by RJ Corgan
Tiko shook her head in irritation and stalked up the path, leaving Fernando and Kea to follow at a distance. Kea winced. “I never know what to say sometimes. Or, always.”
“It’s not you,” Fernando said quietly.
“Were she and Bruce close?” Kea judged the gap between Bruce and the young Georgian to be at least twenty years and almost two hundred pounds.
Stranger things, she thought.
“Yes and no.” Fernando plunged his hands into his jacket pockets as a fresh gust of air berated them. “He was our manager if that’s what you mean. They’ve already had a rough year, and now this happens.”
“Bruce mentioned something about losing someone else on his team, but not that they, you know, died or anything.”
“What?” Fernando looked confused. “Oh, Andrea? She didn’t- she just didn’t show up one day. I think she moved to one of our competitors. Always happens. She keeps posting about how awesome her new job is on social media. Shame though. Andrea was one of the best.” He seemed to look through Kea, his eyes narrowing. “No, that’s not what she’s upset about.”
“Then...” Kea prompted, feeling like she had lost a thread.
“She saw him kill himself, apparently. She told the police this morning.” Fernando looked at her strangely. “Sorry, I thought you knew.”
***
Kea and Fernando caught up with the rest of the volunteers just as Marcus launched into a new lecture.
“A glacier has two zones,” Marcus began. “The region where ice is being added by snowfall is called the accumulation zone. The ablation zone, on the other hand, is the area further down the glacier where melting is taking place. The line where these two zones meet is called the zone of equilibrium. In the case of a retreating glacier like this one, the equilibrium line is moving further and further upslope. As the line moves up the glacier, more and more of the snout wastes away.”
Kea picked her way through the group as they gathered around Marcus in a loose semi-circle. She noticed that Reynard and Derek had separated from the pack, their heads close together, deep in conversation. Spying Julie at the far side of the group, Kea made her way across to her.
“We’re currently standing in the ablation zone,” Marcus continued, holding up a metal rod. “Our goal is to measure the rate at which the melting is occurring. One way to do that is to drill into the ice and insert ablation stakes and measure how much ice has melted from year to year. The trick is getting the sticks deep enough into the ice...” He put down the rod and crouched next to a cylindrical metal tank.
It occurred to Kea that since Bruce was drilling up on the ice with Marcus yesterday, he may have heard this same lecture. This could have been the last thing he heard before he died.
Poor bastard.
“This is a thermal ice drill and uses butane, just like regular camping stoves.” Marcus tapped the tank. “As it boils water, the steam allows us to drill through the ice with this.” He held up the metal wand. “You could always use a hand borer instead, which is basically like a giant corkscrew, but you can only get down a few meters with one of those. With this baby, we can go down nearly eight meters.” He patted the gray metal casing affectionately. “We have placed several more of these across the glacier, but we’re installing this one today to replace one we lost. Or at least I hope we can. Had a bit of trouble with it yesterday, but I think I’ve got the seal fixed.”
Kea noticed Reynard turning abruptly away from Derek, his hands visibly quaking in anger. Derek caught her looking at him and glared defiantly back before turning to watch Marcus’ demonstration with feigned interest.
Shrugging, Kea finally reached Julie and nudged her away from the rest of the group. “Why didn’t you tell me Tiko saw Bruce fall?”
Julie seemed puzzled by the attack. “I thought the inspector told you.”
“Why the hell didn’t she say something before?” Kea fought to keep her voice a low, raging whisper.
“Like before we left him there? Like when we asked everyone? Like any sane person would do?” Julie sounded just as angry as Kea felt. “I have no idea.”
Kea bent her head closer. “What happened, exactly?”
“I wasn’t there,” Julie said. “But Amirah told me that when the inspector asked Tiko why she didn’t say anything, she just said she saw him running and jumping, but she didn’t see the actual fall because of the angle. Too far away. She just thought he landed on another level. She said she didn’t realize what she had seen until after they found his body. She had no idea he was trying to off himself. Who would?”
