They had been at it all day. First, they had cordoned off the whole area, then systematically searched it, photographing and videotaping the scene from all angles. They hadn’t found a single clue as to how the body might have come to be there. With all that snow and ice Charlie hardly dared hope for one. Maybe when the thaw came they would find something. Clothes or a shoe or a backpack, maybe. Even footprints in an underlayer of snow or mud, if they got really lucky.
The two skiers had brought them here at dawn and showed them where the body was. Floating down there in the ice, she was as ghostly a sight as Charlie had ever witnessed and as the county coroner as well as sheriff he’d seen his fair share of bodies over the years. The skiers hadn’t hung around longer than they had to. The father had fifteen stitches in his cheek, which had bruised up like a beetroot. He was keen to get home. The boy had looked pale and still a little in shock. He’d be going home more of a man than he left.
It wasn’t until the early afternoon that they were ready to start trying to cut the girl out. It turned out a whole lot trickier than Charlie had figured. The body would have to be driven over the mountains to the state crime lab in Missoula, a journey that would take a good three hours. With warmer weather forecasted, they all agreed that the best way to preserve it was to keep it encased in ice. Until now they had been working with spud bars, carefully chipping the ice away fragment by fragment so as not to miss any item of evidence that might be frozen there. But it was like mowing a hayfield with a pair of scissors and Charlie decided that unless they changed their method, they would be here for weeks.
The snowmobiles were coming up the last hundred yards beside the creek now, both of them towing sleds stacked with the equipment. Charlie and those who had been waiting with him walked over to meet them. The headlights flashed on the yellow-green fluorescent vests that they were all wearing over their black parkas. As night was falling, so was the temperature. Even in his insulated boots his feet felt numb. What he’d give to be at home in front of the fire with the new book he’d just started. As he trudged through the snow, he took off his gloves and tried to blow some warmth back into his fingers. His mood wasn’t much improved by seeing Tim Heidecker climbing off the first snowmobile.
“What took you so long?”
“Sorry, Chief. Snowmobile got stuck down the creek.”
“Why didn’t you radio?”
“We tried. Couldn’t get anyone to hear.”
“Well, let’s get moving.”
They had brought him some hot soup and some candy bars which made him feel a little more benign. He stood sipping the soup and issuing orders every now and then while they rigged up the lights to the little generator and positioned them. Above him the mountains dimmed to looming shapes against a sky that slowly filled with stars.
Soon the crater into which the skiers had fallen was a cocoon of light in the enfolding night air. Its floor had been brushed of all snow and through the burnished black ice the young woman, with her swirled hair and her arm stretched out and her torn red jacket trailing behind her, looked like a leaping dancer captured in obsidian.
It took another six hours to cut her out. One of the chain saws jammed and twice they had to radio down for more blades. And because the ice crazed and went opaque when they cut into it, they kept having to stop and to use the oxyacetylene torches to melt it so that they could see what they were cutting into. They sliced a wide trench parallel to where the young woman lay and placed a sled there and began to lever her onto it with wooden poles. But her sarcophagus of ice was too heavy and there was a terrible creaking and cracking and one end of the sled broke through and tilted into the running water of the creek below. For a few long and perilous minutes, it seemed as if she was going to slide off and disappear through the hole but the men managed to slip ropes around her and hold her safe until they got the poles beneath the sled and propped it up and righted it.
They trimmed more ice from around her to lighten the load but the block was still too big for a body bag, so they radioed down for tarpaulins and wrapped it up like a parcel and fastened it with duct tape and ropes. And just before midnight three snowmobiles and half a dozen men, all straining at the ropes, succeeded at last in hauling the sled and its black-shrouded cargo from the hole.
Getting her down to the bus took another hour and it was nearly three by the time they had her loaded into the back of Charlie’s truck, insulated with blankets and sheets of cardboard. A couple of his deputies volunteered to accompany him over to Missoula but Charlie declined. They’d been working their butts off for almost twenty-four hours, and he thanked them all and ordered them off to their beds. He felt himself in that strangely energized state that lay beyond tiredness and, for some reason he didn’t fully understand, he wanted to be alone.
He drove down through Augusta and turned right onto Route 200 at a lonely crossroads where only a month earlier he had helped lift two dead teenagers from a wrecked car. Two straight roads met in the middle of nowhere and there were even traffic lights but it remained a place where people regularly managed to die. The memory unsettled him and got him musing about the dead girl who lay behind him, still frozen in her ballerina leap. The image had imprinted itself in his mind and he tried to clear it but couldn’t.
He kept wondering who she was and how she came to be there. He remembered a suicide up there once, not far from Goat Creek, a boy of seventeen who had taken off all his clothes and neatly folded them and placed them in his pack along with a rambling poem he’d written that tried to explain why he had to kill himself. He’d thrown himself off a cliff and his remains were found a month later by some bow hunters. Maybe this young woman was another such case. Or maybe she had fallen by accident. No hikers or skiers had been reported missing but that didn’t necessarily make it suspicious. Most likely she’d been on her own and was from somewhere far away and hadn’t thought to tell anyone where she was going. These things happened. Hopefully the body was in good enough condition to get an ID.
