Part 13: Cold Memory

Previously in the Vines Inquiry— Determined to find out family secrets, Frank took the trolley back up-island. But, on the way, he sees a mysterious woman—stone white and freezing—walking through the woods. He was sure it couldn’t be the Woods Woman, the Carlisle ghost story. He was sure….until he heard the bells again.

Da-da-dum, Da-da-dum, Da-da-dum, Da-da-dum.

Cold air crystallized in Frank’s lungs and he heard it, louder. Just through the open doorway that led off the train. To the outside. To the pines. 

The Woods. 

Frank turned on his heel, took two lunging steps and jumped. He landed on uneven, snowy ground and skidded to a stop on a tree trunk. The trolley chugged along up the hill and away from Frank; surprised declarations quickly cut off by the forest. He shoved his hands in his armpits as the quiet of the woods took hold. It wasn’t the snow globe he’d thought on the trolley.

He was forced to feel it, the pressure-per-square-inch.

He jumped over the track and headed towards the driver’s side woods, scanning for the women. Frank listened, hoping he could hear her movement. A broken twig or a call for help, but nothing came. He called out to her, and received nary an echo in reply. Frank’s feet were instantly numb as he trekked through the woods. He checked his phone, thinking too late to call for help. The cold was rapidly sapping his battery, amidst a measly one bar of service. 

“Ma’am!” he called, putting on his hotel manager voice. Still nothing. He headed deeper in, towards the coast. The signal would be better near the cliffs.

Cold crept into his clothing. It stripped his coat, unzipping his skin until it felt like he was hiking through the storm with his intestines hanging outside of his abdomen, gathering icicles. His shoes went next. His socks. By the time ten minutes had passed, Frank felt near naked. The line between his body and the falling snow was gone. Pine needles scratched against whatever fragile casing remained. Time left him behind even before his phone ran out of battery and took his clock with it.

Frank kept walking. 

When he first realized he wasn’t going to find the woman, he turned back the way he had come. A time after that, he realized he’d lost track of the trolley rail and turned uphill in hopes of making it to a station. The overlook by the hospital. Or if he was further down-island, one of the stops that let out into a cluster of buildings that dotted the sides of Carlisle; a bronchial network of hidden groves.

Frank clutched his body. Even shivering had become a waste of heat. No internal motion was able to shield him. He realized he was looking down, staring at the snow, one foot in front of the other, not even tracking where he was going. There was no other way. One step at a time. 

It won’t be long, he told himself. He could make it. There was no other way. 

Maybe I can die here. Wouldn’t that be fine? 

The kids of Carlisle knew better than to go into the deep woods. The pines were dangerous, full of hiking paths and hidden wasps nests that claimed day trippers every year. Enough of a reason to not trek too far into the tricky thickets. But the locals compounded this danger with folklore and warnings. The Woods Woman, of course, and the other strange tales Harlow had immortalized for McCroy’s.

Ricky Friedburg’s uncle swore he’d seen a cougar climbing up a tree in high summer when he was a junior in high school. Mrs. Espach still warned every young puppy owner not take it down to the beach as it would most-definitely be swallowed up by whatever hungered beneath the docks. Although she credited the disappearance of her dog Pancake (just one) to patients that had escaped from Hughes House and roamed the streets of Carlisle after midnight. Why the afflicted individuals waited until 12 a.m. EST to do their roaming was a question Espach refused to dignify. 

These expansive myths were obvious parental continuations—implemented once they realized the stories worked just as well as the harder to pin down Boogeyman. 

“Who or what is he, though?” asks one young parent to another. “Like, is it too much What does he want?”

“Sarah, chill out.” 

Conflicting accounts of a singular threat only weakened its power, but various dangers that all circled around ‘Follow the rules or get disappeared’ became wholly effective at keeping Carlisle’s children snug in their beds and home before curfew. Maybe that’s what had gotten Dick in the end. He hadn’t followed the rules. The only trouble with that was one bottomless pit of a question: Who’d started all these stories? 

It was their parents, right? But they’d never take credit. They’d heard it from their own mothers and fathers. Beliefs, rules, passed on. With no responsibility taken. 

The ancestors couldn’t take credit. Wouldn’t dare take the credit, lest they call the cougars, and Woods Women and escaped mad men down upon themselves. They were the sort of tales that were safest to keep in the shadows. The tales that had every adult on Carlisle checking the backseat before they got into their car. Only told at night, just loud enough for the new generation to be warned without alerting the beasts to their knowledge share.

