White Heat

by Melanie McGrath

  Derek left a pause before turning to Willa, but Joe's brother continued to stare at his feet. Shock or simple misery, Derek didn't know. Either way, it was clear there was nothing Derek could do for him.

  Next, he went over to Edie and just sat beside her. At one point he noticed she was shaking.

  Then Robert Patma directed him to the body. The young man was lying in a bag on the morgue slab. Robert slid the zipper down far enough for Derek to be able to see Joe's face.

  'Who found him?'

  'Edie. She's pretty cut up. I just checked the pharmacy,' Robert said. 'One hundred and fifty Vicodin missing, fifteen blister packs. He must have taken them while Sammy and I were in the other room.' The nurse sucked his teeth. 'He had the keys to the pharmaceutical cabinets. Shit, maybe I shouldn't have given them to him, but he helped me out round here, you know? I can't tell you how bad I feel.'

  Derek acknowledged the nurse's feelings with a nod. 'You took some samples?'

  Patma gestured towards some specimen bags and bottles lying on the counter.

  Derek said: 'I'll get them down to the police lab in Ottawa.'

  He signalled the OK for Patma to zip up the body bag.

  'Any chance of finding the other guy alive? Andy Taylor?'

  'Not much chance of finding him, period. If he's dead or dying, we would have expected to see some wolves in the area, maybe foxes. If he's alive then he's keeping very quiet about it. Either way, no clues.' Derek looked towards the door to check it was closed and, seeing that it was, continued. 'You knew Joe well, right?'

  'Pretty well.'

  'Anything different, suspicious?'

  Patma handed over a bag of labelled samples and asked Derek to sign for them. 'Joe usually kept his feelings to himself but he was pretty shaken up about the death of that hunter guy, Wagner, was it? This latest thing just made it worse. When he got back here yesterday, he was a mess: hypothermic, confused, out of his mind. He kept saying he'd left the guy to die.'

  'You think something happened out on Craig, the two men got into some kind of argument and it got out of control?'

  Patma met Derek's eye. 'No, no, that's crazy . . .'He looked at the body bag, considering, then checked there was no one standing at the door. 'Well, it's possible, I suppose,' he said. 'And there is something else. I didn't like to say anything to the family. A couple of days ago I was on the computer. Joe's the only one who ever used it, except me. I found a website in the history, seems Joe had been there a lot, so I clicked on it, just out of curiosity, and some virtual poker thing came up. It asked for a password and I couldn't get in. Joe was always really keen to help me out with the admin and I just used to leave him to it. . .'

  Suddenly a great deal of shouting came from the waiting room. Derek strode to the door, swung it open and saw Edie standing near the exit. Sammy was beside her. From what Derek could see, he was trying to restrain Minnie, who was screaming at Edie and swinging fists at her.

  'Keep her away from me,' Edie was saying.

  Minnie lunged again and was held back by Sammy. Derek looked around for Willa and saw him still sitting in his seat, a look of contempt on his face.

  'That bitch took my husband and now she's taken my son,' Minnie shrieked. She staggered for a moment then collapsed into Sammy's arms.

  'Damn, Sammy, keep your crazy ex-wife off me,' Edie spat.

  Derek made to stand between them. 'C'mon,' addressing himself to Edie. 'I'll take you home.'

  They reached the front door to Edie's house in silence and took off their outerwear.

  Derek said: 'You want some tea?'

  'Uh nuh.'

  'Listen, Edie, I need to look in Joe's room,' Derek said. 'You don't mind staying out here?'

  'Actually, Derek, I do.'

  He didn't have the heart to argue with her. So long as she remained in the doorway, she could look, he said. He stepped inside the room, a typical young man's bedroom, full of the flotsam and jetsam of a life beginning to be explored. It broke his heart to think that, of all the young men he knew, Joe Inukpuk was the one to decide he had nothing to live for. He noticed that someone had taken the bedcovers.

  'Sammy,' Edie explained. 'They were stained. He took them away.'

  'I'm sorry,' Derek said. 'This must be very tough.'

