by RJ Corgan
That’s science indeed.
Boots, she reminded herself, focusing again on Bonnie’s footwear: booties with dangling laces that had furry little balls on the end, like little bunny tails.
“They said his lungs were full of water, indicating that he was breathing when he drowned.” She paused, blinking stupidly at the boots. The others said nothing. Something niggled at the back of her mind, something that didn’t add up.
Eventually, she found that she could speak again, but her voice sounded chalky and foreign to her own ears. “They checked with the local authorities back in the states, and the note checks out. It’s his signature. They’ve ruled it a suicide. The body’s being shipped back tomorrow. We’re to collect his tent and things and mail them to his family. We’re all free to go.”
Marcus puffed up his cheeks and blew out the air like a sagging balloon. “Right then, that’s that. We still have six field days left. I’ll ask the others if they’d like to stay and help.”
“That’s that?” Tony barked. “That’s all you have to say? He’s dead for Chrissake-”
“We had nothing to do with any of this,” Marcus held up his hands. “It’s just a very unfortunate-”
“Will the both of you stop!” Julie slammed her fist against the hood of the jeep.
Kea flinched. The volunteers across the field were all staring at them.
All this mess could have been avoided if I had stepped up, if I had just insisted that the others report head counts.
She caught Max looking at her. He was too far away for her to know for certain, but it seemed like he was smiling. Mocking.
If. If. If. If I had done a million other things differently.
“ENOUGH!” Kea bellowed, surprised at her own outburst. The anger welling up inside her pushed aside her doubts, her insecurities, her grief. She lowered her voice, fighting for control. “Enough. We’re not doing all that again. Marcus is right, getting home sooner won’t help Bruce. For all we know, this is the last season we may have funding, given the way budgets are going. The equipment is here, and so are we. Let’s finish the work, then pack out as planned. If anyone would like to go to Bruce’s funeral, there’ll still be time after we get back.”
In truth, Kea knew she would be the only one of their group attending, but she wanted to extend the offer. Worse, a part of her had no desire to go at all. She had no idea how she could even begin to explain to his family what had happened on her watch, but she knew she had little choice.
“Now,” she continued, riding the wave of confidence that her rage provided. “Julie, please inform the others. If they’d like to stay and assist, they’re more than welcome, but no one, and let me make this absolutely clear, no one other than the four of us are going out on the ice again. If the volunteers want to stay, they can help with the ground surveys, but other than that, no one leaves our site. Tony, I’d like a word alone, please.”
Marcus, to her surprise, nodded and exited without a word, Julie in tow. Tony hovered by the rear of the jeep. Shifting his weight from foot to foot, she was reminded of an errant child called to the principal’s office. She folded her arms across her chest and considered him. “Two questions.”
Tony stopped fidgeting and leaned against the jeep, crossing his arms defensively.
“What were you doing out on the moraines today?” she asked in her most matronly tone.
That seemed to throw him for a moment, which was what she wanted.
“Marcus asked me to update the margin position.” He seemed annoyed. “To track the recession.”
“Oh.” Marcus had been so obsessed with the new equipment, she hadn’t heard him talk about anything else.
“What happened up there with Bruce?” she pressed. “Did you see anything?”
“What? No.” Tony’s demeanor changed from defensive to pleading. “We were just fixing the stupid drill. We weren’t paying attention to anything much else.”
As he sputtered and whined, Kea could tell he was telling the truth.
“I should have done a head count,” he lamented. “But I was too focused on loading the rest of the volunteers into the rafts. I’m... I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Kea waved for him to stop. “I was just hoping that, oh, I don’t know. Never mind. Look, why don’t you break out some of the beers for dinner.” She waved to one of the boxes next to the supply trailer. “It might be good for folks to let off some steam.”
Leaving Tony to unpack the booze, Kea felt the urge for another chocolate fix. She knelt by one of the plastic tubs that held the toolkits and pulled out the jar of hazelnut spread. Sucking a dollop off the top of her finger, something clicked in her head. She popped open the lid of the tub that contained their records and started digging.
