P. Parrish - Heart of Ice

The clerk directed them to a small tearoom, where they ordered sandwiches and orange pop. Lily ate only half of her egg salad as she watched the carriages come and go outside the window. Louis felt helpless as he tried to get her to talk.

“How about some ice cream?” he asked.

She perked up. “Can I have a hot fudge sundae?”

“I am pretty sure they have hot fudge here.” He signaled to the waitress and ordered two sundaes and a coffee. Lily dug into hers eagerly, but Louis couldn’t stop staring at the splint on her forearm. Couldn’t stop thinking of the phone call he was going to have to make to Kyla. And more than anything, couldn’t stop thinking about what Lily felt when she saw those bones.

He waited until she was finished, then decided to just plunge in. “Lily, I think we should talk,” he said.

She took a sip of orange pop. “About what?”

“What happened today.”

She didn’t look up, just kept drinking.

“How do you feel about it?” Louis said. “I mean, what happened today.”

“I didn’t mean it,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m sorry I went inside the house,” she said softly. “I’m sorry I broke the floor.”

He touched her hand. “Oh God, Lily, that’s not what I meant. I meant how do you feel about seeing those bones?”

She looked down at the place mat.

“It’s okay to be scared,” Louis said. When she didn’t say anything he decided to press on. “I’ve seen a lot of bones before and I know it’s scary.”

She looked up at him. “Is that what I’m going to look like when I die?”

He tightened his hand around hers. He didn’t have a clue about what to say but he knew instinctively that the wrong words right now could stay with her forever. He was saved from saying anything because she spoke first.

“I saw a dead person once when I was little,” she said. “When Grandpa Brown passed, Momma took me to say good-bye to him. He was in a really pretty wood bed with a lot of flowers. He looked okay, like he was asleep. But I knew he was dead.”

“So you know we leave our bodies here when we. .” He paused.

“When we go to heaven,” she said, nodding her head.

She pulled her hand away and started playing with the straw in her drink. “What’s going to happen to those bones?” she asked.

This one was easy at least. “The police will try to find out who they belong to,” he said.

“And then what?” she asked.

“They will be sent home so the person’s family can have a funeral, like you did for Grandpa Brown.”

She considered this for a moment. “How will they figure out whose bones it is?”

“They have lots of ways of finding out,” Louis said. When he realized she seemed okay with where this conversation was going he couldn’t resist showing off a little. “They can match teeth. They can sometimes match hair or jewelry. They can check records to figure out if someone disappeared.”

She was looking at him intently now. “Is that what you do in your job?”

“Sometimes,” Louis said.

Lily sat back in her chair, thinking. “It’s sad,” she said softly.

“What is?” he asked.

“It’s sad that the bones were down there in the dark for so long and no one knew it.”

Strange that she should put it that way. It seemed that during most of his career he had been dealing with cold cases, cases where people had gone missing, leads had died, and detectives had lost interest. Even his first homicide had been unsolved for thirty-five years-a pile of bones found with a noose in a Mississippi swamp.

“Yes,” he said. “It is sad.”

They stopped off in the gift shop so Louis could buy toothbrushes and two Grand Hotel T-shirts. As soon as they got back to the room, Lily wanted to take a bath. Louis filled the tub halfway, throwing in some stuff that looked like bath salts at the last minute. He carefully positioned two big pink towels and a T-shirt on a stool by the tub’s edge, then returned to the bedroom. Lily was struggling to take off her sweatshirt using her one good arm but finally just gave up and looked at him with big eyes. He wasn’t sure who was more embarrassed. She allowed him to ease the sweatshirt up over her head, leaving her wearing just a white T-shirt and slacks. He took a step back, feeling helpless. She set her lips in a determined line.

“I can do the rest,” she said.

“You sure?”

She nodded and walked off to the bath. He followed her and she turned, looking up at him.

“Be carefully not to get your splint wet,” he said. “I’ll leave the door open just a crack. You just holler if you need anything, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. Standing in the big white bathroom, she looked very small-and very tired.

He left the door ajar and sat on the edge of the bed. He felt tired, too, as if the full weight of the day was suddenly bearing down on him. He pulled off his shoes and lay back against the headboard.

He was about to close his eyes when he focused in on the telephone.

Shit.

There was no way to avoid it a moment longer. He swung his legs over the bed, pulled out his wallet, and found the slip of paper with Kyla’s phone number. The area code was for Chicago, where she was attending a conference for black career women.

He dialed the number, halfway hoping she wouldn’t be in her room. But she picked up on the fifth ring.

“Kyla, it’s Louis.”

“Louis? What. .? Why are you calling? Where’s Lily?”

God, was the woman psychic?

“She’s right here with me. She’s taking a bath.”

There was a pause on Kyla’s end. “Louis, is something wrong?”

He rubbed his face. “She. . we had a little accident-”

“What? Oh God, what-?”

“Kyla, calm down, everything’s fine. Lily’s fine.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down. What’s going on up there?”

“She fell down. She’s fine, the doctor says it’s just a sprain and that-”

“A sprain? Don’t lie to me!”

Louis’s eyes shot to the bathroom door and he turned toward the wall so his voice wouldn’t carry. “Kyla, goddamn it, calm down. Lily’s fine. I wouldn’t lie to you about her. Now, calm down and just listen.”

He could hear Kyla breathing hard, and he pulled in a deep breath himself before he spoke. “We were riding bikes and we were doing a little exploring.” He knew Lily would eventually tell her about the bones, but he also knew there was no way he could tell Kyla about them right now.

“She fell and sprained her arm,” Louis said. “They took X-rays and the doctor said-”

“There’s a doctor on the island?”

“There’s a good medical center,” he said. “Kyla, you have to believe me, Lily’s fine.” When Kyla didn’t say anything for a long time he knew what she was thinking-that he wasn’t competent enough to keep his own daughter safe on a tourist island for three days.

“I can be there tomorrow,” Kyla said.

“No,” Louis said quickly. He glanced at the bathroom door. “She’s fine, Kyla, and she doesn’t want to go home.” He paused. “And I don’t want her to. I need this time with her. Please don’t cut it short.”

There was a long silence on the other end. Then she said, “Are you going to Echo Bay after this weekend?”

Louis sat back against headboard. The last thing he needed right now was a lecture about Joe. “Yes, I am,” he said.

Another silence, then “How about if I come up to the island Monday afternoon and pick up Lily?”

He was confused. Kyla had never been particularly kind to him in the past about anything, so why was she offering to save him a trip back to Ann Arbor? Especially since it freed him up to be with his lover, Joe, a woman Kyla clearly didn’t approve of.