Innocent Murderer (14 page)

“It was just an accident, Cordi,” said Duncan quietly.

“But if it wasn't?”

“Would you at least promise to see someone when we get back to Ottawa? I can set you up with an excellent specialist I know.” He looked so serious and so concerned that I agreed. The way one does when they don't really mean it. After all, I was not delusional.

By the time we'd figured out the state of my depres
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sive nature and the fate of the bodies it was 9:00 a.m. Since it was a foggy day there were no shore excursions and I wasn't slated to give a lecture until the afternoon. I took off for the bridge, deciding to retrace my route of the night before, in case Balaclava had dropped any
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thing. When I got there I thought there was no one on it, just like last night. But I was wrong: Jason was leaning against the starboard side of the ship, staring out to sea, his face completely still except for the tear dribbling its way down it.

I cleared my throat and he hastily looked away, bring
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ing up his sleeve to his cheek, and then turning to face me. Who did he keep crying for? Sally? Terry? Surely not Terry. Or was it something else altogether? His eyes were red and I wanted to say something, but since I didn't know why he'd been crying I was limited to saying “Hello.”

“What's wrong with your voice?”

“Laryngitis on the mend.”

He gave me a weak smile and flung out his arm at his fog-enshrouded ship. “Zero visibility. I've never seen such bad weather. Storm moving in too. You people have hardly been ashore at all and we're due in Nanisivik in forty-eight hours.” He stopped abruptly, moved over and twiddled with something next to the helm, while I digested the fact that the trip was almost over. We were due to fly out of Nanisivik. I'd lost count of the days, but I couldn't honestly say that I wasn't happy to be going home. The ship was beginning to feel like a prison, or maybe Tweety Bird's cage with a human sized Sylvester on the loose.

We talked a bit about the awful weather and the pack ice, then I asked him who was on watch last night at about 1:00.

“That'd be the second mate,” he said. “Why?”

I didn't tell him everything but I did tell him I'd been on the bridge at 1:00 and nobody had been there.

“Probably in the washroom. Did you call out?”

I pointed at my throat and shook my head. Why hadn't I thought of the washroom? Not that I knew where it was. Even so, it couldn't be far, so there'd been someone right there to help me all along. If nothing else, Balaclava lived with a lot of luck. But then, if there had been someone on the bridge, Balaclava would have gone down the outside stairs, which I had completely failed to notice, and left me in peace. I sighed. I wondered what else I had failed to notice.

Chapter Eleven

I
left the bridge and followed my route from the night before, all the way up to the sixth observation deck. I was alone.

I could feel the motion of the ship swaying gently in the quickening breeze. I looked out over Lancaster Sound and thought again about the men who came looking for the Northwest Passage — Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, Bylot, Parry, Ross, Amundsen, Franklin. It didn't exist at the time, but now, with global warming, it did. I wondered what they would have thought of our world. Ship after ship had come to sail the ice-infested waters, their men to chart the unknown land, and, for far too many, to die in this vast and barren place, so cold and far from home.

I was in my own little world up here on the grass green deck with the white railings hemming me in, keep
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ing me from the sea, which seemed to come alive and begin throwing itself at the ship. I felt it in my legs too and not long after, in my stomach. I walked over to the stern rail and looked down. Overnight someone had drained the pool. It looked like a giant cement tube capped on the bottom, lifeless the way only empty pools can be. The rails stood guard around three sides, like sentinels who don't know their quarry has flown. The inside of the pool was painted a pale ocean blue that was flaking off like spindrift, reminding me of the wind that was whipping all around me. I felt the hundred and sev
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enteen metre ship groan and quiver up through my legs.

I headed back to my berth.

The following day I awoke to a dead calm and bril
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liant sunshine. When I looked out the porthole I could see Dundas Harbour, cradled by stark, eroded cliffs that looked like one of those cakes with scalloped sides. The cliffs swept down to the sea and turned into gravel spits left behind by the glaciers. As I watched, a single Zodiac headed out, presumably to check things out before we all descended.

