The Ice Cradle: A Novel from the Ghost Files - Softcover
Sleepy Block Island seems just the place for ghost whisperer Anza O’Malley to find some much-needed peace and quiet. But with troubled spirits dead set on making their voices heard, rest is in short supply!
February 1907, Block Island. Residents of this tiny Rhode Island community awaken to a scene of tragedy: During a midnight blizzard, a New York–bound steamer carrying 157 passengers has been destroyed at sea. Volunteers rush to the beach to organize a search-and-rescue effort—but for most of the passengers, hope is already lost.
A century later, residents of the island are busy preparing for the summer season and debating the merits of a proposed wind farm near the beach. No one expects that those long-forgotten passengers may have something to say about the project, but the restless spirits are furious that their final resting place may be disturbed—and turn to Anza to help them protect it. If spirit-world preservationists aren’t enough, Anza also has to face the uncomfortable possibility that her five-year-old son, Henry, has inherited her gift. And then there’s that handsome fisherman whose charms are proving difficult to ignore.
What began as a simple island sojourn turns into a week of chills, thrills, and ghostly intrigue in this gripping second novel in the Ghost Files series.
February 1907, Block Island. Residents of this tiny Rhode Island community awaken to a scene of tragedy: During a midnight blizzard, a New York–bound steamer carrying 157 passengers has been destroyed at sea. Volunteers rush to the beach to organize a search-and-rescue effort—but for most of the passengers, hope is already lost.
A century later, residents of the island are busy preparing for the summer season and debating the merits of a proposed wind farm near the beach. No one expects that those long-forgotten passengers may have something to say about the project, but the restless spirits are furious that their final resting place may be disturbed—and turn to Anza to help them protect it. If spirit-world preservationists aren’t enough, Anza also has to face the uncomfortable possibility that her five-year-old son, Henry, has inherited her gift. And then there’s that handsome fisherman whose charms are proving difficult to ignore.
What began as a simple island sojourn turns into a week of chills, thrills, and ghostly intrigue in this gripping second novel in the Ghost Files series.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Mary Ann Winkoski is a paranormal investigator and the author of When Ghosts Speak, The Book of Illumination, and The Ice Cradle. She has collaborated closely with several federal agencies and was the consultant for the CBS series The Ghost Whisperer.
Maureen Foley is the acclaimed writer, producer, and director of the film American Wake and the award-winning Home Before Dark. She is also the coauthor of The Book of Illumination and The Ice Cradle.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Maureen Foley is the acclaimed writer, producer, and director of the film American Wake and the award-winning Home Before Dark. She is also the coauthor of The Book of Illumination and The Ice Cradle.
Chapter One
Saturday
It wasn’t as warm as I’d hoped. In fact, we were freezing. Back in January, when the director of the Block Island Historical Society had been in touch with me, offering me a week’s work in April, on an island I knew to be, well, somewhere vaguely south of us, drifts of snow three feet high had bordered the sidewalks and buried the gardens and yards of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live with my five-year-old son, Henry. Seven more inches had accumulated during the night, temporarily beautifying the filthy piles of ice, sand, and salt that lined the streets.
As I’d gazed out the window of our second-floor apartment and down at the fluffy white mounds I would soon be shoveling, I didn’t go so far as to dream of tropical drinks with little umbrellas or sunblock scented like Polynesian fruit. But I sure didn’t imagine that come the last week in April, identified on Henry’s school calendar as “spring vacation,” my son and I would be riding the Block Island ferry wearing mittens and scarves and three or four layers under our puffy down jackets.
School had been canceled that day in January, leaving me with a familiar dilemma: I could be a great mom or a not-so-great mom. A great mom would seize the moment and take her child sledding at Fresh Pond, then cheerfully agree to host whomever he wanted to ask back to the house for cocoa and popcorn and grilled cheeses, and a serenely supervised afternoon filled with board games and fort building and tent-tunnel making, using sheets and blankets and all the tables and chairs.
The trouble was, I had work to do, and as a freelance bookbinder working from home, I couldn’t call in sick or take a
personal day. Sure, I could just not work, but our financial cushion, never plump in the flushest of times, had recently been getting flatter and flatter.
I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t feel like I was bleeding money, but I hadn’t actually had time to sit down and go through all
the bills and receipts. And what was the point of that, anyway? It wouldn’t change the simple reality: I was obviously earning too little and spending too much.
Many single mothers wouldn’t be happy with the agreement I have with Henry’s father, but it suits me just fine. Declan is a Boston cop—a detective, to be precise—and by any measure, a first-class dad. He also happens to be married to someone else: Kelly, from whom he was separated when he and I had our little . . . thing. They ended up getting back together. I ended up having Henry. Then Dec and Kelly had two girls of their own, Delia and Nell, whom I adore, and with whom Henry now spends lots of time on weekends and vacations. It’s not the simplest of family arrangements, but it’s ours, and it works.
