Ice Maiden

by Dale Mayer

He stared up and out the front windows at the mountain. “In some ways I feel like I’m waiting for her to come home,” he whispered. “We never had a chance to say goodbye.”

  “Is there any chance, do you think that she jumped?”

  He turned that gaze to her. “I hope not,” he said. “I know it sounds terrible, but it’s easier to … to think that she was murdered than that she chose to do this,” he said. “How do you reconcile yourself to the fact that your beloved wife chose death over life with you? She could have gotten a divorce, if she were so unhappy. I mean, I would have fought her all the way because I loved her so much, but to think that this is what she saw as her only option is just horrific.”

  “But then again, maybe somebody did throw her over the edge,” she said quietly.

  “A good thirty or more people were up there at the time. The cops kept asking me who was up there, who had opportunity, who had motive, but I didn’t have any answers. I didn’t know who could have done this because, to me, nobody could have done it. Why would they? She was beautiful inside and out,” he said in a broken voice.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “That’s so terribly hard.”

  “You have no idea,” he said in little more than a whisper. “She was everything to me. Absolutely everything.”

  “I can see that,” she said. “And maybe what you’re really waiting for is your time to die, so you can join her.”

  He looked at Gabby slowly. “I’m in my mid-seventies, and I’m not very healthy,” he said. “That day can’t come soon enough for me.”

  She slowly straightened, feeling her heart tug at the thought of a man who’d rather die early than recover from the death of his wife. “What are you gonna do with all this?” she said, looking around.

  “The bookstore was hers,” he said. “It was her dream, not mine.”

  She said, “Ah, that explains some things.”

  “You mean, the fact that some of it I don’t care about? That it’s just an income? That it’s just something for me to do while I’m here, waiting to die? It pays the bills, and then I can move on?” There was no sarcastic tone, just a sad acceptance.

  “To a certain extent, yes,” she said carefully, trying not to offend him. “I’m sorry that you’ve spent your life here so unhappy. If you’d left, maybe you could have rebuilt a new life.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but I wanted nothing else. I just wanted her.”

  Something was almost creepy about that, but Gabby didn’t have any energy at the moment to think about it. Just then the doorbell rang, and a customer walked in. She smiled at the young man and asked, “May I help you?”

  “Are you Gabby?”

  She smiled, nodded, and said, “Yes, I am.”

  “I’m Carl, Betty’s boyfriend.”

  “Oh,” she said, with a hand extended, walking toward him. “How’s she doing?”

  “Well, she’s pretty angry. She’s blaming you for this.”

  At that, Gabby stopped just short of approaching Carl and stared at him in shock. “Me? What have I got to do with it?”

  “She says it’s your fault,” he said, getting belligerent and angry himself. “Otherwise she would have moved back into the apartment with you guys.”

  “But somebody was killed in that apartment,” she said slowly. “Why the hell would she blame me for that? She lived there just as much as I did.”

  “But you’re the weird one who did the tarot cards, and, if you hadn’t done that, none of this would have happened apparently.”

  She stared at him in shock. “What? So I’m to blame for the murder of my friends?” she asked, her voice rising in shock.

  “Well, I asked her about that, and she said, Absolutely, and, if you hadn’t been playing with the tarot cards, death wouldn’t have found everybody.”

  Gabby shook her head. “The tarot card readings aren’t reality.”

  “Well, apparently they are now,” he said. “I came here to warn you.”

  “Warn me?” she said, stepping back slightly.

  “Yeah. Stay away from her,” he said. “She doesn’t want to be the next victim. If you’re doing this,” he said, “you need to stop.”

  “If I’m doing this, as in you think I killed our friends?” She couldn’t imagine anybody would have thought something like that, much less Betty and her boyfriend. To think they would even consider something like that just blew her away. “I didn’t kill anybody,” she cried out.

  “Well, I don’t know if I believe you,” he said. “You are kind of weird-looking.”

  She shook her head, in shock. “Weird-looking?” She didn’t even know what to do with that.

  “Yeah,” he said, “weird-looking. Now stay the hell away from Betty.”

  “That’s fine,” she said quietly, as he turned toward the door. “Have a good life.”

  He turned and snapped at her, saying, “Stop saying weird shit like that too.” And, with that said, he stormed out.

  It was all she could do to not run after him and see what he was driving, just so she could tell Damon. Yet it made no sense to figure out what vehicle the guy had. Damon could easily track it all down anyway. She turned slowly and looked at her boss, who was back to looking as if he’d just had a heart attack. She raced over to his side. “I really think you need to go to the hospital,” she said.

  “No,” he said, “but it’s happening all over again.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Things like that. Angry men coming in and making accusations for no reason.”

  “You mean, this happened back with your wife?”

  “After she died,” he said, “it happened all the time. It was just nonsensical stuff, as if somebody out there were just trying to torment me. As if I wasn’t tormented enough already,” he said hoarsely.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t even know what that guy is all about,” she said. “Betty was one of the roommates I shared an apartment with. But I don’t know why I’m supposed to be the weird one, or why I’m responsible.”

