Melt (3 page)

This was Kelly’s first extended assignment with Chuck. Prior to this, she had only furnished him with a few photos for his articles back home. She found his style refreshing and intelligent, devoid of sentimentality. He didn’t write fluff pieces. If you wanted to know the facts, he was your guy. An unapologetic carnivore, he wrote the way you’d expect him to write. He delved into the meat of a subject and presented it like a raw, bloody mass, untrimmed and unseasoned.

He wagged his head. “I know she washed that shirt again. And you know how she washes things. She may as well take it out and pound it with a fucking rock in the river.”

“If she hears you talking like that, she’ll be tossing you in the river next.”

He rolled his eyes. “Naw, that old girl loves me. You know she does.”

“She does seem to have a soft spot for you. You can get away with anything.”

Chuck struggled constantly around Mrs. Arensen with his well-ingrained tendency toward crude language. He had complained to Kelly that every time he saw her wince at his speech, he was tossed into the abyss of Catholic guilt that had been his childhood. For reasons not too difficult to imagine, the landlady reminded him of ruler-wielding nuns.

“Maybe I can get it out of the machine before she washes all the character out of it.” He dashed away.

Besides Chuck and herself there were two other boarders, another American named Trevor Waddell who was an oil company scout and a Greenlander named Annalise, a woman in her twenties from Nuuk who taught a summer accounting course to the locals, a government program designed to provide marketable skills to people who were no longer able to make a living at traditional fishing and hunting. Annalise spoke little English and kept to herself. Other than mealtimes, Kelly rarely saw her. The only other resident was Mrs. Arensen’s twenty-one- year-old grandson, Jens, on summer break from his university in Denmark. He was a pre-med student who financed his education in part by taking tourists for helicopter tours. Altogether, there were six residents in the house and one cat, an old calico named Paluaq, a Greenlandic word meaning “butterfly.” Cats were rare in this country. Greenlanders, especially in the northern cities, kept dogs, not cats, but Mrs. Arensen had brought the pet with her from Nuuk where she used to live.

Kelly went to the kitchen to pick up her bread and butter. Mrs. Arensen was cooking hot cereal in a pot at the stove. Muesli, no doubt. Kelly cut herself a thick slice of homemade bread from the loaf on the counter and smeared butter on it. The bread and the butter here were irresistible. She’d never tasted butter so good as this Danish stuff.
Børd og smør
, she practiced silently, reminding herself to work harder on her Danish.

“You will care for yourself out there,” Mrs. Arensen cautioned, handing her the plastic bag of birkes.

“Nothing to worry about,” Kelly replied breezily. “I hike all the time back home and Pippa’s done this route lots of times. I don’t expect to be back in time for supper, but any time after that.”

Kelly ripped off a mouthful of bread as she emerged into the hallway, then went out the front door to find Chuck on the porch wringing out his sopping wet T-shirt.

“What’d I tell ya?” he groused, jerking his head toward the shirt. “That woman’s OCD when it comes to cleaning. She’s got some kind of dirt phobia. Do you know she actually scrubs the baseboards? I saw her doing it. Whoever heard of that?”

“Well, I—” Kelly began.

“This thing has to last me the rest of my life,” he snarled. “The way it’s made it this far is by being washed only once in a blue moon. So what if it’s got a bit of a manly smell? What’s wrong with that?” He held the shirt up by the shoulders, shaking it out. “Shit! It’s already got some peeling here on the middle guitar.”

The beloved shirt was a classic Van Halen design with a white VH in the center, scrollwork around that and three guitars underneath. In the background were the words
Rock ‘n’ Roll.

“Chuck,” Kelly said, “it’s not going to last forever. If I were you, I’d look for another one on eBay or something. Besides, it’s a little tight on you anyway. Thirty years has taken its toll on both of you.”

He glared. “I got this shirt at a concert during the promotional tour of their 1984 album. That was the last time David Lee Roth performed with the group. They split right after this tour. If that isn’t enough to make this a priceless one-of-a-kind memento, how about this? That was the night I scored with Janie Grosswaithe, the hottest sophomore at Penn State. We did it in the back of my classic 1979 Dodge van while an eight-track tape of Olivia Newton-John singing ‘Let’s Get Physical’ serenaded our epic lovemaking. It was magical until a candle caught the shag carpet on fire and forced us out wrapped in faux leopard skin blankets. What a night!” He paused and regarded her with one half-closed eye. “If that was your memory, Sheffield, do you think you could replace this shirt with a soulless look-alike from eBay?”

