The Stranger on the Ice

by Bernadette Calonego

  “Tanya was always looking for money or to steal something so she could buy drugs. The poor woman must have become a target when Tanya heard about her being in Tuk and talking to people. Danny told us she stole the woman’s backpack. It had probably been left in the pickup, and Roy was coming back to get it. Maybe her camera was in it. And Tanya swiped it off Roy.”

  His words came slowly, haltingly.

  “Roy confronted her, and Tanya knocked him down. Then she probably spotted the open cellar door . . . Tanya didn’t want the woman to sound the alarm. So she slammed down the lid and closed the door to the shack without locking it.”

  He looked around.

  “I need a strong, hot coffee. How about it?”

  He pointed to the coffeemaker.

  Valerie nodded, still stunned.

  “Sure thing.”

  He filled the pot with water.

  “It took us about half an hour to get her up out of there. She’d slipped and sprained her ankle trying to go up the ladder in the dark. What a nightmare. Two days!”

  “Will she pull through?”

  “I think so. She had extreme hypothermia—her speech was pretty incoherent. We laid her down in my warm truck. We got instructions from the ambulance service not to move her again because of her ankle or worse. Fortunately, the helicopter came pretty quickly. The RCMP has taken over now.”

  He sniffed.

  “They’ll have some explaining to do. Apparently, nobody thought to check the ice house. Incredible.”

  “But how would they know Roy had somebody with him? The lid was down. The ice house door was shut. The woman’s backpack was gone. And Roy couldn’t talk.”

  The coffee machine gurgled loudly.

  Valerie clasped her hands together.

  “So it isn’t Sedna; Faye told me someone saw her at the snowmobile race. So who could the woman be? Does anybody know if there’s a woman traveling around here by herself?”

  “I got your text message saying that Sedna had been spotted in Tuk. I thought it would be her.”

  Clem poured coffee into a white cup and handed it to Valerie before continuing.

  “The police haven’t made the woman’s name public yet, so I’m not allowed to tell you. The immediate family has to be notified first. And she’s not allowed visitors until she’s stable.”

  Valerie’s conversation with Marjorie Tama crossed her mind. “Your friend,” Marj had called her, never referring to Sedna by name.

  Her heart began to thump. Suddenly, she had a hunch.

  “Do you remember I told you about that woman in the Whitehorse museum who pretended to know me? She said her name was Phyllis Crombe. I don’t know any Phyllis Crombe. I found out that she was considerably older than Sedna.” Her voice was nearly hoarse now. “The woman you found, is her name Christine? Christine Preston?”

  The astonishment on his face said it all.

  Valerie jumped up and paced back and forth between the door and the bed.

  “She was a childhood friend of my mother’s. She turned up at one of my presentations, introduced herself, and gave me an envelope with an old article about . . . about my parents’ disaster. Here, you can read it for yourself.”

  She took the article out of her handbag and passed it to Clem.

  “Why . . . why are these people showing up all of a sudden and asking questions about my parents? What’s that woman doing here? First Sedna, now Christine Preston! Do I mess around in their family history? What took place back then was bad enough. They ought to leave us in peace! I . . . I . . .” She struggled to find the right words. Tears welled up in her eyes.

  Clem put down his cup and went over to her. He first laid his hand on her arm, then he drew her to himself, and she offered no resistance. She leaned her head on his shoulder and felt his arms wrap around her back.

  He pressed his warm face to hers, and she heard him whispering. Words she didn’t catch, but they aroused a longing in her. She raised her head and looked at him.

  “It’ll make things more complicated,” she said softly.

  He smiled.

  “No, it’ll make things much simpler.”

  He held her tight, then he kissed her. His lips were rough from the cold, his movements gentle and searching.

  Her body reacted at once, paying no heed to whatever mental reservations she might have had. Her hand wandered up to his face and over his hair and the back of his head. Suddenly, she couldn’t get close enough to this man. His passion swept away her laboriously maintained reserve. She lost all awareness of time and place—until a cell phone melody broke the spell.