  “You aren’t,” he said, patting her hand. “People used to accuse me of it too, back then. They tried to ruin my life. And it had already been ruined because of my wife’s death, but it didn’t seem to matter to them. They all seemed to think that maybe I’d killed her and wanted her out of here. So I could steal the store out from under her or something.” He shook his head. “It made no sense to me because she loved this store, absolutely loved it, and I loved her,” he said sadly. “So none of their logic made any sense to me.”

  “I’m not sure they are using logic,” she said. “When you think about it, they’re just spouting nonsense, trying to convince others to believe it too. Then they cause the chaos they want to, based on that nonsense.”

  *

  Damon spent the afternoon in the records room, accessing the full digital database, looking up old case files, even though he had been warned away from it. It wasn’t something he could stop. As far as he was concerned, fear now prevented people from finding out the truth. He wasn’t willing to walk away again, and they couldn’t handle that. This needed to be solved, and it needed to be solved now. Otherwise it would just get worse.

  And then to have another bout of deaths wasn’t acceptable either. But he didn’t know quite how to handle his own coworkers putting up a wall and not dealing with what looked to be a repeat serial killer. Still he had to keep going. He had to try something. When he came across another death on the mountain, he started searching for just mountain deaths, not deaths in town—which might have limited his ability to find everything related to his two current cases—but it was a place to start. He requested each of the relevant files as he found one.

  When he went to pick up the cold case files, the front-desk clerk said, “That’s a whole pile of cases.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I was just thinking it might be related to something more current.”

  “Well, there are a lot of mountain deaths. Several books been written abo
ut it.”

  Damon looked up, frowned, and said, “Really? Which ones?”

  The clerk thought about it and then said, “I don’t remember any specific titles, but my wife will know for sure.” He quickly sent her a text and got a reply right away. He wrote down the two titles for Damon and said, “Here you go.”

  “Thank you,” Damon said. “I appreciate that.”

  “No problem. Nice to have some young blood around here, shaking things up a bit.”

  “Well, you may be the only one who appreciates it,” he said, laughing.

  “Isn’t that the truth? The captains never like it, but you know that shaky stuff has been going on here for a long time.”

  At that, Damon looked back at him and asked, “How long you been here?”

  “Oh, forty-two years,” he said. “At least next month it will be. Seen a lot in my time. Lots more I’ve forgotten too.”

  “That’s a long time,” he said.

  “Yep, sure is.”

  “So you know all about these deaths on the mountains then, huh?”

  “I know about a lot of them. Some of them were pretty scary. Some of them were pretty weird. Some of them were out there—like really out there. But we’re not allowed to talk about those.”

  “And those are exactly the ones I want to hear about,” he said.

  “Ha,” he said, “well, I’m retiring next month, so I’m not sure that they can do anything about that except retire me a little sooner.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to do anything to put your pension in jeopardy.”

  “Nothing they can do at this point,” he said. “I’ve got three weeks of vacation time to use, so I’m out of here in a few days.”

  “So, in a few days, can I come talk to you?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, we can do it that way. But no need. There’s really not much to tell. The higher-ups put a gag on the cops in the initial case. Now they knew stuff. Otherwise grab the files. The rest? … Well, that’s just the voodoo factor of unexplained happenings. Read up, and, if you still have questions, you can call me. Not that I’ll know more than the books and the files will show, though.”

  “Okay,” Damon said. “I’ll take these, and thanks for the book titles.” He signed them all out and packed up everything into his car. Picking up the other ones from his office, he added them to the carload and headed to the bookstore. As he walked in, a client was just walking out. He looked up, saw Gabby staring at him, and he smiled. “Hey, you ready to go home?”

  “Sure,” she said. “This is getting to be a habit.”

  “A nice one,” he said easily. “But a little business first,” he said, handing over the handwritten note. “What about these two books? Do you have them?”

  She glanced at the titles, nodded, and said, “Actually, yes.” Then she walked over to the counter, right beside the cash register, and picked up both books. She checked the titles, shook her head, and looked up at him curiously. “Who told you to get these?”

  “The guy on the Cold Case desk,” he said. “Why?”

  “I have a weird story about them,” she said. “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Perfect,” he said, “let’s grab them and go.”

  She rang them up, and he paid for them; then she called out to her boss, “Jerry, I’m going for the day.” He’d been sitting in the back office, recovering from his earlier shock.

  When he came out, she saw how he looked older and older as time went on. She frowned and said, “Are you sure you’re okay? Maybe you should just go on upstairs now.”

  “I’m going up,” he said. “Lock up the front, will you? I’ll just call it quits for the day.”

  She nodded. “I’m really worried about you, Jerry.”

  He gave her a gentle smile. “I know,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m not so sure,” she said, chewing on her bottom lip.

  He waved at them both and said, “You go on. It’s all good.”

  She nodded slowly and headed out, shaking her head.

