The Bone Seeker

by M. J. McGrath

  Derek’s voice called to her. He was standing on the deck beside the detachment front door with a mug in his hand. She climbed back up the steps towards him.

  ‘That whisky,’ she said. ‘I didn’t, did I?’

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘When I got back from the airstrip you were going through the cupboards, remember? I emptied it down the sink. You came back from Charlie Salliaq in a strange mood, Edie. You took a sleeping pill. You told me you’d taken it from Charlie Salliaq’s room.’

  The evening’s events were beginning to come back to her. Last night it had all been getting to her. She rubbed her face with her hands.

  ‘Maybe we’re out of our depth, like Klinsman said.’

  ‘Klinsman is a condescending prick.’ He passed her his mug of coffee. She took a long gulp and remembered why she preferred tea, but it woke her up.

  ‘You said that about Chip Muloon.’

  ‘Something about the Arctic attracts them. All that space to stretch out their egos.’

  She laughed and pressed past him through the door into the office. Then she remembered where she’d woken up. She twisted her head to meet his eye. He caught her meaning.

  ‘I like to think you would have remembered if we had.’ He winked. ‘We thought it would be safer for you to sleep here from now on, remember?’

  The phone rang. Derek went over to his desk and picked up. He flipped on the speakerphone and got Edie’s attention.

  ‘I’m at the airport at Iqaluit.’ Anna Mackie’s voice. In the background they could hear a PA system announcing a flight. ‘I’ve decided to take unpaid leave until this blows over.’ She tailed off. When she spoke again it was softly, with the slight reverb that comes from holding your hand over your mouth. ‘Listen, the D-men came back while I was up in Kuujuaq with you guys. They took Martha Salliaq’s body away to a military morgue. Ransom dealt with it. I asked him why and he said it was a safety hazard. Radioactive contamination. Must have come from the water at Lake Turngaluk.’

  There was another announcement on the PA.

  ‘That’s my plane. I’m sorry.’ The line went dead.

  Derek and Edie sat for a moment in silence, their minds slotting pieces of the puzzle together, making the connections.

  ‘The Defence Department didn’t want anyone with access to Martha Salliaq’s body to start asking the wrong kind of questions,’ Derek said. ‘That’s why they took over the investigation. It had nothing to do with protecting an individual. It had to do with protecting the Defence Department.’

  ‘We should talk to Toolik Pitoq,’ Edie said. ‘He was there when the Glacier Ridge fire happened. We might reach the point where we need another witness.’

  ‘What was that you said about being out of your depth?’

  Edie met his wink with a grin.

  ‘Turns out I’m a better swimmer than I thought.’

  • • •

  On their way over to the Pitoqs’ house they ran into Markoosie, who was just setting out to host the morning radio show.

  ‘Your father in?’ Derek said. ‘We need to ask him some questions.’

  ‘About what?’ Markoosie took the cigarette Derek offered him. The two drew the smoke deeply into their lungs.

  ‘Glacier Ridge stuff, way back.’

  Markoosie shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘I guess you know old Toolik can be a bit forgetful. Isumairutijuq.’ The Inuktitut word for ‘dementia’ sounded more forgiving than the English. It was often said the elderly were closer to the spirit world. In the old times people with isumairutijuq might have been shamans. Markoosie went on, ‘But he’s better with things that happened a long time ago so you should be OK.’

  Toolik Pitoq was sitting in a chair, idly carving a piece of soapstone into what looked like the figure of a shapeshifter, part man, part goose. In the corner an Oilers vs. Senators game was proceeding unwatched on the TV. The old man looked up as they entered, an enquiring look on his face.

  ‘It’s Sergeant Palliser,’ Derek said.

  Toolik lifted a hand as if to bat him away. ‘Oh I know who it is. The Lemming Police. And the woman from Autisaq. What do you want?’

  Edie saw Derek press his lips together and frown. Edie sat down and took the old man’s hand.

  ‘You remember working with Charlie Salliaq at Glacier Ridge, elder?’

