The Bone Seeker

Also by M. J. McGrath

In the Edie Kiglatuk series

White Heat

The Boy in the Snow

Nonfiction as Melanie McGrath

Motel Nirvana

The Long Exile
: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic

VIKING

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Published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

Copyright © 2014 by MJ McGrath Ltd.

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First published in Great Britain by Mantle, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGrath, M. J., 1964-

The bone seeker : an Edie Kiglatuk mystery / M. J. McGrath.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-101-60489-2

1. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 2. Arctic regions—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6113.C4775B66 2014

823'.92—dc23

2014004496

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Ian Jackman

That Friday afternoon in late July was the last time Edie Kiglatuk saw Martha Salliaq alive. As the school bell signalled the end of a long, sultry day and students tumbled out into the corridor, eager to get to their summer fishing camps, Martha spilled the contents of her purse on the floor. Pens, crayons, an eyeliner pencil and a stick of lipstick went skittering across the hot linoleum. As a rule, Inuit girls didn't wear make-up. Her curiosity aroused, Edie went over.

‘Going somewhere special?' she asked, holding up the lipstick.

Martha took the stick and dropped it back inside her bag. She flashed her teacher an embarrassed smile.

‘Just curious.' Edie palmed her hands in surrender.

‘No offence, Ms Kiglatuk.'

Edie laughed. ‘None taken.' All the same, in a small, remote corner of her heart Edie was a little
stung. She'd been teaching Martha three weeks and in that time she'd grown fond enough of the girl to have to hide her favouritism. The old teacher's pet syndrome.

They finished picking things up. Martha zipped her purse into her backpack and slung it over her shoulder.

‘Well,' said Martha, ‘thanks for helping.'

Edie watched the back of Martha's head as she made her way to the door, and for the first time since she'd moved from Autisaq a month ago, she was struck by a sudden burst of longing for female company.

The girl wore dark braids in traditional Inuit style, tied together at the back. A week or so ago she'd added a subtle blue tint to the colour. Unusual.

‘Hey, I like what you've done with your hair,' she shouted after her student.

Martha turned, touched her head and smiled, pleased. ‘My parents hate it.'

As the two women stood facing one another, some connection passed between them. Edie found herself thinking she wished they knew one another better. Then the girl looked away and the moment was gone.

‘
Saimu
, Ms Kiglatuk.' Bye. It was the last thing Edie Kiglatuk would ever hear Martha Salliaq say.

•   •   •

That evening Edie spent reorganizing her tent. Her police friend Derek Palliser had recommended her for the summer job at the school then found her a cabin to rent on the outskirts of the settlement. They'd both agreed that, after the last summer, she'd be better off spending July and August away from her hometown of Autisaq, 70 kilometres to the east. Here in Kuujuaq it would be easier to escape daily reminders of the death of her beloved stepson, Joe. She'd arrived in the settlement fully anticipating hunkering down in the little rental cabin but it turned out that Kuujuaq was more sheltered than Autisaq and the ambient temperature occasionally topped 10C, turning the interior into a furnace and driving her back outside under canvas. Her tent was now pinned in the front yard of the police detachment where Derek had obligingly given her use of the bathroom.

An hour or two into her reorganization, and for no good reason she could discern, the conversation with Martha came back to her.
Going somewhere special?
What a dumb question to ask a teenager! She laughed and shook her head and thought, a little wistfully, that her own evening was turning out to be nothing special at all. The last couple of weeks she'd taken to spending a good deal of her off-time with Chip Muloon. Probably too much. Chip was the first white guy she'd ever been with and since they both agreed there was no future in it, she had to wonder if she wasn't playing out some kind of father thing, her own daddy being a
qalunaat
like Chip, who'd abandoned her and
her mother when she was six. Sometimes even casual relationships were so hard to decipher you had to take time out or risk going crazy. Picking up her hair oil, she climbed the wooden steps to the detachment and looked forward to a long, cold shower and an early night alone.

