The Bone Seeker (30 page)

Derek swept up the bottle of pills and dumped it in his pocket, then the two men went to either end of the gurney and lifted Toolik on Luc's count.

‘We'll need to tell Markoosie.'

‘I don't think that'll be necessary,' Edie said. She mentioned the signs of a fast exit.

Derek looked sceptical. ‘The old man has dementia. He could easily have taken an accidental overdose.'

Something told her it hadn't happened that way, but this wasn't the time for a debate. Instead, she waited for the men to leave then started making her way through the drawers and cupboards in Markoosie's room. Nothing jumped out at her until her eye was drawn to a photo album bound in blue leatherette sitting on the single bookshelf beside the Bible and a couple of textbooks on running a radio station. It was the only thing on the shelf not sitting in a pool of dust. She opened it up, flipping through forty or fifty pages of perfectly ordinary family photographs, and was about to put it back when something odd struck her. In every picture of the young Markoosie and the woman she presumed was his wife, Nora, there was a little girl. Who looked very much like Martha Salliaq.

She left the house and made her way along the path to the town hall building. The door to the radio station was locked. Peering between the gaps in the venetian blind she could see that the room was empty. She headed outside. A row of parked ATVs was lined up in front of the building, but Markoosie's was not among them. Swinging back onto her vehicle, she turned and began to bump along the path to the Salliaqs' house.

Lizzie and Willa Inukpuk were busying themselves in the yard
stretching sealskins onto racks. She guessed they had come clean about their relationship after Charlie had been taken to hospital. Lizzie spotted her first. She stopped what she was doing and stood up. Something in her expression gave Edie the sense that she knew what was coming. Willa followed her, holding his hand above his face as a sunshield. Whatever secret Lizzie had been keeping all this time, she hadn't shared it with her lover.

‘Is Alice here?'

Willa flipped his head towards the door.

‘She's packing Charlie's things to take down to Ottawa.'

A cheap weekend case was standing just inside the door. Alice was in the kitchen making bannock bread, her hands powdered with flour. She left off when she saw Edie and, brushing back her hair with a forearm, went to the sink to rinse her hands.

‘You only ever come when something's wrong. So what is it?'

‘Your father. He's at the nursing station but I think he's gonna be OK.'

Saying nothing, the woman wiped her hands dry on a rag and went to the door. With a raw, quiet dignity, she said, ‘Willa, you drive me?'

Willa nodded.

‘Lizzie, ride with me?' Edie said, hoping to use the time to get her to talk. The girl shook her head emphatically.

‘I'll take my father's vehicle.'

•   •   •

By the time they reached the nursing station Toolik Pitoq was lying on a gurney, his breath struggling in his chest like a trapped hare, unable to speak. When he heard his daughter and granddaughter's voices he mustered a smile but the confusion in his face suggested that he had no idea where he was or what he was doing there. The official version of events was that he had taken an accidental overdose. To Edie, though, that seemed unlikely. The bottle on the nightstand had contained Ambien. Luc had checked both his stock and his script records. He'd never prescribed it to the old man and there was none missing from the pharmacy.

‘That doesn't mean anything,' Derek said. ‘Kuujuaq is awash in prescription pills in the summer. Contractors bring them up, the crew on the supply ship, even bush plane pilots. Every so often me and Stevie try to crack down on it, but it doesn't make us popular. People like getting high.'

Edie reminded him that Saxby had taken some from the pharmacy at Camp Nanook and said he'd sold it on to a local man. Maybe that man was Markoosie Pitoq.

‘Might explain why he switched his father's blood last week, though. If he'd been taking them himself he'd know his blood would show up dirty,' Luc volunteered.

‘Maybe,' Derek said. ‘But that doesn't make the fella guilty of trying to poison his father.'

Edie drifted back to Toolik Pitoq's bed. Lizzie was sitting beside her grandfather. She registered Edie's presence momentarily and by the movement of her shoulders, angled away, Edie got the sense that she wasn't wanted. The girl had already made plain that she wasn't interested in talking and now that Willa and Lizzie had gone public with their relationship, she no longer had the hold over them she once did. All the same, it seemed more important than ever to Edie to try. She drew up a chair.

‘Your sister and her uncle spent a lot of time together, didn't they? When she was a little girl and then, maybe, later.'

