Detective Truro consulted his notes. He was wearing a pin in the shape of a fish in the lapel of his jacket, she noticed. A Christian, then. Evangelical, she guessed from the name of the church on the leather folder. Qalunaat evangelicals appeared every so often at home, on Ellesmere Island. Missionary work. Only in the summer though. Most of the villagers were happily Anglican or Catholic, or, like her, they stuck to the old beliefs, but the evangelicals usually made a convert or two. Edie guessed that was why they kept coming back.
‘The man you spoke to, he have an accent at all?’
‘An accent compared to what?’ Edie allowed herself to feel offended because, for an instant, it gave her the upper hand. Truro’s brow wrinkled, as though he was waiting for some addendum. Edie thought of the little boy in the snow and relented.
‘Some kind of accent, yes.’
Truro nodded and went on.
‘The clothes the two were wearing, the long robes. The man’s facial hair. Are you aware that what you described is typical of the Old Believers?’
‘Since I already told you I don’t know what that means, I guess the answer’s no.’
Detective Truro began to stroke his tie. He caught her eye and looked away. Then he reached out and turned off the camera.
‘Miss Kiglatuk, I have to ask you, why did you pick up the body?’
Why had she? It was hard to say. At that moment, her thoughts had been swirling around in a blizzard in her mind.
‘I didn’t know what was in the parcel when I picked it up. And then, when I did, I guess I wanted to try to comfort him.’ She thought about the ghosts of people she’d loved and lost.
Truro lifted his eyes from the desk and cut her an icy look.
‘You make a habit of comforting the dead, Miss Kiglatuk? You realize you could have seriously compromised our investigation?’
She didn’t answer.
Truro continued to look at her, his gaze fading away to a scowl. She held it. They sat like this for a moment.
‘The Old Believers are a religious cult. Are you familiar with that term?’
She blew air down her nose. ‘I’m Inuit, not an idiot.’
‘Of course.’ His eye flipped across a typewritten page. ‘Your people here call themselves Eskimos, by the way.’
‘I’m guessing they call themselves Alaskans too,’ she said, ‘which, by the way, technically makes them your people.’
‘You believe in God, Miss Kiglatuk?’ Truro looked put out.
She looked at the badge on his lapel.
‘Not in the way you do.’
‘In evil then.’
‘You mean, the Devil?’ She thought about the little boy lying frozen in the woods. If he’d asked whether she believed in devilishness, she’d have said, oh yeah, seen plenty of that, but a red guy with a forked tail? She shook her head.
A look of frustration or maybe disappointment spread across Detective Truro’s face.
‘Let me tell you something about these people you ran into, the Old Believers. They’re not regular folk, like you and me.’
She had to pinch herself to stop herself talking back. Regular folk? What did that mean?
Truro didn’t appear to notice her expression and continued. ‘Originally, they came from Russia. People here still call them Russians though they haven’t actually lived there since they broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church hundreds of years ago and started wandering across the globe. They’ve been here in Alaska forty years and some of ’em still don’t even speak English. They’re closed people, they stick with their own, they call folk like us “worldly” and do their best to avoid us,’ he said. ‘We don’t know much about them, but we don’t much like what we do know.’
He picked up a pen, see-sawed it about between his fingers.
‘You remember the cross, the one marked on the body?’
She looked at him, aghast. How could he imagine she would forget it?
‘That silk stuff wrapped around the body of the little boy you found? The Believers use that for their religious ceremonies. The little house is a spirit house. It’s an Athabascan native tradition.’
He turned the camera back on and Edie wondered if anything he had said amounted to much more than supposition, prejudice even.
‘Now, let’s go back to when you saw the two Old Believers on the snowmachine.’
She wanted to tell him about how little snow drift there had been around the house, about the absence of footprint or tracks leading up to it and what all that said about when the house had been left. She wanted to explain about how the ice crystals had broken where they had touched the frozen corpse, how she didn’t understand what it meant though she was sure it was significant, but she no longer had any confidence that he’d listen.
It was about 10 p.m. as she made her way down Fourth Avenue after the interview. The weather was clear but street lights formed a ceiling of brightness just over her head, obscuring her view of the stars. The contrast between the stifling heat of the APD building and the cold March night brought on a thrumming jaw ache. She passed by some souvenir stores selling cheap native crafts, tacky bits of fake mammoth-tooth carving, furs inexplicably sewn into miniature copies of the fur-bearing creature they first came from, moose-shit novelties, trash of all kinds. A couple were bent over the glass, window-shopping. Beside her, on the street, trucks rumbled by, leaving a wake of diesel fumes.