  Toolik sighed. ‘Hard. Our families went hungry. We had no time to go hunting. Even if we had, the men at the station had already hunted out all the game. They liked to corner musk ox so they huddled into a defensive circle round their young. Then they’d machine-gun them. They thought it was funny.’

  ‘Do you remember the fire?’ Edie said.

  Toolik nodded slowly. ‘We don’t talk about that,’ he said.

  ‘Charlie Salliaq has talked about it.’

  ‘He has?’ Toolik seemed confused for a moment, then a spark came into his eyes. ‘Oh well, see, a long time after, when they came back, they said I could do a temporary job. There was this oil or sludge and they wanted me to scrape it up. Something came off it that made it hard to breathe. They always said wear gloves and a mask but they never gave us any. Hard as hell to get off your hands. They piled it all up, dug out the bowl in the ground, and buried it again.’ He coughed, as if the fumes were still swirling round him. Edie thought about what Charlie had said to her, that history bled through into the present. That was how it was for Tooliq now. So much history had bled through it was hard for him to know what belonged to now and what to the past.

  He rattled on. ‘We didn’t like it, but you know, it was hard enough just to survive in those days. A day after the fire, me and Salliaq and a couple of the others who’d been laid off went hunting. We were wondering how we were going to feed our families. We went down to the beach, by the cliffs. A pod of beluga had gotten washed up. Just lying on the beach, they were. Already dead but fresh and not a mark on ’em. Never seen anything like it before or since.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Oh, we had a field day. A whole year we lived on those beluga.’

  ‘You think you might let the nurse do some tests on you, Toolik? Maybe take some blood?’

  The old man shrugged and held out his skinny arm. Edie noticed an abrasion inside the crook of his elbow. It was pretty crude, more like a slice in the arm than a needle mark. ‘How did you come by that there?’

  Toolik gazed at the wound and said nothing. He took a long draught from a cup on the table and began to drift, striking up a tuneless humming.

  ‘Oh, no, my son never got over losing that girl,’ he said, finally. ‘Now then, Martha. Where’s my lunch?’

  36

  Derek met Rashid Alfasi’s parents at the landing strip and brought them directly to the nursing station. They had travelled for the best part of twenty-four hours to reach Ellesmere from Vancouver and were sallow from the journey; the father, craggy-faced, holding up his small, plump wife whose legs trembled with grief or exhaustion. At least they had a body to bury, Edie thought. Right now the Salliaqs had nothing. Edie made them tea and sat with the mother while her husband went to the morgue to formally identify his son. They had brought flowers and wanted to lay them at the spot where Rashid had died, so while Luc Fabienne and Joe Oolik loaded the body into a crate in preparation for the flight, Derek took the bereaved parents out to the trout lake and Edie returned to the detachment to do some more research.

  She moved over to Derek’s computer and entered three words into the search engine. Strontium, tritium, caesium. Unfamiliar words for which there were no Inuktitut translations, words that felt heavy on the tongue. It felt bad keying in the word Arctic beside them, as though, even as symbols, their proximity had the power to contaminate. She pressed enter and sat back.

  To her surprise pages and pages of links appeared. Most of them, it seemed, had to do with submarines and the Soviet Union. She ran her eyes down until s
he came to a word that caught her attention. Aleut.

  Inuit, Eskimo, inhabitants of the Arctic. Her own people.

  She clicked on the link. A page scrolled up with another unfamiliar word: Amchitka, an island, as it turned out, one of many in the drowned mountain range known as the Aleutians, far off the Alaskan coast. She read on. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the islands had been the remote domain of Aleut fishermen and Russian sea otter trappers. Their fate changed in 1942 when the Japanese captured two of the islands in the chain, Attu and Kiska. Not long afterwards the United States established a beachhead on Amchitka from which they launched an offensive to recapture Attu. According to the web page three thousand Aleuts and soldiers from both sides were killed in the battle. Edie turned that number over in her head. It contained another word that had no equivalent in Inuktitut. Thousand. In her language there was only one, two, three and many. The way Inuit had survived for so long on the vast expanses of the Barrenlands was by keeping themselves small. This was another thing qalunaat didn’t understand. Perhaps they were beginning to understand it. But perhaps it was too late.

