by Jodi Picoult
You’d think that in this environment, Trixie would have looked ridiculously out of place, but if anyone noticed her presence, they didn’t seem to care. She wasn’t stopped when she took a bowl of stew from the Crock Pot on the back table and then went back seconds later for another helping. It wasn’t beef—frankly, she was a little scared to find out what it was—but it was the first food she’d eaten in almost two days, and at that point, anything would have been delicious.
Suddenly the woman behind the table stood up and started toward Trixie. She froze, anticipating a moment of reckoning. “Let me guess,” she said. “You’re Andi?”
Trixie forced a smile. “How’d you know?”
“The other JVs called from Tuluksak and said you were new and you’d gotten snowed in Outside.”
“Outside where?”
The woman grinned. “Sorry, that’s what we call all the other states. We’ll get someone to run you to the checkpoint before the mushers arrive.”
“Tuluksak,” Trixie repeated. The word tasted like iron. “I was hoping to get to Akiak.”
“Well, Tuluksak’s where we stick all the Jesuit Volunteers who work up here. Don’t worry—we haven’t lost one yet.” She nodded toward a box. “I’m Jen, by the way. And it would be really great if you could help me carry that down to the starting line.”
Trixie hefted the box, which was full of camera equipment, as Jen pulled her face mask up over her nose and mouth. “You might want your coat,” she said.
“This is all I brought,” Trixie replied. “My, um, friends have my stuff with them.”
She didn’t know if this lie would even make sense, since she hadn’t understood any of Jen’s comments about Jesuit Volunteers and Tuluksak in the first place. But Jen just rolled her eyes and dragged her toward a table covered with K300 merchandise for sale. “Here,” she said, tossing her a big fleece jacket and mittens and a hat that Velcroed under the chin. She took a pair of boots and a heavy anorak from behind the headquarter tables. “These’ll be too big, but Harry’ll be too drunk later to notice they’re missing.”
As Trixie followed Jen out of the Long House, winter smacked her with an open hand. It wasn’t just cold, the way it got in Maine in December. It was bone-deep cold, the kind that wrapped around your spine and turned your breath into tiny crystals, the kind that matted your eyelashes together with ice. Snow was piled on both sides of the walkway, and snow machines were parked at right angles in between a few rusted trucks.
Jen walked toward one of the pickups. It was white, but one of the doors was red, as if it had been amputated from a different junk heap for transplant onto this one. Tufts of stuffing and coils sprang out from the passenger side of the bench. There were no seat belts. It looked nothing like Trixie’s father’s truck, but as she slid into the passenger seat, homesickness slipped like a knife between her ribs.
Jen coaxed the truck’s engine into turning over. “Since when did the Jesuit Volunteers start recruiting on playgrounds?”
Trixie’s heart started to pound. “Oh, I’m twenty-one,” she said. “I just look way younger.”
“Either that, or I’m getting too damn old.” She nodded toward a bottle of Jägermeister jammed into the ashtray. “Feel free to have some, if you want.”
Trixie unscrewed the cap of the bottle. She took a tentative sip, then spit the liquor across the dashboard.
Jen laughed. “Right. Jesuit Volunteer. I forgot.” She watched Trixie furiously trying to wipe the mess up with her mitten. “Don’t worry, I think that it’s got enough alcohol in it to qualify as cleaning fluid.”
She took a sharp right, turning the pickup over the edge of a snowbank. Trixie panicked—there was no road. The truck slid down an icy hill onto the surface of a frozen river, and then Jen began to drive to the center of it.
A makeshift start and finish line had been erected, with two long chutes cordoned off and a banner overhead proclaiming the K300. Beside it was a flatbed truck, on which stood a man testing a microphone. A steady stream of dilapidated pickups and snow machines pulled onto the ice, parking in ragged lines. Some pulled trailers with fancy kennel names painted across them; others had a litter of barking dogs in the back. In the distance was a belching hovercraft, one that Jen explained brought the mail downriver. Tonight it was serving free hot dogs, in honor of the race.