She made her way up to the cheap studio she’d rented for the duration of the Iditarod and, not for the first time since she’d opened the grisly package in the forest, was struck with a powerful desire to drink herself into oblivion. Not that drinking was any solution to anything, except the pain of the moment, but the pain of the moment held her so powerfully that she had to say the words out loud in order to make herself commit to them: I will not drink.
Instead, she went to the kitchenette and put on the kettle for a mug up. On either side of her, through the drywall, she could hear the sounds of her neighbours’ bedtime routines: the burble of TVs, the coughs and sighs of men and women settling down for the night. When she’d first arrived two days ago, she’d knocked on the doors on her floor, intending to introduce herself, but hardly anyone answered and she could tell from the bewildered and wary expressions of those who did that they suspected her of being crazy. She didn’t tell them what she really thought, that they were living like cliff birds, wedged into their tiny little fortresses, puffing up their feathers and pecking away all comers, wary of any motives that were not their own.
Going over to the single window, she flipped the blind to block out the thin light coming in from a fluorescent tube in the walkway outside. Then, with a mug of hot tea in one hand, she went over to the phone and dialled the number Derek had given her for his digs in Nome, the finishing point for the Iditarod. An unfamiliar voice answered and asked her to wait, then came Derek’s soft, familiar tone.
‘Edie, hi. I was waiting for you to call.’
‘Who was that picked up?’
‘Zach Barefoot. The friend from the Native Police Association I told you about? I’m staying in his spare room.’
Derek was right, he had told her. She felt relieved, slightly foolish. Over the course of the day she’d almost forgotten what she was doing in Alaska in the first place. Still, she wanted to keep what had happened as private as possible till they’d had time to talk it through.
‘Zach still there?’
‘No, why?’ Derek’s voice sounded alarmed. Without waiting for an answer, he said, ‘Sammy set off OK?’
‘Yeah. At least, I think so. I wasn’t there.’
‘I thought we agreed you were going to see him off.’ Derek sounded peeved.
She told him everything that had happened. ‘The thing that freaked me out, it seemed like Truro had an angle, like he just wanted me to say that these Old Believer people had done it.’ She knew Derek would understand her reservations about religious nuts of all kinds. It was missionaries and zealots who’d told th
em that the old customs were evil, even though in some cases, like when the brother of a dead hunter took the widow for his second wife, they saved lives. But it was mostly their absolute moral intransigence which bothered her. You were either with them or against them. You were one of the saved, or you were the Devil’s work.
Derek heard her out and was sympathetic. He tried to get her to come up to Nome for a couple of days. ‘I don’t like the thought of you being alone.’
She let out a dry laugh.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘The lone wolf. Even lone wolves have to return to the pack sometime.’
‘Is that what you are, Derek, the pack?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Edie.’ He sounded irritated. ‘I’m your friend.’
The rebuke stung her a little, but she knew it was deserved. She took a pause to signal that she’d taken it in.
‘Then do me a favour, as my friend. Don’t mention any of this to Sammy, OK?’ She’d already decided not to speak to her ex for the duration of the race unless there was no way to avoid it. As she understood her role, there would be no particular need to speak to him unless something happened in the race which required her assistance in Anchorage. His more routine communications would be routed through Derek at the Iditarod HQ in Nome. She didn’t trust herself not to be selfish and tell Sammy the whole story.
‘If you think that’s for the best,’ Derek said, unconvinced.
‘It’s just that he’s been wanting to run the Iditarod ever since I’ve known him. It was all he used to talk about when we were married. If he gets wind of what’s happening down here, he’s gonna be on the first plane to Anchorage, thinking he can rescue me.’
‘I understand,’ Derek said simply.
Edie smiled to herself. In her experience, most men shared certain rescue fantasies, particularly when it came to women.
‘But you know, Edie, I really think this is a matter for the police department. Why don’t you come up here?’
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, to humour him. She liked Derek, admired him even. At the same time she knew there were things about her he’d never understand.
Later, in bed, she tried to get the image of the dead baby out of her mind.
‘Why me?’ she asked herself, as though her heart didn’t already know the answer.
THE BONE SEEKER,
M. J. McGrath’s next Edie Kiglatuk mystery,
is coming from Viking in Summer 2014.
Edie Kiglatuk's Christmas Page 7