Heart of Ice (10 page)

Chapman stared hard at Flowers.

Flowers glanced at Louis and shifted in his chair. “Why don’t you tell us more about Julie?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“What was she like?”

“She was a good girl,” Chapman said.

“Can you be more specific?” Flowers asked gently.

Chapman seemed confused. “She was very smart, an excellent student. She was polite, funny, and shy. She loved to ride horses and she wrote poetry.”

“Poetry?” Louis asked.

Chapman was slow to focus on Louis. “Yes. She won a school prize once.”

“Do you still have any of her poetry?” Louis asked.

“Why would you want that?”

“It might help us understand her,” Louis said.

Chapman hesitated, then nodded. “If you think it might help,” he said. “I’ll have the notebooks sent up. I don’t know what you think you might find in them, though. They’re just poems.”

Just poems, Louis thought. Julie Chapman was shy and had attended an all-girls school. When a seventeen-year-old girl lies to her parents about where she is going, it’s usually about a boy. The Bloomfield Hills police had found no evidence of a boyfriend. But if one did exist Louis had a hunch he’d find him in Julie’s poems.

Louis was quiet, his eyes on the photographs of Mackinac Island on the wall over Flowers’s desk. And maybe he would find him here.

Twenty-one years ago, the police hadn’t asked about the summer home because there was no connection to the island. But now there was—the bones in the lodge.

“Mr. Chapman, did your family spend the summer of 1969 here on the island?” Louis asked.

Chapman had been looking out the window, and it took a moment for him to turn back to Louis.

“Yes,” he said. “We always came up north for the summer. We’d open the cottage on Memorial Day and close it on Labor Day.” He paused. “But that last summer . . . things didn’t work out like I planned.”

When he fell silent Louis said, “Please go on, sir.”

“I thought it was important that we all be here that summer,” Chapman said. “The kids were getting older, and I had this idea that we needed that one last summer together as a family. But I was called away unexpectedly to Paris and didn’t make it.”

“So that summer before Julie disappeared, just your wife and the children came up here?” Louis asked.

“No, Ellen was ill. So the kids came up with Maisey.”

Louis recognized the name from the police report. Maisey Barrow had been the family’s housekeeper. He was about to ask if the housekeeper could be contacted, but suddenly Edward Chapman began to gasp for breath.

Flowers jumped to his feet, but before either he or Louis could make a move toward Chapman, the office door opened.

The black woman who had been sitting outside was at
Chapman’s side in an instant. She checked the tubes in his nose and then adjusted the gauge on the oxygen tank.

“Try to relax, Mr. Edward,” she said.

Chapman’s watery eyes were riveted on her as he struggled to control his breathing. It took at least a full minute but finally the color began to return to Chapman’s face.

Louis realized he had been holding his own breath and slowly let it out.

The black woman looked at Flowers. “I need to take him home,” she said.

Flowers glanced at Louis and nodded. “We’re finished for now,” he said.

She took Chapman’s elbow and helped him to his feet. He looked at Flowers and whispered something to the woman. She frowned but nodded.

“Mr. Edward wants to help you,” she said. “We’ll be at the cottage if you need him. But right now, he needs some rest.”

“I appreciate it, Mr. Chapman,” Flowers said.

The woman led Chapman out of the office. Louis watched them leave, then turned back to Flowers.

“You handled that well,” he said.

Flowers rubbed his face as he sank back down into his chair. The phone rang, and Flowers looked out to the dispatcher, who mouthed the word
Rafsky
.

“Fuck,” Flowers whispered. He hit the speaker button on the phone.

“Chief Flowers here.”

“I’m in Marquette,” Rafsky said. “I have some news.”

Flowers rolled his eyes.

“The medical examiner took a second look at the
bones,” Rafsky said. “He overlooked something the first time.” There was a pause. “Am I on a speakerphone?”

“Yeah, Kincaid’s here with me.”

Another long pause.

“You going to tell us the news?” Flowers said.

“There were more than two hundred and six bones. The extras were fetal bones. I’m on my way back. I’ll be there by five.”

Rafsky hung up.

