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

by M. J. McGrath

  He grabbed the keys and made his way towards the back door which led out onto the landing strip and the hangar building. At the exit he hesitated a moment before turning back to Edie and saying, ‘The flying thing. Best if the others don’t know.’

  On their way to the hangar they paused at the weather station to check the anemometer and barometer. The wind had turned 180 degrees and was blowing in from the west now. Derek looked upwards. Edie scanned his face, trying to read his thoughts, then lighted on the barometer. Above, the sky was empty of birds. All of which meant one thing: there was a polar cyclone coming and it would be centred, as always, on Baffin Island. Exactly where they were heading.

  Over at the hangar they saw Willa waving them over. They began to run.

  ‘Any point in trying anywhere else?’ she said.

  ‘With the fuel we have and my navigation? Maybe Resolute.’

  Edie groaned. Resolute was where the High Arctic SOVPAT military exercises were headquartered.

  They stopped beside the hangar and paused a moment to catch their breath.

  ‘How’s the weather looking?’ Willa said.

  ‘Bumpy.’

  Edie turned to her ex-stepson and clutched his arm. ‘You don’t need to come with us. Klinsman knows we took the guard’s weapon. You can say we forced you.’ Willa blinked back his astonishment. Something passed between them. She turned away, unable to stomach the hurt on his face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Of course you’re coming.’

  • • •

  The police Twin Otter was sitting in its summer position in the open hangar, face-out to the strip. Derek clambered into the cockpit, nervously eyeing the controls, naming each under his breath to calm himself. Airspeed indicator, altimeter, turn and bank indicator, heading indicator, artificial horizon, vertical speed indicator. Compass. He checked the fuel gauge and the time on his watch and hit the ignition switch; the propeller buzzed into action. He swung his head back to check on the others and saw the lawyer and Willa buckling themselves in and Edie behind them, locking the passenger door.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said, throttling forward, and they began to rumble towards the landing strip. He could feel his pulse screaming, his palms, already raw from the rope, now stinging with sweat. They reached the landing strip and he aligned the plane, managing to bring it to a halt, his hand shaking on the control yoke. He could feel himself losing awareness, as though the present moment were leaking out of him. He swung around and, finding Edie with his gaze, he said,

  ‘I could use you up here.’

  As she clambered into the seat beside him, he eased off the brake, his fingers sharp and painful on the controls. The engine roared and lurched forward and they began to rattle down the landing strip. As they picked up speed he felt the doughy feeling in his head lift. He focused his attention back on the strip then pulled up the control yoke and they were up and climbing out over the Sound. He took the plane higher. The Otter would have a hard time in cyclonic winds. It was bad luck. Summer cyclones were rare and, generally, not as severe as the winter variety. He might have trouble keeping the plane on a straight course but it was unlikely to break up. What worried him more was the possibility that the buffeting might cause them to veer off course enough to use up their fuel. If they managed to reach Iqaluit, the next big challenge would be landing in downdraughting air with strong ground winds. He could feel his fear waiting to spring.

  They hit rough air and the plane shuddered and trembled. Then it dropped. Derek felt his stomach leave him. No one spoke. He held on tighter to the control yoke. The palms of his hands were burning. He checked the altimeter and levelled the plane out. He was remembering something Pol once told him, that bush pilots never talked about what they’d do if they crashed. They only talked about when.

  Edie caught his eye and threw him a sympathetic look. Since he’d met her he’d felt himself heading out to meet life and that inevitably meant coming nearer to death too. Still he hadn’t regretted it. Not once. Or, at least, not for long.

  The plane rocked again. He could feel the pull of the wind on the fuselage. He tried to shut down the side of himself that felt panicked by it but he felt like a whale in an ocean of air, forcing himself up to breathe. He looked at his bloody hands and steadied his thoughts. He realized that he’d never really talked to anyone about the Yellowknife accident and he made a promise to himself that, if he got them through this, he would. And there was no one he wanted to talk to about it more than Edie Kiglatuk. The woman sitting beside him knew how it felt to walk away alive; to have to live haunted by ghosts of the dead you’d left behind.

