The Ice Maiden

by Edna Buchanan

  I exited the car gingerly, one eye on the dogs, the other on the woman, who had pushed open the screen door. Nearly six feet tall and rangy, with a wiry, too-curly salt-and-pepper permanent, she wore a shapeless cotton housedress, stockings rolled down to mid calf, and sneakers.

  The dogs followed curiously as I approached the porch. I patted the yellow Lab.

  “Don’t mind them, they’s all bark,” she called. “Kin I help you?”

  “Mrs. Pinder?”

  She nodded and I handed my card up to her, introducing myself. She held a section of newspaper, a good sign. I twisted my neck to confirm, with a touch of pride, that it was the News’s local page. A subscriber. Perhaps she’d just been reading one of my stories.

  “Thought you were from the real estate company,” she said. “What kin I do for you?”

  The dogs padded happily up the porch steps after me.

  “Weren’t you the one who called the police when two teenagers were shot and left for dead in a field a long time ago? On Christmas Eve? Do you remember?”

  Her expression changed, face somber. “I’ll remember that night till the day I die.”

  She held the creaky screen door open and I followed her inside. “Excuse the mess,” she said. “Me and my husband been here thirty-four years, my husband’s family afore that. This was his father’s place originally. We’re fixing to move out soon, a job I wouldn’t wish on anybody. I was just packing the good china.”

  I saw she hadn’t been reading the newspaper after all. She was using it to wrap the dishes she was packing into two wooden barrels like those waiting on the front porch. A stack of newspapers sat on the wood floor in front of a half-empty china cabinet.

  “We don’t close till next month, but there’s too much to do. Can’t leave it all for the last minute.” She led me into the living room, where old-fashioned Bermuda-style shutters blocked out the sun.

  “Didn’t know anybody else still remembered.”

  She sat, her feet resting on an old-fashioned footstool. Her ankles looked swollen.

  “That poor young girl still livin’?”

  “She’s an artist now, a sculptor.”

  “Praise be to God. Night she left here in that there ambulance, I thought she’d never live to see another day.”

  “I’m writing a Sunday magazine story about some homicide detectives who are working new leads in the case.”

  “After all these years?”

  I nodded. “They think a man who was killed recently might have been one of them, a second suspect is in prison, and they’re attempting to identify the others.”

  “They should hang them,” she said abruptly. “By the neck, until they are dead.”

  “Sounds fair to me.” I opened my notebook. “I’d like to talk to you about that night.”

  “I believe I still have it all here, somewheres in the sideboard.” She struggled to her feet. She opened one drawer, then another, sorting through tablecloths, napkins, and place mats, and then lifted a cardboard box out of the bottom drawer. “Knew it hadda be here somewheres. Good you came today, probably woulda thrown it out when I started the packing in here.”

  She sat heavily on the couch next to me and lifted the lid. The box on her ample lap was full of musty old news clippings. Most I had read in the News files, but these were in their original state, photos and headlines still attached, yellowed newsprint jagged and crumbling at the edges. A few were stories from other papers that I hadn’t seen.

  “Who’s this?” I asked, studying a picture that accompanied one story.

  “That there,” she said, pointing, “is my husband. It was after sunup then. All the police and their people were here, and reporters had started showing up. After a while when they got too pushy, the cops got tired of it and pushed ’em back to where they couldn’t take pictures. But reporters, they don’t take no for an answer. Don’tcha know, some of them came back by helicopter, started shooting pictures from the sky. Nothing the police could do about that.”

  The news photo, shot by one of the competition, showed half a dozen crime scene trucks and police vehicles. In the foreground, a younger Craig Burch and a South District police lieutenant were deep in conversation with a man wearing a baseball cap, windbreaker, and jeans. Clyde Pinder was sharp-featured, with a prominent nose and chin. He wore glasses, and his raised right arm pointed toward some far-off object beyond camera range. The eyes of the two cops followed his gesture.

