The Bone Seeker

by M. J. McGrath

  She allowed herself a moment of relief but it was soon replaced by a new fear. Her nostrils were now becoming so blocked with drying blood that she was having to breathe through her mouth. Her lips and tongue felt sore and swollen. The swelling would likely continue. Eventually it would block her breathing altogether. The need to divest herself of her binds had suddenly become more urgent. She scoped about, looking for a sharp surface, and spotted a thin, bladed edge in the limestone just under edge of the overhang. Below it, fed by the droppings of birds, was a clump of dwarf willow and saxifrage, which she might use as an anchor. She shuffled over, knelt up and stretched her arms back behind her, but could not quite reach the rocky edge. A slight tremor started up under her feet. She froze and listened out. For a while she could hear only the wind and weather but the sound grew thicker and in it she detected the faint rumble of an engine. Outside the rain had turned to sleet. She felt her stomach turn over and a pulse start up in her head. It had to be Muloon, she thought. No one else would be travelling in weather like this. He was the only person who knew where she was. Had he relented and come to rescue her, or decided it was too dangerous to leave her alive?

  Her immediate thought was not to take any chances. But she could hardly run, not like this, hands and feet tied, barely able to catch a breath. As the engine grew closer, a plan came together in her mind. She stilled her thoughts, channelling the adrenalin into a narrow tunnel of intent. Quietly panting to draw oxygen into her muscles, she found purchase in the clump of willow, counted to three and heaved herself upwards towards the raw edge of the overhang. But something went wrong in her movement, she felt her left toes give and there was a moment when her feet, tightly bound together, kicked out, scrabbling for purchase. She went down again, heavily this time, the right leg twisted under the left, her ankle popping, and she had to bite her lip in order not to cry out with the pain. She sat back, breathing heavily through her mouth, trying not to give in to the dark feelings creeping over her.

  The engine was very close now and she could feel the vibration of the tyres against the rock. Sleet fell thickly, obscuring her tracks. She decided to try to remain hidden under the overhang. There was always a chance Muloon might not find her. The vehicle stopped. She could hear distinct footsteps crunching across the gravel slope, then a sigh and the sound of someone jumping from a height. She tested her sore ankle. It hurt like hell but it could probably still hold her weight. There was a darkening in the gloom inside the overhang and a pair of legs appeared, walking away from her. From her new vantage she could see a man’s hand clutching a hunting knife. Her blood quickened, every muscle tightening, and for a moment her heart felt as though it might burst. The legs swung around and began to move back towards the overhang. A voice started up inside her head. Please don’t let what happened to Martha happen to me.

  The legs stopped. To Edie’s horror she saw a disturbance in the gravel where she’d dragged herself inside. The legs swivelled around then paused. It seemed as though their owner had seen it too. Through the blanket of sleet she could see his fingers tightening around the knife in his right hand, less than a couple of metres from her face. She held her breath.

  Suddenly, the legs folded and Sammy’s face emerged from the gloom.

  ‘Edie!’

  She fell back, crying out in relief. He reached in a hand.

  ‘I thought you were Muloon,’ she said. ‘How the hell did you find me?’

  ‘When it got late and you didn’t come, I went up to the detachment. There was a message from Derek asking you to call, which was how I knew you hadn’t been back. I called him on the number he left for you and he told me to go round to Muloon’s and take a gun. Muloon wasn’t there, so I followed his tracks. Leastwise till the weather started washing them away.’

  She’d slid out from under the overhang on her butt. For the first time, Sammy was looking at her eye to eye. Didn’t much like what he saw. She turned so he could cut the rope on her wrists.

  ‘That icicle qalunaat do that to you?’

  She presumed he meant Muloon. It was a pretty accurate description actually.

  ‘All my own work.’ She put a hand to her face, fingers working around the bloody, crooked bulb that had been her nose. It felt bad and it probably looked worse.

  ‘I guess I’m not gonna make Carnival Queen this year.’

