White Heat (21 page)

    And,
suddenly, there it was. A ray of sun had pierced the cloud cover in just the
right spot and the sparkle had returned. Edie bent down and picked up a gold
earring, plain but set with a brilliantly cut diamond, identical to the one
Andy Taylor wore in his right ear. She clasped it in her hand
- thank you,
sun
- and suddenly felt quite weightless, as though she might blow away. A
thought brought her back to earth, one of those sudden, painful reminders of
the life she had lost. Joe hated her habit of saying thank you. Gratitude is a
qalunaat
custom, he'd say. Inuit were entitled to help from each other.
Gratitude didn't come into it.

    She
took off her kamiks, then the Gore-Tex socks she always wore, followed by her
outer socks stitched from softened caribou leather so that finally she was left
standing in nothing but her hare skin liners. Then she began to shuffle across
the clamshells and the shale, moving in tight, slowly expanding circles, eyes
fixed inside, mind and body focused absolutely on the sensations of the stones
on her soft, sensitive feet.

    Pretty
soon she detected something other than stone, shell, shale or ice, possibly a
remnant of cotton grass or a piece of dried lichen. Reaching down, she pushed
aside the thin covering of ice around the spot. At first she didn't see
anything, but Edie was hunter enough to be able to weigh the evidence of her
various senses and to decide that, in this case, her feet were right and her
eyes were wrong. She sank to her knees then lowered her body onto the shale to
be nearer to whatever was lying there. She had felt it once and she would just
have to try to feel it again. It was what she'd do if she were trying to detect
the presence of a seal beneath the ice and she figured that this object was
like the seal, something that did not wish to give itself up.

    She
removed her mittens, then her outer and inner gloves, finally the glove liners
and began to probe around in the snowy shale, very delicately, so as not to
force what she was looking for deeper into the layers of shell and stone.
Despite the spring sun, it was still bitterly cold. Without gloves, the tiny,
almost invisible hairs on her fingers froze and the moisture on her fingertips
bedded in as ice. Then she put her thumb on it. Pulling it gently from the
shale, she felt first the hard nub, then the crispy layer around. She had just
unearthed a fragment of torn fabric, once most likely yellow, now bleached to a
mottled tea colour, attached to what was once a shirt button. The button had
cracked and only a thread now held the pieces. There was a stain on one corner,
blood maybe. Jumping up, she began circling again, her heart beating out a
satisfying thud. Here it was, the moment the paths of the hunter and the hunted
first collide.

    Not
far from this first find, her feet detected something larger, a man's watch,
the face so scratched by ice that Edie couldn't make out whether or not it was
still working, though it hardly mattered: Inuit rarely wore watches and would
never risk one out on the land where, in any case, they were redundant. This
was the watch of a
qalunaat.

    Over
the hours that followed, turning her circles, Edie gradually and meticulously
accumulated the bits and pieces of a partial human skeleton, the flesh mostly
torn off by animals, marking each piece in her mind as she went: a length of
femur, a piece of skull, both metatarsals, three finger bones. When she was too
cold to go on, she gathered her findings together and went into her tent to
inspect them.

    Edie
had a familiarity with bones. If you were Inuit, you couldn't not. All her
life, she'd been flensing them of their flesh, chopping them to get to the
marrow, to make soup or to give to the dogs. When they'd been boiled and
cleaned, she'd carved them into seals and birds, or whittled them into needles.
Bones had been her drumsticks, boot jacks, ear picks and head scratchers. If
you counted antlers, they'd been coat hooks too. And her experiences with bones
hadn't been confined to animals. In the summer, as the snow retreated from the
land, it left behind it the strewn remains of humans as well as creatures.
Nothing on the tundra rotted much. After you buried a body under piles of
rocks, the ice and the wind would eventually liberate it, if the foxes, wolves
and bears hadn't already done so. The whole history of human settlement lay
exposed there, out on the tundra, under that big northern sky. There was
nowhere here for bones to hide.

    Animals
had been at these, which explained the pattern of their scattering. They seemed
almost unnaturally clean, though Edie thought perhaps that was because April
and May were hungry months and a number of scavengers had been over them. A few
were splintered and on one or two of the larger bones there were teeth marks
consistent with fox. She picked out a fragment of skull, from the top back of
the head, she thought. In the midst of it was a small hole, about the size of a
nickel, almost perfectly round. The unmistakeable entry wound of a bullet.

    So
here it was, proof all of a sudden that Andy Taylor hadn't simply got lost in
the blizzard and died of hypothermia but that someone had killed him.

    But
who? She thought of Old Man Koperkuj but dismissed the idea. Koperkuj avoided
people whenever he could. For the first time, the thought occurred to her that
Joe and Taylor might have had some kind of falling out, but the instant it came
into her mind, she chased it away, ashamed of herself. Joe was no more capable
of shooting a man than Bonehead.

    She
picked out a piece of femur and turned it over in her hands. The first faint
bloom of algal growth had already begun to appear over the surface. Though the
growing season could not really be said to have started, the snow covering had
insulated the bones from the worst of the cold, as it did lemmings and bear
cubs, and all snow-buried things. The algae had grown a little more densely in
the hairline cracks and indentations of the bone. The difference was very subtle
but it had the effect of creating a faint frilling over the bone. Out of
curiosity, she scraped at the markings with a finger. The algae concealed a
tooth-like pattern. The marking had been scrubbed by weeks under the shifting
snow, but to a hunter, it was absolutely unmistakeable. Someone had cut at the
bone with a serrated hunting knife.