  Edie didn't reply. He had the sense she was trying to hold herself in.

  'Did you find any foils, from the tablets?'

  'I didn't think to look,' she said quietly.

  He moved towards the bed and pulled open the little drawer in the bedside cabinet. There, wedged between a notebook and the edge of the drawer, were fifteen blister packs, stamped with the Vicodin trademark, all empty and neatly piled in criss-cross formation. He drew out a pair of vinyl gloves, took out the notebook and flicked through it, hoping to find some explanatory note, but it just seemed full of nursing details, technicalities about dressings and saline drips.

  'Think you can face talking about it?' he asked.

  They sat on the sofa cradling mugs of hot tea.

  'I'm wondering, did he say anything yesterday? Any clue as to how he was feeling?'

  Edie was quiet for a moment, running the question though her head, he imagined. He noticed that her hair had come unbraided, as though she'd been picking at it. For some reason it moved him. He felt slightly agitated, aroused maybe, and had to tell himself to shape up.

  'Not really. I mean, by the time I saw him he'd taken a Xanax. Me and Sammy had to help him walk back here from the nursing station. He was kind of out of it. When Sammy and I... when we were together, Joe and Willa had bunk beds in that room. They practically grew up in there.' Edie stared ahead, trying to gather her feelings, the tears streaming down her face like meltwater. 'Now it just looks like an empty box.'

  'Robert said Joe was pretty cut up about losing that Wagner guy.'

  'What he was sore about was that no one .. .' She glared at Derek.'... no one wanted to investigate it.' Edie punched her chest with a tiny fist. 'Goddammit.' She held her hand over her mouth and nose as though hoping to stifle her breath. 'You know, this was my fault,' she said. 'I shouldn't ever have left Joe with that asshole.' Derek waited for her sobbing to die down.

  'Edie, you know anything about gambling?'

  'What, Joe?' She snorted. 'Ridiculous.' Her voice became sharp, wary. 'Who said that?'

  'He belonged to some online site.'

  'That's crazy, he was saving for school.' She looked exhausted. 'No, no, I can't believe that.'

  He thought about asking whether Joe and Andy Taylor could have got into a fight but, conscious of the pain he would cause, held back. In any case, it was a futile question. Until Taylor had been found everything was just speculation.

  'Have you eaten?'

  She waved him away. 'Not hungry.'

  'You should eat.'

  He went over to the kitchen and looked in the fridge.

  But by the time he had gathered together a few crackers, she was asleep on the sofa. He picked her up and put her to bed. It was late now and he didn't want to leave her to wake up on her own, so he lay on the sofa and closed his eyes. After an hour or so, with sleep still eluding him, he sat up, switched on the lamp and looked around the room for something to occupy his mind. Eventually his eyes alighted on a DVD sitting beside the TV. He picked it up and turned the cover over. Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush. He slotted the disc into the player and sat back. In a while he heard a soft sound coming from behind and Edie appeared and came and sat with him on the sofa. He took her hands in his. Without saying anything, she leaned her head on his shoulder. They sat like that, in silence, for what seemed like the longest time, watching Charlie in the log cabin as it pendulumed from the cliff side to the abyss.

  By eight the next morning he and Pol were back out flying over Craig but after a few hours the low cloud reappeared and they still had nothing.

  Back in Autisaq Derek paid visits to Joe's family and took formal statements from everyone who had seen him on his retur
n from Craig. Early evening, with one final statement to do, he dropped in on Edie and found her staring at a bowl of caribou liver soup.

  'I feel like I'm trapped under the ice,' she said. 'I can see out, but I can't get out.' She pushed away the soup. 'It's just so difficult to take in.'

  Derek took her hand and squeezed it. When Misha had left him, he'd found a website listing Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Since Misha had gone, he'd worked through the first three and found himself stuck in the depressive phase. Edie had only just started out. He felt for her. It would be a long journey.

  By nine that evening, he was at the terminal building beside the airstrip with Pol. The mayor was seeing them off.

  'You'll be reporting the qalunaat missing, presumed dead,' he said to Derek. 'Lost in the blizzard.'