Unfortunately, at that moment Marcus paused in his lecture, permitting the word ‘body’ to float through the ranks of the team. Shamed into silence, Kea and Julie stepped apart as Marcus finished connecting the hoses to the butane tank.
After much fussing, and a good deal of swearing, Marcus sat back on his heels and gave a grunt of success. The volunteers waited for something flashy, but after several minutes of the device doing nothing more than emitting a low rumble, their excitement waned. The device had to achieve the correct temperature and pressure to operate the drill, but Kea knew that they were waiting around for water to boil.
Looking for a distraction, she took out her GPS handheld device to mark the location of the drill site. The digital readout flickered, alternating constantly. She gave it a hearty slap.
“Everything okay?” asked Bonnie.
“GPS can be tricky up here,” Kea frowned at the sky. “We don’t get a lot of coverage this far north, so there are periods when the satellites dip below the horizon. It requires patience, but you can usually get enough signal during the day, although you may have to wait twenty minutes.”
Bonnie held up her cell phone. “I’ve got plenty of signal.”
Kea pointed toward the road. “On this glacier, we’re close enough to the highway to get a decent cell signal. Sometimes we get Wi-Fi coverage from the Face-Googles,” she waved up at the invisible high-altitude balloons and other toys the big companies had recently released around the globe. “We’re not really in their loop, so it can be hit or miss. Ah, there we go,” she corrected herself, seeing the display flicker into life, “seems to be fine here.”
She looked downslope to the base of the glacier. Apart from a couple of areas where the ice bowed and humped, they had visibility straight down the gentle path to where they had walked onto the ice. Nowhere for anyone to get lost, nowhere for anyone to hide, no place for anyone to jump. Now that she had a moment to think about it, she tried to picture what Tiko could really have seen from her position all the way over at the Double Embayment…
A hissing startled her as the drill finally spat to life. Marcus moved it into position above the ice and began slowly lowering the wand down into the surface of the glacier. The rod disappeared into the ice a few centimeters at a time. Before long, the wand had vanished from sight, leaving only the black tubing to mark its descent.
The volunteers pulled some snacks out of their bags and squatted on the ice, waiting for something interesting to happen. Normally, they’d be in for a long wait, but not today. Even Kea was surprised when an angry snarling sound began emitting from the borehole.
Marcus swore under his breath and started tinkering with the tank. After a few minutes, he powered everything down and withdrew the hose and drill from the ice, checking along its length for damage.
“Anything I can do to help?” Kea asked.
“No,” Marcus snapped. “Just an issue with a valve seal,” he said in a calmer tone. “I thought we’d fixed that.” He turned back toward the volunteers and flashed them a reassuring smile. “I’ll take another stab at fixing the old girl tonight.”
Kea tilted her head. It was still only just after noon, but she didn’t have any other activity to keep the volunteers entertained. “Back to camp?”
Marcus nodded and began packing up his gear.
“All right, everyone,” Kea called. “Have a look around to make sure that
you’ve got all your stuff and we’ll head back down. Slowly,” she added for emphasis.
The team was far more energetic on the hike back down the glacier. Despite her words of caution, she watched the younger members race each other downslope. As she followed at a more sedate pace, she made a mental note to dig out the moleskin from the medical kit to treat the inevitable blisters that would appear later.
Bright flashes of neon purple caught her eye as Reynard sped into view, his trouser legs rolled up, exposing brightly colored socks and porcelain white calves. He wore only a T-shirt, exposing freckles that shot up his bare arms like a rash. There was a similar explosion of melanin peppering his neck and cheeks. She deliberately increased her descent to keep pace with him.
Reynard noticed her gaze. “I did not expect to get a tan. Not in Iceland anyway.”
Kea cracked a smile. She desperately wanted to know what he and Derek had been arguing about. Act normal, she told herself, engage, relate. It was the exact opposite of what she wanted to do, which was to let everyone walk off the glacier so she could remain up here, all alone.