“Olivia Newton-John?” Kelly asked. “‘Let’s Get Physical’?”

“On continuous play.”

“To think, all of that was going on in your life before I was born. Amazing! And extremely vivid. I can almost picture it…but I don’t want to. Besides, I have to go or I’ll miss my boat.”

“Where are you going?”

“Hiking. I told you.”

“You did?” He wrinkled his forehead. Typical that her plans had zipped right through his consciousness without a pit stop.

“Yeah. I’m taking the tour boat to Rodebay and hiking back with Pippa.”

“Pippa? Oh!” He nodded. “The little girl who’s been hanging around here. The tour guide.”

“Right. Sometimes I wonder how you can be a journalist with such a lousy attention span.”

“I notice things that matter. No point cluttering up my mind with details about your extracurricular activities. When are you getting back?”

“This evening.”

“Good. Don’t be too late because we’ve got a morning appointment with that guy at the Jakobshavn Glacier. You’re gonna love it. You’ve never seen a glacier this big. It’ll blow your mind.”

“Yeah, I’m stoked about that. By the way, when are we meeting with Jordan Westgate?”

“Don’t know. I sent her an email last night. No answer yet.” He looked mildly puzzled. “Why?”

“Oh, no reason,” Kelly said noncommittally. “Just trying to keep track of our schedule.” She hopped down the stairs and called over her shoulder. “See you tonight.”

Be careful,
she warned herself.
I can’t let him figure out the truth about me and Jordan
. So far she had kept her many questions about Jordan to herself, but the closer the time came to seeing her, the more excited she had become. Chuck was a shrewd investigator and could read people, an invaluable skill for a reporter. But he didn’t need to know anything about this. As far as he was concerned, she and Jordan were complete strangers who would be meeting for the first time in a few days. If it came out later that they had known each other previously, that was okay. It would just look like an interesting coincidence. But she didn’t want him to think Jordan had anything to do with her being here. For that matter, she didn’t want Jordan to think so either.

When Chuck had sent her a rough itinerary of the trip, asking her to come along, she had been shocked to see Jordan’s name on the list of scientists he would be meeting. Kelly hadn’t ever thought much about Greenland. She’d certainly never thought about going, and she hadn’t known about Jordan’s work here.

She had also never seriously expected to see Jordan again. She’d gone on with her life, years had gone by, and the ache and need had diminished.

But a few hours after seeing Jordan’s name and realizing it was possible to see her again, it became imperative that she
must
see her again, if only to satisfy her curiosity. Sometimes opportunity created its own need. Suddenly, there was no question that she would go to Greenland. How could she pass up a chance to see Jordan again? Under what better circumstances? They would be meeting as two people working. It would all be very businesslike, just the way Jordan liked things. No emotional messiness. Jordan had never been comfortable with that. Kelly was determined to present herself as a mature, professional woman, someone Jordan could respect and could regard, if not as her equal, then at least not as the foolish and immature adolescent she had once been.

No more questions about Jordan, she silently reiterated. It was only a few days now before Jordan would appear before her in the flesh and all of her questions would be answered.

Chapter Three

When everyone was aboard the boat, the captain, Amaalik, doffed his cap and introduced himself and his eleven-year-old son Nuka in broken English. Both of them wore summer outfits of short sleeved shirts and lightweight pants.

“Titanic iceberg,” he said, grinning cheerfully, “from here.” He waved his hat toward the bay, then laughed and ducked inside the cabin. A second later, he appeared in the window above, ready at the helm.

“The iceberg that sunk the Titanic came from here?” asked an old woman with a British accent.

“Yes,” Nuka confirmed. “From the Jakobshavn Glacier.”

Kelly wasn’t sure why a tour boat skipper thought that was funny or something to be proud of, but he had carted out the same piece of trivia the first time she’d been on this tour.

