Valerie observed Christine with growing astonishment. She seemed very cheery. Some people survived traumatic situations better than others. Valerie took a chance and probed a little more deeply.
“Why did you come to Inuvik all by yourself in the first place, Christine?”
“I knew you’d ask me that. Fair enough. The answer’s quite simple: my dear husband died of cancer, so I had time on my hands. First I paid a visit to my daughter. I had to do something after my husband’s death to avoid falling into a depression. I never forgot Mary-Ann during all those years. I told you when we first met that she was my best friend. I never had another best friend after her. Friends, of course, but not the same close bond.”
“Please excuse the question . . . couldn’t you have just come with us on our tour?”
Christine smiled.
“Yes, I contemplated that possibility. Especially after I met you. Maybe you don’t know this, but you resemble Mary-Ann a lot. Not so much in the face or the voice, but rather in your demeanor, your body movements. Your smile. Your gestures. It’s almost weird.”
She looked off into the distance.
A strong bond had held these two women together—Valerie understood that now. And it held still, even thirty years after Mary-Ann’s death. But a man had come between them, an idol the masses worshipped, Peter Hurdy-Blaine.
Christine continued.
“I wanted to be alone. I wanted to relive my memories of Mary-Ann all by myself. To be intimately together with her once again. At least that was my dream.”
Christine furrowed her brow, then smiled.
“You must think I’m peculiar. You know, people and experiences from our childhood sometimes have long-lasting effects on us. And at some point, you’ve got to face up to that. Look, I was against Mary-Ann’s marriage to your father. I knew he would try to dominate her. I had a suspicion that he’d try to force her to live his lifestyle. I made no bones about it, and Peter Hurdy-Blaine heard about it one day. Mary-Ann and I argued as a result, and she broke off any and all contact with me.”
Christine fell back on her pillow as if she’d been pushed.
Valerie shifted her chair closer. The right moment was now.
“Why did you offer to pay people here for my father’s diary?”
Christine’s face lit up; that wasn’t the reaction Valerie was expecting.
“I’d have been so happy to do that for Mary-Ann—to acquire the diary. And for her daughter. For you, Valerie,” she said in a tone of voice melting with warmth. “I’d heard rumors that somebody had hidden it. I heard it from Roy Stevens. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if I could have presented you with it? Alas, I failed.”
Christine’s eyes turned moist. “Roy told me everything,” she said.
Every muscle in Valerie’s body tensed up.
“About what happened back then? Please, please tell me.”
Christine pulled herself up again.
“It was bad luck. Roy had his hunting rifle with him, and she wanted to show him that she was a good shot. The bullet ricocheted off a tree and came back like a boomerang and hit her.”
She stopped, took several breaths, and collected herself.
“Your father saw the whole incident. And I must say I respect him much more now than I did then. In spite of his grief over Mary-Ann, he wanted to make sure that Roy—he was just fourteen—wouldn’t be blamed. It was a bullet from Roy’s rifle that was in her chest. But your father wanted to protect the boy at all costs.”
The door opened and a nurse stuck her head inside.
“Everything OK?” she asked.
“Yes, everything’s OK,” Christine replied, and the nurse disappeared. “Really nice people here,” Christine murmured.
Valerie couldn’t get a word out but gestured her approval when Christine asked solicitously, “Shall I go on?”
The blizzard looked so heavy through the window that it wiped out the shape of everything outside.
“Your father paid for the boy’s education and his family’s move to Yellowknife. The Anaqiinas were apparently feuding with some relatives; that’s why they wanted to move away. They . . .”
“So it wasn’t hush money?”
Christine looked at her, confused, until she caught on.
“No, no. There was nothing to hide. Oh, maybe you don’t know that there were witnesses. Another family was there en route to the caribou hunt. The three of them were not alone.”
“Where is this family? Where can I find them?”
Christine sighed.
“Roy told me that the family doesn’t want their whereabouts known. They have English names now and have removed all traces of themselves. Maybe your father pulled some strings for them. He wanted to preserve his privacy, too.”
One last question was on the tip of Valerie’s tongue. “Were you in the Whitehorse museum under the name of Phyllis Crombe?”
Christine hesitated momentarily before answering.
“Phyllis Crombe was someone I knew from Whitehorse. My late husband’s cousin. She was with me in the museum. They probably remembered her name because she’s from Whitehorse. Why?”
“Because a Phyllis Crombe let the museum director’s secretary know that Peter Hurdy-Blaine’s daughter would be coming to the museum with a tour group. Nobody knew my identity before that.”
Christine closed her eyes and rubbed her fingers against them.
“That was my fault. I’m awfully sorry. I realized in retrospect that it might have been an indiscretion.” She looked at Valerie. “But I promise you that from now on, I’ll never make anything about you or your parents public without your permission. I can give it to you in writing if—”
The phone on the night table rang. Christine picked it up and after a few words handed it to Valerie. It was Faye.
“I’d like to come pick you up and bring you back to the hotel now; it might be impossible soon. It’s getting worse and worse outside.”
Valerie said good-bye to Christine quickly and promised to see her again in the next few days.