I took the last boat out, spending the intervening time standing at the railing watching the Zodiacs being swung over and lowered to the water below. There was a biting wind, but on the lee side of the ship, with the sun shining down, it was almost warm. But I was still glad I had my orange jacket on.

I noticed the group below were being handed some hot chocolate and I scurried down to get some. I could see Martha and Duncan heading toward the gangway.

“Are you coming? You're going to miss the last boat!” yelled Martha.

I waved and started moving for the gangway.

It was a relief to be in a Zodiac that didn't bounce and grind. As we motored in, some harp seals came swimming alongside us, their sleek, shiny backs glinting in the sun as they porpoised along. Every now and then they would dive and when they surfaced their curious whiskered little faces bobbed up and down out of the water as they tried to place us. Thousands of seabirds skimmed the waters and soared overhead. A small herd of walrus was lazing about on the ice floes, their huge slug-like bodies and delicate whiskers in soft contrast to their long, white, dagger-like tusks. I remembered learn
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ing that those selfsame tusks were used to break through a breathing hole that had frozen over and it gave me shivers imagining swimming up to a hole and finding it blocked. They looked so out of shape with their rolls of fat, but it was all a mirage. The blubber in those rolls of skin provides heavy-duty insulation to see them through a long, hard Arctic winter. As I thought about being a big fat, almost hairless human, just like the walrus, except with no chance in hell of surviving even a second of minus fifty, we landed on a gravel spit that led gently up a whaleback and into a secluded cove.

Martha and Duncan strolled over. Martha said, “This is unreal. Nothing grows here, Cordi. It's dead, sterile, barren, stark, cold, hard, rocky.”

“What's this then?” I asked as I pointed at something at my feet.

“What? I can't see anything. You mean that little red thing?”

“Yeah. That's a prickly saxifrage.”

“How do you know that? You're not a botanist.”

“I read the brochure. And this one,” I crouched down and touched a golden yellow plant, “is an Arctic willow.

They've already changed colours. The Arctic summer is ending.”

“What summer? I don't see a summer,” said Mar
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tha. “Ooooo, look! There's a big ball of fluff galloping up the hill.” And she pointed up the whaleback beneath a cliff. We all whipped out our binoculars, but I already knew what it was, I'd just never seen one before: a mus
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kox, its hair so long as to hide its legs even in flight. But take away the insulating hair and like a grape to a raisin the animal shrinks. We watched it run by two unsuspect
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ing tourists who visibly jumped as it careened over the whaleback and disappeared.

Duncan and Martha moved off and I continued climbing until the cove came into view. Backed by a cliff were four or five deserted wooden buildings, aban
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doned by the RCMP many, many years ago. The biggest one was built in the shape of an L and had a rusted old stovepipe poking up through the roof. I went and looked inside. It was little more than a one-storey shack and all the windows had long since ceased to function as win
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dows, merrily letting the weather in instead of keeping it out. There was a jumble of old stuff on the floor, books, a coffee pot, some plates, all left behind long ago. As I snooped about I heard a footfall and looked up to see LuEllen enter the building. I looked behind her expecting to see Scruffy, but there was no little dog in sight.

“Where's Scruffy?” I asked. She started and then stared in my direction, her eyes getting accustomed to the dark.

“Is that you, Cordi? They won't let Scruffy ashore in case he harasses the polar bears.” I wasn't sure if she was joking or not, but the image of tiny little Scruffy harassing a polar bear was comical. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe Scruffy had wakened LuEl
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len the night of the deaths — he was quite the little yap
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per. I asked her.

“We slept right through it all. Poor sweet Sally.”

I took note of her not mentioning Terry and didn't want to let it slide by this time. “I'm sure you're going to miss Terry too?”

“Why would I miss Terry?” Her voice was cold and lifeless.

“Because she was your teacher?”

“That doesn't mean I had to like her.”

“I gather you didn't.”

“Would you like someone who …” she stopped abruptly, turned on her heel, and left, leaving me with my mouth wide open, wondering how that sentence was meant to finish.