Louis picked up the small gold ring, turning it so he could see the initials
J.C.
He looked up at Flowers. “Looks like the perfect daughter wasn’t so perfect.”

M
aisey Barrow stood on the veranda of the cottage and took in the view. She hadn’t been here in five years, yet nothing had changed. The cottage—she had always thought it funny that people called a place with seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms a “cottage”—still sat in its prime position in the cul-de-sac on West Bluff Road. Beyond the sloping green lawn lay the gray-blue sweep of Lake Huron. Off to the west the little red-and-white Round Island Lighthouse still sat at the harbor like a Monopoly game hotel. And off to the east, the twin towers of the Mackinac Bridge still stood like white wicker legs under a tablecloth of gray clouds.

The cottage’s paint had faded and things looked a little shabbier, but nothing had really changed much. Nothing ever changed on this island.

Why some folks thought that was a good thing she had never quite figured out.

She folded her bulky sweater tighter around her chest and went back inside, pausing in the foyer. Nothing had changed in here, either.

The same oak paneling that had always needed polishing. The same Oriental runner that always needed sweeping free of sand. The same heavy oak doors that always
needed closing because things in this house were always a little off-kilter.

“Ma’am, where would you like these?”

She turned at the sound of the man’s voice. The fellow she had hired at the ferry to bring up the luggage was standing just inside the archway that led to the parlor.

“Those brown ones go in the first bedroom on the right,” she said, pointing. “That red one’s mine.” She hesitated. “Put it in the room next door to that.”

The man hoisted the bags and went up the staircase. As Maisey watched him go, she ticked off the list she had written in her head. She had done this so many times in the past she could do it in her sleep. Protective plastic removed from the veranda. Dust cloths pulled off the furniture. Electricity, gas, and telephone turned on. Grocery list sent to Doud’s. Cleaning girl booked. Furnace man coming tomorrow because it was too damn cold to take a chance and who knew how long they’d be here? Boy hired to rake up all those leaves. Doctor alerted at the medical center.

Doctor . . .

She allowed herself a deep sigh. She was sixty-seven now, and things weren’t easy anymore. Not that they’d ever been. For more than forty summers she had been running this house, been the one who had run all the houses for the Chapmans, from that first place in Dearborn to the big house in Bloomfield Hills. She had even crossed the Atlantic on the Cunard liner to open the town house in London. She was the one who had taken care of everything.

I’m like a duck,
she would joke,
it’s all smooth on the top, but underneath I’m paddling like crazy.

This was the first time she had to worry about having a doctor on call.

The man came down the stairs. Maisey handed him his money and ushered him out the door. She watched him pull up his coat collar, climb aboard the dray, and urge his horses on.

She went through the archway and into the large, cold room. She stood in the center, turning in a slow circle. Mrs. Chapman had insisted on calling it a parlor, but it was what most folks would call a family room, really, because it was the only room in the huge house where the family had always gathered. At least in those early days.

More oak paneling, a mix of wicker and lumpy slip-covered furniture, bookcases crammed with board games and Mrs. Chapman’s Book-of-the-Month Club novels, a yawning stone fireplace with a mantel crowded with model sailboats, crumbling dried flowers in blue porcelain vases, driftwood, and dozens of picture frames.

Maisey went to the mantel, her eyes traveling over all the family photographs. The earliest one showing Edward and Ellen Chapman alone just after their marriage. Another of a beaming Mr. Edward, Ross just a toddler and baby Julie in Mrs. Chapman’s arms. And all the later ones—Mr. Edward playing croquet on the lawn with the kids, Ross tan and lanky standing near his sailboat, Julie on a pony.

Maisey picked up one of the larger frames. It was the last photograph of Ellen Chapman taken at the cottage, two summers after her back surgery. She was sitting alone in a glider on the veranda. A book lay across her knee, and she was staring into the distance, hand to her forehead.
The sadness was there in her face, as if she knew that even as the pain pills were taking hold of her, her husband and children were slipping away.