  She let go of him and said breathlessly, “You have to take it.”

  He nodded and fished the phone out of his pants pocket.

  The voice at the other end was so loud that Valerie could hear it.

  “You tell Helv to give up first place, or I’ll tell the police who I saw Gisèle with before they found her body.”

  “Phil, why—”

  “He rammed me—it’s all there on the video. Either he admits he’s wrong, or I go to the cops!”

  “What’s gotten into you? I’ll be right there.” But the connection was already lost.

  Clem checked the phone, put it away, and looked at Valerie. She didn’t let on that she’d heard the whole conversation.

  He took her hands in his.

  “I have to go. It’s urgent.”

  He slowly stroked her hair and tried to read the expression on her face.

  “Let’s not let this go. I’ve waited a long time for this moment.”

  His words were touching. She took his head in her two hands and briefly pressed her lips against his mouth.

  “It can only get better.”

  She would want to erase that sentence from her memory afterward, born as it was out of confusion and wishful thinking.

  Clem slipped out of the room. She sat down on the bed, her thoughts racing. Clem’s kisses. Christine Preston. The Ice Road. Gisèle. That odd phone call.

  She went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Although she felt stressed, her face was beaming. She quickly splashed cold water on her burning skin and applied some lip balm.

  A minute later, she was knocking at Faye’s door.

  “I thought you’d come by when you were finished with the ice master,” Faye said as she let Valerie into her room.

  “You really don’t miss a trick.”

  Faye grinned.

  “Come sit down. I walked past your door and heard voices. So tomorrow we’re off to Tuktoyaktuk?”

  Valerie realized that Faye hadn’t heard anything about Christine.

  “That’s crazy,” Faye whooped after Valerie’s detailed report, from their first meeting up to Christine’s rescue from the ice house.

  “Can we still go down in the cellar after all that’s happened?”

  Valerie shrugged.

  “I have no idea. I’ll have to get that straightened out, I suppose.”

  She pressed her hands to her burning face. Faye sat down beside her and put an arm around her shoulder.

  “I know you really don’t want to hear this, but I’ve got to tell you. On Glenn’s video—you know, of the snowmobile race—you can see Sedna for a brief moment. I’m absolutely certain. She was in the crowd at the starting line.”

  Valerie sat bolt upright, and Faye’s arm slid down.

  Faye carried on: “I discovered something else, too. Sedna bought supplies in Inuvik. She was interested in a camp stove, something with propane. She told the store owner she’d had problems with another gas stove.”

  “How’d you find all this out?”

  Faye produced a good-natured laugh.

  “I ask around, my dear. Isn’t that why I came along? I do want to track Sedna down.” She winked. “Sometimes it pays to hang out in the bar.”

  “I could use a drink right now. That must have been a nightmare for Christine. Unimaginable.”

  “What are gals li
ke her thinking? This is the Arctic, for Pete’s sake! Not a Vancouver beach.”

  But Valerie was already somewhere else in thought.

  “So Sedna’s in a place without electricity. What’s she up to?”

  “Wouldn’t I like to know. And why does this Christine lady suddenly pop up here? That can’t be a coincidence.”

  Valerie stood up.

  “I have to get a few e-mails off. So tomorrow at seven? Thanks for everything.”

  She went back to her room and booted up her laptop.

  A message from Kosta was in her in-box.

  “My dearest darling sister,

  I found out more about Mary-Ann Strong’s alleged secret service contacts. I got help from a friend in the States. The US authorities lifted the ban on certain documents after thirty years. It looks as if Mary-Ann sent regular reports on the Arctic to the prestigious Institute for Nordic Studies in Boston. The Canadian intelligence agency got wind of it and considered her an informer for the Americans (typical overreaction), so it kept an eye on her activities. US secret service agents had apparently read her reports concerning events and people in the Arctic. It was all very routine. The documents also record her death by rifle bullet. The Canadians apparently contacted the Americans about this through diplomatic channels. In the end, it nonetheless emerged from the appraisal of her reports that Mary-Ann’s records were harmless, and it was concluded that her death was unrelated to her activities.