  'Unless any evidence emerges to the contrary.'

  'He should never have gone off like that on his own.'

  Derek tried not to look surprised. 'Are we sure that's what happened?'

  Simeonie gave a little snort, as though he found the question absurd. 'You know, kids like Joe, young Inuit men and women, they deserve a shot at proper employment.' His voice had taken on a chummy, avuncular tone Derek found sickening. 'If this whole tragedy tells us anything it's that Autisaq needs to be brought into the twenty-first century. Jobs, technology, enterprise. We need our young people to aspire to more than massaging the egos of qalunaat.'

  They flew low over Derek and Misha's old house and turned towards the landing strip. Pol put on his headphones, spoke briefly to whoever was on shift in the control room, took out his gum and stuck it above the altimeter, ready for the next flight. The settlement lights sparkled like ice crystals caught in a flashlight beam.

  Pol said: 'No place like home.'

  Derek said: 'No place at all.'

  The plane bump-landed onto the strip and they slid across the gravel, coming to a halt beside the control and cargo building. They filled in the necessary flight papers in the terminal building and made for their snowbies. Derek didn't notice Pol waving him off until the pilot was half way down the path leading away from the strip towards the mayor's office. He tipped Pol a loose salute in return.

  'See you tomorrow evening?'

  Derek gave an exaggerated shrug.

  'The party at Joadamie Allak's?

  Derek hesitated, trying to recall when he had been invited, then realized he hadn't. He made as if to remember and gave the thumbs-up, watched the pilot's shrinking back for a moment, then set off in the opposite direction.

  As he reached the spur leading to the police detachment he spotted a husky sniffing around under the school building, coat blank and featureless, ribs like lead pipes. No way to know whose it was. An instant later he saw another, trotting blithely along the path to the garbage dump, past the telegraph pole and the sign about keeping dogs tied at all times. A sudden flare of anxiety rose up from his gut. He'd been in Kuujuaq ten minutes and already he felt like a lab monkey strapped to an electric chair.

  Derek took off his snow boots, pushed open the door to the detachment office and went to his apartment at the back. He made himself a cup of instant ramen noodles and went to bed.

  When he appeared the following morning, Stevie was already sitting at his desk. The familiar bleeps and pips of World of Warcraft sailed over. Seeing Derek, he flipped out of the game into a boss screen.

  'Tea, D?' Stevie said, adopting a perky air.

  Derek decided to let last night's dog business, as well as the game, drop for the moment. Right now there were more important things to attend to. He intended to spend the rest of the day writing a preliminary report into Taylor's disappearance and Joe's apparent suicide. The samples from Joe's room would have to go off to the path lab and it was also his job to call Ottawa to try to trace Taylor's next of kin.

  Simeonie Inukpuk had agreed to send out another search and recovery team but until they found a body, Andy Taylor would have to remain on the official missing list. He emailed a quick update to Ottawa, then started to work on his report.

  There was no doubt in his mind that Joe had killed himself. Derek knew better than most how such impulses were sown then slowly cultivated. He'd developed his understanding as a teen at residential school in the south, where they'd kept him on a diet of potatoes and gravy and beaten first the Cree and then the Inuktitut out of him. Looking back, he realized only a very healthy investment in masturbation had prevented him from tying his sheets together, sneaking out to the football pitch at night and stringing himself up from the goal post. He knew other kids, less well-versed in the pleasure principle, who had gone down like catapulted dovekies. Three over one particularly dark summer: Ben Fleetfoot, found floating in the lake, pockets full of ice-hockey pucks he'd stolen from the gym; Holbrook Brown, who'd had to be pulled from the bathtub with the red water pouring from his body like summer melt, and Katryn Great Elk, who'd raided the sick bay and swallowed as many pills as she could find.

