White Heat (13 page)

    'I
need you to come out to Craig with me tomorrow and look for Joe.'

    Willa
glanced up sufficiently to register her presence but did not otherwise respond.
He was like that with her now, sullen and uncooperative. She strode over to him
and grabbed the joystick.

    'Not
a request, Willa.'

    Willa
reached for the joystick, but she held it out of his reach. For a moment they
were locked in a humiliating game of snatch.

    'Look,
Joe got weathered out. Big fucking deal.' His voice was petulant and full of
resentment. 'Why do you always treat him like he's still a kid?
Your
kid? He's not, OK? He's Minnie and Sammy's kid and, by the way, he's not a kid any
more.'

    She
handed him the joystick back. The tinny sound of cars colliding emanated from
the machine.

    'Why
don't you pay for
my
training?'

    Edie
took a breath. This was all so familiar, so painfully hopeless. Edie had taught
Willa for a while at high school. He'd been an indolent student, playing up to
his friends and acting as though it was all too much hassle. He didn't
graduate.

    
'Huvamiaq
,'
he said finally. Whatever. 'But I'm doing this for my brother, not for you. Now
get off my back.'

    'Early
start.' Her voice softened. 'Make sure you look your snowbie over.'

    The
remainder of the evening passed in a blur of indecision and self-doubt. Edie
lay in bed, alone and sleepless, in the bright light of the spring night. At
some point she must have drifted off because she was woken in the middle of a
dream by Sammy's voice.

    'Hey,
Edie. Get up. Up!' He was standing in the room in his outdoor gear. Joe had
returned. He was at the nursing station.

    She
pushed off the cover and sprang from the bed, aware of being naked but not
caring, pulling on her clothes.

    As
they marched up towards the medical building, Sammy explained that Joe had
pitched up at his house an hour earlier. He'd lost Taylor in the blizzard then
his snowbie had broken down, so he'd skied all the way back from Craig. The
journey had taken him two days and a night. He was weak and distressed and
hypothermia had set in, so he wasn't making a great deal of sense.

    From
what Sammy could make out he and Taylor had gone to investigate separate
cairns. He was up on the high tundra there when the blizzard came down. Taylor
was on lower ground. Joe managed to make his way through the whiteout back to
the beach where he and Taylor had agreed to rendezvous, but by then the
visibility was terrible and he couldn't see any signs of his companion. His own
tracks were being covered with new snow almost instantly, so he knew it was
pointless trying to look for footprints. He'd tried to call home but he
couldn't get the sat phone to work.

    He
was rambling, repeating himself, Sammy explained. He said he'd seen his
ancestor, Welatok, walking through the snow towards him but when he got closer,
Welatok became a bear and ran away. At one point, Joe said, the cloud had lifted
and he'd spotted a green plane. He waved and shouted, and the plane dropped
height and came in close but then just as suddenly it seemed to veer away. He
went back inside the makeshift shelter he'd built, convinced that the plane
would make a second pass, looking for somewhere to land, but when he next went
out he realized what he'd thought was a plane was actually a rocky overhang on
the cliffs opposite and he figured that the engine he thought he'd heard must
have been the roar of the wind. Sensing himself gradually becoming less
rational, he decided to get back to Autisaq for help before the hypothermia
rendered him completely crazy. It was then he discovered his snowbie wouldn't
start. The journey on skis had taken him so long that he was worried that
Taylor would be dead.

    They
reached the clinic and clattered up the stairs. Robert Patma was waiting for
them just inside the door.

    'I
just went over to wake the mayor,' he said. 'Simeonie's already spoken with
Sergeant Palliser. He's going to get an S&R plane out.'

    'Let
me see him,' was all Edie said.

    Joe
was lying asleep on a gurney in the nursing station under a fluorescent light
with his black hair flipped across his forehead, his mouth slightly open. His nose
was greyish from frostbite, but not alarmingly so.

