CHAPTER 9
Chi mal pensa, mal abbia.
Everyone knows that ice is slippery. It was now common knowledge, at least to those at Icicle Lodge, that ice was also deadly.
As a result it was pandemonium in the rink when everyone tried to get close to Pamela’s unmoving body in the center of the ice, because no one except the deceased was wearing ice skates. Despite how slowly or gingerly they moved, people kept slipping and some even fell onto the surface of the ice on the short, but risky, trip from the safe ground outside the rink to the precarious surface that was the crime scene.
Vinny led the group and walked steadily to where Pamela was lying facedown, his work boots with their grooved soles giving him some traction on the slippery surface. Right behind him was Alberta and Sloan, who held on to each other and took small steps to minimize their chances of falling, and Helen and Joyce, who despite their combined efforts were taking more slips than steps.
Trailing behind was Jinx who, filled with a reporter’s curiosity and youthful energy, kept finding her feet slip out from underneath her because she was walking too quickly. Luckily, Freddy was right behind her and picked her up each time she fell. His athleticism and sports background gave him a natural ease to glide across the ice even without the benefit of wearing skates.
Straggling behind and to the sides of them were Stephanie, Charlie, Cathy, and Max. Cathy and Max were holding hands and seemed to understand the best way to maintain their posture from the waist up was to use their feet to glide across the ice, followed by Stephanie, who, even though she took more measured steps, fell twice. Bringing up the rear, Charlie fell so many times he finally gave up and crawled on his hands and knees until he joined the group that had formed a circle around Pamela’s dead body.
Vinny knelt beside Pamela and with his gloved hand gently pulled her right shoulder allowing the body to turn onto its back. The result caused more than one member of the group to shriek in horror.
The left side of Pamela’s face was glistening from the ice it had been resting on, while the right side was powdered with snow, making her look like the titular star of The Phantom of the Opera. Her eyes were still open and were alive with shock and confusion, she didn’t seem to know why or how she had died any more than the observers around her did. While her face was alarming, it wasn’t the body part garnering the most dreadful responses. That honor went to her wrists. They were covered in blood.
“No!” Cathy shouted. “This can’t be happening!”
Max held her back from getting any closer to Pamela, although it wasn’t clear if he was reacting in order to protect the crime scene or prevent his boss from giving in to her emotions and doing something impulsive she’d later regret like shaking the dead body until it came back to life.
Cathy finally stopped screaming, not because of Max’s intervention, but Patrick’s. Coming out of the shed where the Zamboni was housed, Patrick hopped over the wall of the ice rink and expertly glided to where Cathy was standing. When she saw him, she broke free from Max’s grip and glided with similar ease into Patrick’s arms. Whatever he whispered to her couldn’t be heard by the others, but it resulted in Cathy becoming calm and in total control of her emotions. His words, whatever they were, worked.
Helen’s words worked to bring everyone back to reality. “Who has a phone to call 9-1-1?”
As everyone started to reach into their pockets, Vinny brought them to a halt. “I already did that and I spoke to my buddy on the force in Jefferson Township, which has jurisdiction over this area. There’s a massive accident on I-80 so it’ll be a while until someone can get here. Until then, I’m in charge.”
“Then it looks like it’s up to you to find out who would’ve murdered her,” Freddy said.
“And who could’ve murdered her?” Sloan added. “Without being seen, I mean. The lodge is a couple hundred feet away.”
Wearing an exasperated expression perfected from years of police work, Vinny shook his head and warned, “Don’t jump to any conclusions, we don’t know that Pamela’s been murdered.”
“Yes we do.”
Alberta’s quiet proclamation caused everyone to face her, eager to hear how she could substantiate her claim. But they’d have to wait a bit longer.
“No, Alfie, we don’t,” Vinny corrected. “This has all the markings of a suicide.”
“Except that the markings are wrong,” Alberta confirmed.
“What are you talking about?” Vinny asked. “A blind man can see that she’s got slash marks on her wrists.”
“And if the blind man were also smart he’d know that the marks were slashed in the wrong direction,” Alberta replied.
“Berta, how do you know that?” Joyce asked.
Holding on to her sister-in-law’s arm for security, Helen bent forward to get a better look at Pamela’s bloodied cuts, and answered, “It’s quite obvious, actually, if you know what you’re looking for.”
“Do you wanna clue the rest of us in?” Vinny asked, his temper beating out his professionalism.
“I don’t want to steal my sister’s thunder,” Helen said. “Go for it, Berta.”
“If someone is trying to commit suicide by slitting their wrists they’ll cut vertically to open up the veins and arteries more fully so the blood flows faster,” Alberta explained. “They won’t make horizontal cuts like the ones on Pamela’s wrists.”
“Oh my God, Gram!” Jinx cried. “How do you know that?”
“Vicky DeGrasso, God rest her soul,” Alberta said softly. “Distant relative on my mother’s side killed herself that way.”