The following day she got up early, packed some dried fish, her Remy 303 and her fishing rod and lure and drove her ATV out past the military camp onto the harsh, rocky landscape of the polar desert. The joint demands of work and Chip had left too little time for exploring the terrain and she was feeling the familiar pull of open ground. A swollen, rushing river meandered through the rubbled plain that opened into a broad bay. The land was dotted with sedge meadow and hummock tundra and was unlike her home terrain in subtle ways that only someone who had made their living on the land on Ellesmere Island would notice. The tundra here was, if anything, more beautiful than at Autisaq, a jewel box of saxifrage and Arctic poppies set off against soft limestone gravel, fields of black basalt splashed with map and blood-spot lichen, and for hours she meandered happily along thin trails, stopping every so often to collect goose eggs or fish for char by the river, navigating only by the man-shaped cairns, or
inuksuit
,
silhouetted against the summer sky, whose granite arms pointed the way back to the settlement.

On her return in late afternoon there was a note waiting for her in the tent. She put down the fish she'd caught, wiped her hands on her summer parka and picked it up. A Ranger friend of her ex-stepson had swung by to say that he was hoping to come into town that evening and would drop in on her. Willa Inukpuk was stationed at a rappel training camp a few kilometres from Camp Nanook, the summer military encampment established by Canadian Joint Forces North as part of their regular SOVPAT sovereignty patrol exercises.

Her heart quickened at the thought of Willa's visit. She and the kid had history together. Mostly bad. Mostly her fault. She'd always loved his brother Joe a little too much and Willa never quite enough. Her drinking, his drug habit and the break-up with Willa's father, Sammy
Inukpuk, hadn't helped. It was only after she'd lost Joe that she realized how much she missed his brother. In the year since Joe's death, Willa had stopped drinking and smoking weed and got himself together. Joining the Rangers was one of the few good decisions he'd made in adult life. Another, even more recent, had been to set aside his resentments and try to rebuild a relationship with his ex-stepmother. Until now she had always been the one seeking forgiveness and Willa had always rebuffed her. Now it seemed that things between them might finally be thawing.

Setting aside the plumpest Arctic char and a handful of goose eggs for their supper, she gutted the remainder of the fish – pegging them on the line to dry in the sun – laid the fire with heather and peat to light on Willa's arrival, then went to the store and bought a packet of his favourite choc chip cookies for ten dollars, and returned to the tent to tidy up. The note hadn't given a specific time. Inuit never planned things that way. She was happy to bide her time. While she waited she reminded herself of the good times she'd shared with the boy before her drinking took hold and he stopped wanting to be around her. Like the first time
they watched Laurel and Hardy together and he asked if everything in the south was black and white. Or the summer he and Joe had caught their first harp seal and Willa stuffed his pillow with the blubber and said it was because it was soft even though they both knew it was because he was so proud of becoming a hunter.

Eventually, when hunger began to overtake her, she went outside and checked the sky. The sun was behind cloud now and the air had taken on the dumb stare of midnight. There were no birds about. She went back inside the tent and reread the note and saw that it said that Willa only
hoped
to come and reminded herself that Inuit never committed themselves to these things in the way
qalunaat
seemed to. Flexibility was a necessary tool for survival up here.

It was too late to eat now. Trying not to feel unreasonably disappointed, she peeled off her summer parka and her shirt and clambered between her sleeping skins. It was only as sleep was stealing over her that
she remembered she'd said she would go round to Chip Muloon's house for supper and sex. It was also too late for that now. Her appetites had clocked off for the night. Within seconds of the thought, she was asleep.

•   •   •

Sunday came and went. Sometime in the mid-morning she went around to Chip's cabin and, finding him out, left a message to apologize for not showing. In her – admittedly limited – experience of
qalunaat
she'd sensed that they could be picky about form. Most assumed that Inuit would play by
qalunaat
rules. Very few ever thought to accommodate themselves to the Inuit way of doing things.

Outside the wind was soft and the air was nasty with mosquitoes. She spent most of the rest of the day in the tent avoiding them, catching up on marking school papers and mending the soles of her favourite sealskin kamiks.

At some point in the afternoon Derek looked in on her. He scanned her few belongings, now neatly arranged.

‘My, you been remodelling in here? Next time you got a couple free hours, my apartment could use a woman's touch.'

‘I'll touch it all you like, but you can get someone else to clear it up, if that's what you're getting at,' Edie said.

