The Ice Cradle Read online

  We had been sitting on the porch watching a two-sailed sloop glide gracefully along in the water, but the wind picked up suddenly and turned right toward us, driving us back inside.

  Earlier, Henry had discovered a television and a collection of DVDs in one of the rooms off the main sitting area, and I was happy to hunker down with him for a couple of hours before dinner, assuming we could agree on a movie. We’d already had a long walk, followed by a short nap, followed by a shell-collecting expedition up the beach. On a Sunday in the off-season, on a quiet island in New England, there isn’t much else to do.

  “This one?” Henry asked, holding up The Crying Game. He was attracted, no doubt, to its dramatic black-and-white cover, which featured a smoking gun and a sultry femme fatale.

  “No way.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s for grown-ups.” I reached instead for Hitchcock’s The Birds and flipped it over to see if it had an MPAA rating. Personally, I’d never found the movie to be all that frightening, but most people obviously did. I didn’t want to plant the seeds of any nightmares. Fortunately, a Three Stooges collection tumbled onto the rug, and Henry snatched it up.

  “Perfect!” I said. “You’ll love this!” He pried his feet out of his sneakers and climbed up onto the couch. I plopped down into the chair by the window.

  Lauren came in about half an hour later, just as Moe, installed by a group of businessmen as the dictator of “Moronica,” was pulling off an eerie parody of Hitler.

  “Cup of tea?” she asked.

  “That’d be great.”

  When five thirty came, she and I were sitting at the big oak table in her kitchen, and I was peeling carrots for our supper. From the laughter that still echoed through the empty downstairs rooms, Henry had neither lost interest in the shenanigans of Moe, Larry, and Curly nor budged from his spot on the couch.

  Lauren and I had gotten several things out of the way. Henry and I weren’t going to be served in the dining room anymore. I found it awkward to be sitting there like the grande dame while Lauren waited on us. I assured her that we’d be perfectly happy to have normal meals in the kitchen, and surprisingly, without too much protest, she agreed. She said she hated eating alone when Mark, her husband, who wrote articles on economic issues for the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal, had to leave the island on business, as he was going to have to do this week.

  I didn’t want her to clean our room every day, either. I told her we’d be glad for fresh towels on Tuesday or Wednesday, but we could make our own beds and pick up after ourselves. She agreed to that, too. She and Mark were trying to conserve energy and water, and daily washing of all the sheets was shamefully wasteful of both.

  “How long have you lived here?” I asked.

  “A little over a year.”

  “Are you from the island?”

  “No, I grew up in Vermont, outside of Burlington. Mark and I met at Middlebury.”

  “How’d you come to be running an inn?”

  “I was dragged, kicking and screaming. No, not really. I told him I’d give it five years.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “It’s a beautiful place.”

  “The island or the house?”

  “Both, but I meant the house.”

  “Thanks. We still have a lot of work to do, but we’re getting there. Mark’s aunt wasn’t really able to keep it up.”

  “It’s a family place?”

  “Mark’s great-grandparents built it in 1901. It was their summer home.”

  “Wow!”

  “Yeah, I know. Alby—Mark’s great-grandfather; his name was Albert Riegler—came from a family of Austrian bankers. He ran their New York office. He and his wife and kids lived on Park Avenue and spent their summers here on the island.”

  “When did it become an inn?”

  “We got all the permits after we bought it. Eva, Mark’s aunt, ran it for years as a kind of boardinghouse, after the family lost all their money in the stock market crash in 1929. Folks would stay for weeks at a time, even the whole summer. But it was always people they knew, extended family, friends of friends. You couldn’t just call up and reserve a room.

  “After Eva died, in the seventies, the house was passed down to Mark’s parents and uncle. They used to come here a lot, especially when Mark and his sister were growing up, but now Mark’s parents are retired and living down in Florida, and Uncle Pete’s out in Santa Barbara. He rarely comes back East. The place was falling apart, but Mark had always dreamed of turning it into an inn.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to do it,” I said. “I don’t have the temperament.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see whether I do. It’s been a lot harder than I expected.”

  “How so?” I asked. “The renovations?” That I could imagine. The floors had all been refinished, and the rooms freshly painted and papered with beautiful William Morris–style wallpapers. All the new hardware, from the bathroom fixtures to the hinges on the doors and cabinets, looked historically accurate.

  “No, that was the fun part,” Lauren said.

  “Then what?” I asked.

  She took the bowl of carrot peelings, stood up, and went over to the sink. She emptied the peels into a stainless-steel compost pail on the counter, then stood staring out the window overlooking the backyard.

  “The reservations aren’t exactly pouring in. The place has a—reputation,” she finally said.

  “Let me guess,” I offered. “People think it’s haunted.”

  She wheeled around. “How’d you know?”

  “Just a hunch,” I said. “A historic inn on an island? Come on, it’s right out of Agatha Christie.”

  Lauren grinned. “I suppose it is. I can’t believe I’m telling you this. You’re not going to want to stay here.”

  “I don’t have a problem with ghosts,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Really. My grandmother was kind of—psychic.”

