He was in one of his confrontational moods, but wasn't he always like that with her these days?
She said: 'Just a small thing.'
Nancy shifted awkwardly in her seat, then rose. 'I'll go fix some food.'
Edie waited for her to disappear into the kitchenette, and turned to Willa: 'We need to talk in the snow porch.'
'What?' He looked up at her, irritation hardening his face.
'Privately.'
The cramped porch forced the pair to stand closer than was comfortable for either. Not so long ago they would have hugged, but it had been a long time since there'd been any chance of that. She still remembered when, at bedtime, he would call out to her to come and tell him the story of Sedna, the little girl whose grandfather tossed her from his boat then cut off her clinging fingers. 'The fingers became seals and walruses,' she would say, 'and Sedna sat at the bottom of the ocean directing the animals to give themselves to the hunters or to stay hidden in the depths, depending on whether Inuit people made her happy or not.'
'Do I make Sedna happy?' he would ask.
'Sure you do,' she'd say and he'd close his eyes and be asleep in moments.
Now, given his mood, Edie thought it best to get directly to the point.
'I figure the glasshouse was your idea,' she said. 'But why the hell did you have to drag Joe into it?'
Willa had been a pothead for as long as she could remember, she didn't know how long exactly because by the time she'd been sober enough to notice, he had already moved on to heroin. Eventually he'd given that up and gone back to marijuana. Progress of a sort.
He shook his head and let out a venomous snort.
'You're priceless.'
Taking a step back she held up her hands, palms towards him. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'That came out bad. Can we do this civilized? I just mean, how was Joe involved? Was he smoking?'
It seemed unlikely, she hadn't smelled it on him, but she knew that marijuana made some people depressed, paranoid, and even suicidal.
Willa glanced back towards the living room but Nancy was still in the kitchenette. 'For one tiny second I forgot that everything, every damned thing, always has to come back to Joe. Forget it, Edie. I stopped owing you anything a long time ago.'
Edie stood for a moment. Willa was right. She had given up the right to have any claim over him the moment she'd hit the bottle. All those years when he still wanted her to love him as much as she loved Joe and she'd been unable to give him what he wanted. Now he was just content to see her suffer. She'd brought his hatred on herself. It was no less than she deserved.
'Listen,' he said, sounding more conciliatory. 'If I had any idea why my brother killed himself, I'd tell you. But I don't.' A plume of warm air rushed in where he held the door open. 'Joe was complicated. Ayaynuaq, Edie, it can't be helped, so just drop it.'
'I would if I could.'
Willa rolled his eyes. 'You wanna know what we did? I'll tell you what we did. We supplied the qalunaat at the science station. You wanna know another thing?' He was going to tell her anyway. 'I didn't make nothing from it, Edie, not the whole time. Every damned cent, every loonie went to Joe, his nursing fund.'
Her breath caught in her throat and for a moment she was stuck there, unable to inhale.
'Did you know Joe was gambling?' She wondered if it would give Willa any satisfaction to discover his brother had his own flaws, but saw he was as shocked as she had been. She felt ashamed of herself. 'I think maybe your brother gambled away that money.'
Willa took a step back.
'You're crazy.'
Something occurred to her. 'You weren't... he wasn't... using, was he?'
'Every so often we had a smoke. So what.' He stared at her, searching for meaning, then his face grew as dark as a winter noon. 'Oh, I get it. You think I was trading weed for dope, something I could spike. That's it, isn't it?' He let out an ugly laugh. 'You want to know, was I helping my own brother turn into a junkie?'
'No, Willa,' she said. 'Uh nuh.' The truth was, she didn't know what she thought.
'It ever even occur to you, Joe wanted to use, he had a whole pharmacy of drugs, more pills than the average junkie could spike in a lifetime, sitting right there at the clinic. All he had to do was to cook 'em up a little and grab the nearest needle.'
She looked at him blankly. It had never crossed her mind that pills could be injected. Willa gave her an exasperated look.
'Duh.'
With that he slammed the door and disappeared back inside the house.
