Frozen Solid: A Novel (10 page)

It was a video log. Emily had been an avid amateur shooter, loved video calls and YouTube. It was natural that her journal would be in this form. She had arrived in January of the previous year. Hallie opened the first file from that month and suddenly there was Emily looking back at her from the screen. She double-clicked on the image, and Emily spoke.

“So. This is January sixth. My first full day here at Pole and my first entry into the video log.”

Hallie hit the Pause symbol and wiped away the tears that were filling her eyes. Emily looked like the young woman Hallie had known at BARDA—auburn hair, freckles, lively green eyes, an infectious smile. And a honey-sweet Georgia accent. So full of energy that Hallie could feel it coming through the monitor. Involuntarily, she found herself smiling back through the tears. She recalled things she and Emily had done together, the great climb on Denali, the avalanche, Emily digging her out, their decision to keep going, making the summit, all the hard-ass climbers cheering and buying them endless rounds when they stumbled back into the Talkeetna Lodge.

“Emily,” she said.

She touched one finger to the side of Emily’s cheek on the screen. Gave herself a few moments, then hit Play, and Emily started talking again.

“This is such an amazing place. It’s dark twenty-four hours a day and cold as hell—seventy-one below outside right now, according to the intranet. Makes Alaska seem almost tropical. Everything is
just … 
extreme
. I can’t wait to look around more. It’s like being out in space, totally alone. There’s even a greenhouse where they grow vegetables. Somebody said they grow pot in there, too.” She frowned, shook her head. “The vegetables are a good idea, anyway.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I’m going to keep a record of my time here. I can record footage of other things in the station and here in the room and outside with my video camera and produce something later when I have time.”

Emily stopped, yawned again, rubbed her face. “But right now I need to get some sleep. I am just about out on my feet. Nap time. More later!”

The image faded.

Hallie jumped to an entry from July, seven months into Emily’s stay. Dark circles had developed under her eyes. The freckles, brighter against pale skin, looked like little scabs. Her lips were cracked, and when Hallie hit Play, Emily came to life, but her smile did not.

“Let’s see. It’s July twenty-ninth. About halfway through my stay. What’s the big news? Not much. Unless you count the partying. I’ve never seen so many people walking around drunk and high. Pot, of course, but not just. You wouldn’t believe the booze they stockpile here. I mean, gallons and gallons, all top-shelf—Chivas, Jack D, Stoli, you name it. And they make moonshine! Some of the Beakers built a still. The stuff is clear like vodka, but it’s about 160 proof and tastes like I think jet fuel would if you drank it. They call it Poleshine.

“I’m tired. No, exhausted. Everybody said this is a hard place to be, and it is. The disgusting food, being dirty all the time, annoying people, so much darkness. And getting sick. If you don’t have Polarrhea you have a cold, and vice versa. There are scientists from so many different countries, who knows what kinds of bugs are floating around this place? I’m the only one from North America this year. Pure luck of the draw, the way grants shook out. We just keep swapping germs back and forth.”

She looked into the camera without talking for several moments. “Need to get some sleep,” she said, and the screen went blank.

Hallie jumped ahead again and opened a video from early in the
January just past. Emily’s appearance last time had been disturbing. Now it was shocking. Weight loss had sharpened her face to points and edges. Her hair looked dirty and uncombed, and her teeth were yellow, with little wedges of plaque between them. There was a scabbed scratch on one cheek and blue-black circles under her bloodshot eyes. Her lips were chapped and cracked.

Emily stared blankly at the camera for several moments after turning it on. Her eyelids fell and rose slowly. She ran her tongue over her lips, grimaced, and then did something that struck Hallie as odd: she half-turned and looked over her shoulder. Was someone in the room with her who the camera wasn’t showing? Had someone knocked on the door? After a moment, Emily turned back.

“The New Year’s Eve party. Unbelievable.” She rubbed her face, ran fingers through greasy hair. “Ambie got totally fucked up again.” Her eyelids drooped and she nodded forward in a microsleep. Then she came back.

“It’s getting harder to think straight. At first, when I heard people talking about being crisp I thought they were exaggerating to freak out a fungee. They weren’t. I can’t wait to get out of this goddamned fucking place.