Charlie wondered about her parents or some other loved one and what they must be going through, the daily agony of not knowing where she was. He couldn’t help imagining the same thing happening to Lucy. His only child just vanishing like that and he and her mother not knowing if she were alive or lying murdered at the bottom of a ditch. How would he handle it? Hell, it would drive any parent insane.
He crossed the Continental Divide at Rogers Pass and started the winding descent toward Lincoln. But so lost was he in the dark meanderings of his head that he took a bend too fast and almost ran into a pair of white-tailed deer. He stamped on the brake and the truck slithered and snaked across the road. He heard the body sliding forward behind him and as he skidded to a sideways stop across the verge, it slammed into the back of his seat with such force that his neck whiplashed and he saw stars.
Charlie sat for a few moments, collecting himself and waiting for his heart to settle down. If the road hadn’t been gritted, he’d have been flying off it into the treetops. He drove the rest of the way at forty miles an hour with an oldies radio station on full blast to keep bad thoughts at bay, his neck throbbing to the beat.
The state crime lab was a smart brick building just off Broadway on the way to the airport. He’d had his office phone ahead to make sure there would be someone there to admit the body and to warn them it was a heavy one. They had obviously gotten the message because the two guys who came out to meet him looked like Olympic weight lifters.
“So this is our Jane Doe,” one of them said as the three of them struggled to load her onto the gurney. “Man, talk about on the rocks. You got more ice than body here.”
“Freshness is our byword,” Charlie said.
They wheeled her straight into the cold room and Charlie signed a form and wished them good night.
The eastern sky was paling to shades of pink and dove gray as he drove back into town. There were one or two cars and trucks about now. He briefly considered driving home but concluded it wasn??
?t wise. Now the job was done, tiredness was falling heavily upon him and his neck hurt like hell. He found a motel near the interstate and took a room barely bigger than a pool table. But it had a bed and that was all he cared about. He shut the beige plastic blind, shed his jacket and boots, and crawled under the covers. Then he remembered he hadn’t turned off his cell phone and wearily went to get it from his jacket. The screen showed that he had voice mail. He got back into bed, lowering his neck carefully onto the pillow. He switched off the bedside lamp and accessed the message.
It was Lucy. She said she hoped he was okay and that she was sorry he hadn’t been able to get to her party. She told him she missed him and loved him very much. It was dumb, Charlie knew, and not at all like him, and it was only because he was so ragged with tiredness. But, alone in the darkness, if he’d allowed himself, he could easily have wept.
THREE
She had been waiting nearly a quarter of an hour and was starting to feel foolish. Across the sunlit white stone floor of the small piazza, a group of schoolgirls, some of them licking ice creams and all impossibly pretty, kept staring at her and although Sarah barely understood a word of Italian, she was sure they were talking about her. The girls were supposed to be listening to their teacher, a nervous-looking woman with tightly pinned hair who was reciting from a book. She was no doubt briefing them about the gallery that they—and Sarah, if her date showed up—were about to visit.
She took her cigarettes out of her purse and lit one. She would give him twenty minutes. That was what Benjamin used to say. If someone kept you waiting, allow twenty minutes, then go. It was polite yet assertive, he said. Any longer and people would believe you had no self-respect. It irritated her that she should still think to behave according to his rules after four and a half years of living without him. But it was too ingrained.
In so many different situations, whether buying clothes or choosing from a menu or expressing a view on almost any subject, she would catch herself wondering what Benjamin would say. Then, to punish herself, she would deliberately go the other way, opt for a color or entrée she knew he would hate, or voice an opinion that would have him howling in protest. The trouble was, after so many years together, their views almost always coincided. The cost of her rebellion could be counted in the number of ghastly new outfits that hung unworn in her closet.
It was her last day in Venice and she didn’t want to waste it waiting for a virtual stranger, a man at least twenty years her junior who, in any case, had probably forgotten all about her. She had planned to spend the day browsing the shops, buying gifts for a few people back home. And to get this done in time to meet the young man, she had risen, breakfasted, and left the hotel before eight.
They had met the previous morning on the ferry to Torcello. Her tour group had split up for the day and only a handful had wanted to make the hour-long trip across the lagoon. They were mostly retired couples or pairs of friends, either from New York City or New Jersey. All were a good ten years older than Sarah and she had little in common with any of them. There was too much moaning about the hotel food and how expensive everything was. All week she had kept her distance, politely declining offers to include her. Her best friend Iris, with whom she had booked the trip, had cancelled at the last moment because her mother had a stroke. Sarah probably should have cancelled too. But she’d never been to Venice and was reluctant to miss the chance.
On the ferry she chatted for a while with the merry widows—two women from Newark who never stopped laughing—and then escaped aft to find a seat where she could quietly read her book and gaze out across the green water at the vaporettos chugging by.
