‘Why do you think it’s Willie took her, Alice?’
The woman’s face grew dark. ‘Leverage,’ she said simply. ‘That boy got the devil in him. He never forgave my daughter for breakin’up with him.’
‘So … he’s trying to punish her?’ Edie looked around, noting the cheap, plastic strings of little reindeer strung across the room, the shiny little baubles, the bright, spangly, sweet trash of Christmas.
Alice, seeing her looking, said, ‘Aggie loves Christmas, like all kids that way, I guess.’ A smile came into her eyes, but faded before it reached her lips. ‘“Rudolph the Red- Nosed Reindeer”. She adores that song.’ Tears began to stream down her cheeks.
Edie got up and paced about, trying to give the woman a little space in which to gather herself. A plastic Christmas tree stood in the corner of the room, a fairy on top of it. Someone had pasted a photo of the little girl onto the fairy’s face. Edie peered at it. Aggie peered back, a little hand poking out from the left pupil, as though waving.
The shock made Edie lose her balance and for a moment she thought she might careen into the plastic tree, before she managed to steady herself and calm her breathing.
‘Forgive my not knowing, but is Aggie Nancy and Tommy’s baby, Alice?’
Alice looked up with a furrowed brow. ‘Now what kind of question is that?’
■ ■ ■
Outside a search team was already mustering, led by the mayor. The men had brought their hunting rifles. Now that Tommy was dead and the little girl was missing, they weren’t minded to think well of Willie Killik. Not so long ago, before anyone paid much attention to southern law, they’d have taken him up to the cliff and pushed him off. A few of them looked as though they thought that wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
■ ■ ■
Willie’s parents, Josephie and Lizzie, had gone to ground. Edie found them hiding out in the house of a distant cousin with a large bottle of Canadian Mist. In the last few years they hadn’t had much to do with their son and it was clear from their hostility to Edie’s visit that they didn’t want to have much to do with him now.
‘Damn kid took our snowbie,’ Josephie grunted. He was a tall man, unusually so for an Inuk, with a barrel chest and huge arms. Years of booze had ruined him, but he must once have been powerfully frightening to a skinny kid like Willie.
‘The snowmobile isn’t top of my list right now,’ Edie said.
Josephie shot her a look. Guilt, but resentment too. ‘Well that’s just fine, lady, but who’s gonna get us another one?’ he said. ‘We ain’t got no money.’
‘You help me find your son, you get your old snowbie back.’
Josephie shot a glance at his wife, who shrugged as if to say why not?
‘Like how?’ he said.
‘You think of any reason he might have taken Aggie Muttuk or where they might have gone?’
Josephie shifted in his chair, hawked up some phlegm, swallowed it. Edie looked around the dimly lit room, the greasy couch, the plain, unloved walls, the complete lack of any kind of Christmas cheer.
‘He ain’t never been too keen on Christmas,’ Josephie began, nervously scraping his hands together. He flashed a look at Lizzie.
‘Anything else you can think of?’
Josephie held the whiskey up to the light. ‘I guess he always was sweet on Nancy. High school sweethearts. Thought he’d end up with her. Always was a boy who could hold a grudge.’ Looking at her bright-eyed suddenly, he said, ‘Say, is there a reward for information?’
■ ■ ■
On Edie’s way back into town she passed the land search team heading out towards the tundra, the mayor waving to her as they sped by, their headlights cutting wires of light into the darkness. Unless they had some idea of where to look, they’d have trouble finding Willie. The wind was taking away vehicle tracks as fast as they were made. But Inuit were nothing if not dogged and there was a kind of glee in their voices Edie didn’t much like. She knew that tone only too well. It was the thrill of the hunter on his way out to the hunt.
There was only one thing for it and that was to return to the old man, try to get out of him whatever else it was he knew. Maybe he’d take pity on Nancy and Alice, want to help them find their little girl. He was an ornery old walrus but it was Christmas and somewhere inside that raddled skin there was a heart that beat same as everyone else’s.
‘You again,’ Koperkuj said at the door. He lowered his shotgun. ‘Well, you better come in.’