  He began slicing at the rope around her ankles with the serrated blade. She spotted the SOG Seal Team logo on the handle. Same brand as Skeeter Saxby’s.

  ‘That your knife?’

  ‘Believe it or not I found it. There’s some animal bones and a fire circle just down the way. The blade was in a clump of cotton grass. Got tooth marks on the handle. Wolf picked it up most like, smelled blood on it.’

  She shook her limbs and stood up.

  His face was a crumple of concern.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ she said.

  • • •

  Sammy called the top name on the list of first-aiders posted at the entrance to the nursing station then joined Edie inside. Ahnah Oolik appeared shortly after to patch up Edie. While she got to work, Sammy went round to Muloon’s cabin and came back with the not unexpected news that the man had cleared out. His office was empty too. No sign Chip Muloon ever existed.

  When Edie got back to the detachment there were six messages from Derek on the voicemail, each sounding more worried than the last. Edie called the number he’d left. The night desk answered and told her that the sergeant was up at Iqaluit airport and they’d get a message to him. She waited by the phone. Moments later a wired, anxious-sounding Derek came on the line.

  ‘You scared the hell out of me.’

  She filled him in on everything but her injuries. Didn’t feel like telling him she’d busted her own nose.

  ‘Tell the truth, I feel kinda dumb. I couldn’t even get out of him what he was working on. Said I wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘The man always was a condescending prick.’ His tone grew softer. ‘You OK? You sound kinda gummy.’

  ‘Summer cold.’ She glanced at herself in the reflection on the computer screen and wished she hadn’t.

  ‘My guess is Muloon will have gone to Camp Nanook. I don’t think he’ll be bothering you again. Go get some rest, Edie. It’s not over yet. You’re gonna need all the strength you can muster.’

  • • •

  She went back to her tent, exhausted, and found Sammy sitting on the sleeping skins, smoking. She sat down beside him and he put an arm around her shoulder.

  She leaned in to him and allowed herself to be comforted by the warmth of his body.

  ‘I spoke with Willa,’ he said. The smoke from his cigarette curled upwards. ‘I know you two have had your differences, but he’s a good kid, Edie. He has a big heart. Sure, he went off the rails awhile, but he’s straightening himself out. The Rangers, Lizzie, he’s making it work. You need to trust him more.’

  She knew Sammy was right, but that only made it more painful. The first step to trusting the people around her was to trust herself. But that was going to be a lifetime’s work. Maybe more. And right now she couldn’t do anything except rest.

  ‘Let’s get some sleep,’ she said.

  She turned over inside her sleeping bag and lay awake for a while thinking about Willa and Joe and Sammy in the old days, when they were all a family, and she forgot about the pain in her nose and Chip Muloon and even Martha Salliaq and slept.

  She woke to find Sammy sitting in the same corner, wrung-out and smoking, his rifle in his lap. She checked her watch. It was eight o’clock. Sunlight blasted through the canvas.

  ‘You been on guard all night?’

  ‘Most of it.’

  Her hand went to her face. ‘How’s my nose?’

  ‘Like a walrus with a cocaine habit.’

  She got up, stretched and pulled on some outerwear. ‘I’m go
nna make us some breakfast.’ She knew he’d be expecting there to be a renewal of the closeness between them. That wasn’t something she could allow. ‘Why don’t you check the weather? If it’s looking good this might be the day for you to make the trip back to Autisaq?’

  He threw her his wounded look. She returned it with a quiet smile. They’d been through this a hundred times.

  ‘You know how it is when we’re together for any length of time. It starts off OK then one of us opens a bottle. Right now, Sammy, I don’t trust myself not to be the bottle-opener.’

  Outside she took a deep breath. Somewhere beneath the dank, vegetable scent she could already detect the chill, electric tang of winter. Something in her needed to be away from Sammy and from the settlement and back out on the land.

