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

by M. J. McGrath

  Toolik gazed at the wound and said nothing. He took a long draught from a cup on the table and began to drift, striking up a tuneless humming.

  ‘Oh, no, my son never got over losing that girl,’ he said, finally. ‘Now then, Martha. Where’s my lunch?’

  36

  Derek met Rashid Alfasi’s parents at the landing strip and brought them directly to the nursing station. They had travelled for the best part of twenty-four hours to reach Ellesmere from Vancouver and were sallow from the journey; the father, craggy-faced, holding up his small, plump wife whose legs trembled with grief or exhaustion. At least they had a body to bury, Edie thought. Right now the Salliaqs had nothing. Edie made them tea and sat with the mother while her husband went to the morgue to formally identify his son. They had brought flowers and wanted to lay them at the spot where Rashid had died, so while Luc Fabienne and Joe Oolik loaded the body into a crate in preparation for the flight, Derek took the bereaved parents out to the trout lake and Edie returned to the detachment to do some more research.

  She moved over to Derek’s computer and entered three words into the search engine. Strontium, tritium, caesium. Unfamiliar words for which there were no Inuktitut translations, words that felt heavy on the tongue. It felt bad keying in the word Arctic beside them, as though, even as symbols, their proximity had the power to contaminate. She pressed enter and sat back.

  To her surprise pages and pages of links appeared. Most of them, it seemed, had to do with submarines and the Soviet Union. She ran her eyes down until she came to a word that caught her attention. Aleut.

  Inuit, Eskimo, inhabitants of the Arctic. Her own people.

  She clicked on the link. A page scrolled up with another unfamiliar word: Amchitka, an island, as it turned out, one of many in the drowned mountain range known as the Aleutians, far off the Alaskan coast. She read on. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the islands had been the remote domain of Aleut fishermen and Russian sea otter trappers. Their fate changed in 1942 when the Japanese captured two of the islands in the chain, Attu and Kiska. Not long afterwards the United States established a beachhead on Amchitka from which they launched an offensive to recapture Attu. According to the web page three thousand Aleuts and soldiers from both sides were killed in the battle. Edie turned that number over in her head. It contained another word that had no equivalent in Inuktitut. Thousand. In her language there was only one, two, three and many. The way Inuit had survived for so long on the vast expanses of the Barrenlands was by keeping themselves small. This was another thing qalunaat didn’t understand. Perhaps they were beginning to understand it. But perhaps it was too late.

  It was certainly too late for Amchitka. In 1965 the US Defence Department exploded a nuclear device on the island that caused radioactive contamination of its freshwater lakes. This was kept secret. Edie thought about Lake Turngaluk, the lake no birds would fly over, the lake of evil spirits whose waters poisoned the body of Martha Salliaq. The lake that, for forty years, no one would talk about.

  But that wasn’t the end for Amchitka. Four years after the first explosion, the Atomic Energy Commission, which had taken over responsibility for nuclear testing, detonated a calibration device which triggered earthquakes and landslides. You might have thought this would be enough to have stopped them, Edie thought, but it wasn’t. On 6 November 1971, in project Cannikin, the AEC detonated the largest underground nuclear test bomb in US history on Amchitka, a bomb 385 times the size of Little Boy at Hiroshima.

  The bomb was placed in an underground concrete chamber.

  It was like finding the perfect snowflake in the midst of a storm. The one precise, orderly explanation, the vanishing point in the chaos. What else could explain the sudden expansion of the site at Glacier Ridge, the anomalies in the plans, the secret underground bunker, the fire and the dead whales, the banning of tests on animal bones, Charlie Salliaq’s leukaemia and finally, but by no means least, the transfer of Martha Salliaq’s body to a military morgue and the Defence Department’s determination to close the investigation into her murder?

  She sat back, her breath heavy in her chest, and there was a sudden coldness in her belly as though she’d been lying on ice. Officially, she saw now, none of it had ever happened.

  But Charlie Salliaq was witness to the fact that it had.

