Thin Ice (25 page)

“Don’t you dare put out a hat for money,” I warned as I rose with our garbage. “It’s probably illegal here and I sure don’t have the cash to bail you out of a Chicago jail.”

The nearest trash bin was overflowing. Gulls pecked at the spillage. Good citizen from a small town, I started picking up the mess and smashing it into the bin. A blader whizzed by, tossed a drink cup stuffed with wrappers. He rolled on out of sight as his trash hit the ground. “Slob!” I shouted, and at least fifty people turned and looked at me.

A crowd of children and weary parents had gathered around Kady and Jean. It was hard to tell who was happier—the kids or their parents, who were obviously thrilled to have someone else entertain the children. I couldn’t see the show but I heard the silly noises: Kady’s “ugh, ugh” and Jean’s “gotcha, baby,” followed by plenty of cheers from the audience.

Behind them, Lake Michigan was a placid gray sheet. I stared at the water until my eyes blinked and teared, then looked back at the people surrounding my friends. There were even more now—children galore, mothers and fathers, a few scoffing kids my own age, one policeman, and a few yards back, alone, a man in a blue dress shirt and jeans. Short guy, kind of bald, tan, no beard.

There he was.

Scott leaned forward, peering in disbelief at the crowd, stunned to recognize the performers, his carefree
day in
Chicago now ruined. Then he looked around, a startled deer. Could he still get away, had he been seen?

I pounced on him before he took a step. Sprang from behind and pounded him on the back.

“You bastard! I should kill you! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”

He sank under my punches. “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, God,” he murmured again and again, maybe ten times more. I didn’t quit hitting.

“Stop it,” he said finally, wearily.

“Like hell I will. I hate you, I hate you. How stupid did you think I was?”

I felt someone tugging on my arm. Jean pulled me away just as the policeman put a hand on Scott. The juggling was over and the crowd had turned, all eyes on me and my brother. Parents began to hurry away with their young, while the kids my age stayed and watched.
This is better!
their faces said.

“None of this,” the policeman said.

“You heard him, Arden,” Scott said. “Cool off, now.”

“Just a brother-sister thing, Officer,” Kady explained. “She’s very mad at him. She hasn’t seen him for a long time. He forgot to write. That’s all.”

The policeman wasn’t so sure. “That right, miss?”

I nodded, but kept my eyes on my brother.

The cop patted the air with his hand. “Everything okay now?”

“Just fine,” I snapped, eyes still on my brother. The cop left.

“What are you doing here?” Scott said.

“What am
I
doing here? You’re the one who’s supposed to be dead.”

“Shhh,” Jean cautioned. “You’re getting loud again.”

“Arden,” said Kady, “I am very, very sorry. Huge apology, okay? None of us should ever have doubted you.”

“So I fooled someone?” Scott said.

“We all thought you were dead,” Kady said. “Thought you were frozen solid under the ice. Not Arden, though. She insisted it was all a stinky stunt.”

Scott lifted a hand and reached for me. “I knew it would work if I could just fool Arden. I knew that would be the tough part.”

I backed away from him. “Stop it, dead man; I don’t want to listen to you.” I walked to the nearest empty bench, sat down, pulled my knees into my arms and glared at him. Kady followed, ready to nurse if I collapsed. Jean stayed with Scott, ready to chase if he bolted.

“Should I call someone?” Kady asked me.

“No.”

“Al or John, maybe. Or Claire. They’ve got to know.”

“They will, but I get to tell them.”

Scott stuffed his hands into his pockets, looked around, shuffled nervously, watched me. He picked up some litter, walked it to a trash barrel, then came over to me. Jean followed him closely.

“What are you doing?” he said to her.

“Making sure you don’t get away.”

He motioned toward the bench. “May I?” he asked Kady. She nodded and gave him her spot. He sat, placed a hand on my knee, and said, “So, Arden, how were your grades?” I couldn’t help it, I collapsed and cried. Fell against his shoulder and emptied months of pent-up tears and snot on his shirt.

“Give us some time?” he asked the twins.

“Arden?” Jean said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “He’s not going anywhere.”

Kady nodded. “We’ll go hunt down some ice cream.”