She got home and clambered, wretched, into bed, clutching the pillow over her face to block out the world. It was either that, she sensed, or another rendezvous with the bottle and she'd promised herself not to go back there.
Still, the encounter with Willa had hit her like an ice avalanche. How many relationships would she have to ruin before she was prepared to give up? Maybe there was no rationale whatsoever for what had happened to Joe.
Just then, the front door slammed. Sammy burst in.
'Why are you doing this, Edie?' Angry. Again.
She sat up in bed, dazed. Then she laughed at what a fool she'd been to doubt herself. Hunting was the way she made sense of the world. No hunter ever called off a hunt until it was hopeless.
Sammy stood at the foot of the bed. He'd been drinking. 'Leave my son out of it.'
She felt suddenly desperate. 'Which one?' Her voice was harsh. 'The dead one, or the pothead?'
The second the words left her mouth she knew they were incendiary. He took the bait. In an instant, he flared and came at her, a ball of fury. For a moment she thought he was going to hit her; she could see in his face he thought it too. Then he slumped back, slit-eyed with exhaustion.
When he'd collected himself he said:
'The glasshouse thing, Edie, it was my fault.'
'Uh nuh, Joe was gambling, he was in debt.' She wasn't going to let her ex play the martyr. 'He was doing it at the clinic, online, with his credit card,' she said. 'He owed money.' There was no point keeping it from him now.
Sammy looked puzzled.
'Edie, Joe didn't have a credit card.'
He was wrong. She and Joe had filled in the application together. He'd needed the card to buy nursing books from some internet site.
Sammy sat down at the end of the bed, all the anger drained out of him. 'Joe cut up his card. I saw him do it.'
'You mean he maxed it out?' That would explain why he'd come to her for a loan when he needed new parts for his snowbie. This was worse than she'd imagined.
Sammy shook his head. 'No, I did.' His voice faltered. 'I needed a thermal scope on my rifle, I mean, I wanted one. You know, for night hunting. I didn't have any money, and I knew I'd never get credit, so I borrowed Joe's card.'
'You borrowed your son's credit card?'
'OK, I took it. And then Lisa persuaded me to buy her a new furnace.'
For the first time in as long as she could recall, Edie was speechless.
'But then the credit-card company contacted Joe and, Jeez, Edie, the whole thing was a mess.'
'So, the glasshouse money ...'
Sammy nodded miserably. 'Went to pay off the credit card. Which is why Joe cut it up.'
'So his father couldn't steal from him again.'
Sammy snuffled. 'Aw, Edie.'
'I'm tired, Sammy. You can let yourself out.'
Lying in bed on her own once more, she tried to figure out the sequence of events. Maybe Joe had set up a gambling account then never used it? But no, that didn't make sense. More likely he had started to use it then, when he saw where it was taking him, he'd given it up. Maybe none of this mattered any more. She'd made a mental note to speak to Robert Patma, but not now. Right now she needed to sleep.
When she woke it was light. But then it was always light now. There was also a man standing in her room. For an instant she thought the puikaktuq was back, then the figure resolved into Mike Nungaq.
'You sick, Edie?' He sounded genuinel
y worried. 'It's late.'
'Uh nuh.'
He held out a mug. 'I made you some tea.'
While she was taking the first sip, he dug around in his pocket and pulled out a padded envelope. 'Your stone came back.' He was watching her expectantly. 'I thought you'd want to know.'
Two mugs of tea and twelve teaspoons of sugar later she was beginning to feel almost human.
Mike handed her the stone.
'Turns out I was right about the meteorite, but, like I said, I'm no expert. There were a couple of things Jack - my friend - pointed out I hadn't noticed. First, this piece of space rock has been on Planet Earth a long, long time.' He pointed to a blackish patch. 'See that there? In fresh meteorites that fusion crust is all over. The dark brown varnish is rusted iron-nickel like I said before, but here, see .. .' He pointed to the outer edge of the rock. '. . . It's smooth, where the outer part vaporized as it fell through the atmosphere.' He pointed to the edge opposite to the first, which was sharper: 'And it's been chipped with a tool, suggesting that it was once part of a larger piece. The tool was non- metallic, probably another piece of meteorite, but you'll see that both edges have the same dark brown varnish, so if it was hammered off something bigger, it must have been done a while back. Jack reckons maybe more than a century. He says the oxidation layer is pretty even too.