Dec and I had the talk about money before I even took Henry home from the hospital, when we were both overwhelmed and completely in shock. At that moment, he would probably have said yes to anything. But I have my pride. I’m healthy, hardheaded, and college educated. No way did I want to get a check every week. If he could just relieve me of the responsibility for our son’s health insurance and his college education, I told him, I was sure I could handle everything else.
And I have.
But the call from Block Island felt like manna from heaven. The man from the Historical Society, who identified himself
as Caleb Wilder, had gotten my name from a bookbinder with whom I’d worked the previous fall, Sylvia Cremaldi. The Society had received a modest grant.
“What kind of grant?” I’d asked.
“To create a new collection, based on a set of historical papers.”
“What kind of papers?”
“They have to do with something that happened here about a hundred years ago, a collision at sea.”
“Oh!”
“Between a steamship and a schooner,” he continued. “The Larchmont, the steamer, was making an overnight trip from Providence to New York City in February 1907. There’s disagreement about how many people were aboard—the passenger manifest went down with the ship—but the number was somewhere around a hundred and fifty. She was hit by a schooner, the Harry Knowlton, and sank in fifteen minutes.”
“Wow! What happened to all the people?”
“A lot of them went down with the ship. They were asleep in their berths when the crash happened. The ones who made it up to the deck weren’t much better off: the boat was sinking, they were in the middle of a blizzard, and the seas were vicious. Most of the folks who got into the lifeboats were in their nightclothes, so even if their boats didn’t capsize, they froze to death.”
“That’s terrible. Did anyone survive?”
“Nineteen people. Though many were never the same.”
“And how does this—what does this have to do with Block Island?”
“The Larchmont sank just a few miles from here. A couple of the lifeboats reached us by morning, and the island became the center of the search-and-rescue mission. But there weren’t many people to rescue. A few of the bodies washed up on shore the next day, and fishing boats picked up twenty or so more, but the tide carried most of the victims out to sea. All in all, it was a fairly big event for a fairly small island.”
“I’ll say.”
Caleb went on to describe the nature and scale of the project and the salary they were able to offer me, a sum that struck me as more than fair. But he, or someone else, must have thought the pot needed sweetening, given that they were under a very tight deadline to get the work completed. For reasons he didn’t explain, the money would not be available until April first, the volumes needed to be bound, and a new website, which someone else was going to design and launch, needed to be up and running by sometime this summer. So I was going to be housed free of charge at a Victorian inn that was under new ownership, a place right on the water called the Grand View Hotel.
Meals were included. And all expenses.
“It sounds fabulous,” I said. “I’d love to do it.”
“Terrific!” cried Caleb. “Wonderful! Now if I could just get some—”
“But you see,” I added, interrupting. “It’s a little hard for me to travel. I have a son who’s five. It’s just the two of us.”
“Could you bring him?” asked Caleb.
“Well, I could, but I wouldn’t get much work done.”
Caleb laughed. “I know the feeling. My daughters are eight and six. Does he have a spring vacation?”
“I think so,” I said, “but I’m not sure which week.”
“If he’s on vacation the same week our kids are, the Block Island School runs a full- day drama camp—from nine to
six.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. They do a musical every year. I hear this year it’s Grease.”
“He’d love it!”
So that’s how, on a Saturday in April, Henry and I happened to be making a bone-chilling journey across Block Island Sound. We’d been warmer that day back in January, when, entirely pleased with myself for coming up with eight thousand dollars’ worth of work (well, all right, saying yes to eight thousand dollars’ worth of work), I blew off the day and took Henry sledding. We brought a pack of people home with us, kids and parents, ten or eleven in all. We got pizzas and movies and beer for the grownups, and it was great, even if it did take me three days to get the apartment back to normal.
So in the end, at least that day, I got to be a pretty fair mom. So much of it depends on luck.
Saturday
It wasn’t as warm as I’d hoped. In fact, we were freezing. Back in January, when the director of the Block Island Historical Society had been in touch with me, offering me a week’s work in April, on an island I knew to be, well, somewhere vaguely south of us, drifts of snow three feet high had bordered the sidewalks and buried the gardens and yards of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live with my five-year-old son, Henry. Seven more inches had accumulated during the night, temporarily beautifying the filthy piles of ice, sand, and salt that lined the streets.
As I’d gazed out the window of our second-floor apartment and down at the fluffy white mounds I would soon be shoveling, I didn’t go so far as to dream of tropical drinks with little umbrellas or sunblock scented like Polynesian fruit. But I sure didn’t imagine that come the last week in April, identified on Henry’s school calendar as “spring vacation,” my son and I would be riding the Block Island ferry wearing mittens and scarves and three or four layers under our puffy down jackets.