“We’ll be right here,” I said as I wiped my face on his shirtsleeve.

Scott leaned back. “Yuck.”

“Oh, I am so sorry, I am sooo sorry: I messed up your shirt, what an awful thing to do to someone. Can you ever forgive me?” I turned away from him and looked at the thousands of joyful summer-happy feces. My brother was back from the dead; wasn’t that how I was supposed to feel?

“How’s Claire?”

I snorted. “You care?”

“I do.”

“She’s fine. About to be a mother again, but you know that. She’s getting so big it looks like she could pop any day. By the way, they’ve moved into the house.”

“What?”

“Last month. I had all that room, they were cramped out at the park, she’ll need help with the two kids, and who better than the baby’s aunt.
Especially
since the father isn’t around.” A smile spread across his face, and he turned away to hide it. “What’s the joke, Scott?” I snapped. “I don’t see anything funny about any of this.”

“I’m just enjoying the predictability of things, I guess,”

“What do you mean?”

“Arden, without you I couldn’t have done it. The conscience would have pricked too hard. But I knew you’d come through, knew you’d do the right thing for Claire. Be responsible, step in, take care of things.” He shifted and stretched his legs. “Like I did for you.” The jazzy sound of a clarinet floated across the air. Five minutes passed without either of us speaking, then:

“Are you okay, Arden?”

“I had an awful winter, Scott.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I looked so hard for you. They all thought I was having some sort of a breakdown, but I wasn’t. I knew what you had done.” I punched his shoulder again, harder than ever.

“Careful,” he said. “Cop might be hovering.”

“It was too perfect. You did it too perfectly. Did you have fun planning it?”

“I did, I must admit. But it was scary, in a way. Almost changed my mind every day.”

“I didn’t know right away. For weeks I was pretty shocked about you dying. Then I woke up and I could practically smell it. From almost the moment Claire told me she was pregnant it felt like I’d been shaken out of a bad dream. But no one would take me seriously. It will feel so good to tell them. How did you do it, exactly? I figured you dumped the sled and walked through the woods, but how did you plan it, how did you get away, how did you live?”

He took a breath, stroked the phantom beard and then let go of his secret in a long jumbled rush, as if he was happy to be sharing it with someone at last. He told me about his trips to Minneapolis, supposedly to buy a new machine, and he’d done that, yes, but he’d also set up a mailbox at a packaging store, then bought an ID, car, and trailer from a guy he knew who specialized in what he called difficult transactions. “The guy can get anything,” Scott said, still amazed.

“Is your car stolen?”

“Don’t think so. The papers look good, they’re all in the right name.”

“You could be in serious legal trouble, Scott. The county won’t be happy that they staged a dangerous and unnecessary search.”

“It won’t be anything I can’t face. I prepared for that too, Arden, for getting caught. I checked into the legal crap; there’s nothing too serious they can slap on me. If I get hauled back to Wisconsin and put in front of a judge, I suppose I could claim emotional duress and insanity. Take my chances.”

“You don’t look very duressed, Nice tan. Where have you been for six months?”

“Around. Warm places. I drove to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Florida. Take a look at this.” He showed me a Minnesota license for Phil Owen. The picture was Scott.

“You can quit pretending to be him.”

“I suppose. That will be nice, in a way. I was never quite sure how good the bogus identity was. Always worried I’d get stopped by a cop for something and he’d run the name through a computer and Bang! I’d find out Phil Owen was some dead mugging victim, or maybe a wanted career criminal. America’s Most Wanted. Well, I knew he wasn’t that. I actually went to a post office in Nevada once and checked the posters. Did they ever find my wallet in the river?”

“They found everything but you.”

“I’ve been carrying an old license with me. In case I had an accident somewhere, I wanted you to be notified.”

“How thoughtful, considering I was supposed to think you were already dead.”

He shrugged, then continued his story. “The same guy delivered the car to Penokee and left it at the motel. There was a rally that weekend, and the motel lot was filled with cars and trailers. That’s why I picked that date—if anyone had seen me, I would have been forgettable, just another sledder. Besides, the rally diverted most of the sledders to the track at Brimhall, so I didn’t think I’d see anyone on the state trail. I rode to the motel early that last morning, put the sled on the trailer, and drove out to the river. I parked the car, got back on the sled, and was back home before you were out of bed. Later that day I rode to Winker’s, had some beers, and then off I went in the storm. I dumped the trailer in a lot in Rice Lake.”