  • • •

  She went back to the old man’s room and found him sleeping soundly. She whispered his name, stroking his face with her finger. It was only when she began to sing that he woke and, opening a single eye, said,

  ‘Is that you, Lemming Police’s girl?’

  ‘Yes, avasirngulik.’

  He chuckled. ‘You sing like a goose.’

  ‘Then you’ll prefer it if I talk.’ She told him everything. The plans, the bunker and the Cannikin test at Amchitka. The irradiated water, the unholy trinity and the bone seeker. She told him about the memorandum and the animal bones. Last, but most important, she told him about the removal of his daughter’s body, the attempt to sweep her death away as though it was of no importance.

  He listened in the Inuit way, intently and without comment. The last part would hurt him terribly, she knew, but she thought it might save him too. Sometimes it worked that way. He let her finish. Then he gave a sigh and said, wearily, ‘Qalunaat have always done whatever they wanted in the Arctic.’

  She pressed her lips together and squeezed her hands into fists in her lap so that he would not see them. For all his talk about the past Charlie Salliaq had been one of the few who had been able to shrug it off. A strong man who had refused to be timid. A warrior disguised as a janitor. And now she needed him to wake up from his dying slumber and fight.

  ‘I thought Charlie Salliaq was in this room,’ she said. Her voice had pebbles in it.

  The old man rolled his foggy eyes. He gestured towards the nightstand to have his water cup passed. He took a long sip from the straw and lay back. His chest began to spasm.

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said, ‘ask Sonia Gutierrez to help you.’

  ‘You are the witness, Charlie. We need you. The Defence Department took a calculated risk at Glacier Ridge. They figured we wouldn’t stand up for ourselves and no one else would give a damn. Nothing will bring Martha back, avasirngulik, but we won’t ever know for sure who killed her until we confront the people who are trying to make her death unimportant. Take the blood transfusion and help me, avasirngulik. Help Martha.’

  The old man’s brow furrowed. He let go of her hand.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said simply. ‘Leave me alone now, Edie Kiglatuk.’

  • • •

  Luc was on the phone in his office. He waved at Edie to help herself to a hot beverage in the waiting room while he finished the call. Moments later, he joined her, yawning and rubbing a hand across his head.

  ‘Not sleeping?’

  ‘The damned light. It’s like being interrogated twenty-four hours a day for four months. How do you stop yourself going crazy?’

  ‘It helps if you start out that way.’

  Luc smiled. ‘In case you’re wondering, Derek is up at the landing strip, seeing off the Alfasis’ flight. He asked me to take a blood sample from Toolik Pitoq. I’m afraid I haven’t gotten around to it yet. It’s been crazy busy. But it’s next on my list, I promise.’

  She thanked him, then remembered the injury to Pitoq’s right arm and asked Luc to check it out while he was at it.

  • • •

  On her way back to the detachment she noticed the door flap of her tent was moving softly in the wind. She was usually meticulous about roping it down to keep stray huskies or foxes from raiding her food stores. She parked up her ATV and went over to check it out. Inside, nothing seemed to have been moved or taken, but she had the uneasy feeling that someone had been in nonetheless. She thought back to Klinsman’s visit and wondered where Chip Muloon was now. A vehicle pulled up alongside and she heard Derek shouting her name. She poked her head out of the canvas.


  ‘I swung by the store on my way back. Thought I’d make hamburger. You want some?’

  The plane came up and over the houses, sucking the air below into its slipstream. They waited for it to pass.

  ‘Alfasi’s parents are going back to Morocco,’ Derek said. ‘They say this place makes their blood freeze.’

  ‘Funny, it makes mine boil.’ The way Edie said this brought an enquiring look from Derek.

  ‘I’ll fill you in over lunch.’

  • • •

  As it turned out, Derek’s idea of making hamburger was to empty the meat out on a plate raw, stick a fork in the top and open a jar of pickles. She picked at the food without any appetite, telling him what she’d discovered and venturing her theory about nuclear testing. As she went on he began to eat more and more slowly until at last he put his fork down for the final time.