Tell a story, said a quiet voice inside her head. It was the same voice that quelled her panic whenever she had to present in front of packed lecture halls. Escape into a story.
“I had a colleague once, back when I worked in Hawaii, who wore shorts one day when we were walking on the lava flows.” Not the brightest person in the world, Kea remembered, and one who wouldn’t stop trying to get into my pants. “The lava field was covered with pahoehoe, so it was basically a plain of twisted ropes of black volcanic glass.” Telling the story became easier as she remembered standing under the burning sun in Hawaii. She had been surrounded by endless black fields of glass that stretched out around her like a vast pool of tar, tens of miles wide. “He wore plenty of sunblock, but it wasn’t until he got back later that night that he hadn’t considered the sunlight being reflected up his shorts. Which would have been fine, if he’d been wearing underwear. Poor guy roasted all his goodies.”
Reynard made a sound like a goat being kicked. Even though she knew it must be laughter, the noise still startled her.
He smiled, his blue eyes and perfect teeth beaming in the sunlight. His crooked nose and sharp chin made for a peculiar profile, but one, she noticed for the first time, that was oddly handsome.
“You may need that soon.” Kea nodded at the jacket wrapped around his waist. “It can get chilly pretty fast. The cold air from the ice sheets up here is much denser than the warmer air by the coast. It causes katabatic winds, as the air rushes down into the valleys below.”
Reynard grinned, his expression suggesting he already knew this. He paused at an area where the ice leveled off into a gentle plateau. “Are you going up to Svartifoss tonight?” he asked, referring to the waterfall nestled in the mountain high above the campground. “Julie said she would take us.”
“I’ve already been up a few times this season.” Tourist sites were the farthest thing from her mind right now. “You should go up though, it’s quite a sight.”
“I may.” Reynard’s eyes flickered from her to the view and back again. “I am sorry. I heard he was a friend of yours.”
Kea felt as if she’d stumbled. It was like he knew why she was talking to him.
Am I that obvious?
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry too” Kea found herself wondering again what she really knew about Bruce, and, for that matter, what kind of friends had they really been? But if the game was already up… “I have to ask, what happened up there?”
Reynard fixed his gaze on the ocean which simmered just below the horizon. “The drill, it was taking forever, kept breaking. We all got bored. We had lunch. Then coffee.” He squatted down and started picking cobbles out of the melting glacial crust. “Then more coffee. Marcus was very angry, shouting.”
Reynard flicked rocks down the glacier as they walked, one by one. Normally, Kea would have stopped him on principle, but since there was no one downrange of his projectiles, she said nothing, hoping he’d keep talking.
“He shouted at Tony, then they were both arguing.” Reynard spoke in a lower voice now, the cold breath of the glacier threatening to steal his words. “Drill still wasn’t working. Rest of us, we started wandering around, to kill time, let them cool down.”
Kea closed her eyes and lowered her head. She could picture it all too clearly. On the ice, it would be easy enough to lose track of someone, particularly in an area full of dirt cones and active drainage channels. She pictured the map of the area in her head again. “But Bruce must have been gone for ages. How could you not see him? What on earth were you and Derek doing?”
Reynard glanced sharply at her, fixing her with a hard stare for what seemed like a full minute. Abruptly, he tossed the last rock down a narrow crevasse. “Photographs,” he said, patting his bag. “I want to capture this.” He pulled out his digital camera. “All of this beauty. Not... not men squabbling. I’ve seen enough of that for a lifetime.”
Kea watched as he walked down the slope. She couldn’t help but feel that she’d hit a nerve somehow, but she couldn’t put her finger on what. Everyone insisted that they felt fine, but there was an air of electricity she felt whenever she spoke to anyone. She was afraid of getting too close and get zapped.
