Hot Ice Read online

  She was tired, too tired to concentrate well enough to fire up her torch again. In any case, nothing she’d begun in the past few weeks had turned out well. But she was much too restless to nap or to stretch out on the floor and devour some daytime television.

  On impulse she rose and went to a large trunk that served as seat, table, and catch-all. Digging in, she riffled through an old prom dress, her graduation cap, her wedding veil, which aroused a trio of reactions— surprise, amusement, and regret—a pair of tennis shoes she’d thought were lost for good, and at last, a photo album.

  She was lonely, Clare admitted as she took it with her to the window seat overlooking Canal Street. For her family. If they were all too far away to touch, at least she could reach them through old pictures.

  The first snapshot made her smile. It was a muddy black-and-white Polaroid of herself and her twin brother, Blair, as infants, Blair and Clare, she thought with a sigh. How often had she and her twin groaned over their parents’ decision to name cute? The shot was fuzzily out of focus, her father’s handiwork. He’d never taken a clear picture in his life.

  “I’m mechanically declined,” he’d always said. “Put anything with a button or a gear in my hands, and I’ll mess it up. But give me a handful of seeds and some dirt, and I’ll grow you the biggest flowers in the county.”

  And it was true, Clare thought. Her mother was a natural tinkerer, fixing toasters and unstopping sinks, while Jack Kimball had wielded hoe and spade and clippers to turn their yard on the corner of Oak Leaf and Mountain View lanes in Emmitsboro, Maryland, into a showplace.

  There was proof here, in a picture her mother had taken. It was perfectly centered and in focus. The infant Kimball twins reclined on a blanket on close-cropped green grass. Behind them was a lush bank of spring blooms. Nodding columbine, bleeding hearts, lilies of the valley, impatiens, all orderly planted without being structured, all richly blossoming.

  Here was a picture of her mother. With a jolt, Clare realized she was looking at a woman younger than herself. Rosemary Kimball’s hair was a dark honey blond, worn poofed and lacquered in the style of the early sixties. She was smiling, on the verge of a laugh as she held a baby on either hip.

  How pretty she was, Clare thought. Despite the bowling ball of a hairdo and the overdone makeup of the times, Rosemary Kimball had been—and was still—a lovely woman. Blond hair, blue eyes, a petite, curvy figure and delicate features.

  There was Clare’s father, dressed in shorts with garden dirt on his knobby knees. He was leaning on his hoe, grinning self-consciously at the camera. His red hair was cropped in a crew cut, and his pale skin showed signs of sunburn. Though well out of adolescence, Jack Kimball had still been all legs and elbows. An awkward scarecrow of a man who had loved flowers.

  Blinking back tears, Clare turned the next page in the album. There were Christmas pictures, she and Blair in front of a tilted Christmas tree. Toddlers on shiny red tricycles. Though they were twins, there was little family resemblance. Blair had taken his looks from their mother, Clare from their father, as though in the womb the babies had chosen sides. Blair was all angelic looks, from the top of his towhead to the tips of his red Keds. Clare’s hair ribbon was dangling. Her white leggings bagged under the stiff skirts of her organdy dress. She was the ugly duckling who had never quite managed to turn into a swan.

  There were other pictures, cataloging a family growing up. Birthdays and picnics, vacations and quiet moments. Here and there were pictures of friends and relatives. Blair, in his spiffy band uniform, marching down Main Street in the Memorial Day parade. Clare with her arm around Pudge, the fat beagle who had been their pet for more than a decade. Pictures of the twins together in the pup tent their mother had set up in the backyard. Of her parents, dressed in their Sunday finest outside church one Easter Sunday after her father had turned dramatically back to the Catholic faith.

  There were newspaper clippings as well. Jack Kimball being presented a plaque by the mayor of Emmitsboro in appreciation for his work for the community. A write-up on her father and Kimball Realty, citing it as a sterling example of the American dream, a one-man operation that had grown and prospered into a statewide organization with four branches.

  His biggest deal had been the sale of a one-hundred-fifty-acre farm to a building conglomerate that specialized in developing shopping centers. Some of the townspeople had griped about sacrificing the quiet seclusion of Emmitsboro to the coming of an eighty-unit motel, fast-food franchises, and department stores, but most had agreed that the growth was needed. More jobs, more conveniences.

  Her father had been one of the town luminaries at the groundbreaking ceremony.

  Then he had begun drinking.

  Not enough to notice at first. True, the scent of whiskey had hovered around him, but he had continued to work, continued to garden. The closer the shopping center had come to completion, the more he drank.