The young man had come on board when the ferry stopped at the Lido. He took a seat across the aisle from her, facing the same way. He was probably in his mid- to late twenties, conservatively dressed in a white shirt and pressed charcoal pants. He caught her looking at him and gave her a beautiful smile. She smiled back politely and quickly looked down at her book, hoping the glow she could feel in her cheeks didn’t show. Out of the side of her eye she saw him pull a sketchbook from his black leather bag. He flipped through it until he found the page he was looking for and then took out a pen and set to work.
Sarah could see it was a precise drawing in black ink of an old palazzo. There were patches of crumbled stucco and ornate scrollings at the windows. He was filling in the detail, perhaps from memory or perhaps simply from his own imagination. Whichever it was, the work was impressive. Again he caught her looking and graciously showed her what he was doing. They began talking. In robust, if flawed, English, he told her he was from Rome and that he came to Venice every spring to visit an aged aunt. The picture was of her house.
“She must be very grand,” Sarah said.
“I make it look much grander than it is. She like that.”
“You draw very well.”
“Thank you, but I know I am too technical. I am a student of . . . architettura.”
“Architecture. My husband was an architect.”
“Oh. He is no longer?”
“No, I mean, he is an architect. He’s just no longer my husband.”
When they reached Torcello, they found themselves walking together along the path that wound from the dock to the ancient church of Santa Fosca. The early spring sun was hot and reflected brightly on the white cement. Sarah took off her sweater and tied it around her hips like a teenager. She was wearing a sleeveless pink T-shirt and a white linen skirt.
The young man said he had come that day to draw Torcello’s famous bell tower. He seemed to know a lot about the history of the island. It was settled, he said, in the fifth century, much earlier than Venice itself. It had once been a thriving place, with a population of twenty thousand. But malaria had driven people away and most of the buildings had fallen into ruin and disappeared. These days only a few dozen people lived there.
Outside the church, he showed her the crudely carved stone throne that was supposed to have belonged to Attila the Hun.
“Do you think he really sat on this?” she said.
“Not for very long. It looks not very comfortable.”
“Maybe that’s what made him so mean.”
They went inside the church. It was cool and dark and filled with a reverential hush. They stood in awe for a long time before a golden mosaic of the Madonna and Child. He whispered to her that in his opinion it was the most beautiful thing to be seen in all of Venice, except perhaps for the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. He asked her if she had been there yet and, when she said no, offered to show it to her the following day. Flattered and amused by the attention of this handsome, diffident man who, with his perfect skin and perfect teeth and clear brown eyes, was young enough to be her son, she agreed. They arranged to meet. She left him settling down to draw the bell tower and only when they shook hands to say good-bye did they tell each other their names. His, appropriately, was Angelo.
And now here she was, waiting as agreed, like a fool, outside the Scuola Grande or whatever the damn place was called, being giggled at by a bunch of schoolgirls who probably, given that she was smoking and trying too hard to look chic in her shades and her little navy Armani dress, had her down as some sort of superannuated hooker. She checked her watch again. He’d had twenty-two minutes (those two extra minutes a pathetic defiance of her ex-husband) and that was enough. She squashed her cigarette under her shoe, stuck out her tongue at the most insolent of the schoolgirls, and strode off.
Three minutes later she heard her name being called and looked back to see Angelo running over the bridge she had just crossed. She waited for him to reach her and gave him her coolest smile. Through his panting he managed to explain that his aunt had been taken ill that morning. Bless him, Sarah thought, surely he could do better than that. But he seemed so genuinely contrite and distressed for having kept her waiting that she couldn’t help but forgive him. Okay, she was a pushover, but what the hell? He was a lot better company than the merry widows, who had probab
ly written her off anyway as too damn snooty.
The Scuola Grande was filled with Tintorettos. The upper hall was vast and dark and sumptuously furnished in red velvet and polished walnut that gleamed in the pooled light of the wall lamps. There were perhaps fifty or sixty people there and all, even the schoolgirls who were now there too, stood peering in silent wonder at the paintings that adorned the walls and ceiling. The pictures themselves were dimly lit and Sarah had to put on her glasses to make out the religious themes they depicted.
Angelo was as diligent and informed a guide as he had been the previous day on the island. He whispered to her that the place was built in the early fifteen hundreds and dedicated to San Rocco, the patron saint of contagious diseases, in the vain hope that he might save the city from the plague. Tintoretto, Angelo said, had spent almost a quarter of a century decorating it. It was the kind of information that could easily have been plundered from any guidebook and the cruel thought occurred to her that perhaps he made a habit of picking up female tourists of a certain age.
The most renowned of Tintoretto’s paintings, The Crucifixion, was in a small adjoining room and they stood there for a long time staring at it. Sarah had never known quite what to make of religion. Her mother was a lapsed Catholic and her father a lapsed atheist, now teetering in his seventies over the edge of agnosticism into an as yet amorphous realm of belief. Benjamin had always denounced any form of religious belief as a convenient excuse for not thinking. And though Sarah was less zealous in her skepticism, her attitude on this—and so many other issues—had been infected by his.