Wealth causes strife among kinsmen,
The wolf lurks in the forest.

Fine white flakes sifted across the sallow slash of the spotlight in the town square. Callous gift of a cold-hearted Mother Earth: a hard blessing of snow that fell and fell and fell. The sculptures carved of brittle ice looked small, insignificant in the wavering, jaundiced holes in the night. Above it all the clouds hung like dirty laundry.

Artie Wacker poured coffee. It was obscenely late, or early. The town slept. We sat in the Second Sun, my Jackson gallery, with the track lights off, in our own pools of weak light, waiting for word from the police station. Thinking: I should be there, I got up to pace. I thought about the postcard I got from Erik yesterday, the one with the joke about the end of his marriage: Only the ice man has his pick. Prophetic now. All is prophetic in hindsight. I picked up the telephone and dialed Erik's number in Tucson. It rang six times before he picked it up, sleepy.

"It's Alix."

"Hey, little sister." A click, the light. "It's three in the morning."

"I know. Listen, Hank's been arrested."

"Who?"

"Hank Helgeson, our mother's husband? Chubby little ornery cuss, more Swedish than meatballs?"

"Oh, Hank. The meatball. Did he leave his socks on the floor or something?"

"Mom didn't arrest him, Erik. The cops did. For murder. Can you come up here by any chance?"
"Whoa, whoa, back up. Murder?"

"The weird thing is he really liked this guy. A Norwegian artist, same kind of twisted Norsky pride."

"A real Norwegian?"

"From Norway, just got here today and tonight he's dead. The Chamber of Commerce is going to love this."

"Was he in a rental car? Never mind. Why was Hank arrested for it?"

"Something about him being there in the room with the body. Can you come? I don't think I can handle Mom by myself."

"Who are you kidding? You're the youngest, her fair-haired girl. Ever since I called her a freeze-dried pickle at the reunion--"

"You did have too much to drink."

"She hasn't spoken to me since. You think she's going to want to see me in her hour of need? After I sang that little ditty about Hank-- A Norse is a norse, of course, of course--"

"She's going to be humiliated."

"She married the meatball."

"Oh, Erik. Come for me then."

He sighed, long and hard. "Tomorrow the Over Eighty Tournament starts with a bang. I've got a staff of a hundred for these geezers, with that many golf carts. I can't, X. But let me know what happens. Like if Mom gets her revenge. That was always fun."

"Hank was supposed to show his Viking longboat in the parade tomorrow -- tonight for the winter festival. Nordic Nights."

"The thing he's been building in the garage for the last five years?"

"His pride and joy."

Erik sighed again. "How are you doing?"
"Business is great. Couldn't be better. Christmas was fabulous."

"No, you yourself. Personally."

"Fine."

"Still the stoic Norsky. I thought that business last summer might have changed you."

"It did, Erik."

"I know, kiddo."

"It meant a lot to me that you came up then. I'll get through this. I will."

"I always said you had bigger balls than Odin."

"Thanks, I guess."

"Give the meatball my best."

Artie Wacker and I finally bundled up and walked the five blocks to the police station. The night sky huddled close overhead, gray and frigid, unwilling to let us forget the grip winter had on us, body and soul. My slouch hat wasn't much protection from the snow and biting cold but Erik's faded red down jacket, dotted with duct tape to keep in wayward feathers, still held winter at bay. Artie hailed from Alabama. He was no doubt regretting his decision to take a semester off from LSU and come north. His teeth took up a sing-song chatter before we got to the corner. At least he had a butternut-brown goatee to keep his chin warm.

The Town Hall squatted, lonely and dark with its fancy cedar siding and moss rock, its modern clock tower announcing that we should be in bed. Picking our way through the drifts we found the back door. I had to knock loudly, twice. A policeman opened the door and recognized me.

"What's going on?" I asked, searching the cop's chest for his name tag. He wasn't wearing his uniform. Out of luck. And not for the first time tonight.

"Your mother's in there with Mr. Helgeson and Roscoe Penn."