The girl blinked. She looked away for a moment as if collecting herself.

‘Why do you ask that?'

Edie could sense that she was close to something now. All she had to do was press it home, just a little. ‘You ever catch a thaw pocket, Lizzie?'

Lizzie hesitated, not sure where this was going. Kids learned about thaw pockets from the moment they could first walk. Formed when temperatures rose, causing the surface ice to rot and liquefy, then freeze again, leaving a thin layer of new ice crusted over the rot, they
were hard to spot and dangerous. If you weren't careful you could find yourself breaking through the thin crust into deep freezing water.

The girl glanced at her grandfather, then looked at her feet. Silent tears began to spiral down her face. When she spoke her voice was the sound of icicles cracking.

‘OK,' she said, ‘but not here.'

They moved to the nursing station's waiting area. For what seemed like a long time Lizzie sat with her hands in her lap, her eyes flickering at the edges, jaw working, from time to time opening her mouth to speak, then thinking better of it.

Beside her Edie waited patiently, hardly even blinking, a hunter at the breathing hole of a seal. For ten days she'd been asking Lizzie Salliaq questions and for ten days the girl had offered only partial answers. Now, she sensed, they were at the door to somewhere new. All Edie had to do was wait for the girl to push it open.

‘You think my uncle gave my grandfather those pills, don't you? No one else does, but you do.'

‘I'm good at thinking bad things. It's not a skill I'd recommend but it seems to be one I'm stuck with. I think your uncle was afraid your grandfather might give him away. All families have secrets. They can be toxic.'

For the first time Lizzie looked Edie directly in the face. She was weeping openly now.

‘My mother was Charlie's second wife – did you know that?'

‘Yes.'

‘He didn't have any children with his first wife. Her name was Elizapee. She had two babies, but they couldn't hold on to life. We'd been moved to a new place, so people said that their spirits weren't ready to come down from the stars yet. They were afraid of getting lost. That was how people accepted it.'

‘Inuit are good at accepting things. We need to get better at not accepting them,' Edie said.

Lizzie wiped a hand across her eyes. ‘Something happened to Elizapee. She got sick and died. My father married my mother. She got pregnant and had a boy who died before I was born. Then nothing happened for a long time and by the time I came along they had more or less given up.'

‘They must have been excited to have you.'

Lizzie cocked her head. ‘I guess. I wasn't an easy baby. I had some problems for a while. But I lived. My
hanaji
named me
nerriungnerk
, hope. No one thought that my parents would have any more kids so when my mother became pregnant again with Martha they thought their troubles were over.'

‘Were they?'

‘In a way. In another way, though, they were just beginning. Martha wasn't sickly like me. She was the healthy one, everyone's favourite.' Lizzie turned away. ‘Not that it matters now.'

‘It matters now more than ever.'

Lizzie nodded. ‘Maybe. You saw the pictures of my uncle Markoosie, and his wife, Nora, with Martha. They couldn't have children of their own. There were many other couples like them but I guess that didn't make it any easier. Nora was like Elizapee. She gave birth to two children but they both died. People began to say Lake Turngaluk had stirred up bad spirits. They thought about moving to Autisaq or to one of the other settlements but there wasn't enough game in those places for everyone to eat. They wondered if it was their fault. They wanted to go back home, down to the Hudson Bay, but the government wouldn't take them.'

The story was familiar to Edie, to every Inuk living on Ellesmere Island. The government had taken them to this impossible place promising them a better future. When the better future didn't materialize the government forgot they'd ever made the promise. Edie had heard that emotion or some variation of it expressed so many times in Inuit
dealings with
qalunaat
that she'd lost count. The helplessness, the loss of confidence, the feelings of unease.

‘Did anyone ever mention a link between Lake Turngaluk and the fire at Glacier Ridge?'

Lizzie shrugged. ‘I don't know about any fire.'

‘But people didn't talk about Lake Turngaluk?'

‘No. People said the bad spirits would get tired of being ignored and go someplace else.'

‘But they didn't?'

Lizzie shook her head. ‘You know how Inuit are. We share everything. My father began to say that he and my mother would share their children with Markoosie and Nora.' She turned to look at Edie. ‘You remember how it was.'

Edie did. The custom ensured there were never too many mouths to feed in one family and never too few in another to help hunt or gather food. It still happened sometimes.