  What was less certain was why. Derek flipped a packet of Lucky Strikes from his shirt pocket, turned over the perky 'Welcome to This No-Smoking Office' sign hanging on the door, lit a cigarette and tried to put himself in Joe's shoes. Looked at one way, everything in the boy's background and circumstances had him down as a suicide waiting to happen: the guilt he was carrying about not being able to save Felix Wagner, compounded by the loss of Andy Taylor; the tangle of loyalties he felt towards the various factions of his family; and what seemed to be a gambling habit. A mixture of shame, guilt and hypothermia coupled with easy access to drugs could well have amounted to an insurmountable force in the boy's mind, propelling him in a moment of confusion into taking his own life.

  Still, there were a number of oddities to the story, the first of which was Taylor himself. Why did he return so quickly after the Wagner business? Edie said he needed the money and maybe he did, but why then had he seemed so nervy? Edie mentioned he'd been drinking the night before they went out. Then there was the fact that Joe had skied all the way from Craig to fetch help. Usually an Inuk would wait out a storm, even if there was someone missing. If Joe had killed Taylor, accidentally or otherwise, would he have gone for help? Except as a cover, perhaps?

  Maybe Joe had buried the body under rocks? That might explain why they hadn't found any trace of Taylor. On the other hand, Robert Patma had said Joe had been rambling and incoherent. Surely, in his confusion, he would have given himself away.

  Derek's train of thought was interrupted by the phone ringing. He didn't feel like talking but he picked up anyway. It was the mayor.

  'Hey, Derek. Flight back OK?'

  Derek shifted the papers on his desk around. 'I'm guessing you didn't find the body already.'

  There was a noisy pause and what could either have been interference on the line, very common up at these latitudes, or a cough of irritation.

  'Martie and Sammy will be flying out to Craig just as soon as the weather improves.'

  Simeonie had a way of making you feel you were the sled dog and he held the tracing.

  'You tell the family yet?' he said.

  'Not yet. I'm waiting for confirmation on next of kin.'

  'Be sure you don't get their hopes up.' That little cough again, held back just enough to communicate the effort Simeonie was making to seem reasonable. 'Best all round we just be honest, eh? It's four days now since the man went missing. Qalunaat couldn't take a piss on his own without assistance. He's inuviniq, a dead man. It might be more helpful to the family to know that we'd seen the body from the air but couldn't land to retrieve it. That way family gets closure and we don't have a missing person on our hands.'

  So that was what the call was all about. Simeonie had a point: finding Taylor alive was about as likely as a branch of Prada opening up in Kuujuaq. Whether there was a body or not, Simeonie wanted Andy Taylor buried. Missing persons made longer headlines than dead ones. Any uncertainty might send a flush of
southerners up to Autisaq asking awkward questions. All the same, in the law's eyes Andy Taylor wasn't officially dead until a body had been found or a lot more time had passed.

  The line crackled and all Derek could hear was the wailing of some Chinese opera. Then Simeonie's thin, insistent voice returned. The mayor was in the middle of saying something about his nephew.

  'There's money for this kind of thing. Suicide prevention. One of the things I'm thinking, it might help the initiative to have more of a police presence. Build a brand-new detachment right here in Autisaq, expand on the existing facility, install all the latest equipment, budget for travel. Set up a cadet force, boys' club kind of thing, roll it out across the region, nail this suicide stuff.'

  'Strictly speaking,' Derek said, 'we should fly in a pathologist, examine Joe Inukpuk's body directly.'

  The mayor barked instructions to someone in the office then he came back on the line.

  'Look, the kid was my nephew.' A bleeding-heart tone now. 'I just want to make sure other families don't have to go through this and I think, with the right funding, you could be at the heart of that.'

  The mayor was trying to bulldoze his way back to normality.

  Derek had to hand it to him. He was good.

  The sound of distant voices came on the line. 'I have to go,' Simeonie said suddenly. 'Development consultants. Derek, we're on the same page here. Write your report: an accidental death and a suicide. Do the right thing. Let Joe's family bury his body.'

  The line went dead. Derek swung violently on his chair. He wanted to punch someone. Instead, he lit a cigarette. He'd hardly taken his first drag when the phone rang again.

  'Let me speak to the other fellow.' Derek recognized the voice immediately. Tom Silliq.