The Ice Cradle (4 page)

T
HE BREAKFAST BUFFET
was embarrassingly elaborate. There was granola that looked homemade, a bowl of fresh cantaloupe cut up with strawberries, three varieties of yogurt, three of bagels, two of English muffins (white and whole wheat), and a loaf of soda bread that still felt warm.

Lauren appeared at the dining room door, her cheeks even pinker than they were yesterday, probably from the heat and bustle of getting this feast together.

“Good morning!”

Henry was transfixed by the sight of the buffet table but managed a distracted “Hi.”

“Coffee?” she asked me.

“Please.”

She disappeared into the kitchen as Henry stood paralyzed by the choices before him. In a moment, she was back with a gleaming silver pitcher. She filled my cup with the rich, amber fluid as the aroma of freshly brewed French roast, my favorite, permeated the room.

“Now,” she said, parking the pitcher beside my place setting.
“Would you like some eggs? An omelette? Or I could make pancakes, or homemade waffles.”

“Waffles!” Henry shouted before I could impose restraint.

“That’s way too much work,” I said.

“Please?” he begged. “I love waffles!”

“Then waffles you shall have!” said Lauren. “I’ve got a brand-new waffle iron. I have to break it in sometime.”

“All right,” I said, “but
just
for today.” I turned to Henry. “Only because it’s our first day,
and
Sunday. Starting tomorrow, we’ll be back to—”

“I know, I know,” he interrupted impatiently.

I can lay it on too heavily sometimes, ruining, for example, the exceedingly rare and genuine pleasure of a stop at McDonald’s with a lecture on chain restaurants’ driving out mom-and-pop diners or on the evils of factory farming. Henry was warning me to zip it, before I managed to ruin this, and he was right.

In the end, I was glad he had lobbied for waffles. They were irresistible, even before I smeared a shocking amount of butter across their tops and watched it melt into little square pools. The maple syrup was real, too, sparing my poor child a lecture on the treachery inherent in corn syrup’s being chemically flavored to taste like maple. We ate more than it was polite to eat, but in our defense, Lauren practically begged us to let her finish up the batter.

We had been sitting on the porch watching a two-sailed sloop glide gracefully along in the water, but the wind picked up suddenly and turned right toward us, driving us back inside.

Earlier, Henry had discovered a television and a collection of DVDs in one of the rooms off the main sitting area, and I was happy to hunker down with him for a couple of hours before dinner, assuming we could agree on a movie. We’d already had a long walk, followed by a short nap, followed by a shell-collecting expedition up the beach. On a Sunday in the off-season, on a quiet island in New England, there isn’t much else to do.

“This one?” Henry asked, holding up
The Crying Game
. He was attracted, no doubt, to its dramatic black-and-white cover, which featured a smoking gun and a sultry femme fatale.

“No way.”

“Why not?”

“That’s for grown-ups.” I reached instead for Hitchcock’s
The Birds
and flipped it over to see if it had an MPAA rating. Personally, I’d never found the movie to be all that frightening, but most people obviously did. I didn’t want to plant the seeds of any nightmares. Fortunately, a Three Stooges collection tumbled onto the rug, and Henry snatched it up.

“Perfect!” I said. “You’ll love this!” He pried his feet out of his sneakers and climbed up onto the couch. I plopped down into the chair by the window.

Lauren came in about half an hour later, just as Moe, installed by a group of businessmen as the dictator of “Moronica,” was pulling off an eerie parody of Hitler.

“Cup of tea?” she asked.

“That’d be great.”

When five thirty came, she and I were sitting at the big oak table in her kitchen, and I was peeling carrots for our supper. From the laughter that still echoed through the empty downstairs rooms, Henry had neither lost interest in the shenanigans
of Moe, Larry, and Curly nor budged from his spot on the couch.

Lauren and I had gotten several things out of the way. Henry and I weren’t going to be served in the dining room anymore. I found it awkward to be sitting there like the grande dame while Lauren waited on us. I assured her that we’d be perfectly happy to have normal meals in the kitchen, and surprisingly, without too much protest, she agreed. She said she hated eating alone when Mark, her husband, who wrote articles on economic issues for the
Boston Globe
and the
Wall Street Journal
, had to leave the island on business, as he was going to have to do this week.

I didn’t want her to clean our room every day, either. I told her we’d be glad for fresh towels on Tuesday or Wednesday, but we could make our own beds and pick up after ourselves. She agreed to that, too. She and Mark were trying to conserve energy and water, and daily washing of all the sheets was shamefully wasteful of both.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

“A little over a year.”

“Are you from the island?”

“No, I grew up in Vermont, outside of Burlington. Mark and I met at Middlebury.”

“How’d you come to be running an inn?”

“I was dragged, kicking and screaming. No, not really. I told him I’d give it five years.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “It’s a beautiful place.”

“The island or the house?”

“Both, but I meant the house.”

“Thanks. We still have a lot of work to do, but we’re getting there. Mark’s aunt wasn’t really able to keep it up.”

“It’s a family place?”

“Mark’s great-grandparents built it in 1901. It was their summer home.”

“Wow!”

“Yeah, I know. Alby—Mark’s great-grandfather; his name was Albert Riegler—came from a family of Austrian bankers. He ran their New York office. He and his wife and kids lived on Park Avenue and spent their summers here on the island.”

“When did it become an inn?”

“We got all the permits after we bought it. Eva, Mark’s aunt, ran it for years as a kind of boardinghouse, after the family lost all their money in the stock market crash in 1929. Folks would stay for weeks at a time, even the whole summer. But it was always people they knew, extended family, friends of friends. You couldn’t just call up and reserve a room.

