Melt

by Robbi McCoy

  Sonja frowned. “Are you really that big of a prude? Make whatever rules you want for yourself, Jordan, but this is none of your business!”

  Jordan made a conscious effort to stifle her rage, but she could sense it was futile.

  Sonja got to her feet and appeared to relax. “Look,” she said, dropping the antagonism, “nothing happened. I admit I tried to seduce her, but she chickened out. All I did was kiss her. So it’s official. I have now struck out with every lesbian within five hundred miles. But even if we’d finished the job, I don’t know what you’re so upset about. She’s an adult.”

  “You don’t know what I’m upset about?” Jordan was flabbergasted. “This is all just a joke to you, isn’t it? Do you really think it’s okay to seduce a girl who’s in a relationship with another woman? You don’t have any qualms about that?”

  Sonja looked confused. “Huh? Pippa? She’s not in any relationship. She’s never even been kissed if I can judge by what happened here a few minutes ago.”

  Jordan balked, shaking her head. “But you told me she and Kelly—”

  Looking suddenly enlightened, Sonja sucked in a breath. “Oh, right!”

  The contrite look on Sonja’s face gave Jordan her first clue that she had been misled about Kelly and Pippa. Oh, my God! she thought. Pippa has a crush, but Kelly… It all made so much more sense now. Suddenly her head was whirling.

  “They’re not in a relationship, are they?” she asked evenly.

  Sonja shook her head. “Just friends.”

  “Then why the hell did you say they were?”

  Sonja winced at the volume and tone of Jordan’s voice. “I…I just…” She shuffled her feet. “Aren’t you glad I wasn’t trying to steal Kelly’s girl? Pippa just wanted her cherry popped and I was happy to oblige. Just doing a good deed. Or trying to. So no harm done.”

  “No harm done?” Jordan sputtered, her body shaking with rage. “Pack your stuff! I’m sending you home!”

  “What? Why? I didn’t do anything! So I told a tiny lie. What difference did it make?”

  Jordan turned to leave.

  “Jordan!” Sonja begged, grabbing at her arm. “I don’t understand.”

  Jordan wrenched herself free and ducked through the flap to emerge in front of the others who stood gathered around, all three of them looking stricken with disbelief. They had heard every word.

  She brushed past them and took refuge in her tent where she fell onto her cot and lay on her back staring at the green fabric above her, distraught and embarrassed at her behavior. She had behaved like a lunatic. She’d let her emotions overwhelm her, something rare and terrifying that took her back all those years to those disastrous days at Cornell.

  She didn’t like the way she’d been feeling since the night Kelly first showed up in camp. She was distracted and on edge and she wasn’t sure why. So what if there was a good-looking, sexy woman around? It wasn’t like that hadn’t happened before. But it had never affected her like this.

  Now she had to ask herself the same question Sonja had asked her. What difference did it make if Kelly was seeing Pippa or not? She had to get hold of herself. Thankfully, Kelly’s business here was done. She wouldn’t be showing up anymore with her big soulful eyes and her disarming smile.

  Then everything could get back to normal.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Kelly peered at the black-and-white photo in her hands, blown up to an 8 x 10 but still inscrutable. At least to her. This was the clearest of the photos Pippa had shot of the strange markings in the cave. Thin, angular lines formed characters arranged in two rows. Maybe they were words, if she could believe Pippa’s conclusion that these were runic letters. In the enhanced photo, the marks looked less like random scratches than they had before. They were still faint and imprecise, but it was harder to dismiss them now.

  “What’ve you got there?”

  Kelly jerked her head toward the doorway to see Chuck walking toward her in shorts and a short-sleeved T-shirt.

  She handed him the photo. “What does that look like?”

  He stared at it, squinting to correct a mild astigmatism. “Runes,” he said at last.

  She sat at attention. “No doubt?”

  “I’m no expert, but it looks like others I’ve seen.”

  “Can you tell me what it says?”