I went back outside to see if she had maybe changed her mind and saw her standing by an old handmade wooden ladder that was leaning against the outside of the building. But she had her back to me so I went and looked at the little graveyard. It had a little white picket fence around it that looked so brave and so forlorn guard
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ing its graves. There were three graves. I walked over to the farthest one: Constable William Robert Stephens, RCMP 1902–1927. He was only twenty-five years old when he died. I shivered. It seemed so benign here, the sun warm on my back. But it hadn't been for William. I wondered if he had died alone with no one to hear his final words. Such a lonely, lonely place. As I was leaving the little graveyard, feeling forlorn, I bumped into Tracey and her husband, George.

“Sad thing about Sally and Terry,” I said.

George scowled at me. “Sad about Sally, yes, but that bitch Terry deserved everything she got.” I was taken aback by his vehemence and Tracey plucked him on the sleeve, trying to stop him. He ignored her.

“You were there,” he said. “You saw what she did to Tracey. Totally humiliated her, trampling every vestige of her self-respect. I wasn't there, but if I had been I'd have killed her.”

I looked at Tracey, who refused to meet my eyes, and then back at George. Was he the right size to be Bala
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clava? Possibly. We turned to a safer topic and after five minutes of discussing the weather I escaped and walked down near the shore.

I was feeling very sleepy from the bucket loads of Gravol that I'd been taking, so when I saw a nice piece of grass in front of a fairly smooth rock I sat down and leaned back, face to the warmth of the sun, and in an instant I was asleep.

When I woke up the sun had moved. I stood up and looked around. There were no people milling about any of the buildings, no people around the gravesite, and no one on the beach. I was alone. Uneasily I checked my watch. It was 4:30, half an hour after I was supposed to meet the last Zodiac. I felt a moment of panic as I picked up my binoculars and headed up toward the shack and the path over the whaleback to the beach.

I don't know what it was that made me turn and look back, but what I saw froze me: a polar bear stand
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ing some distance behind me, sniffing the wind. Every
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thing I knew about polar bears told me it had seen me and was interested. And then I saw movement off to my right. Two small cubs came gambolling over to the female and I knew I had to do something. I felt caught in a dream, on some gigantic treadmill of time where I could not get away, no matter what. I'd been here before, facing a black bear in the wilds of West Quebec and I couldn't believe it was happening again. I knew one thing for sure: I'd pick the black bear over a polar bear any day. I glanced quickly over my shoulder to look at the building where LuEllen had become tongue-tied. I'd have very little time — polar bears can outrun a man so it could certainly outrun me. She made up my mind for me by starting to amble towards me.

I bolted, dodging old oil barrels and rocky outcrops, forcing myself not to waste time by looking back. I took the ladder on the run and began to climb it. One of the rungs broke and I found myself hanging from my hands, wildly searching for another rung. I could hear the bear now. Frantically I reached for the next rung and pulled my body up until I found my footing. I clambered up and onto the roof; only then did I turn around. The bear was ten feet away and coming fast. A large white slash against the drab grey browns and greens of the rocks and grass. White. The colour of purity. How can purity be so fierce?

I pushed out the ladder and the bear ran into it, slowing its pace, as I scrambled backwards up towards the middle of the gently sloping roof, all the while watching the bear. It came up to the shed and disap
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peared from view. I held my breath and suddenly there she was, all nine feet of her, her head and shoulders rearing above the shack as if it was a doll's house. Her front paws and forearms made contact with the roof and she slowly pulled herself up until she was on all fours and gaining purchase to make the final lunge. I scrambled back over the ridge, avoiding the holes and trying to think up some fantastic getaway plan. But my mind was not co-operating and the bear was barrelling down on me. And then, just as suddenly, she wasn't there anymore. A huge rending of splintering wood and she was gone. I peered down through one of the holes, but I couldn't see her. Worse, I couldn't hear her. Maybe she'd knocked herself out.

It was so fast that I had no warning: an enormous white paw at least ten inches long and ten inches wide came flailing up through the hole beside me and caught my leg a glancing blow before I could move away. As I scrambled back the bear's head came through the hole, her paws gripping the roof, and we just stared at each other. It went on like that for what seemed like a long time, until suddenly she dropped from view and I could hear her muddling around inside the shack.