The Bone Seeker

Book 3: An Edie Kiglatuk Mystery

by M.J. McGrath

Genres: Police Procedurals; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

The intrepid Edie Kiglatuk discovers one of her female students dead in a toxic Arctic lake.

In the third novel in this highly praised mystery series that will appeal to fans of The Killing, Top of the Lake, and The Bridge, Edie Kiglatuk is working as a summer school teacher in the Canadian Arctic. When one of her female students is found dead in nearby Lake Turngaluk, Edie enlists the help of Sergeant Derek Palliser to pursue the case, promising the girl’s Inuit family that they will uncover the truth. Meanwhile, lawyer Sonia Gutierrez investigates the toxicity of the lake and suspects that there might be a larger conspiracy involved. As the three clamber over rocky terrain under twenty-four-hour daylight, they start to unearth secrets long frozen over—risking their own lives in the process.

With stunning prose, M. J. McGrath delivers another thrill ride through a hauntingly beautiful landscape.

Release date: July 24, 2014

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

1

That Friday afternoon in late July was the last time Edie Kiglatuk saw Martha Salliaq alive. As the school bell signalled the end of a long, sultry day and students tumbled out into the corridor, eager to get to their summer fishing camps, Martha spilled the contents of her purse on the floor. Pens, crayons, an eyeliner pencil and a stick of lipstick went skittering across the hot linoleum. As a rule, Inuit girls didn’t wear make-up. Her curiosity aroused, Edie went over.

‘Going somewhere special?’ she asked, holding up the lipstick.

Martha took the stick and dropped it back inside her bag. She flashed her teacher an embarrassed smile.

‘Just curious.’ Edie palmed her hands in surrender.

‘No offence, Ms Kiglatuk.’

Edie laughed. ‘None taken.’ All the same, in a small, remote corner of her heart Edie was a littlestung. She’d been teaching Martha three weeks and in that time she’d grown fond enough of the girl to have to hide her favouritism. The old teacher’s pet syndrome.

They finished picking things up. Martha zipped her purse into her backpack and slung it over her shoulder.

‘Well,’ said Martha, ‘thanks for helping.’

Edie watched the back of Martha’s head as she made her way to the door, and for the first time since she’d moved from Autisaq a month ago, she was struck by a sudden burst of longing for female company.

The girl wore dark braids in traditional Inuit style, tied together at the back. A week or so ago she’d added a subtle blue tint to the colour. Unusual.

‘Hey, I like what you’ve done with your hair,’ she shouted after her student.

Martha turned, touched her head and smiled, pleased. ‘My parents hate it.’

As the two women stood facing one another, some connection passed between them. Edie found herself thinking she wished they knew one another better. Then the girl looked away and the moment was gone.

‘Saimu, Ms Kiglatuk.’ Bye. It was the last thing Edie Kiglatuk would ever hear Martha Salliaq say.

• • •

That evening Edie spent reorganizing her tent. Her police friend Derek Palliser had recommended her for the summer job at the school then found her a cabin to rent on the outskirts of the settlement. They’d both agreed that, after the last summer, she’d be better off spending July and August away from her hometown of Autisaq, 70 kilometres to the east. Here in Kuujuaq it would be easier to escape daily reminders of the death of her beloved stepson, Joe. She’d arrived in the settlement fully anticipating hunkering down in the little rental cabin but it turned out that Kuujuaq was more sheltered than Autisaq and the ambient temperature occasionally topped 10C, turning the interior into a furnace and driving her back outside under canvas. Her tent was now pinned in the front yard of the police detachment where Derek had obligingly given her use of the bathroom.

An hour or two into her reorganization, and for no good reason she could discern, the conversation with Martha came back to her.Going somewhere special? What a dumb question to ask a teenager! She laughed and shook her head and thought, a little wistfully, that her own evening was turning out to be nothing special at all. The last couple of weeks she’d taken to spending a good deal of her off-time with Chip Muloon. Probably too much. Chip was the first white guy she’d ever been with and since they both agreed there was no future in it, she had to wonder if she wasn’t playing out some kind of father thing, her own daddy being a qalunaat like Chip, who’d abandoned her and her mother when she was six. Sometimes even casual relationships were so hard to decipher you had to take time out or risk going crazy. Picking up her hair oil, she climbed the wooden steps to the detachment and looked forward to a long, cold shower and an early night alone.