  “We go to bed early,” she said. “Planned to load up the truck early next morning. Had a fresh ham, a Key lime pie, and a couple of jars of my mango chutney. Taking it to my sister’s in Florida City for Christmas day. I thought it was the storm that woke me up. A real gully washer, it come on with no warning, just teeming, pounding on that roof, which needed fixin’ at the time. Clyde was dead to the world, so I got out of bed to close the windows and set a pan under a leak in the upstairs hall. The squall was comin’ out of the east, hammering right acrost the fields, through the screens, gettin’ the floor all wet. That was when I heard the moans. It was eerie. I thought it was the wind. You know how sometimes the wind has a voice?”

  I nodded, recalling fierce tropical storms I had heard, their voices ranging from the deep bass rumble of a freight train to the high-pitched wail of a screaming woman.

  “But this time it had words to it. Half asleep, going on back to bed, I stopped to listen. It was saying Help me, oh, God, please, help me. Then it faded. I opened the window again, to listen. Rain hitting me in the face, spraying cold water on my bare feet, and I didn’t hear nothing but the storm. But when I started to close the window again, the wind said Please. Don’t let me die.

  “I run down those stairs like a crazy woman, barefooted, in my nightgown, throwed open the front door, and she was laying there at the foot of the steps. Naked as the day she was born, half drowned, facedown, had long hair, one hand pressed to a bloody hole in the side of her head. I just blinked for a minute. I couldn’t believe she was real. We had an old collie then, name of Lady. Used to be a good watchdog, but she never barked that night. The dog was just standing there beside her like a ghost, whimpering in the rain.

  “I run down the front steps, scared to touch her, scared that somebody hurt her and was still hiding out there in the dark somewheres. But I couldn’t leave her laying facedown in the rain. So I drug her up the steps onto the porch and into the front room, threw an afghan over her, dialed 911, and started screaming for Clyde. About then she started shaking, teeth chattering, like she was having a fit. Blood and water was streaming out of her hair onto my clean floor. I thought she was dying. She looked so young.

  “Clyde couldn’t believe what he was seeing when he come down those stairs. Thought he’d have a stroke and I’d have two dead bodies on my hands. She stopped shaking, started talking ’bout a boy named Ricky. Said he was out there, hurt. Needed help. I held a dish towel to her head, trying to stop the bleeding, telling her to hang on, the ambulance was coming and yelled for Clyde to get his ass on out there, somebody else had got hurt too. He pulled on his pants and a yeller rain slicker, got his shotgun, put the big spotlight on the truck, and run on out to look.

  “Young policeman got here first. He was radioing for them to put a rush on that ambulance, when Clyde got back, white as ashes. Said he found a boy, but he was dead. Next thing you know the whole front yard looked like a carnival, full of flashing red and blue lights.

  “They carried her off in the ambulance, that young cop holding on to her hand. Had a notebook like yours on his knee. Never saw her again. Detective brought my afghan back next day, had blood on it. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it, finally threw it in the trash. Thing took me half a year to make.”

  She paused. “The mother wrote me a nice note later, to thank me for helping her daughter. Are the parents still living?”

  “Up in Broward County,” I said.

  “The girl must be growed up by now. Did she ever marry, have children of her own?
”

  “She lives in Miami Beach. Not married.”

  “And she’s okay, up here?” She tapped a thick fore-finger to her temple.

  “Fine,” I assured her. “The shooting cost her the hearing in one ear, but that’s all that’s noticeable.”

  “Amazin’,” she said, in disbelief. “A miracle from God she ever found this place. It’s pitch black out here at night. Ordinarily the whole house would be dark. It was raining, no stars, but, you see, I had a little Christmas tree up in the front window, had sparkly lights blinking on and off. It was Christmas Eve. Only time I let the tree lights burn all night. She was lucky.”

  “To survive,” I said. “But if she’d been really lucky it wouldn’t have happened.”

  She showed me where Ricky’s body was found. Rebecca Pinder sat in my T-Bird, directing me, as the dogs barked madly and scrambled after us.

  The field itself, with its tidy and uniform rows of plants, looked no different from all the others, apparently chosen by the killers only for its proximity to the unpaved road that ran by it. I stood out there for a time, imagining what it had been like, remembering what Burch had told me about his visits there in the dark.