    'I
guess Sammy told you we couldn't get much sense out of him.' Robert turned to
Edie. 'He'll be OK. I've given him something to help him sleep. We'll put him
in one of the obs rooms.'

    Edie
suddenly felt very calm. 'No. I want him to wake up in his own bed. In my
house.'

    Sammy
and Robert exchanged looks. Sammy shrugged.

    The
nurse raised his eyebrows. 'I don't think that's a good idea. He needs to be
monitored.'

    Edie
gave the nurse a pleading look and said nothing. She had to teach in the
morning but she could be back to look after him by the early afternoon.

    'It's
OK,' Sammy said finally. 'I'll stay with him while his stepmother's at school.'

    Edie
flashed him a thank you.

    Robert
put on
a
frail smile and said, 'Well, OK, then, if you really must.'

    It
was only when she'd completed the school register later that morning Edie
realized she hadn't marked anyone present. At lunchtime she considered
returning home to check on Joe then decided to leave it till after the end of
the school day. If Joe was asleep she wouldn't want to wake him and if he was
awake, she wouldn't want him to see how torn up she was. Their first encounter
was going to be difficult, she knew. He'd be blaming himself for losing Taylor
and she'd be blaming herself for letting the two of them go out on the land
together.

    The
afternoon dragged and by the time the bell finally rang to signal the end of
the school day the events of the previous twelve hours already seemed murky and
a little unreal. Edie went to her locker, packed her things in her daypack and
walked up to the store, thinking to take Joe some of the caribou hamburger he
particularly liked and a packet of his favourite tangerine Tang.

    Reaching
the snow porch she called out softly, but got no reply. She took off her
shitkickers, wondering whether she should have spent a few dollars more and
bought ribs instead of hamburger.

    There
were some empty cans lying on the floor beside the sofa. The air was thick and
unnaturally still. She felt a small nip of irritation that Sammy had left the
house.

    The
door to Joe's room was shut; he was probably still sleeping. She listened and
heard nothing except the creak of the plastic cladding at the front of the
house where the sun was heating it, and the rustle of her fingers around the
bag of hamburger meat.

    She
put the shopping down on the worktop in the kitchen then noticed that there was
a residual smell of blood in the air so she grabbed the hamburger, put it in
the fridge and returned to the living room. The smell followed her. In that
instant, she felt a raw thump, a terrifying wrench. The smell of blood wasn't
coming from the kitchen at all. It was coming from Joe's room.

    The door
gave way under the pressure of her hand. Inside the curtains were drawn and it
took her a few seconds to adjust to the poor light. Joe's Xbox was lying on the
floor and beside it there was a half-empty can of Dr Pepper. Out of habit, she
picked up the can, intending to leave it on the bedside table so that Joe
wouldn't knock it over when he got up, but at the same time she knew: something
was terribly wrong.

    Joe
Inukpuk was lying in bed, his legs slightly bent at the knees, his face obscured
by the comforter. As she walked towards him she felt something underfoot. She
put the can down on the bedside table, lifted her right leg and plucked the
remains of a pill from the sole of her sock. Lifting her gaze, she reached out
to put the fragments on the bedside table. Time peeled away.

    She
looked at the figure lying in the bed and knew there must be no more excuses.
Taking a breath, she threw the eiderdown aside.

    Joe's
eyes were closed and his mouth hung slightly open. She might have mistaken him
for being asleep were it not for the fact that there was blood thickening on
his lips and chin and, where the skin was in contact with the pillow, his face
was already beginning to blacken.

    Derek
Palliser was doing his best to ignore his creeping nausea. He was never at ease
on a plane; small planes in particular got to him. Whenever he was flying, as
he was now, he couldn't help recalling the fate of his old friend, Lott Palmer.
In twenty-three years' experience piloting Twin Otters above the 60th parallel
Palmer had come down twice and both times lived to tell the tale. The third
time, he was cruising just beneath the cloud line off the coast of Cornwallis
Island, when a freak katabatic wind reached down, picked up the plane and
tossed it a thousand metres through the clouds towards the ice. Lott managed to
wrest enough control of the thing to land it in one piece. He radioed for help
and a ski plane was dispatched from Resolute. The plane arrived at the scene
just in time to see a spear of lightning swoop out from the cloud and punch
Lott Palmer and his plane to kingdom come. When the rescuers landed they found
nothing but a small ball of blackened tin burning a hole in the ice.