School had been canceled that day in January, leaving me with a familiar dilemma: I could be a great mom or a not-so-great mom. A great mom would seize the moment and take her child sledding at Fresh Pond, then cheerfully agree to host whomever he wanted to ask back to the house for cocoa and popcorn and grilled cheeses, and a serenely supervised afternoon filled with board games and fort building and tent-tunnel making, using sheets and blankets and all the tables and chairs.
The trouble was, I had work to do, and as a freelance bookbinder working from home, I couldn’t call in sick or take a
personal day. Sure, I could just not work, but our financial cushion, never plump in the flushest of times, had recently been getting flatter and flatter.
I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t feel like I was bleeding money, but I hadn’t actually had time to sit down and go through all
the bills and receipts. And what was the point of that, anyway? It wouldn’t change the simple reality: I was obviously earning too little and spending too much.
Many single mothers wouldn’t be happy with the agreement I have with Henry’s father, but it suits me just fine. Declan is a Boston cop—a detective, to be precise—and by any measure, a first-class dad. He also happens to be married to someone else: Kelly, from whom he was separated when he and I had our little . . . thing. They ended up getting back together. I ended up having Henry. Then Dec and Kelly had two girls of their own, Delia and Nell, whom I adore, and with whom Henry now spends lots of time on weekends and vacations. It’s not the simplest of family arrangements, but it’s ours, and it works.
Dec and I had the talk about money before I even took Henry home from the hospital, when we were both overwhelmed and completely in shock. At that moment, he would probably have said yes to anything. But I have my pride. I’m healthy, hardheaded, and college educated. No way did I want to get a check every week. If he could just relieve me of the responsibility for our son’s health insurance and his college education, I told him, I was sure I could handle everything else.
And I have.
But the call from Block Island felt like manna from heaven. The man from the Historical Society, who identified himself
as Caleb Wilder, had gotten my name from a bookbinder with whom I’d worked the previous fall, Sylvia Cremaldi. The Society had received a modest grant.
“What kind of grant?” I’d asked.
“To create a new collection, based on a set of historical papers.”
“What kind of papers?”
“They have to do with something that happened here about a hundred years ago, a collision at sea.”
“Oh!”
“Between a steamship and a schooner,” he continued. “The Larchmont, the steamer, was making an overnight trip from Providence to New York City in February 1907. There’s disagreement about how many people were aboard—the passenger manifest went down with the ship—but the number was somewhere around a hundred and fifty. She was hit by a schooner, the Harry Knowlton, and sank in fifteen minutes.”
“Wow! What happened to all the people?”
“A lot of them went down with the ship. They were asleep in their berths when the crash happened. The ones who made it up to the deck weren’t much better off: the boat was sinking, they were in the middle of a blizzard, and the seas were vicious. Most of the folks who got into the lifeboats were in their nightclothes, so even if their boats didn’t capsize, they froze to death.”
“That’s terrible. Did anyone survive?”
“Nineteen people. Though many were never the same.”
“And how does this—what does this have to do with Block Island?”
“The Larchmont sank just a few miles from here. A couple of the lifeboats reached us by morning, and the island became the center of the search-and-rescue mission. But there weren’t many people to rescue. A few of the bodies washed up on shore the next day, and fishing boats picked up twenty or so more, but the tide carried most of the victims out to sea. All in all, it was a fairly big event for a fairly small island.”
“I’ll say.”
Caleb went on to describe the nature and scale of the project and the salary they were able to offer me, a sum that struck me as more than fair. But he, or someone else, must have thought the pot needed sweetening, given that they were under a very tight deadline to get the work completed. For reasons he didn’t explain, the money would not be available until April first, the volumes needed to be bound, and a new website, which someone else was going to design and launch, needed to be up and running by sometime this summer. So I was going to be housed free of charge at a Victorian inn that was under new ownership, a place right on the water called the Grand View Hotel.
Meals were included. And all expenses.
“It sounds fabulous,” I said. “I’d love to do it.”
“Terrific!” cried Caleb. “Wonderful! Now if I could just get some—”
“But you see,” I added, interrupting. “It’s a little hard for me to travel. I have a son who’s five. It’s just the two of us.”
“Could you bring him?” asked Caleb.
“Well, I could, but I wouldn’t get much work done.”
Caleb laughed. “I know the feeling. My daughters are eight and six. Does he have a spring vacation?”
“I think so,” I said, “but I’m not sure which week.”