“After Eva died, in the seventies, the house was passed down to Mark’s parents and uncle. They used to come here a lot, especially when Mark and his sister were growing up, but now Mark’s parents are retired and living down in Florida, and Uncle Pete’s out in Santa Barbara. He rarely comes back East. The place was falling apart, but Mark had always dreamed of turning it into an inn.”

“I wouldn’t be able to do it,” I said. “I don’t have the temperament.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see whether
I
do. It’s been a lot harder than I expected.”

“How so?” I asked. “The renovations?”
That
I could imagine. The floors had all been refinished, and the rooms freshly painted and papered with beautiful William Morris–style wallpapers. All the new hardware, from the bathroom fixtures to the hinges on the doors and cabinets, looked historically accurate.

“No, that was the fun part,” Lauren said.

“Then what?” I asked.

She took the bowl of carrot peelings, stood up, and went over to the sink. She emptied the peels into a stainless-steel compost pail on the counter, then stood staring out the window overlooking the backyard.

“The reservations aren’t exactly pouring in. The place has a—reputation,” she finally said.

“Let me guess,” I offered. “People think it’s haunted.”

She wheeled around. “How’d
you
know?”

“Just a hunch,” I said. “A historic inn on an island? Come on, it’s right out of Agatha Christie.”

Lauren grinned. “I suppose it is. I can’t believe I’m telling you this. You’re not going to want to stay here.”

“I don’t have a problem with ghosts,” I said.

“Really?”

“Really. My grandmother was kind of—psychic.”

Lauren nodded but looked unconvinced. “It goes way, way back,” she said. “There was a novelist who used to come here every summer, a guy named Antony Wicklow. This was back when Eva owned the place. He was a ‘confirmed bachelor’ who lived in New York during the winters and came here every summer. He always stayed in the same room, that back room on the second floor.”

“The one with the green wallpaper?”

“Yeah. Anyway, he became convinced that the room was haunted.”

“By whom?”

“Who convinced him?” Lauren asked.

“No,” I answered. “Who was supposedly haunting it?”

“The ghost of a man in his fifties, who apparently looked
like Abraham Lincoln, and the spirit of a woman in her late thirties or early forties. Her hands were always pressed to her ears. Wicklow claimed to see them night after night, often at the foot of his bed. And he wrote a bestseller about it, a pretty spooky novel in which the ghosts end up smothering a couple of the boarders.

“People figured out that this was the place described in the book and nobody wanted to come here anymore. And at just about that time, a storm brought down one of the chimneys, which some people took as evidence.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know, bad supernatural karma. Eva was hanging on by a thread, and some of her regulars, folks who usually came here for the full season, just up and cancelled. It really put the nails in the coffin.”

“Of the boardinghouse.”

“Yeah.”

“What was the name of the book?” I asked.

“Inn
of Phantoms.”

“Never heard of it.”

“There’s a copy around here somewhere. I’ll find it for you.”

I paused and took a deep breath. “And what do
you
think? Do you believe there are ghosts?”

“I really don’t know. Some weird things have happened, in that room and one other. Mark thinks I’m off my rocker, or at least in a highly suggestible state, but I swear I can feel something in there. The air seems charged, like it’s full of electricity, and when we were doing the work on those rooms, we kept having problems with the simplest things. I know it sounds crazy, but it was like someone
—
some
thing
—didn’t want the room to change.”

“You’re not crazy,” I said, trying to make her feel better. “They definitely exist.”

“Ghosts? You think so?”

“I know so.”

“On account of your grandmother?”

“Yeah.” The time might come for me to level with Lauren about my own experiences and skills, but first I wanted to do a little private investigating. The ghosts that inspired the novel might be long gone by now. I certainly hadn’t encountered them. The little ghost girl would be gone soon, too. I would see to that as soon as I learned a little more about Henry’s relationship with the supernatural world.

“But that book was written so long ago,” I said. “You’d think it would be forgotten by now.”

“I wish. And we did something really stupid.”

“What was that?”

Lauren let out a deep sigh and rolled her eyes. “Mark got a call from
The Ghost Detectives.”

“The TV show? Oh, no!” The “ghost detectives” were two Australian guys who hosted a reality show on haunted buildings and spaces. They came in after dark with infrared cameras and never failed to “prove” the presence of spirits, usually “evil” spirits. I had seen the show a number of times—we don’t have cable, but most of my friends do—and I’d read a lot about it. The ghost detectives never let a little matter like the truth get in the way of a gripping episode.

“They asked if they could do a show on us,” Lauren went on. “We saw it as free publicity and thought it might be a way to lay all the old rumors to rest. Prove that there
aren’t
any ghosts at the Grand View.”

“Have you ever seen the show?”

“I have now. We should have done a little more research before we said yes.”

“Can’t you cancel?”

“We tried. They won’t let us out of it.”

“When are they coming?”

“Saturday.”

“Saturday?
This coming Saturday?”

“Mark has to go into Boston for some meetings. They’re going to meet him there and come back with him Saturday morning. And if they find anything—”

“—which they always do,” I interrupted. The show was completely formulaic. Not finding ghosts would be like the couples on
Wife Swap
getting along or Supernanny visiting a family with well-behaved children.

“I know, I know,” said Lauren. “And they’ll blast it all over the cable universe. Nobody will stay here but crackpots and kooks.”

“It could be really great for business.”

Lauren didn’t smile. “Yeah, or it could scare it away.” Her eyes looked tired and sad. She seemed like a different person than the one I had met yesterday.

“Maybe I can help you,” I said.

“Thanks, but what can
you
do?”

“You might be surprised.”

MONDAY