating.

Dead bodies. My dear old friend, sweet responsible Kady, had searched the libraries of the university system until she had found a book full of pictures of dead bodies. A medical pathology text, three pages from chapter seven, “Drowning and the Body.”

Bloated corpses, white waxy skin, empty eye sockets, missing parts.

I called the Drummonds, tapping the numbers in so fast I got a wrong number. Tried again. She answered. “Obviously, I’m not the one who needs help,” I said. “Did you have fun looking for these?”

“I just think—”

“I know what you think and I don’t care. I’m doing what I want to do, so all you have to do is shut up and cope with it. If you don’t, we just won’t be friends.” I hung up before she could respond to my threat. I crumpled the pictures and pitched them into the sink. My GPA, my business, Jace. Now I could chalk up one more loss to Scott’s little adventure: a best friend.

CHAPTER 20

“Arden, will you be my best friend?”

“I’m a little old for you.”

Hannah spooned heated fudge topping over her bowl of ice cream. “That would only matter if you were my lover.”

I sputtered, shooting drops of pop over the table.

“Hey!” she said, grabbing a handful of napkins, then handing them to me. “Clean it up.”

What had I been like at age six? Was I saucy? Quiet? Could I read? Had I known the meaning of the word
lover
?

Hannah was sleeping over. My idea, and three hours into the experiment, it was working out just fine. We’d watched one movie, made and eaten a large sausage and onion pizza, and fixed dessert, and were about to watch the second of our three videos,
Meet Me in St. Louis.

We were probably the only people in town that particular Friday night. The Panthers, after their mediocre season, had made it into the state hockey tourney. Even the Drummonds, school supporters but hardly hockey fans, had traveled to Madison for the tournament.

“First and probably the only time,” Jean had said. “You’ve got to come with us.”

“Alone again?” Mrs. Drummond frowned.

“You can look over the university campus,” said Mr. D. “We’ll check out the art department”

Kady said nothing. She and I had kept a cool distance since the day last week when she’d dumped the pictures on me. She waited, probably anticipating that her family would change its plans to accommodate my wishes.

“I’ve offered to take Hannah for the weekend,” I said, thinking fast “Claire needs the break.”

True enough, though I’d only thought about making the offer and hadn’t actually done so.

“A six-year-old?” asked Jean. “Weird.”

“How kind,” said Mrs. Drummond.

“Bring her along,” said Mr. D., probably hoping I wouldn’t.

“Suit yourself,” said Kady.