He paused, glancing over at Edie expectantly. She fixed him with a non-committal sort of smile. Dragging Derek into her fine mess was one thing, but Mike was another: Mike Nungaq actually had something to lose. Disappointment curdled his expression as he realized he wasn't going to get any more out of her, but he took a breath and went on anyway.
'The thing I hadn't noticed, inside here . . .' He pointed to the part that had been drilled out to form a pendant, '. . . are these silvery-white spots, like tiny ice crystals. Jack had a hunch about those, so he scraped some of the rock off and tested it. And he turned out to be right. Iridium. A transition metal, related to platinum but much, much rarer. On earth, iridium is mostly confined to the core, but it's more common in space rocks. Which is why it's found in the craters left by meteors. Astroblemes.'
'Astro what?'
Edie flashed him a look, hoping he would get to the point, whatever it was. She had no idea what Mike was talking about.
'You familiar with the theories about the extinction of dinosaurs?' He finished his tea, gazed into the bottom of the mug and started up again. 'It was the high level of iridium in a part of the Yucatan which gave Luis Alvarez and his team the idea that what did for the dinos sixty-five million years ago was the impact of a giant meteorite.'
Edie coughed politely.
Seeing he hadn't got through to her, Mike took another tack.
'Remember those geologists who came up for the summer a couple of years back, Quebecois, I think?'
Edie cast her mind back and came up blank. 'Geologists are like rocks, Mike, ask me, they all look pretty much alike.'
'I helped this bunch out some. When they finished the project, they sent me a copy of their paper. I remembered something in it so I dug it out. What they found on Craig, Edie, was a small astrobleme. The crater left by a meteor. They just stumbled on it. They were interested in other stuff, see. The thing about the astrobleme only appears in the research as a footnote.
'I did some rooting around. Normally, beneath the 60th, you can trace astroblemes from their magnetic effects. That was how iridium was first discovered. Up here, it's much harder because of the weird magnetic fields.'
Edie registered the point. She was beginning to find what Mike was saying of more interest. The unreliability of compasses north of the 60th parallel was known even to the earliest of the European explorers, but here, well above the 70th, you took out a compass it could be pointing anywhere, depending on the local geomagnetic field.
'So, if there was an astrobleme on Ellesmere, or on Craig Island, it would be more difficult to detect?'
'From magnetic data, yes. Unless you just happened to come across it, like those geologists, the only way to find it, without doing years of complicated geologic research, would be to start from the fragments of meteor that caused it, then work backwards. Even then, it would be a tall order. The meteor usually gets scattered on impact.'
'Mike,' Edie interrupted. 'I'm really not all that bright. You're going to have to help me out here.'
Mike rubbed the stone in his hands.
'What I'm saying, you looked hard enough on Craig you'd find a perfect match to this. Find a few dozen, you could map out the scatter pattern and from that locate your astrobleme. It'd be a helluva job though. I don't have to tell you what it's like out there. Ten months of the year, the whole place is under three metres of ice and snow.'
'But the Quebecois fellows already found it.'
'I'd be willing to bet not many people know that.' Mike slapped his knees and stood up to go. 'Well, I hope that was worth getting you out of your bed for.'
As he reached the door she thought of something and called him back.
'Just out of interest, those geologists, the Quebecois? What were they actually looking for?'
'Salt,' he said. 'Garden variety salt.'
After he'd gone, she went to the bathroom and grabbed a bottle of Tylenol. Her head was thundery with new information. She wondered if it would ever be possible to make sense of it all.
Fixing some tea for herself, she went to the sofa, covered herself in a caribou skin, knocked back a couple of pills and tried to think. All of a sudden, an idea came into her head. It was as a result of something Willa had said. She picked up the Tylenol bottle, shook out a pill and crushed it under her sugar spoon. Then she poured a little hot tea onto the powder. Almost immediately it dissolved, leaving a puddle of liquid on the table. You can inject pills, why hadn't she thought of that?
