“Joe. I like you. Hell, you, Karen, and Eddie probably saved a few hundred lives here last summer. But you still didn’t tell us why you’re really here until yesterday.”
“Clay was a spy for you, you’re saying.”
“He was my cousin and a trained investigator and he was undercover for me. He helped out.”
“Spying on the Harmons.”
“No,” Merlin said, frowning, pouring coffee, stirring in sugar. “He was on another kind of case with them. Actually, he was trying to protect them.”
“From what?”
Merlin sipped his coffee, made a face, dumped in more sugar. “Clay believed that someone has been trying to stop their work all summer,” Merlin said. “He hangs out at the base and he decided, too many accidents. Too many delays. But why? Why them? Something is going on!”
“Like what?”
A shrug. “Who knows? Something small and personal? Something bigger? Someone trying to keep them from going somewhere, doing something, seeing something related to us? Either way, if someone is breaking equipment, starting fires, that’s a crime. And now, on top of that, the kid’s on the phone. ‘We’re all sick.’”
I thought about it. It made sense. I sat and sipped coffee, and let the acid spread warmth into my stomach.
Merlin said, “Anyway, right now you and I ought to get to the office. Major Nakamura has something to show us.”
I started. Why didn’t you tell me that right away?
Merlin added, “While you were parking your truck, my friend, he found the diary.”
I’d shut my phone off so any ringing wouldn’t disturb me grilling Merlin. The police chief was grinning now, enjoying this part. I sighed. “Okay, Merlin. You win.”
Merlin changed out of a T-shirt and into a button-up. He added a bolo tie with a walrus-ivory clip, a carved hunter. He kissed Edith good-bye as she walked on the slow-moving treadmill. He took a paper bag lunch from the refrigerator and put on an anorak against the thirty-six degree cold, whereas I needed a parka. I followed him outside. He stared at the ocean for a moment, across the street, beyond the beach. It was black, frothy with wavelets.
“Hmm, see that sky, Joe?”
“What about it?”
“Surely you smell that?”
I sniffed. “Pancakes?”
“Winter’s coming,” said Merlin, tapping his nose.
“Any day now,” I answered.
“No, in about twelve hours,” he said. “By tonight that ocean out there will slush and ice.”
I drove fast, following Merlin, my rented twelve-year-old Ford Explorer eating up the six miles of dirt-and-gravel road; past city garages and yellow bulldozers waiting for winter, past the blue Astroturf football field donated by a Florida woman for Barrow’s high school, into the triangular mass of streets and past a restaurant that had once been a whaler trading station, abutting the beach, fronted by a bleaching bowhead skull — a popular spot for tourist photos.
I passed another tourist attraction: a signpost on a pole, nailed with wooden arrows pointing in all directions. They read: SEATTLE, 1,960 MILES. LOS ANGELES, 2,945 MILES. AYACUCHO, PERU, 7,691 MILES. PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, 4,966. WASHINGTON, D.C., 3,600.
Many Barrow streets lacked street signs. Homes were designated by number for postal deliveries. We passed the Osaka restaurant where Karen loved the sushi. Backyards were little museums for people who loved the outdoors, filled with sleds, SUVs, hanging racks for drying fish or caribou hides. The tallest structures in town, grouped around one intersection, were Borough Hall, the Wells Fargo Bank building; the Iñupiat owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation; and the two-story police station, in front of which we parked. Jail cells upstairs.
There was no need at this time of year to plug the engine into one of the electric heating sockets situated in rows outside any public building, like hitching posts in Old West towns.
Eddie sat in Merlin’s small office, at Kelley’s laptop. Its cover open, pasted with a mass of stickers depicting singing stars: Ed Sheeran, Meghan Trainor.
Eddie looked up. He seemed exhausted. On Merlin’s leather couch I saw rumpled bedding. He’s probably been here all night. “The diary is several files, some written, some recorded. All labeled something else. She would have made a pretty good researcher, One.”
He’d given me downtime with Karen, while he and Merlin’s computer guy went through file after file in the laptop last night. The remains of a delivered breakfast from Osaka — eggs on muffins, bacon, coffee, hash browns, and a big cup of OJ — sat on the blotter on Merlin’s desk.
“This is as good as any research you’d see at Harvard, Uno.”
“Tell me the symptoms?”
Eddie sat back, reached out, hit a button.
“Oh, man, listen to this.”
Kelley said, in the recording, “The little prickly feelings in my fingers are getting worse. I’m having trouble walking sometimes, losing feeling in my left leg, below the knee. I tap it. It’s numb.”
“Nerve problems,” whispered Eddie, making a list while Merlin and I hung over his shoulder, riveted to the frail voice. Kelley quavering but staying focused. The kid sick and scared, but diligently making her “observations” file.
“Dad said we all have a flu or a cold and he broke out the five-day Zithromax. But that makes no sense. How come if we all have the same thing, we show different symptoms?”
“Name them,” I urged the voice, the living speaking to the dead, to the past, to the void.
“I think it’s the water. The bottled water tastes funny. Like there’s metal in it or something. Scratchy. It hurts my throat. Mom said she saw the redheaded woman back in Barrow, in the airport, with our supplies. I bet that woman put something in the water. Water! I feel disgusting. I won’t take a shower. My hair is so gross that I got angry at the mirror and broke it, when I saw myself. Ugh!!!!”
Eddie looked up. “Water tasted funny? Or her taste buds changed?”
“Write them both down. Also, irritability.”
“But is that a symptom? Or is she just pissed off?”
“Just write it!”
Eddie said, “Maybe you caught it, Uno, speaking of irritability. What redheaded woman is she talking about?”
“It’s got to be that Greenpeace girl,” Merlin answered, frowning, hands on his hips. Outside the office, through glass, door closed, uniformed police officers were staring in at us. “From Anchorage. Tilda Swann. A Brit. She’s also in PETA, an animal lover. Stop the whaling. Save the bears. Save the seals. The Iñupiats can go to hell.”
“But why target scientists working on lakes?”
“I’m just telling you who Kelley’s probably talking about. Firebrand is more like it. Odds are it’s her.”
Click. The girl’s recorded voice said:
“I don’t like the way Clay Qaqulik looks at Mom. He stares at her in the way that boys watch Jackie DiNardi in school. I saw him touching himself when she wasn’t looking. I’m getting afraid of Clay. He’s angry all the time, not like he used to be. He got on a four-wheeler yesterday and drove it in circles, faster and faster, crazy, laughing, on the tundra. He keeps cleaning his shotgun. Last night he kept staring into the lake for a long time. I asked him what’s in there, and he didn’t answer, just looked up fast, muttering about imminnauraq, little people. I walked away. I was shaking. I couldn’t even open the door latch, because my fingers wouldn’t work right. I’m scared!”
Merlin looked baffled. “Clay doesn’t get angry. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen my cousin angry.”