Heart of Ice (4 page)

“It’s a ring,” Flowers said.

Louis squatted next to the chief. The gold ring was dusty, but he could see a red stone and what looked like embossing.

“I guess I should just leave it and go call in some techs,” Flowers said. “They’ll have to come over from St. Ignace.”

Louis knew that once something was removed or disturbed it was impossible to restore the scene to its pristine condition. But Lily’s fall onto the bones had already compromised the crime scene.

“Take the ring with you now,” Louis said. “Get it to a lab or someplace so you can get started on an ID. That’s always the first step. Then get some of your guys out here to secure the place and make sure no one gets in.”

Flowers looked him square in the eye, and Louis waited
for some defensive comeback. But the chief let out a long breath and began swinging the flashlight slowly over the floor again. Louis realized he was looking for something to put the ring in.

Louis was about to offer to go upstairs and ask the EMT for a plastic bag when Flowers pulled something from his back pocket.

It was a small rolled-up Baggie. Flowers emptied what looked like three aspirin from the Baggie and swallowed them dry. Then he turned the Baggie inside out and used his pen to push the ring inside.

Louis followed Flowers up the stairs and out of the lodge.

Chuck had Lily wrapped in a blanket, and she was sitting in the back of the ambulance. She was licking a lollipop.

“You okay?” Louis asked her.

“It hurts,” she said.

“I think it’s a sprain,” Chuck said. “But we need to get her to the clinic to be x-rayed to be sure.”

Louis looked at his watch. “When’s the last ferry?”

“At five o’clock,” Flowers said.

“You’re staying in Mackinaw City?” Flowers asked.

“Yeah, the Best Western.”

Louis let out a hard breath. Their luggage was at the hotel, they were stuck here, and he still had to call Kyla.

“Look,” Flowers said,
“I’m going to have to call the state in on this, and the investigator is going to want to talk to you. Why don’t you stay here on the island tonight?”

Louis hesitated.

“I’m going to need your little girl’s prints for elimination,” Flowers said.

Louis glanced back at Lily. She was hurt and scared, but he could also see the disappointment in her face that their trip was ruined. And that she had caused it.

“My cousin works at the Grand Hotel,” Flowers said. “I can call and get you a room. It will be on the department’s dime.”

When Louis had planned this trip he had called the Grand Hotel, hoping the October rates might be more affordable than in peak season, but there had been no room for less than three hundred a night. A stay in the best hotel on the island might be just what Lily needed.

“Okay, I’ll take you up on that,” Louis said.

“Great,” Flowers said. “You go get your little girl taken care of, and I’ll send an officer over to Mackinaw City to get your things. I’ll send someone back for your bikes.”

“Thank you,” Louis said.

Flowers pocketed the Baggie and headed off to retrieve his bike. Louis watched him pedal off as he made his way back to the ambulance.

“Did he give us a ticket?” Lily asked.

“What?”

“Did the policeman give us a ticket for transgressing?”

“Trespassing,” Louis said. He smiled. “He let us off the hook.”

She looked down at the splint on her arm, then wiped her nose with her good hand.

“How you doing?” Louis asked softly.

“Okay, I guess,” she whispered, but didn’t look up.

Chuck came over. “We should get her to the medical center, sir.”

Lily looked at Chuck. “I’ve never been in an ambulance before. Can I work the siren?”

Chuck smiled. “We don’t use the siren here. It scares the horses.”

Lily considered this, then nodded gravely.

Chuck started to close the ambulance door, then paused. “Would you like to ride in the back with your daughter, sir?”

Louis met Lily’s gaze. He wondered if she had felt the same strange tug that he had when she heard “your daughter.” But he couldn’t read a thing in those somber gray eyes.

T
he last time he had laid eyes on the Grand Hotel was when he was nine and on the trip up here with the other foster kids. He could remember looking up at the huge white hotel on the hill and thinking that it was called the “grand hotel” because it must have cost a grand to stay there.

He didn’t know much about hotels then. His only exposure had come that very same weekend, when his foster father Phillip Lawrence checked them all into the Wonderland Motel back in Mackinaw City. That place had two hard double beds and a cot, a bathroom that smelled like Clorox, and a black-and-white TV that picked up only a Canadian station showing hockey games.

