She still loved her husband, but when he wanted them to move to Paris because of a job opportunity, she panicked. She chose the dumbest excuse to escape her marriage: an affair. The assignations meant little to her, apart from the fact that they were a novel experience. When Matt found out she’d been unfaithful, he said, “You’re not the woman I used to know,” and moved out of their apartment. She still felt an attraction toward him afterward, but there was no going back. She no longer trusted herself in matters of the heart. She wished she could have asked Bella, her stepmother, for advice, but the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s were already apparent, and Valerie didn’t want to bother her with it.
Matt quietly waited for her response on the end of the line.
“I’d like you to tell me something. Why did you go out with my friend Sedna Mahrer?”
“She got in touch with me and asked me,” he said without hesitation.
“How . . . did she find you?”
“I assumed you helped her.”
“No, I had no idea.”
“Isn’t she a friend of yours?”
“I’m not so sure at this point.” Valerie was at a loss about what to think.
Matt continued.
“I met up with her, we went to Cardero’s, and I haven’t laid eyes on her since.”
“She didn’t try to contact you again?”
“No. She didn’t seem very interested in me.”
“Oh.” Valerie struggled to find the right words. “How—”
Matt cut her off.
“I had the impression she wanted to talk about you, Val. She asked me lots of questions about you. And about your family. I have to say, she was very clever about it. Still, I caught on and wasn’t very forthcoming. So you don’t have to worry.”
She knew exactly what that last sentence was meant to convey. Valerie and her twin brothers had had more than enough public attention.
“What did she want to know about me?”
“Your background, your parents, how you grew up—Val, I’m very sorry, I’ve got a meeting. Maybe you should talk to Sedna about it and not me.”
And he was gone.
Valerie waited until the next patrol to confront Sedna. She knew Sedna couldn’t avoid her while sitting in the car.
“Were you with my ex in Cardero’s?” she asked the moment she got into the passenger seat.
Sedna waited just for a second.
“Yes. Why?”
“Why? What were you thinking?”
“I went out with him.” Her voice was perfectly calm.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit . . . out of line?”
Sedna looked her straight in the eye.
“Out of line? Just because you were once married to him? You’re divorced, Val. You left him. He’s free to do whatever he wants.”
“But I confided in you! I told you things about me and Matt.”
“Yes, that’s right. You told me a lot of very nice things about him. So I thought it would be fun to get to know him.”
“You could’ve at least asked for my opinion. That’s what I’d have done if I were you.”
“Val, you’d have found a way to stop us from meeting if you’d known about it beforehand. That’s why I didn’t ask.”
Valerie stared at Sedna. Sedna stared right back with her intense blue eyes.
“If looks could kill,” she muttered.
Sedna stopped the car, and Valerie opened the door and got out.
It crossed her mind too late that she hadn’t asked Sedna why she’d wanted to know so much about her family.
She found out two weeks later that Sedna had gone off on a long journey. And nobody knew where.
CHAPTER 3
Clem Hardeven prowled like a tiger around his little row house from the kitchen to the living room and back because he’d forgotten what he wanted to do. Meteor, his Husky-Labrador mix, lay on his doggie bed, lifted his head, and watched him. Clem was irritated but couldn’t do a thing about it.
Damn, damn, damn.
He couldn’t get anybody on the phone, and if he did, they’d know diddly-squat, just like him. Times are hard when you can’t slam down the receiver in a rage. Would make him feel a lot better right now.
Something was brewing in Inuvik—he’d never felt such tension in the air. He was the man in town who was supposed to know what’s up. He was the manager of the Ice Road. The ice master, the go-to guy. But ever since they’d found that body, he was out of the loop. Literally left out in the cold. It drove him nuts.
He had to know what was going on. Helvin, his boss, was nowhere to be found. Incommunicado. For hours! He wasn’t in the office or at home. Supposedly. His secretary played dumb.