  • • •

  After breakfast she said goodbye to Sammy and, taking the coastal track, drove along to the bird cliffs and parked up on the beach, keying off her ATV. Above her the cliffs thrust skywards. Leaving her vehicle, she clambered up the path to the summit. From here there was a view across the high plateau of Glacier Ridge to where it tumbled down to meet the plain below. Beside her stood an inukshuk – a stone figure – pointing away from Lake Turngaluk. She moved forward, trudging across gravel and lichened rock, scoured and dried by the wind, until she reached the new security fence. From here she could see beyond the remnants of concrete and Cold War rubble to the spot where Martha Salliaq’s body had been found. The surface was cracked and stained rusty brown. She thought about Martha, wondering if this was where she had come to dream, long before she’d met Rashid Alfasi, Jacob Namagoose, Skeeter Saxby or Chip Muloon.

  She walked back to the inukshuk and stood beside it, following the direction of its pointing hand with her eyes, pondering what it was about Lake Turngaluk that made even stone men turn away. A surprising thought filtered into her consciousness and began to take root in her mind and for a long time she was so lost in thought that she didn’t hear the detachment plane until it had passed directly overhead and was banking before making its approach into Kuujuaq.

  By the time she got back Derek’s ATV was already sitting outside the detachment. She stomped up the steps into the office, shouting his name.

  The man himself appeared from the kitchenette a moment later, carrying a tray on which sat two steaming bowls.

  ‘I got us some real food.’ Her face stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘Jesus Jones, did Muloon do that?’

  ‘No, why, you think it doesn’t suit me?’

  ‘On the contrary. If I was a walrus I wouldn’t be able to keep my flippers off you.’

  She laughed and took a bowl from the tray.

  ‘That’s more or less what Sammy said.’

  The food he’d cooked was some kind of hamburger, caribou she suspected, but whatever it was, it took some chewing and the state of her nose made her unable to taste it. While her jaw worked Derek filled her in on his trip to Iqaluit. He’d come back gloomy about the prospects of concluding the case.

  ‘You see those cop shows on the TV where they have a team of forensics and a team of detectives and everyone except the murderer wants to solve the crime. This is kind of opposite to that. A murder investigation where the forensics don’t show up for days, there are no teams of anything and no one gives a shit about solving the crime.’

  Edie swallowed a lump of meat. ‘We do.’

  ‘But we’re not going to solve this crime, Edie, unless we get some kind of breakthrough. All we’ve got so far are leads running into blind alleys.’ Derek rubbed his eyes. His skin was ruddy from the summer sun but where it thinned and at the temples you could see the pallor of exhaustion beneath. He flipped open his pack of cigarettes and pulled one out. ‘If I don’t get some sleep pretty soon I’ll go crazy.’

  She picked up the bowls, put them back on the tray and went out into the kitchen. Her mind ran through the thoughts she’d been having up at Glacier Ridge. She washed up the bowls and put them on the drainer to dry. The sound of raised voices reached her from the other room. Dropping the dishcloth, she came out. Joe Oolik was standing beside the door. He was wet through and dripping. His arms were flailing about and he was trying to say something but he was speaking too fast to be comprehensible. Derek had him by the shoulders and was telling him to calm down. As Edie came into the room Derek’s head swung round to meet her.

  ‘I think he’s found something.’

  Oolik was repeating the Inuktitut word for ‘trailer’.

  Edie strode over to the door. At the bottom of the steps leading from the detachment was Joe’s ATV. A soaked and crumpled tarp lay over the trailer, strapped on with elastic bungees. Edie took one look back then ran down the steps. Joe was shouting at her now, but she couldn’t hear the words above the thick pulse of her own heart. She reached the base of the steps, rushed over to the trailer and pushed the tarp aside.

  Rashid Alfasi’s eyes stared blankly up at her.

  32

  In any normal circumstances it would have seemed beyond doubt that the death of Rashid Alfasi was a suicide. When Joe Oolik found him, face up in shallow water, Alfasi was wearing a backpack weighted with rocks. A thick notebook serving as a diary lay on the table inside his cabin. On top of the notebook he’d left a photograph of Martha Salliaq at the bird cliffs matching the one Edie had found in her bedroom just after her death.