Thanks to their non-existent filing system, it took ten minutes to find their original equipment manifest. List in hand, she returned to the trailers and started counting. As Julie had noted this morning, they were short on the high visibility vests. Not just one, however, but two.
More than just Bruce’s was missing.
Kea counted them once more to be sure, and again came up two short. She sat at the base of the trailer wheel, her mind churning. It was odd, but not unusual. Volunteers treated the flimsy vests pretty badly. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t gone missing on past trips.
Am I looking for evidence? Of what? That something worse happened to him?
It was not, it had to be said, the most damning of evidence. In fact, the absence of the vests was the opposite of having evidence.
She sighed. Short of searching everyone’s tents, and searching all the glacier and sandur, she’d be hard-pressed to find the missing vest, but for the first time since losing Bruce, she felt as if she might have put her finger on something that could help her figure out what had happened to Bruce out on the ice.
***
“So, there I was on the glacier, holding one of Julie’s GPR antennas.” Bonnie addressed the team as they finished their dinner. “But I can’t see where I’m stepping. I realize I’m about to fall into a crevasse behind me when Julie reaches out with both hands. I’m so relieved because I think she’s going to save me at the last second. Instead, she just says, ‘Sorry Bonnie,’ grabs the GPR out of my hands and down I go butt-first into the crevasse!”
“To be fair,” Marcus grinned, “it is expensive equipment.”
“So is my ass!” Bonnie protested.
The tent filled with laughter. The mood of the team had lightened, if only for a moment. She took her plate back to the washtub and slipped it into the tepid water to soak. During supper, she had done little more than push food around her plate. She hovered by the tub, listening to the conversation at the main table.
“Didn’t sleep at all last night,” Erik said. “Not only doesn’t the sun set here, but those sounds the birds were making were crazy.”
That would be the Icelandic snipe, Kea thought. She considered pointing it out, but people tended to not believe her when she tried to tell them snipe were real birds. Too many people, it seemed, had fallen for a snipe hunt prank in their childhoods.
“What’s that?” Cole pointed to a circular emblem on the inside of Max’s left bicep.
“Every time we start a new project, I get a new tattoo,” Max flexed his muscle. “When we complete the project, I get it filled in.”
The tattoo appeared to be an outline of an ant standing atop a blade of grass, although from where Kea was standing, she couldn’t quite make out all the details. The blade had been colored green, but the rest remained a stark outline of black ink against Max’s leathery skin.
“How many tattoos do you have?” Cole leaned in closer for a better look.
“Eight so far, but you’re not allowed to see all of them, kiddo,” Max said with a chuckle.
“Eight?” Bonnie asked. “I only counted five last night!”
Oh dear. Kea shifted down the length of the bench a safe distance, where Julie was showing Jon and
Reynard the data she had collected.
“Here’s the unprocessed data.” Julie pointed to a mess of squiggles on her display. “I’m going to run some basic tools to take out a lot of the noise in the data that we don’t want to see.”
“De-wow?” Reynard pointed to a tool button on the screen. “What is ‘de-wow’?”
Julie smiled. “Wow is just a name for removing the errors caused by two antennas being positioned too close together. It’s one of the processing steps involved in cleaning up the data.”
Jon pointed at another icon on the screen. “And TWTT?”
“Two-Way Travel Time. It’s the time that it takes for the signal to go down into the ice, then come back up and be collected by the receiver,” Julie explained. “Measuring the length of time for the signal to return, and in what pattern, allows us to discern the structure of the ice. Okay, here we go, processing has finished.” The screen flickered, revealing a more coherent image of flecks and lines, although to the untrained eye it still appeared to be nothing more than a grainy mess of streaks.
“What are those?” Jon waved at some streaks that the processing algorithm appeared to have made thicker, more defined.
“Layers within the ice.” Julie followed the path of several of the lines across the screen with the cursor of her mouse. “You can trace the continuous layers. Sometimes its layers of debris, other times its differences in the thickness of the ice itself. Since we mapped out a grid pattern, we can reconstruct the surface in three-dimensions and really understand the structure.”
