P. Parrish - Heart of Ice

She was dressed in tight white shorts and a pink blouse tied below her breasts. One of her long tan legs was bent like a model’s, and her arm was draped over Cooper Lange’s shoulders.

Her father had described her as “boy crazy,” but it was more than that. Even at sixteen, Rhonda Grasso was a girl at ease with her sexuality.

“Chief,” Louis said, holding out the photograph, “I think we might have a triangle-Rhonda, Cooper, and Julie.”

Flowers looked up, letting the garbage bag fall. He came over and took the photograph, looking at it for a long time.

“If it was, it was a pretty ugly triangle,” he said softly.

“Aren’t they all?”

“Yeah, but you’ve got to understand what it’s like up here,” Flowers said. “The locals are stuck here all winter and then summer comes and the fudgies take over. They make a big mess, then leave everything for us to clean up. If a townie girl like Rhonda thought a Bluff girl like Julie wanted her guy, she wouldn’t give him up easily.”

Flowers handed Louis the photograph and went back to bagging up the papers.

Louis started to put the photograph away, then stopped. He stared at Rhonda Grasso, thinking about Danny Dancer’s description of her- eyes like ice, heart like ice -and he had the feeling he was looking at a killer.

The first thing Louis did when they got back on the island was drop Flowers off at his home. It was clear the trip had taken all the starch out of him. Louis caught a glimpse of Carol waiting for him at the front door as he trudged up the walk. She waved to Louis, wrapped an arm around her ex-husband, and ushered him into the house.

Louis turned the police SUV around and started back to town, eager to tell Rafsky about Rhonda Grasso. But then he stopped at an intersection, remembering his promise to Danny Dancer.

I’ll take care of your skulls.

Dancer’s cabin was just up the road from Flowers’s house. What the hell he was going to do with the damn skulls, he had no idea.

A few strands of yellow crime scene tape hung limply from the trees. Apparently it had been enough to keep trespassers out, as Louis saw no fresh footprints close to the cabin and no sign anyone had poked around. The evidence tape that sealed up an active crime was gone from the front door, so Louis knew the police and DA were finished. He could enter without disturbing anything.

The door was locked. The shutters had been taken down, so Louis tried the front window. It took him a while to get the frozen window open, but finally he was inside.

He hadn’t been back since the shooting. Parts of that day were a little fuzzy, blurred by the memories of bullets whizzing over his head and Flowers bleeding in his arms. Yet the place seemed less gruesome. Then he knew what it was-the stench was gone. All the beetles were dead.

Louis looked around. The cops had cleared the shelves of Dancer’s sketchbooks. But his other books remained and Louis took a moment to scan the titles: Greek Mythology for Children, The Road Less Traveled, and a third book, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self.

So Joe’s hunch had been right.

He opened it to the copyright page. It had been published in 1967 and checked out of the St. Ignace library that same year, when Dancer would have been about sixteen. He thought of Aunt Bitty and how hard it must have been for her to raise a child she had probably not understood very well.

Louis turned to the task of gathering the skulls. The only containers he could find were the plastic bins with the dead beetles in them. He took two of them outside and rinsed them out with half-frozen water from the spigot.

Back inside he lined each bin with sheets off Dancer’s bed and started putting the animal skulls in them, starting with the large ones. When both bins were full, he began gathering up the smaller skulls. It was freezing in the cabin, and he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. He thought about leaving the smallest skulls, then realized he couldn’t.

You got to get them all.

He went through the kitchen cabinets, finally spotting a large shoe box under the sink. He dumped out the hammer and small crowbar and started back to the skulls. Halfway across the room, he stopped and looked back at the tools.

He was remembering what Pike said that day at the lodge.

Want to see his little rat hole?

The hole in the foundation that was Dancer’s secret entryway. The hole where, each time he left, he would carefully re-place the boards’ nails into the same well-worn holes.

Louis turned a slow circle. The interior wood walls already had holes cut in them from where Rafsky’s men had searched inside.

Louis looked up. Nothing but a peaked roof and rafters.

He looked down at the floorboards.

Pike had said the foundation under the cabin was concrete. Louis had a sudden memory of the movie Escape from Alcatraz and Clint Eastwood chipping away at the old concrete in his cell with a spoon.

Louis grabbed the crowbar and scanned the floorboards again, looking for uneven slats or protruding nails. He saw nothing, so he started moving the furniture.

He dropped to his hands and knees. Starting in the farthest corner from the door, he crawled along the wall, sliding his palm over the worn boards and tapping to find a hollow spot.

In a corner by the bed he found what he was looking for. A hollow sound beneath three boards, which all had holes wider than those of the abutting boards.

It was easy to use the crowbar to pull up the boards. Beneath, set down in a hole in the concrete, was a wooden box about the size of a twelve-pack of beer. He wedged his fingers down each side, lifted the box out, and opened the lid.

Fur. Brown and red fur.

An animal pelt wrapped around something else. He peeled away the top flap of fur.

Julie Chapman’s skull lay on the leathery underside of the pelt.

Rafsky had been right. Dancer had Julie’s skull all along. And it had been well cared for. It was clean and smooth and Dancer had even used fine wire to attach the jaws, giving the skull the look of a perfect laboratory specimen.

Louis gave the pelt a shake. A wad of money, a brooch, a tiny Bible, and a set of keys tumbled to the floor. He was sure the keys were for the Ford Dancer kept garaged in St. Ignace. He stuffed them and the other things in his parka pocket, pushed, to his feet, and took the skull to the window so he could get a better look at it.

There it was-a small crack in the right temple area. Now they had a cause of death.

He turned the skull around to the front.

There was something about seeing a human skull that conveyed a reality that a photograph could not. As he stared at Julie Chapman’s skull he could imagine the white bone with long black hair and brown eyes. But as his eyes moved over the curves and ridges, an uneasy feeling started to settle inside him.

It was the teeth.

There was a bottom molar missing and the two front teeth. .

There was a gap between them.

Jesus .

Louis set the skull on the counter and reached into his parka, pulling out the photographs he had taken from Chester Grasso’s garage. He held the close-up of the smiling Rhonda Grasso next to the skull.

He let out a long breath. He was no expert, but to his eye there was no doubt that this was not Julie Chapman. It was Rhonda Grasso.

It took Rafsky a good five minutes to open his hotel room door. He was wearing a wrinkled T-shirt, sweatpants, and his face was lathered with shaving cream. His eyes looked like a road map, blue shot through with red, and his hand holding the razor trembled slightly.