‘
Qalunaat
like to say that blood is thicker than water. But up here in the Arctic, blood is thicker than ice. Your parents didn't have any more children?'

‘No, but they'd already promised Markoosie and Nora that they would share Martha so when she was eighteen months old my sister went to live with our uncle and aunt.'

‘They must have doted on her.'

‘They did,' Lizzie said, with a hint of bitterness. ‘My aunt especially. But when my mother realized she wasn't going to have any more children she started to want Martha back. Eventually my father went and collected her. That broke my aunt Nora's heart.' Lizzie's face crimped at the remembrance. ‘She went out one day in a blizzard and never came back. They found her body later under the bird cliffs. I think Martha blamed herself. That's why she was always round at my uncle's house, cooking lunch, tidying up, sewing his clothes.'

The young woman shoved her hands in the pockets of her summer parka. ‘You've asked me if Martha wanted to leave. And I've told you
the truth, which is I don't know. But I do know that too much love can smother a person just as easily as too little can starve them.'

•   •   •

Back outside it had begun to rain. Some instinct made Edie go back towards the studio. Markoosie's ATV wasn't outside and the door was still locked. She picked open the lock and found herself inside. The studio was a small, soundproofed room, the desk and broadcast equipment taking up the majority of the space. Beside the desk was an office chair, dented with use, and she noticed that the headsets sitting on the desk itself were old and greasy-looking. Along the back wall a shelving unit bulged with files and discs arranged by date. Scanning along the disc boxes, she found one marked
Show #1437 7/24
, the Saturday Martha died, pulled it out and checked it over. She was about to push it back in its place when curiosity moved her to switch on the player and slot it into the tray. The machine hummed and the disc disappeared inside. Pulling out the chair and reaching for the headphones, she waited for the familiar opening jingle followed by Markoosie's introduction – ‘It's eight p.m. on Saturday 24 July.' She checked the player's time and date screen for confirmation.
7/24 10.17
. She looked again. Then she pushed the open button and the disc tray buzzed forward. Thinking she'd got something wrong, she scooped up the disc, checked the label, then matched it to the writing on the box. She steadied herself for a moment then checked everything again with the same result. The timecode on the machine was insisting that Markoosie Pitoq had recorded the Saturday evening show on Saturday morning.

Which meant that on the Saturday evening, as his show was going out, Markoosie Pitoq could have been anywhere.

She dropped the disc into her pocket. Her hands were trembling as she went back over to the shelves to close the gap she'd left so that Markoosie wouldn't notice anything missing, but as she rearranged the discs, she could feel something catch at the back, as though there was some kind of impediment there. She pushed a couple of fingers into the space but whatever it was eluded her. Her curiosity fully aroused now, she went back to the door and flipped the inside lock. Returning to the
shelf, she began removing the discs either side of the space until she could finally insert her hand. Her fingers waved about in space for a moment then came to rest on a thin circular object. When she pulled back her fingers it came with them, made a thin scratchy sound against the plastic of the CD cases. A long skein of blue-tinted, black hair, braided into an amulet.

A part of her wanted to run, to get away from the awful realization, but the greater part knew there was no running away from this. The evidence backed up what she already in her heart knew: that not only had Markoosie Pitoq killed his niece but that, on the morning of Saturday 24 July, he had sat down in his studio to record his alibi. Perhaps he'd planned it to coincide with the arrival of Camp Nanook, knowing that the soldiers would provide him with cover. That was conjecture. What was certain was that by the time Martha came around to pick up her schoolbook and offer to cook his lunch, he had already planned to kill her that evening. The man who had for part of her life brought her up as his own daughter and with whom she must, at least as far as any woman ever feels completely safe with any man, have thought of herself as being safe. Edie had to hope that he never told her what he intended to do. That he spared her that terror, at least.

Now she knew why he had disappeared, all she had to figure out was where he was likely to be. In her mind she went through everything she knew about the man and thought it was all pointing one way.

She dialled the detachment. Derek answered.

‘Drive around to the town hall building. Bring your service weapon and a rifle.' The authority she felt must have translated into her voice, because for once he didn't question her.

Then she pulled open the radio station door and tripped down the steps, her breath coming fast and shallow, the adrenalin chasing though her veins, every sense intensely focused. She knew this feeling. It came to her when she was hunting.