Frank kept walking, first humming to himself, then singing; the same song the other passengers had on the trolley. The woods opened up to him, then. A welcome home. He recognized trees, the hills they rested on. Stones, a second before had been treacherous teeth, grinned at him. Long gone hikes called him to the past as Frank looked to the coastline. He heard it again. The bells. 

From last night. From the trolley. And from something else. Older. The theme song to a show everyone watched in third grade.

His feet were disappearing beneath the snow. Whatever. He couldn’t feel them. The sun was setting in that winter way. True dark was still hours off, but the woods was becoming all spines, no flesh. Boney, probing fingers instead of hugs. Would the grinning stones betray him, snatch at his frozen ankles to crack them clean? Ponds with the sheen of a frozen surface only to collapse beneath. 

Am I close to there? He stopped and scanned the trees as if he might recognize a cluster, his Woe sign. “This way to the trolley. Head east for the pond where you let your brother die.” 

He was back there again. Christmas. Their birthday. Or close enough to call it. Frank managed to be not only a surprise deep into the second trimester of Rosalind’s pregnancy, but also a ten-hour labor. Dick came out in under one. 

It had been snowing. He remembered that now. On the twenty-fourth of December. It was late, or the sun was down. Hard to tell the difference that time of year. There were promises of a white Christmas, more uncommon than any child from Maryland had been led to believe.

Dick and Stella—young, in love and at the height of their social power—had organized a party. The fact that it was a quick, impromptu affair only added to the fun. Frank had been invited to this one. A marked difference from the birthday dinner his parents were throwing Dick the next day. 

“It’s tradition, Francis,” they’d said. 

They called the party Reindeer Games, huge fans of the film, but relying on the concept of getting absolutely hammered sometime near the winter holidays. They’d all snuck out and it had been good fun. Warm and filled with laughter and cinnamon-flavored whiskey. A bonfire, if the memory was coming back to him correctly. That part could have just been wish fulfillment, but Frank swore that now he could see the dark spot where the blaze had been. 

The time was all loopy, lost. The bell sounds—da-da-dum, da-da-dum—had gone the way of the Dodo bird and were replaced with the drunken mirth of that high school revelry. Random screams that meant joy, precursors to their more honest twins, cut through the chilling air. Frank couldn’t remember that snow storm being this cold. Was it fading now? The icy feeling? A mercy or the onset of hypothermia…

“Oh my god,” he said aloud, needing to hear something in the woods. Something to keep him company. “Am I having a little match girl moment? Wait, no. She had fond memories.” 

Frank turned around, looking back into the woods and saw a group of volunteer firefighters, shivering as they stood around Dick and shone their flashlights on the pond. 

He saw himself—younger, fitter, dry and shaking—standing at the edge of the circle. Someone had given him a blanket. Droplets from the pond froze in Dick’s hair as they worked on him. Smoke from the failing bonfire was carried off into the bay. They kept asking how it had happened, how they hadn’t seen the water? Why hadn’t they just swam to surface? 

“There was ice,” muttered Frank, answering all the stupid questions. No such thing! Did anyone hear him? 

“Help him, dammit!” screamed Richard.

Rosalind stood, her body crooked but unshaking, wrapped in a black silk shawl over her party dress. She badgered the volunteers with instructions, shoving them aside. Richard joined her, both of their hands blue with the cold but moving deftly. They worked over Dick together. Rosalind performed CPR while Richard whispered something, quick and quiet, into Dick’s ear. Stella cried slow tears into her mother’s shoulder while the rest of the gathered friends—with parents trying to hide their relief it wasn’t their kid dying—stared, wide-eyed and sallow. 

“We need to take him home, Richard.” Rosalind stood and a volunteer took over the CPR. She kicked him, booting him off Dick’s still body. “We’re taking him home.” 

They heaved Dick, already looking leaden, into his father’s arms and trudged off into the blizzard without another word. 

Coordinated, or coincidental. Unconscious or a well-aimed dagger; Frank would never know, would never have the courage to ask. But both his parents looked back at him as they hiked up-island—not an invitation. A wicked questioning. 