A pair of enormous flood lamps illuminated the night, and for the first time since she’d landed in Bethel, Trixie got a good look at the Alaskan tundra. The landscape was layered in pale blues and flat silvers; the sky was an overturned bowl of stars that fell into the hoods of the Yup’ik children balanced on their fathers’ shoulders. Ice stretched as far as she could see. Here, it was easy to understand how people once thought you could fall off the edge of the world.
It all looked familiar to Trixie, as impossible as that might be. And then she realized it was. This was exactly how her father drew hell.
As mushers hooked dogs to their sleds, a crowd gathered around the chute. All the people looked immense and overstuffed in their outside gear. Children held their hands out to the dogs to sniff, getting tangled in the lead lines.
“Andi. Andi?”
When Trixie didn’t answer—she forgot that was the name she’d been given this time—Jen tapped her on the shoulder. Standing beside her was a Yup’ik Eskimo boy not much older than Trixie. He had a wide face the color of hazelnuts, and amazingly, he wasn’t wearing a hat. “Willie’s going to take you up to Tuluksak,” Jen said.
“Thanks,” Trixie answered.
The boy wouldn’t look her in the eye. He turned away and started walking, which Trixie assumed was the cue that she was supposed to follow. He stopped at a snow machine, nodded at it, and then walked away from her.
Willie disappeared quickly into the dark ring of night outside the flood lamp. Trixie hesitated beside the snow machine, not sure what she was supposed to do. Follow him? Figure out how to turn this thing on herself?
Trixie touched one of the handlebars. The snow machine smelled like exhaust, like her father’s lawn mower.
She was about to look for an On switch when Willie returned, holding an oversized winter parka with black wolf fur sewn into the hood. Still averting his glance, he held it out to her. When she didn’t take it, he mimed putting it on.
There was still heat trapped inside. Trixie wondered whom he’d taken this jacket from, if he or she was shivering now in the cold. Her hands were lost in the sleeves, and when she pulled up the hood, it blocked the wind from her face.
Willie climbed onto the snow machine and waited for Trixie to do the same. She glanced at him—what if he didn’t know his way to Tuluksak? Even if he did, what was she going to do when everyone realized Trixie wasn’t the person they were expecting? Most important, how was she supposed to get on the back of this thing without having to lean up against this boy?
With all of their layers, it was a tight fit. Trixie pushed herself back to the very edge of the seat, holding on to the rails at the sides with her mittened hands. Willie pulled the rip cord to start the machine and they groaned forward slowly, to keep the dogs from startling. He maneuvered around the chute and then gunned the engine, so that they flew across the ice.
If it was cold standing around, it was fifty times colder on a snow machine blasting at full throttle. Trixie couldn’t imagine not having the parka; as it was, she was shivering inside it and had curled her hands into fists.
The headlamp on the front of the machine cut a tiny visible triangle in front of them. There was no road whatsoever. There were no street signs, no traffic lights, no exit ramps. “Hey,” Trixie yelled into the wind. “Do you know where you’re going?”
Willie didn’t answer.
Trixie grasped onto the handholds more firmly. It was dizzying, going at this speed without being able to see. She listed to the left as Willie drove up a bank, through a narrow copse of trees, and then back out onto a finger of the frozen river.
“My name’s Tr
ixie,” she said, not because she expected an answer but because it kept her teeth from chattering. After she spoke, she remembered that she was supposed to be someone else. “Well, it’s Trixie, but they call me Andi.” God, she thought. Could I sound any more stupid if I tried?
The wind blew into Trixie’s eyes, which—as they started tearing—froze shut. She found herself huddling forward, her forehead nearly touching Willie’s back. Heat rose off him in waves.
As they drove, she pretended that she was lying prone in the back of her father’s pickup, feeling it vibrate underneath her as he bounced into the parking lot of the drive-in. The metal flatbed pressed against her cheek was still warm from a whole day of sun. They would eat so much popcorn that her mother would be able to smell it on their clothes even after she’d put them through the wash.
A frigid blast of air hit her full in the face. “Are we going to be there soon?” Trixie asked, and then, at Willie’s silence, “Do you even speak English?”