  The farmhouse seemed much too far away to walk. I wondered what it had been like for a young girl, wounded and bewildered and bleeding, in a dark and unfamiliar place, naked in a cold and driving rain. How long had she wandered before seeing the lights?

  I drove Rebecca Pinder back to her home, silhouetted against the big sky, surrounded by drifting clouds and endless sunlit fields. If I had been an artist, I would have liked to paint the scene.

  “It must be difficult to leave a home you’ve lived in for so long,” I said.

  “Pshaw,” she said. “Truth is, I can’t wait to walk out of this hellhole. Glad we’re sellin’ it. Nothin’ but hard work and heartbreak here. Farmers are screwed. Can’t make a living anymore. Nobody can. The government favors foreign imports, cheap produce from Mexico and South America. They give foreigners a break. And what do we get? Flood and fire, hurricanes, droughts, and tornadoes. Farmers don’t stand a chance. If that’s what people want, cheap fruit and vegetables from places where the workers pee and poop right in the fields and use dangerous pesticides and fertilizers banned in this country, well, they can be my guest.”

  The new owners, the Catholic archdiocese, planned to subdivide the property, she explained, for a retirement complex: a townhouse village with a golf course, an assisted living facility for those unable to maintain their own residences, a nursing home for the sick, and a hospice for the final stage, all in one huge development.

  “We’re damn lucky,” she said. “We got us a good deal. After all the sweat, all the labor we put into it, this is the end. No more crops will be growin’ on this land.”

  Another crime scene would be paved over, its ghosts erased from the map, more farmland swallowed by concrete, asphalt, and contrived landscaping, I thought, as the T-Bird lurched down the unpaved track. The two dogs followed me halfway to the main road.

  10

  “Wait till you see her,” I said, sotto voce, as we approached apartment 1-A. “She’ll either be bundled up like an Eskimo or behind a green rubber mask with what looks like an elephant’s trunk. You may freeze to death or cough your brains out in a dust storm. And if the woman speaks at all, it will be about her work. Exclusively. There is nothing else. Zilch. She’s always alone, like a recluse. And, oh”—I warned Nazario—“did I neglect to mention that she’s probably armed? Most likely with a knife, but it could be anything from a chisel to a sledgehammer to a chain saw. The place is full of power tools.

  “This could take time,” I explained, hammering on the wood paneling. There were no sounds of demolition under way or major construction work inside. “She’s probably taking a break,” I said. “Or she’s in the freezer.”

  He lifted a wary eyebrow.

  “I forgot to tell you about the walk-in freezer. Big as the coolers at the morgue. She could stack two, maybe three dozen bodies in there.”

  The door inched open. No one seemed to be there until I looked down.

  The huge eyes of a small boy, age five or six, gazed up at us.

  “Jonathan, remember what we learned? We never open a door until we know who’s there.” It was Sunny speaking, a Sunny I hadn’t seen before.

  Hair long and loose around her shoulders and down her back, she wore a white T-shirt, sleeves rolled up, white Capri pants, and sandals that accentuated her long tanned legs. She had a box of Crayolas in her hand and two little girls clinging to her as though they were attached. She looked beautiful, wholesome, normal. Not at all like the weird recluse I had described.

  Nazario gave me a quick puzzled look.

  Sunny caught it, taking a startled step back.

  “Hi, Sunny,” I said cheerfully. “When you didn’t call, we decided to stop by. This is Pete Nazario, from the squad.”

  A bigger boy, about ten, and a sad-faced small girl scrutinized us inquisitively from their seats at a worktable. Not a knife, hammer, or razor-sharp tool in sight. Only colored pencils, crayons, and bright-hued children’s drawings scattered across the tabletop.

  “Hey,” squealed a high-pitched voice. A pixie peeked from behind the leg of the other worktable. Pink barrettes in frizzy hair, eyes big and dark. I glanced around. Where did all these munchkins come from? How the hell many were there? Not an icicle or speck of dust in sight. Nazario must think I’m crazy, I thought. He smiled at Sunny, then at little Pixie-face.