All I want, Kea thought as she looked out to the sea, is a long, warm bath, with a bottle of wine. While I’m dreaming, I’d also kill for a full body massage, a pizza, and a-
Movement on the terrain below caught her attention. Atop a series of slight rises in front of the margin, Tony held a survey-grade GPS staff aloft, looking for all the world like Gandalf. Shielding her eyes, she squinted at the little figures of a few volunteers who followed him.
“What’s he up to down there anyway?” she muttered to herself.
“Mapping the moraines,” Max’s sonorous voice caused her to flinch.
She jerked around to see the large man standing behind her. She hadn’t heard him approach, which she found unsettling. The rising winds must have covered the sound of his boots on the ice.
“Is that what he said?” Kea shifted, keeping Max in her peripheral vision and watched as Tony walked along a narrow ridge that ran parallel to the front of the glacier margin. There was nothing remarkable about the recessional moraines that he was surveying. The thin ridges were left behind following the retreat of the glacier margin, like ripple marks on a beach. Tony hadn’t mentioned needing to map them.
Still, she considered, perhaps he was just filling time while they waited for everyone to come down. Just trying to keep busy. It was what she was doing up here too.
As she watched the others file off the ice and onto the plain, she noticed Derek and Reynard together once more. Reynard’s hands were gesturing wildly, up the glacier.
At me, Kea realized.
Derek caught Reynard’s arm, appearing to calm him down. She watched as they re-joined the rest of the group, but caught Derek giving her a quick, not so casual, sidelong look before stepping onto the sandur.
Kea found herself reluctant to follow. Up here on the ice, it felt as if she was part of another world. One without people, without drama. She squatted down on her knees and made as if to tie her shoe, in case the others wondered what she was up to.
What am I up to?
“Great question,” she breathed to the glacier.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall... The grotesque nursery rhyme played in her head as she stood and walked.
Who had been up on that wall?
Bruce had been with Tony and Marcus and...
Who else?
She ticked off names on her fingers: Reynard, Derek, and Jon.
Who else was on the ice?
Her apple team of course, but they had spent most of the afternoon in the wildlands.
Who did that leave? The GPR team?
She’d have to double check, but she thought it had consisted of Nadia, Tiko, and Lexie, along with Zoë and Cole on the drone team by the
esker. She tried to picture the locations of the teams on the ice, the distances between them, and Bruce somewhere out on the ice, falling to his death into a crevasse or pit. She envisioned his body being dragged by the harsh waters through the chaotic innards of the glacier before finally emerging, battered and broken, into a proglacial lake.
Kea pulled out the little plush toy. “Bruce, what on earth were you all doing up there?” The platypus refused to answer.
And why didn’t you give me this?
The night they had spoken, the conversation had turned quickly to ex’s and breakups, so perhaps it wasn’t the best time to give gifts, she admitted, but if he was really going to end it all, why bring the toy all the way to Iceland then not give it to her? Did he know she’d find it afterward, or did he just intend to give it to her later?
She cast her eyes up to the sky, searching the heavens above.
Bruce, what the hell were you thinking?
Chapter 7
Later that afternoon, Kea was hacking out lumps of dried clay from her boots with a sliver of rock when the chief inspector called. She listened politely, thanked him, and hung up, all the while staring at the clumps of sand and grit still embedded in her sole as the reality of Bruce’s death hit home once more.
She forced herself to finish cleaning her boots before she rounded up the team leads behind the jeeps to give them the news. Unable to meet their eyes, she kept her gaze trained on the volunteers that were sitting out on the grass in front of the main tent, enjoying the blue sky and sunlight. Safe.
“They completed the autopsy,” Kea announced, fixated on a pair of furry boots Bonnie was wearing. They seemed oddly out of place, Kea thought, although absurdly comfortable. “As the medics noted yesterday, he took quite a beating when the waters carried him through the glacier and out into the lake.”
An image of Bruce’s body, broken and battered, leaped back into her mind. When asked to identify the him, she and Marcus had been faced with a nightmare. The head had been smashed to a pulp, his limbs fractured, the bones bent in horrific unnatural directions, the pale flesh swollen and torn.