P. Parrish - Heart of Ice

Maisey shook her head. “God Bless her soul, but I barely remember her. I didn’t even get her name right.”

Louis was quiet, and so was Maisey. If she knew nothing of Julie’s whereabouts, why wasn’t she asking questions? Why wasn’t she asking why Julie’s ring had been found in the lodge? Why wasn’t she asking about Ross being the father of Rhonda’s baby?

Maisey started to get up from her chair, but Louis put a gentle hand on her forearm. She sat back down.

“Julie had a boyfriend named Cooper Lange,” Louis said. “She was going to run off to Canada with him so he could avoid the draft. Did you know that?”

“No. I told you, I didn’t know anything.”

“Back then you didn’t know anything,” Louis said. “What about now?”

“What do you mean?”

He had gone too far to turn back. He had to put the question out there and see what it got him.

“I believe Julie is alive,” Louis said.

He could feel Maisey’s arm trembling under his hand. He could see something in her face, the same thing that had been in Cooper’s face that day in the interrogation room when he talked about Julie. It was the need to not be alone any longer with a secret.

“Maisey,” Louis said gently, “do you know where she is?”

Maisey opened her mouth to say something but then clamped it shut. She started to pull away, but Louis tightened his hand on her arm as a subtle pressure, hoping that if he waited long enough the weight of what she knew would become unbearable.

But Maisey drew her arm away and rose. She was gathering herself together, and he knew he had lost the moment of her vulnerability.

“I can be of no help to you, Mr. Kincaid,” she said.

“I know you want to protect Julie but-”

Maisey interrupted him. “I have things to do upstairs. Please see yourself out.”

He stood up quickly, pissed at himself for not being more aggressive with her.

“Maisey.”

She was almost to the stairs and she stopped. There was one open cardboard box, stuffed with newspapers. She set the frames she was carrying on top of the newspapers, reached into the pocket of her sweater, and pulled something out. Louis saw it was the little ceramic horse he had seen up in Julie’s room.

She set the horse on top of the picture frames and looked up at him. Her eyes were brimming.

“I’ve given you all I can, Mr. Kincaid,” she said. “In the only way I can.”

She turned and went up the stairs.

There was no reason to call to her because he knew she would just ignore him. And he wasn’t going to drag her down to the station and rip the truth from her by tag-teaming her with Rafsky as if she were a common criminal. There had to be another way.

I’ve given you all I can. In the only way I can.

What had she given him besides Julie’s journal?

Louis moved to the open cardboard box and picked up the ceramic horse. Underneath was the framed photograph of Julie sitting in a white wicker chair holding a rag doll, the same picture he had seen before. Except. .

Louis pulled out his glasses. It wasn’t a rag doll, he could see that now. It was a sock monkey.

Edna Coffee had seen a teenage girl carry a monkey onto the ferry that winter day twenty-one years ago. If Julie treasured the stuffed animal that much, surely Maisey would have noticed it was missing after Julie disappeared. But that day up in Julie’s room, when he had asked Maisey if Julie had a stuffed monkey, she had said no.

He knew now Maisey hadn’t lied to protect Julie. She had lied to protect herself. She knew Julie had not been abducted. She knew Julie had left voluntarily.

Why had she kept the secret from Edward? Maybe because she knew Julie was running away from something and didn’t want to be found?

He looked up the staircase. Maisey had wanted him to find the photograph. She wanted him to find Julie now.

But one photograph was not enough proof. He looked back at the open cardboard box. The only other things sitting atop the newspapers were some books. They were so thin he was able to grab all four with one hand.

They seemed to be a set of some kind, the dust jackets all featuring landscapes-snowcapped mountains, a deserted beach, a shadowed forest, jagged ocean rocks, a log cabin on a lake. The author’s name, Emma Charicol, meant nothing to him. The titles held no clues- The Path to Acheron, Elysian Echoes, From Pelion, Island of the Sun.

His heart gave a kick.

Pelion.

The place in Julie’s poem where the centaur Chiron lived. The name she gave to the lodge.

The drawing on the jacket of From Pelion was of a log cabin high on a bluff overlooking a lake. He turned the book over. There was no author photo, just a brief biography.

Emma Charicol is the author of four books of poems. She is an adjunct professor of creative writing at Berkeley City College, where she is a founder of the Lyrics and Odes Reading Series.

Louis flipped through the poems, scanning them for something that would resonate with Julie’s journal. Finally, he found it. The last poem in the book, titled “Seventeen.”

From a chrysalis of ice

Into the August sun I glide

A flight too brief

On wings of grief

Now my heart beats a dirge

For the girl who died

There had been a poem in Julie’s journal called “Twelve.” It had clearly been about the incest. Was this one-also titled with what could be an age-about the death of Rhonda Grasso?

Louis closed the book, looking again at the author bio on the back. There was a small rush of adrenaline moving inside him, but there was also something else. Something more sobering-the knowledge that if Emma Charicol was Julie Chapman, then his next step would be exposing a woman who had spent her entire adult life trying to escape her childhood.

But she was also a murder suspect.

He gathered up the four poetry books, the ceramic horse, and the photograph of Julie and started toward the door.

Masiey’s voice came soft and weary from the quiet shadows of the second floor.

“Good-bye, Mr. Kincaid.”

He paused, his hand on the doorknob. “Good-bye, Maisey,” he said. “Thank you.”

Louis drove slowly up the narrow winding road, leaning forward to see the house numbers through the light fog. Then, around another bend, there it was-290 Rose Street.

He pulled to a stop, looking up at the big shake-shingled house. It had come down to this one moment, all the months of investigation, all the hours of work he and Rafsky had put into this case. It had all come down to this moment and his instinct-that Julie Chapman was dead but had come alive again as Emma Charicol.

Rafsky had decided not to make the trip to California. There would be no way to explain it to his boss without revealing how far things had gone off the rails. Except for finding her address in Berkeley, they had also decided not to alert any authorities in California or run any computer checks on Emma Charicol. First Louis had to see her himself.

During the long flight from Chicago to San Francisco, Louis had read all the From Pelion poems. They had none of the desperate despair that infused Julie’s childhood verses. Emma’s poems were about gardens that bloomed in winter, deaf children who sang, and mythical worlds where three moons burned so white that “the night was benign and belighted.”

Louis picked up the From Pelion book from the passenger seat and turned to “Seventeen.” It was the only one of Emma Charicol’s poems that had a hint of darkness and perhaps a hint to what happened in the lodge in 1969.

My heart beats a dirge for the girl who died.