“Your car’s a big old beater, right? People saw you, Scott, they saw it parked on JG.”

“It’s a new Camry, and I parked it on TT. It’s a longer distance from the river to that road, but there’s not as much traffic on TT. It was snowing hard and I was on snowshoes. Not getting me on those ever again.” He shook his head. “Arden, people may have seen someone, but it wasn’t me. I was careful and I was ready to give it up at any time if anything went wrong.”

I stretched my legs. “I had it,” I muttered. “I had the big picture figured right, I just didn’t get the details. I’ll have to tell Rose.”

“Who’s Rose?”

“An investigator I hired.”

“A detective? How much money did you spend?”

“No more than you were worth, okay? And speaking of money, where did you get it? That’s the one thing I couldn’t figure out. How could you afford to buy this new life?”

He sighed. “I need a Sno-Kone. Want one?”

“Blue, please.”

I watched him take his turn at the vendor’s cart. Cone by cone, he moved up in line. An older couple right in front of him took a very long time deciding on flavors, and he turned and smiled at me, his eyebrows hopping on his broad forehead as he tipped his head toward the old people. At that moment my rage subsided, cooled by the gust of lake air that washed over me.

“I don’t know how long it will last,” I said when he handed me my Sno-Kone, “but at this moment I’m glad to see you.”

“You were always happiest when I brought home the groceries. By the way, have you been eating okay? You’re very thin.”

Not thin, not by a stretch. I had lost a few pounds, maybe ten. I filled my mouth with slush. “I’ve been on the Anxiety Diet. Now tell me about the money.”

“You’re so smart, you can figure it out.”

“No one could.”

“You will.”

My bad mood returned and I swore sharply. “I am tired of your game, Scott. Where did you get the money? Did you steal it?”

“Not really. Maybe from you, I guess. But you and the future baby got everything else, so I figured I was entitled to what I took.”

“What did you take? I checked your baseball cards. They weren’t worth much.”

“No,” he said thoughtfully, “I mostly collected no-names. Utility guys, not the stars.”

“The money?”

“Mom and Dad left a very nice photography collection. She’d started collecting when she was in college, building on a few pieces that belonged to her parents. I’d almost forgotten about it, because we stashed all that stuff in the basement years ago. There were some pretty valuable things. Stieglitz, Steichen, Man Ray, Arbus. I sold the collection in Minneapolis when I was buying the sled. Figured no one would know the difference because Mom and Dad’s estate was handled by some senile guy down in Rice Lake, things weren’t inventoried very carefully, and I didn’t think you’d remember we had them.”

“I didn’t”

“I didn’t sell all the pictures. I left you two. They’re packed in a box tucked under the steps, behind the trunks.”

“How thoughtful. Did it ever occur to you how awful it would be for the rest of us to lose you?”

“Of course it did, I guess I decided not to think about that, not to let it be a factor. Arden, for ten years I was the good guy. Reliable, steady Scott. Day after day, year after year, it was all I heard. ‘Take a look at my engine, Scott.’ ‘I’m having trouble with my brakes, Scott.’ ‘Aren’t you sweet with your sister, Scott?’ ‘Isn’t Arden clever, Scott?’ Shit. Did people ever wonder what I was feeling? Nope, I was just the perfect mechanic, the dutiful brother, and God knows I was the obedient son. Hell, it went back longer than ten years. Our parents were great people, Arden, and sure, I loved them, but, man, how they pushed! They pushed me through school, wanting perfect grades. Pushed me to Yale. Pushed and pushed while we moved to new places so they could play out dreams of being saintly doctors. Just when I got old enough to think about pushing back, they died and I had to take care of you. Then, just when I was beginning to think I was done playing Daddy, Claire laid her news on me. I couldn’t do it, Arden. I didn’t have it in me. I had to get out, had to go after what I wanted.” A frail-looking green bug landed on his knee and he flicked it away. “I know there’s no way you could understand.”