But this place . . .

Louis leaned forward to get a better view as their horse-drawn carriage approached the covered portico. It was as big as he remembered: a sprawling white wedding cake of a place, with soaring pillars, a veranda with bright yellow awnings, and a cupola topped with a huge American flag snapping against the cobalt sky.

He glanced over at Lily. Her face was somber but he could see something in her eyes that made him relax a little.

“Are we staying here?” she whispered.

“Yes. Is that okay?”

“I don’t have any pajamas,” she said, looking up at Louis.

“The police are sending someone over to our hotel to pick up our stuff,” Louis said. “They’ll bring it here.”

“What about Lucy?”

Louis remembered the stuffed rabbit she had carefully positioned on her pillow before they left for the ferry. “They’ll bring Lucy, too,” he said.

The carriage stopped, and Lily’s eyes locked on the man in the red livery coat, white britches, and black stovepipe hat.

“Welcome to the Grand Hotel, miss,” he said, holding out his hand.

She glanced at Louis, and he gave her a nod. She let the man help her from the carriage and walked ahead of Louis up the stairs. She slowed as they entered the lobby. Even Louis had to stare. Green walls with white wainscoting, burnished antiques, and gilt-framed paintings. Pink and green upholstered wing chairs and tufted sofas dotted the flowered carpeting, and every corner glinted with mirrors and chandeliers.

At the front desk, Louis checked in and told the clerk their luggage would be coming later.

Lily was quiet on the elevator ride, and when he unlocked the door he let her go in first. He watched her as she went to the center of the room, turning slowly as she took in the pink flowered wallpaper, green carpet, and two white canopy beds.

“This is like for a princess,” she whispered.

“Well, I don’t know about princesses but President Bush stayed here once,” Louis said.

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

Lily went to the window and looked out at the lake and came back to perch gingerly on the edge of the bed. She stroked the comforter.

“How’s your arm?” Louis asked.

She gave a small shrug. The doctor had given him some liquid acetaminophen and a mild sedative. But he wasn’t sure if he should give her either—or both. Then he remembered they hadn’t eaten since breakfast, which was more than seven hours ago.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Kind of.”

“Me, too. Let’s go see if we can find something to eat.”

She was picking at the mud on her pants. “I’m all dirty,” she said.

“Me, too. No one will notice,” Louis said.

The clerk at the front desk had told Louis that because it was the last weekend before the hotel closed for the winter and the pantries were being cleared, there would be a bounty of good food and wines at reduced prices. Louis said that all they needed was a couple of sandwiches for now.

The clerk directed them to a small tearoom, where they ordered sandwiches and orange pop. Lily ate only half of her egg salad as she watched the carriages come and go outside the window. Louis felt helpless as he tried to get her to talk.

“How about some ice cream?” he asked.

She perked up. “Can I have a hot fudge sundae?”

“I am pretty sure they have hot fudge here.” He signaled to the waitress and ordered two sundaes and a coffee. Lily dug into hers eagerly, but Louis couldn’t stop staring at the splint on her forearm. Couldn’t stop thinking of the phone call he was going to have to make to Kyla. And more than anything, couldn’t stop thinking about what Lily felt when she saw those bones.

He waited until she was finished, then decided to just plunge in. “Lily, I think we should talk,” he said.

She took a sip of orange pop. “About what?”

“What happened today.”

She didn’t look up, just kept drinking.

“How do you feel about it?” Louis said. “I mean, what happened today.”

“I didn’t mean it,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m sorry I went inside the house,” she said softly. “I’m sorry I broke the floor.”

He touched her hand. “Oh God, Lily, that’s not what I meant. I meant how do you feel about seeing those bones?”

She looked down at the place mat.

“It’s okay to be scared,” Louis said. When she didn’t say anything he decided to press on. “I’ve seen a lot of bones before and I know it’s scary.”

She looked up at him. “Is that what I’m going to look like when I die?”