  “Problems?” Damon asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, “he had a shock today, and he turned white. I thought for a moment he was having a heart attack or something. But he wouldn’t go to the hospital, wouldn’t have anything to do with the idea. I’m really worried about him,” she said. “Underneath that rough exterior, he’s the sweetest guy.”

  “He’s had a pretty rough time of it.”

  “We talked about his wife today. He’s tormented by the idea that she might have thrown herself over the cliff to get away from him.”

  “That’s enough to make anybody’s head spin,” he said. “My captain said Jerry’s wife’s death was originally classified as murder because, as far as they could tell, she was picked up and thrown over.”

  “Which would look similar, I would think, to a running jump, wouldn’t it?”

  “Possibly.” He filled her in on what Captain Meyer had said.

  “So they changed it to undefined, unknown causes?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but she died of blunt force trauma from the fall,” he said. “The old guy back in the Cold Case files says it’s one of the things they’re not allowed to talk about.”

  “What do you wanna bet it’s more woo-woo stuff,” she said quietly, “and nobody knows how to handle it?”

  “Well, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “It’s happening right now to me, and I don’t know what to say to people.”

  “Did you tell your boss about last night?”

  “No,” she said, “he also doesn’t think that he’s the one who pulled out the tarot cards from under the counter.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I just wondered at the time if maybe it was anything like me not remembering dancing in the cold last night. What if something like that had happened to him, and he didn’t remember what he’d done either?”

  “Interesting,” he said. “Well, I brought a pile of files home with me.”

  “It will be interesting to see what shows up,” she said.

  “If anything,” he said, “but I’m beginning to wonder if history is repeating itself.”

  “Sounds exactly like it’s doing that. Jerry thinks so too. So how long ago did this originally happen? How many times did it go on? I wonder what caused it to stop and what triggered it again.”

  “I know. … All good questions,” he said, “and ones we need to get answers to. We should get some dinner first, though.”

  “I don’t think we have anything for dinner, do we?”

  “I have lots at my place.”

  “Or I can have another omelet or some toast or just make a sandwich,” she said.

  “You might as well come to the main house,” he said. “I’ve got chicken defrosting, enough for two.”

  “That would be lovely,” she said, raising her eyebrows at him.

  “Well, no point in both of us cooking meals like that, when I have enough food for us,” he said. “And good food. I don’t want you just eating sandwiches, when you should have something more substantial.”

  “Well, more substantial would be nice, but it’s not always doable,” she said.

  “When do you get paid again?”

  “Friday,” she said, “but honestly, after seeing Jerry today, I’m not sure I’m gonna have a job.”

  “Do you think he’s that ill?”

  “I think he’s definitely that ill. He’s only kept the bookstore all these years because it was her dream. He told me that he felt like he was waiting for her to come home.”

  “Weird,” he said, “but I guess, when you’ve lost somebody in a shocking way, you don’t really know what you’re supposed to do, do you?”

  “I’m not sure there’s any right way to handle it. These instantaneous and unexpected deaths are all so disorienting,” she said. “He did tell me that his buddy helped search and rescue retrieve her body from the mountain. So I’m not sure why he thinks she’s still gonna come home
.”

  “That’s a good point too,” he said, “since theoretically, by bringing her body home, she should have been home.”

  “Exactly. So I don’t know. It seems like the more I get into this, the less it makes any sense.”

  “Of course. But we also have that lovely little encounter that you had last night,” he said, “where what you did isn’t something you remember doing, and yet we have proof of your actions.”

  “Yeah, great. Thanks for bringing up that whole dancing out in the cold thing again.”

  “Well, what if Jerry doesn’t remember parts of his world from when his wife died?”

  “Or weird parts that he has rewritten because it’s easier?”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m just wondering if his wife’s body was really ever recovered. Or, if he’s still sitting there, hoping that his buddy will make another attempt and get her.”

  “Hmm. That’s a good insight into Jerry,” he said, “though Andrea’s body was found, since the coroner found blunt force trauma from the fall as her cause of death. Although, if they will change one record, why not change another?”

  “Well, if nothing else,” she said, “you won’t be bored investigating this case and any others of note.”

  “Oh, I’m not bored,” he said. “I’m just trying to keep you safe at the same time.”

  “Speaking of which, I had a visit from Betty’s boyfriend,” she said. “He basically told me to get out of town and to stay away from her. He didn’t want her turning up dead too.”

  “Ouch. Did he accuse you of killing the others?”

  “More or less,” she said, striving for a light voice.

  “Because you can tell him to call the cops, and we’ll back you up, if he’s getting violent.”

  “But, as you well know, violence happens when nobody else is around to help,” she said.

  “Not necessarily. If you’ve got a problem with him, it’s really important to nip things right at the start,” he said, “so we don’t have that same issue going forward.”

  “That would definitely make sense,” she said.

  “Sure it does. Basically, if he’s gonna threaten you, he needs to know that we’re here.”

  “Okay,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t think he’s harmful anyway. He seems kind of, … I don’t know, … rude to say it, but kinda useless. But I think he cares about Betty, and that’s worth a lot.”