If anybody would know that a dead body had been discovered, it was Helvin West. Nothing happened on the Ice Road without Helvin’s say-so. Clem couldn’t even go out to drill holes to check the ice thickness and see that the Ice Road was safe for heavy trucks without Helvin’s OK. And the secretary told him: No drilling until further notice. And no vehicles on the Ice Road until further notice. It drove him bananas. What the hell was going on? Todd, the truck driver, was keeping his mouth shut. Not a peep out of him about finding the body. Not because of the police investigation either. For sure. Bullshit. There were forces more powerful than the dozen cops stationed in Inuvik. Todd was keeping mum because Helvin had told him to. And that really made Clem antsy.
Otherwise news flew around Inuvik as fast as a seal can dive. It wasn’t so hard in a village of thirty-five hundred people. Maybe Hisham had gotten wind of something.
He put on his snowmobile suit and picked up his jacket. Meteor was already at the door, his tail wagging faster than a windshield wiper in heavy rain. The dog knew what was coming. Clem walked out into the snow and scanned the sky. Gray, but no sign of an approaching storm. The winter had tested the character of Inuvik’s residents more than once. Power outages and frozen pipes. Sometimes for days. Not only the pipes for drinking water but also the sewer pipes that were above ground.
Inuvik seemed to Clem like a mock-up in a human anatomy class: all the pipes and tubes ran outside in front of the buildings for all to see. Like a passel of giant snakes, the interlocking circulatory system was several feet above ground, courtesy of the ever-present permafrost. And the layer of soil above the permafrost moved like a live beast; it froze and expanded in the cold, thawing and contracting when it turned warm again.
Clem’s eyes didn’t burn in the cold as much as they had a week ago.
Four sunny days in a row. Maybe spring was actually on its way.
He drove his snowmobile up to a green building where a sign read, COMPUTER-REPAIRS@NETPOLAT. If rumors were flying around, they made their way to Hisham, the village’s computer-repair technician. Hisham was one of Inuvik’s Muslims who prayed in the northernmost mosque in North America. “The world’s first mosque on permafrost,” Hisham would boast to the tourists. The house of prayer had been donated by a charitable organization in Winnipeg and built in that city, almost twenty-eight hundred miles away. It was then trucked sixteen hundred miles before being floated downstream on the Mackenzie River for the remaining twelve hundred miles. It was the last barge to make it before winter arrived.
“I’d never have allowed that thing on the Ice Road,” Clem had joked, trying to get a rise out of Hisham.
Hisham had responded coolly, “That wasn’t your call. We’d have asked Helvin.”
When Hisham opened his shop door for Clem and Meteor, he didn’t appear to be in a particularly good mood.
“Why am I told nothing?” he shouted. “Did I break the law? I should know exactly what’s happened—I’ve got three daughters after all. They could be in danger!”
How the hell would I know? Clem wanted to say but bit his tongue. He wasn’t used to having to ask for information either.
“The police are investigating, so they can’t go around telling the whole world about it,” Clem said.
“The wh
ole world?” Hisham tossed a computer cable into a corner. “I couldn’t care less about the police investigation. I’m interested in blood.”
Blood. Exactly what Clem now smelled. “Who said anything about blood?”
“Todd found the body. He says he’ll be as silent as the grave. But you know what?”
He spread his arms as if wanting to hug the broad-shouldered man in front of him.
“Todd talks in his sleep!”
He looked at Clem in triumph.
“He spilled the beans in his sleep—his wife heard it.”
“Hisham, for Chrissake, where did you get this crap?”
The pious Muslim ignored Clem’s choice of words.
“She was here with her iPad. Todd talked about a lot of blood. In his sleep. In his sleep!”
Clem got angry all over again. Dammit, that might have been a murder, a murder on the Ice Road, and he knew fuck all about it.
“Is that everything you know?”
“Isn’t that enough? A dead woman and lots of blood! How are my daughters supposed to feel safe from now on?”