‘Your boy’s in trouble, elder.’ She told him about the abducted girl and the search team who would find the boy sooner or later. ‘How’s about you let me help him?’
Koperkuj went over to the table, picked up an old pipe and lit it. The smell of cheap tobacco drifted by. He didn’t seem in any hurry but Edie could tell by the worried look on his face that he was thinking. She moved across the floor. As she pulled out the chair opposite him his expression changed.
‘Young Willie, he’s not gonna hurt that little girl,’ the old man said.
‘Listen old man, you and I both know the truth of that. Aggie Muttuk is Willie’s daughter. I’m guessing that’s no surprise to you. But the fellas in the search party don’t know that, and you should have seen them, they got their hunting blood up.’
Something passed across the old man’s face. Concern. A little anxiety, maybe.
‘Now’s the time to talk, elder,’ Edie said.
Koperkuj nodded. ‘Not long after you left, Willie came by for his komatik, hitched it up behind his snowmobile. Honestly, I don’t know where he went,’ the old man said.
Edie shot him an icy look.
Koperkuj shrugged. ‘Really, lady, I don’t. You might follow his tracks a while.’
‘I might, if the wind wasn’t acting like a giant broom today. No tracks to speak of left. Which is just as well for Willie, because I wouldn’t like to think what’ll happen to him if I don’t get to him first.’
The old man was biting his lip now, genuinely worried. ‘All I know, he took his baby and his komatik.’
Edie thought about this for a moment. Then an idea bubbled up. She stood up, pulling on her mittens, snapping her snow goggles back over her eyes.
‘I’m gonna give it my best guess,’ she said. ‘For Willie’s sake, you better hope I’m right.’
■ ■ ■
The cabin was on the lee side of a bluff, out of the wind, which was a bit of luck, since the remnants of snowmobile and komatik tracks were just visible leading away from the outhouse to the east. This too was a good sign. The prevailing winds were north-westerly. Travelling east meant going in the same direction as the wind and snow, which wasn’t just faster but made visibility much better too. She set off, the tracks quickly giving out as she rounded the bluff and moved out onto the windswept tundra, but now she had more of an idea where she was heading. She navigated around the bluff towards the coastline, keeping a steady speed, then turned in at the headland beside the glacier, making her way up a steep slope. Far, far into the distance, the pinprick taillights of the mayor’s search party were bobbing along low, like stars kicked from the sky, in what she hoped was the wrong direction.
She went on, driving steadily across the tundra, up the ridge, then down, across a wide-spaced plateau which was a sedge meadow in the summer, up and over another bluff until finally she came to a long finger fiord, lined one side by cliffs, the other by low sloping foothills, which gave out eventually to the deep forever winter of the interior icecaps. She came to a halt just shy of the cliff-edge, walked along and looked out across the ice rubble of the fiord to the slopes on the other side. In the faint light of the moon she thought she could make out a handful of shapes moving slowly along the far margin of the fiord. Further away was another, longer shape that looked as though it just might be a vehicle pulling something behind it. She smiled, going back to her snowmobile and, taking a route that put her downwind of the moving shapes, she manoeuvred herself across the ice at the foot of th
e fiord. On the other side she dismounted and strapped on her cross-country skis. Silently, she made her way across the slopes.
The sky had cleared now and the moon seemed brighter, its light reflecting off the snow, throwing a deep blue gloam across the landscape. She was not far from the moving figures now; a herd, as she had suspected, though as she was downwind from them they had not detected her. She could see the light of Willie’s snowmobile now and in its back beam, the man himself, untying the komatik. Inside, there was a small dark shape. She opened her mouth to call out, then decided against it. When he had finished detaching the komatik, Willie began to lay out something on the snow. When that was done, he stood back and, staying very still, began to whistle, softly at first, then more insistently. Edie waited for what seemed like a long time. She sensed the herd drifting slowly away. Then slowly, something seemed to emerge from the gloom and a juvenile caribou appeared in the light of the snowmobile, making its way slowly and deliberately towards the spot where Willie stood until it was right up close, nuzzling his pockets for food. He stroked and patted it for a while, whispering in its ear to reassure it, then slowly and with great delicacy, he lowered a harness over its head, tucking the sealskin straps around the animal’s ears, its modest little rack of antlers and whisking bobtail.
