The Stranger on the Ice

by Bernadette Calonego

  “Awesome! So he knows her?”

  “No, not really, but his girlfriend does. And she also knows Gisèle . . . or did know her.”

  Valerie scratched Hector behind the ears.

  “When was Sedna in Dawson?”

  “End of February. He gave me his girlfriend’s name. She works as a waitress in the Downtown Hotel. You know the one, where they serve a dead toe in whiskey.”

  Valerie glanced over to see Trish and Carol disappearing into the main building of the ranch. Souvenirs-and-coffee break.

  Faye was very excited.

  “She still has her wild-colored hair. He confirmed it. Though he didn’t know what she was planning to do.”

  Faye knelt down next to Valerie and the dog.

  “We need to talk to Scott’s girlfriend.”

  Valerie stood up and gave Hector a farewell pat.

  Faye was unstoppable.

  “You know what this means, don’t you? Sedna isn’t wearing a wig or something. She isn’t in hiding.”

  They walked on the trampled-down snow to the log lodge, where Valerie took off her hat and gloves.

  “So that’s the way it is,” she said. “Now, who in the hell is Phyllis Crombe?”

  CHAPTER 14

  The door opened once again.

  Clem really didn’t feel like having more visitors. The doctor had prescribed rest, rest, and more rest. Why were all these people being let in to see him? He’d really have to complain to the nurse on duty.

  All of Inuvik seemed curious to see Clem Hardeven in his miserable state. Even John Palmer of the RCMP dropped by, although that was to be expected. But Clem wasn’t much help to the officer. Everything had happened so fast, and all of a sudden, he was unconscious. What could he tell Palmer? He wasn’t aware he had any enemies in Inuvik. He always steered clear of brawls and altercations. Nevertheless, could he really say whether or not certain people harbored a secret grudge against him?

  Palmer let Clem know that Helvin still hadn’t turned up. The RCMP apparently didn’t have the foggiest notion where he might be. Clem told Palmer the location of Helvin’s hunting cabin, but the police had already searched it. No trace of Helvin West.

  Clem welcomed some visitors more than others. Helvin’s foreman wanted instructions concerning the Ice Road. The three kids who’d found Clem lying on the frozen ground and had gone for help just wanted to check on him. Good boys. All three were Inuvialuit kids. Clem promised them the new video game they were dying to have.

  His pal Phil Niditichie found time for a brief visit before flying to Whitehorse. As always, Phil couldn’t hold his tongue.

  “So, a concussion. You know what that means? No work, no TV, no racing, no sex.”

  “Fuck off,” Clem muttered.

  He was secretly happy that it was only a mild concussion. A snow pile had broken his fall.

  The face that came into his field of view was the last one he expected to see.

  Toria. Helvin’s wife.

  She’d thrown her parka and ski pants over her right arm and held her hat and gloves in her left hand. Toria was one of those women who didn’t confine herself to shapeless winter clothing; she dressed in fashionable, revealing clothes. She was wearing a tight, melon-colored cashmere sweater with a plunging neckline. Toria had once been the reigning beauty in Inuvik. Her ancestors were German and Inuvialuit, and this mixed heritage had found its supreme combination in her. But her generous consumption of alcohol and nicotine had begun to leave visible traces in her evenly proportioned face. As she neared Clem’s bed, he couldn’t help but notice her swollen eyes.

  “You look awful,” she said. “Did somebody kick your face in?”

  He wanted to shake his head but remembered in time that anything of the sort was prohibited.

  “No, I simply hit the ground . . . after somebody whacked me on the head.”

  She stopped at the end of his bed.

  “Jesus Christ, Clem! What the hell’s going on in this damn town?”

  “You’re asking me, Toria?”

  He avoided eye contact and looked out the window at the blue-and-red facade of the other hospital wing. The sky was overcast, but there was no wind. The flag of the Northwest Territories drooped from the flagpole.

  “I want to hear it from you. Where’s Helv?”

  “No idea. Wish I knew. Why didn’t you phone me first, before the cops?”

