The frozen lake cracked beneath his feet. A ribbon of dull yellow twisted under the surface. It reminded him of her hair, and for a second he allowed himself to swim in the fantasy that would be if he broke through the ice and scooped her into his arms. He could almost feel the security of her weight against his chest, and her raven black eyes unwavering as they gazed into the windows of his soul. She would be drenched in cold, but her kiss would hold the warmth of a battle won. Then he would carry her back to his Rolls Royce, which was the only reason she'd ever wanted anything to do with him.


The Mistress of the Ice, as she was known in East End. A true local of New York. It's where all her stories unfolded. 


The gossip about her all started the same way: a rowboat on a lake in Central Park. She was six years old, and almost lost her life in the bone-piercing depths. When she emerged, she was never the same. Ever more charming, immortally bewitching, and once and for all, alone.


Everything about her seemed wrong; the dusty blond hair, the iris and pupil that seemed to blend into the pools of ink she scrawled onto her canvases, and the corners of her mouth that had never quite figured out how to form a conventional smile. She was a tapestry of wrong that would have ruined any other face other than hers. 


He stared at the fracture that snaked in a diagonal line in front of him. He was ten steps from shore. The first time he'd gotten that piercing pain in his chest, he'd taken a step forward. The second time, he took two steps. Then three. Then four. It was that last step that made the first crack. He'd felt a jolt of panic, but not much else. He hadn't been feeling much for what felt like years but had really only been a day. How could he live like this? The thought brought on another jolt of pain, so he took five steps. Another crack, smaller this time, appeared by his left foot. He watched it, and it reminded him of that one smile line, by the top right corner of her mouth, that always seemed to crease at dirty jokes. He wasn't really good at telling them. Perhaps that was why she'd laughed so much. Maybe she'd just liked to see him squirm.


The three weeks he had been so lucky to get with her had been the most amazing of his life. A dizzying spin of popping flashes and a deep, settling feeling in the hollows of his heart. It paled anything else in comparison, which was why he was here. She had pulled away, like he'd been told she would, and now this was his life. As cold and blank as the frozen water surface of this Central Park lake, that should have devoured her when it had a chance. 


The Hamptons never felt quite right without flying sand in your eyelashes and salt spray on your cheeks, but he was a local and never left it. Except for this January morning, the start of the coldest day of 1961, though granted the year had just begun. He couldn't help but wonder if she had anything to do with the low looming gray sky and the dried blood on his cracking hands. He'd tried to drink and go to bed, to escape the poor reality he had become. But it didn't work. The tossing to the right, then the left and back again, the ceiling fan that blew his hair into his eyes, and the blanket that either froze or scorched him had made the few hours of sleep he'd tried to get unbearable. So he'd waited for the earliest flash of white light through the curtains, grabbed the keys to that cursed Rolls Royce, and sped to Central Park. He still didn't know why he was here; perhaps the Mistress's story just called to him, like everything else about her. 


He tried to find a piece of their memories that he could make sense of, that he could truly believe had come from love. That was just theirs, and not some routine she'd shared with hundreds of faces. 


It'd been her first month in the Hamptons; God knew where she'd hunted before if not the deep pockets of this summer town. Her first kill had been Jensen Stales, as stale as the name but twice as rich as he was. He had two Roll Royces. They'd been together a month, until both disappeared but only she returned. She stayed, she mingled, she drank, she read, and she painted. People said she had a room full of canvases, a museum of the men whom she destroyed. He didn't even think he would make that museum. 


She'd left for a while, and came back one Thursday night, the worst night of the week as she'd often said to him. His lights had flashed over her, and that startling hair had roped him in. The town was almost deserted, and it was clear she was not there to stay. She went where the crowds went, she would say. But he'd convinced her to stay the night in his valley home where the night had evolved into poker, which she'd won at every hand that she punctuated with a laugh, loud and surprising, untamed and divine. 


The afternoon she'd left him had been so predictable it was almost insulting she had not put more effort in her escape. She'd gone in for milk for his coffee, and come out with a battered briefcase with a strip of linen peeking from the opening. He'd only given it a glance, then spent the rest of his seconds with her gawking at her face, somehow still not believing she could do something like this. She'd placed her palm on his cheek, her eyebrows slanted down in a V, her mouth in the gray area between smiling and pouting. Then a gray Town Car pulled up, with a man in a khaki beret at the wheel. When he looked back she was already walking, the shattered pieces of the man she'd broken already long forgotten. She hopped to the back door, her conscience light and her victim heavy with the agony he hoped would also befall the man in the hat. When she'd leaned towards the man, he could not bear to keep on watching, simply burrowing his face in the fold of his arm until he heard tires screech around a turn, the dirt seasoning the coffee he never got the milk for. 


-


The next day, the papers would report of a drunken man who fell through the ice in the lake in front of the fountain. People would give a moment of silence over their breakfast cereal, then allow the weight of it to fade with their daily routine. The few that knew him would probably laugh, as he would not be very missed and knowing his funeral would have the best booze. 


And the Mistress of the Ice would laugh, squinting her charcoaled eyes at the astoundment of East End, a murmur on her lips that they should listen to the rumours.