Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

“Thanks. What did you say your name was?”

“Muffin.”

“I thought it was Cupcake.”

“Okay then, Cupcake.” She moved her gaze pointedly to Valena’s left hand. “No wedding ring.”

Valena shook her head. “No wedding ring and no dice.”

“Aw, you’re no fun.”

Valena began to smile. “Yeah, well.”

The woman seated across from her said, “I’m Doris.”

“How do you do, Doris?”

“About as I please today. The rest of the time I gripe a lot.”

Valena asked, “Is there something I’m not quite understanding about Sundays in McMurdo?”

Doris said, “We work nine hours a day, six days a week. On Sunday, we kind of get out of hand.”

Another man came to the table, plopped down in the empty seat to the right of Doris, draped an arm around her, and fixed a grin on Valena. “Who are you?” he inquired.

Cupcake said, “This is Valena from Reno. Sounds like a song.”

The man began to make up a tune, and sang, “Va-le-na from Re-no, she really knew her ice, she was so very nice, that Va-le-e-e-na… from… Re-e-e-no!”

Then he held out a hand. Valena took it. He bent forward and rubbed his cheek to it as if it were a cat. He began to purr.

Trying to pull her hand away without being too abrupt, Valena reflexively asked one of the two standard questions. “What do you do here?”

“I do Doris,” he said, giving her a salacious grin. “Life is good.”

Valena yanked her hand away.

Doris said, “She needs that hand to eat with, sweetie. And she’s a grantee. Treat her nice. What did you say you did, Valena?”

“Ice. Stable isotopes.”

“Whatever,” the man said. “Beakers. Cut ‘em some slack and they talk weird at ya.” His grin moved from salacious to soupy.

Peter said, “Always remember, were it not for the beakers, none of us would be here.”

“What’s a beaker?” Valena asked.

Cupcake said, “Scientist. As in, the glassware. A fingie beaker at that.”

“And ‘fingie’ means?”

“F-N-G. The second two letters stand for ‘new guy.’”

Valena choked on her orange juice, and it came out her nose. Coughing and laughing, she put a napkin to her face.

Peter said, “So, Valena, whose project you on, or are you McMurdo’s youngest PI?”

Valena tensed. Here was her opening. “I’m working with Emmett Vanderzee.”

“Oooooh…” said Cupcake, letting the sound rise and fall. “Man, you really got hosed!”

Valena waited, hoping someone would offer information, but all eyes were on her, waiting for the same. Taking a deep breath, she said, “Can anyone tell me what happened? I just got here last night and, well, all I know is he’s been sent north.”

Cupcake patted Valena on the shoulder. “Eat up,” she said. “I got someone you should meet.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, HER BODY LOST UNDER THICK polypropylene underwear, wind pants, wool socks, floppy blue FDX boots, mittens, a fleece hat, and the capacious acreage of her big red parka, Valena found herself hustling to keep up with Cupcake. “Are you certain I need this many layers?” she asked. She was beginning to sweat, and her blue boots flopped like clown’s feet.

“We’re still in the wind shadow of the buildings and these hills. Why do you think they put this armpit of a station where it is?”

They emerged from the cover of the buildings and headed away down a trail in the volcanic rock that formed the island.

Valena pulled off her fleece hat and stuffed it into a pocket. The gravel of the trail moved oddly under her feet, and she looked down to study it. It was formed of bashed-up scoria, a volcanic rock filled with little air bubbles because it had flowed out of the ground frothing with rapidly expanding gasses. It was odd to think that in this world of ice, the island had been born of fire. She had been to Hawaii, where volcanic rock weathered quickly under invasive vegetation and other organisms, but this scoria was so cold and perennially bound in ice and snow that nothing could grow on it or live in it, nothing to break it down into soil. She glanced around, confirming to her still disbelieving eyes that there was not a single nonhuman organism anywhere in sight: no trees, no grass, no moss, no lichens, not even a bird in the air. The great blue-white landscape of ice and distant mountains was punctuated only by the line of aircraft parked on the ice, the few ski-mounted small structures that attended them, and this odd gathering of humans.

They kept moving. Cupcake led the way down the long, shallow slope toward a point of land that jutted from the end of the peninsula on which McMurdo Station had been built. Valena was having trouble walking in the big, soft boots. “Who are we going to see?” she asked, trying to get Cupcake to talk more so that she would have to slow down. She threw open her parka, which was so warm that she had not, in the twenty-four hours she had been using it, ever actually zipped it up; she had used it instead as a wrap.

“You are about to have the honor of meeting the master blaster.”

“Master… what?”

“Blaster. Didn’t you—oh, right, you just got here, so you don’t know. They’re blasting the road that leads towards Castle Rock, trying to straighten it, for some goddamned reason. He’ll be out at the hut today. He goes out there every time they open it up and let us wackos in. I think he likes to photograph ghosts or something. Anyways, you can corner him there and ask your questions.”

“And I want to ask him questions because…?”

“He was out in your dude’s field camp last year.”

“I see.”

“Gotta go right to the source around here. Otherwise, all you hear is rumors. That, and suppositions. It’s like this place is a halfway house for paranoiacs.”

Valena asked, “What’s this hut he’s photographing?”

“Discovery Hut. Actually, it was a warehouse. I guess they lived aboard the ship, which of course got stuck in the ice. Those boys were good at getting things stuck. You’re lucky; they don’t open it to visitation very often.”

“They lived aboard the ship? Who built it? When?”

“Scott, 1902. His first expedition. Got his butt to eighty-two south, had to turn back. Not the 1911 expedition where he froze to death.”

Sir Robert Falcon Scott! Valena drew in her breath with surprise. Scott’s first attempt to reach the South Pole was mounted just two years into the twentieth century. He had arrived aboard a ship named Discovery. And this is the hut named for that expedition! She thought. I am walking on ground on which he walked!

As she continued down the trail, her heart now racing with excitement, they came out from the lee of the hills that surrounded McMurdo and were caught by an exhalation of frozen air off the ice sheet. Valena was instantly cold, so cold that her muscles began to contract. She hurriedly put her hat back on, pulled up the hood, and tried to get the slide of her big red parka’s zipper engaged. As she fumbled with chilling fingers, the wind found its way down her neck. The zipper was jammed. She tried it again and again, reseating it, pulling at it, cursing it.

Twenty strides down the trail, Cupcake turned around to see why Valena had dropped behind her. “Oh, hell, hasn’t anyone given you the short course on how to work the zipper on your big red yet?” She strode back toward Valena and grabbed the two sides of the track, yanked the one on Valena’s left down sharply, slapped the slide from the other side onto it, and whipped it up to her chin, all in the space of three seconds. “You gotta let it know who’s boss,” she said. She opened it again. Showed Valena how to hold the pieces properly, tugging the left side down sharply and holding it taut while she worked the right. “Now you try it. Yeah, that’s it. You’d think they’d make it idiot proof, considering that your life depends on it, but there it is.” As she turned around to resume her march, she said, “It’s like just about everything else down here: it’s essential, you need a short course to know how to do it, and that course doesn’t exist.”