  They were over Baffin now, heading into the cyclone. He considered diverting to Pond Inlet or one of the other handful of tiny north Baffin settlements to wait out the worst of it, then realized what folly it was even to think that way. If they tried to conceal themselves, Klinsman and his men would come after them. The only place to hide was in plain sight.

  He did a quick calculation in his mind, plugged in the Iqaluit airport frequency, identified himself and waited for a response. Nothing. He wondered if the storm was taking out the radio, then took a breath, recalculated and decided that most likely they weren’t yet in range. For an instant he let his unpreparedness get to him, then he gathered himself once more and decided that after another ten minutes’ flying time he’d try again.

  He felt the sweat trickle down the back of his neck. The plane was dancing about like a mayfly. Beside him, Edie seemed calm and unruffled. He glanced into the rear mirror. Willa was chewing his finger. Gutierrez had a hand over her mouth as though she was trying to stop herself from screaming. He gripped the control yoke more tightly. The shaking was constantly threatening to loosen it from his grip. If the cyclone held to this strength, he could probably get them through, he thought, but landing was going to require assistance. They weren’t expected though, so he had to hope the airport hadn’t closed. His eyes flipped from the control panel to the windshield and he watched Baffin Island slowly disappear into whipping cloud.

  Ten minutes later he tried the radio again with the same result. A bead of anxiety began to grow in his stomach, and he felt a tic start up in his eye. He swung his head around to look at Edie. Her eyes were closed. The plane was shaking like a cottonhead, the wings rattling, the wind screaming across the fuselage. Behind him, Willa was still chewing his finger but Gutierrez was being sick. No one had spoken for a long time.

  There was a part of him, he realized, that wanted to take his hands from the control yoke and float off into oblivion. He looked over at Edie again and felt a sudden surge of resentment. It was she who had pushed him into this. Without her, he might have walked away from the case the moment the Defence Department had taken it over, allowed the Killer Whales to go down for the murder of Martha Salliaq and cleared his mind of any talk of underground tests and radioactive contamination. But he knew that, without her too, he would have carried on living in the shadows, shoring himself up with cigarettes and coffee and lemmings. The only person who’d cared enough to stop him becoming the Lemming Police was the woman sitting right next to him.

  And he didn’t want to be responsible for killing her.

  He made another dead reckoning of their position but it was difficult to do without a confirmed forecast wind speed. Once more he tried the radio but what came back was white noise. By his calculations they were less than fifty kilometres from Iqaluit now, but he couldn’t be sure. What he did know was that they were long past the point of no return. If he overflew Iqaluit or otherwise missed it, he didn’t have enough fuel to take them on to the landing strip at Kimmirut.

  He dropped the plane, hoping to fly under the cloud to get a visual, without going low enough to make them vulnerable in a sudden downdraught. At the descent, he felt his stomach lurch and his pulse begin thudding again. Suddenly, the cloud cleared momentarily and he saw, far distant, the pucker on the tundra that was Iqaluit. And then it was gone once more. He pushed up his headpho
nes, switched the comms lever, identified himself and requested a response. For a moment or two there was nothing, then a voice said,

  ‘What the hell are you doing? The airport is closed.’

  Relief flooded across his face.

  ‘This is an emergency. I’m going to need to make a landing at Iqaluit.’

  ‘Copy that,’ the voice said, adding, ‘you’re lucky I had to come back for my laptop.’ There was a pause. ‘What is your position?’

  He felt himself smile and loosened his grip just a little on the control yoke, mentally keying himself into the comforting, unequivocal language of the control tower. He passed on the position. The controller OK’d him and gave preliminary instructions. The plane began its descent, buffeted wildly by the wind.

  ‘We got strong side winds on the runway. Brace yourselves for a rough landing.’