When the animal was harnessed up, Willie went back to the komatik and, lifting the sleeping little girl out of the back seat, he clambered in and sat her down on his lap. As sleep released her, and she saw where she was, she began to leap up and down, gurgling with delight. Then picking up the reins, Willie shouted ‘Ha! Ha!’ and the caribou began to move forward. Feeling the motion, the little girl squealed. Willie shouted ‘Hoowoop!’ and the deer broke into a trot. Before long, they were going round and round in large circles, the little girl starting up ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, her father joining in.
And when they had sung all the verses of Rudolph four times over, Edie stood and skied down the small slope and positioned herself in the light of the snowmobile. She heard Willie shouting ‘Iq! Iq!’ at the caribou and the komatik slowed. The little girl grew quiet again and finally Willie pulled up the sled alongside Edie.
Willie smiled. ‘I thought you’d figure it out eventually,’ he said. He didn’t seem angry, only perhaps a little sad.
‘Tommy got family too,’ she said.
He flashed her a look, angry maybe, a bit regretful. ‘I’m real sorry how it turned out with Tommy. I never meant for him to die. I punched him all right, hard too. But when I left him he was on his feet, like I told you.’
‘Teacher!’ the little girl said, pointing excitedly at Edie.
‘This teacher’s a clever lady,’ Willie said to his daughter.
‘Clever lady,’ Aggie agreed.
‘You two get to spend much time together?’ Edie asked.
Willie poked his finger into Aggie’s belly and began to tickle her.
‘Her mother don’t let me see her.’ He picked up the little girl in his strong arms and began to fly her through space. ‘Says she isn’t mine.’ The baby began to shout joyously. ‘I guess she didn’t want Tommy to find out. She was with him when we …’ he tailed off. ‘She was scared of him, even then. I did her a favour in a way.’ The wires in his neck grew taught and his nostrils flared and he looked up at Edie with a sour expression on his face. ‘Oh I know I’ll have to pay for it. I know that all right.’
He stood the little girl in his lap and pretended to bite her nose. She squeaked happily and returned the favour.
‘You two seem to know each other pretty well.’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘I used to wait until they put her down for her nap, in Alice’s room. I used to come to the window, didn’t I Aggie?’
Aggie nodded and jammed her finger in her mouth.
‘You been planning this a while, I’m guessing,’ Edie said. ‘You tame that caribou?’ She’d only ever seen reindeer pulling sleds on the TV, something that happened in Scandinavia. Up here on Ellesmere Island, caribou were strictly for consumption only.
‘I came across young Rudy here in the spring,’ Willie said, chin-flicking towards the caribou. ‘He was just a calf then. His mother had abandoned him. I kept him at old man Koperkuj’s house until he was old enough to go find the herd.’ He patted the animal’s flank. ‘I knew he’d come back.’
Then he shrugged and gave a resigned smile.
‘Well, I wanted to give my girl one more good memory of her daddy than I ever had. And now I guess I’ve done it.’ He held up his hands as if in surrender.
‘Oh, blow that,’ Edie said, ‘What’s the hurry?’ She gestured to the komatik. ‘You got room for me in there?’
Willie smiled. ‘Get in,’ he said, then turning to his daughter, ‘OK, Aggie, you wanna see how fast this thing can go?’
THE END
Read on for the first chapter of M. J. McGrath’s novel, WHITE HEAT, also available from Penguin Books.
Praise for White Heat
by M. J. McGrath
“M. J. McGrath opens a window onto a fascinating and disappearing culture in this haunting mystery.”
—Parade, “12 Great Summer Books”
“This debut novel encompasses the hard, otherworldly beauty of the far north and the rapaciousness of energy moguls determined to exploit the area’s natural resources. . . . [McGrath] skillfully describes the destabilizing effects of global warming, on both the landscape and the lives of the people settled there.”