“If he’s on vacation the same week our kids are, the Block Island School runs a full- day drama camp—from nine to
six.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. They do a musical every year. I hear this year it’s Grease.”
“He’d love it!”
So that’s how, on a Saturday in April, Henry and I happened to be making a bone-chilling journey across Block Island Sound. We’d been warmer that day back in January, when, entirely pleased with myself for coming up with eight thousand dollars’ worth of work (well, all right, saying yes to eight thousand dollars’ worth of work), I blew off the day and took Henry sledding. We brought a pack of people home with us, kids and parents, ten or eleven in all. We got pizzas and movies and beer for the grownups, and it was great, even if it did take me three days to get the apartment back to normal.
So in the end, at least that day, I got to be a pretty fair mom. So much of it depends on luck.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherCrown
- Publication date2010
- ISBN 10 0307452468
- ISBN 13 9780307452467
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages304
- Rating
Buy New
Learn more about this copy
US$ 15.91
Shipping:
US$ 2.64
Within U.S.A.
Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace
Seller Image
Ice Cradle : A Novel from the Ghost Files
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 9598659-n
Buy New
US$ 15.91
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Ice Cradle: A Novel from the Ghost Files
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. Book is in NEW condition. 0.53. Seller Inventory # 0307452468-2-1
Buy New
US$ 18.56
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Ice Cradle: A Novel from the Ghost Files
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. New! This book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published 0.53. Seller Inventory # 353-0307452468-new
Buy New
US$ 18.57
Convert currency
Seller Image
The Ice Cradle: A Novel from the Ghost Files (Paperback or Softback)
Published by
Crown Publishing Group (NY) 10/5/2010
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0307452468
ISBN 13: 9780307452467
New
Paperback or Softback
Quantity: 5
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback or Softback. Condition: New. The Ice Cradle: A Novel from the Ghost Files 0.51. Book. Seller Inventory # BBS-9780307452467
Buy New
US$ 18.70
Convert currency
Seller Image
The Ice Cradle: A Novel from the Ghost Files by Winkowski, Mary Ann, Foley, Maureen [Paperback ]
Published by
Broadway Books
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0307452468
ISBN 13: 9780307452467
New
Soft Cover
Quantity: 10
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Soft Cover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9780307452467
Buy New
US$ 20.85
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Ice Cradle: A Novel from the Ghost Files
Print on Demand
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Brand New! This item is printed on demand. Seller Inventory # 0307452468
Buy New
US$ 21.22
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Ice Cradle: A Novel from the Ghost Files
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # I-9780307452467
Buy New
US$ 23.00
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Ice Cradle (Paperback)
Published by
Random House USA Inc, New York
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0307452468
ISBN 13: 9780307452467
New
Paperback
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Sleepy Block Island seems just the place for ghost whisperer Anza O'Malley to find some much-needed peace and quiet. But with troubled spirits dead set on making their voices heard, rest is in short supply!February 1907, Block Island. Residents of this tiny Rhode Island community awaken to a scene of tragedy- During a midnight blizzard, a New York-bound steamer carrying 157 passengers has been destroyed at sea. Volunteers rush to the beach to organize a search-and-rescue effort-but for most of the passengers, hope is already lost.A century later, residents of the island are busy preparing for the summer season and debating the merits of a proposed wind farm near the beach. No one expects that those long-forgotten passengers may have something to say about the project, but the restless spirits are furious that their final resting place may be disturbed-and turn to Anza to help them protect it. If spirit-world preservationists aren't enough, Anza also has to face the uncomfortable possibility that her five-year-old son, Henry, has inherited her gift. And then there's that handsome fisherman whose charms are proving difficult to ignore.What began as a simple island sojourn turns into a week of chills, thrills, and ghostly intrigue in this gripping second novel in the Ghost Files series. In this second novel from the Ghost Files, the follow-up to "The Book of Illumination," paranormal expert Winkowski and award-winning screenwriter Foley bring fans back into the world of Anza O'Malley--a woman gifted with the ability to see and speak to ghosts. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780307452467
Buy New
US$ 23.18
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Ice Cradle: A Novel from the Ghost Files
Published by
Three Rivers Pr
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0307452468
ISBN 13: 9780307452467
New
Paperback
Quantity: 2
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Brand New. original edition. 304 pages. 8.00x5.25x0.75 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # x-0307452468
Buy New
US$ 23.61
Convert currency
Stock Image
The Ice Cradle
Published by
Random House USA Inc
(2010)
ISBN 10: 0307452468
ISBN 13: 9780307452467
New
Paperback / softback
Quantity: > 20
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback / softback. Condition: New. This item is printed on demand. New copy - Usually dispatched within 5-9 working days. Seller Inventory # C9780307452467
Buy New
US$ 25.62
Convert currency