Heart of Ice (27 page)

The dark hair, the solemn dark eyes. Was it there? One drop, they had always said, that was all it took. He was sure he should have been able to see it, but he couldn’t. Maybe back in the fifties and sixties no one else could, either.

“Julie was born in London,” Ross said. “We lived there for two years.”

It made sense. Living abroad, it had probably been easier for Edward and Maisey to keep their secret. Whatever strange arrangements Mrs. Chapman had signed off on, Louis would never understand.

Louis set the photograph down. “How do you know this? Did your father tell you?”

Ross shook his head. “I just knew it.”

“Did Julie know?” Louis asked.

Ross looked him straight in the eye. “No,” he said.

Another black woman’s face flashed into Louis’s head. His sister Yolanda, sitting next to him on the porch, teasing him again about his hair, telling him that he wasn’t really one of them because his daddy was white. The memory was gone as quick as it had come because he had been only four. But he had somehow understood even then that he didn’t fit.

“I didn’t kill her,” Ross said. “Why don’t you believe me?”

“You’re the best suspect,” Louis said. “You had means,
motive, and opportunity. And unless someone can place you in Ann Arbor all weekend twenty-one years ago, a jury will make the leap that you were on this island killing your sister in that lodge.”

Ross put his head in his hands.

The door jerked open, and Rafsky came back in the room. He looked more agitated than when he had left, rubbing the bruised knuckles of his right hand.

“You can go,” Rafsky said.

Ross looked up. “What?”

“I’m sick of looking at you.”

Ross stood up slowly, his eyes going from Louis and then back to Rafsky. “What happens now?” he asked.

“We tear your life apart,” Rafsky said. “I’ll be sending investigators downstate. We’ll be talking to your college friends, your Cranbrook buddies, old girlfriends, your wife.”

Ross’s face reddened with anger, but beneath it Louis could see his fear. “You said that if I talked you wouldn’t make me a public suspect,” Ross said.

“I never said anything like that,” Rafsky said. He opened the door. “Get out of here.”

Ross picked up his overcoat and started to put it on, then draped it over his arm. He was halfway out the door when he looked back at Rafsky.

“I want a copy of that DNA report.”

“Why?” Rafsky asked.

“I need to know I’m really the father,” Ross said.

Rafsky thought about it for a moment, then sifted through some papers in the folder and produced the lab report.

Ross took the report, stuffed it into his pants pocket, and pushed out the door. As he started across the outer office, two officers stopped to shake his hand and congratulate him on his election. Ross managed a few handshakes and abruptly broke away.

Rafsky gathered up the three photographs. When he looked up he seemed surprised Louis was watching him.

“You upset about what happened at the cemetery?” Rafsky asked.

Louis shook his head. “No, we’re good. But we need to talk about something Ross told me.”

The phone rang, and Rafsky held up a hand to Louis before picking it up. He said something, then covered the receiver, looking at Louis.

“I’m going to be a while with this,” he said. “Let’s meet at the Mustang in an hour.”

Rafsky went back to his call, and Louis left the office. He started away but then looked back. Rafsky was sitting down at Flowers’s desk, taking notes. He rose suddenly and, still talking on the phone, tacked the three photographs on the bulletin board behind Flowers’s desk—Julie, the skeleton, and the fetal bones.

Rafsky had started a murder board.

H
e decided he needed fresh air more than a drink. Instead of waiting for Rafsky at the bar he took a walk through town. The wind had died, and the air was icy and still. Main Street was deserted, and he kept to the middle of the street where the snowmobile tracks gave him sure footing. Louis didn’t know where he was going, but it felt good to be out, away from the weird masculine energy that seemed to dominate this island now.

Where the hell were all the women, anyway? Even the blond bartender at the Mustang had vanished, replaced by a fat guy with a beard. Louis had a flash of memory—Joe sitting by the fire reading a book. He had been sprawled on the sofa, half-asleep from sex, wine, and lasagna.

What are you reading?

Mansfield Park
by Jane Austen.

What’s happening in it?

