The Bone Seeker (34 page)

The flight controller's name was Forester Norven. He was a thickset
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with the reddened pelt and bedevilled face of a man who'd given up booze and was now regretting it. The moment they'd landed Sonia Gutierrez had rushed to the bathroom to be sick. Norven found the others a place to sit in the terminal waiting area and went to fetch coffee and some towels. The run from the plane to the terminal building had left them soaked. Moments later he returned.

‘You know, guys, I'm probably going to have to report this.' He ran a palm over his bald spot. You could see he was torn between duty and his desire to help and hadn't yet decided which way to go. All he needed was a little nudge in the right direction.

‘Call Sergeant Makivik at the Iqaluit RCMP,' Derek said, towelling down his clothes. ‘He'll make it right. And tell him Derek Palliser says he needs to get up here right away. In fact, why don't I call him direct?'

Norven signalled to Derek to stay sitting. He wasn't about to let go of the situation. ‘You get your breath back. I'll speak to Makivik myself.'

Soon after he'd gone Gutierrez reappeared, looking hollow-eyed and clutching her backpack. She'd dried her hair with the washroom hand dryer.

‘We should alert Chris Tetlow,' she said. ‘I've got a contact at the Toronto press and there are some lawyers – '

Derek stopped her. ‘We're not doing anything until we've thought this through a little. Bill Makivik will find us some place safe to stay. We'll take advice, get some shut-eye, then decide.' When Gutierrez opened her mouth to speak again, Derek held up his hand to steady
her. Gutierrez sank back into her seat, a surprising look of relief on her face.

Just then Norven appeared from a door marked Authorized Personnel Only and announced that Makivik was on his way.

•   •   •

Sergeant Bill Makivik arrived ten minutes later in his storm gear, dripping rain. He was a fit man but the cyclonic wind had left him breathless.

‘Jesus H, Derek,' he said, simply. ‘This is a pretty crazy time to be up in the air, don't you think?'

‘It's been a pretty crazy time all round,' Derek said. His eyes moved to Norven, who was listening intently. ‘We'll explain at the detachment.'

‘I'm looking forward to that,' Makivik said.

In her peripheral vision Edie saw Norven's face fall. It was going to be hard to keep this quiet.

All four of them crammed into the detachment jeep beside Makivik. There was no point trying to talk. You couldn't hear anything above the storm. The wind was pushing great fists of rain at the windshield and Makivik was having trouble keeping the jeep stable. They more or less aquaplaned along the road into town. By the time they reached the detachment the rain had frozen into hailstones the size of ptarmigan eggs. They'd been lucky. If they'd set off in the plane an hour or two later they wouldn't have made it.

Makivik managed to bring the vehicle up close to the detachment entrance and they ran in, Gutierrez clutching her backpack to her chest to keep the rain off. Inside they shook themselves and wiped the rain from their heads. It was late by now and almost everyone at the detachment had gone home early in order to ready their houses for the cyclone. The sole duty officer, an Inuit woman with a cheerful smile and bad teeth, exchanged perfunctory greetings with Derek.

‘You folks got no luggage?' Makivik said, waving them into a side room.

‘We left in a hurry.'

Makivik frowned but thought better than to demand an explanation right there and then. ‘You should get out of those wet clothes. We got some coveralls somewhere.' He scanned the room as though looking for a closet, then went over to the door and called out to the duty officer, who came back a moment later carrying four prison-issue coveralls. They went to the washrooms, hurriedly changed and returned to the side room.

‘Now, folks,' Makivik said. ‘What the fuck?'

•   •   •

It took Derek a while to outline the events of the past couple of weeks, from finding Martha's body at Lake Turngaluk to their arrival in Iqaluit. He told Makivik about the two men from the Defence Department checking out the body then the department's decision to reclaim the land at Glacier Ridge, which he saw now as an attempt to shut the investigation down before anyone started asking questions about the lake.

Listening to the story, Makivik's eyes grew wider and his legs began to swing nervously in his chair. Maybe he was beginning to wish the plane hadn't made it after all, Edie thought.

