Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen

“Quiet, Harry,” she said to her dog. “Poor thing, some students got him, then realized they couldn’t take care of him and left him behind when they went home for the sum­mer. Happens every year. Abandonment.”

“Good it wasn’t a pony,” I said.

When I approached, Harry sniffed me politely. He was slobbery, but gentlemanly. Not the pet I’d expected Frances to have.

“I thought you’d have a cat,” I said. “The stereotype.”

“Do you?”

“It’s not officially mine. It belonged to a co-worker. It thinks it’s mine when dinnertime comes around. And I had a mole. Adopted as well. I just released it into the wild. The hedge in front of my house, actually. I thought I’d bet­ter set it free before I killed it. I have terrible luck with living creatures.”

“They came looking for Seth Jones,” Frances said.

“What?” I couldn’t have heard quite right. We were talk­ing about pets, weren’t we?

“Let’s go in,” Frances suggested.

I followed her, and the dog followed me. Had she said something about Seth Jones?

We sat down in the kitchen. Frances had made lemonade. Poured cherry juice into the pitcher, a faint blush, a sour pink. I could see it even though it was so pale. This was going to be worse than being fired. She wanted to talk about Lazarus, the man I never spoke about, the man I knew I would lose. Just not now. Not yet.

“The Orlon sheriff ’s office got a call from some character at a feedstore. That’s how the whole thing started, and now they’re convinced some crime has been committed. No-body’s seen this fellow Jones, not since he was struck by lightning, and now a deliveryman from the feedstore swears he recognized a man in Jones’s house who wasn’t Jones. It was someone who worked at the feedstore a while back. So now they’re digging around.” Frances let that all sink in, then she asked, “I suppose you want to know how I know all this.”

“Yes, how?” I suppose I looked stunned. I certainly felt it.

“They came for his library information. His card.”

Frances poured me a glass of lemonade. 180

“It was missing from the catalog, but I found it on your desk.”

She knew a lot. More than I would have expected. She’d been seeing through me all along.

The dog was sitting beside me, hoping there’d be cookies to go with the lemonade, I suppose, breathing on my leg.

I thought about which sort of lie would fit best.

“Don’t bother,” Frances said before I could even begin. “I don’t care how you’re involved. We’re going to burn the card, and just so they don’t think we did so intentionally, we’re going to burn all the others as well.”

We went over to the pantry. The boxes of catalog cards had been stacked inside, including the ones from the base­ment. There was the musty, sad odor of paper. Frances had spent all week carrying boxes of cards home.

“Because what someone reads in a library is nobody else’s business,” Frances said.

We waited for the sun to go down. Then we dragged the boxes into the backyard, dumped some cards into the barbe­cue, then poured on some fire starter. It was pitch-black now, a hazy night. I had my backpack; I unzipped it and took out Seth Jones’s cards. The ones I’d swiped.

“I appreciate your helping me,” I said. “And just so you know, there hasn’t been any criminal activity. Nothing like that.”

“Don’t tell me anything. I’m not helping you. It’s some­thing I believe in. Let them find their man some other way.”

It took nearly three hours to burn all the cards. We drank all the lemonade, then switched to whiskey.

“The sheriff will be back tomorrow. I insisted I needed time to look up the gentleman in question’s card. I’ll let him know that over the years records have been lost.”

I worried for Frances, putting herself on the line this way.

“Oh, I know our funds will be cut. If they close the library, people in town will have to go to the Hancock Public Li­brary, or maybe the university will let them use their facility. Maybe I’ll go to Paris. If I do, you can take care of Harry.”

I laughed.

“I’m serious.”

She just might be. We both had soot on our faces, under our nails, along with paper cuts from ripping up the catalog cards.

“He likes you,” Frances said.

The dog was at my feet, a mountain of fur.

“I’m totally unlikable,” I insisted.

The Newfie sighed and Frances and I both laughed.

We finished the whiskey, then had coffee to sober up. Now that we were done with the burning, we wet the ashes and scraped them into garbage bags, which I took with me when I left. No evidence. Harry followed me to my car and watched as I drove away. Nice dog, but I already had a pet.

I drove until I felt I’d found a safe place; I tossed the bag of ashes in the bin behind the diner. Then I headed out of town fast. I hadn’t thought to phone Lazarus; I’d thought we had time. Now I wished I’d called him from Frances’s house. I simply hadn’t expected the authorities to move so quickly. When I got there I knew something was wrong be­fore I turned into the driveway. I pulled over onto the shoul­der of the road. From here I could see there were no longer any red oranges. Everything had turned black. Oranges were dropping from the trees, like stones. Through the trees, I saw the whirl of blue light.

There was a sheriff ’s car at the rise of the drive, so I kept going; I doubled around and drove back to the Interstate. By then, I was shaking. I wasn’t sure if I’d done the right thing. Should I have driven right in and demanded to know what the hell was going on? Maybe I’d panicked. Or maybe I was smart. Either way, I was now on my way home. I stopped at the gas station in Lockhold and considered going back for Lazarus. I sat in my car for almost an hour, debating, and then I headed to Orlon.

I would hire a lawyer — that’s what I’d do. I would stand beside him even if they thought he’d murdered Seth Jones. Perhaps I would be an accessory to murder in their eyes. Perhaps Lazarus wouldn’t even be charged with anything. I stopped at another gas station. I didn’t know if I should go backward or forward, so I just went nowhere. This time I got out and called the police station in Red Bank, New Jer­sey. It was a crazy thing to do and I wasn’t sure why I did it. Some decisions you make and some seem to be made for you. I suppose I called the person I trusted most. The one whose opinion mattered. I stood near the restrooms in the dark, pushing quarters into the pay phone. Trucks rumbled by on the Interstate. When I got Jack Lyons on the phone he was quiet at first. He didn’t seem to believe it was me.

“Of course it’s me,” I said. “The parking lot. You and me.”

“Okay,” he said. “You and me.”

“I need to ask you some reference questions.”

In our small town Jack had been in charge of death of all sorts: homicide, suicide, double homicide, death by misad­venture and by accidents, death by natural causes. When folks saw him walk into the old-age home, the residents crossed themselves, turned to look in the other direction, knew one of them was gone for sure. When he went to talk to the elementary-school kids about safety — no sticking fingers into electrical outlets, no grabbing pots off the stove — some of the children got hysterical and had to be taken to the nurse’s office. All that time Jack had been call­ing me with reference questions, he could have looked up the answers himself. I’d come to understand that. He knew it all already, so maybe he simply liked my pronunciation of asphyxiation, nightshade, West Nile virus.

Or maybe he just wanted to speak to me in my own language.