The Bone Seeker: An Edie Kiglatuk Mystery (Edie Kiglatuk Mysteries)

by M. J. McGrath

  • • •

  At the detachment steps they stopped. Derek pulled his ATV keys from his pocket.

  ‘I need a break from those papers, see how Anna Mackie’s getting on. Alfasi’s parents should be arriving any time. They’ll be wanting to know when they can take the body. We’ll get back to the papers when I return.’

  Edie watched his vehicle lumber up the track. She returned to the detachment and tidied the papers into a pile. A sticky note fell out with the letters RTG and SrTCs scribbled in blue ink in Sonia’s handwriting. She turned the paper over in her hands and sank back. It meant nothing. The paper trail had fried her brain in a way that a trail on the tundra never did. Her head felt watery-heavy and letters and plans spun together behind her eyes.

  She went into the kitchenette, found the remains of the walrus head in the refrigerator and, cutting off a few slices, made a large walrus omelette from the last of the eggs. This she wrapped in plastic film and slipped inside Gutierrez’s backpack, then she made her way towards the nursing station.

  Luc was in the consulting room taking a clinic. Anna and Derek were in the makeshift morgue packing up.

  ‘I’ve brought walrus omelette,’ she said.

  Mackie pulled off her examination gloves and began collecting her instruments. Edie sensed that relations between Derek and the medical examiner were strained.

  ‘Alfasi drowned,’ Derek said. ‘No reason to think it was anything but a suicide.’

  Mackie turned briefly. ‘That’s what I’ll be saying in my report for the coroner but in the end it’s her decision.’ Mackie snapped off her surgical gloves and went to wash her hands. Her voice, like her actions, had a crisp, official air to it.

  ‘You see Sonia Gutierrez around Iqaluit the last couple days, Anna?’

  Mackie stopped drying her hands and turned around to face the question.

  ‘I already told Derek, no,’ she said decisively.

  Edie offered her a piece of omelette. She shook her head, turned her back and went on with her packing, closed as a clam. On the other side of the room Derek grimaced as if to say this was a lost cause. He took the piece of omelette. They ate in silence for a minute or two, while Mackie worked around them. When it looked like they weren’t going to get anything more out of the ME, Edie licked her fingers, drew the sticky note out of her pocket and passed it over to Derek. ‘I found this, it’s Sonia’s handwriting.’

  Derek read the letters RTG out loud, handed the note back and carried on chewing. ‘Means nothing to me.’

  It was a few seconds before Edie noticed that the clinking sound of metal on metal had ceased. In the corner of the room Mackie had stopped what she was doing and was standing with her back to them, her shoulders tensed. The atmosphere in the room thickened. Eventually Mackie turned to face them. She seemed to have had a change of heart.

  ‘You two just don’t give up, do you? RTG might be radioisotope thermoelectric generator. They were installed in a lot of remote Arctic monitoring stations. They use radioactive decay to generate electricity off-grid. There were still a few in use in the North American Arctic right up to the end of the nineties.’ She stopped abruptly, as though her battery had just run out, before deciding to go on.

  ‘A couple of cases came to me when I was working in forensics over in the Yukon . . . drunks sticking their heads right inside them and getting radiation burn. But you’d have to get right up close.’

  Edie flipped the sticky note over in her fingers and read what was written on the reverse. A thought arose in her mind like a footprint in the snow, deep and telling.

  ‘What about SrTCs? That an acronym for something?’ They were the same letters as she’d seen written on Chip Muloon’s hand but she decided it was better not to say anything about that. Mackie was spooked enough as it was. She didn’t want to frighten her off completely.

  As it was, the ME seemed profoundly unsettled. She had her back to the counter, her hands clasped along its edge, and was staring into the middle distance as though she was trying to make sense of something.

  ‘Anna, please,’ Edie said simply.

  When Mackie turned her head Edie could see that her eyes were moist with tears.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ she said quietly. Her chest rose and fell. For a moment she seemed to fix on the door and Edie wondered if she was about to make a run for it. But there was nowhere to run to and Anna Mackie knew that too.

  ‘We found a paper forbidding the testing of the animal bones among Sonia Gutierrez’s documents. We know that Charlie Salliaq has bone-marrow disease and now you tell us that the Defence Department took samples of Martha’s bones. What is it about bones, Anna?’

  The ME went over to the gurney and zipped the body of Rashid Alfasi back up inside its bag. She seemed to be weighing up her options.

  Edie gave her a pleading look. The dead have ears, she thought, and they can speak. She could hear Martha Salliaq whispering to her but there was only one word in a hundred she could catch. And all around her this deafening roar of paper. The white man’s footprints. She thought about the photo of Martha that she’d been carrying around in the pocket of her parka. She pulled it out now and went over to where Mackie was standing. It may be, she thought, that Mackie was so used to seeing the dead that she’d forgotten the one great truth about them, that they had all once lived.

  The ME took one look at the photograph and issued a little cry of shock.

  ‘She was beautiful and smart and in love. With him’ – she pointed to the body bag – ‘with Rashid Alfasi.’

  Mackie bit her lip. She looked gaunt and haunted. With a fierceness that was almost frightening, she suddenly thrust out her hand and said, ‘Show me the note.’

  Her eyes flashed over it.