  “No. It’s like Arabic or Chinese. I can recognize it without being able to read it.” He handed the photo back. “Where’d this come from?”

  “The cave Pippa fell into.”

  “No shit?” Chuck looked suddenly interested.

  “She’s trying to get an archaeologist to come take a look. I wish I knew what this said…if anything.”

  “Why don’t you have Elsa look at it?”

  “Huh?”

  He responded to her confusion with a look of mild disapproval. “To you she may just be a sour old landlady who doesn’t know how to boil a potato. But before she retired she had a long and not completely obscure career as a museum historian. In Nuuk. She’s an expert in Viking culture. I’m sure she’d leap at the chance to solve your puzzle here.”

  Kelly was stunned. How superficial of her, she chided herself, to know nothing of her landlady’s life.

  “I’ll ask her!” she said decisively.

  A few minutes later she was in Mrs. Arensen’s small sitting room. She sat in a threadbare easy chair listening to classical music with her cat Paluaq sprawled on the arm beside her, sleeping. When Kelly handed her the photo, she put on her reading glasses and scrutinized it closely for a long, silent minute. When she looked up, she said, “This is interesting. They are not deep or uniform. Seems like a…how do you say…quickie?”

  “I think you mean a rush job.”

  “Ja, seems like a rush job.”

  “Can you read it?” Kelly asked anxiously.

  Mrs. Arensen nodded, pressing her lips tightly together. “Some of these letters you could take two ways. But, ja, I think so.”

  “Do you think this is authentic? Do you think it’s old, I mean?”

  “Old like Viking age? I do not know. Not from a photo. You have to see the original, see what mold or dirt is in the grooves. And see if you can tell what kind of tool was used. You look in a microscope. It is a complex matter to determine if it is authentic.”

  “But you can decipher the message at least.”

  “Ja. It looks like Younger Futhark period.” Mrs. Arensen’s eyes lit up as she said, “Bring me some paper.”

  Kelly brought a tablet of lined paper and sat on the floor next to Mrs. Arensen’s chair while she unhurriedly drew the symbols on the pad. Paluaq, now awake and curious about what was going on, butted her head into the back of the photo. Kelly distracted her by petting her.

  “Mrs. Arensen,” Kelly said, “I’d be interested in your opinion about what happened to the Viking colonists.”

  “Ja,” said Mrs. Arensen, not looking up from her work.

  “I heard they were assimilated into the native population.”

  “Ja, sure, that is one hypothesis.”

  “Do you think it happened?”

  Mrs. Arensen looked up. “There is not much evidence. But there is not much evidence to support any hypothesis, so it is okay. It is a possibility. I would not discount it.” She waved her pen. “The Norse who were left would have been a tiny number compared to the native people. If they joined them, it is possible they left no mark.”

  “Left no mark? Not even in the DNA of their descendants?”

  “Ah, well, sure, what do I know about DNA?” She rolled her eyes dismissively. “I am talking about culture. Language and customs. Inuit culture shows nothing of the Vikings. But what would they want of Viking life anyway? They would have no use in the Arctic for wool clothing and wooden houses. If they had taken those things, they would have died out too.” She laughed abruptly. “There are a few old Inuit stories told of white people, but they are legends. Some are for sure fiction, so these stories cannot
be used as evidence.” She shrugged and returned her attention to the runes.

  Kelly hoped she could present a translation to Pippa that would please her. Pippa had not returned her calls and was presumably still angry at her for turning down her shocking offer of love. Kelly felt sorry for hurting her and wanted to make it up to her somehow.

  As Mrs. Arensen worked, Kelly tried to imagine what the runes depicted, but she had no idea what a Viking might write on the wall of a cave. Maybe something equivalent to “Kilroy was here.” Or “This is Erik’s cave. Keep out!” Or something more poetic like, “There was a young girl from Elnesvågen…”

  “This is an epitaph,” Mrs. Arensen announced, startling Kelly.

  She rose to her knees to look at the paper with its many notes and scribbles. “An epitaph? Are you sure?”