Henry and Maria are just about to cross the ha-ha.

The what?

The ha-ha. It’s a big trench in an English garden that keeps the cows from wandering. But Henry and Maria are having a secret affair and the ha-ha stands for the moral line they are going to cross.

Louis trudged up the hill through the snow. He was
thinking of Rafsky. It was clear he had reached the edge of his own trench. What wasn’t clear yet was if he was going to try to jump it.

He didn’t realize he had walked all the way up the road to the Grand Hotel. It stood in the gloom like a big gray ship, moored and silent. The streetlamps on the road below the hotel glowed like beacons in the mist. He followed them all the way to the last house on West Bluff Road.

He drew up short. There were lights on inside.

It couldn’t be Ross. He had left a half hour ago in his chartered plane.

Louis trudged through the drifts and up onto the porch. He tried the front door. It was open. He went in, stopping in the foyer. One lamp was on in the parlor, another deeper in the house, probably in the kitchen. He could also see lights at the top of the dark staircase.

“Hey! Anyone here?” he shouted.

There was a loud bump from above and then the creak of the floorboards over his head. A moment later, Maisey’s face appeared over the banister above.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Maisey. Louis.”

She was clutching something against her chest, maybe a load of books? Louis switched on the hall light. Maisey hesitated, then came down.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Kincaid?” she asked.

“I saw the lights—”

“I mean on the island.” She searched his face. “You found out something, right?”

How much should he tell her? He couldn’t tell
her that Ross was now a suspect in Julie’s murder. But didn’t she have a right to know her suspicions about the incest had been correct? And what about the rest? Didn’t he have a right to know if Maisey was really Julie’s mother?

“You were right about Ross and Julie,” Louis said. “He confessed everything to us.”

Maisey’s face sagged, and she carefully put the books on the table, then went into the parlor. Louis followed her. She seemed to be searching for something. Finally she went to the bookcase and picked a picture frame from a group on the top shelf. It was a family portrait of all the Chapmans, taken on the front lawn of the cottage when the kids were very young.

Maisey stared at it for a moment, then put it back on the shelf. “I don’t know what to take,” she said, as if to herself. “The lawyer said it was all mine now, but I don’t know what to take.”

“Yours?” Louis asked.

She looked at him. “Mr. Edward left me this house.” Her eyes wandered around the room. “I don’t want any of this. The real estate lady said I could leave it all and she’d sell it.”

So Edward had taken care of her after all. The cottage would probably bring Maisey about a million dollars. No matter how much Ross protested that the island meant nothing to him, it had to have stung to find out the house that had been in his mother’s family for three generations was now owned by “just a housekeeper.”

Maisey picked up another frame. It held a small photograph of Julie sitting in a wicker chair holding a rag doll.
Maisey used her sleeve to wipe the glass, then folded it to her chest.

“Maisey,” Louis said. “I have to ask you something.”

She looked up expectantly.

“I don’t know how—” he began. Then he let out a long sigh. “Is Julie your daughter?”

Her mouth dropped open. It took a few seconds, but then the shock faded and something else replaced it.

“How could you ask me such a thing?” she said.

It wasn’t anger he was seeing in her face. It was indignation that he knew instinctively came not from guilt but from deeply bred modesty. It was one thing for a woman like Maisey to admit that back in the fifties she had loved a man like Edward. It was something else entirely for her to hear a near stranger give words to what had to be a painful secret.

“I’m sorry,” Louis said. “I have to know.”

“Why?” she demanded.

How did he explain this? How did he explain to her that family dynamics—and race—could factor into a murder motive?

“The family is important in a murder investigation,” he said.

“Family,” Maisey said quietly, turning away. She set the frame back on the mantel and started away.

“Maisey—”

She spun around. “Mr. Kincaid, you need to leave.”

“Maisey, you don’t understand.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she said, pointing a finger at him. “You think you do because you’re black. But you’re too young, and you don’t know.”

She went out into the foyer, and he followed.

“Maisey,” he said. “Please. I need an answer.”

