Frozen Sun

by Stan Jones

  Her breath came faster and faster and then he heard muffled sobs. He supposed she had her hand over the mouthpiece, or had pressed it to her chest.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, and waited for her to calm down.

  “And my cousin Nita? Is she dead, too?” Her voice was shaky and it sounded like her nose was blocked from crying.

  “No, Nita wasn’t in the plane.”

  A long silence, then, “Who’s got her? Dammit, Nathan, are you there? Who’s got her? Nathan!” His name came out as a howl.

  “Your parents have her. I think they plan to adopt her, or your father will if your mother passes on first.”

  “Nathan, you can’t let that happen. He’ll, he’ll - - with my mother gone …”

  “Do you want me to take your story to the D.A.?”

  “I … oh, God.” There was a long silence, then the bitter bark-laugh he remembered from Dutch Harbor. “What for? Who’s going to believe me?”

  “Well, Jason outlined his defense–you were sick in the head then and you’re still sick now. “

  She drew a shaky breath, exhaled loudly. “Yeah, yeah, and with Aunt Aggie gone … It will just make him stronger if I take a shot at him and miss. Nathan, you’ve got to talk to Nita, find out what’s going on with her.”

  “I’ll try, but it’ll be hard. Your mother has already refused permission. I’ll talk to my boss, see what we can do in a case like this. Maybe a social worker…”

  “Fat chance if my father’s the target.”

  “Well, I can at least let Jason know I’m watching.”

  “I doubt it’ll stop him.”

  “I think I’m out of options.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  “Will you be all right?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Right now? I’m going to go out and either get some Marlboros or a ticket on the next flight to Four Street.”

  “You’re not serious, about Four Street?”

  There was a click and the line went dead.

  He hung up, then tried to make himself call the state offices at the north end of town, see if the Division of Family and Youth Services still had anyone in Chukchi, what with the state budget being cut because the North Slope oil fields were starting to run dry. But he couldn’t bring himself to take another step into the swamps of the Palmer family’s sexual history. Or Grace Palmer’s dementia, whichever it was.

  Then he realized he could close the book on another aspect of the Amazing Grace story, or at least write himself out of it.

  That was the whole Angie Ramos thing. If he wrote up his interviews with Grace Palmer in Dutch Harbor and sent them to Dennis Johnson, Dennis could turn the files over to Homicide and then he, Nathan Active, could forget about it.

  It took him a couple of hours, but when he was done he was reasonably satisfied with the result. True, it had required a little needle-threading, a little rapids-shooting, to explain how an informal welfare check requested by Grace Palmer’s family had blossomed into a confession of Oil Dividend fraud and identity theft—which had to be some kind of crime, even if he wasn’t sure what—not to mention the actual homicide case itself, which turned on how Angie Ramos had ended up in the path of a rotary snowplow and, perhaps, on whether APD ever found the dispatch logs from the night of her death.

  The worst problem was the fact that he had never quite gotten around to Mirandizing Grace Palmer in two evenings of interviews. He finally decided the less said about that, the better, and didn’t mention it at all.

  He printed out the report, dropped a copy into an envelope and addressed it to Dennis Johnson.

  After a moment’s thought, he opened the report on his computer screen, copied the text, and pasted it into an e-mail message, then sent that to Dennis, too. Whatever was going to happen couldn’t happen soon enough, that was how he felt. Anything to clear up the swarm of mysteries that followed Amazing Grace Palmer around like a band of avenging angels.

  He walked back down to the dispatch booth, were Lucy Generous was once again devoting full attention to her console.

  “So,” he said. “Are we still on for dinner.”

  “Do you still want to?”

  He nodded. “Of course.”

  “Do we have to talk about her?”

  He nodded again. “I’m afraid we do.”

  “That was her on the phone, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I called to let her know about her aunt being killed in the plane crash. She was calling back.”

  Lucy sighed and her shoulders sagged. “OK. We can have dinner, I guess.”

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at the end of your shift.”

  Lucy Generous watched miserably as Nathan wolfed down his Szechwan beef like this was just another day, just another dinner at the Northern Dragon after which they would go back to his place and … how long had it been?

  The last time had been the Friday before Nathan left for Anchorage. Now it was Monday, the second Monday since then. That made ten days since the last time she had experienced that melting bliss, which was the only term she could think of to describe it. Certainly none of the terms for it in women’s magazines seemed to fit. They sounded nasty, or mechanical, no hint of … well, of melting bliss.

  Before Nathan, she had almost no experience. Just one boy right after high school and only twice with him, Jimmy Kalina. A sweet enough boy, going to a trade school in Nome now to become an electrician. But Jimmy Kalina had been inexperienced and clumsy and quick and when after the second time she still felt untouched, deeply untouched, she had told him she didn’t want to do it anymore. Jimmy had lost interest and found another girl, Esther DeLong, who by reputation did want to do it, and as often as possible.

  And that had been her encounter with sex—not very interesting, although apparently necessary if you wanted to hold a man, but why, exactly, would you want to hold him if something as boring as sex was the only thing that would do it?

  “So you won’t be alone,” Aana Pauline had told her when she posed that question.