  ‘Those letters are the symbols for strontium, tritium and caesium. Strontium and caesium are radioactive metals, tritium is an isotope of hydrogen. People sometimes call them the unholy trinity. Exposure to them causes radiation sickness and cancers. Of the three, strontium is probably in the god spot. It collects in the bone marrow and causes leukaemia. People call it the bone seeker. It’s generally a by-product of nuclear fission.’ She seemed resigned now, and lonely, as though she had crossed over a line from which there was no going back.

  Derek had stopped eating. Edie saw him watching Anna intently. The three of them unwilling actually to give voice to what they now knew.

  • • •

  They finished the packing in silence and Derek escorted Anna Mackie back to her plane. While he was gone, Edie returned to Charlie Salliaq’s room in the nursing station. She pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed. The old man did not open his eyes, but neither did it seem to her that he was sleeping. He had grown even paler since her last visit, the veins on his arms like the milky-blue run-off on moraine. It was clear he didn’t have long to go.

  ‘Avasirngulik.’ The old man’s eyes moved under their lids.

  ‘The Lemming Police’s girl.’ He reached out and patted her affectionately on the leg. The pupils were glassy and unseeing. ‘Did you find your way through that storm of paper?’ He chuckled. ‘You know why they shower these document blizzards down on us? It’s so they can sneak in while we are blinded and do what they like.’

  ‘Is that what they did at Glacier Ridge?’ Edie said.

  The old man gave a sigh of resignation. ‘That’s what they always do.’

  ‘Can you remember what happened there, avasirngulik?’

  ‘Ha, my memory,’ Charlie said, smiling weakly. ‘I saw a TV show when I was down in Iqaluit. They said that by the time the light from the stars hits us it’s old. They said that what we see is already history. You, me, everything.’ He reached out and patted her arm. ‘But we already know that, don’t we, Lemming Police’s girl? We Inuit have known since before time began.’

  His breath became a cough and as his body seized Edie caught a glimpse of the skin on his chest beneath the hospital gown, the colour of it translucent and as yellow-g
rey as a stretched seal bladder. She picked up his water cup from the nightstand. He propped himself up on an elbow and took a sip.

  Then he lay back, shifting his body a little in the bed.

  ‘Glacier Ridge was a long time ago. I was a handyman. I cleaned up and fixed things.’

  ‘Did Martha ever visit you there?’ Edie said.

  He shook his head. ‘I finished working there before Martha was even born.’

  ‘You recall anything they were trying to keep secret, Charlie? Any place you weren’t allowed to go, any process you weren’t allowed to witness?’

  The old man raised a bony hand and rubbed his left ear. ‘I’m tired, Edie Kiglatuk.’

  ‘You need that blood, elder.’

  There was a fleeting instant when she saw something raw and full of life cross his face.

  ‘There was one time. Way back. It was in the winter, I remember, because the sky lit up the night and then the ground shook and there was a hot, rushing wind and the sound was like a thousand icebergs turning over. We were all scared. We thought maybe the sun had made a mistake, maybe that the seasons had gotten mixed up. We were living in huts then, just tiny little cabins fixed together from old packing boxes, heather and fur between the walls as insulation. Some of us stayed in our cabins with our families. The ones who believed in Jesus, they went to the church and said their prayers. In the evening a qalunaat came into town; he was dressed strange. He said they were closing the station for a few days. He gave us two weeks’ pay. But they never reopened it properly.

  ‘Not long afterwards the qalunaat shut the place down and shipped out. But the fire burned for a long time. You couldn’t see it but you knew that it was there. It made that lake. The water was hot for a while but no birds ever flew over. People said the fire brought evil spirits from their resting places. Why we called it Lake Turngaluk.’

  ‘You recall what year this was?’

  ‘I’m old, I don’t remember things that way,’ Charlie said. He sensed Edie pressing him. ‘I was married to another woman then, and I didn’t have my daughters.’ A sudden look of pain came over him. ‘People said that qalunaat had put a curse on the place. Babies died. My wife, that wasn’t Alice then, Elizapee was her name. Her babies died. The spirits at the lake took ’em down into the underworld, that’s what people said.’ He lifted his head and licked his dry lips. Edie held the water to him and he took another sip.

  ‘Who else worked at the site?’

  ‘They’re all gone to spirit now. All except Toolik Pitoq.’ Charlie gave a long sigh and shut his eyes. ‘It’s taboo to talk about this. The spirits don’t like me to talk about it. That’s why I’m so tired.’

  Edie took the old man’s fragile hand in hers and placed a kiss on his forehead. Salliaq whispered something she didn’t catch, then, without opening his eyes again, he fell asleep.

  35

  It took Edie a while after she’d woken to figure out where she was. The sun was blading through the blinds in Derek’s bedroom. Derek himself was still asleep, a blanketed mound on the couch. She got up, quietly wrapped his robe around her and stole towards the door without waking him. An empty whisky bottle lay in the sink. Had they drunk it? She couldn’t remember. She blew on her palm but her breath smelled only of sleep.

  She made some tea and took it out onto the steps. The jaeger was sitting on the telegraph wire. It whistled a warning call. She went around to the back of the building and checked the nest. There was only one fledgling now, almost fully grown, preening itself in a soft cup made from the down and feathers of its devoured siblings. It froze when it saw Edie’s face, its beady eye indignant at the intrusion.

  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?’