“Lock them up in the house, the way you always do when I show up.”
“You can talk, Clem; you don’t have any daughters. Maybe it’s about time you got around to finding a wife. You can’t marry your dog, you know.”
Clem never saw Hisham’s daughters when he went to the Netpolat store, even though they were computer savvy and often helped their father out. His buddy Phil Niditichie, a First Nation Gwich’in, once teased him about it: “You’re a Christian and just too good-looking.” That cost Phil a round of beer in the Crazy Hunter. Clem didn’t take remarks about his good looks lightly, although he was aware that the women in Inuvik—many younger than his thirty-six years—noticed his tall, muscular build and attractive face.
Around the Mackenzie Delta, there was no bad blood between whites and Muslims or the Gwich’in indigenous people, nor between whites and the Inuvialuit, as the Western Arctic Inuit called themselves. No malice, just a whole lot of good-natured joking. And they all were united in the collective implementation of “Delta Time,” which didn’t exist as a time zone in reality but was the universally accepted custom of always being late.
No, there was hardly ever a fight. But now there was a dead woman.
And all Hisham knew was what Todd had supposedly blabbed in his sleep.
Clem opened the door to leave, and Meteor ran out ahead of him.
“Give me a call if you hear something.”
“Inshallah,” Hisham replied.
Meteor had reached the Crazy Hunter before Clem pulled up. The dog was sniffing out the surrounding area as much as possible before the familiar motor of the snowmobile started up again. Clem went into the watering hole that from the outside resembled a garage more than a bar.
The air stank of damp clothing, barbecued hamburgers, and alcohol-soaked breath. Clouds of smoke obscured his sight in defiance of the no-smoking signs.
The customers were crowded around the bar, and it wasn’t yet five o’clock. Clem noticed one pair of eyes after another following him. Everyone looked curious, hungry for news, and more than a few patrons eagerly asked him what he knew. He wouldn’t find the answers he was hoping for in the Crazy Hunter. He quickly scanned the crowd for a face that might promise some more information, then waved to the bartender before making a quick departure.
Outside, Meteor was nowhere to be seen. Clem called him and started his motor. The dog came running and immediately dashed over to the other side of the street where a man was standing. Clem recognized the face under the wolf-fur-lined hood. Lazarusie Uvvayuaq, an Inuvialuk from the town of Tuktoyaktuk, greeted him with a broad grin. Clem drove over and gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder.
“Hey, Laz. Looking for a warm bed?”
Clem prided himself on having discovered Lazarusie’s talent as a hunting and fishing guide for tourists. Maybe not discovered it, but certainly promoted it. He used his connections elsewhere in Canada, especially Ontario, to drum up business for him.
Laz needed the money for his seven children and thirteen grandchildren. Only his adopted daughter, Tanya, and his son Danny were still living at home as far as Clem knew. But Inuvialuit families were tightly knit communities, and grandparents were often the main providers for the children who left home. Clem was deeply indebted to Lazarusie, who had once saved his life when his snowmobile fell through the ice.
“Can’t go home,” Lazarusie said with a laugh, showing several gaps in his teeth. He’d come from Tuktoyaktuk by snowmobile, the whole way across the Ice Road. It was five hours there and back.
“I know, the Ice Road is closed,” Clem said, not revealing that he wasn’t the man behind the closing. Lazarusie knew he could stay at Clem’s; it was a ritual for them.
“The door’s open. Make yourself at home. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
He turned his snowmobile around, but had a sudden thought and stopped.
“When did you leave Tuktoyaktuk?”
Lazarusie casually looked away as he climbed onto his own snowmobile, as if he didn’t know why Clem was asking him that.
“Yesterday.”
A few seconds of silence. Then Clem spoke: “Go to my place and wait for me.”
Lazarusie nodded, and Clem watched him drive away. Meteor followed Lazarusie for a while, then came back panting.
“Meteor, go with Lazarusie, go home,” Clem ordered. “I’m going into the lion’s den.”