  After that, she had allowed herself to assume she might someday marry a pleasant man who would be a good provider and not want too much sex, perhaps just enough to give her the two children, a boy and a girl, who seemed always to loom on the horizon when she tried to imagine her life. Someday, but not too soon, she hoped.

  And then one day she had noticed Nathan. He had been in Chukchi a year when this happened. She had seen him many times. He stopped by the dispatch booth to joke with her every work day, usually. She had idly wondered if he could be the nice-enough husband who would want just enough sex for two children, but hadn’t thought more about it until one day he stopped stopping.

  He would just walk past the booth on his way in or out of the Public Safety Building, looking preoccupied and not saying a word, not even a nod, and that was when she noticed him, or noticed that he had quietly grown to be this enormous presence in her life without her being aware of it.

  And now Nathan had withdrawn, as casually and with as little explanation as he had come, and she was terrified. She had wanted to ask him what she had done wrong, or to apologize for it without even asking what it was, but that was ridiculous. He obviously felt nothing and didn’t attach any more importance to not stopping by dispatch than he had to stopping, and therefore her questions were questions that could not be asked, her apologies were apologies that could not be offered.

  “What should I do?” she had asked her Aana Pauline, after explaining the situation.

  “Look pretty, smell nice, smile a lot, and wait.” Aana Pauline had said.

  Aana Pauline was seventy-two and a very traditional old Inupiaq, but Lucy had always found her advice about people, men especially, to be timeless. So she had done as Aana Pauline had advised, though it seemed far too inconsequential to make a difference.

  Nonetheless, and for whatever reason, there Nathan was at the Dispatch booth agai
n one day, bantering away and smiling— those lips!—as if he had never stopped stopping, which made her wonder if he even realized he had done it.

  She began flirting back, blushing sometimes when he glanced at her in a certain way, and felt herself opening up, blooming out like the tiny flowers that carpeted the tundra in brief, wild, profusion every spring when the sun took away the snow.

  And instantaneously, from one day to the next, she understood all the fuss about sex, because she wanted Nathan Active, would feel a warm, empty, ache down there that she had not felt, had not even imagined or dreamed of, with Jimmy Kalina, would have to look away when Nathan came to Dispatch to keep her voice from shaking or herself from simply bursting into tears.

  But no amount of flirting, hinting, smiling, looking pretty, and smelling nice seemed to move Nathan Active. He was content with a few minutes of chatter at the Dispatch booth every day, and that was that.

  So finally, with the help of Aana Pauline, she had lured him over one evening on the pretext that Pauline needed a ride to bingo. As arranged, Pauline was out when Nathan arrived, so she had invited him in to wait and, as if by accident, undone him by letting him see her nude as she brushed out her hair after a shower.

  That night was her first experience of the melting bliss and she immediately understood why the women’s magazines were always writing about it, how to find it, how to make it better and stronger and longer, even if they did call it by those nasty, mechanical names.

  Since then, as she recalled, it had never been more than three days from one time to the next with Nathan, except for the five or six days a month when it was unappealing to both of them, and now she depended on it like food or water. Not the sex itself. She had tried and failed to imagine it with Jimmy Kalina when he stopped in at Dispatch one day and hinted around about old times. Sex with Nathan Active was what she needed.

  And now it had been ten days, ten days when he had been chasing Grace Palmer the beauty queen all over Alaska, this Grace Palmer he was now saying they had to talk about. Ten days without sex and he was sitting there eating Chinese food like he didn’t have a care in the world, not even noticing how she was picking at her own food, just stirring it around on the plate and mixing it up with her chopsticks. Ten days and here they were at this restaurant rather than at his place where she could get dinner going, then they could talk with their bodies while it cooked, say the important things that didn’t need words, then eat, then body-talk again, then, if they still needed to, they could talk about Grace Palmer and anything else that required words.

  But no, here he was, filling up on Szechwan beef, looking a little subdued perhaps, but not particularly worried or alarmed, certainly not miserable and terrified like she felt.

  He was telling her a story she could hardly follow, she was so distracted, something about a woman, a former prostitute or madam possibly, who drove a limousine in Anchorage, no, Dutch Harbor, she was pretty sure it was Dutch Harbor, because apparently this woman felt she had missed so many planes she could never get back to Anchorage. That made absolutely no sense because there would always be a later flight, but probably it would have made sense if she’d been following Nathan’s story instead of thinking about the question she’d finally come up with. A question that she might actually be able to get up the nerve to ask and might actually make him think about their relationship and his feelings for her, perhaps even make him talk about it, an act of which to date he seemed not only reluctant but incapable.

  The question was not “Do you love me?” or “Will you marry me?”

  No, she could never ask either of those questions, or even, “How do you feel about me?” But she thought she could ask this question she had come up with. Even Aana Pauline thought it might work.

  “What do you want?” That was her question, “What do you want?” It seemed like a non-threatening, open-ended question on the surface, but was deep and dangerous underneath because once Nathan started into it there would be no easy way to get back out. Every turn would just lead deeper and deeper towards his heart and she’d find out what was really in there. Maybe Nathan would, too.