  I have discovered some other interesting facts; I’ll tell you about them in more detail soon.

  Any news about Sedna Mahrer?

  Kosta”

  Valerie began typing her reply and didn’t stop until it was eleven.

  CHAPTER 29

  “The caribou photographers again? It’s like they’re following us or something.”

  Valerie caught sight of the dark SUV in the rearview mirror. They’d just turned onto the Ice Road, and the group immediately demanded a photo stop for the ferries and barges that had been drawn up on land.

  Faye looked straight ahead.

  “The Ice Road doesn’t belong to us, my dear.”

  Valerie kept quiet. She didn’t want to spoil everyone’s good mood on this sunny day. The sky was a pristine blue, like an unwavering canvas. The previous year they’d crawled along the ice in a blizzard, a white wall of snow in front of the windshield. Nobody had wanted to step out into that ice-cold inferno to snap a few pictures then.

  A little while later, Trish spotted the black-and-yellow police tape, marking the spot where Gisèle Chaume’s body had been found. Faye braked so gradually that the Chevy came to a halt a couple of hundred feet past the tape. They got out and waddled like ducks over the slippery footing.

  “What? No cross to mark it?” Anika shouted as she felt her way along the ice, holding on to Valerie’s arm. Paula seconded her.

  “They never even lit a candle for poor Gisèle.”

  “We’ve got emergency candles in our luggage,” Jordan remarked helpfully as he set up his tripod.

  “Good idea!” Trish shouted.

  Valerie had no choice but to part with two of their emergency candles. Not much of a risk given the beautiful weather. The dark SUV drove past them and was soon out of sight. Paula walked carefully, ministep after ministep, in the direction of Inuvik and climbed the wall of snow the plow had piled up by the roadside. Too much coffee for breakfast, Valerie surmised. Anika, who turned out to be a fan of true-crime cases, inundated her with questions.

  “Where exactly was the body lying? Couldn’t Gisèle have made it to Inuvik on foot? Was it bright enough yet? Is there cell phone reception out here?”

  Carol shook her head.

  “Why do you think we have a satellite phone in the car?”

  Paula was the last to get back to the bus.

  “Look what I found.” She held out her hand to Valerie as she was getting in.

  A blue cigarette lighter. Plastic—a dime a dozen. Except for an inscription: “Booster Adventures.”

  Valerie looked at the lighter and deliberated.

  “May I keep it?”

  “Sure. My gift to you,” Paula said with a laugh before she turned her focus to the group. “Are you all aware that we’re traveling over water?”

  Everyone in the back seats began to chatter, but Valerie was lost in thought. Faye was also quiet now, concentrating on seeing cracks in the ice. Her speedometer needle never passed forty.

  Valerie didn’t exactly know what to expect in Tuktoyaktuk. She’d called the police station to ask if the ice house was accessible again, but they couldn’t provide a real answer. So she decided to find out definitively once they got there.

  The hills and the bony, fir-treed ridges on their left disappeared as the landscape flattened out to the horizon, as if someone had gone over it with a rolling pin. Valerie loved that white nothingness, the unobstructed, undisturbed vastness where your gaze could get lost.

  Several trucks, a grader, and a plow came toward them, stirring up huge white clouds of snow. Later, when the road had grown to more than six hundred feet wide, they stopped again so the group could study the bare ice, which shimmered bluish, purple, and greenish, with black intervals, covered by a mesh of white lines—a frozen kaleidoscope.

  Valerie saw an opportunity to organize the obligatory group photograph. Minus her and Faye, they formed a half circle on the ice. Valerie shot the same picture with eight different cameras. Then she took a shot of Faye standing in the middle of the Ice Road, raising her arms to heaven with her eyes closed. Would she send this picture to her relatives in Haiti? Valerie liked to think so.