    If he
didn't have pressing business when he reached his destination, Derek liked to
pop a Xanax to help him cope with the chopping and bumping that went with
flying tiny planes through blowy, unpredictable Arctic conditions. But today he
was flying clean. He'd been woken some time after seven by a radio call from
Simeonie Inukpuk. An unexpected blizzard had swept across Craig Island and a
man was missing. A
qalunaat.
The missing man had been travelling with
Joe Inukpuk when they'd been separated in a whiteout. With the only available
plane in Autisaq grounded on account of the pilot, Martie Kiglatuk, being too
drunk to fly, Simeonie needed Derek to conduct a search and rescue from
Kuujuaq. He and the police pilot, Pol Tilluq, were to fly over Craig looking
for signs of the missing man. It was just possible that he'd managed to find
somewhere to shelter and was still alive.

    It
had taken Pol a couple of hours to ready the plane and check the forecast but
by nine thirty that morning they were in the air and heading east towards the
target area. Pol Tilluq was among the most competent pilots in the region:
visibility was good and, despite his fear of flying, Derek knew he was in
capable hands.

    Simeonie
had faxed over the expedition questionnaire Joe and Edie had completed before
taking their parties out on the land. It was mostly a box-ticking exercise that
all guides on Ellesmere were required to fill out, giving details of the
proposed route, the equipment taken, the number of days the expedition was
expected to last. Derek took it out now. Reading made his nausea worse, but he
pressed on all the same, knowing that the more he understood about the
expedition, the more likely it was that he and Pol would find the missing man.
The trip looked like a pretty routine entry-level tourist caper. To anyone
experienced in High Arctic travel, like Joe Inukpuk, Craig Island was
relatively unchallenging. Guides often took visitors out there. The routes
across the ice pan were well-established and the terrain was pretty soft; no
glaciers, sheer cliffs or moraine slips. To someone unfamiliar with High Arctic
conditions, though, Craig would be extremely forbidding. The advice the guides
gave in the event their clients got separated was always to stay put and wait
for help. Their best hope was that Taylor had holed up somewhere safe and was
doing just that. If he'd been stupid enough to try to get himself off the
island, he'd almost certainly be dead by now, and the odds on finding his body
would be about the same as discovering leprechauns living in the lemming shed.

    They
flew over Cape Storm and continued east towards South Cape. Before long the
roads and buildings of Autisaq appeared, tiny pixels on an otherwise blank
screen. They'd offered to pick up Robert Patma and take him with them in case
they found Taylor in need of urgent medical attention, but the weather forecast
was predicting low cloud and the mayor thought it best not to waste time while
conditions were still clear. If they found Taylor, it would be easy enough to
fly directly back to Autisaq and get him looked at there.

    Pol
turned the plane south towards the low coast of Cape Sparbo. Ahead, across the
solid ice field of Jones Sound, loomed the purple ellipse of Craig Island. At
this height, it looked like nothing so much as a plum in a bowl of cream, but
in reality it was two banks of sloped cliffs divided by an icy plateau about
twenty kilometres wide. The west coast was lower and quieter, the east rockier,
bifurcated with finger fiords in the north and in the south, small glaciers
that tongued out into the sea. The coasts had very distinct weather patterns.
It could be blowing a blizzard in the east and still be perfectly sunny in the
west. The region of fiords in the northeast was different still, which was how
it was that, while Joe and Taylor were being battered by
two-hundred-kilometre-an-hour winds, Edie and Fairfax had been able to
snowmobile back to Autisaq in almost perfect conditions.