"Roscoe Penn? The lawyer?" Artie grabbed my sleeve to peek around me, struggling for a view of the lawyer through the blinds in the hallway window. "I saw him on Geraldo last summer. He's really something, isn't he?"
Out of my foggy brain came the policeman's name, Elmer: tall, fifty-five, going to fat. He leaned into me and whispered in my ear, "Who's the elf?"

"Artie Wacker, works for me at the gallery. Artie, meet Elmer."

They shook hands. Artie wasn't too interested in the policeman. He squatted down to look under the blinds.

"Hank wanted Roscoe Penn," I said, still sorting it in my own mind.

"Damn fine representative of the legal profession," Elmer said. His gray mustache twitched.

"And to think he could have had Uncle Lars's stepson, Eugene. Or a lawyer who wears three-piece suits. Did you see Roscoe on Geraldo? The Indian blanket around his shoulders and a coonskin cap? He looked like Davey Crockett rolling out of the sack."

"He's gone to the cowboy hat tonight," Elmer said. "With a big feather though."

"Is Charlie Frye in there?" I asked. Elmer nodded.

"Here comes Roscoe Penn!" Artie said in an excited whisper, standing up.

The door opened and the lawyer stepped through. Smiling, his gray cowboy hat sitting back on his head, Roscoe Penn cut a grand figure through the cold, bland corridors of linoleum and fluorescents with his taupe gabardine cowboy-cut suit and shiny black boots. He looked Artie, Elmer and me in the eye like he was running for office, then turned back to take my mother's arm, gentleman-like.

Una smoothed her indigo velveteen tunic, her hand shaking. Her short cap of gray-blond hair hung neatly over her tired blue eyes. Roscoe dwarfed her with his height. She looked up from listening to his whispering and saw me. She reached out her hand and squeezed mine.

"You really should be in bed. It's late, isn't it?" She looked at her watch. "Dear me."

"I couldn't sleep, Mom." I looked around her and Roscoe. "Where is he?"

Roscoe Penn rubbed his square jaw. His face had the rugged appeal of the Marlboro Man, who Penn had represented once: a match made in litigious heaven. The feather in his hat was striped and extravagant, like the man himself. He needed a shave, (a little salt-and-pepper there) but who didn't at 4 a.m.? "We can't get a hearing on the bail until morning and the authorities, in all their wisdom, think it's best to keep him here." Penn gave Elmer a dismissive look. "This will all be over in the morning. It's a simple mistake."

"They're keeping him overnight?" I asked. Una nodded, flashing her expressionless eyes at me, then Penn.

"Believe me, Mrs. Helgeson, honey," Penn turned to her and said, "I'm going to straighten all this out in the morning. He'll get a wicked night's sleep." He glanced at his watch and raised his eyebrows: not much night left. "Then ol' Roscoe here will get Judge Foss to send him home in the morning." He straightened his broad shoulders, to reassure us of his manly confidence, then turned toward us and declared: "There is nothing worse than a small man with authority."

Charlie Frye came out of the room on cue, holding Hank by the arm, wearing his all-weather trademark wrinkled gray suit, his crew-cut fresh above sagging eyes. Chief of police Charlie Frye's dislike of me had solidified last summer. The fact that I had put a slew of his arson cases to bed did nothing to affect Charlie's attitude. I made work for him, I have an intrinsic disrespect for authority, and I made him look like the political-appointee-with-shit-for-brains that he was. Come to think of it, I might dislike me too if I was Charlie.

This was my first look at Hank since his arrest, since he left for a nightcap with Glasius Dokken and Una earlier this evening. Glasius, who was now dead. What had they done after I left the gallery? Hank, my stepfather, looked terrible. His ragg wool sweater had crept over his large, round belly to reveal the unbuttoned blue, oxford cloth shirt underneath and curly gray hairs, much more than grew on his head. At sixty-four he was three years younger than Una -- and nearly bald. His gold wire-rimmed glasses, framing small gray eyes, were bent, sitting askew on his bulbous nose. His mouth hung open, spittle clung to the corners. His wrists were in handcuffs. He looked so different than our tall, lanky father whose flaxen hair and James Dean coolness was seared into my memories that my brother's description of Hank as a meatball sprang again to mind.