“Well, thank you for that enlightenment, Alfie, but that doesn’t completely rule out suicide,” Vinny affirmed. “Pamela might not have known the right way to do what she was trying to do.”
“Looks like she succeeded anyway,” Freddy added.
Cathy gasped, but before she could let out another scream Patrick buried her face into his chest so her cries were still heard, but muffled.
Jinx tried to bring the conversation back from an emotional and inflammatory discourse and to a more mundane and logical route. “Howsabout we search for the murder weapon?”
“Only if you all understand that if we find a weapon it might have been used to commit murder,” Vinny cautioned. “But it could also have been used by Pamela herself to commit suicide.”
Vinny watched the group nod in agreement and was even satisfied by the shrug of Alberta’s shoulders and the tilt of her head.
“Work in teams of at least two and do not touch anything, even with your gloves,” Vinny instructed. “If you find something, call for me.”
“Wait! Don’t move.”
Once again Alberta had shifted the focus from Vinny to herself with a simple announcement.
“What now?” Vinny asked, openly perturbed.
“We’re ignoring another very important clue,” she said. “Look around the ice.”
Everyone turned their heads to the left and the right searching for whatever Alberta was talking about, but came up empty.
“What are you talking about, Alfie?” Vinny asked. “There’s nothing on the ice.”
“Exactly!” she replied excitedly. “The only marks on the ice were created by Pamela’s skates, there are no other grooves anywhere, which means that whoever killed her wasn’t wearing skates.”
“Or someone killed her off the ice and she somehow tried to skate away,” Jinx suggested, adding to her grandmother’s theory.
“Or there was no murderer and she killed herself,” Vinny concluded.
“Stop it!” Stephanie’s cry echoed loudly gaining power with each repetition until it grew as large as the mountains surrounding them. Everyone turned to see her, crying and shivering and looking much younger than her years. Even though Max was standing close to her, he didn’t reach out to comfort Stephanie, it was as if he was paralyzed by her outburst. Alberta, however, understood when a person needed nothing more than a hug.
Walking slowly toward Stephanie, Alberta managed to make it to the young woman without falling. She didn’t say a word, but wrapped her arms around Stephanie, who began to sob in Alberta’s arms. Whatever kind of dysfunctional relationship she had with Pamela, her unexpected and very public death greatly upset her. Alberta didn’t waste any time dissecting the relationship or trying to understand it, such examination could wait until later. Right now all Stephanie needed was to be held.
Without the strong maternal instinct of her grandmother, Jinx focused on her strengths and utilized her own skills to start questioning those around her.
“So Patrick,” Jinx started. “What did you hear this morning?”
Caught off guard, Patrick didn’t have an immediate answer, but rather a question. “What do you mean?”
“You were in the shed, presumably when Pamela was being killed—”
“Allegedly,” Vinny interrupted.
Jinx disagreed with Vinny’s hope that Pamela was her own murderer, but knew she’d be wasting her time arguing until it could be proven that she was indeed murdered, so she acquiesced to his point of view and amended her question. “Did you hear anything when Pamela died?”
“We don’t know exactly when she did die.” This time it was Sloan who pointed out a flaw in her questioning. Before she could alter her approach yet again, Patrick answered.
“I cleaned the ice with the Zamboni early this morning around seven o’clock knowing that Pamela would want to take the ice around eight,” he explained. “Then I drove it back into the shed and stayed there working.”
“On what?” Jinx asked.
“If you haven’t noticed we’re in the middle of a major snowstorm and according to the reports it’s only supposed to get worse,” Patrick shared.
No one could question that statement as the snow had fallen even harder during the short time they’d been outside.
“So I wanted to make sure the generator and snowblowers were all in perfect working condition.”
“What time did you get into the shed after cleaning the ice?” Jinx questioned.
“Probably no later than 7:15,” Patrick replied. “It only takes about ten minutes on the Zamboni.”
“And you were in the shed from that time until you heard the commotion outside?” Sloan interjected.
“Yes.”
Jinx didn’t mind having help while questioning a potential witness, but she wanted to remain in control of the inquiry. “And you didn’t hear anything suspicious?”
“The equipment can get pretty loud so I closed the door so it wouldn’t disturb anyone, and the windows, of course, were shut,” Patrick conveyed. “Even if there was a disturbance I doubt I would’ve heard anything.”
“And yet you heard Cathy scream.”
Sloan was much more a librarian than a detective so he was not yet the master of subtlety. His forte lay in facts. The result was that his comment sounded exactly like an accusation, which is how he meant it to be interpreted. Sloan didn’t believe Patrick’s claim, and Patrick’s stony glare was proof that he was not happy with his thinking.
“I finished my work just as Cathy started screaming,” he stated. “Got lucky, I guess.”
“You’re also lucky that you didn’t break your neck racing over to Cathy,” Freddy said. “Dude, you ran over that ice like you owned it.”
Patrick maintained his blank expression for a few moments before shrugging his shoulders to confess, “Must’ve been adrenalin. I’m not very good on the ice.”
