The Ice Child Read Online Free Page A

in Alicia Marshall’s face.
    Instead the other woman began to close the door.
    “I was wondering if you could tell me about this trip,” Jo said. “Why your husband went … how you feel about such”—she hesitated for a second under the scathing gaze—“such adventures.”
    For the first time Alicia Marshall smiled. “Adventures?” she echoed.
    “Have you heard from your husband?”
    “No.” The door caught a little on the flagstone floor of the hallway. Alicia pushed it hard.
    “You’ve heard nothing at all? Since he left?”
    “No. Now please—”
    Jo put her hand on the door frame. “Are you separated?” she asked.
    Alicia Marshall gave Jo a lingering look. Then, “You people,” she said at last, contempt in her voice.
    “Would you speak to me about him?” Jo persisted.
    “Please take your hand from the door.”
    “Are you worried?”
    “No.”
    “I’m sorry? You’re not worried at all?”
    Mrs. Marshall stared pointedly at Jo’s hand.
    “Do you think he’s alive?” Jo asked.
    “I really have no idea.”
    Astonished at her tone, Jo dropped her hand.
    Alicia Marshall shut the door in her face.
    For some time Jo remained where she was, staring at the heavy iron knocker. Behind her the rain pattered down through the magnolia. Turning, she glanced up and saw the drops forming on the first half-opened petals on the naked branches.
    “Not worried,” she murmured.
    Past the tree a field stretched away to a patch of woodland. Nothing stirred in the landscape at all, not a blade of grass, nothing in the blue blur of the distant city. It was a picture book, with Douglas Marshall’s house delicately penciled in the foreground.
    Jo wondered what had happened here, to make a wife want to seem careless of a husband’s life or death. And suddenly she felt very sorry indeed for Douglas Marshall.
    And very interested indeed in what had taken him away from home.

Two
    John Marshall was dreaming.
    He knew it, but he couldn’t wake up.
    He could see his father out on the ice, a long way out, a pinprick of black on a frozen ocean. The sky was a pale eggshell-blue above him. Doug was saying something to his only son—something very important—while he turned his head away, his words swallowed in the vast, flat space.
    John looked down.
    At his feet, outlined in the snow with curious clarity, were polar-bear prints. All four massive paws had left a closely spaced track: the claws had left long trails between each print. He stepped forward now and put his own foot inside one of the enormous depressions.
    When he looked up, his father was gone.
    Instead, not twenty yards from him, and rising, on her side, from the ice, was the Jeanette .
    Shock coursed through him. You’re dreaming , he thought. You’re at home — in bed — and asleep. It’s not real at all . And yet it did look so real—De Long’s pretty little ship, bought in England, wooden hull, steam powered. He moved toward it along the line of bear prints, seeing how they circled the lifeless wreck.
    How many years was it since the Jeanette had sailed? A hundred and thirty? She was not even a wreck now, but somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, crushed and broken … and yet here she was, not a man aboard her.
    But him.
    He suddenly felt the handrail as he came up the hatchway. He was climbing her with ease, the fluid ease of sleep. Just at the first rung, the rail was puckered and fluted, a lighter color showing in the oak. He knew that for almost two years the Jeanette had lived in a deadly, drifting dance. She had sailed free for only a matter of weeks, until the ice claimed her, and had held her, month after cold month, week after frozen week, as she trailed in a helpless triangular journey dictated by the polar drift.
    He knew the details of the journey as if he had made it himself.
    They had sailed from San Francisco in July 1879. They had passed through the Bering Strait at the end of August. They had been chasing a dream—the fantasy