The following day she got up early, packed some dried fish, her Remy 303 and her fishing rod and lure and drove her ATV out past the military camp onto the harsh, rocky landscape of the polar desert. The joint demands of work and Chip had left too little time for exploring the terrain and she was feeling the familiar pull of open ground. A swollen, rushing river meandered through the rubbled plain that opened into a broad bay. The land was dotted with sedge meadow and hummock tundra and was unlike her home terrain in subtle ways that only someone who had made their living on the land on Ellesmere Island would notice. The tundra here was, if anything, more beautiful than at Autisaq, a jewel box of saxifrage and Arctic poppies set off against soft limestone gravel, fields of black basalt splashed with map and blood-spot lichen, and for hours she meandered happily along thin trails, stopping every so often to collect goose eggs or fish for char by the river, navigating only by the man-shaped cairns, or inuksuit,silhouetted against the summer sky, whose granite arms pointed the way back to the settlement.

On her return in late afternoon there was a note waiting for her in the tent. She put down the fish she’d caught, wiped her hands on her summer parka and picked it up. A Ranger friend of her ex-stepson had swung by to say that he was hoping to come into town that evening and would drop in on her. Willa Inukpuk was stationed at a rappel training camp a few kilometres from Camp Nanook, the summer military encampment established by Canadian Joint Forces North as part of their regular SOVPAT sovereignty patrol exercises.

Her heart quickened at the thought of Willa’s visit. She and the kid had history together. Mostly bad. Mostly her fault. She’d always loved his brother Joe a little too much and Willa never quite enough. Her drinking, his drug habit and the break-up with Willa’s father, Sammy Inukpuk, hadn’t helped. It was only after she’d lost Joe that she realized how much she missed his brother. In the year since Joe’s death, Willa had stopped drinking and smoking weed and got himself together. Joining the Rangers was one of the few good decisions he’d made in adult life. Another, even more recent, had been to set aside his resentments and try to rebuild a relationship with his ex-stepmother. Until now she had always been the one seeking forgiveness and Willa had always rebuffed her. Now it seemed that things between them might finally be thawing.

Setting aside the plumpest Arctic char and a handful of goose eggs for their supper, she gutted the remainder of the fish – pegging them on the line to dry in the sun – laid the fire with heather and peat to light on Willa’s arrival, then went to the store and bought a packet of his favourite choc chip cookies for ten dollars, and returned to the tent to tidy up. The note hadn’t given a specific time. Inuit never planned things that way. She was happy to bide her time. While she waited she reminded herself of the good times she’d shared with the boy before her drinking took hold and he stopped wanting to be around her. Like the first timethey watched Laurel and Hardy together and he asked if everything in the south was black and white. Or the summer he and Joe had caught their first harp seal and Willa stuffed his pillow with the blubber and said it was because it was soft even though they both knew it was because he was so proud of becoming a hunter.

Eventually, when hunger began to overtake her, she went outside and checked the sky. The sun was behind cloud now and the air had taken on the dumb stare of midnight. There were no birds about. She went back inside the tent and reread the note and saw that it said that Willa only hoped to come and reminded herself that Inuit never committed themselves to these things in the way qalunaat seemed to. Flexibility was a necessary tool for survival up here.

It was too late to eat now. Trying not to feel unreasonably disappointed, she peeled off her summer parka and her shirt and clambered between her sleeping skins. It was only as sleep was stealing over her that she remembered she’d said she would go round to Chip Muloon’s house for supper and sex. It was also too late for that now. Her appetites had clocked off for the night. Within seconds of the thought, she was asleep.

• • •

Sunday came and went. Sometime in the mid-morning she went around to Chip’s cabin and, finding him out, left a message to apologize for not showing. In her – admittedly limited – experience of qalunaat she’d sensed that they could be picky about form. Most assumed that Inuit would play by qalunaat rules. Very few ever thought to accommodate themselves to the Inuit way of doing things.

