The Ice Maiden

by Edna Buchanan

  He held on without comment as I blew an amber light to escape a stampede of aggressive window washers at the Dolphin Expressway ramp, where the winos were in bloom and the bums in season. We hurtled west, then south to the Don Shula. Local street names leave no doubt as to what takes priority in Miami.

  Traffic resembled a presidential motorcade, with flags mounted on nearly every vehicle.

  “Makes you feel good to see that, doesn’t it?” Ryan said.

  “Sure,” I said. “if you think it makes sense to fly American flags from huge gas-guzzling SUVs.”

  I thought of the two-year-old girl whose mother had decided to surprise her husband with a shortcake dessert that night. Their toddler stumbled into an uncapped well in a strawberry field and suffocated before rescuers reached her.

  After that tragedy, the county ordered that wells in fields open to the public be capped and marked with red flags.

  They must have missed one.

  After farmers’ commercial harvests, entrepreneurs lease farm fields and open them to the public. Families on outings or tight budgets pay to pick their own produce.

  “It must be fun,” Ryan was saying dreamily. “I’ve always wanted to go down there and spend a day picking fruits and vegetables. You can really experience what it’s like to be a migrant worker. Like Cesar Chavez—”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “It must be so enlightening when you go home to your air-conditioned condo to relax in the Jacuzzi with a glass of wine.”

  Ryan gazed at me fondly, all soft eyes and long lashes. “Are you in a bad mood, Britt?”

  “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “No.” How could he remain so together, so relaxed, on deadline, when my every pore oozed adrenaline? I hit the gas to pass a lumbering cement truck, then apologized for being so snotty.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “It’s healthy to vent.”

  I told him about the squad, the old cold case they were hot to pursue, and my lackluster love life.

  Farm fields stretched as far as the eye could see as we neared our destination. Was this the route the killers took with their captives that Christmas Eve? I wondered aloud. Did Richard Chance die here? Over there? Or had the crime scene been lost forever, obliterated by one of the new subdivisions we had passed?

  “The maps are all different now,” Ryan said.

  “Right.” I sighed. “The middle of nowhere is a lot farther south and west than it used to be.”

  Luckily my scanner picked up police transmissions from the scene, radioing directions to incoming emergency crews. Soon we were trailing a convoy of flashing red, blue, and yellow lights.

  Badges and sunglasses glinted amid precise rows of tomato plants. Florida Power and Light and Bell South drilling equipment arrived when we did. Far from the wildfires, there was no haze here, only brittle blue sky and an unforgiving sun.

  My stomach clenched like a fist as a distraught young woman in a cotton blouse and blue jeans struggled with a fireman and another man who were trying to lead her away from a small opening in the ground.

  “Look,” I told Ryan, “I don’t need any help. I can handle it. I like working solo.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I don’t feel so good anyway. I think I’m coming down with something. I’ll go find a cold drink. Want one?”

  The man’s becoming a hypochondriac, I thought, as I stumbled through stubble and loose dirt.

  The weeping woman was in her twenties, with honey-colored hair and little makeup on a face ruddy with emotion. “It’s Justin!” Her voice teetered on the edge of hysteria. “He’s only sixteen months old! He was right behind us.”

  She turned, sobbing, against her husband’s chest. Tourists from Findlay, Ohio, they had stopped to see the farm and buy fresh vegetables.

  “He was tagging along about three rows behind us,” the father said, eyes wet behind the lenses of his glasses, “sort of talking to himself and singing like he always does. All of a sudden, we didn’t hear him.”

  When they turned, Justin had vanished, leaving only his strangely muffled wails, as though from an echo chamber.

  “He’s scared,” his mother sobbed. “He’s so little.” She clenched her fists helplessly. “It was covered by grass. You couldn’t even see it!”

  Rescue crews moved in heavy equipment, wheels spinning in the dirt. “They’re the best,” I assured them. I didn’t mention that, so far, the best had never been good enough.