  She crossed her arms, emphasizing the curves of her breasts.

  “This time it’s different. I don’t think he’s chasing a woman.”

  Clem slowly turned his injured head in her direction. Their relationship had been awkward for some time. Ever since she’d thrown herself into his arms and tried to seduce him because Helvin had once again picked up a tourist from Sweden or Switzerland or wherever the blondes of this world come from. Clem had only wanted to comfort her. Not that it hadn’t been enjoyable when Toria’s body snuggled against him. She made no bones about desiring even more concrete comforting. But she was his boss’s wife, for Chrissake! That was a problem he could very well do without.

  She walked to the other side of the bed. For a few seconds, he was afraid she’d sit on it. But she began pacing up and down the room instead.

  “I don’t know what he’s got up his sleeve. He . . . he thinks the gas pipeline will never get built. He’s bet all his hopes on it. And his money. Our money. All those outlays for machines that are rusting away before his very eyes.”

  None of this was news to Clem. He’d warned Helvin time and again not to invest any more cash until it was clear that the oil company would go ahead with the project. Helvin just laughed at him.

  “You’ve got to think big, man. You’ll never have any success if you aren’t the first to get in there. If you hesitate, then other people are gonna shoot right past you. And I know how to prevent that, believe you me.”

  Clem waited for Toria to divulge more. But she held back.

  He tossed out a baited hook.

  “Did you get the pickup back from the cops?”

  “You can’t really believe he had anything to do with that woman! With that Gisèle. He was in bed with me the whole night. He’s got an airtight alibi. She stole our truck.”

  Her face crinkled up with rage.

  “And just so you know: the RCMP has hauled Pihuk in for questioning. That Gisèle woman went to have a rendezvous with him that night on the Ice Road.”

  Clem was silent. He cursed his helplessness. He wanted more than anything to get up and run out of the room.

  What Toria told him made no sense. Gisèle was interested in shamans like Pihuk and in meeting him, but how could she have stolen the truck? How could she have gotten into the Suntuk Logistics compound all by herself? Maybe somebody took her there. And then there was Pihuk. If he really was a suspect, then he was caught in a trap. Somebody had to help the poor bastard. And Clem knew exactly who could do it. But for that, he’d have to get out of this damn hospital.

  Toria was now in high gear.

  “Helvin’s an idiot at times, but he never does anything illegal. Last summer he lent his pickup to that woman from Vancouver,” she said, smoothing down her sweater. It was not long enough to cover her derrière or anything else in those revealing leggings.

  Was she talking about Valerie? He felt a pain in his stomach.

  “Didn’t Val tell you? She’d get so upset when her friend would disappear for days at a time.”

  Sedna. Toria meant Sedna. So Helvin had a hand in that. Toria’s anger revealed more than she’d intended. When he looked at her exhausted face, he found more than worry over Helvin’s probable dalliance with a woman. He could see that she was genuinely afraid of something. Before he could drill down, the nurse appeared.

  “Visiting hours are up, sorry,” she announced.

  “I’m on my way,” Toria said, picking up her winter clothes.

  “I can’t go looking for him with this concussion,” Clem said apologetically. “Not for the nex
t several days.”

  Toria looked at him with a mysterious glint in her dark eyes.

  “Better for you to stay here. You wouldn’t want to be where I suspect he is now, believe me.”

  With those cryptic words, she left him to himself.

  CHAPTER 15

  Anika Forman carefully placed one foot ahead of the other. She insisted on treating herself to a stroll along the wooden sidewalks of Dawson City to admire its buildings. Glenn Bliss and Jordan Walker each held an arm so that she could keep her balance on the icy boards. Valerie had never had a single person on her tour who didn’t love the atmosphere, shrouded in mystery, of this historic gold-mining town. And everyone loved the raised pedestrian sidewalks, which looked just the way they had in the pioneer days, when asphalt streets didn’t exist—just dirt on fine days and mud on rainy ones.

  Anika refused to be treated like an old lady. But she liked the “Calgary boys,” as she called them.