“And that?” Jon pointed at a large distortion in the data.
“Erratic.” Julie traced its outline. “A boulder in the ice.”
“A meteorite?” Reynard's voice rose in excitement.
“That's an option,” Julie admitted. “But more likely it’s just a rock carried by the glacier. Don’t get me wrong, a glacier can carry and move objects like meteorites, but there'd be more disturbance in the surrounding layers. Although, that’s not really my specialty. It’s far more likely this is just a boulder, scraped off from a cliff... I’ll probably run the rest tomorrow morning. I just wanted to check to make sure the data recorded-”
“But with this,” Reynard pressed, “you could find a meteorite?”
Julie shook her head. “It wouldn't really be a good tool for that. I mean, yes, this could find an object lodged in ice, but you’d rather use, and I’m just guessing, but a magnetometer? Metal detector? I dunno really.”
Despite Julie’s omnipresent smile, Kea detected an edge in her voice as she tried to hide her impatience. She couldn’t blame her. She remembered being a graduate student all too well. How the work stretched into endless years of data processing and sourcing citations. Given how much work Julie had in front of her, Kea considered, chatty volunteers weren’t going to be much help.
Since Reynard seemed eager to ask more follow-up questions, Kea motioned for them to move away from Julie so she could finish her work. “Anyone for a cup of cocoa?” she asked sweetly, feeling like a stewardess.
“Yes,” Reynard said. Jon nodded his affirmation. Julie flashed her a grateful smile as she turned back to her screen.
Kea found herself waiting for water to boil. As she spooned out the cocoa mix and poured the water, she noticed Zoë hovering around her son. Cole was playing a round of poker with Bonnie, Max, and Erik. After serving the others and pouring one for herself, Kea used the opportunity to hand Zoë a cup of cocoa. “How’s Cole holding up?”
Zoë pulled an odd face and paused for a beat before responding. “I honestly don’t know.” She studied Cole as he laughed triumphantly and set down two face cards. “The joy of having a teenager is that they barely speak to you, and when they do, it’s not generally pleasant.” She took a tentative sip of her drink. “You have to learn to read them in other ways.”
“You sound like a narrator from the nature channel,” Kea remarked.
“It’s a bit like animal behavior... and just as smelly.” Zoë turned back, and Kea found herself staring into Zoë’s dark, soulful eyes. “If you’re asking about how he’s handling the incident, he seems fine.”
“And his father?” Kea ventured, realizing that she wasn’t sure if he was in the picture or not.
“He sees him sometimes. More often now. Been about ten years since the divorce,” Zoë said in between sips. “He’s still an asshole though, but he tries to help. A little. He taught Cole to play poker.” She waved over to Bonnie’s gang. “That’s something I’ve only just discovered.”
“Well,” Kea said kindly, “I suppose you can’t help what his father may let him get up to.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Zoë said. “Cole’s spent the last couple of years putting up so many walls, that I’m not sure I’ll ever see all of him.”
Zoë’s face carried the exhaustion of motherhood, her forehead and mouth creased with deft, dark shadows. Despite the weariness of her expression, it only made her appear more beautiful.
“Sometimes,” Zoë continued, a faraway look in her eyes, “I’m not sure I want to.”
***
Refreshed from a long shower, Kea headed back toward the main tent, where the sounds of laughter and conversation drifted across the grass. As she made her way through the field, she passed Zoë’s tent, where she could hear her scolding Cole. While she couldn’t make out the words, the tone suggested that the rest of his trip was going to be unpleasant. Kea reached the entrance of the main tent, only to nearly collide with a hastily exiting figure.
“Sorry,” mumbled Tiko, her face flushed. She held open the flap and stumbled over her words as she brushed past Kea.