Outside the wind was soft and the air was nasty with mosquitoes. She spent most of the rest of the day in the tent avoiding them, catching up on marking school papers and mending the soles of her favourite sealskin kamiks.

At some point in the afternoon Derek looked in on her. He scanned her few belongings, now neatly arranged.

‘My, you been remodelling in here? Next time you got a couple free hours, my apartment could use a woman’s touch.’

‘I’ll touch it all you like, but you can get someone else to clear it up, if that’s what you’re getting at,’ Edie said.

‘We a little ornery today? Need to eat maybe?’ She saw him eyeing the remaining goose eggs and realized two things: first, he had an agenda and second, dammit, he was right.

‘You like ’em raw or soft-boiled? I got some fish in here somewhere too.’

His face erupted into a grin.

She shot him a salty look. ‘Just as well for you I could use some company.’

• • •

Early evening, she took herself back to Chip’s place and found him sitting at his kitchen table surrounded by papers. His lips were stiff when she went to kiss him.

‘Don’t be like that,’ she said.

Chip had arrived in Kuujuaq a few weeks before and taken over an office from the school counsellor, whose job had gone in the latest round of cuts. That was how they’d met. He was working on something dry and technical to do with long-term health outcomes among High Arctic populations and seemed pretty dedicated to it. They’d never discussed his work in detail. Neither was under the illusion that they’d got together to exchange ideas. It was a sex thing mostly, and that was fine. There were unexpected but welcome differences. The hard angles of his body. Inuit men were generally superbly fit but theirs was a kind of lean, compact and wiry muscularity. By contrast, Chip was tall and bony, with large hands and venous, rocky feet. His eyes were the colour of icebergs with depths she couldn’t read. She liked the hairiness of him, and the odd, milky-brown colour of the hairs, like a ptarmigan in summer plumage.

They were both outsiders in a town that didn’t exactly open its arms to strangers. In September, when his contract came to an end, he’d be heading back to his office in the Health Sciences Building at the University of Calgary and she’d return to Autisaq. For now, though, they could do a fine job of keeping one another company.

‘I left you a note,’ she said.

‘I got it.’ They operated in separate universes. His, a world of clocks, written reports and predictability. Hers, well, not.

She went in for an Eskimo kiss, an exchange of breaths, and sensed him soften.

‘God, I wish southern women knew how sexy those are,’ he said.

‘You can teach them.’

He pulled her in close. ‘First, some more practice.’

• • •

Part way through the night, it was hard to tell when exactly because it never got dark at this time of year, Edie woke in the middle of a dream and from it managed to hold on to Martha’s face as she turned at the door; then the picture faded and was lost, leaving behind a drift of emotion too fragmented to put a name to. For a while she lay awake, listening to the soft purr of Chip snoring beside her, then, restless suddenly, she crept out of the cabin and down the little track to her tent, where she fell into a profound and dreamless sleep.

• • •

When Martha Salliaq failed to show up for class that Monday morning, Edie was surprised, but it was only when the dream resurfaced a little later that morning that she felt a prickle of disquiet. Traditionally minded Inuit thought dreams were visits from the spirits. She wasn’t one of them, least not as a rule, but the coincidence of the dream with Martha’s no-show was enough to unsettle her.

At morning recess she caught up with Lisa Tuliq by the door to the classroom. Lisa was small and plump, with the pinched, repressed air of a kid who’d grown up watching her parents slowly dismantling themselves with alcohol. She and Martha sat next to one another in class and Edie had sometimes seen them leaving together. But Lisa had nothing to offer on Martha’s whereabouts. She’d been out at her family’s summer camp all weekend, and hadn’t seen her friend.

‘My uncle gave me a ride in this morning.’

‘Did Martha say anything on Friday about where she might be?’

‘Not to me,’ Lisa said simply. She looked longingly down the corridor for a means of escape. ‘Can I go now?’

Edie followed the girl out into the corridor, passed through a fire door and knocked on Chip Muloon’s door. The knock was a little too hard and hurt her knuckles. She’d picked up frostbite in Alaska in the spring trying to track down a bunch of people traffickers and still tended to forget how supersensitive her fingers were. A hard rap and it was as though a wire in her body had shorted.

