P. Parrish - Heart of Ice

Cooper’s eyes locked on one sentence: “Although a positive identification has not yet been made, sources close to the investigation say police are proceeding on the theory that they may belong to Julie Anne Chapman, who disappeared from her Bloomfield Hills home twenty-one years ago.”

The photograph pulled him back. She looked exactly the same as he remembered. The same oval face framed by straight black hair and somber dark eyes. If was as if the past twenty-one years had never happened. Or as if she had been frozen in time. Frozen in his mind.

Cooper rose and went to the coffeemaker. He poured himself a fresh mug and stood at the sink, staring out the window at the flannel-gray fog.

It felt like the fog was there in his head. It had felt like this for as long as he could remember.

Like those warm nights with her in the lodge were something he had only imagined. Like that cold day on the ice bridge had never happened. Like those eleven months in Vietnam had been a nightmare and the six months in the VA hospital one big narcotic dream. Like the constant pain in his leg was something his mind made up when he needed an excuse to crawl into himself and die for just a couple of hours.

“You’re up early.”

He turned. His father was standing in the doorway. It was just a trick of the gloomy morning light, but for a moment he saw his father as he had that day twenty-one years ago, when they had stood in this very same spot and he had told his father- lied to him- that he was going ice fishing for three days up near Whitefish Bay. The next thing he remembered was his father’s face above him when he woke up in the St. Ignace Hospital, half-dead from hypothermia.

“You okay? You look a little pale,” his father said.

“I think I got a bug or something,” Cooper lied.

His father moved into the kitchen. He glanced at the newspaper, but nothing registered. There was no reason it should. Cooper had never told him why he had been out on the ice bridge that day, never told him about the girl on the island.

For a second he thought about telling his father all of it now. Telling him, too, that maybe he needed to go to the island and talk to the police.

“The cold’s coming early this year,” his father said.

“Yeah.”

“The storm windows-”

“I already did them.”

“I better check the furnace.”

“I’ll do it, Pop.”

His father’s eyes lingered on him before he turned to the coffeemaker.

“Flu’s going around,” his father said. “Maybe you should stay home today. I can go open the bar.”

Cooper didn’t answer. He moved past his father out of the kitchen. In the bedroom he pulled on a sweater and work boots. He went to his closet, looking for his down vest because he felt the cold so easily these days. As he grabbed the vest his eyes were drawn to the old Converse shoe box on the shelf.

He pulled it down and sat on the bed.

There wasn’t much in the box. But then, there had been no reason to add anything for a long time. And even less reason to look at what was there.

But he did now. He pulled out the black case and cracked it open. He ran a finger over the Purple Heart, closed the case, and set it aside. He barely gave a glance to the faded varsity letter from LaSalle High School but took a long time staring at the Timex watch that had belonged to his grandfather. There were papers that he sifted through quickly, things that he didn’t remember keeping, and the coaster from the New York Bar in Saigon made him remember a night he had tried to forget. At the bottom of the box were the photographs.

Only a few. Most faded-to-orange Polaroids of bare-chested smiling men with palm trees and tanks in the background. A few of the guys he had worked with on the pipeline and a blurred one of his ex-wife on the beach at San Padre Island. And then. .

A black-and-white photograph of a girl with long dark hair and somber eyes. Its edges were curled, its image faded.

He stared at it for a long time, then turned it over.

The delicate handwriting had been lost a long time ago in the icy water. Only a few words of what she had written to him remained.

Love. . may shatter your dream

What had happened? The newspaper told him nothing, just that there were bones in the lodge. He closed his eyes against the image in his head.

Had she frozen to death waiting for him?

Something tore deep in his chest, and it hurt so bad that for a moment he couldn’t even pull in enough air to breathe.

He couldn’t even move, because he knew now he wasn’t going to do anything. Any thought he had of helping the police was gone. All he wanted to do now was survive.

He put the photograph back in the shoe box and stuck the box in the far corner of the closet.

* * *

Danny Dancer picked up the Mackinac Island Town Crier . For the tenth or eleventh time today he read the story about Julie Anne Chapman.

It told him that her bones had been found in the lodge, that she was from Bloomfield Hills and had a brother who was running for the Senate. It told him that the police weren’t sure yet that it was her. But he knew it was her.

He carefully smoothed the newspaper out on the table and concentrated on the photograph. It looked like one of those school pictures, but it was in plain old black-and-white. Not nearly as pretty as the picture of her he had stored in his head.

Skin glowing gold from the bonfire. Hair black and glossy as a horse’s mane. Eyes like the night sky pricked with stars, filled with love for the boy who worked at the stables.

Dancer couldn’t remember the boy’s name, and he didn’t care. He couldn’t remember the names of the fudgies or the rich West Bluff kids or even the names of the local kids who worked and played on the island.

But he remembered what they looked like. He remembered how they spent their days, what they did in the dark, because he watched them summer after summer.

They let him hang around but never too close. He never got invited up to Fort Holmes, where they went to smoke pot. Never got to share a bottle of Boone’s Farm around a campfire. Never had a chance with a girl on an Indian blanket.

When he was young things like that hurt, and one day, many winters after Aunt Bitty was gone and he was all alone, he simply gave up watching them. He grew too old, grew too into himself, and stopped talking to anyone except the postal lady, the waitress at Millie’s, or the grocer at Doud’s.

It was just him and his skulls.

Until that day he found her, and suddenly the loneliness was gone.

When was that? He didn’t know. The newspaper said she was here in 1969 and the date on the newspaper said it was now 1990, but a sense of time was something he couldn’t grasp.

His life passed in seasons. Forests on fire with color. Gray skies and ice-chunked water. Melting drizzles and finally the bloom of the purple lilacs and dahlias as big as white dinner plates.

Dancer rose from the table and went to the shelves. He picked up the skull from the top.

“Hello, Julie,” he said softly.

He slowly ran his fingers over the smooth curve of bone. His eyes were burning, and it felt almost like all those times when the beetles were doing their work and he got too close to the skulls. But this burning was different. It was the burn of panic.

The newspaper said police had found her in the basement of the lodge. It hadn’t said anything about her skull being missing, but he knew the police would need it to figure out for sure that it was her.

They would want it back. They would come looking for it.

Had he been careful enough getting in and out of the lodge? Had the police found the hole that for so many summers had been his secret way in? Had he left fingerprints?