“Not even slightly odd,” Kea muttered. Inside, she found only a handful of volunteers. Nadia played solitaire while Gary sat at the end of the table reading one of the scientific journals that the team had left out. Derek sat across from Amirah who was doing some knitting. Of what had troubled Tiko, Kea could see no sign, but seeing the hungry look that Derek was giving Kea, she could hazard a guess.
Amirah, dressed in a sweatshirt and practical pants, welcomed her and poured her a cup of cocoa. Amirah sported gold bracelets, earrings and a lovely silk scarf that blazed with the hues of a Pacific sunset. A soft jingling noise followed her as she busied her hands with her own mug.
“Love the scarf. Fabulous,” Kea commented, eyeing the cocoa cautiously. It was still only nine o’clock. If she wasn't careful, she was going to be up all night. “Where did you get it?”
“Oman,” Amirah said proudly. “My home.”
“Corvis certainly is a global company,” Kea commented. “It’s really amazing to see such a mix of people.”
“When I started the company, I wanted to ensure that it contained a diverse workforce,” Amirah said. “It is very important to me.”
Kea could have kicked herself. This whole time she had assumed that Andrei was, if not the owner, then at least the lead presence for Corvis. And I get upset when people think Marcus is my boss, she thought wryly. “Did you make the decision to bring the Corvis team to Iceland?”
Amirah nodded. “I am not the biggest fan of camping.” She made a distasteful little flicking gesture as if warding off a fly. “However, these glaciers are a sight that I have always wanted to see.”
Amirah didn’t say ‘before they’re gone,’ but over the last several years Kea had heard similar sentiments from volunteers. The glaciers were retreating right before their eyes. Volunteers often came to see the ice in all its glory, or to see what there was left of it.
“How about you?” Amirah asked. “Where are you from?”
“A small town in Vermont, but I’ve always felt at home here in Iceland,” Kea admitted. “It’s warmer here than where I grew up, but in many ways, the climate is very similar.”
“Minus the glaciers,” Amirah pointed out.
“Well, yes,” Kea laughed. “Although ten thousand years ago, there was an ice sheet more than two miles thick sitting o
n top of my little town, which is hard to imagine. We still get aftershocks from the isostatic rebound as the land is still responding to the removal of the weight of all that ice. Did you know the Great Lakes are spilling southward? They’re pouring down into the United States, like a bucket being gently tipped over.” Seeing the deer in headlights expression on Amirah’s face, she paused. “Sorry, I switched into lecture mode again there.”
“Not at all,” Amirah replied with a smile. “I came here to learn.”
“Well, we appreciate you all helping,” Kea said.
“Hard work is the best way to see the world.” Amirah replied. “Not that spending a week by a pool is torture, mind. But by working somewhere, you really get to know a place, the bad and the good. And the people...”
Kea noticed Amirah looking at the group of card players.
“Is Tiko okay?” Kea asked. “She seemed a bit off when I passed her just now. I mean, I know yesterday...”
Amirah nodded. “Awful. I hope she will be fine. She was playing cards with the rest of them, but most everyone went to the cave.”
Kea wasn’t certain, but she thought Amirah’s gaze lingered on Derek as she commented.
Poor Tiko.
Kea would have to have a word with Derek if he kept hitting on everyone in sight.
Alarmed, Kea grabbed Amirah’s arm. “I’m sorry, what did you just say just now?”
“Bonnie and a few of the others.” Amirah, taken off guard by the physical contact, regarded Kea with wide eyes. “They said they were going to check out some ice cave they found on the internet…”
Kea released Amirah from her grip, worried she would frighten her. More calmly, she asked, “Do you remember where?”
“S… something.” Amirah attempted to mutter half-heard Icelandic syllables. “I think.”
“That’s terribly helpful,” Kea replied frostily. “Was it Skeiðarárjökull perhaps? Skaftafellsjökull? Svínafellsjökull?”
“That’s it,” Nadia called from across the table. “The Svína one.”
“Oh, that’s all right then.” Kea felt the knot in her stomach relax a bit. Svínafellsjökull was a good two or three miles away. “It’s not like they have a car or anything. What were they going to do, walk there?”