  “Hey, yourself,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Rosie.” The child preened and posed.

  “I asked you to call first,” Sunny said, ignoring Nazario, her voice cold.

  “Sorry. It’s my fault.” Nazario apologized for us. “Didn’t know you had company. Look at all this fabulous artwork!”

  The children flocked around him as he examined their drawings. He held up a crude picture, crayoned orange palm trees silhouetted against a hot pink sky with a large purple blob in the center. The blob had big round eyes and sported whiskers.

  “Excellent!” The detective turned to Sunny. “This must be yours. I knew you were an artist, but they didn’t tell me you were this good.”

  She didn’t smile, not even when little Pixie-face, literally spinning with excitement, screamed, “No! No! I did it! It’s mine! It’s mine!”

  “Lookit mine! Lookit mine!” the other kids chorused.

  “We were just leaving,” Sunny said.

  “To see manatees!” shouted the child who had opened the door.

  “Not you. You’re not going. You in trouble,” the bigger boy said with authority.

  The smaller boy’s face crumpled. Sunny didn’t look much happier. “Now, Carlos,” she said softly, “of course we wouldn’t go without Jonathan.”

  “You’re all so lucky.” Nazario turned to me. “We love manatees too, don’t we?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “They’re so cool.”

  “Can you eat them?” the smaller boy said.

  “No!” everyone else cried.

  “Sea cows are our friends,” Sunny told them. “We have to help save the manatees. Remember the book we read?”

  “Can you come with us?” Rosie coyly asked the detective.

  “We’d love to, if we’re invited.” Nazario looked hopefully at Sunny.

  “Yes, yes!” the children cried.

  “We can help,” I offered. “I’m sure you have your hands full.”

  Sunny shrugged reluctantly.

  “Great!” Nazario boomed, as though she had welcomed the idea.

  “Everybody goes to the bathroom before we leave,” Sunny told the children. “No, no. One at a time, not all together. That’s right, let Jonathan go first.”

  “But I don’t have to,” the boy protested.

  “All right, let the girls go first. But Jonathan,” she whispered, “remember last time? Just go in there for a minute and try before we leave.
Okay?”

  “Where are we headed?” Nazario said, as the children got their things together.

  “The Seaquarium,” Sunny said frostily, without looking at him. The children, she explained, were from a South Beach shelter for battered women. Another volunteer, a former ballerina, taught them dance steps and took them to performances. A local writer read to them and helped them write stories and poems. Sunny was introducing them to art.

  “You’d be surprised how many of these kids miss the normal cultural activities most children are exposed to,” Sunny said softly. “Their mothers are busy just surviving.”

  We were rolling across the Rickenbacker Causeway in Sunny’s eight-year-old van, the kids all strapped in and singing “Over the River and Through the Woods.” I wished my editors could see me. I love this job, I thought. I never know what the day will hold. I might find myself at an inner-city murder scene, aboard a police helicopter whirling high above the bay, clinging to the back of an airboat skimming across the saw grass headed for an Everglades plane-crash site—or in a van full of happy children bound for discovery and adventure. The earlier scenarios were more usual for me. Was this a glimpse into how normal people lived? No, I thought. Sunny was damaged. These kids had probably already seen more strife and violence than many people do in a lifetime. And though Nazario seemed to be enjoying himself, this was certainly out of the ordinary for a homicide investigator. We were all outsiders, our noses up against the glass, wistfully seeking glimpses of real life.

  I caught an occasional puzzled look from Nazario, but he sang along, learning lyrics from the children, pointing out rare palms, gliding pelicans, and out-of-state license tags. But mostly he looked at Sunny like a puppy coveting a bone.

  The kids clamored to see who would spot the Seaquarium’s distinctive round dome first. This was their second visit. Last week’s was fun. Today’s would focus on manatees. Later, in Sunny’s studio, they would fashion manatees out of quick-drying clay, paint them with acrylics, and bake them.