  Lauren nodded but looked unconvinced. “It goes way, way back,” she said. “There was a novelist who used to come here every summer, a guy named Antony Wicklow. This was back when Eva owned the place. He was a ‘confirmed bachelor’ who lived in New York during the winters and came here every summer. He always stayed in the same room, that back room on the second floor.”

  “The one with the green wallpaper?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, he became convinced that the room was haunted.”

  “By whom?”

  “Who convinced him?” Lauren asked.

  “No,” I answered. “Who was supposedly haunting it?”

  “The ghost of a man in his fifties, who apparently looked like Abraham Lincoln, and the spirit of a woman in her late thirties or early forties. Her hands were always pressed to her ears. Wicklow claimed to see them night after night, often at the foot of his bed. And he wrote a bestseller about it, a pretty spooky novel in which the ghosts end up smothering a couple of the boarders.

  “People figured out that this was the place described in the book and nobody wanted to come here anymore. And at just about that time, a storm brought down one of the chimneys, which some people took as evidence.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know, bad supernatural karma. Eva was hanging on by a thread, and some of her regulars, folks who usually came here for the full season, just up and cancelled. It really put the nails in the coffin.”

  “Of the boardinghouse.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was the name of the book?” I asked.

  “Inn of Phantoms.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “There’s a copy around here somewhere. I’ll find it for you.”

  I paused and took a deep breath. “And what do you think? Do you believe there are ghosts?”

  “I really don’t know. Some weird things have happened, in that room and one other. Mark thinks I’m off my rocker, or at least in a highly suggestible state, but I swear I can feel something in there. The air se
ems charged, like it’s full of electricity, and when we were doing the work on those rooms, we kept having problems with the simplest things. I know it sounds crazy, but it was like someone—something—didn’t want the room to change.”

  “You’re not crazy,” I said, trying to make her feel better. “They definitely exist.”

  “Ghosts? You think so?”

  “I know so.”

  “On account of your grandmother?”

  “Yeah.” The time might come for me to level with Lauren about my own experiences and skills, but first I wanted to do a little private investigating. The ghosts that inspired the novel might be long gone by now. I certainly hadn’t encountered them. The little ghost girl would be gone soon, too. I would see to that as soon as I learned a little more about Henry’s relationship with the supernatural world.

  “But that book was written so long ago,” I said. “You’d think it would be forgotten by now.”

  “I wish. And we did something really stupid.”

  “What was that?”

  Lauren let out a deep sigh and rolled her eyes. “Mark got a call from The Ghost Detectives.”

  “The TV show? Oh, no!” The “ghost detectives” were two Australian guys who hosted a reality show on haunted buildings and spaces. They came in after dark with infrared cameras and never failed to “prove” the presence of spirits, usually “evil” spirits. I had seen the show a number of times—we don’t have cable, but most of my friends do—and I’d read a lot about it. The ghost detectives never let a little matter like the truth get in the way of a gripping episode.

  “They asked if they could do a show on us,” Lauren went on. “We saw it as free publicity and thought it might be a way to lay all the old rumors to rest. Prove that there aren’t any ghosts at the Grand View.”

  “Have you ever seen the show?”

  “I have now. We should have done a little more research before we said yes.”

  “Can’t you cancel?”

  “We tried. They won’t let us out of it.”

  “When are they coming?”

  “Saturday.”

  “Saturday? This coming Saturday?”

  “Mark has to go into Boston for some meetings. They’re going to meet him there and come back with him Saturday morning. And if they find anything—”

  “—which they always do,” I interrupted. The show was completely formulaic. Not finding ghosts would be like the couples on Wife Swap getting along or Supernanny visiting a family with well-behaved children.

  “I know, I know,” said Lauren. “And they’ll blast it all over the cable universe. Nobody will stay here but crackpots and kooks.”

  “It could be really great for business.”

  Lauren didn’t smile. “Yeah, or it could scare it away.” Her eyes looked tired and sad. She seemed like a different person than the one I had met yesterday.

  “Maybe I can help you,” I said.

  “Thanks, but what can you do?”

  “You might be surprised.”

  Chapter Four

  MONDAY

  THE BLOCK ISLAND school, a jaunty new brick and shingle edifice, served all the young scholars on the island, from age five to age eighteen. As Henry and I approached the building early on Monday morning, dozens of kids, some still small enough to be wearing OshKosh overalls and others sporting Goth-style makeup and downy upper lips, could be seen making their way to the island’s only school—ambling in clumps of three or four, speeding on bikes, hopping out of the cars and trucks their parents had pulled in to the school’s circular drop-off area.

  The morning had gone smoothly enough, eased along by Henry’s elation at the fact that he didn’t to have to wear his school uniform: chinos, blue oxford shirt, navy blue clip-on tie.

  “What?” I said, laughing. “You thought you’d have to wear your uniform?”

  “You said it was school!”

  “No, honey, I said it was at a school. You think I’d make you go to school on your vacation? Come on! It’s more like—camp! It’ll be really fun!”

  “It will?” His hair was all cowlicky. He beamed up at me, prepared to believe just about anything I said.