  Valerie led her tour through the streets, past buildings from the gold rush years. Her favorite photographic subject was the old bank by the iced-over Yukon River. In Dawson City—shortened to “Dawson” by the locals—there were several carefully restored dwellings; others were near the point of collapse, but they helped keep the city from looking like a sterile, open-air museum. In the golden evening light of the winter sun, the decaying mustard-colored facade of the former bank was resplendent in its former glory, in spite of the boarded-up windows beneath the neoclassical molding. Like an aging actress in flattering light is how Valerie saw it.

  Her group was in a good mood. Valerie heard lively chatter and laughter, which cheered her heart. They walked past large heaps of snow bordering the streets until Valerie stopped in front of a frame house that had lines of poetry painted on the wall. The poet’s name, Robert W. Service, was written under them; he was obviously known to her little group. “The Spell of the Yukon.” Paula Kennedy recited the inscription as if she were in front of her class; nobody interrupted her.

  The poem told the tale of a prospector who grubbed around in the muck like a slave for years, suffering sickness and hunger, sacrificing his youth to the gold rush—all in the mad hope of getting rich. This fable had lost none of its appeal after more than a hundred years. The narrator in Service’s famous ballad finally made his fortune in gold—and was disenchanted all the same. Gold and wealth didn’t deliver the contentment, happiness, and joie de vivre he’d been promised.

  “And somehow the gold isn’t all.” The first stanza ended with this line. Paula recited the rest of the ballad, resolutely and with the pathos of a star onstage. She even took off her cap in spite of the biting wind. Anywhere else she might have been embarrassing, Valerie thought, but here, where the drama had played out almost a hundred and twenty years ago, everybody was all ears. After Paula spoke the final line and tossed back her gray pageboy haircut to great effect, the tour members all applauded with enthusiasm.

  “Just think: that guy wasn’t even a prospector,” Jordan piped up.

  “Who? Robert Service?” That was Trish.

  “Yep. He worked in a bank in Whitehorse. He wasn’t in Dawson for the gold rush but only several years later. He could very well claim he didn’t give a hoot about gold. It was with his poems that he made his fortune so he could retire to the French Riviera.”

  Valerie was impressed. She’d recommended Service’s works to everyone, as well as the books of the legendary Jack London, who tried prospecting for gold in Dawson for a short time.

  After Jordan’s remarks Paula followed suit, adding, “That’s right. He came to Dawson later, when he was already a writer. When was that, Valerie?”

  “Nineteen oh eight,” she replied, retaking her role as tour guide. “The Klondike gold rush lasted from 1896 to 1899. During that time, over thirty thousand people lived in Dawson, mostly Americans. There are only about two thousand people living year-round in Dawson today.”

  Then she added a juicy detail that always elicited bemused amazement from the tourists: “During the gold rush, there were only three toilets for all those people.”

  The group’s lively reaction didn’t disappoint her.

  “Only a very few got rich . . .”

  “Besides Service and Jack London,” Jordan interjected.

  “That’s right. Most of them came to Dawson too late. The land claims had already been granted by the time they arrived. And of the hundred thousand people who tried to get here, only half of them made it to their destination. As few as twenty thousand registered their claims around the creeks. Even those men came away empty-handed. Perhaps three hundred of them found enough gold to get wealthy. And just like lottery winners, most of these lucky devils squandered their wealth right away and wound up with nothing in the end.”

  While she was talking, she felt the tip of her nose getting colder and colder. But since six pairs of eyes were on her, she concluded her little speech.

  “The people who really earned a lot of money were the owners of the brothels, shops, and saloons. Many of them lived far away in Vancouver and Seattle and San Francisco. That’s where the prospectors had to buy their gear and food supplies.”

  Paula piped up again.

  “The police forced the prospectors to buy enough food and equipment to survive the winter, right?”

  “Unless they died in ships’ accidents or in the mountains before winter even started,” Anika chimed in, indicating that she too had done her homework for the trip. “I need an invigorating brew, or I’ll freeze on the ground.”