—The New Yorker
“[McGrath] weaves a strong strand of whodunit into a broader story about life in a twenty-first-century community on Canada’s Ellesmere Island. The plot is wholly satisfying, and McGrath’s portrait of a culture that uneasily blends yesterday and today is engrossing on its own merits. The Arctic is a big place—big enough, one hopes, for Edie Kiglatuk to find another mystery that needs solving between warm bowls of seal blood soup fresh from the microwave.”
—Associated Press
“In a gripping debut novel, McGrath (who has written nonfiction as Melanie McGrath) transports the reader to a land of almost incomprehensible cold and an unfamiliar but fascinating culture, taking on issues of climate change, energy exploration, local politics, and drug and alcohol abuse. Edie, a fiercely independent woman in a male-dominated milieu, is sure to win fans. Expect great things from this series.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“An arctic setting so real it’ll give you frostbite.”
—Dana Stabenow, author of A Cold Day for Murder and Though Not Dead: A Kate Shugak Novel
“A gripping crime novel in which the main character never runs (sweating leads to hypothermia), chews fermented walrus gut, and builds an emergency snowhouse with the right kind of three layered snow in a matter of hours . . . [a] deft story of family loyalty and clashing cultures . . . charging forward to an unexpected, satisfying, and chilling conclusion.”
—New York Journal of Books
“Author McGrath’s sense of location is spot on; her characters are believable, sympathetic and complex. No surprise for an author of her caliber: In an earlier incarnation (as Melanie McGrath) she won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best British writer under 35.”
—BookPage
“Award-winning British journalist McGrath shares a wealth of knowledge about life in the High Arctic that is central to her story. Well written and researched, her excellent adventure murder-mystery will hold readers’ attention until the last page.”
—Library Journal
“A solid thriller . . . A picture soon emerges that includes a fight for precious natural resources and secrets that stretch back generations. McGrath captures the frigid landscape beautifully, and her heroine personifies the tension between the Inuit and qalunaat ways of life.”
—Publishers Weekly
“McGrath has written a mystery . . . reminiscent of Tony Hillerman’s culture-clash novels. The language is
beautiful, especially the descriptions of the Inuit people, living in ‘a place littered with bones, with spirits, with reminders of the past . . . surrounded by our stories.’ Detailed in her knowledge of setting, McGrath vividly invokes the frozen land, and her portrayals of the rugged people who cherish its beauty and bounty, especially Edie and Derek, ring true. A promising first installment in an upcoming series of arctic adventures.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“M. J. McGrath’s White Heat pulls you along like a steel cable, inexorably welding you to the characters and a place that you’ll never forget.”
—Craig Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of The Cold Dish and As the Crow Flies
1
As she set a chip of iceberg on the stove for tea, Edie Kiglatuk mulled over why it was that the hunting expedition she was leading had been so spectacularly unsuccessful. For one thing, the two men she was guiding were lousy shots. For another, Felix Wagner and his sidekick Andy Taylor hadn’t seemed to care if they made a kill nor not. Over the past couple of days they’d spent half their time gazing at maps and writing in notebooks. Maybe it was just the romance of the High Arctic they were after, the promise of living authentically in the wild with the Eskimo, like the expedition brochure promised. Still, she thought, they wouldn’t be living long if they couldn’t bring down something to eat.
She poured the boiling berg water into a thermos containing qungik, which white people called Labrador tea, and set aside the rest for herself. You had to travel more than three thousand kilometres south from Umingmak Nuna, Ellesmere Island, where they were now, to find qungik growing on the tundra, but for some reason southerners thought Labrador tea was more authentic, so it was what she always served to her hunting clients. For herself, she preferred Soma brand English Breakfast, brewed with iceberg water, sweetened with plenty of sugar and enriched with a knob of seal blubber. A client once told her that in the south, the water had been through the bowels of dinosaurs before it reached the faucet, whereas berg water had lain frozen and untouched by animal or human being pretty much since time began. Just one of the reasons, Edie guessed, that southerners were prepared to pay tens of thousands of dollars to come up this far north. In the case of Wagner and Taylor, it certainly wasn’t for the hunting.
Edie Kiglatuk's Christmas Page 2