Chip was at his desk flipping through some paperwork. He shot her a low, withering look.

‘I guess you know it’s rude to sneak out in the middle of the night without so much as a “See ya”, right?’

‘No,’ she said. In her culture it wasn’t.

‘Well it is,’ he said, as though that settled the matter. It was one of the things she found most difficult about him, not that he lived in another world, but his refusal to meet her somewhere on the bridge between them.

‘Martha Salliaq didn’t show this morning. It’s not like her. I was wondering if she said anything to you?’ It was this she really wanted to talk about. There was no point in wasting time trying to resolve the rest. Come September it would resolve itself anyway.

‘Why would you think that?’

‘Because you two talked.’ It was an odd question. She’d seen them chatting in the corridor a few times and once bumped into the girl coming out of his office. She had no idea what they’d talked about. She’d never asked him about it.

‘Not really.’ His eyes fell back on his paperwork. ‘She’s probably still at summer camp.’

‘In this dream I had . . .’

‘Oh, OK, you had a dream,’ he said.

• • •

She forgot about Martha for a while in the afternoon. The effort of trying to teach a class of kids who didn’t want to learn a bunch of stuff the government insisted they must took up all the space in her head. And if that wasn’t enough the heat in the classroom made her hands worse. Whoever had designed the building hadn’t understood how things worked up on Ellesmere and failed to make any allowance for the continual summer sunshine blazing through the picture windows, which barely opened. There was no air conditioning and either no one had thought to order blinds or they’d not had the money.

At 3.30, Edie thought the hell with the geography of British Columbia, set some homework and let the class out early. She was rubbing the whiteboard clean when Martha’s father, Charlie Salliaq, appeared.

‘Martha here?’ The old man swung about, scoping out the class as if his daughter might be found among the empty desks and vacant chairs.

‘No, and she hasn’t been in all day,’ Edie said. The faint, distant shimmer of unease which had accompanied her most of the day suddenly condensed into a dark, forbidding cloud.

Charlie leaned back and pinched his chin between his fingers. ‘We were expecting her over at the camp on Saturday afternoon. I figured maybe she’d got tied up with schoolwork. I had to come into town anyway. Ran into that friend of hers at lunchtime, Lisa. She told me Martha hadn’t shown up for the morning session.’

Derek had warned Edie about Charlie the moment she stepped off the plane. As one of the oldest men in town he felt entitled to respect and, for the most part, got it. Unlike most Inuit, Charlie could be as blunt as a duck’s beak. Most folks respected his achievements. For more than a decade he’d lobbied the Defence Department to cede land at a Cold War era Distant Early Warning radar station back to the people of Kuujuaq. When the department had finally given in to his demands five years ago, he’d begun another campaign to force them to pay for a full decontamination and clean-up of the site, known as Glacier Ridge, a battle he’d won only last year. All that fighting had made him uncompromising and ill-tempered and most people preferred to keep him at arm’s length.

‘You checked the house?’ Edie asked.

‘Do I look senile to you?’ Salliaq’s brow knitted. ‘I don’t know what could have gotten into her,’ he went on. ‘She hangs out with her uncle Markoosie when we’re out of town and he hasn’t seen her since Saturday morning. She picked up a schoolbook she’d left at his house. Her ATV’s still parked outside.’

‘I’m sure she’ll turn up,’ Edie said, to reassure herself as much as anything. The dream came to mind again but she decided not to mention it. She realized that Martha hadn’t talked much about her life out of school. ‘Is there anywhere else she’d be likely to visit?’

‘The bird cliffs up by Glacier Ridge, but I went by there on my way here.’ Salliq’s face locked into a series of frowns and lines like some glacier-scoured rock. ‘I’ll go over to the town hall and put out a message on the red radio.’ The local CB network was always the first port of call for any urgent requests or news. ‘But I don’t like it,’ Salliaq went on. He was leaning against the desk now, as though having to steady himself. ‘Not with all those unataqti just outside of town.’