  “Ja, well, it is the most common thing we see. Stones erected at gravesites. They are all over the northern countries, in Iceland, Norway, the UK, everywhere the Vikings lived. Even after they took the Latin alphabet, they still used runes for gravesites because of the spiritual meaning. They usually say something like, So-and-so erected this stone or cut these runes for so-and-so, daughter or son of so-and-so. Some are long and complicated and some are simple, like this one.”

  “What does it say?”

  Mrs. Arensen read the message clearly. “For Torben, son of Asa.”

  Kelly fell back to a sitting position, a chill running down her spine. “No, no,” she muttered. “It can’t say that.”

  Mrs. Arensen took off her glasses and frowned with indignation. “It is a simple message. Not hard to translate. I have seen hundreds of these.”

  Kelly struggled to recover from the shock of this discovery, her mind immediately grappling for logical explanations for the unbelievable coincidence of the name “Asa” from Pippa’s dream.

  She leaned over the photo and said, “Where does it say Asa?”

  Mrs. Arensen pointed to a series of three characters. “Right here. There is the character for ‘a’.”

  “It looks like an ‘f’.”

  “They do.”

  But it wasn’t possible Pippa’s vision was real!

  Maybe she was better at reading runes than she knew. Maybe, in her fevered state, drawing on subconscious knowledge, she had read this correctly and it had been the seed for her entire dream. Or maybe she had carved this message herself, in her delirium, and didn’t remember. If so, the official analysis would show that these markings were recently made.

  Having latched onto two acceptable explanations, Kelly relaxed. But now she questioned the wisdom of presenting these findings to Pippa. She didn’t want to encourage her fantasy because of the inevitable disappointment she would face when the experts discovered the truth. If Pippa had made this carving herself, she was in for a seriously embarrassing outcome. Kelly was left with the unhappy conclusion that she couldn’t tell Pippa what the runes said after all.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Jordan sat by herself under the kitchen canopy drinking a beer. Fifty yards away, Brian, Malik and Julie played basketball on their makeshift court. The night was mild, still and comfortable. The sky was clear and the sun hung above the horizon, shining a golden orange light across the ice at the head of the fjord. It would have made a lovely picture, Jordan thought, and her mind conjured up an image of Kelly standing on the shore with a camera in hand.

  Sonja wandered in and positioned herself a few feet away, leaning casually against the counter. Jordan ignored her and took another swallow of beer.

  “I’ve just had a very interesting online chat with an old friend,” Sonja announced. When Jordan didn’t respond, she asked, “Do you want to know what it was about?”

  “What possible reason could I have for wanting to know what you were chatting about to an old friend?”

  Jordan was surprised and irritated that Sonja had sought her out this evening. She was still smarting from losing her temper earlier in the day. She was angrier at herself than she was at Sonja, and was embarrassed that all of her students had witnessed her breakdown and were moving gingerly around her as if they were afraid of setting her off again. She had taken dinner in her tent, eager to escape the awkwardness of a group meal. She had expected that Sonja would stay away from her tonight. By tomorrow it would all have blown over and they could go on as before, everybody pretending the whole thing had never happened and Sonja grateful for being given another chance. That was the plan in Jordan’s mind anyway, but Sonja was foolishly pushing her luck.

  “I think you might be interested,” Sonja said smugly. “You see, my friend went to Cornell University. Years ago.”

  Jordan’s interest was piqued, but she kept her eyes on the basketball game. “Good for her.”

  “It was about eighteen years ago, actually.”

  Jordan stiffened and lowered the beer bottle to the table.

  Sonja swung into view in front of her, looking crafty and self-congratulatory. “I was just telling her about our work here and about you. Turns out she recognized your name. You didn’t know one another back then, but she had heard of you. You were at Cornell at the same time. She was just a freshman then and you were a graduate student.”

  “What’s your point, Sonja?” Jordan was beginning to feel queasy, but doing her best to appear unruffled.

  “She told me the whole story. Quite a little scandal, wasn’t it? You and your professor’s wife.”