    She
could see now that the same pattern was picked out very faintly in algae on
some of the other fragments too. Edie sat back on her haunches, floored. The
murderer must have dismembered the body before it had frozen solid and become
more difficult to work. But why? The only reason she could think of was that
this way, if the body was ever found, it would look as though Taylor had just
died in the blizzard and his bones had been scattered by animals.

    Edie
pulled out her primus, put on a brew and tried to think the situation through.
There was no question in her mind that she would have to hand at least some of
the bones over to the authorities. Things could turn out very badly for her if
someone came across some other fragments and it was subsequently discovered
that she had said nothing. In any case, if she was careful, it might actually
be in her interest to report her find before the snow cleared from the land and
anyone else went looking for the body. Still, she needed to exercise caution.
In Autisaq, the rumour mill had always been infinitely more powerful than the
facts and if anyone got wind of the knife marks and the bullet hole, they would
jump to conclusions. The one thing she didn't want was for this find to be used
to implicate her stepson.

    It
made sense to hand over only those bones on which there was no evidence of
bullet holes or knife cuts. The bones would be positively identified as belonging
to Andy Taylor and it would be presumed that the
qalunaat
had died of
exposure during the blizzard. Simeonie would ensure that no one went looking
for the remainder of the skeleton and she would buy some time to discover who
had killed Taylor, and from that learn something about Joe's state of mind as
he stumbled back into Autisaq that day.

    The
next task was to find Taylor's snowmobile in case it carried clues and
neutralize the evidence to fit in with the natural death story. It made sense
that the vehicle would be somewhere not far distant from the body. It was
harder to lose a snowbie than a body, so the fact that none of the S&R
expeditions had located it suggested it had been hidden away somewhere or was
sitting under a mound of wind- driven snow. Edie doubted the latter. There
hadn't been a great deal of snow since April and the prevailing winds tended to
drift it on the east-facing slopes.

    In
her mind she followed Craig's southern coastline from east to west, as though
she were kayaking it, past rocky outcrops, beaches, cliffs and landings,
alighting anywhere accessible to a snowbie. She was half way to Bone Beach, as
she now thought of this spot, when she remembered the ice cave.

    It
was Joe who had found it, three or four years ago, a roof of
sikutuqaq,
multi-year ice, enclosing the two walls of a narrow passage between two cliffs,
hard to spot from land and impossible from the air. Those who were not as
familiar with Craig as Joe was wouldn't have any reason to know it was there. In
the winter, the entrance was blocked off with snow, in the summer it tended to
be obscured by outcrop- pings of willow and sedge; but Joe had started to use
it as a shelter from bad weather. Edie fed the dogs and made herself another
brew with extra sugar. She would snatch a little rest and get going again
sometime after midnight when the sun was in the north, and the ice conditions
were at their best. Three hours' sleep, then onwards.

    The
smell of metal at the cave's entrance made her pulse race. She switched on her
flashlight. A snowy owl flew up towards her, then swished along and away. At
the back of the cave something large glinted in the torchlight. It was Taylor's
snowbie, the trunk open, the sides covered in owl guano where the animal had
been preparing its nest. Beside it, scattered on the shale, were a tent, some
waterproof waders and diving gear. Nothing had been torn or attacked, merely
tossed aside. It looked as though someone had gone through Taylor's stuff in a
hurry. Old Man Koperkuj maybe.

    Above
her, the old, grey ice squealed as it shifted against the rock walls. Already,
the rime on the vehicle was beginning to melt near where the owl had been
roosting. Edie flashed the light around the walls of the cave, searching for cracks,
but it appeared to be sound for now.

    She
was about to direct her flashlight back towards the snowbie when her eye was
drawn to a contrasting patch in the ice. Up close, she could see that there was
an area of compacted snow pressed into the surface of the ice, the marks of
fingers still on it.

    She
took out her
ulu,
the crescent-shaped knife carried by Inuit women, and
prodded the spot until a few pieces of snow fell away. Working her way around
it with the
ulu,
she uncovered a Styrofoam cup. Inside it was a plastic
bag. She pulled out the bag and looked at the contents. Three sheets of paper
had been fastened together with a paperclip that had rusted and bled. On each
sheet, one edge was worn, the other razor sharp, as though it had been cut from
a book. The paper itself was thick and ridged and each page was covered in
tiny, precise handwriting in ink that had once been black but had faded brown.
A combination of rust and damp had eaten away most of the words; with the
flashlight, Edie could pick out only a few fragments, but nothing that made any
sense. On top of the pages was a strip of what looked like ordinary notebook
paper that someone had torn out. On it, written in another hand in ballpoint
pen, Edie made out a single word in English: salt. She folded the paper and put
it in her pocket, inspected the snowbie and decided then and there to head for
home.

    On
the way back to Autisaq the
puikaktuq
appeared again. For a moment it
was unmistakeably Joe. There was something about the expression on his face
that shook her.

    When
she got back home she poured herself a stiff drink, then another. If Taylor had
meant to shelter in the ice cave, why was his body so far from it? Had he known
whoever shot him? Was he trying to hide the pages of old paper and the note
reading 'salt'? The more she thought about it, the more she felt herself being
sucked into something she hadn't bargained for and didn't understand.

    The
next day the
puikaktuq
invaded her dreams and she woke afraid, tears
running down her cheeks.

    By
the time the school bell rang to signal the end of the day, she was seriously
worried. She'd done nothing with what she'd found out at Craig and she felt as
though she might be going crazy. She thought of going to Koperkuj, who had a
reputation for being a shaman, but she didn't want to see him again just yet.