  She swallowed some tea, took a breath, wet her lips, and was working up the nerve to say, “Can I ask you something?” when Nathan ended the story about the limousine in Dutch Harbor and pushed back his plate and looked at her–turned those amazing, lonely eyes full on her–and said, “So. About Grace Palmer.”

  Active watched in pain as Lucy flinched, almost like he had swung at her, and said, “I don’t want to talk about her.” She looked down at her food, which he had seen her fiddling with but not eating all the time he was downing his Szechwan beef.

  “I still think we need to.”

  “Well I don’t want to talk about her here. Can we go to your place?” She looked up at him, flushed slightly, and looked down again.

  “How about the pullout?”

  She shrugged and nodded as he picked up the bill and checked the math in his head. He paid in cash, not wanting to wait for the credit card verification to go through, and they went out into the west wind snapping across Beach Street. Now, in evening, it was bringing in fog from the sea, and Chukchi felt as cold, clammy, and closed-in as a coffin. Lucy shuddered and pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt as he unlocked the passenger door of the Suburban and helped her in.

  He raced around the front of the rig while Lucy unlocked his door from the inside. He jumped in, started the engine, and turned the heat on high. He was gratified to feel a little warmth emerge from the blower, and thankful the big V-8 engine hadn’t cooled off completely as they ate.

  He drove to the pullout, feeling stupid because, with the fog blanketing everything in wind-ripped gray, there was no reason to sit there on the beach and gaze at Chukchi Bay. Except one, which was his certain knowledge that, if they went to his place, they’d end up in bed, making up for ten days of lost time. Nothing would be said about Grace Palmer, no air would be cleared. So he nosed the Suburban up to the seaward edge of the pullout.

  And there, with the engine rumbling and the heater whirring and the wind sighing around the rig and the rig itself creaking occasionally in the heavier gusts and the little waves that passed for surf in Chukchi breaking with a rush on the riprap along the shoreline, he told her the Grace Palmer story.

  He started with Jason Palmer saying, “Beautiful, wasn’t she?” ten days ago, left out nothing and went right up through that afternoon, when he had e-mailed Dennis Johnson the report suggesting Grace Palmer had killed Angie Ramos.

  Lucy was silent for a long time after he finished, sipping the tea she had brought with her from the restaurant and looking thoughtful. “So she pushed this Angie Ramos into the snow plow?”

  He nodded. “That’s how it looks.”

  Lucy sipped again. “And she says she was molested by her father?”

  He nodded again. “Did you ever hear anything like that? About her or Jeanie?”

  Lucy shook her head. “Nothing. And that kind of thing travels pretty fast around here.”

  He thought about what she had said. Should he believe her? Lucy manifestly considered Grace Palmer a rival, so naturally she would want him to think that Grace was lying about the incest, or was crazy, or both. He was trying to think of another way to ask it when Lucy put in a question of her own.

  “And she invited you to sleep with her?”

  He nodded, remained silent.

  “And you wanted to ?”

  He nodded again, wanted to break their gaze, decided it would be cowardly, and hung on.

  “But you didn’t.”

  He shook his head.

  “And why was that?”

  He groped for an answer as she sipped tea and studied him. Somehow she had wound up on top in this conversation, and he felt relieved. He realized that was because she had been on the bottom in their relationship so long that it had come to feel almost abusive to him, even though he didn’t know how things had gotten that way and was pretty sure he had
n’t wanted it.

  “Well?” she said, and he loved it that she had the confidence to sound demanding. Not whiny or complaining, just demanding.

  “I thought maybe she was trying to make me forget how Angie Ramos died. And besides that it just didn’t feel right somehow.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure exactly. Maybe because she doesn’t seem capable of informed consent about sex. She’s still too twisted, is how it felt.”

  “But it wasn’t because of me?”

  He shook his head.

  “And you two might get together after”–here Lucy waved her hand vaguely at the fog in front of the truck, which he thought was a pretty good metaphor for Grace Palmer’s situation–”after all this clears up or goes away, or something.”

  “That’s what we said.”

  Lucy shook her head, pulled the Nordstrom’s box out of a sweatshirt pocket. “And you brought me this because you wanted me to smell like her?”

  He nodded.

  “When we … ?”

  He nodded again.

  “Are you blushing, Nathan?”

  “I think so.”

  “Have you ever blushed before?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  She was silent a long time, sipping the tea until the Styrofoam cup was empty, then dropping it into the vinyl litter bag hanging from the Suburban’s cigarette lighter. She shifted on the seat to face him. “Nathan, what do you want?”

  He couldn’t get it out, so she said it for him. “Grace Palmer?”

  He nodded.

  “And me?”

  He nodded again, waiting for the explosion.

  “You’d like me to come over to your place right now and put on this lavender perfume and smell like Grace Palmer and go to bed with you, is that right?”

  He nodded and closed his eyes and waited. Whatever she wanted to do he figured she was within her rights and he planned to offer no resistance. Swear, hit him, anything short of pulling his Smith and Wesson from its holster and shooting him. She wasn’t very big; she couldn’t possibly punch very hard.