  ‘I’ve suddenly lost my appetite,’ he said.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘This must be what Gutierrez got close to before she disappeared,’ she offered. ‘Since he was being paid by the Defence Department I’ll bet that was what Chip Muloon was working on. Long-term health outcomes. Maybe Rashid Alfasi was in on it too.’ An image of the jellyfish sprang to mind, its tentacles reaching out across the beach.

  Derek pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette, then stubbed it out.

  ‘I really should give this up,’ he said. Seeing Edie’s expression he added, ‘I mean, the smokes.’ In the last couple of days he had stopped shaving and he was now scratching the stubble on his chin, which, being half Inuit and half Cree, was dark and sparse.

  The phone went. It was Luc.

  ‘Old Salliaq seems to have changed his mind. He says he’s willing to fly out to Ottawa for a blood transfusion and a possible bone-marrow transplant. I’ve spoken to Applebaum and he’s contacted the city hospital there. They’ve got a bed waiting for him.’

  Edie felt herself smile.

  The old man couldn’t resist a fight.

  Derek said he would ask Pol to make a quick turnaround in Iqaluit and head directly back.

  There was a pause. ‘One other thing,’ Luc said, ‘there’s been some kind of mix-up with my blood samples. I’m not sure how it could have happened. I just came back from taking blood from Toolik Pitoq. You asked me to see if I could find anything wrong with his white cell count so I had a quick look at his medical records. As you probably know, the records don’t go very far back . . .’ The sound of voices interrupted his flow. Luc mumbled something, then returned to the phone. ‘Some patients just arrived so I gotta keep this brief. Toolik Pitoq is blood group A. He’s pretty anaemic and there appears to be an abnormality in his white cells. As a precaution, I checked his son’s records, just to see if Markoosie had been diagnosed with anything. These things often run in families. Markoosie’s blood is AB. Which kinda surprised me because I was pretty sure when I’d taken that elimination sample from him last week, he was group A. I checked out that injury you talked about, Edie, and it looked like someone had made a little incision into a vein. When I asked the old man about it he just went quiet. Any case, I got out the backup sample I always take in case the original gets lost and tested it again. Either the written records are wrong, which is possible, or that blood sample Markoosie gave us last week wasn’t his. Which got me to thinking . . .’

  Derek was leaning over the phone now, his elbow in the forgotten plate of meat.

  ‘. . . Markoosie said he felt faint and asked for a glass of water. That’s pretty common and I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but looking back, I wonder if he swapped the samples when I turned away to get the water. That kind of thing used to happen when I was doing random drug-testing back in Toronto. Employees covering for their drug habits. I was always more vigilant back then, but I’ve never heard of anything like it happening up here in the north before.’

  • • •

  Motes of sunlight striped the furniture in the Pitoqs’ house, picking out the stains left by beer cans and TV dinners. The TV had been switched off only recently, its static still ripening the air, but to the right of the snow porch the door to the storeroom was open and there was evidence of someone having left in a hurry.

  Toolik Pitoq lay on his bed fully clothed and fast asleep, his breathing slow and uneven. Derek went over and shook him gently, calling his name, but got no response. On the nightstand there was a pharmaceutical bottle with a scattering of pills beside it. Derek tapped Toolik’s arm and when he still did not stir he gently opened one of the old man’s eyelids. The pupil was rolled up and away. A wisp of foam started to play around the lips.

  ‘Call Luc.’ Derek waited for Edie to reach the phone then yelled the number.

  By the time Edie returned, the old man had begun to struggle for breath. Foam rolled from his mouth now and his legs began to shake violently. There was a great gasp after which the legs fell still. Derek leaned in close, feeling for breath. He flung off the blanket and began pumping at the old man’s chest with his hands.

  ‘He’s stopped breathing.’

  The door flew open and Luc appeared. Derek swung his head around, his hands continuing their motions.

  ‘Take over?’

  ‘You’re doing fine.’ Luc inserted a finger into the old man’s mouth and pulled out the foam, then he grabbed his wrist and felt for the pulse.

  ‘It’s OK. You can stop.’

  Derek stepped back. The nurse placed his stethoscope against Toolik’s chest.