He tightened his hand around hers. He didn’t have a clue about what to say but he knew instinctively that the wrong words right now could stay with her forever.
He was saved from saying anything because she spoke first.

“I saw a dead person once when I was little,” she said. “When Grandpa Brown passed, Momma took me to say good-bye to him. He was in a really pretty wood bed with a lot of flowers. He looked okay, like he was asleep. But I knew he was dead.”

“So you know we leave our bodies here when we . . .” He paused.

“When we go to heaven,” she said, nodding her head.

She pulled her hand away and started playing with the straw in her drink. “What’s going to happen to those bones?” she asked.

This one was easy at least. “The police will try to find out who they belong to,” he said.

“And then what?” she asked.

“They will be sent home so the person’s family can have a funeral, like you did for Grandpa Brown.”

She considered this for a moment. “How will they figure out whose bones it is?”

“They have lots of ways of finding out,” Louis said. When he realized she seemed okay with where this conversation was going he couldn’t resist showing off a little. “They can match teeth. They can sometimes match hair or jewelry. They can check records to figure out if someone disappeared.”

She was looking at him intently now. “Is that what you do in your job?”

“Sometimes,” Louis said.

Lily sat back in her chair, thinking. “It’s sad,” she said softly.

“What is?” he asked.

“It’s sad that the bones were down there in the dark for so long and no one knew it.”

Strange that she should put it that way. It seemed that during most of his career he had been dealing with cold cases, cases where people had gone missing, leads had died, and detectives had lost interest. Even his first homicide had been unsolved for thirty-five years—a pile of bones found with a noose in a Mississippi swamp.

“Yes,” he said. “It is sad.”

*  *  *

They stopped off in the gift shop so Louis could buy toothbrushes and two Grand Hotel T-shirts. As soon as they got back to the room, Lily wanted to take a bath. Louis filled the tub halfway, throwing in some stuff that looked like bath salts at the last minute. He carefully positioned two big pink towels and a T-shirt on a stool by the tub’s edge, then returned to the bedroom. Lily was struggling to take off her sweatshirt using her one good arm but finally just gave up and looked at him with big eyes. He wasn’t sure who was more embarrassed. She allowed him to ease the sweatshirt up over her head, leaving her wearing just a white T-shirt and slacks. He took a step back, feeling helpless. She set her lips in a determined line.

“I can do the rest,” she said.

“You sure?”

She nodded and walked off to the bath. He followed her and she turned, looking up at him.

“Be carefully not to get your splint wet,” he said. “I’ll leave the door open just a crack. You just holler if you need anything, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. Standing in the big white bathroom, she looked very small—and very tired.

He left the door ajar and sat on the edge of the bed. He felt tired, too, as if the full weight of the day was suddenly bearing down on him. He pulled off his shoes and lay back against the headboard.

He was about to close his eyes when he focused in on the telephone.

Shit.

There was no way to avoid it a moment longer. He swung his legs over the bed, pulled out his wallet, and found the slip of paper with Kyla’s phone number. The area code was for Chicago, where she was attending a conference for black career women.

He dialed the number, halfway hoping she wouldn’t be in her room. But she picked up on the fifth ring.

“Kyla, it’s Louis.”

“Louis? What . . . ? Why are you calling? Where’s Lily?”

God, was the woman psychic?

“She’s right here with me. She’s taking a bath.”

There was a pause on Kyla’s end. “Louis, is something wrong?”

He rubbed his face. “She . . . we had a little accident—”

“What? Oh God, what—?”

“Kyla, calm down, everything’s fine. Lily’s fine.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down. What’s going on up there?”

“She fell down. She’s fine, the doctor says it’s just a sprain and that—”

“A sprain? Don’t lie to me!”

Louis’s eyes shot to the bathroom door and he turned
toward the wall so his voice wouldn’t carry. “Kyla, goddamn it, calm down. Lily’s fine. I wouldn’t lie to you about her. Now, calm down and just listen.”

He could hear Kyla breathing hard, and he pulled in a deep breath himself before he spoke. “We were riding bikes and we were doing a little exploring.” He knew Lily would eventually tell her about the bones, but he also knew there was no way he could tell Kyla about them right now.