  “What makes you think the story is true?”

  “I admit it doesn’t sound like you. A sordid love affair with a married woman, the wife of your thesis advisor, no less. But they say you left Cornell right after the story broke. And shortly after that, the Marquettes separated. A couple of details that give the story some credence, don’t you think?” Sonja smiled slyly. “A person could probably dig up a few more details if she worked at it.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “I’m guessing this isn’t something you’re proud of. I’m guessing you wouldn’t like people to know. After all, you’re the cool-headed professional. Never a hair out of place, right? A messy sex scandal wouldn’t fit that image very well, would it? You had to leave Cornell because of it. What would it do to your reputation at Boulder if everybody there knew?”

  Jordan choked down the anger welling up in her. “What do you want?”

  Sonja smiled, a look of subdued triumph in her eyes. “I want to stay. After all, I haven’t actually done anything so awful. I misled you a little bit about Kelly because I wanted you for myself. But it’s not like I did something as reprehensible as, say, have an affair with a married woman.” Sonja lifted her chin haughtily. “Despite what you may think of me, I’m serious about my career. So I just want to stay and finish the job. And I want full credit. An A would be greatly appreciated.”

  “Anything else? No pile of cash?”

  “That’s all. I just want what I deserve.”

  “And if I don’t think you deserve an A?”

  Sonja smirked. “I think you’ll agree that I do.”

  Jordan noticed Malik standing aside from the others at the basketball court, watching with concern. Sonja would tell him regardless, Jordan decided, because of their friendship. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. But would she tell the others? When they got home, would she start the rumor around campus and infect Jordan’s carefully cultivated reputation? She thought of her colleagues, her students, of losing their respect, becoming a laughingstock. If she had to leave Boulder, leave the area, how would she be able to continue her work at the ice core lab?

  Would this old mistake never stop plaguing her?

  She stood and faced Sonja. “If I agree?”

  “Then I won’t tell anybody. Your secret is safe with me, Jordan.” Sonja gazed solemnly into her eyes, implying that they had a special bond between them now. “It’s kind of funny, but I’m glad to find out you were once capable of losing your head over love.”

  Jordan swept past her and walked down
to the dock. The glassy surface of the water reflected the high walls of the fjord on either side, broken only by a couple of small icebergs below the tongue of the glacier. It was colder down here than it was in camp. She stood with her arms wrapped around herself, staring absentmindedly at the water.

  She resented Sonja’s self-righteous remark about her losing her head over love. At least she had said “love.” It wasn’t nearly so harsh or cynical as Marquette’s “piece of tail.” Of course Sonja was glad to know it. It gave her power. But that wasn’t what she meant. Jordan knew what she meant. She was glad to know that The Ice Queen was fallible, that she was not a superior being. She was human, like herself. People liked to see the flaws, as Kelly had said. She had loved Jordan because of her imperfections, not in spite of them.

  People loved the underdog and the runt. Jordan didn’t want love, especially love tinged with pity. She wanted respect. There was no hint of respect left in Sonja. She had defeated her foe, had found her Achilles heel and had brought her down.

  Jordan felt weary. She had spent so much time and energy trying to rise above her youthful mistakes. But there were still plenty of people who remembered, like Sonja’s friend. The worst thing, though, was that Jordan remembered. No matter what she did, no matter what her accomplishments, she could never escape the reality of her own imperfections. The veneer of control that protected her from the woman who could lose her head over love was thin and brittle, like a shallow sheet of ice on the surface of a lake. It was better not tested; the risk of drowning was too real.

  The sound of her students at their game broke into her thoughts. She shivered, realizing she was chilled. She walked back to camp where Sonja stood next to the basketball court watching the others play. Jordan walked up to her and said, clearly and precisely, “I don’t accept your terms.”

  Sonja looked surprised.

  The basketball bounced off the edge of the rim and came toward Jordan. She caught it in both hands. “Do whatever you want,” she said to Sonja. “I really don’t care.”