He looked at her intently, and it appeared as though he was trying to make out whether she really believed what she was saying.
“Boo,” she said. He gave a funny sniffing laugh, a sound, it seemed to Pauline, of admiration. He was cute, wasn’t he? Reminded her of Johnny when she first met him. She deposited the work logs and sat down at the table, but as she did she felt a tightening in her uterus and then the unmistakable release of fluid. She jumped back up again. “Oh!” she said.
“You okay?” Sam Tulley said.
“I forgot one of the files,” Pauline said. “I’ll be right back.” She made it to the bathroom in time to avoid a complete mess. Thank God Claire kept the ladies’ room stocked. The bleeding was copious. She couldn’t remember it being this heavy since she was a teenager, and the last time she’d been to the doctor she’d been proclaimed “perimenopausal,” which pissed her off pretty good. God! Period doesn’t come for four months and now this? What kind of cosmic comedy was going on here, anyway? She got herself together and was washing up when, ridiculously, her throat closed and a prick of tears appeared. Because this wasn’t fair. It wasn’t. This stupid OSHA crap, and all the work she hadn’t touched yet today, and Claire mad at her, and—most horrible—Johnny, sitting home with a tumor in his brain. Don’t worry, Dr. Tosh had said. Trust me, he’d said.
Impossible, Pauline should have answered; we don’t even know you.
She dabbed her eyes with a paper towel and tossed it into the trash, remembering another time she’d been in this bathroom crying, the day of the roller skates, the day of Billy. Come now, Jesus, where you at? The aching cramp tightened in her belly, and just then she really did hear the orphan babies weeping, somewhere up in the ceiling. Or maybe it was just the catbirds, gotten into the rafters again.
Four
The MacKinnons’ house, in which they’d lived for twenty-five years and whose stairs Johnny descended in the weak, wet light of a Florida dawn the next morning, had a story, as some houses do. From every room, Johnny could hear the pounding Atlantic surf, a sound so ingrained now in his consciousness he was hardly aware of it anymore, though when he thought about it in the darkness of a sleepless night, he was amazed at the unerring violence of the sound track of his life: by day the gnashing machines of the ice factory, by night the battering hammer of frothing water on sand: Whump, shhhhh. Whump, shhhhh.
The house was built more than a hundred years ago; it was the first house on Watchers Island, in fact, which back at the turn of the twentieth century was just a big, nameless pancake of sand wedged between the ocean and a wide swath of the Intracoastal Waterway. Back then, the island was accessible only by way of a rickety one-lane bridge, and the house was little more than an outpost built by a resourceful pioneer who had one hand in the shrimp trade of Mayport and the other in the palm trade of Palm Valley, and who found that the remote island offered convenient proximity to both enterprises.
In the twenties, an enterprising recluse named Donald Stone bought the house. Johnny pieced Stone’s story together from a few articles curling in smudged glass display cases at the Watchers Island library. Stone took a perverse enjoyment in being the easternmost resident of a thousand-acre island that was home to only a few dozen intrepid homesteaders and no end of mosquitoes, languorous snakebirds, and puddle-headed armadillos. But after a couple of years, he found he was tired of having to row out and haul drunken boaters—usually moneyed tourist types on their way to drop cash in the restaurants of St. Augustine—off the vessels that ran aground just offshore on foggy nights. The currents surrounding the island created continually shifting sandbars, and without a solid reference point, many captains piloted too close to shore and quickly got stuck.
So Stone got smart. He converted his home into a lighthouse by means of a sturdy windowed cupola added onto the east dormer. He added a three-foot Fresnel lens to fashion a powerful beacon visible four miles offshore, thus signaling shallow waters and significantly reducing the number of pesky wrecks that interrupted his pleasantly lonesome cocktail hours. But the lighthouse design had proved untenable in the long run, given its relatively diminutive tower and the tendency of a rowdy buttonwood tree behind the house to sprout new branches and obscure the light. When the island’s population began to grow, thanks to the construction of a new bascule bridge linking it to the mainland, the Coast Guard decided something had to be done and built a proper lighthouse at the north end of Watchers Island.
