Page 33 of Thin Ice

I cleaned like it was a job Jerry was paying me for.

The bathroom first because the bathroom was the emergency. Scrubbed the tub. Scrubbed the sink. Replaced the hand towel with the one good one from the closet, the one we saved for company, which was only Christmas.

Then the kitchen. Counters, stove, the grease spot behind the burners. I cleaned the outside of the fridge, which I've never done. Then I opened the fridge and cleaned the inside, which nobody in this family had ever done. Threw out a yogurt that had expired during the Obama administration and cleaned the shelves.

Then the living room. Vacuum. Dust the bookshelf. Straighten the blanket on the couch. Still not decoration, but at least it could be neatly not decoration.

I caught myself rearranging my mom's bookshelf and stopped.

I was doing it again. The same thing I'd done at the marina with the coveralls. Moving evidence. Except now I was doing it to my entire house, rearranging my mother's living room like a stage set.

But I couldn't stop. The house was small, and it was old, and it was ours, and I could hold two of those without a problem, but all three made my hands reach for more cleaning chemicals.

The decoration bin was in the closet under the stairs, behind two coats and a box of my mom's nursing textbooks from her certification years ago.

I dragged it out. The lid was cracked. The plastic was the yellow-white color that clear things turn when they've around for too long.

Inside, a life in ornaments. Strings of lights I'd have to test. A star wrapped in newspaper we'd always used. Tinsel in a ball. Glass balls, half of them cracked, the other half survivors. A wooden reindeer with a broken antler I'd made in third grade. A candy cane made of pipe cleaners.

I went back to the closet for the tree.

Five feet, artificial, the same one we'd had since I was in middle school. It came in three sections that slid into a pole, and the middle section always stuck, and the branches had to be bent out by hand one at a time because the box crushed them flat every January. I set it up in the corner by the window. Same corner, every year. It leaned a little to the left no matter what I did with the stand.

Then, I pulled the first string of lights out of the bin and plugged them in on the carpet. Dead. The second string lit up about two-thirds of the way and then quit at a knot. I sat cross-legged on the floor and worked through it bulb by bulb, pulling the dead ones, pressing in replacements from the little spare bag taped to the end of the string until the whole line caught. Then, the second half. Then a third string for the top.

Forty minutes on the floor with tiny glass bulbs and my fingers going numb, and the tree lit up section by section. Warm white. A few dead spots where I'd run out of spares, but lit.

I started hanging ornaments. Glass balls first. Survivors in the front, cracked ones in the back where nobody would see them. The reindeer. The candy cane. The tinsel, draped loosely because my mom hated it placed strand by strand, and I'd learned that the hard way at nine.

And there it was, near the bottom of the bin, under the tinsel, wrapped in tissue separate from everything else. I almost missed it.

I picked up the paper-wrapped ornament and pulled off the paper.

The glass heron.

Maybe four inches tall. Hand-painted, blue-gray with white at the throat, standing on one leg on a little wooden base. The paint was wearing at the edges, but the neck was still right. That long S-curve herons do when they're watching the water.

My father had given it to my mother.

I held it in my palm and thought about Alex.

He'd told me about Frederick. The heron at the inlet on the Point.

And here was a heron in my hands. Painted glass, bought at a craft fair by a man who thought it would make a woman smile. Different bird. Different family. Same lake.

I didn't know what to do with the coincidence, so I hung it on the tree. Near the top, where my mom always put it.

The tree was done. Five feet, leaning left, lights mostly working, cracked ornaments in the back, and a glass heron near the star. The whole thing looked like what it was. A family's best effort with what they had.

My phone rang, and I went into the kitchen to get it. It was Noah.

"Captain Moore." Noah's voice, zero preamble. "Tell me everything."

"Tell you everything about what?"

I crossed the room and plopped down on the couch.

"About the fact that you're across the lake from your boyfriend on Christmas break. How is that going? What's happening?"