“But it’s important to record what’s happened while I’m here and it’s still fresh.”

AGAIN EMILY STOPPED TALKING AND STARED, EYES VAGUE AND DISTANT
, seeing something Hallie could not imagine, or perhaps seeing nothing at all. She came back, sipped from a dirty white mug, and her hand trembled as she brought the mug down from her mouth.

“Okay. Have to focus. I need to talk about Ambie. We started really hanging out after Thanksgiving. In the world, I don’t know. There’s a saying here: ‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd.’ Ambie’s okay-looking and he can be funny. He has a really amazing mind. He is a little odd, true, but nothing compared to some of what slouches around this place. So, okay, we hooked up.

“He’s great at some things, but holding his liquor isn’t one. He got really totally shit-faced at the New Year’s Eve party. Plus, he mixed Ecstasy with the Stoli and beer. Offered me some, too. I told him, yet again, that I don’t do drugs. I had to almost carry him back to his room. Usually when he gets that drunk, he rambles for a few minutes and passes out. This time was different. He was all jazzed. The Ecstasy.

“He kept babbling about triage, which was odd. I thought he was hallucinating about a disaster or something. I told him nobody was
hurt. He said triage was about
saving
people. He said some other things, just making no sense at all. Then he passed out. We didn’t even have time to make love. Better living through chemistry. Right.

“The next day we were here in my room. He had a horrible hangover. I felt fine. I said, ‘What was all that stuff about triage last night?’ Incredible. He turned white as the ice sheet. For a second I thought he was going to faint. He looked
terrified
! I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and he snapped at me, like, ‘What the
fuck
are you talking about?’ So I explained about the night before, the things he kept saying. He just freaked. ‘What else did I say? What
else
?’ He actually grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to shake me. I told him to get his hands off me and shoved him away, but it scared me. I’d never seen him like that. Then I thought he might cry. Totally bizarre. He went, ‘
Please
tell me what else I said.’ I actually felt sorry for him then, so I really tried to remember and got some of it back. I told him, “You said triage is coming. Then I said nobody was hurt, why would there be triage? And you said, No, no, you don’t understand, nobody is going to die, because it won’t kill them and they won’t even know they have it.’

“It took me a long time to convince him that this was all I remembered. I said that he had been stumbling drunk and high on Ecstasy, and that you can’t hold somebody responsible for stuff they say when they’re so messed up. I don’t think he even heard that. He sat down and squeezed my hands and made me promise not to tell anyone else. I said, ‘Okay, I won’t tell anybody. It didn’t make any sense anyway. You were drunk out of your mind and all drugged up. Why would I?’ ”

Emily rubbed her face, and when she looked up again, tears filled her hollow eyes. The monitor screen went dark.

She made her next video entry on January 26: “I’m not sure what’s happening. After that last talk with Ambie, I didn’t say anything to anyone. Didn’t mention it to him again, either. He left it alone, too. A week went by. But it was just too weird. I couldn’t get his reaction out of my mind. I thought, Okay, I promised not to tell, but it would be okay to
ask
, wouldn’t it? So over the next ten days I did—Agnes Merritt, Doc, two or three others. Not all at once. Everybody said basically
the same thing: triage is an emergency medical protocol they use in war and disasters.

“Ambie has changed. Before, he couldn’t get enough sex, at least when he was sober. Now he could care less. But even without sex, it’s been like he doesn’t want to let me out of his sight. Even weirder, right? So I told him to back off, leave me alone. He wasn’t happy, but it got me my space.”

She paused, closed her eyes, and some time passed before she opened them again. “I feel like I’m being watched. That sounds weird and paranoid, I know. But I can’t shake the feeling. It’s like that old thing where you’re walking by yourself on a dark sidewalk and think somebody’s following you, but when you look over your shoulder, there’s no one. I haven’t said anything about that, even to Fida. But I’m thinking maybe I should.

“One thing’s for sure. On Friday I am going to Thing Night. Alone. No Ambie. Wore out his welcome. I just want to drink a beer and dance a little. Have fun. If I can remember how.”

The video stopped. It was the last one.