There was all this guilt and hurt and pain floating around in the air, and with that look it found a home. Burrowed into the new fissures that had opened that night and its many smaller cousins that had formed over the years. Cracks from shame, from questions. And suddenly, he was blamed. For everything. Suddenly, he deserved it. 

Frank didn’t see his brother again until the funeral, and even then, it was a closed casket. The last time he ever saw Dick’s face was the night of the party, in the cold pond, as they fell away from each other. 

Now, he blinked, and it was all gone again. He had to go. Had to keep moving. 

He trudged forward, trying to find another carol to sing him some company, but they felt blocked away behind the ice that was surely forming a casing around his brain.

His memories jumped to the next morning; back at the house. The police had come once the sun rose and the snow finally stopped. They’d gone around the back of the manor to the patio that looked out onto the cliffs. It was a gory, beautiful morning with a blazing red sky reflecting off the undisturbed snow. Aunt Toni had brought her partner that way, far from the candle-armed neighbors who’d been standing at the manor gate all night. These devotees had begun a vigil as soon as Dick was brought back inside the Big House. 

Frank rubbed at his eyes, unsure if he was even warm enough to produce a tear. Could tear ducts freeze? He was curious, but uninterested in finding out what it felt like.

He sniffled and heard a prickle of laughter from across the way, like someone had seen. He stopped marching to silence the snow-squish and listen for anyone that might have called to him; the frozen woman, the trolley conductor. He heard nothing. The feeling wouldn’t leave. The piercing, judgmental eyes followed him as he trudged on, trying his best not to whimper or summon another match girl moment.

But even when he rubbed his eyes, the image wouldn’t fade. The back patio of the Big House, all whited-out from the snow. The grey slate archway even had icicles for him. He blinked again. Nothing.

He’d made it. 

Frank couldn’t run by then, but he hurried his pace with the excitement of salvation. Of surviving a stupid decision that his family would only chock up to be his latest versus his last. He stumbled up the final thirty yards, pulling himself against the winds that sliced up the cliffside. As he got closer to the Big House, the woods gave way. Lingering branches grazed his numb shoulders, but found no purchase. In the daylight, he saw Christmas decorations; grand enough you’d think Dick himself had done it. He’d always gone big for their Chri-birth-mas, despite Richard’s protests. Their father never wanted to put holes in the walls, even if it was for tacking nails to string lights. 

They tried so hard this year. Another thought joined it, one of a genre Frank realized he might have to get used to. What was in the walls that Dad didn’t want to get out? 

White lights hung along the gutters, outlining the house with seasonal twinkling. The song came back to him. “Five…golden rings….” He mumbled through blue lips. “Four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves…” 

That’s what it was. They’d put up turtle doves, a pair of them. Frank had never seen one, let alone a pair, but learned right then that they were bright red. The duo hung in the stone archway, a vibrant ink blot against the pure white blanket that covered everything in sight. 

“Five golden rings…” he repeated as he chugged up the hill. He was going to make it. He was going to get to tell Harlow what a turtle dove looked like! 

“They’re like robins,” he said to himself. “Gleaming. Slippery looking. No, wet. They look…”

Frank reached the archway but would not stand directly under it. He didn’t want the pair to drip on him. The eyes from the woods watched him, giggling in his skull as he realized what the bright red ornaments hanging in the stone archway were. They’d bled down, leaving a pink circle of melted snow beneath. 

Lungs. The color of raw beef, or a boiled lobster’s claw. Yes, that’s what they looked like. One half of an inflated lobster claw, hung by some tendon. They were brighter, lighter than beet red.

Get off food, Frank! 

He covered his mouth in a belch and stood there, not even shivering. His body was frozen solid; from the cold, from the shock. He saw it all out in front of him. A new urban legend for the kids: Frank Vines, the murderer who froze to death at his parents’ back door. They’d probably turn it into a parable about playing nice with family, or if they took it in the ‘by the back door’ direction something significantly more fae. He chuckled to himself, hoping for the latter in petty spite. 

“Francy?!” said someone approaching. A large, bleached-blonde apparition. 

He whipped around and tripped over his own feet. Frank landed on his tush, immediately soaking his underwear through with the snow-blood. “Oh, for shit’s sake, Frank. What the hell are you doin’ out here?”

A drop of blood fell onto his forehead and dribbled in a line down his nose. He sat there, swampy-butted and cold, with no answer for his Aunt Antonia.