To her surprise, he ground the brakes, until the snow machine came to a stop. Willie turned around, still avoiding her gaze. “It’s fifty-five miles,” he said. “Are you going to yap the whole time?”
Stung, Trixie turned away and noticed the eerie light that had spilled onto the surface of the river up ahead. She traced it to its overhead origin—a wash of pink and white and green that reminded her of the smoke trails left behind by fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky, it bled color?
“That’s beautiful,” Trixie whispered.
Willie followed her gaze. “Qiuryaq.”
She didn’t know if that meant Shut up or Hold on or maybe even I’m sorry. But this time when he started the sled, she tilted her face to the Northern Lights. Looking up here was hypnotic and less harrowing than trying to squint at the imaginary road. Looking up here, it was almost easy to imagine they were nearly home.
7
Max Giff-Reynolds had made a career out of focusing on the things most people never saw: a carpet fiber trapped on the inside edge of a victim’s coat, a grain of sand left at a crime scene that was indigenous to a certain part of the country, the dust of a coffee grinder on the makings of a dirty bomb. As one of two hundred forensic microscopists in the country, he was in high demand. Chances were that Mike Bartholemew would never have gotten anywhere close to him for an analysis of Trixie’s hair sample—if he hadn’t known Max when he was a skinny little geek in college, back when they were roommates and Bartholemew served as bodyguard in return for private tutorials in chemistry and physics.
He’d driven to Boston that night with a hank of Trixie Stone’s hair on the seat beside him. The salon, Live and Let Dye, hadn’t even sent the sample in to Locks of Love yet; it had been languishing in a drawer in the back room near the peroxide and the paraffin wax. Now he was sitting on top of a counter, waiting for Max to tell him something useful.
The lab was piled with boxes of dust and hair and fiber for comparison. A poster of Max’s hero, Edmond Locard, hung over his polarized-light microscope. Bartholemew could remember Max reading books about Locard, the father of forensic science, even back at U Maine. “He burned off his fingerprints,” Max had told him once with admiration, “just to see if they grew back in the same patterns!”
It had been almost thirty years since they’d graduated, but Max looked the same. Balder, but still skinny, with a permanent curve to his back that came from bending over a microscope. “Huh,” he said.
“What’s that mean?”
Max pushed back from his workspace. “What do you know about hair?”
Bartholemew grinned at the other man’s gleaming pate. “More than you do.”
“Hair’s got three layers that are important, in terms of forensics,” Max said, ignoring his comment. “The cortex, the cuticle, and the medulla. If you think of a piece of hair as a pencil, the medulla is the graphite, the cortex is the wood, and the paint on the outside is the cuticle. The medulla is sometimes in pieces and differs from hair to hair on the same human head. The cells in the cortex have pigment, which is pretty much what I’m trying to match up between your two samples. You with me so far?”
Bartholemew nodded.
“I can tell you, by looking at a hair, if it’s human or not. I can tell you if it came from someone of Caucasian, Negroid, or Mongolian origin. I can tell you where it came from on the body and whether the hair was forcibly removed or burned or crushed. I can tell you that a hair excludes a suspect, but I can’t use it to pinpoint a particular one.”
He spoke as he bent over the microscope again. “What I’m seeing in both samples is a moderate shaft diameter and diameter variation, medulla continuous and relatively narrow, soft texture. That means they’re both hairs from a human head. The hue, value, and intensity of the color are nearly identical. The tip of your known sample was cut with a pair of scissors; the other still has a root attached, which is soft and distorted—telling me it was yanked out. Pigment varies a bit between the two samples, although not enough for me to draw any conclusion. However, the cortex of the hair you found on the victim’s body is much more prominent than the hairs in the known sample.”
“The known sample came from a haircut three weeks before the murder,” Bartholemew said. “Isn’t it possible that during those three weeks, the cortex got more . . . what did you say again?”
“Prominent,” Max answered. “Yeah, it’s possible, especially if the suspect had some kind of chemical hair treatment or was excessively exposed to sunlight or wind. Theoretically, it’s also possible for two hairs from the same human head to just plain look different. But there’s also the chance, here, that you’re talking about two different heads.” He looked at Bartholemew. “If you asked me to get up in front of a jury, I couldn’t tell them conclusively that these two hairs came from the same person.”