  Two days after its grand opening, on a hot August night, he had emptied a bottle and tumbled, or jumped, from the third-story window.

  No one had been home. Her mother had been enjoying her once-a-month girls’ night out of dinner and a movie and gossip. Blair had been camping with friends in the woods to the east of town. And Clare had been flushed and dizzy with the excitement of her first date.

  With her eyes closed and the album clutched in her hands, she was a girl of fifteen again, tall for her age and skinny with it, her oversize eyes bright and giddy with the thrill of her night at the local carnival.

  She’d been kissed on the Ferris wheel, her hand held. In her arms she had carried the small stuffed elephant that cost Bobby Meese seven dollars and fifty cents to win by knocking over a trio of wooden bottles.

  The image in her mind was clear. Clare stopped hearing the chug of traffic along Canal and heard instead the quiet, country sounds of summer.

  She was certain her father would be waiting for her. His eyes had misted over when she walked out with Bobby. She hoped she and her father would sit together on the old porch swing, as they often did, with moths flapping against the yellow lights and crickets singing in the grass, while she told him all about the adventure.

  She climbed the stairs, her sneakers soundless on the gleaming wood. Even now she could feel that flush of excitement. The bedroom door was open, and she peeked in, calling his name.

  “Daddy?”

  In the slant of moonlight, she saw that her parents’ bed was still made. Turning, she started up to the third floor. He often worked late at night in his office. Or drank late at night. But she pushed that thought aside. If he’d been drinking, she would coax him downstairs, fix him coffee, and talk to him until his eyes lost that haunted look that had come into them lately. Before long he’d be laughing again, his arm slung around her shoulders.

  She saw the light under his office door. She knocked first, an ingrained habit. As close a family as they were, they had been taught to respect the privacy of others.

  “Daddy? I’m back.”

  The lack of response disturbed her. For some reason, as she stood, hesitating, she was gripped by an unreasonable need to turn and run. A coppery flavor had filled her mouth, a taste of fear she didn’t recognize. She even took a step back before she shook off the feeling and reached for the doorknob.

  “Dad?” She prayed she wouldn’t find him slumped over his desk, snoring drunk. The image made her take a firmer grip on the knob, angry all at once that he would spoil this most perfect evening of her life with whiskey. He was her father. He was supposed to be there for her. He wasn’t supposed to let her down. She shoved the door open.

  At first she was only puzzled. The room was empty, though the light was on and the big portable fan stirred the hot air in the converted attic room. Her nose wrinkled at the smell—whiskey, strong and sour. As she stepped inside, her sneakers crunched over broken glass. She skirted around the remains of a bottle of Irish Mist.

  Had he gone out? Had he drained the bottle, tossed it asid
e, then stumbled out of the house?

  Her first reaction was acute embarrassment, the kind only a teenager can feel. Someone might see him—her friends, their parents. In a small town like Emmitsboro, everyone knew everyone. She would die of shame if someone happened across her father, drunk and weaving.

  Clutching her prized elephant, her first gift from a suitor, she stood in the center of the sloped-ceilinged room and agonized over what to do.

  If her mother had been home, she thought, suddenly furious, if her mother had been home, he wouldn’t have wondered off. She would have soothed and calmed him and tucked him into bed. And Blair had gone off as well, camping with his jerky friends. Probably drinking Budweiser and reading Playboy by the campfire.

  And she’d gone, too, she thought, near tears with the indecision. Should she stay and wait, or go out and search for him?

  She would look. Her decision made, she moved to the desk to turn off the lamp. More glass crunched under her feet. It was odd, she thought. If the bottle had been broken by the door, how could there be so much glass here, behind the desk? Under the window?

  Slowly, she looked up from the jagged shards at her feet to the tall, narrow window behind her father’s desk. It was not open, but broken. Vicious slices of glass still clung to the frame. With watery legs she took a step forward, then another. And looked down to where her father lay faceup on the flagstone patio, impaled through the chest by the round of garden stakes he had set there that same afternoon.

  She remembered running. The scream locked in her chest. Stumbling on the stairs, falling, scrambling up and running again, down the long hall, slamming into the swinging door at the kitchen, through the screen that led outside.

  He was bleeding, broken, his mouth open as if he were about to speak. Or scream. Through his chest the sharp-ended stakes sliced, soaked with blood and gore.

  His eyes stared at her, but he didn’t see. She shook him, shouted, tried to drag him up. She pleaded and begged and promised, but he only stared at her. She could smell the blood, his blood, and the heavy scent of summer roses he loved.

  Then she screamed. She kept screaming until the neighbors found them.