"Did you hear that, honey?" Una said to him. "Mr. Penn says we'll have you out in the morning. Do you want me to bring over your Metamucil?"

Charlie Frye and Elmer exchanged looks. I stepped up: "Mom, I don't think Hank's going to need that tonight." My mother blinked viciously. "He'll be out before you know it. And you have toothbrushes and stuff, don't you?"

"Come on now, Helgeson," Charlie barked with excess authority, ignoring me. "Elmer, take him to the lock-up."

The policeman was gentle with Hank, guiding him, shuffling, past his wife and lawyer, down a dim corridor. Elmer flipped on a few switches as he went. We watched from the hallway for a moment, then Una turned away, a flicker of pain across her still-blond eyebrows. She lifted her apple-red chin, chapped by the winter wind, and turned to the lawyer.

"Eight o'clock, did you say, Mr. Penn?"

"Nine will be fine, Mrs. Helgeson," Roscoe Penn said, helping her slip on the navy peacoat, putting his arm around her shoulders as we walked to the door. Penn, ever the gentleman, offered us a ride in his Cadillac.

We climbed into the Caddy, a turquoise cruiser from the early seventies sporting longhorns on the hood like a cartoon villain's sinister mustache. The crushed velvet back seat swallowed us up, bringing back memories of the Thorssen-mobile, a '62 Plymouth station wagon. I could barely see out the windows. Artie pulled his feet up under him. Penn drove carefully on the snowy streets, back fins swinging around each corner. Having a car like this in Jackson Hole was even more deranged and impractical than owning, as I did, a '67 Saab with bad tire karma and a squirrel-powered engine. I had to admire him for it.

He was giving us a little legal pep talk, telling us about his clout, dropping names of judges, politicians, backstage with Call-me-Phil Donahue in the early days, later with Oprah. My mother was eating it up, hanging on every word.

Penn took a breath. I asked, "What exactly do they have on Mr. Helgeson, evidence-wise?"

"Squat, Miss Thorssen. They don't have jack. There's nothing to link Mr. Helgeson to the ice pick in the deceased. He says he didn't even touch it when he found the body. It's another case of Big Fucker Charlie Frye -- pardon me, Mrs. Helgeson -- thinking he can solve a case because somebody's handy to pin it on. He doesn't have anything, he doesn't know anything. It'll all be over in the morning."

Una sighed a ragged little sigh in the front seat. I stared at the dark, snowswept boardwalks of Jackson, Wyoming, through the crystallized glass. Unrelenting winter: a good night for Skadi, Viking goddess of snow. If the Thorssens of a millennium ago had sailed the fjords, tracked the barren snowfields on two spruce planks, and sent their children far west across endless seas to distant, unknowable dangers, what did that make me? A blood-thirsty adventurer, a foolhardy seeker of knowledge, a risk-taker? I didn't know. I didn't know if I ever would know. Maybe the journey to find out who you were was what spurred on the Vikings -- and spurred on me.

Glasius Dokken. It wouldn't be over for him in the morning. He would still be dead. I shut my sandpapered eyes. Shit, why did I bring him to this town? Why couldn't I have let him have his flyover, go directly from Seattle to Minneapolis without Passing Go, without collecting his two-hundred dollar ice pick between the ribs? Why couldn't I have been satisfied with a simple ice sculpture contest? Why did I always complicate things to the n-th degree, as my ersatz boyfriend Carl Mendez would say. Tangle, tangle, endless thread, Find the finish then you're dead.

A kindred spirit, Glasius: I still had his moody, complicated murals of Viking legends at the gallery. Yesterday morning there was an air of excitement in Jackson. The first day of Nordic Nights. Not an average day in the gallery, not at all.

But I hadn't thought it would end in murder either.