CHAPTER 4
“It’s probably garbage. Nevertheless, we still have to tell the police.”
Faye, Valerie’s next-door neighbor in their duplex, sat in an armchair, far enough from Valerie’s bed to avoid breathing her flu germs but near enough not to appear insensitive. She eyed the pile of trash in the room without comment: orange peels, empty yogurt containers, crushed tissues, and damp washcloths. Faye was more than just Valerie’s neighbor: she was worth her weight in gold. When Valerie moved into the left half of the duplex, Faye had introduced herself at once.
“We single women have to look out for each other. We might be lying hurt or dead in the house, and nobody would notice,” she’d announced. Valerie was newly divorced at the time, and this horrific scenario struck a nerve. She’d hardly ever lived on her own. But she didn’t want to cling to Faye and vice versa; she made that clear to her right away. Faye just gave a chirpy laugh and said, “You Canadian women really are afraid of relationships. There’s a practical side to that kind of help.”
Faye did not become a clinging vine. Valerie hadn’t really found out much about her in all their time together, other than her family had escaped poverty and the dictatorship in Haiti and immigrated to Canada. Faye had been a social worker in Toronto before moving to the Sunshine Coast in her early forties and taking up painting. She couldn’t live off her art so she got by doing modest house renovations.
Valerie often caught herself gazing at Faye’s face for too long, because it was a delight to the eye. Valerie envied her neighbor’s long, thick eyelashes, her big eyes, and her sharply defined, full mouth. Faye’s impeccable skin was a shimmery, warm tone like dark honey (Valerie couldn’t describe it in any other way, although it sounded like a cliché). At some point the genes of white colonizers must have mingled with her family’s genes. Her body appeared strong and muscular. Not only did Faye work hard, she really liked to do weight training.
With her slight frame, Valerie would have profited from some muscle training, but she disliked all sports other than badminton and Zumba. Long, strenuous walks were part of her routine, but she felt they didn’t count. Her skin tended to burn in the sun, and she continually applied lip balm to prevent chapped lips. She’d have loved to project the image of a tanned, tall, athletic, blond tour guide in a khaki tropical outfit. She saw herself instead as a fragile ballet dancer, with thin arms (Matt had called them “swan necks”) and small feet. In spite of how she looked, she wasn’t at all fragile, which was someth
ing she constantly had to prove to others. At least she’d been blessed with perfect teeth, olive-green eyes, and evenly arched eyebrows, attributes inherited from her mother, whose beauty had beguiled the best-known athlete in Canada.
But Faye wasn’t aware of all that.
Valerie drew the covers up to her chin.
“It was a weird telephone call,” she said.
“With Sedna, weird is normal; that we know.”
Faye had met Sedna at a Toastmasters club meeting where the women honed their public-speaking skills. Sedna stood out because of her peculiar interests. Such as, why every family ought to own a gun to defend itself.
“She begged me to help her,” Valerie repeated.
“To save her from the clutches of some backwoodsman?”
“She said somebody was trying to kill her.”
“Are you certain that your fever didn’t make you hallucinate?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Where is she?”
“I asked her that but couldn’t hear her response very well. Her voice faded in and out . . .”
“Have you got her cell number? No, wait, it’s in my phone.”
Faye pulled out her cell, typed, and waited, tapping her feet in their black-and-white polka-dotted stockings.
“I texted her. Let me see your phone. I want to know where that call came from.”
Valerie did as requested, but after looking at the display, Faye frowned.
“Unknown number. Not exactly helpful.”
She looked around as if there were a clue somewhere nearby.
“We’ve got to tell the police. And her family. Know anything about Sedna’s family?”
“No.”
Valerie felt like a log drifting helplessly on the ocean. Faye regarded her sympathetically.
“I’ll take care of it. You look like death warmed over. You need to rest and have no more excitement.”
The Stranger on the Ice Page 2