  “Well, it might be time for the sourtoe cocktail,” Glenn shouted, though he was otherwise reserved; frost had formed on his mustache again. Valerie was convinced he was kidding because she couldn’t imagine that he was so keen on this bizarre tourist ritual.

  But everyone else was for it. They didn’t meet a soul on the icy path to the Downtown Hotel. After they’d turned onto Second Avenue, a dark SUV overtook them, then parked behind another dark SUV at the curb. Valerie saw a man get out of the second vehicle and go into the first one. Her temperature shot up. In the milky glow of the streetlights, she thought she recognized a face. But she couldn’t make out any faces behind the frosted-up windshield.

  In the hotel bar, she quickly drew Faye aside.

  “I need to make an urgent call,” she said quietly. “Can you watch my group?”

  “Of course.” Faye gave her a thumbs-up. “I confess I haven’t a clue how this crazy ritual with a toe in whiskey works.”

  “Don’t worry. The bartender will regale you with the history of the old custom and teach you how to deal with the mummified toe.”

  “You mean we don’t chew it up and swallow it?” Faye grinned. The whole business was obviously fun for her, Valerie noted with relief.

  One less thing to worry about.

  The tour group was already encamped at the bar inside, where a young female bartender Valerie didn’t know was reciting the legend about the wizened toe. Valerie had heard it over and over. A human toe was preserved in salt when not in use, and then, when the tourists showed up, it was dropped into a whiskey-filled glass, where it swam around merrily. A customer wishing to become a member of the Sourtoe Cocktail Club had to drain the glass to earn the appropriate certificate.

  “The toe must touch your lips,” the woman behind the bar said emphatically.

  The whole group accepted the dare, and Jordan and Glenn continued shooting a video to document it all for posterity. Valerie sneaked out into the corridor and called Clem’s number. If he didn’t want to be disturbed, she could at least leave a message. But he answered quickly and seemed pleased to hear her voice.

  “Finally, a ray of light in my drab days.”

  “How are you doing? Are you still in the hospital?”

  “No, they kicked me out as fast as possible. Too many patients, too few beds. Where are you?”

  “I’m in Dawson, and I think I saw Helvin.”

  A few seconds of silence. Then Clem said, �
�Tell me exactly what you saw.”

  Valerie tried. Clem’s voice seemed to come from far away.

  “What did he have on?”

  She gave it some thought. Nothing that had attracted her attention.

  “Anything on his head?”

  “No.”

  “So he climbed out of one car and got right into another?”

  “Yes. I only saw his face for a split second. Maybe he’s got a double.”

  Now she was having second thoughts about whether she should have alarmed him. But Clem was hooked.

  “Can you go back and get the license plate numbers on the cars? And can you inform the Dawson police?”

  “The police? Oh wow! Clem, I can photograph the license plates. But I’d rather not have anything to do with the police.”

  “You did absolutely the right thing. Keep me posted, Snowy Owl.”

  He’d given her this nickname when she first came to Inuvik in a white ski suit with black piping. He’d teased her, saying, “Good camouflage for the snow, but unfortunately not the best color if you want them to find you in the Arctic.” The next year she wore a bright orange down jacket.

  Valerie glanced back at the bar, where the sourtoe madness was going full tilt. Anika posed for Jordan’s camera with her whiskey glass and the mummified toe to her lips.

  “Touch it! Touch it! Don’t bite!” the rest of them yelled. Glenn was the only one hovering in the background; a cautious smile played around the corners of his mouth—just the way she’d imagined an English gentleman would smile. Faye was directing the whole show, and Valerie felt a warm wave of gratitude rising in her.

  She hurried out onto the street, where she saw one of the SUVs some distance away. When she got close, she didn’t see anything moving or hear a sound. She took her cell phone out of her purse, where she’d wrapped it in a warmer, and had just bent down when she heard the car door open. She quickly stood up and saw two men coming at her. Neither one was Helvin. She slid her hands in her pockets because she had no gloves in spite of the cold.

  “What are you doing there?” one of them asked. “Are you photographing the car?”