I did not see Jens’s truck there. But I knocked.
Nothing.
I banged on the door. I knew she was in there if her car was here.
Nothing.
I grew worried about Michelle. She was a slender, observant, cheery presence at the post office, always helpful when inevitable delays kept packages from reaching Barrow from the lower forty-eight. I’d seen her at the Saturday night dances. I usually nodded hello at restaurants. Her brother, Philip, was a roustabout on the research base, working with scientists who tagged bowheads.
She still did not answer the door.
Heart in my chest, I tried the knob. It opened. I walked into the cunnychuck, stood amid the hanging parkas, saw no wet marks on the floor, heard a dog snort inside the house. What was her dog’s name? Waggy? Wilmer? It started with a W, I recalled, envisioning a big animal, St. Bernard or Malamute. Northern dog.
“Waggy?”
It stood there when I opened the inner door, three feet off, its big gray-and-white tail swishing back and forth. Beyond the enormous head I saw artist renditions of Jesus on the walclass="underline" Jesus on a cross, bleeding; another on a cross, not bleeding; Jesus with his palms up, eyes to heaven. There were porcelain Jesuses. There were lots of photos of Michelle’s extended family. I smelled wet dog, pancakes, old electronics, dog food, fresh laundry.
“Good boy, Waggy. Michelle? Jens?”
Nothing.
I stepped into the house. I looked around, leaving mud.
No one here.
“Shit!”
I walked out of the house and heard Michelle’s musical voice from the side of the house. “Doctor?” I turned and saw her emerging from the ground, from the open wooden trapdoor of their ice cellar. She was bringing up meat from below, frozen ribs, moose, from the big size. The ribs looked like a bloody harp.
“Doc, how are you?”
It was funny, but her smiling face and normal-sounding voice got to me. She radiated kindness, just as she always did behind the counter at the post office. I felt sympathy coming off her. Karen.
“I’m looking for Jens, Michelle. He here?”
“He went out, Doctor.”
“Do you know where I can find him? It’s important.”
She walked toward me. Ice bits twinkled on the meat. Her face was a study in sympathy.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
It hit me hard. It got past my defenses. I looked away for a moment and blinked and did not trust my voice to come out the usual way.
“Thanks, Michelle.”
“I just wanted to say that. Why do you want Jens?”
“Oh, a job came up.”
“Good! He’ll like that. He’s getting cranky sitting around, doing nothing. Hey, do you need any meat, Doc?”
“Excuse me?”
She nodded at the wooden trapdoor leading down to her ice cellar. “Jens is as good a hunter as any in town. He had a great summer. We’ve got more than we can use. Caribou. Musk ox. Don’t be shy. That Army food stinks.”
“By the way, does Jens have a silencer on his rifle?”
“Sure. Doesn’t spook the caribou that way.”
I started to say no to her offer but then I turned and stared at the ice cellar. What is an ice cellar but not a huge freezer, I thought. And what else can you keep in freezers?
I said, slowly, “Maybe I will take something, if it’s really okay. Can I go down, take a look?”
My heart was going crazy. I borrowed a flashlight and declined her offer of help, trudged to the gray, weathered wooden door and reached down and pulled the heavy thing back on its rusted hinges. There was a jury-rigged system of electrical wires down there, a freestanding light switch. I flicked it. Dull yellow illumination gleamed on earthen walls coated with slick, permanent ice.
The ladder was wooden. I felt the rungs bend beneath my weight, heavier from the extra clothes and ballistics vest. I stood at the bottom, looking around. I was in a large, squarish room, eleven feet high, my breath frosting as it would in a Manhattan meat locker. The cold down here was a thousand years old. The meat lay stacked irregularly in piles. I saw a pile of frozen fish. I saw hacked-off chunks of sinew and bone, ribs and fat. The smell was cold.
Michelle’s voice drifted down from the small opening. “You good down there, Doc? I need to go into the house.”
“I’m good!”
I stood and slowly pivoted. I thought hard. This is a natural version of what Eddie and I use in the lab building to store samples in, disease samples, to preserve them, so that they can be unfrozen and brought back to life.
Was it possible?
I saw that my breathing had quickened from the puffs dissipating as they left my mouth. I felt mucous freezing in my nostrils, felt my moist lips cementing together. I opened them.
Gotta watch that.
It won’t be in the meat. There are lots of places to hide things in meat, cavities, rib cages, or the piles… but Michelle lets people come down here and take what they want. Jens would be crazy to hide anything in the meat.
But the walls…
The walls weren’t solid. They looked solid as steel, but anyone could easily chisel out a small opening in the permafrost, and then, within twenty minutes, use a spray bottle, and ice glaze would cover it up again.
My boots crunched. Even the air down here seemed to be ice. The meat smell was hot and wet. I let the flashlight beam enhance the weak bare bulb light. The beam played over the walls, glaze, and came back at me in an ice reflection.
Check the ice thickness.
All you’d need to conceal a small vial would be a few inches of space, tiny opening, four-inch-deep hole.
It won’t be here. You’re imagining things.
I went slowly, inches at a time, letting the beam move like a mini searchlight up a wall, right, left, down.
Take two steps over and start again at another spot.
This is crazy. There’s too much wall here. I won’t find anything. I’m wasting time.
I kept going.
I saw a thin spot where the light looked sharper, an area where the ice seemed thinner. I pulled out my Leatherman and dug at it. The tip broke through, I hit earth. Solid, packed, two-hundred-thousand-year-old earth.
Sighing, I moved left.
I saw another interesting patch about seven feet off the ground. I moved the ladder. The cold here was more severe than outside. It was a cold that had been nurtured and preserved, enhanced, cold that formed the base of cold. I needed a new word to describe it, not just, the English, cold.
I felt the air creep through my mittens and my fingers. I felt it start to turn my trachea white. I felt it inside my elbows. I used the Leatherman on the spot seven feet up. I broke through. I poked the Leatherman into earth.
Solid again.
Leave. This is stupid.
I moved the ladder left three feet, climbed up, letting the flashlight beam play over the upper level of ice. I moved around the basement, using the ladder as if I occupied a private library and climbed up and down, getting new volumes in reach. Somewhere at this depth, not here, but at the quarry, researchers had found frozen mammoths, petrified cartilage of sharks the size of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, creatures that fell to the bottom of a Jurassic Ocean long before Jesus walked the earth.