Alberta and Jinx exchanged glances and they each read each other’s minds—they weren’t sure if Patrick was telling the truth, but they sure were impressed by their boyfriends’ detective work. They both had to conceal smiles since an air of joviality in the presence of a corpse would be harder to explain than the reason for the presence of the corpse in the first place.
* * *
Two hours later that reason had still eluded the group. After Vinny and the men wrapped Pamela’s body in a large plastic bag that typically was used to haul mulch to the recycling center half a mile away as a sort of makeshift body bag and placed her in one of the lodge’s freezer units until an ambulance could arrive to take her to the morgue, the group conducted a thorough search of the area. It was a search that proved futile.
No one had found a knife or sharp object that could’ve been used as a weapon to commit murder or suicide. The group checked the area surrounding the ice rink and even the grounds near the banks of Lake Ariel and the start of the mountain trail, and not only came up empty, but they didn’t see any footprints in the snow or blatant attempts to cover up any footprints that would suggest someone had walked to the lake or the mountains to dispose of the weapon. And considering that however Pamela died it was done within a small window of time between 7:15 and 8:00 that morning, after Patrick drove the Zamboni back into the shed and before people started to arrive to catch Pamela practice her skating routine. All they knew was that her death had to be quick and quiet since it didn’t arouse anyone’s suspicions nor did it attract anyone’s attention. It was ironic that Pamela had died so differently than she had lived.
“Maybe her death was symbolic,” Vinny offered.
The fire in the fireplace crackled violently in response to Vinny’s comment, and to Alberta it sounded as if Pamela was laughing at Vinny from beyond the grave. “What do you mean, Vin?”
“If it was suicide, maybe Pamela wanted to embody her death with meaning,” Vinny hypothesized. “The Ice Princess who lived for the ice dies on it.”
“That’s fancy talk, Vinny,” Joyce said. “But I don’t think it holds water or ice.”
“Why not?” Vinny asked.
“Because Pamela was rich and successful and didn’t show any signs of being depressed.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Alberta said.
“Why?” Cathy asked. “Did Pamela say something to you?”
“As a matter of fact she did, to me and Helen, just last night.”
“Well, don’t keep us in suspense, Gram, what did she say?”
Before Alberta spoke she surveyed the faces of the people sitting in the main living room of the lodge and tried to see if she could read their faces. She wanted to see who was worried by what she might reveal and who was merely curious. Unfortunately, no one looked obviously nervous so she couldn’t vamp any longer.
“Pamela told us that she regretted something from her past and that the harder she tried to run from it the harder her sin clung to her.”
“Who among us is unblemished by sin?” Father Sal scoffed.
“That’s right, we all have regrets,” Cathy said. “She didn’t get any more specific than that?”
“No,” Helen replied. “Only that she thought coming here might have been a mistake.”
“Here?” Patrick repeated. “Why would she say that? She was about to skate in public for the first time in years. That’s what we . . . all of us wanted. I mean, isn’t that what skaters do? They skate.”
“I don’t think it was necessarily Icicle Lodge that she regretted coming to,” Alberta clarified. “It was returning to the ice.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Stephanie declared. “She loved the ice. She lived for it. And whoever killed her knew that.”
“Chi mal pensa, mal abbia,” Vinny muttered.
“What?” Stephanie asked.
“Sorry, a bit of Italian,” Vinny said. “Don’t attribute something to malice that can be explained some other way.”
“You can hide behind your fancy sayings,” Stephanie replied angrily. “Someone murdered Pamela and that someone is sitting right here.”
Silence permeated the room like an invisible airborne disease. It couldn’t be seen or heard, but everyone felt its closeness and its threat. And everyone knew Stephanie was right—they were in danger of being infected.
Intuitively knowing that fear and panic could swiftly become the new unwanted guests at Icicle Lodge, Vinny had to take action and assert his power.
“You might be right about that,” Vinny agreed. “But until we can find a murder weapon and a motive to dispute what looks like an apparent suicide, let’s try to keep the accusations and finger-pointing to a minimum. There is absolutely no reason to jump to any unsubstantiated conclusions. Everything will be fine and as the chief of police back home and the person in charge of this investigation for the time being, you have my word on that.”
When the rest of the group had cleared out and retreated to their rooms, Vinny sounded much less convincing.
“Alfie, I think it might be time to resurrect the Ferrara Family Detective Agency.”
This was the last thing Alberta had expected to hear. “So all that bluster and bravado back there was all for show?” Alberta questioned.
“Let’s just say ever since you’ve come back, I’ve understood the true meaning of ‘backup.’ ”
Alberta hoped their services wouldn’t be needed and foul play would be ruled out, but she was bursting with pride that Vinny was willingly reaching out and asking for their help. She would not let an old friend down.
“Never fear, Vinny,” Alberta replied. “If we find ourselves in the middle of another murder mystery, you can rest assured that the Ferraras will solve it.”