  Reggie Handleman, the fire department’s information officer, took off his orange hard hat and steered me away from the parents. “It’s an irrigation well,” he said, “about twenty-five-feet deep. The hole is nine inches across. The kid slid down feet first and got wedged about ten feet down, in water up to his chest.”

  The child’s father had run to the farmhouse for help. A twelve-year-old boy came running with a rope, as his mother dialed 911. The boy wriggled into the well but couldn’t reach the child. When his shoulders got stuck, they dragged him out.

  The first police officer who arrived managed to hook the child’s T-shirt with a fruit picker—a wooden pole with curved metal claws at one end—to keep him from sliding any farther as he squirmed and struggled.

  “After the last kid,” Reggie said quietly, “the guys worked out a plan, Britt. They think we’ve got a good shot at saving this one.”

  I wondered how long the tot could survive his watery claustrophobic prison. I said a silent prayer, as drilling equipment rumbled loudly into action, and wondered why it had been so long since my prayers, or anyone else’s, seemed to make a difference. Was anybody listening?

  Firefighters began to dig a parallel shaft but struck solid coral rock just beneath the sandy loam. Progress was painfully slow as the sun climbed higher, melting the air around us into liquid heat. Gasping workers drilled a connecting tunnel to the well, wading in waist-deep water as the baby wailed.

  The media pack had arrived. TV crews ran amok, trampling adjacent farm fields. News choppers churned up huge clouds of gritty dust, increasing the discomfort. My sunglasses kept skidding down my sweaty face until the bridge of my nose was rubbed raw. I could feel the tan on my arms darken and wished I could wring out my underwear.

  I interviewed firefighters, cops, the man who had leased the field, and the stouthearted twelve-year-old who’d made the first rescue attempt. Villanueva, a News photographer dispatched by Gretchen, had also arrived.

  Ryan reappeared to steer me toward a witness. “She and her husband own the place,” he said in my ear. “Her son, Burt, attempted the first rescue. She remembers the murder you were just talking about.”

  “My husband’s up in Tallahassee lobbying for farm aid,” the anguished woman told me. “I want to go over to talk to the mother; I’m a mother myself. But I don’t know what to say to her….” Her voice trailed off. They had never had an accident like this one in the three generations the farm had been in her husband’s family.

  “I’m surprised you still remember it,” she said, when I asked her about the teenagers abducted and shot fourteen years earlier. “I haven’t heard talk about that for years. A terrible thing. They never caught them, you know.” Her eyes flooded. “Seems like nobody can live a normal life anymore. We haven’t had a good year in so long I can’t remember when. You just survive.” She stared tearfully across the fields at the emergency equipment, reporters, and their vehicles. “You just try to get through one disaster after another—fires, floods, hurricanes, drought. If not for bad luck we’d have no luck at all.”

  The field where the boy and girl were shot still existed, she said, about five miles south. “The Pinder place, real nice piece of property.”

  “The Pinders are still there?”

  “Not for long,” she said. “I hear they’re packing it in. They’re inside the new district. Used to be no more than one house allowed for five acres. But the county changed the zoning. They’re selling out to developers. They got lucky, the Pinders di
d. Somebody’s paying big bucks for their property. Wish it was us.” She covered her eyes with her hand.

  Microphones suddenly appeared over my shoulder, thrust in her face. TV reporters are relentless when they smell tears.

  The pounding air hammers were giving me a headache. The baby must be deafened and terrified, if he’s still alive, I thought. But when the hammers stopped, the sudden silence made my heart pound.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Handleman said. “The connecting shaft is only inches away from him. They’ll work by hand now, chip the coral rock away with chisels.”

  Justin began to wail again, his cries music to our ears.

  But as the tunneling slowly continued, his cries faded, then stopped. His mother’s eyes closed, lips moving.

  “He’s whimpering!” a firefighter shouted from the mouth of the well. Those of us still braving the shadeless heat breathed a collective sigh of relief.

  My underarms felt sticky, my clothes soggy, as sweat made a snakelike spiral down my spinal column.

  Twenty minutes later, a fireman in the shaft cautiously broke through the final few inches of rock.