She visualized the neat pile of foils left stacked in Joe's drawer. Was it likely that someone in Joe's position would have been able to think straight enough to pop one hundred and fifty Vicodin out of their blister packs then stack the packs back in a tidy little pile? It didn't seem so. And it was even less likely that someone could have made him swallow those pills if he hadn't wanted to. But supposing someone had 'cooked 'em up', as Willa called it, and injected Joe as he lay sedated and sleeping? It wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility, was it?
The thought made her sick with horror, but at the same time it made sense. All along Edie had fought against the notion that Joe had taken his own life. It was too easy. Yet until now there had been no way round those irrefutable path lab results. Joe had died of an overdose of Vicodin.
But what if the overdose had been administered by someone other than Joe? What if someone else had stolen into the nursing station and taken the pills then waited for Joe to be alone to inject him? Closing her eyes, she tried to take in the enormity of the idea. Her eyes were still shut tight when the door swung open.
It was her ex.
'Not now, Sammy.'
She wanted to be left alone with her thoughts. 'Edie, I. . .' His voice was whiny, like a beaten dog's.
He was feeling bad about the credit card business and was looking to her for absolution.
'Go away.'
'Aw, Edie,' he said, 'don't be like that. You doing this to punish me?'
'Now let me think,' she said. Her voice sounded harsh and sarcastic.
'Is this because I racked up Joe's card?' The whining evaporated and his voice took on a tone of righteous indignation. 'Or maybe it's those two men I took to Craig?' The idea had only just occurred to him, she could see. 'You're not sore about that, Edie? Are you?'
Edie finished her tea. She hadn't given the two duck hunters much thought but remembering them now, she realized just how odd their appearance in Autisaq had been. At the time, she'd been too drunk to make the connection.
Sammy sighed. 'So that is it. You want, I'll give you half the fee. Gimme a break here.'
She took a breath and set her mind back, sober as a rock. She wasn't list
ening to what Sammy was saying to her now because she was too busy trying to recall exactly what he'd said to her on the evening of his return from the trip: how the two hunters had insisted on being taken to Craig and their enthusiasm for the island's geology once they were there. And wasn't there something else about that trip? Of course, she remembered now. The plane with its unfamiliar green livery. Two ideas knitted together in her mind. Hadn't Joe said he'd seen a green plane? He thought he'd imagined it, but what if he hadn't? She felt the palms of her hands begin to prickle.
'Those fellows, you remember their names?' She was aware that her voice sounded inquisitorial, but she couldn't help herself.
Sammy's mouth fell open. He looked at his feet. 'They said they were Russian hunters. What do I know about Russian hunters?'
'Names maybe?'
'You want their names? No, Edie, I don't remember their names. I remember their money.'
She let out a snort. It was hopeless. He was hopeless.
'Sammy, don't take this the wrong way, but I'd really like you to go. Preferably right now.'
He left without a protest, for which she was grateful. Once he was gone, she paced up and down a little. The feeling that she was standing on the edge of something new and unexplored was dizzying. It made her want a drink so badly her chest throbbed with it. I need to sleep, she thought. I need to sleep.
Without the discipline of the school routine, and with twenty-four-hour light, her body clock had pretty much broken down. She'd begun to lose sense of night and day. She felt light-headed, exhilarated by the possibilities of the truth and at the same time terrified of how close she might be to discovering it. Maybe I'm losing sense of the world, she thought. And then, remembering the way the Tylenol had dissolved in the tea, thought, Or maybe I'm finally beginning to make sense of it.
The next step, she saw now, was to find out who the Russian hunters were and where they'd come from. But not before she'd slept. She lay down and closed her eyes and by the time she rose a few hours later, she had a plan.
Late that night, when Autisaq had gone to bed, Edie crept out into bright sunshine, let Bonehead off his chain, attached him to a leash and made her way to the Town Hall. Leaving the dog tied up outside, she slid Joe's key into the door and, creeping in without taking off her outerwear, she made her way to the mayor's office. Anyone came, she figured Bonehead would give her due warning.
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