  It would have been usual procedure to take the body to the morgue, inform the next of kin and get started on the necessary administration in the morning. A sad fact of High Arctic life was that young men killed themselves at an alarming rate. But Rashid Alfasi was both a suspect in Martha Salliaq’s murder and on secondment to the military and Derek was concerned that, if he didn’t act quickly, the Defence Department would find some excuse to remove his jurisdiction.

  And so over the next few hours he busied himself with transporting the body into the morgue and making the necessary phone calls to the medical examiner and the police in Vancouver and filling in incident reports and other paperwork. While he worked Edie scanned the pages of the notebook, trying to put together the pieces of Alfasi’s life that might tell the story of his death.

  What was immediately clear was that Rashid Alfasi had been a hopelessly conflicted young man, torn between his identity as a Muslim and the paths he had taken. From Edie’s reading of the notebook, it looked as if two incidents had come together in the same day which, in Alfasi’s view, had made his life unendurable.

  From what Edie could piece together, it seemed that Rashid Alfasi had been seeing Martha in secret for about five months. They met mostly at the bird cliffs and sometimes, when the weather was bad, in one of the abandoned buildings at Glacier Ridge. The meetings were marked in the diary, along with the occasional annotation ‘left flowers’, presumably to mark those times that Martha couldn’t get away but Alfasi wanted her to know he had waited for her. The diary entry on the Friday before Martha died was of particular interest. Long and anguished, the writing by turns compressed and scrawling, it narrated a series of momentous events in Alfasi’s life.

  Alfasi had been working at the weather station. In the afternoon, he had called his parents in Vancouver from the satphone there. It was his mother’s birthday and he’d wanted to wish her a happy day. But the conversation drifted into more painful territory. Evidently, Alfasi hadn’t told his parents about his secondment to the military. But they had found out from Alfasi’s brother. They disagreed with the deployment of Canadian troops in Afghanistan and saw their son’s secondment as a betrayal. Alfasi’s mother had threatened never to speak to her son again.

  This must have been echoing in his head as Alfasi went to meet Martha that Friday after school. According to the notebook, he didn’t tell Martha about the row with his parents. Instead, they talked about Martha’s desire to move to Vancouver and study there. She wanted Alfasi to move with her. They could be marrie
d. ‘I imagined what my mom would say to that and panicked,’ he wrote in the notebook. He told Martha to forget the move because he didn’t want to be with her any more.

  Alfasi had told them the rest of the story when they’d interviewed him. He ran because he knew that his relationship with Martha would be discovered eventually and he supposed that he would get the blame for her death.

  By the time Derek had finished with the papers and Edie had been through the notebook it was early morning. There was no point in trying to get some sleep. Anna Mackie was due to arrive before too long and Derek needed to stay awake in order to make arrangements with the Vancouver Police family liaison. Alfasi’s parents had already decided that they wanted to fly to Ellesmere to pick up their son’s body.

  Derek made coffee for himself and tea for Edie and they sat in the office and talked about Edie’s findings.

  ‘You think he could have killed her?’ Derek asked after Edie had outlined Alfasi’s version of events.

  ‘Unlikely, I’d say. His story adds up. It explains why Martha was upset on Friday night and why she took the Killer Whales to the Shoreline Bar, knowing Alfasi would be working in the Shack at the back. Wanted to make him jealous.’ It also explained what it was she was trying to tell Willa, Edie thought, though she kept this to herself. ‘Namagoose said Martha had told him she’d had a fight with her boyfriend. Turns out he was telling the truth.’

  ‘Any firm evidence as to why Alfasi killed himself?’

  ‘Nothing you can take directly from the notebook. There’s no suicide note,’ Edie said. ‘I had to guess, it was a combination of things. Family disgrace for one. Then the sense that he was about to be accused and bring more shame on his family. Guilt, maybe. If he hadn’t finished it with Martha she wouldn’t have hooked up with Namagoose and Saxby.’