  “I see his face!” he shouted. He carefully enlarged the opening, then tugged Justin through it.

  Like being born again, the child emerged from darkness into the light. Handed up to a husky deputy, he howled and waved his tiny fists amid the cheers, applause, and whir of the cameras. A happy ending. At last! Tears stung my eyes. Glare from the sun, I told myself. But burly firefighters also wiped away tears.

  Squinting at the light, his face a grimy pout, Justin was embraced by his parents and then bundled in a blue blanket for a helicopter ride to county hospital.

  Ryan returned, sunburned and loaded down with enough cartons of tomatoes and okra for us both. We piled into the T-Bird and raced north to Miami. He was already off for the day, so I left him at his car in the News parking lot.

  I conferred with the art department on diagrams of the successful rescue effort and then began putting the story together. Villanueva’s color photos had captured the glorious moment of rescue. The hospital said Justin was fine, only a few minor scrapes and bruises. I wished I could say the same for myself. Gretchen hovered over me like a vulture as I wrote.

  “No.” She peered over my shoulder, tapped a polished finger against her chin, and frowned. “That’s not the right lead.”

  Gingerly exploring the raw spot on my nose, I squinted at the racing hands on the newsroom clock and wondered what cruel twist of fate had put her in charge of my story.

  “How about,” she said, in singsong fashion, slowly rolling her eyes, “leading with the fact that, despite passage of the well-capping ordinance, no county inspection program was ever implemented to enforce it.” She snapped her fingers. “That’s it! There’s your lead!”

  “I don’t think so, Gretchen.” My overheated body began to shudder in the icy air-conditioning. The transition from farm field to newsroom had the effect of heatstroke followed by frostbite. “I think the human drama of the rescue should lead, with the ordinance and inspections coming in at about the third graf.”

  “TV will report the rescue,” she said, shaking her head emphatically, her bouncy hairdo swinging like a model’s in a shampoo commercial. “We need a second-day lead.”

  “But people want to read about the joy of that moment,” I said. “They need it; we all do. The firefighters, the rescuers, are heroes. After the other tragedies, they devised a new plan and made it work. Unlike TV, we can describe it in depth, on a personal level.”

  “This is not the time to be a prima donna, Britt.” She frowned, pursing her lips.

  “I’m not a prima donna,” I protested, echos of air hammers beginning to pound in my head, “but I’d be embarrassed to turn in a story that ignores the human element, the most important point.”

  “It won’t be ignored,” she snapped. “Report the rescue farther down in the body of the story, as tight as you can make it.” Lowering her voice, she leaned so close that her perfume made my eyes water. “I will be editing your copy,” she said crisply, “so if you don’t change it, I will. And, Britt, I hate having to bring this up again, but for God’s sake, will you try to remember that, when in public, you represent this newspaper.”

  I squinted up at her, dehydrated and thirsty. “What?”

  “Appearances,” she hissed, eyes wandering disdainfully from my limp sweat-soaked hair to my rumpled clothes and muddied shoes.

  “I’m busy,” I muttered, gritting my teeth. “If you decide to rewrite it your way, you can just take my name off it.”

  “Fine.” She shrugged and stalked back to the city desk.

  There are editors whose orders I will follow like a marine. Gretchen is not one of them. I wrote the story with the strongest stuff at the top and hit the SEND button, and it was out of my hands.

  My first stop was the water fountain. Then, chilled to the bone, I dug an old yellow cardigan out of my locker. Gretchen was busy at her editing screen when I returned. I couldn’t bring myself to look. “Any questions?” I inquired from a distance.

  She shook her head without looking up.

  When Andy Maguire returned from criminal court, he said a $75,000 bond had been set for Gomez. The shopkeeper and his pregnant wife, devastated by the charges and the fire, had wept in court. The Reverend Earl Wright, a fiery local black activist, was now involved. He had organized a noisy demonstration outside the Justice Building before attending the hearing with a number of protesters, all seeking justice for the dead man and harsh punishment for Gomez.

  All I was seeking was a cool shower, a hot meal, and bed. The phone rang as I cleared my desk. I thought about walking away but didn’t. I never do.