By the time Johnny and Pauline bought the old lighthouse, it had been renovated and updated through a series of owners, all of whom did their part in bringing the old beast up to comfortably elegant standing. It had been shingled, painted, insulated, scrubbed, weather-stripped, air-conditioned, plumbed, and enlarged. The old Fresnel lens had been sold to a collector, and its housing in the cupola had been dismantled and removed, leaving only a round, rusty imprint in the wood floor, like the ring under a coffee cup.
But none of that was the story for which the house was known. The story, as Johnny had heard it, was grisly enough to have made Pauline hesitate before they’d signed the sales contract all those years ago. It happened back in the thirties, when old Stone still kept the light. One day the Coast Guard was summoned to a terrible scene. A luxury yacht had run aground just off the island. The five passengers—a family, including three young children—had been shot through the head, the yacht plundered for cash and jewelry.
When the tug came to pull the yacht off the sandbar and take the bodies to the coroner, somebody mentioned that Stone’s light was out, that it had been out for quite some time, in fact, which probably explained the reason the yacht ran aground in the first place. The police rowed over to the island and searched, but found no sign of Donald Stone. The old lighthouse was empty save for a hungry, mewling tomcat. A half-pack of cigarettes lay damply in the kitchen sink. One kitchen chair was overturned. The Fresnel lens was cool. And Stone was never heard from again.
It was not until three years later, when the house came out of receivership and a new buyer started renovations, that Stone’s body, now a skeleton, was found under the floorboards of the front room, its skull cracked wickedly across the brow. A pirate’s trusted strategy: kill the lightkeeper, snuff the light, rob the ships that subsequently ran aground.
The house story had never bothered Johnny before, but lately he’d been thinking more about old Donald Stone and his unfortunate end here at 15 Beacon Street, and lately the vision of the rotted corpse beneath the foundation was becoming increasingly unsettling. Johnny wondered if Stone was still alive when the boards were nailed down over his head. He used to tease Pauline, saying that he heard knocking on the floorboards in the middle of the night, but lately he was sorry he’d come up with that, because there were times when he actually did hear an odd rhythmic tapping coming from the front room, and he had to concentrate hard on the sound before convincing himself it was only a branch from the pecan tree off the porch, rattling against the gutter. The poor tree was now looking nearly bald on one side for all the limbs he’d cut back in an effort to curtail the rattling and settle his own nerves.
Still and all, it was a wonderful old house. Johnny had always loved it. He and Pauline had bought it for a song during a time of cruelly depressed home values, and though Johnny felt a little guilty about it, they had walked away with quite a deal from the previous owner, a recently divorced, hard-drinking fellow who was clearly losing his shirt. They bought it with the original intention of restoring it and selling it to turn a profit, but the island’s quiet and the smell of salt air outside their bedroom windows had seduced them, even in the early days when the road was still rutted and sandy, when they still had to drive across the old bridge and up to Ponte Vedra to get to Publix.
Now, steady development had done a lot for Watchers Island, which was today populated by a few thousand residents, mostly Jacksonville commuters, young families, pothead beach urchins, and the independent sort of seniors who rejected the gated communities and
“active retirement” neighborhoods of some of their contemporaries. Johnny liked to think he and Pauline fit squarely in the first category, but as the years went by he could see that perhaps they were destined for the last, which was not an unpleasant thought. As long as Watchers Island didn’t wash away anytime too soon. What with algae blooms and sea-level rise and all the rest of it, some scientists were already announcing that the entire Florida peninsula would be underwater by the end of the century, and though Johnny himself believed this could be true, he also knew he wouldn’t be around to have to worry about it. Let the waters rise.
The cupola that once housed the light was today accessible only by means of a pull-down staircase, and the little room the stairs led to was cramped and low-ceilinged, with barely enough space for even a man of Johnny’s small stature to stand up straight. Pauline only occasionally ventured up anymore; it made her claustrophobic, she said. But the windows opened nicely to a view of the Atlantic to the east, the Intracoastal to the west, the green canopy of trees to the north and south. Johnny kept a chair and a little table in the cupola, and he went up to look at the ocean and have a smoke now and then, a habit of which Pauline disapproved and for which he feigned subterfuge and the sense of guilt it implied, out of respect. As if there could be a secret between them. As if after all these years there could be something they didn’t know about each other.
