The Winter Over(4)

Images she’d hoped to forget splashed across her memory. Crumbling walls. Stricken faces. One long arm draped over the side of a stretcher, bouncing gently as it was pulled hand over hand out of the debris. Incomprehension growing into horror.

It didn’t matter that this wasn’t that. Sheryl’s death summoned forth the same bottomless, sinking, sucking hole of blame and self-loathing she’d felt then; it opened up at her feet once more, tugging her downward. She rubbed her face against the rough material of her jumpsuit, trying to pull herself out of the spiral, whispering over and over again, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”





CHAPTER TWO


“So why did he pick you to go?”

Cass tugged the card table away from the wall so she could run the vacuum behind it, wrinkling her nose at the rising cloud of body odor and stale carpet. That question, among others, had cost her a full night’s sleep and had gnawed at her mind. But when Biddi said it with her lilting Scottish accent—normally employed to tell a dirty joke or dish out gossip about one of the other Shackleton staffers—it possessed all the drama of asking her if she’d seen the mess someone had left in the men’s room.

“Earth to Cass,” Biddi said. “Anyone home?”

“I don’t know.” Cass bumped her hip into the table to jog it left another half foot, then plugged in the vacuum. “He claimed I was just . . . here. Available.”

“And?” Biddi ran a dust cloth over the tops of the bookcases, the door frame, and the pictures of past Antarctic explorers. Her arms jiggled as she wiped. She was the heaviest member of Shackleton’s winter-over staff and a source of wonder to everyone at the base, where—despite doubling caloric intake—most of the staff lost fifteen pounds over a season just trying to stay warm.

Cass folded the chairs from around the poker table and leaned them up against the wall. “He got the call that Sheryl was missing, ran down to the VMF to grab some wheels, and found me there working on one of the snowcats. He realized a little too late that he might need help getting . . . getting the body onto a sled. I was the only one around, so there you go.”

“I thought Mr. ‘Have You Reported Your Hours Yet?’ Taylor was with him.”

“Later. He followed us out.”

Cass stopped speaking as the door to the lounge opened with a loud clack . A pale man with a sandy blond mustache took a step inside. Without raising her head, she snapped the vacuum cleaner on, filling the small space with a roar like a transport jet taking off. The man made a face and retreated from the room. She waited for the door to close, counted to five, then turned the vacuum off.

“Which one was that?” Biddi asked.

“Schaffer. One of the beakers from the geophysics lab. Taking a last look around, probably.”

Biddi made a rude noise. “That one. Eats like a two-year-old. He’s always spilling milk on the table after breakfast, like he can’t find his mouth yet. Bless him for shipping out with the other summer people.”

Cass smiled, despite her anxiety. Since the very first base had been founded in Antarctica there had been friction between staffers and scientists—“beakers” to the rough-and-tumble support crew—and it would continue until the last base shut its doors. The former knew they wouldn’t be there without the scientific need in the first place, but it was aggravating to be treated like an afterthought. Conversely, the latter’s work couldn’t exist without around-the-clock support, but most scientists were oblivious to the effort that entailed, or worse, simply accepted the service of others as their due. Biddi had put more than one astrophysicist in his place when she’d been treated like the hired help.

“I think there’s another reason he picked you,” Biddi continued.

“Oh?”

“We’re the low persons on the totem pole, my dear.” Biddi helped her pull a couch away from the wall. “It doesn’t matter that you have a mechanical engineering degree and keep every damnable snowmobile and -cat in the ‘vehicle maintenance facility’”—she put air quotes around the VMF’s formal name—“running. And it doesn’t matter that I’m a registered nurse and went to culinary school, we’re both—”

“Bloody fucking janitors,” Cass finished for her. It was Biddi’s favorite phrase when she went on an anti-oppression rant. At least she wasn’t singing from Les Mis this time. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Because Hanratty thinks he can control you,” Biddi said, snapping the dust rag. “Do you think the head of the neutrino collection program is going to keep his mouth shut just because Hanratty says so?”

“And I will?”

“Yes. Not because of who you are, but what you are. Face it—it doesn’t matter what else we know or what else we’ve done, we really are bloody fucking janitors and not much else for the next nine months.”

Cass stared at her. “Where is the real Biddi Newell and what have you done with her?”

“I don’t like class distinctions any more than you do, my sweet, but the way to survive an Antarctic winter is by keeping your head down. You don’t want to stick out as a troublemaker before they’ve even shut the doors, do you?”