“It happened seventy years ago and everyone on the North Slope knows about it and there’s been no evidence since then of any damaging consequences, not here. Merlin, the likelihood is that your cousin went crazy and shot these people, and then he shot himself.”
Merlin sighed, subsided. “Clay was not that kind of person.”
I knew that the police chief was too experienced to believe this, that nobody was ever not that kind of person. I asked, “Did he take drugs, Merlin?”
“No.”
“Drink?”
“As a teen. But his father shot himself while drunk. Clay never touched alcohol after that. He coaches… coached… girls basketball and made it a point: One drink and you are out.”
Eddie suggested, “Maybe he hid it from you. I mean, you being the police chief and all.”
Merlin said, “You can hide being a drinker in the city where you come from, but you can’t hide here. Everyone finds out who you are.”
“We had to ask, Merlin.”
“No problem.”
“We’ll run the samples. I’ll tell you everything. But right now we need to find Kelley’s diary.”
Merlin’s eyes showed red, with moisture at the edges.
The sky was growing darker. It smelled wet and violent, like a sudden storm was brewing.
Merlin’s voice cracked. “Oh, hell. What will I tell my aunt?”
Ten minutes later the pilot announced in our earbuds that the weather report had turned worse, and that we had at most thirty minutes before we needed to get out of here.
After that, the gusting winds would rise to sixty miles an hour, and the chopper couldn’t fly. Hail was falling in Barrow. We’d be stuck here for at least the night.
“Which would be no problem normally,” I said. “But we don’t know if the Harmons and Clay absorbed something toxic here.”
“I wish we could find that diary,” Eddie said.
We searched fast, under mattresses, in kitchen drawers, in the supply area stocked with canned tins of Dinty Moore stew and baked beans and Spam, Sailor crackers, PowerBars, and several dozen gallon-sized jugs of bottled water.
Someone put something in the water, Kelley had said.
So we took a few gallon jugs for analysis.
We found no diary. We found girl things: her summer reading assignment from high school, For Whom the Bell Tolls; a backpack filled with pink sweaters and logo T-shirts; a suitcase under the bunk, which held mostly hip-hop music selections; a paperback dictionary; a small, stuffed bear with a red ribbon on its head; a selection of Nordic sweaters; cords and jeans and girlish undergarments.
“Maybe it’s in her laptop, One.”
“Power up the laptop. Does the battery work?”
“I see lots of files here, but no diary.”
“Take it along. Hurry up.”
There was no book-style diary in the cabinets or desktop. Or wedged beneath overstuffed chair cushions. And certainly not among her parents’ gear, by the outhouse, the samples cooler, which seemed filled with seeds and other plant and lake life: algae, flowers, dried mud.
With ten minutes to go until we had to leave, Luther Oz returned on the ATV to say, baffled, that the tracks he’d followed had begun in camp, all right, and went out for half a mile, but then began making crazy circles, looping, carving Z shapes in the grass, leaving skid marks that turned back into tracks that eventually ended up where they started, back here.
“I don’t get it,” Oz said, scratching his head. “Nobody else was here. Someone went out, drove around in circles and came back. What gives?”
It was clear that within minutes the heavens would open up, and any evidence, whatever might exist in the open, tracks, hairs, chemicals, would be washed away.
Merlin suggested leaving the bodies here, the death scene undisturbed, a deputy guard overnight, but that was a bad idea, I responded, if there was something toxic here.
After all, we had not eliminated sickness as an element in this disaster. Or a chemical that could be anywhere in the camp. The cabin. The soil. The lake. The bodies.
“Better take them along, so animals don’t get at them, and return later and do a better search,” I said.
“Imminnauraq,” muttered Merlin in the Iñupiat language.
“What’s that?”
“Superstition. Little people. Jokers. Or, Sinik Tagnailaq. This lake,” he said morosely. “A place where you don’t want to stay the night. Stay and something bad happens. We never did love the idea of a camp set here.”
Eddie said as we wrapped things up, “Why?”
“It goes back to the whaling years. Those New England whalers carried flus which decimated us. Back in 1870, a party of Iñupiat were coming back from the Barrow trading post, heading inland — infected but they didn’t know it. It hit them when they overnighted here. Later their bodies were found, scattered along the trail. The lake got blamed for causing the fever. Then the Navy built this cabin for oil geologists. But there was no oil, so it was abandoned until the scientists came. More bad luck.”
I shivered as the first drops fell, and envisioned a party of Eskimo men, women, and children camped by the lake, 150 years back, maybe a fire roaring. Then the first person started coughing, feeling feverish, and then the party tried to move out the next day, things getting worse, getting bad fast for people with no immunity to the whaler diseases… and the sick elders saying, Leave me here. I’ll slow you down. You’ll live if you leave me behind.
I said, “We wrap ’em up. We wear masks and gloves, even in the chopper. The bodies go to the hospital. We’ll do autopsies tomorrow, when we’re fresh.”
“Disinfect the chopper,” said Eddie.
“Rescue squad does it all the time,” said Merlin.
“Anyone feels ill, after we get back, tell your people, call me right away,” I said. “No matter how late.”
As we loaded up, I asked Merlin, “Your cousin Clay. Any problems at home?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Anger issues? Debts? Psychological history? He was a veteran, right? Grudges? Money problems?”
“Plenty of men in town are veterans. I’ll have my detectives do the police work. Them. Not you, Joe. Thanks for coming. But you two stick to disease.”
The bodies lay covered with plastic.
The rain began pummeling us.
“We need to get going,” Merlin Toovik said.
We lifted off. As dusk approached the tundra below rolled out in multiple variations. Light browns grew darker. Glassy lakes produced whitecaps. Grass bent sideways as sheets of rain slashed at the crowns.
A lone caribou, almost a shadow silhouetted in moving mist, looked up at the passing chopper. The glass of the cockpit was smeared wet, streaming rain.
I saw a single ATV below pulling a small four-wheeled wagon. A hunter drove. A small boy sat on the cart, both people in jackets, hoodies and stocking hats against the wet, heading toward Barrow, hauling fresh meat: probably caribou, bound for the hunter’s ice cellar, the fifteen-foot-deep pit in the permafrost dug behind many Barrow homes.
Like medieval monks looking up inside cowls, man and boy followed our progress, probably frowning. Everyone up here recognized the markings of the rescue chopper. If it was out, someone was injured, sick, or dead.
As soon as we landed — when Eddie and I were alone in our Ford truck — I called the admiral to tell him what had happened. He was angry that we’d disobeyed instructions.
“I told you not to get distracted.”