Faye was right on. The Chevy proceeded at a crawl. They were driving through a frightening, almost impenetrable wall; Faye called it “a white darkness.” They were on edge, searching for the slightest indication of where they were.
They finally made it to the hotel parking lot, and Faye heaved a loud sigh of relief.
“You deserve a medal, my dear,” Valerie acknowledged.
Faye nodded.
“Yeah, I think so, too.”
She turned to Valerie.
“A man’s waiting for you at the reception desk.”
“Police?” She was thinking of Franklin Edwards, the police officer from Yellowknife with that funny stare.
“No. Glenn’s lawyer.”
Now it was Valerie’s turn to sigh. She was about to open the door when Faye held her back.
“Before we go in, what’s the latest?”
Valerie filled her in.
“I don’t know what to think of all this,” Valerie said. “There’s an inconsistency in Christine’s version of my mother’s death. She says there were other witnesses—a family on their way to the caribou hunt. But Kosta didn’t say anything about them. Something doesn’t add up.”
Faye agreed.
“It would be a good thing if the diary turned up. That would sure explain a lot.” She pulled her hood on. “I wonder what Sedna found out.”
Valerie shrugged. She couldn’t tell Faye what she suspected. If Sedna had brought their father’s diary or other important documents to the cabin—maybe they were among the papers that Glenn had thrown onto the floor—then Kosta’s security people, Ellen and Alex, might have swept them up before the police set foot in the place. Maybe that was why they were so eager to cut and run.
CHAPTER 37
Valerie was in the bathtub trying to relax when her phone alerted her to a text message. After her long conversations with Kosta, Christine, and Faye, she desperately wante
d to be alone. But as a tour guide, she couldn’t disregard her phone. She wiped the moist film from the display in order to read the message: “It was a brutal day. Only you can save it. May I invite you to dinner?”
Instead of words, she sent Clem five exclamation marks.
She laid the phone down on the tile floor so she wouldn’t drop it in her excitement. Then she ran some more hot water, as much as the small bathtub could take. Filled with expectation, she gave her thoughts full rein—beautiful and secret thoughts she would never have revealed, even to Faye.
She reluctantly got out of the bath and dried herself. She snuggled into her soft bathrobe and texted Faye: “Do you mind if I don’t spend tonight with you?”
Her instant reply: “No, as long as you don’t spend it with Jordan.”
Jordan Walker? Valerie stared at the words, baffled. Then she couldn’t resist a smile. The sly little bitch! And she hadn’t even picked up on it.
She put on a long white sweater with glitter around the décolleté and picked out dark stretch pants. Clem was going to have every reason to call her Snowy Owl again. She blow-dried her chestnut hair and styled it so that her brushed locks fell over her shoulders.
The reward for all her efforts was Clem’s admiring look when she opened the door. Compared to his full-bore Arctic dress, she felt like a summertime tourist.
“You’ll need your parka,” he declared.
She looked at him in disbelief.
“We’re not going out in this storm?”
“Storm?” He laughed. “If you ever experience a real Arctic storm, you’ll call this one a bunch of pretty, swirling snowflakes.”
Five minutes later, he led her through the biting wind to his pickup.
She didn’t have the slightest idea where they were going, but it was not to his place.
Clem put on soft country music.
“I was on the Ice Road today. Some Austrian tourists were stuck in a snowbank. The motor was still running, thank God. They had to wait four hours for the tow truck from Tuktoyaktuk because it was already towing a truck. It was pure chaos.”
Valerie felt an instant chill.
“They could have frozen to death.”
“Fortunately, they had several gas cans in reserve. And a satellite phone. Still, some of them were scared half to death when I talked to them.”
“How did you manage to get there?”
“With my GPS and a plow.”
He laughed and turned his bold face toward her. She warmed up at once.
The truck stopped, and Valerie could just make out a large shadow through the windshield. After hopping into the snow, she recognized the Inuvik community greenhouse.
“C’mon!” he shouted and showed her to the entrance with a flashlight.
It wasn’t as cold inside as she’d feared.
“I’ve rented the whole place. A refuge for poor little plants like us.” He threw her a mischievous grin. “Follow me!”
She felt her way through the hall after him. She caught sight of flickering candlelight out of the corner of her eye and turned to see a row of burning candles in aluminum bowls filled with water. He must have bought up all the wax candles in Inuvik. The warmth they spread was amazing. There were hide blankets on a platform of wooden boxes; paper shopping bags were bunched up beside it.
He took off his gloves and hat and made an inviting gesture.
“Make yourself comfortable.”
She had to take in the scene first.
“Clem, I . . . this is . . .” She was at a loss for words.
“I thought maybe an igloo at first but couldn’t find anybody fast enough to have one made. Besides, it would really have been a cliché. And hey, who ever heard of a greenhouse in the Arctic?”
He unpacked some white wine, fried chicken, cheese, olives, and tomatoes that looked impressively fresh.
“Bread straight out of the oven.” Clem beamed, and Valerie glowed along with him.
She couldn’t show off her glittery sweater and stretch pants because the parka and her ski pants were keeping her warm.
