Girl in Ice(53)

Raj glanced at Nora as he pulled up a chair. “We should tell you, Sigrid’s been giving us these drawings as well.”

I sat back, nursing the faint hurt that perhaps Sigrid had given up on me. “When?”

He shrugged. “Over the past week or so. Whenever she thinks no one is looking.”

“Mostly she gives them to him,” Nora said. “She loves Seal Man, you know.”

“What do you think of them?”

Raj drew his finger thoughtfully along the squiggly lines. “These could be a kind of seaweed, don’t know. But that bird does look like an Arctic tern.”

“Why would she want them, do you think?”

He got up and brought over a box of shortbread cookies: stale, processed, and delicious. “Want them? I have no idea.”

I retrieved the drawings of “suns” I kept in one of my Greenland books. Flattened them on the desk. “What about these? I must have thirty of these pictures. What do they look like to you?”

“Like circles,” Raj said. “Babe, what do you think?”

“Maybe she likes the shape.”

“Could they be suns, do you think?” I asked. “Or moons?”

“I guess…” Raj said.

“Think about it,” I said. “She could draw anything. Anything at all. And this is what she draws. Why? She’s drawing squiggles, birds, and then circles, the last one red, and look how she colors it, see? Like it’s, I don’t know—” My voice quavered, the possibility of what it meant haunting me.

“Like it’s what, Val?” Nora asked gently.

“Like those suns indicate days.” I extracted one of the earlier drawings. “Look. Fifteen suns, the last one blotted out with red Magic Marker.” I freed the next one in the pile. “This one, made three days later. Twelve circles. Twelfth circle colored red. But this one?” I held up one she’d drawn just days before. “Seven circles. Seventh circle, same thing.” I scrambled in my pocket, hands shaking as I unfolded her latest drawing. “This one is from last night. Five circles. The last one, look what she did to it.”

The red marker had torn the paper nearly in half.

“She’s trying to tell us she has five days to live. Don’t you see? She has five days unless we find her this snake and this tern. Otherwise she’ll die.” Hysteria rose in my chest, fluttering like a trapped bird. I clutched one hand with the other, trying to stop the quaking.

Nora and Raj exchanged a glance.

“Val,” Nora said. “Would you fancy a little drink, maybe?”

“A drink drink?”

She nodded.

“You have alcohol here?”

Raj laughed, got up, and rummaged around in a box of supplies. “All we have is this revolting Icelandic liqueur called—”

“I’d love some.”

Raj poured a shot of brown liquid into a metal coffee cup. It tasted like actual mud, but sweet. “You know, we’ve been a little worried about you, Val.”

“Why?”

“You seem somewhat strung out. I mean, Wyatt told us you misplaced your pills—”

“He stole my fucking pills.”

Another glance exchanged, like I was so bad off I couldn’t notice these things.

“Like I said, we’re just a bit concerned, that’s all. Have you been sleeping?”

“I was up all night reading these books on ancient Inuit culture.”

“Too stimulating,” Raj said. He tossed me a copy of their diving checklist. “Read this. You need something boring and tedious. This will do it. I’m serious.”

I stuffed the checklist in my pocket. “Can we talk about Sigrid now, please?”

“Has Wyatt seen the drawings?” Nora asked.

“Just the snake and bird ones, not the suns, I’m pretty sure.”

“Because she showed him or you showed him?”

“Because he snoops around my room when I’m not there looking at my shit and stealing things from me—” I thought of the journal I’d started and abandoned after my pills disappeared, convinced he would find it. After that I spoke all my notes into my handheld recorder, kept it with me at all times.

Raj poured me another shot. I willed myself to sip it, not inhale it.

I said, “Do you realize how old this girl is? These people hunted seal, narwhal, walrus—even whales!—from flimsy sealskin boats. They made sleds out of whale jaws. Lived in sod houses. Four or more families to these cramped underground dwellings pieced together from earth and whale ribs and driftwood. Windows made out of stretched seal intestine that barely let light in, all winter, ten months at a time. They spoke some ancestral language, which evolved into Greenlandic but is incomprehensible to me. And she won’t…” I dropped my head in my hands, struggled to lift it. “She refuses to try to communicate with me, to really learn, and I’m mystified, and terrified, because we’ve only got these five days….”

Raj set his drink down. “That’s one interpretation, Val, I can see that. But do you really believe she thawed from the ice alive? Much less that she’s hundreds of years old?”

“Well, did you look at the cells?”

“They were human, but the leap from that to Sigrid being… Well, it’s a bit rich. It really is. Wyatt’s got some fame-and-fortune scheme cooked up, which would rankle me except he’s going nowhere with it. He’s flailing around with pseudoscience, with science fiction, really!” Face drawn tight, he leaned forward, one fist clasped in the other hand. “The thing that kills me is that this girl has been taken from somewhere, and—mark my words—the minute we wrap up here and get back to civilization, Wyatt is going to pay for this. We’re going to get Sigrid back to her home and her family, and he is going to bloody pay.”