Bartholemew felt like he’d been punched in the chest. He’d been so certain that he’d been on the right track here, that Trixie Stone’s disappearance flagged her involvement in the murder of Jason Underhill.
“Hey,” Max said, looking at his face. “I don’t admit this to many people, but microscopy’s not always an exact science. Even when I think I do see a match, I tell detectives to get a DNA analysis to back up what the scope says.”
Mike sighed. “I have a root on only one of the hairs. That rules out DNA.”
“It rules out nuclear DNA,” Max corrected. He leaned over and took a card out of his desk. He scribbled something on the back and handed it to Bartholemew. “Skip’s a friend of mine, at a private lab in Virginia. Make sure you say I sent you.”
Bartholemew took the card. SKIPPER JOHANSSEN, he read. GENETTA LABS. MITOCHONDRIAL DNA.
• • •
By the time the storm blew in, Trixie had already lost feeling in her toes. She was nearly catatonic, lulled by the cold and the exhaust of the snow machine. At the first strike of ice against her cheek, Trixie blinked back to awareness. They were still somewhere on the river—the scenery looked no different than it had an hour ago, except that the lights in the sky had vanished, washed over by gray clouds that touched down at the line of the horizon.
Snow howled. Visibility grew even worse. Trixie began to imagine that she had fallen into one of her father’s comic book panels, one filled with Kirby crackle—the burst of white bubbles that Jack Kirby, a penciler from years ago, had invented to show an energy field. The shapes in the darkness turned into villains from her father’s art—twisted trees became the clawed arms of a witch; icicles were the bared fangs of a demon.
Willie slowed the snow machine to a crawl and then stopped it altogether. He shouted to Trixie over the roar of the wind. “We have to wait this out. It’ll clear up by morning.”
Trixie wanted to answer him, but she’d spent so long clenching her jaw shut that she couldn’t pry it open wide enough for a word.
Willie moved to the back of the machine, rummaging around. He handed he
r a blue tarp. “Tuck this under the treads,” he said. “We can use it to get out of the wind.”
He left her to her own devices and disappeared into the whorls of snow. Trixie wanted to cry. She was so cold that she couldn’t even classify it as cold anymore; she had no idea what he meant by treads, and she wanted to go home. She clutched the tarp against her parka, not moving, wishing that Willie would come back.
She saw him moving in and out of the beam cast by the snow machine’s headlight. He seemed to be snapping off the branches of a dead tree next to the riverbank. When he saw her still sitting on the snow machine, he walked up to her. She expected him to scream about not pulling her weight, but instead his mouth tightened and he helped her off. “Get under here,” he said, and he had her sit with her back to the snow machine before he wrapped it in the tarp and pulled it over her, an awning to cut the wind.
It wasn’t perfect. There were three large slits in the tarp, and the snow and ice unerringly found those gashes. Willie crouched down at Trixie’s feet and peeled some of the bark off the birch branches he’d gathered, tucking it between lengths of cottonwood and alder. He poured a little gas from the snow machine on top of the pile and ignited it with a lighter from his pocket. Only when she could feel the fire against her skin did she let herself wonder how cold it might be out here.
Trixie remembered learning that the human body was, like, sixty percent water. How many degrees below zero did it have to get before you literally froze to death?
“Come on,” Willie said. “Let’s get some grass.”
The last thing Trixie wanted to do right now was smoke weed. She tried to shake her head, but even that set of muscles had stopped working. When she didn’t get up, he turned away, as if she wasn’t even worth bothering with. “Wait,” she said, and although he didn’t look at her, he stopped moving. She wanted to explain how her feet felt like blocks and her fingers stung so bad that she had to keep biting down on her lower lip. She wanted to tell him how her shoulders hurt from trying not to shiver. She wanted to tell him she was scared and that when she imagined running away, this hadn’t entered into it. “I c-can’t move,” Trixie said.