‘We a little ornery today? Need to eat maybe?' She saw him eyeing the remaining goose eggs and realized two things: first, he had an agenda and second, dammit, he was right.

‘You like 'em raw or soft-boiled? I got some fish in here somewhere too.'

His face erupted into a grin.

She shot him a salty look. ‘Just as well for you I could use some company.'

•   •   •

Early evening, she took herself back to Chip's place and found him sitting at his kitchen table surrounded by papers. His lips were stiff when she went to kiss him.

‘Don't be like that,' she said.

Chip had arrived in Kuujuaq a few weeks before and taken over an office from the school counsellor, whose job had gone in the latest round of cuts. That was how they'd met. He was working on something dry and technical to do with long-term health outcomes among High Arctic populations and seemed pretty dedicated to it. They'd never discussed his work in detail. Neither was under the illusion that they'd got together to exchange ideas. It was a sex thing mostly, and that was fine. There were unexpected but welcome differences. The hard angles of his body. Inuit men were generally superbly fit but theirs was a kind of lean, compact and wiry muscularity. By contrast, Chip was tall and bony, with large hands and venous, rocky feet. His eyes were the colour of icebergs with depths she couldn't read. She liked the hairiness of him, and the odd, milky-brown colour of the hairs, like a ptarmigan in summer plumage.

They were both outsiders in a town that didn't exactly open its arms to strangers. In September, when his contract came to an end, he'd be heading back to his office in the Health Sciences Building at the University of Calgary and she'd return to Autisaq. For now, though, they could do a fine job of keeping one another company.

‘I left you a note,' she said.

‘I got it.' They operated in separate universes. His, a world of clocks, written reports and predictability. Hers, well, not.

She went in for an Eskimo kiss, an exchange of breaths, and sensed him soften.

‘God, I wish southern women knew how sexy those are,' he said.

‘You can teach them.'

He pulled her in close. ‘First, some more practice.'

•   •   •

Part way through the night, it was hard to tell when exactly because it never got dark at this time of year, Edie woke in the middle of a dream and from it managed to hold on to Martha's face as she turned at the door; then the picture faded and was lost, leaving behind a drift of emotion too fragmented to put a name to. For a while she lay awake, listening to the soft purr of Chip snoring beside her, then, restless
suddenly, she crept out of the cabin and down the little track to her tent, where she fell into a profound and dreamless sleep.

•   •   •

When Martha Salliaq failed to show up for class that Monday morning, Edie was surprised, but it was only when the dream resurfaced a little later that morning that she felt a prickle of disquiet. Traditionally minded Inuit thought dreams were visits from the spirits. She wasn't one of them, least not as a rule, but the coincidence of the dream with Martha's no-show was enough to unsettle her.

At morning recess she caught up with Lisa Tuliq by the door to the classroom. Lisa was small and plump, with the pinched, repressed air of a kid who'd grown up watching her parents slowly dismantling themselves with alcohol. She and Martha sat next to one another in class and Edie had sometimes seen them leaving together. But Lisa had nothing to offer on Martha's whereabouts. She'd been out at her family's summer camp all weekend, and hadn't seen her friend.

‘My uncle gave me a ride in this morning.'

‘Did Martha say anything on Friday about where she might be?'

‘Not to me,' Lisa said simply. She looked longingly down the corridor for a means of escape. ‘Can I go now?'

Edie followed the girl out into the corridor, passed through a fire door and knocked on Chip Muloon's door. The knock was a little too hard and hurt her knuckles. She'd picked up frostbite in Alaska in the spring trying to track down a bunch of people traffickers and still tended to forget how supersensitive her fingers were. A hard rap and it was as though a wire in her body had shorted.

Chip was at his desk flipping through some paperwork. He shot her a low, withering look.

‘I guess you know it's rude to sneak out in the middle of the night without so much as a “See ya”, right?'

‘No,' she said. In her culture it wasn't.

‘Well it is,' he said, as though that settled the matter. It was one of the things she found most difficult about him, not that he lived in
another world, but his refusal to meet her somewhere on the bridge between them.

‘Martha Salliaq didn't show this morning. It's not like her. I was wondering if she said anything to you?' It was this she really wanted to talk about. There was no point in wasting time trying to resolve the rest. Come September it would resolve itself anyway.