Alaska News

Reading the North: Glacier fever, Inuit murder mystery

Cold Spell

Deb Vanasse (University of Alaska Press, $15.95)

The blurb: From the moment Ruth Sanders rips a glossy photo of a glacier from a magazine, she believes her fate is intertwined with ice. Her fascination unsettles her daughter, 16-year-old Sylvie, still shaken by her father's leaving. When Ruth uproots Sylvie and her sister from their small Midwestern town to follow her growing obsession — and a man — to Alaska, they become entangled with an unfamiliar wilderness, a divided community and one another. "Cold Spell" tells the story of a mother who risks everything to start over, and a daughter whose longings threaten to undo them.

Excerpt: I am a poem, Sylvie once thought, swollen like a springtime river, light swirled in dark, music and memory. Then her father ran off and her mother became obsessed with a glacier and she realized this was what happened to girls who believed themselves poems, poems in fact being prone to bad turns and misunderstandings.

Before the glacier, Sylvie's mother had been ordinary and dependable, a plain woman with kind eyes, unlike her father who was dashing and quick, with a flair for the dramatic. When he'd come home cursing his boss in the Ford parts department or when he'd blow up at the neighbor for turning his dog loose, Sylvie's mother would massage the base of his neck and speak calm, soothing words. After he left Minnesota for Florida in the company of Mirabelle, a redhead from the dealership, Sylvie cried in long, heaving sobs every night for a week, and because she cried her sister Anna did too, and there was nothing poetic in their sorrow, no words for it even.

With her soft, steady voice and her fingers stroking their hair, Sylvie's mother assured the girls that their father loved them whether he was still in Pine Lake or not. For her mother's sake Sylvie tried to pretend this was so, though in truth she doubted it deeply. She wished her mother would cry, wished she would wail and scream and flail, wished she would rage at something, at someone, at anyone, even at Sylvie.

Instead her mother's smile, always ready, became automatic, as if by the push of a button her lips made their slight upward turn. She roused the girls every day at precisely 6:30, even on weekends. She sliced bananas over their oatmeal and sprinkled brown sugar, one tablespoon each. She sipped coffee brewed in a new pot that made only one cup and ate toast spread thin with peach preserves and deflected Sylvie's complaints that no one else ate oatmeal for breakfast. She rinsed the dishes and loaded the dishwasher, glasses on top, bowls on the bottom, spoons up, butter knives down, and she folded tidy waxed paper over sandwiches cut on the diagonal, peanut butter and apple for Anna, cream cheese and turkey for Sylvie, both on wheat bread no matter how Anna begged for white, the old-fashioned wrapping an embarrassment to Sylvie, who turned her wishes to small things like thin, transparent plastic. The tiniest quiver in her mother's smile hinted at their shared understanding, hers and Sylvie's, of how a single uncontrolled moment could upend everything.

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The Bone Seeker

M.J. McGrath (Viking, $27.95)

The blurb: Edie Kiglatuk, the fearless Arctic heroine from M.J. McGrath's "White Heat" and "The Boy in the Snow," is back and involved in another mystery.

Edie is working as a summer school teacher in the town of Kuujuaq when one of her favorite students, Martha Salliaq, goes missing. When the young woman is found dead and brutally defiled in nearby Lake Turngaluk, Edie teams up with Sergeant Derek Palliser to uncover the truth behind Martha's murder and find justice for her traditional Inuit family.

Excerpt: When Martha Salliaq failed to show up for class that Monday morning, Edie was surprised, but it was only when the dream resurfaced a little later that morning that she felt a prickle of disquiet. Traditionally minded Inuit thought dreams were visits from the spirits. She wasn't one of them, least not as a rule, but the coincidence of the dream with Martha's no-show was enough to unsettle her.

At morning recess, she caught up with Lisa Tuliq by the door to the classroom. Lisa was small and plump, with the pinched, repressed air of a kid who'd grown up watching her parents slowly dismantling themselves with alcohol. She and Martha sat next to one another in class and Edie had sometimes seen them leaving together. But Lisa had nothing to offer on Martha's whereabouts. She'd been out at her family's summer camp all weekend, and hadn't seen her friend.

"My uncle gave me a ride in this morning."

"Did Martha say anything on Friday about where she might be?"

"Not to me," Lisa said simply. She looked longingly down the corridor for a means of escape. "Can I go now?"

Edie followed the girl out into the corridor, passed through a fire door and knocked on Chip Muloon's door. The knock was a little too hard and hurt her knuckles. She'd picked up frostbite in Alaska in the spring trying to track down a bunch of people traffickers and still tended to forget how super-sensitive her fingers were. A hard rap and it was as though a wire in her body had shorted.

Chip was at his desk flipping through some paperwork. He shot her a low, withering look.

"I guess you know it's rude to sneak out in the middle of the night without so much as a 'See ya,' right?"

"No," she said. In her culture it wasn't.

"Well it is," he said, as though that settled the matter. It was one of the things she found most difficult about him, not that he lived in another world, but his refusal to meet her somewhere on the bridge between them.

"Martha Salliaq didn't show this morning. It's not like her. I was wondering if she said anything to you?" ...

"Why would you think that?"

"Because you two talked." It was an odd question. She'd seen them chatting in the corridor a few times and once bumped into the girl coming out of his office. She had no idea what they'd talked about. She'd never asked him about it.

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"Not really." His eyes fell back on his paperwork. "She's probably still at summer camp."

"In this dream I had..."

"Oh, OK, you had a dream," he said.

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