  A little while later they passed a wrecked vehicle, a white pickup emblazoned with the black lettering of a rental-car company in Inuvik. Valerie thought of Helvin West’s truck near where Gisèle’s body was found. The police hadn’t deemed him a suspect. Did Gisèle really steal the pickup as Helvin claimed?

  “What’s that?” Carol shouted, pointing to peculiar large humps on the horizon.

  “Pingos!” Paula and Valerie shouted at the same time.

  “They look like ice volcanoes,” Anika remarked.

  Valerie yielded the floor to Paula.

  “They are not volcanoes; they have a core of ice with a layer of earth on top.”

  “But they’re white,” Trish replied.

  “Of course, because there’s snow on the dirt.”

  “Massive lumps of ice and dirt,” Glenn interjected.

  “How high are those pingos?” Anika wanted to know.

  “The highest in the area is over one hundred and sixty feet,” Paula declared. “And pingo means ‘little hill’ in the indigenous language. Inuvialuktun, in case you’re interested.”

  During their slow approach to Tuktoyaktuk, Valerie was thinking about the next sight on the horizon, the buildings of the DEW Line—the Distant Early Warning Line—and its anti-aircraft and radar installations. It had been built in 1957 to defend against Russia’s nuclear force. Valerie had a little spiel prepared—her customers were always amazed at the sight of radar towers and a military base in the middle of an Arctic landscape. Faye saw them first.

  “Are they drilling for oil over there?” she asked.

  Before Valerie could answer, Glenn chimed in.

  “This defense system was built during the Cold War and stretched from Alaska through Canada to Greenland. It was built in case the Russians sent bombers to North America over the North Pole. From 1954 to 1957, the Americans built forty-two stations in the Canadian Arctic. They also paid the full cost; the Canadians didn’t contribute one red cent.”

  “Why not?” Carol asked.

  “Because the Canadians were slackers. They probably didn’t have the money for it.”

  Visibly pleased with himself, Glenn added a few statistics.

  “More than four hundred and sixty thousand tons of material and equipment were transported into virtually uninhabited regions. All that sand and gravel could have built the Grea
t Pyramid of Giza two times over.”

  Valerie was astonished. She recalled that Glenn was American. And the others were impressed—even Paula, who couldn’t contribute anything to the topic.

  “Were Americans stationed in Tuktoyaktuk?” Paula asked.

  Glenn really got going then.

  “Actually, the Canadians wanted to man the bases, but they didn’t have the required specialists. So a lot of Americans worked here.”

  “Are the bases still operating?”

  “Most of them are not. The entire system was modernized later, in 1985, I think. Since then, it’s been called the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The Tuktoyaktuk base is still operated by remote control, or so I read somewhere.”

  The year Mary-Ann Strong died—1985. A young, adventurous woman whose travel reports from the Arctic had fallen into the no-man’s-land between two neighbors who were officially allies but kept a sharp, steady eye on each other nonetheless. The government in Ottawa feared for Canadian sovereignty in their northernmost regions, which make up a fifth of Canada’s landmass. Nothing’s really changed there, Valerie thought. Except that the threats today were new ones. According to a newspaper report, somewhere out there on the vast ice now lying before her eyes, hunters had witnessed a giant explosion.

  The bus passengers were talking about something else now. Their conversation focused on the first visible houses in Tuktoyaktuk, the stilts they stood on obscured by the snow.

  Valerie and Faye dropped the group off at the one store in the village, then drove on to the schoolhouse to pick up the key to the ice house. A teacher referred them to Lazarusie and gave them directions.

  When they arrived at Lazarusie’s house, he was just leaving it, so Valerie hopped out of the minibus and waved him down.

  “Laz!”

  He turned around. His face brightened when he recognized her.

  “You’re lucky. I was just off to Inuvik to see Tanya.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Not too well. She talks too much. She’s telling the RCMP just what they want to hear. That Gisèle sold drugs. That she wanted to meet Gisèle on the Ice Road that night to buy some hash, but she didn’t make it. But she isn’t telling them anything about Roy.”