But there wasn’t a chic restaurant in Vancouver that could beat this experience.
She sat down on the hide-bedecked platform, and Clem handed her a glass of wine. Not in crystal but in a kid’s party glass decorated with colored balloons. Valerie never missed crystal glasses less than at that moment.
“Tell me how your day went,” Clem said.
She recounted her conversation with Christine and her meeting with Glenn’s lawyer. Clem didn’t comment on Christine’s revelations, which surprised her. But when she came to the lawyer, his eyes grew wider.
“His lawyer! He got to Inuvik fast.”
“Yes, I wondered about that. Maybe Glenn has more money than we supposed.”
She popped an olive into her mouth. The little green morsel had probably never dreamed it would leave the groves of southern France to end up in the Arctic, she mused. She resumed her narrative.
“The lawyer was eager to extricate his client from the affair with the least possible harm to Glenn. He let it be known he was ready to make a deal.”
“And—what did you say to that?”
“That he should get in touch with Kosta. I can’t make the decision all by myself.”
Clem bit off a piece from a drumstick and said with his mouth full, “All the same, you must know what you want.”
“I want Faye to get her money back so she can renovate her house. What was Sedna thinking?”
“I assume she wanted to spend some more time with Richard Melville. Maybe he talked her into it. Richard can sell refrigerators to the Eskimos, so they say in Dawson.”
“Maybe she’d fallen in love with him, who knows?”
Clem chopped the tomatoes into small pieces with his pocketknife and piled them up on a plastic plate.
“You mean, love is blind?”
She raised her eyebrows in feigned indignation.
“I’d like something else,” she stated. “I’d like to write up my parents’ story, to do justice to all those involved. And by all I’m including Sedna and Glenn.”
Clem bobbed his impressive head back and forth, chewing with relish.
She definitely had to get one more thing off her chest before the evening with Clem took off in a certain direction.
“I still owe you an answer,” she began, the wine lending her courage.
Clem looked at her, eyebrows raised.
“When you told me about you and Sedna . . . at first I was . . . well, not exactly thrilled. But I have enough . . . let’s call it life experience, to know that things happen. When I wanted to leave my marriage—not because my husband was a bad man, on the contrary—I managed to do it in a not very decent manner. I . . . was unfaithful to him. And he didn’t find out until I told him.”
She looked at him before turning away. He fished a paper napkin out of a bag and wiped the grease off his glistening lips.
“If now is the hour for confessions, then I have some explaining to do, too.”
He picked up the bottle and refilled her glass. For a second his face was very close, but she didn’t dare kiss him. They hadn’t even touched up to then.
“You mentioned once,” he began, “that you’d heard the men up here—white men—have escaped to the North to get away from something.”
He stared at the wavering candles, his head slightly turned away from her.
“That probably—no, that rather accurately applies to me. I worked in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa as an expert for the Middle East. I’m sure that will surprise you. I traveled a lot in the Middle East working as a hydrologist. From the sandy desert to the ice desert—how’s that for a career arc?”
Valerie sensed he was masking his vulnerability.
“And wonder of wonders, who fell in love with me? The daughter of the foreign minister, Claude Duchéné. And I with her. Naturally, I was flattered. I admit she was enchanting, really pretty. She was also .
. . erratic. Unstable. Had violent mood swings. All that put a great strain on our relationship.”
She felt his eyes on her as she listened to him in silence.
“To keep it short: I broke off our relationship. At first she was enraged and vengeful, which made it easier on me. Easier than if she’d . . . just been devastated. Three weeks later, she committed suicide.”
“Oh, no!” Valerie gasped.
“Yes.” He turned his glass around and around in his hands.
“It was hell on wheels. I felt guilty, of course, and had to live with the fact that I was almost instantly persona non grata in Ottawa. A leper. It was clear that any plans for a career in foreign affairs were down the drain. I was treated like a pariah. I found out later that she’d been suicidal as early as sixteen. By then, I was living in Inuvik.”
Valerie looked at him, trying to fathom his expression. She decided to take the bull by the horns.
“Are you afraid that I’d do something to myself if . . . if, say, you don’t want us to see each other again after I leave Inuvik?”
He reacted so forcefully that he almost spilled his wine.
“No, Val, no! I don’t mean anything of the kind. For God’s sake, no.”
He crept closer until he was kneeling before her.
“What I’m most afraid of at this instant is that I won’t see you for a whole year.” The next moment, he was gently kissing her mouth. “I don’t want to be with anyone but you.”
His voice sounded rough, raw.
She felt his eager, searching lips on her face, on her mouth, on all the bare places he could reach in spite of her parka.
They sank onto the covers, and she heard him say as if from afar, “I scared up some caribou hides. They’ll keep us warm.”
CHAPTER 38
This was his chance.
He had to do it.
The weather gods couldn’t have been more propitious for him and his plan. A clear, sunny day.
The Ice Road was open. The plow had cleared the ice, and the grader had roughed up the surface to help prevent skidding. That guy Hardeven sure did good work. He’d heard that yesterday some Austrian tourists had turned a deaf ear to Clem’s warning.
The Stranger on the Ice Page 23