Outside, the air was thick with moisture, and on the front walkway, Johnny noted that now, on top of everything else, there was a problem with frogs. Thousands of them. Cuban tree frogs, nonindigenous invaders, brought by the night’s rains. He wasn’t entirely surprised. A number of frogs usually appeared on Watchers Island each year around this time, when the barometric pressure was low and the humidity was high.
But this year’s influx was more intense than any Johnny had witnessed before. It seemed to be a multigenerational invasion: thick-bodied adult frogs the size of golf balls and spindly insect-like youth, all hurling themselves, lost, through the sawgrass. Frogs dotted the driveway and clung to the windowpanes, drawn by insects and the glow of lamps. They piled in muddy layers on the porch and suctioned their wet way up the front door. They shat in the grass and clogged the drain return. With the break of dawn, it looked like many of the frogs had begun a flopping, jerky retreat to the standing puddles and sodden gullies around the house. Many had died, and some lay stricken, wounded, on the driveway and on the walkway leading to the house. It was Frog Normandy, Johnny decided. Frog Leipzig. Frog Armageddon.
He went for a broom and started to sweep the driveway, but the frogs were resisting. The effect was a little horrifying—they flattened themselves against the concrete and let the straw bristles of the broom scrape across their backs. When he nudged one into a fleshy ball and swept at it quickly and perhaps a little too forcefully, it pitched across the driveway and panked against the trunk of a pine, leaving a bright silvery spot. Oh, God.
“All right!”
He turned toward the voice to see his neighbor Jerry coming down to the end of his own drive, where their two bricked-in mailboxes stood side by side.
“Six-pointer!” Jerry called. “Nice!”
Jerry was an interesting specimen. He was once a competitive bowler, taking a Florida championship and competing seriously in a Southeastern conference before he suffered a stroke at the age of fifty that partially paralyzed the right side of his body, and thus his bowling arm. So he started over as a lefty. He was at first lauded for his spirit and his determination, but he confessed to Johnny one day, when he’d cornered him at the dustbins, that the left-handed bowling wasn’t going so well. No more trophies, put it that way.
Things tended not to go well for Jerry. He’d been a bachelor for years, desperately lonely, given to lingering like a remora in Johnny’s driveway and around his mailbox, hoping for a confab. Then a few years ago, he’d married a woman named Tina. He met her online and she moved down from Detroit. She was Hispanic, quite attractive, and hardworking (a dental hygienist, if Johnny recalled correctly), but it turned out that the Tina package included a teenage son who was something of a train wreck. Pauline was friendly with Tina, had her over for a glass of wine now and then, and had gotten the whole story. It seems the kid had gotten into some trouble for shoplifting and vandalism. Then he failed his junior year and refused to go back to school. And he’d evidently called the principal a cunt on the way out the door, so Johnny couldn’t imagine he was entirely welcome anyway. “He just needs direction,” Johnny overheard Tina sighing to Pauline one day. “He just needs to get inspired by something, you know? I mean, don’t we all need to be inspired?”
Johnny saw the boy almost every day, walking barefoot to the beach, shag-haired and slow-moving and indeed, by all appearances, bereft of inspiration. Usually he was dressed in a military jacket of some sort, insignia across the back and down the sleeves. But sometimes he went shirtless, and his arms and belly wobbled with stubborn remnants of baby fat. Last Christmas he’d gone back to Detroit to live with his father and had gotten a job busing tables at an upscale steakhouse. Jerry was thrilled. Tina told Pauline the kid was doing great up there, really thriving, just soaring, and that they were so proud of him.
But then there was more trouble—a skirmish with a mouthy customer at the steakhouse followed by a dustup with the heavy-handed dad, Pauline said—and next thing they knew the kid was back with Tina and Jerry on Watchers Island. “Can you imagine?” Pauline said. “They just don’t know what to do with him.” Johnny could imagine.
