P. Parrish - Heart of Ice

“Mr. Chapman, do you think your daughter lied to you about going to stay with her brother?” Louis asked.

Chapman was staring at the ring again and looked up quickly.

“Perhaps she was going to go somewhere or see someone you didn’t approve of?”

Chapman shook his head. “Julie never lied. Maybe she just changed her mind about going to Ann Arbor. Maybe she wanted to surprise Ross. Maybe. .” His voice trailed off. “Julie never lied to me.”

“Mr. Chapman,” Flowers said, “I have teenage daughters, too, and sometimes they get secretive.”

Chapman stared hard at Flowers.

Flowers glanced at Louis and shifted in his chair. “Why don’t you tell us more about Julie?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“What was she like?”

“She was a good girl,” Chapman said.

“Can you be more specific?” Flowers asked gently.

Chapman seemed confused. “She was very smart, an excellent student. She was polite, funny, and shy. She loved to ride horses and she wrote poetry.”

“Poetry?” Louis asked.

Chapman was slow to focus on Louis. “Yes. She won a school prize once.”

“Do you still have any of her poetry?” Louis asked.

“Why would you want that?”

“It might help us understand her,” Louis said.

Chapman hesitated, then nodded. “If you think it might help,” he said. “I’ll have the notebooks sent up. I don’t know what you think you might find in them, though. They’re just poems.”

Just poems, Louis thought. Julie Chapman was shy and had attended an all-girls school. When a seventeen-year-old girl lies to her parents about where she is going, it’s usually about a boy. The Bloomfield Hills police had found no evidence of a boyfriend. But if one did exist Louis had a hunch he’d find him in Julie’s poems.

Louis was quiet, his eyes on the photographs of Mackinac Island on the wall over Flowers’s desk. And maybe he would find him here.

Twenty-one years ago, the police hadn’t asked about the summer home because there was no connection to the island. But now there was-the bones in the lodge.

“Mr. Chapman, did your family spend the summer of 1969 here on the island?” Louis asked.

Chapman had been looking out the window, and it took a moment for him to turn back to Louis.

“Yes,” he said. “We always came up north for the summer. We’d open the cottage on Memorial Day and close it on Labor Day.” He paused. “But that last summer. . things didn’t work out like I planned.”

When he fell silent Louis said, “Please go on, sir.”

“I thought it was important that we all be here that summer,” Chapman said. “The kids were getting older, and I had this idea that we needed that one last summer together as a family. But I was called away unexpectedly to Paris and didn’t make it.”

“So that summer before Julie disappeared, just your wife and the children came up here?” Louis asked.

“No, Ellen was ill. So the kids came up with Maisey.”

Louis recognized the name from the police report. Maisey Barrow had been the family’s housekeeper. He was about to ask if the housekeeper could be contacted, but suddenly Edward Chapman began to gasp for breath.

Flowers jumped to his feet, but before either he or Louis could make a move toward Chapman, the office door opened.

The black woman who had been sitting outside was at Chapman’s side in an instant. She checked the tubes in his nose and then adjusted the gauge on the oxygen tank.

“Try to relax, Mr. Edward,” she said.

Chapman’s watery eyes were riveted on her as he struggled to control his breathing. It took at least a full minute but finally the color began to return to Chapman’s face.

Louis realized he had been holding his own breath and slowly let it out.

The black woman looked at Flowers. “I need to take him home,” she said.

Flowers glanced at Louis and nodded. “We’re finished for now,” he said.

She took Chapman’s elbow and helped him to his feet. He looked at Flowers and whispered something to the woman. She frowned but nodded.

“Mr. Edward wants to help you,” she said. “We’ll be at the cottage if you need him. But right now, he needs some rest.”

“I appreciate it, Mr. Chapman,” Flowers said.

The woman led Chapman out of the office. Louis watched them leave, then turned back to Flowers.

“You handled that well,” he said.

Flowers rubbed his face as he sank back down into his chair. The phone rang, and Flowers looked out to the dispatcher, who mouthed the word Rafsky .

“Fuck,” Flowers whispered. He hit the speaker button on the phone.

“Chief Flowers here.”

“I’m in Marquette,” Rafsky said. “I have some news.”

Flowers rolled his eyes.

“The medical examiner took a second look at the bones,” Rafsky said. “He overlooked something the first time.” There was a pause. “Am I on a speakerphone?”

“Yeah, Kincaid’s here with me.”

Another long pause.

“You going to tell us the news?” Flowers said.

“There were more than two hundred and six bones. The extras were fetal bones. I’m on my way back. I’ll be there by five.”

Rafsky hung up.

Louis picked up the small gold ring, turning it so he could see the initials J.C. He looked up at Flowers. “Looks like the perfect daughter wasn’t so perfect.”

Maisey Barrow stood on the veranda of the cottage and took in the view. She hadn’t been here in five years, yet nothing had changed. The cottage-she had always thought it funny that people called a place with seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms a “cottage”-still sat in its prime position in the cul-de-sac on West Bluff Road. Beyond the sloping green lawn lay the gray-blue sweep of Lake Huron. Off to the west the little red-and-white Round Island Lighthouse still sat at the harbor like a Monopoly game hotel. And off to the east, the twin towers of the Mackinac Bridge still stood like white wicker legs under a tablecloth of gray clouds.

The cottage’s paint had faded and things looked a little shabbier, but nothing had really changed much. Nothing ever changed on this island.

Why some folks thought that was a good thing she had never quite figured out.

She folded her bulky sweater tighter around her chest and went back inside, pausing in the foyer. Nothing had changed in here, either.

The same oak paneling that had always needed polishing. The same Oriental runner that always needed sweeping free of sand. The same heavy oak doors that always needed closing because things in this house were always a little off-kilter.

“Ma’am, where would you like these?”

She turned at the sound of the man’s voice. The fellow she had hired at the ferry to bring up the luggage was standing just inside the archway that led to the parlor.

“Those brown ones go in the first bedroom on the right,” she said, pointing. “That red one’s mine.” She hesitated. “Put it in the room next door to that.”

The man hoisted the bags and went up the staircase. As Maisey watched him go, she ticked off the list she had written in her head. She had done this so many times in the past she could do it in her sleep. Protective plastic removed from the veranda. Dust cloths pulled off the furniture. Electricity, gas, and telephone turned on. Grocery list sent to Doud’s. Cleaning girl booked. Furnace man coming tomorrow because it was too damn cold to take a chance and who knew how long they’d be here? Boy hired to rake up all those leaves. Doctor alerted at the medical center.

Doctor. .

She allowed herself a deep sigh. She was sixty-seven now, and things weren’t easy anymore. Not that they’d ever been. For more than forty summers she had been running this house, been the one who had run all the houses for the Chapmans, from that first place in Dearborn to the big house in Bloomfield Hills. She had even crossed the Atlantic on the Cunard liner to open the town house in London. She was the one who had taken care of everything.