She was halfway up the stairs but turned and came down a few steps. Her eyes glistened, but Louis knew she wouldn’t cry until she was alone.

“I’m not Julie’s mother,” she said.

He almost said it, almost said that a simple test would prove it. But this woman had trusted him with her family’s darkest secrets. He couldn’t push this. He would have to take her word for it.

“I’m sorry, Maisey,” Louis said. “I am just trying to help you take Julie home.”

Her hand went to her chest and she wiped at her eyes. She came down the steps, reached into the box, and pulled out a small red book.

“This is Julie’s journal, the one from that summer, with her poems,” she said, holding it out to Louis. “Take it. Maybe it will help you.”

T
he ferry was moving slowly, carefully maneuvering through the channel the coast guard ice cutter had forged in the straits. The day was bright with a stinging sun, but it was too cold to be outside, so Louis stayed inside.

When the boat docked in St. Ignace Louis picked up the small bag and hurried off the ferry. It was six blocks to the Mackinaw County substation and jail. His shoes were soaked from the snow by the time he got there, and he made a mental note to buy some boots, since it was apparent he was going to be here awhile longer. Rafsky had asked him to stay on indefinitely and had even issued him a temporary state police ID.

The investigation was progressing in fits and starts, but at least they were moving forward. Rafsky was shepherding the investigators he had sent to Ann Arbor and Bloomfield Hills to dig into Ross Chapman’s life. He was hell-bent on proving Ross Chapman guilty of murdering his sister. But Louis wasn’t convinced. And it was something small that triggered his doubt, something Ross had said at the cemetery.

Lodge? What lodge?

Louis had felt from the beginning that the lodge was important to the killer. But the place didn’t seem to register on Ross’s radar.

That’s why Louis had spent last night reading the poems in the journal Maisey had given him. He was hoping to find some reference to the lodge or to the boy he was convinced Julie had been seeing that last summer on the island.

Julie Chapman’s poems were strange and often beautiful but all were painful to read. She wrote about her mother’s spiral into addiction. She wrote about her father’s long absences in words that careened from anger to aching loneliness. She wrote about feeling smothered in what she called Kingswood’s “velvet coffin.”

There was an undercurrent of repressed rage. One chilling poem called “Slammed and Damned” detailed Julie’s ostracism by a clique of girls using “slam books.” Louis had heard of slam books. They were a fad in the sixties where kids wrote anonymous biting comments about one another in spiral notebooks. Julie’s poem ended with the subject thinking about killing her tormenters but committing suicide instead.

In a poem called “Lost in the Mist” the narrator was a color-blind girl who lamented that she was “not black, not white, but just shades of gray.”

And then there were the poems about Ross. None of them mentioned him by name and none used the word
incest
. Still they were almost unbearable to read. One called “Tick Tock” was about a clock that ran backward “to the time when I was new, back to the time before there was you.” Another called “Night Creature” was about a sharp-clawed beast slipping into her bed and tearing her open with “claws like razors, a tongue like a blade.” The hardest one to read was “Twelve.” Louis had memorized the last lines.

Your fingers are ice on my body

Your heart is ice on my soul

I let you take

What should have been mine to give

Louis had almost stopped reading after that. But then he got to the poems that dated to Julie’s final month on the island. They seemed as if they were written by a different girl.

The tone was brighter, almost hopeful. One poem called “Phoenix” was a long tale about a girl whose home burned down, but she hatched out of a golden egg and flew away to make a new life on a tropical island. But there was nothing in any of the summer poems that spoke about being in love and nothing about a special boy.

Except for maybe one poem. It was called “Centaur” and it was about a creature, half man and half horse, that was “wise and gentle” and carried the girl away from earthly tormenters.

Was “Centaur” Julie’s island love?

It was a long shot, but the poem was why Louis was now on his way to see Danny Dancer. His plan was to show Dancer the poem and hope it triggered him to remember an image from his own sketchbooks.

At the county building, a sign on the front door directed Louis to the jail around the side. The desk sergeant behind the Plexiglas spoke without looking up from his paperwork.