  It was certainly too late for Amchitka. In 1965 the US Defence Department exploded a nuclear device on the island that caused radioactive contamination of its freshwater lakes. This was kept secret. Edie thought about Lake Turngaluk, the lake no birds would fly over, the lake of evil spirits whose waters poisoned the body of Martha Salliaq. The lake that, for forty years, no one would talk about.

  But that wasn’t the end for Amchitka. Four years after the first explosion, the Atomic Energy Commission, which had taken over responsibility for nuclear testing, detonated a calibration device which triggered earthquakes and landslides. You might have thought this would be enough to have stopped them, Edie thought, but it wasn’t. On 6 November 1971, in project Cannikin, the AEC detonated the largest underground nuclear test bomb in US history on Amchitka, a bomb 385 times the size of Little Boy at Hiroshima.

  The bomb was placed in an underground concrete chamber.

  It was like finding the perfect snowflake in the midst of a storm. The one precise, orderly explanation, the vanishing point in the chaos. What else could explain the sudden expansion of the site at Glacier Ridge, the anomalies in the plans, the secret underground bunker, the fire and the dead whales, the banning of tests on animal bones, Charlie Salliaq’s leukaemia and finally, but by no means least, the transfer of Martha Salliaq’s body to a military morgue and the Defence Department’s determination to close the investigation into her murder?

  She sat back, her breath heavy in her chest, and there was a sudden coldness in her belly as though she’d been lying on ice. Officially, she saw now, none of it had ever happened.

  But Charlie Salliaq was witness to the fact that it had.

  • • •

  She went back to the old man’s room and found him sleeping soundly. She whispered his name, stroking his face with her finger. It was only when she began to sing that he woke and, opening a single eye, said,

  ‘Is that you, Lemming Police’s girl?’

  ‘Yes, avasirngulik.’

  He chuckled. ‘You sing like a goose.’

  ‘Then you’ll prefer it if I talk.’ She told him everything. The plans, the bunker and the Cannikin test at Amchitka. The irradiated water, the unholy trinity and the bone seeker. She told him about the memorandum and the animal bones. Last, but most important, she told him about the removal of his daughter’s body, the attempt to sweep her death away as though it was of no importance.

  He listened in the Inuit way, intently and without comment. The last part would hurt him terribly, she knew, but she thought it might save him too. Sometimes it worked that way. He let her finish. Then he gave a sigh and said, wearily, ‘Qalunaat have always done whatever they wanted in the Arctic.’

  She pressed her lips together and squeezed her hands into fists in her lap so that he would not see them. For all his talk about the past Charlie Salliaq had been one of the few who had been able to shrug it off. A strong man who had refused to be timid. A warrior disguised as a janitor. And now she needed him to wake up from his dying slumber and fight.

  ‘I thought Charlie Salliaq was in this room,’ she said. Her voice had pebbles in it.

  The old man rolled his foggy eyes. He gestured towards the nightstand to have his water cup passed. He took a long sip from the straw and lay back. His chest began to spasm.

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said, ‘ask Sonia Gutierrez to help you.’

  ‘You are the witness, Charlie. We need you. The Defence Department took a calculated risk at Glacier Ridge. They figured we wouldn’t stand up for ourselves and no one else would give a damn. Nothing will bring Martha back, avasirngulik, but we won’t ever know for sure who killed her until we confront the people who are trying to make her death unimportant. Take the blood transfusion and help me, avasirngulik. Help Martha.’

  The old man’s brow furrowed. He let go of her hand.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said simply. ‘Leave me alone now, Edie Kiglatuk.’

  • • •

  Luc was on the phone in his office. He waved at Edie to help herself to a hot beverage in the waiting room while he finished the call. Moments later, he joined her, yawning and rubbing a hand across his head.

  ‘Not sleeping?’

  ‘The damned light. It’s like being interrogated twenty-four hours a day for four months. How do you stop yourself going crazy?’