The thought had already occurred to Edie. For the past week, several hundred soldiers, Marines and Rangers, had stationed themselves at Camp Nanook, a temporary encampment a few kilometres from the settlement. This year the Sovereignty Patrol, or SOVPAT, forces were headquartered in Resolute, a few hundred kilometres to the south of Kuujuaq, on Cornwallis Island. It was the first year they’d deployed on Ellesmere. Camp Nanook was their farthest flung satellite and something of an experiment.

The sudden influx of qalunaat into an otherwise quiet and remote Inuit settlement had, unsurprisingly, created a few problems. In the week since they’d arrived, several dozen unataqti had made their way into town in the evenings, looking to drink and gamble and meet young women. There had been a few insignificant cases of harassment, a couple of minor brawls. Many local families had decided to take no chances and moved off to their summer camps on the coast earlier than usual. Others were happily profiting from the new arrivals, setting up impromptu bars to cater to their desire to drink and even, rumour had it, establishing a brothel, though none of the locals seemed to know where it was or who was working there.

‘Listen, avasirngulik,’ Edie said – she was careful to use the respectful ‘elder’ with him – ‘you want help looking for your daughter, I’ll come along. I’ve hunted this way a few times, though I don’t know the land around here real well. Either way, I think it’s best if we go see Sergeant Palliser at the police detachment. Maybe he’ll organize a search plane.’

Sergeant Derek Palliser was the more senior of the two members of the Ellesmere Island Native Police, who between them were responsible for policing five hamlets and a couple of weather stations scattered across a frigid desert of mountains, fjords and rocky scree the size of Wyoming. Right now, Derek’s deputy, Constable Stevie Killik, was on a computer course in the south, so Palliser was on his own, but he knew the land, he knew the people and, more to the point, he was Edie’s friend. They’d solved a couple of tough cases and she trusted him to know what to do.

‘The Lemming Police got nothing to say that I want to hear,’ Salliaq said. The local people found Derek’s scientific interest in lemming population dynamics quirky at best. Salliaq had nothing but contempt for it. For Palliser himself too. Edie wondered if it was because Derek was half Inuit and half Cree. Charlie made no secret of the fact that he didn’t trust Indians or qalunaat. There were exceptions, of whom Edie was one. He’d heard about her going after her stepson Joe’s killer and seemed impressed.

‘They tell me you’re half qalunaat, but you don’t play by qalunaat rules,’ he’d said when he’d first met her.

‘Only set of rules I know is mine,’ she’d said. ‘And I don’t have any.’

That tickled him.

Now, though, his mood was more sombre.

Edie picked up her bag and made a move towards the door.

‘Well, I don’t suppose you have any objections to my talking to him?’ She’d already decided she was going to do just that whether the old bigot liked it or not.

‘You can try. Won’t do anyone no good, though.’ Salliaq shrugged. For a moment their eyes locked.

‘You do what you like,’ the old man grumbled, finally. ‘What I heard, that’s what you always do.’

‘I’ll take that as permission granted,’ Edie said. As she followed him out into the corridor, Martha’s face reappeared as it had in her dream and a rush of foreboding rolled towards her like a low, dark wave.

2

Derek Palliser lit his seventh cigarette of the day, put down his empty coffee mug and returned to plugging the hole in the window frame of his lemming shed. He was making slow progress, though, on account of the stiffness in his fingers, which had continued to plague him long after his hands had healed from the frostbite he’d suffered last spring. He’d planned to spend the morning working out a route for the summer patrol, but the weekend rain had swollen the window frame and busted out the glass. Once Constable Stevie Killik returned from his combined computer course and summer leave, Derek intended to start a programme of exterior renovations in preparation for the winter, but the window on the lemming shed was one chore that wouldn’t wait. If there was one thing the rodents couldn’t stand it was draughts.

The cigarettes and coffee were keeping him just the right side of alert. Truth was, he could have done with a few more hours in bed and would have taken them if he’d thought that there was a chance in hell he’d sleep. He had to remind himself that he’d felt this exhausted every summer since he’d first arrived on Ellesmere nearly thirteen years ago. The constant light – and absence of anything approaching a normal ‘night’ – from March through to September always left him wired and ornery. White noise cascaded through his brain, as if a permanent avalanche had set up inside his head. He knew from bitter experience there was nothing for it except to keep himself pepped on nicotine and coffee, but this year, somehow, everything seemed even more of an effort than usual.