Hallie stared at her laptop’s screen. What to do next? First thing, secure the card. She put it back where she had found it. If the thing had stayed there undiscovered this long, it was as good a place as any.

She could not get the afterimage of Emily’s ravaged face out of her mind. She wasn’t sure she ever would. It took her back to a time when they had both looked like that, after the climb on Denali.

The Cassin Ridge stuck out of Denali’s south face like the dorsal fin of a shark and was one of the world’s great big-mountain ascents. Before dawn they started up the route on the sixty-degree Japanese Couloir, about 1,000 vertical feet of ice, a long, shining blue mirror. Placing the tool picks and crampon points was like trying to drive nails into slabs of glass. Chunks of ice called “dinner plates” kept breaking off and shattering when they hit the ice lower down. It was some of the most delicate climbing Hallie had ever done. They would have moved to the couloir’s rock walls, but those were even worse, encased in a half-inch of clear, brittle ice called
verglas
.

With the chute finally climbed, they stopped on the Cassin Ledge,
a rock shelf at 13,400 feet just big enough for two tents. They drank tea and slurped energy gel. The air was clear, a light wind blowing up the face. To the south they could see the Kahiltna Glacier curling around like a vast, white snake and, beyond that, the shining peaks of Mounts Hunter and Huntington, giants in their own right but dwarfed by Denali, the highest mountain in North America and the largest massif on earth.

They moved out, and an hour of moderate rock climbing brought them to a nightmarish obstacle called the Cowboy Traverse, a knife-edged ridge, very exposed, with both flanks dropping away at sixty-degree angles.

They were climbing unroped—simul-soloing—for speed. Hallie went first, straddling the ridge like a horse, crunching through crust over loose sugar snow. She knew that there had to be another hard, slick layer somewhere underneath. An avalanche could start when the weight of new snow—or a wrong step by some climber—sent the whole thing sliding like sand down a tilted mirror. But if you wanted the Cassin, this was how you went.

Seventy-five feet out, Hallie took that wrong step. A crack one hundred feet long opened across the slope, and a slab avalanche two feet thick let go. At first, it felt slow and gentle, unreal as a dream. Three seconds later it was like being spun in a giant dryer full of bricks.

The friction-melted snow froze as solid as concrete seconds after stopping. Upside down, she could move her tongue and one eyelid. She had created a small air space by cupping her hands in front of her face as the avalanche slowed. It was the first time in her life she had known absolutely that she was going to die.

She closed the working eye and said the Lord’s Prayer several times. Brought up images of her mother and father, brothers, and Barnard. Moved away from tears. Every trip had a verdict. She’d known that going in. No blame for a mountain.

She was hypoxic and semiconscious when something struck her boot sole a hard blow. Three shovel strokes later, she felt Emily shake the boot and yell at her to keep fucking breathing, goddamnit.

Later, off the ridge and looking back, she saw. Emily had traversed diagonally down and across 150 feet of intact but unstable slope to reach her. That whole section could have slid at any second.
Should
have, really.

“We both ought to be dead right now,” Hallie said, still shaking from cold and fear. “You know that.”

“What would you have done?” Emily handed her another cup of hot, sweet tea.

She thought about living another fifty or sixty years knowing she had done nothing. “The same.”

“See? No choice.” And then they both cried.

She wasn’t sure how long that reverie lasted, but now she had to think carefully about what she had seen. Who was Ambie? A pet name, obviously. But short for what? There weren’t a lot of men’s names that began with those letters. Ambrose, Ames, Amal, Amadeus … What she needed was a roster of station personnel.

Merritt, overseeing only the scientists, wasn’t likely to have that.

But Graeter, captain of the ship, was.

If she could find a man with that name, she might find Emily’s killer.

HALLIE THOUGHT GRAETER MIGHT SAY HELLO. INSTEAD, HE POINTED
at his wrist.

“You’re late. Doctor. Leland.”

“Actually, I’m not.” Having taken his measure yesterday, Hallie had made a point of being precisely on time this morning. She held up her wristwatch as proof. “Twelve noon.”

Graeter held up both hands. He wore two watches, one on each wrist. “My time is Pole time,” he said. “I have you two minutes late. You might want to synchronize your watch with mine.”