  ‘It helps if you start out that way.’

  Luc smiled. ‘In case you’re wondering, Derek is up at the landing strip, seeing off the Alfasis’ flight. He asked me to take a blood sample from Toolik Pitoq. I’m afraid I haven’t gotten around to it yet. It’s been crazy busy. But it’s next on my list, I promise.’

  She thanked him, then remembered the injury to Pitoq’s right arm and asked Luc to check it out while he was at it.

  • • •

  On her way back to the detachment she noticed the door flap of her tent was moving softly in the wind. She was usually meticulous about roping it down to keep stray huskies or foxes from raiding her food stores. She parked up her ATV and went over to check it out. Inside, nothing seemed to have been moved or taken, but she had the uneasy feeling that someone had been in nonetheless. She thought back to Klinsman’s visit and wondered where Chip Muloon was now. A vehicle pulled up alongside and she heard Derek shouting her name. She poked her head out of the canvas.

  ‘I swung by the store on my way back. Thought I’d make hamburger. You want some?’

  The plane came up and over the houses, sucking the air below into its slipstream. They waited for it to pass.

  ‘Alfasi’s parents are going back to Morocco,’ Derek said. ‘They say this place makes their blood freeze.’

  ‘Funny, it makes mine boil.’ The way Edie said this brought an enquiring look from Derek.

  ‘I’ll fill you in over lunch.’

  • • •

  As it turned out, Derek’s idea of making hamburger was to empty the meat out on a plate raw, stick a fork in the top and open a jar of pickles. She picked at the food without any appetite, telling him what she’d discovered and venturing her theory about nuclear testing. As she went on he began to eat more and more slowly until at last he put his fork down for the final time.

  ‘I’ve suddenly lost my appetite,’ he said.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘This must be what Gutierrez got close to before she disappeared,’ she offered. ‘Since he was being paid by the Defence Department I’ll bet that was what Chip Muloon was working on. Long-term health outcomes. Maybe Rashid Alfasi was in on it too.’ An image of the jellyfish sprang to mind, its tentacles reaching out across the beach.

  Derek pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette, then stubbed it out.

  ‘I really should give this up,’ he said. Seeing Edie’s
expression he added, ‘I mean, the smokes.’ In the last couple of days he had stopped shaving and he was now scratching the stubble on his chin, which, being half Inuit and half Cree, was dark and sparse.

  The phone went. It was Luc.

  ‘Old Salliaq seems to have changed his mind. He says he’s willing to fly out to Ottawa for a blood transfusion and a possible bone-marrow transplant. I’ve spoken to Applebaum and he’s contacted the city hospital there. They’ve got a bed waiting for him.’

  Edie felt herself smile.

  The old man couldn’t resist a fight.

  Derek said he would ask Pol to make a quick turnaround in Iqaluit and head directly back.

  There was a pause. ‘One other thing,’ Luc said, ‘there’s been some kind of mix-up with my blood samples. I’m not sure how it could have happened. I just came back from taking blood from Toolik Pitoq. You asked me to see if I could find anything wrong with his white cell count so I had a quick look at his medical records. As you probably know, the records don’t go very far back . . .’ The sound of voices interrupted his flow. Luc mumbled something, then returned to the phone. ‘Some patients just arrived so I gotta keep this brief. Toolik Pitoq is blood group A. He’s pretty anaemic and there appears to be an abnormality in his white cells. As a precaution, I checked his son’s records, just to see if Markoosie had been diagnosed with anything. These things often run in families. Markoosie’s blood is AB. Which kinda surprised me because I was pretty sure when I’d taken that elimination sample from him last week, he was group A. I checked out that injury you talked about, Edie, and it looked like someone had made a little incision into a vein. When I asked the old man about it he just went quiet. Any case, I got out the backup sample I always take in case the original gets lost and tested it again. Either the written records are wrong, which is possible, or that blood sample Markoosie gave us last week wasn’t his. Which got me to thinking . . .’

  Derek was leaning over the phone now, his elbow in the forgotten plate of meat.