Derek went on, detailing how he now saw Klinsman's eagerness to cooperate in the indictment of Privates Namagoose and Saxby as part of the department's plan to wrap the case up speedily and in a way they could control. It wasn't clear why Klinsman appeared to be doing the department's bidding. Maybe he'd been given no choice. Like Edie, Derek sensed that Klinsman was troubled by his role and thought that was why he'd tried to warn them off continuing with the investigation.

Before long, Gutierrez began to chip in with her own version of events. She hadn't gone to the detachment with what she knew earlier, she explained, because she hadn't been sure who she could trust with the information.

‘When I heard those voices in my room at the hotel I should have just run, but a place like Kuujuaq, there's nowhere to run to.'

‘Rashid Alfasi found that out,' Edie said. She took up from where Gutierrez had left off. ‘I picked up Sonia's papers. By then we knew that the Defence Department had covered up something really big at Glacier Ridge. And we knew that Martha's murder had the potential to be the key that opened it up. So we talked with some of the elders up in Kuujuaq who'd worked at the radar station way back in the seventies.'

Makivik leaned forward to speak, then held back.

‘Turns out there was a big fire up at Glacier Ridge back in 1973, and the earth shook. They found a whole load of dead animals. And then the babies started dying. And they kept on dying. No one talked about it. Said it was taboo.'

Makivik gave a puzzled frown.

‘How do you know this explosion wasn't an accident?'

‘We don't. But we do know that the Defence Department built an underground bunker to contain some kind of nuclear device. It seems likely that it was intended as a test. We don't know for sure.'

There was a pause. Makivik began working his lips in and out, trying to edge his way towards an understanding. Edie felt for him. How much easier it would have been to leave secret weapons programmes and government cover-ups, global warming and oil exploration, street drugs and alcohol, to
qalunaat nunaat
, the white man's world. But it was all a part of their world now too. The Arctic and the south shared a destiny. Inuit could no longer afford to avoid the new reality, however unwelcome. Their survival depended upon it.

‘In death, Martha became a kind of human Geiger counter,' Edie went on. ‘The Defence Department must have worried that radioactive contamination on her body would alert people to their little secret. They sent their men up here to check. Then they took over the Glacier Ridge site, knowing the military would take over jurisdiction on the case and they would have more control.'

‘This is a lot to take in,' Makivik said.

‘All you really need to know is that the Defence Department would be very happy if we all disappeared right now, and they're not above
trying to make that happen,' Gutierrez said. ‘So we have to find somewhere safe while we decide what to do next.'

•   •   •

The place Makivik came up with was a cousin's house on the outskirts of town. The cousin was at a drying-out facility and his family had gone to summer camp, so the place was empty. There were two bedrooms. Edie and Gutierrez each took one. Willa would bed down in Edie's room while Derek slept on the couch. Makivik left them then reappeared a while later with bandages for their hands, some painkillers, the leg of a caribou he'd shot a week ago, and some of his wife's bannock bread, promising to be back in the morning. Gutierrez helped bandage up their hands. They were all too shaken from the flight to cook, but sandwiched the raw meat between pieces of sugar-crusted bannock and all but Gutierrez ate it as it was. No one felt much like going to bed and with the storm howling around the house it didn't seem likely anyone would sleep in any case.

‘Do you really think Klinsman will come after us?' Willa asked. He'd been silent on the flight and had said almost nothing since.

‘He won't find us here,' Edie said, reassuringly. She wondered what his father would say when he found out what his boy had done. He'd be proud, she thought. For most of his life Willa had wandered, unsure of a direction for himself. Finally he'd found his moral compass, his position in life. From there he could go anywhere in the world.

From the other side of the table, Edie saw Gutierrez eyeing her sceptically.

‘I wouldn't underestimate Klinsman. He's absolutely loyal. He'll do whatever he has to do to keep the Defence Department's secret under wraps.'

‘Assuming he even knows about it,' Derek said.