Maisey put the frame back in its place among the others, thinking that seeing the photographs displayed like this was like watching the Chapman family age all over again, watching their small circle expand, contract, and then, with the final impact of Julie’s disappearance, slowly ripple into nothingness.

One frame had fallen over. Maisey picked it up, dusted it on her sleeve, and started to put it back. She paused. It was Julie, taken when she was just seven. She was sitting alone in a wicker chair on the veranda, staring up into the camera. Her dark eyes were wide, and there was a small rare smile on her face.

Maisey felt a tightness in her chest, and it surprised her. She thought she had dealt with the hole in her heart a long time ago, thought she had managed to put Julie’s memory away.

But Julie was still there, as real as anything, and Maisey could see her now, a little raven-haired thing running across the wide green lawn with the huge blue lake behind her, her arms flung wide.

“Maisey?”

The voice was a whisper, but she heard it as sure as a high-pitched whistle. She set the frame back on the mantel and went quickly up the staircase.

The door to the first bedroom was open, the Louis Vuitton cases sitting just inside. Edward Chapman was in a chair at the bay window that looked out over the lake, but his eyes were turned to the door, waiting for her.

The room was cold. She went to him, pulling a plaid wool blanket off the bed as she passed it. She laid it over his lap.

“The man promised the heat will be on by tonight,” she said, tucking it around him.

“I’m fine,” he said.

But she could tell he wasn’t. She knelt and checked the gauge on his oxygen. The canister was full, and the flow was good. When she looked back at his face she realized he wasn’t in want of a breath. He was in want of his daughter.

It had been bad enough twenty-one years ago, watching him deal with everything. Julie’s disappearance, the publicity, the police, the investigation that went nowhere, the memorial service with the empty coffin. It had torn the family apart. Slowly, over the years, the hole in Mr. Edward’s heart scarred, but Maisey knew it had never really healed.

But now, because someone had found bones in that old place, it had been opened again.

“Maisey?”

She looked down at Edward and took his hand. It was cold.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” she said.

*  *  *

It was just after four, and the afternoon shadows were creeping into the rooms. Edward Chapman was asleep, and Maisey was sitting in a rocker in front of the parlor’s fireplace. She was tired from the long day. There was a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream on the table—she had ordered it on impulse from Doud’s—but the full glass sat untouched near her elbow.

The old Victorian house was silent around her, like a huge sleeping animal holding her in its cold embrace. Her eyes went to the bank of windows bleeding gold light and then to the game table in the dark corner where the laughter once billowed like clean white sheets in the wind.

It was so quiet, so very quiet.

She had closed her eyes and drifted off when a sharp sound drew her back.

“Hello?”

A figure standing in the archway.

“Maisey, is that you?”

A thud as the man dropped his suitcase. He came into the parlor, pausing to switch on a lamp. She squinted, and Ross Chapman came into focus.

He was forty now, she realized, and with his fine haircut and fancy clothes he had the sheen of a man working hard to impress. She hadn’t seen him in more than a year, the last time he had come to the house in Bloomfield Hills, bringing his two kids and wife for a quick visit to see his father at Christmas. But she had seen him on TV a lot lately because he was having a hard time against that Burkett guy, who was giving him a run for his money in the polls.

Money . . . that was a problem for Mr. Ross right now. She had read the newspaper articles about contributions not going as well as they should and that his campaign was almost broke. She had eavesdropped on his telephone conversations with Mr. Edward, the ones where he begged for money, almost like he had when he was thirteen. She had heard, too, the anger in Mr. Ross’s voice when Mr. Edward said no more.

She stared up at him. “I didn’t expect you till tomorrow.”

“I know. I thought I’d better get here as quick as I could.”

Ross Chapman unbuttoned his raincoat, his eyes going to the bottle of sherry before locking back on Maisey.

“How’s Dad?” he asked.

“Sleeping. I gave him a pill. He was very tired and pretty upset.”

Ross Chapman nodded slowly. “We all are,” he said.

“No,” Maisey said. “It’s worse than what they told you.”

“What do you mean?”

“The police told Mr. Edward that she . . . your sister . . . the skeleton, it didn’t have a head. Your father was very upset after hearing that.”