As the boat began to pull away from the dock, she leaned against the outer wall of the cabin and zipped up her coat. Next to her on a bench sat an American couple in their sixties, looking optimistically uncertain.

The boat inched its way through the harbor, dodging icebergs. Every time it hit a chunk of ice, the American woman stiffened and pressed her lips together in an expression of alarm. She and her husband sat close on their bench, swathed in layers of protective clothing, including parkas and gloves. Despite the chill breeze coming off the water, it was a nice day. Once they reached Rodebay and got off the boat, nobody would be complaining about the weather.

“No safety briefing,” the woman whispered to her husband. “Do you think they even have life jackets on this thing?”

Before he had a chance to respond, they hit an iceberg on the starboard side that sent a substantial shudder through the craft. The jolt caused Kelly to pitch sideways. She moved to the railing and looked overboard to see the berg moving rapidly away from them, propelled by the impact. A chunk of ice like that wasn’t big enough to damage “this thing,” as the woman had called their boat. But she couldn’t know that. What did this frightened American know of icebergs? Kelly knew Amaalik’s joking reference to the Titanic didn’t help.

Ilulissat Harbor changed from day to day. Sometimes it was nearly full of ice, mostly small chunks that boats could push aside. Yesterday boats had to squeeze past a monster berg at the mouth of the harbor. Today that one was gone. Some days the harbor was nearly ice free. Chuck had explained that it had to do with winds, mainly, and how much ice was coming off the glacier each day. He knew a lot about Greenland. He had been here many times before and was considered a Greenland expert among Associated Press reporters. There were a lot of scientists who spent their summers in Greenland, but not a lot of journalists did.

Their boat moved excruciatingly slowly toward the mouth of the harbor, finessing its way around the larger chunks of ice. Amaalik didn’t even try to avoid the small ones, so the continual sound of the hull crashing against solid objects accompanied their journey, keeping the American couple’s teeth visibly on edge.

Kelly glanced up at the helm to see Amaalik peering intently through the window, both hands on the wheel, carefully picking his course. For most of the year he was a fisherman, but for the short tourist season he conducted daily tours for travelers from around the world. In summer, if you had a boat, you could carry tour groups. If you had a car, you could be a taxi driver. If you had a big house, you could rent out rooms. Under circumstances like this, visitors couldn’t be sure what they were getting into when they booked a tour.

Kelly recalled the dazed looks on the faces of the passengers as they had come aboard expecting something bigger and more accommodating, maybe a luxurious catamaran with a well-stocked bar and an indoor seating area surrounded by walls of windows. Instead they encountered a cramped fishing boat with no provisions for tourists. The boat had been retrofitted as a touring vessel only in the imagination of Amaalik and Pippa’s employer, Arctic Explorer Expeditions.

Tourists to Greenland were mostly seasoned travelers and they quickly adapted, anxious to appear unruffled. As if they had expected this all along, the newbies gamely picked up a blanket and seat cushion and plunked themselves on any flat surface that could serve as a seat. But the American woman, peering out from the hood of her parka, seemed genuinely frightened that at any moment an iceberg would rip the hull open.

“The life jackets are inside the bench,” Kelly told her. She didn’t bother to add that a life jacket wouldn’t be much help in this frigid water, not after the first few minutes.

“You’re American!” the woman proclaimed, relief evident in her voice.

“That’s right,” she said. “I’m from the Denver area.”

“We’re the Coopers from Florida. Miami, Florida.”

Kelly chatted with the Coopers for a few minutes, noticing how much calmer they had become. The presence of another American on board changed everything for them, made the whole experience somehow safer and more legitimate, adding something familiar in an otherwise tensely exotic setting. She understood that. Greenland was so far from anything she or the Coopers knew. It was the most different place she had ever been. Chances were they could say the same.

Kelly noticed the boat picking up speed. “We’ve cleared the harbor,” she announced, excusing herself from the Coopers to join Pippa in the bow where she stood in a long-sleeved cotton shirt worn loose over khaki pants. Her straight chestnut-colored hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her narrow face and full mouth were uncluttered by makeup. She wore two tiny peridot studs in her ears, the extent of her adornment.