‘Oh he knows, because I told him.' Gutierrez flipped her hair back. ‘But he refused to believe me, said the department would never knowingly put his men in jeopardy by sending them out to clean up land it knew to be radioactive. He thought I was cooking up some story to get him on my side.' She was sliding the gold crucifix around her neck up and down on its chain. ‘
Es un tonto
, he's a fool.'

Derek pushed his plate away. The wind had eased a little now and piles of hailstones were stacked up against the windows, blocking the light from outside.

‘We should get some sleep, decide what to do in the morning.'

Gutierrez nodded in agreement. She pushed back her chair, stretched and said goodnight.

Turning to Willa, Edie said, ‘You go ahead. Take the bed. I prefer the floor anyway. I'll come in a minute or two.'

Her ex-stepson stood and headed quietly towards the room. As she watched him swing through the door then close it gently behind him she was hit by a strong stab of regret for what might have been. Joe alive still, she and Sammy together, the four of them a family. Then the vision was gradually replaced by the unwelcome reality. Her survival depended on facing up to that too.

She reached out and squeezed Derek's arm. For a moment they sat and listened to the wind tearing around the house.

‘You did a great thing today,' she said finally.

He turned and gave her an exhausted smile.

By the time she went into the bedroom Willa was already asleep and gently snoring. She lay down beside him to be close to the warmth of his body. She supposed that his actions today would make it impossible for him to return to the Rangers and it hurt her to think that he'd given up the life he loved so much when it had taken him so long to find it. But it made her proud that he had. She found herself gently stroking his hair. One eye opened slightly.

‘Go to sleep, Kigga.'

She nodded and shut her eyes. She couldn't ever remember another time that he'd called her by the nickname his brother had coined and her heart swelled so much to hear it that for a while it was hard to breathe.

•   •   •

She was still lying on the bed next to Willa when she woke. It was quiet out now, the cyclone over. She stretched and rubbed her eyes then crept over to the door to avoid waking him. She poked her head out
and saw Derek sitting on the couch with the blankets strewn on the floor, scribbling furiously on a piece of notepaper. Closing the door behind her, she padded over and sat down beside him.

‘What are you doing?' Her hair, which she'd unbraided so it would dry overnight, lay in a great cascade around her head. He smiled then reached out and pushed it back from her face. Something passed between them, then was gone.

‘Making one of my lists,' he said.

He passed it to her, stood and went over to the window. On the paper he'd written down the snippets of evidence they'd accumulated about Glacier Ridge in the past two weeks, which pointed to the probability that the federal government had knowingly conducted at least one large-scale nuclear test on Ellesmere Island in the knowledge that it would probably cause birth defects and fatalities in the population of Kuujuaq; that it had covered up the evidence and was still covering it up; and, it seemed, was prepared to frame innocent men for murder and, possibly, even kill, to keep it covered.

When she finished reading, she followed Derek over to the window. He'd pushed open a gap in the blinds and was peering through it, one hand on his service weapon. Outside the mosquitoes danced in the clear air and a raven flapped its way above the shoreline. Heaps of unmelted hailstones were piled like gravel against the houses. The wind had blown icebergs down from Greenland and the current had scooped them up and swept them into Frobisher Bay. Now a great armada of aquamarine ice stood becalmed on the horizon, waiting for the wind to set it a-sail again.

‘I don't understand how anyone could want to leave this place,' she said.

At the high tide line a soft trail of something white and grey lay on the green-grey shingle. At first Edie thought it was hailstones. Her eyes wandered up the beach.

‘Do you see what I see?' Scattered along the shale were the bodies of dozens of snow geese, early migrants whose journeys had been cut
short by the cyclone which had boomeranged them, dead or dying, back to their summer quarters.

‘Looks like the north wasn't quite ready to give them up,' Derek said.

She turned to look at him. ‘You want goose for breakfast?'

Derek's face broke open into a smile before he remembered where they were and why they were there.

‘We shouldn't go out right now.'

But Edie was already at the door to the snow porch with her fingers on the handle.