Hearing something behind him, he turned to see Edie Kiglatuk, waving and trying to get his attention. He stubbed out his cigarette and went over. Her face was strained.

‘Trouble?’ he said, swatting away an eddy of mosquitoes. He’d allowed himself to get bitten while he was working. Thin, braided rivers of sweat and blood made their way down his forearms.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you inside.’

If Derek had been honest with himself, he’d have seen a long time ago that the interior of the detachment was no better than the outside. The old wooden floor was warped and the boards needed replacing and the blinds at the windows were cracked from sun and frost. He’d lived quite happily in a state of bachelor-style semi-squalor until Edie had arrived. Now he was a little embarrassed by it. Something about her presence made him want to fix the place up, make it look nice. He scouted around for a spare chair.

‘Now, that trouble . . .’

The instant she mentioned the Salliaq family, his spirits sank. Years back, when they’d been having a really bad problem with loose dogs, he’d impounded several huskies belonging to Charlie Salliaq and made the old man pay a fine to retrieve them. Ever since, Salliaq had taken gleeful pleasure in bad-mouthing him. In Derek’s mind the animosity between them had nothing to do with stray dogs and everything to do with the fact that Derek was half Cree. Inuit and Cree had never been the best of friends. The word Eskimo derived from the Cree for ‘head louse’. Just one reason why Eskimo in the eastern Arctic preferred to go by the name Inuit. These days, though, most folk had got over the old hostility and learned to rub along, conscious that both their futures depended on presenting a united front. But Charlie Salliaq was old school; he held on to grudges the way others held on to their hats in a blizzard.

As Edie’s story unfolded, he felt a growing sense of relief. Everyone went a little crazy in the summer and it sounded very much as though Martha had just gone AWOL for a while. Ten to one she was visiting friends in some distant summer camp and, either through thoughtlessness or teenage defiance, hadn’t told her parents she was going. Maybe she’d picked herself a boyfriend from among the soldiers. The military camp had only been up and running a week but already there were plenty of lean young unataqti hanging around town in the hope of meeting local girls. And succeeding. He’d seen them, half cut, clinging on to their conquests like they were life-vests. Broke his heart a little, tell the truth.

‘Who saw her last?’ he said.

‘So far as we know, her uncle, on Saturday morning. She went round there to pick up a schoolbook. Charlie said he’s gonna put out a message on the red radio, hope someone will call in to say they’ve seen her.’

‘They won’t if she’s with a soldier.’ No one was going to volunteer to be the person who broke that news to old Charlie Salliaq. ‘But, look, even if she’s on her own somewhere she won’t have gone far.’ It would have been different in winter. But the polar bears had left for the north with the ice and the wolves were too busy feasting on lemmings to bother humans and he thought it was unlikely she’d come to any harm. In this weather she wouldn’t freeze.

‘I wouldn’t be too worried,’ he said. ‘Even if she’s twisted an ankle or something, there’ll be someone passing who’ll pick her up. The place is swarming with soldiers out on exercise.’

‘It’s the soldiers Charlie’s worried about.’

Derek took out a cigarette, lit it and hungrily sucked in the smoke.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Charlie Salliaq isn’t using this as an excuse to make trouble. He’s made his views on the military clear. Doesn’t like them and doesn’t want them up here. The old man wields a lot of power round these parts. He’s managed to keep control of the Council of Elders for years and he likes to remind everyone of the fact. People don’t necessarily like him but they don’t feel they can oppose him. There’s not many old folk around here with the authority.’

‘I noticed that. Assumed they were all at summer camp.’

Derek stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Some of ’em are, but a lot of Charlie’s generation died young. Problems with game numbers back in the seventies and eighties I believe.’ The name of the place meant Big River, but for years even the fish had stayed away, he said. No one knew the reason and there didn’t have to be one. The Arctic was unpredictable that way.

Edie sat ba