  It was Craig Burch. I slid back into my chair, the neurons in my brain so fried by the sun that it took a moment to remember why I’d been so eager to reach him earlier. Right, I thought, and announced we had a green light on the story for Hot Topics and asked about his progress on the Chance case.

  “Don’t ask.” He sounded bummed.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “You mean Sunny couldn’t identify Coney as one of her attackers?”

  “Shit, worse than that, Britt. I’ve had a helluva day.”

  “Tell me about it.” I commiserated. “I’ve got this editor who—”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Go.”

  “No, I mean face time, me and you.”

  “When?”

  “Whatcha doing now?”

  “Oh, Craig, I’m a mess.”

  “This ain’t a date.”

  I made an exasperated sound. “I know that, Craig, but I’ve been melting in the hot sun all afternoon. You should see me. I’m gonna have to burn these clothes.”

  For a moment I thought he’d hung up, but then I heard him breathing.

  “Where are you?” I said, resigned.

  “The boat ramp up at Pelican Harbor. Buy ya a beer.”

  I massaged my stiff neck and wondered if I had any aspirin.

  “Ten?” he asked.

  “Give me twenty.”

  I stared in dismay at my reflection in the ladies’ room mirror. Worse than I thought.

  I had never seen anyone use the locker room shower. I unearthed a washcloth and a free shampoo sample from my locker, along with a change of clothes stashed for emergencies—fresh underwear, a T-shirt, and an old pair of jeans. Sure, this was no date, but Gretchen’s slurs had stung. I gingerly touched a bare toe to the tiled floor of the narrow cubicle, grimaced, and wished for shower shoes. Who had bathed here last? It had not been recent. The cold, rusty spray of water looked blood red in the dim light. The color eventually cleared but the water never grew warm.

  I trembled as it cascaded over me, teeth chattering as I thought of the young life saved today and of the other youngster, Ricky Chance, who had lost his years ago.

  Once wet, the plastic shampoo packet was too damn slippery to tear open. Frustrated, I finally tossed it aside an
d, knowing I’d regret it, washed my hair with a dried-out bar of unidentified soap someone had left behind.

  I blotted myself roughly with brown paper towels from the rest room, pulled on the clean clothes, and tried unsuccessfully to drag a comb through my wet, tangled hair. Gretchen walked in as I applied a lipstick named Torrid, the only shade in my locker. She shook her head in amused disbelief.

  “I see you have a date, Britt,” she said smartly. “One of your policeman friends?”

  I drove with the windows open to dry my hair, but all the damp, smoky air did was make me sneeze. The temperature, slightly cooler after sunset, was still in the eighties.

  I rolled up behind Burch’s Chevy Blazer. He waved from a rough wooden picnic table that overlooked the dark waters of Biscayne Bay. His jacket and tie were gone, along with the jaunty look he’d worn the day before. A six-pack of Coors sat in front of him. He had started without me. It was half empty. He did a double-take as he rose to greet me.

  “You look half drowned,” he said. “You swim here from the News?”

  “Took a quick shower at the paper.” I paused to sneeze again. “Thank you very much. I’ll probably wind up with pneumonia and athlete’s foot.”

  “Thirsty?” He reached beneath the table. “Didn’t know if you were a beer drinker. Some girls aren’t. So I got you these.” He proudly plunked down a six-pack of assorted sweet wine coolers with names like strawberry blush, mango tango, and peach surprise. The names alone made me queasy.

  “I’ll have a beer, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure thing. Help yourself, there’s more in the car.”

  He cracked open a can and slid it across the table, along with a plastic cup. A thoughtful touch, since he was drinking straight from a can. Normally I am no beer drinker, except with pizza, but this was ice cold and tasted good.

  I sipped, suddenly comfortable in this free and open place, in the heat of the night, as breezes whispered over rushing water, sharing the moment with this man. Strangers might see Burch as an ordinary guy, a beer can in his fist, but I saw him as a soldier on a mission. What pursuit is more important than justice?