  The plane wobbled and swung through the air like a wounded goose. A slow shallow land would leave them more vulnerable to the side winds so he kept the approach at about a hundred knots. When they were at thirty metres Derek instructed his passengers to put their heads in their laps and cover them with their hands. He pushed the prop levers forward, willing the wind not to gust just as he levelled off low for landing. He could almost feel the tarmac beneath him now. He swallowed hard and teased the plane down. The wheels made contact with a loud grinding sound and a hard bump. Immediately, he pulled the prop lever back, trying to correct the push of the wind to keep the plane stable along the strip. He felt it slow. He was in control. He allowed himself to taxi to the second apron then pulled off, engaged the brakes fully and came to a screeching halt.

  Beside him he heard the sound of clapping. Edie grinned, leaned over and gave him an Inuit kiss. He felt himself smile. Then he threw back his head and closed his eyes and allowed himself to breathe.

  42

  The flight controller’s name was Forester Norven. He was a thickset qalunaat with the reddened pelt and bedevilled face of a man who’d given up booze and was now regretting it. The moment they’d landed Sonia Gutierrez had rushed to the bathroom to be sick. Norven found the others a place to sit in the terminal waiting area and went to fetch coffee and some towels. The run from the plane to the terminal building had left them soaked. Moments later he returned.

  ‘You know, guys, I’m probably going to have to report this.’ He ran a palm over his bald spot. You could see he was torn between duty and his desire to help and hadn’t yet decided which way to go. All he needed was a little nudge in the right direction.

  ‘Call Sergeant Makivik at the Iqaluit RCMP,’ Derek said, towelling down his clothes. ‘He’ll make it right. And tell him Derek Palliser says he needs to get up here right away. In fact, why don’t I call him direct?’

  Norven signalled to Derek to stay sitting. He wasn’t about to let go of the situation. ‘You get your breath back. I’ll speak to Makivik myself.’

  Soon after he’d gone Gutierrez reappeared, looking hollow-eyed and clutching her backpack. She’d dried her hair with the washroom hand dryer.

  ‘We should alert Chris Tetlow,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a contact at the Toronto press and there are some lawyers – ’

  Derek stopped her. ‘We’re not doing anything until we’ve thought this through a little. Bill Makivik will find us some place safe to stay. We’ll take advice, get some shut-eye, then decide.’ When Gutierrez opened her mouth to speak again, Derek held up his hand to steady her. Gutierrez sank back into her seat, a surprising look of relief on her face.

  Just then Norven appeared from a door marked Authorized Personnel Only and announced that Makivik was on his way.

  • • •

  Sergeant Bill Makivik arrived ten minutes later in his storm gear, dripping rain. He was a fit man but the cyclonic wind had left him breathless.

  ‘Jesus H, Derek,’ he said, simply. ‘This is a pretty crazy time to be up in the air, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s been a pretty crazy time all round,’ Derek said. His eyes moved to Norven, who was listening intently. ‘We’ll explain at the detachment.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to that,’ Makivik said.

  In her peripheral vision Edie saw Norven’s face fall. It was going to be hard to keep this quiet.

  All four of them crammed into the detachment jeep beside Makivik. There was no point trying to talk. You couldn’t hear anything above the storm. The wind was pushing great fists of rain at the windshield and Makivik was having trouble keeping the jeep stable. They more or less aquaplaned along the road into town. By the time they reached the detachment the rain had frozen into hailstones the size of ptarmigan eggs. They’d been lucky. If they’d set off in the plane an hour or two later they wouldn’t have made it.

  Makivik managed to bring the vehicle up close to the detachment entrance and they ran in, Gutierrez clutching her backpack to her chest to keep the rain off. Inside they shook themselves and wiped the rain from their heads. It was late by now and almost everyone at the detachment had gone home early in order to ready their houses for the cyclone. The sole duty officer, an Inuit woman with a cheerful smile and bad teeth, exchanged perfunctory greetings with Derek.

  ‘You folks got no luggage?’ Makivik said, waving them into a side room.

  ‘We left in a hurry.’

  Makivik frowned but thought better than to demand an explanation right there and then. ‘You should get out of those wet clothes. We got some coveralls somewhere.’ He scanned the room as though looking for a closet, then went over to the door and called out to the duty officer, who came back a moment later carrying four prison-issue coveralls. They went to the washrooms, hurriedly changed and returned to the side room.