  ‘Get the roll-out gurney. I’ll stay here with him.’

  Working together, Derek and Edie unstrapped the kit from the nursing station trailer and laid it out on the bed, then on a count of three rolled the old man on top. He was quiet now, his breath slow and even. Luc rolled up one of his eyelids and shone his flashlight into the pupil.

  ‘I’ll need to gastric-pump him.’ He looked up at Derek. ‘Help me with the gurney.’

  Derek swept up the bottle of pills and dumped it in his pocket, then the two men went to either end of the gurney and lifted Toolik on Luc’s count.

  ‘We’ll need to tell Markoosie.’

  ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary,’ Edie said. She mentioned the signs of a fast exit.

  Derek looked sceptical. ‘The old man has dementia. He could easily have taken an accidental overdose.’

  Something told her it hadn’t happened that way, but this wasn’t the time for a debate. Instead, she waited for the men to leave then started making her way through the drawers and cupboards in Markoosie’s room. Nothing jumped out at her until her eye was drawn to a photo album bound in blue leatherette sitting on the single bookshelf beside the Bible and a couple of textbooks on running a radio station. It was the only thing on the shelf not sitting in a pool of dust. She opened it up, flipping through forty or fifty pages of perfectly ordinary family photographs, and was about to put it back when something odd struck her. In every picture of the young Markoosie and the woman she presumed was his wife, Nora, there was a little girl. Who looked very much like Martha Salliaq.

  She left the house and made her way along the path to the town hall building. The door to the radio station was locked. Peering between the gaps in the venetian blind she could see that the room was empty. She headed outside. A row of parked ATVs was lined up in front of the building, but Markoosie’s was not among them. Swinging back onto her vehicle, she turned and began to bump along the path to the Salliaqs’ house.

  Lizzie and Willa Inukpuk were busying themselves in the yard stretching sealskins onto racks. She guessed they had come clean about their relationship after Charlie had been taken to hospital. Lizzie spotted her first. She stopped what she was doing and stood up. Something in her expression gave Edie the sense that she knew what was coming. Willa followed her, holding his hand above his face as a sunshield. Whatever secret Lizzie had been keeping all this time, she hadn’t shared it with her lover.

  ‘Is Alice here?’

  Willa flipped his head
towards the door.

  ‘She’s packing Charlie’s things to take down to Ottawa.’

  A cheap weekend case was standing just inside the door. Alice was in the kitchen making bannock bread, her hands powdered with flour. She left off when she saw Edie and, brushing back her hair with a forearm, went to the sink to rinse her hands.

  ‘You only ever come when something’s wrong. So what is it?’

  ‘Your father. He’s at the nursing station but I think he’s gonna be OK.’

  Saying nothing, the woman wiped her hands dry on a rag and went to the door. With a raw, quiet dignity, she said, ‘Willa, you drive me?’

  Willa nodded.

  ‘Lizzie, ride with me?’ Edie said, hoping to use the time to get her to talk. The girl shook her head emphatically.

  ‘I’ll take my father’s vehicle.’

  • • •

  By the time they reached the nursing station Toolik Pitoq was lying on a gurney, his breath struggling in his chest like a trapped hare, unable to speak. When he heard his daughter and granddaughter’s voices he mustered a smile but the confusion in his face suggested that he had no idea where he was or what he was doing there. The official version of events was that he had taken an accidental overdose. To Edie, though, that seemed unlikely. The bottle on the nightstand had contained Ambien. Luc had checked both his stock and his script records. He’d never prescribed it to the old man and there was none missing from the pharmacy.

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Derek said. ‘Kuujuaq is awash in prescription pills in the summer. Contractors bring them up, the crew on the supply ship, even bush plane pilots. Every so often me and Stevie try to crack down on it, but it doesn’t make us popular. People like getting high.’

  Edie reminded him that Saxby had taken some from the pharmacy at Camp Nanook and said he’d sold it on to a local man. Maybe that man was Markoosie Pitoq.

  ‘Might explain why he switched his father’s blood last week, though. If he’d been taking them himself he’d know his blood would show up dirty,’ Luc volunteered.