  I squashed the impulse to get all breathless and enthusiastic. I hoped he’d have more fun than I would have had doing this at his age, but things could go either way. I would have hated walking into a huge, strange school filled with as many big loud kids as with kindergarteners, having to be on my own all day long without a pal to eat lunch with, not daring to ask where the bathrooms were. I didn’t want to promise Henry that he’d have fun, because he very well might not, not today at least, and maybe not at all. Fun, sadly, was not the primary purpose of this arrangement.

  I could feel his apprehension kicking in as we approached the school. He started to lag behind me, eyeing the chummy clusters of kids, and beginning to bite his lower lip, a sure sign that he was getting the jitters. I paused on the steps, then took him by the hand and led him over to a bench at the edge of the playground.

  I adjusted his scarf and attempted to subdue a stubborn cowlick.

  “I don’t want to go,” he said.

  “You have to, sweetie. Because I have to go to work.”

  “I can come with you,” he announced, as though alerting me to this possibility for the very first time.

  I shook my head.

  “Listen,” I said. “All these kids hang around together all the time. Every day, summer and winter. They are going to be so excited to meet somebody new—you!”

  He looked up at me, then back at the kids streaming up the steps. A burly teenager wearing a Clash T-shirt chose just this moment to put one of his friends into a headlock.

  “They’re going to have so many questions for you,” I said, trying to distract him.

  “Like what?” he asked, eyes glued to the tussling teenagers.

  “Like—about the T. They don’t have subways here! I bet a lot of these kids have never, ever been on a subway! They might want to know all about it.”

  Henry made no response.

  “And—the Freedom Trail! Paul Revere’s house! Think of all the things you have in your hometown! Because even though we live in Cambridge, you were born in Boston!”

  “And the Children’s Museum,” he mumbled.

  “Right! And those gondolas down by the science museum! They won’t believe we have gondolas in Boston. Gondolas aren’t anywhere but Venice!”

  “Yeah,” he said quietly as I glanced at my watch. I had to go. Soon.

  I stood up, but Henry didn’t budge. When I looked down, I could tell he was about to cry.

  I scooped him up, crossed the lawn, and walked firmly up the steps as he buried his face in the collar of my coat. There was only one way to do this—fast. That much I had learned, during what had felt like the endless nursery-school years. Long, bargaining good-byes might work for some kids, but they never worked for us. Sending the message that I was reluctant to depart made Henry wonder if there wasn’t a very good reason for that, leaving him feeling even more worried and uncertain than he’d originally felt. The current situation might not improve if I continued to project confidence and excitement, but it would surely deteriorate if I didn’t.

  I checked Henry into his classroom, met his teacher, Michelle, who seemed barely out of her teens, made sure he was on the prepaid list for lunch and snacks, and verified my contact information. I hugged him, stood up, and left. I didn’t turn around—I couldn’t—but at least he didn’t come after me, wailing and clinging to my leg.

  I felt heartsick all the way to the Historical Society. You can console yourself with all kinds of platitudes about kids being resilient and able to adapt. You can remind yourself of how lucky your child is to be spending time like this, whether he realizes it right now or not. But it still feels awful to tear yourself away from an anxious little person who doesn’t want to be left.

  As I strode briskly toward the road, pretending to be a happy, well-adjusted mom looking for
ward to her day at the office, I wanted nothing more than to turn around, walk back, gather Henry into my arms, phone Caleb Wilder, and call this whole thing off. Instead, I sniffed, dabbed at my watery eyes, and kept on walking.

  Caleb reminded me of a few guys I’d met since I moved to the East Coast, guys with Ivy League educations who’d decided to take a pass on finance and law and work in what were, at least formerly, genteel professions: teaching in prep schools, working in publishing and journalism, running discreet trusts and historical societies. I knew nothing about Caleb’s background, but he wore horn-rimmed, literary-looking glasses, Top-Siders, a starched white shirt, and a now rumpled, though clearly expensive, sports jacket.

  I imagined there was a very large sailboat in the picture.

  The Historical Society was located on the first floor of a sprawling white farmhouse on Old Town Road. A plaque beside the main entrance informed me that the unassuming structure had been built in 1850, but the house seemed remarkably well maintained, right down to what looked like the original windows: four panes over four on the lower level, and six over six up above. Hydrangea bushes lined the long porch, which ended at an enormous Rose of Sharon hedge. I imagined it was stunning in summer.

  “How’d the drop-off go?” Caleb asked, showing me into his office. “I saw you two there on the bench.”

  “Not so hot,” I said.

  “Yeah, I got that impression. Kara, my eight-year-old, she couldn’t wait to get there. But not Louisa. It was a battle just getting her out the door.”

  “But you like the program,” I prompted anxiously. “I mean, the people are good.”

  “Oh sure, yeah. You’ll see. Kara went last year, which is why she was all revved up. They did Guys and Dolls, and she had a great time.”

  “Guys and Dolls? How’d they manage that, with all the little kids?”

  “Well, the high school students get all the main roles, obviously, but anybody who wants to be onstage gets a part. Or they can make costumes or paint sets—they keep them busy, that’s for sure. Your son—what’s his name?”