  ‘Now, folks,’ Makivik said. ‘What the fuck?’

  • • •

  It took Derek a while to outline the events of the past couple of weeks, from finding Martha’s body at Lake Turngaluk to their arrival in Iqaluit. He told Makivik about the two men from the Defence Department checking out the body then the department’s decision to reclaim the land at Glacier Ridge, which he saw now as an attempt to shut the investigation down before anyone started asking questions about the lake.

  Listening to the story, Makivik’s eyes grew wider and his legs began to swing nervously in his chair. Maybe he was beginning to wish the plane hadn’t made it after all, Edie thought.

  Derek went on, detailing how he now saw Klinsman’s eagerness to cooperate in the indictment of Privates Namagoose and Saxby as part of the department’s plan to wrap the case up speedily and in a way they could control. It wasn’t clear why Klinsman appeared to be doing the department’s bidding. Maybe he’d been given no choice. Like Edie, Derek sensed that Klinsman was troubled by his role and thought that was why he’d tried to warn them off continuing with the investigation.

  Before long, Gutierrez began to chip in with her own version of events. She hadn’t gone to the detachment with what she knew earlier, she explained, because she hadn’t been sure who she could trust with the information.

  ‘When I heard those voices in my room at the hotel I should have just run, but a place like Kuujuaq, there’s nowhere to run to.’

  ‘Rashid Alfasi found that out,’ Edie said. She took up from where Gutierrez had left off. ‘I picked up Sonia’s papers. By then we knew that the Defence Department had covered up something really big at Glacier Ridge. And we knew that Martha’s murder had the potential to be the key that opened it up. So we talked with some of the elders up in Kuujuaq who’d worked at the radar station way back in the seventies.’

  Makivik leaned forward to speak, then held back.

  ‘Turns out there was a big fire up at Glacier Ridge back in 1973, and the earth shook. They found a whole load of dead animals. And then the babies started dying. And they kept on dying. No one talked about it. Said it was taboo.’

  Makivik gave a puzzled frown.

  ‘How do you know this explosion wasn’t an accident?’

  ‘We don’t. But we do
know that the Defence Department built an underground bunker to contain some kind of nuclear device. It seems likely that it was intended as a test. We don’t know for sure.’

  There was a pause. Makivik began working his lips in and out, trying to edge his way towards an understanding. Edie felt for him. How much easier it would have been to leave secret weapons programmes and government cover-ups, global warming and oil exploration, street drugs and alcohol, to qalunaat nunaat, the white man’s world. But it was all a part of their world now too. The Arctic and the south shared a destiny. Inuit could no longer afford to avoid the new reality, however unwelcome. Their survival depended upon it.

  ‘In death, Martha became a kind of human Geiger counter,’ Edie went on. ‘The Defence Department must have worried that radioactive contamination on her body would alert people to their little secret. They sent their men up here to check. Then they took over the Glacier Ridge site, knowing the military would take over jurisdiction on the case and they would have more control.’

  ‘This is a lot to take in,’ Makivik said.

  ‘All you really need to know is that the Defence Department would be very happy if we all disappeared right now, and they’re not above trying to make that happen,’ Gutierrez said. ‘So we have to find somewhere safe while we decide what to do next.’

  • • •

  The place Makivik came up with was a cousin’s house on the outskirts of town. The cousin was at a drying-out facility and his family had gone to summer camp, so the place was empty. There were two bedrooms. Edie and Gutierrez each took one. Willa would bed down in Edie’s room while Derek slept on the couch. Makivik left them then reappeared a while later with bandages for their hands, some painkillers, the leg of a caribou he’d shot a week ago, and some of his wife’s bannock bread, promising to be back in the morning. Gutierrez helped bandage up their hands. They were all too shaken from the flight to cook, but sandwiched the raw meat between pieces of sugar-crusted bannock and all but Gutierrez ate it as it was. No one felt much like going to bed and with the storm howling around the house it didn’t seem likely anyone would sleep in any case.