P. Parrish - Heart of Ice

Cooper took a deep breath.

“She was so pretty but so. .” Cooper couldn’t find the right word because he had never found out what it was that caused that swirl of sadness in her eyes.

“So you hooked up for the summer?” Kincaid asked.

Cooper nodded. “I knew she was a West Bluff girl, and I thought I didn’t have a chance with her. But she kept coming back to the stables. Then one day I took her up to Fort Holmes. I kissed her there.” He paused. “I got the feeling it was the first time for her.”

Kincaid was staring at him oddly now. “When did it become sexual?” he asked.

Cooper wiped his sweating face. “In August,” he said quietly.

“You took her to the lodge?”

Cooper nodded, the images flooding back in a torrent now. “She didn’t want her family to know. I couldn’t take her back to my room in the employee dorm. It was the only place we could be alone.”

“How’d you get in?” Louis asked.

“There was a broken window in one of the front rooms. The shutter half off the hinges, so we snuck in. I had a transistor radio. Julie brought blankets and candles.”

He was surprised to feel a small smile coming to his lips. “It’s a weird old place, but Julie made it beautiful. She called it Pelion. I never knew what she meant.”

“It was the home of Chiron,” Kincaid said.

“Who?”

“He was a mythical creature, a centaur.”

The door opened, and Rafsky came in. He was holding a folder and set a can of Vernors on the table. Cooper popped the tab with his free hand and guzzled half the can.

“He was telling me about Julie,” Kincaid said.

Rafsky said nothing, just took his spot against the wall again. Cooper waited until Kincaid’s eyes came back to him.

“Did she ever talk about her family?”

“No, never,” Cooper said. “I asked her about them once, and she just shut down. I didn’t ask again. I figured she was worried I would ask to meet them or something.”

“What happened at the end of summer?” Kincaid asked. “Did you just split up?”

Cooper shook his head. “She left suddenly. I heard it was because her mother was sick and she had to go home. I stayed here until the stables closed in October. We promised to write, but Julie didn’t want her parents to know, so we sent the letters to each other through a girlfriend.”

Kincaid sat forward. “Rhoda?”

How did they know about her?

“Rhonda,” he said slowly. “Her name was Rhonda Grasso.”

Kincaid wrote the name in a notebook. “Do you know where we can find her?”

“She was from Cedarville and worked here during the summers like me,” Cooper said. “She was part of the summer crowd we hung with. She and Julie were friends, and she volunteered to help us.”

“I need her address,” Louis said.

“I lost track of her a long time ago.”

“What about Julie’s letters,” Louis asked. “Do you still have them?”

Cooper shook his head. “I didn’t keep them.”

Rafsky came forward. “When was the last time you heard from Julie?”

Cooper picked up the Vernors and drained it. His hand shook as he set the can down. How much should he tell them? Would it make any difference now? Julie was dead. He himself might as well be.

“I called her on December 1, 1969,” he said.

“Why are you so sure about the date?” Rafsky asked.

“It was the night of the draft lottery,” Cooper said. “I drew the lowest number.”

Cooper could tell Rafsky knew what this meant and that Kincaid had no idea. “I had to talk to her, so I broke my promise to never call her house. I told her I was going to Vietnam. She cried. I couldn’t get her to stop. Maybe that’s why I said it.” Cooper let out a long breath. “I don’t know now why I did, but it came out.”

“What did you say?” Kincaid asked.

“I asked her to run away with me to Canada.”

Kincaid and Rafsky exchanged looks.

“I didn’t have any money, but I had a friend up there who I knew would help us out,” Cooper said. “I told Julie she had to find a way to get to St. Ignace, and she said she would take the bus. But then she said she wanted me to meet her on the island at the lodge.”

“Why?” Kincaid asked.

“She said she had hidden something there and she had to get it. She said it was a surprise for me.”

“What was it?”

“I never found out. I never made it to the lodge.”

Cooper shut his eyes.

A loud crack, like a rifle shot.

Suddenly the world dropped.

Blackness. Water. Cold.

“Mr. Lange?”

Cooper opened his eyes. Kincaid was staring at him.

“I had to cross the ice bridge to get here,” he said. “I fell through. I was lucky. An ice fisherman saw me go in and pulled me out.”

The room was still hot but Cooper felt a shiver go through him. It was quiet for a long time as he waited for one of them to say something, to tell him he was free to go. Now they understood why he ran.

“So when you fell in,” Rafsky said, “were you coming or going from the island?”

Cooper blinked. “I told you-”

“Prove you weren’t leaving the island.”

“The hospital, there’s a record I was there-”

Rafsky leaned close. “Prove to me you didn’t meet her at the lodge. Prove to me you didn’t kill her.”

“I loved her!” Cooper’s eyes shot to Kincaid, then back to Rafsky. “Why would I kill her?”

“Because when you got to the lodge she gave you your little surprise,” Rafsky said. “She told you she was pregnant.”

Cooper was stunned into silence. “Pregnant? That’s not possible,” he said finally. “I was always careful. I always used a condom.”

Rafsky set a photograph on the table.

“This is Julie,” he said.

He slapped down a second photograph. “This is her baby.”

Cooper stared at the photograph of the tiny bones. He felt a tear in his chest and choked back a sob. He reached out toward the photograph but couldn’t pick it up.

“You’re right, Lange,” Rafsky said. “You were careful. The baby wasn’t yours.”

Cooper looked up at him. “I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do,” Rafsky said. “She told you she was pregnant. You didn’t want to give up your whole life for a baby that wasn’t yours. So you lost it and you hit her.”

“No. .”

“You took her down to that basement-”

“No, no!”

“You killed her. You took her clothes to make it look like a stranger did it and then you left her there to rot.”

“Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” Cooper jumped up, pulled against the cuff, trying to get to Rafsky. His chair clattered to the floor.

“Got a bit of a temper there, Lange?” Rafsky said.

Hands clamped down on his shoulders and Kincaid righted the chair, shoving him into it.

Cooper wiped his face. “I want a lawyer,” he said.

Rafsky picked up the photographs and put them back in the folder. “You’re going to need one,” he said.

Louis followed Rafsky downstairs and into Flowers’s office. Rafsky closed the door and went to the murder board. He tacked the sketch of Cooper Lange on the board and reached for the phone.

The bulletin board wasn’t very big, so Rafsky had added two large drugstore poster-boards to the wall to extend it. But everything was there. The photographs of Julie, the skeleton, and the fetal bones. Danny Dancer’s mug shot and a blowup of Ross Chapman’s license photograph. A close-up of the school ring and shots of the basement from all angles. On one of the poster-boards Rafsky had written out in black marker a time line for all the dates and events. There was also a map of the island that showed the distance between the lodge, Dancer’s cabin, and the Chapman cottage. Another map marked the usual route downstate to Bloomfield Hills, noting the miles and driving time.