Now he stopped sweeping at the frogs—he was beginning to think they were suicidal—and steeled himself for his neighbor’s approach. Jerry was wearing rubber Crocs that made his feet look like large hooves, and he walked with a sliding shuffle, not so much sidestepping the frogs in his driveway as plowing them out of the way as he advanced.
“You believe this?” he said. He spread his arms wide. “Frogs!” he said, as if Johnny had not noticed. Johnny seldom made a habit of stopping to chat with Jerry, and that morning he was less inclined than ever. But Jerry was marching over, resolute. He was a dark, wiry man, very big on Bible studies and men’s fellowship groups, for which he was incessantly trying to recruit Johnny’s membership, and that effort notwithstanding, Johnny had a reluctant fondness for the little fellow. He’d noted with amusement since Tina’s arrival that Jerry’s bristly hair had taken on an unnaturally uniform ebony wash. Johnny suspected he was having it dyed. But what was that to him? He decided to be friendly.
“Hiya, Jerry,” he said.
Jerry approached, shaking his head and gesturing at the frogs.
“Eh?” he demanded.
“Aye,” Johnny said. “Ah dinnae ken.” Americans in general, and Jerry in particular, seemed to like it when Johnny laid on the brogue, though it was really a bit of a put-on at this point, considering how long he’d lived in Florida. But it was an easy matter to slide back, and he could do it to be entertaining. “It seems we have a pestilence,” he added.
“The Bible says they will come,” Jerry said. “I looked it up: ‘Their land swarmed with frogs, even in the chambers of their kings.’”
“We’re not kings, Jerry,” Johnny said.
“Sure we are,” Jerry said. “Look at us. You’re king of ice. And I’m king of fire.” Jerry was the PR guy for the Jacksonville fire marshal’s office. He grinned at Johnny, pleased with his metaphor.
“I just want the sons of bitches off my driveway,” Johnny said.
“True that,” Jerry said. “Anyway.” He crossed his arms, then uncrossed them again and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his cargo pants. He was wearing a pink shirt, and though normally Johnny had no patience for this, on Jerry it was darkly touching. Jerry shifted his weight and looked at Johnny, waiting for conversation.
“How’s the family, Jerry?” Johnny said finally.
Jerry looked over at his house and furrowed his brow.
“Well,” he said. “It’s hard, I guess, to be sevent
een these days. I can hardly remember. The kid’s a waste. And Tina won’t do anything about it.”
“Is he working?” Johnny said.
“Who’s going to hire him?” Jerry said gloomily. “One, he’s a dropout. And two, he’s a freak.”
“Little harsh, Jerry,” Johnny said.
“Call it like I see it, Johnny.” Jerry sighed. “Maybe you can hire him at the factory?”
“Didn’t you just tell me he was a freak? Not exactly a glowing recommendation.”
Jerry nodded sadly.
“Anyway,” Johnny said. “He has to be eighteen to work at the factory. Liability.”
Jerry looked at him sadly. “Oh, boy,” he said. “Frogs.”
Jerry walked back to his house and went into the garage. He came out with a rake, which he took to the frogs rather viciously.
Johnny’s phone buzzed in his pocket. It was Sharon.
“Phone tag,” she said. “I’ve finally got you.”
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s been a little weird around here.”
“Well, it must be contagious,” she said. “It’s pretty weird here, too.”
“What’s going on?”
“Anna’s been arrested,” she said flatly. Johnny had to think for a second. Anna? And then he remembered: Corran’s wife. He sometimes forgot that Corran was a married man. “She was trying to smuggle heroin back from Tenerife; that’s where her parents live. She put it in Lucy’s diaper. It’s horrible. Makes me sick.”
“So, they’re using again,” Johnny said. His stomach clenched.
“Not Corran. Just Anna.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know, Johnny. Been through this enough times, I can tell when he’s on and when he’s off, can’t I? Yes, I can.”
“When did this happen?”
“Little bit ago. Six weeks? No. Two months.”
“Christ. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well,” Sharon said. Her voice took on an edge of irritation. “You took yourself out of the loop, now didn’t you? Talk to your son yourself sometime, why don’t you?”
The Ice House Page 9