The Bone Seeker Read Online Free

twisted an ankle or something, there’ll be someone passing who’ll pick her up. The place is swarming with soldiers out on exercise.’
    â€˜It’s the soldiers Charlie’s worried about.’
    Derek took out a cigarette, lit it and hungrily sucked in the smoke.
    â€˜I wouldn’t be surprised if Charlie Salliaq isn’t using this as an excuse to make trouble. He’s made his views on the military clear. Doesn’t like them and doesn’t want them up here. The old man wields a lot of power round these parts. He’s managed to keep control of the Council of Elders for years and he likes to remind everyone of the fact. People don’t necessarily like him but they don’t feel they can oppose him. There’s not many old folk around here with the authority.’
    â€˜I noticed that. Assumed they were all at summer camp.’
    Derek stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Some of ’em are, but a lot of Charlie’s generation died young. Problems with game numbers back in the seventies and eighties I believe.’ The name of the place meant Big River,but for years even the fish had stayed away, he said. No one knew the reason and there didn’t have to be one. The Arctic was unpredictable that way.
    Edie sat back and thought about what Derek had said and decided it didn’t add up. So what if Charlie Salliaq was troublemaking. Nothing she knew about Martha suggested that she was the kind of girl who went off on flights of fancy. One thing she sensed above everything else was that Martha was hungry for an education. She wanted to have options in life.
    â€˜I guess it just doesn’t make sense to me that she would skip class unless something serious had happened,’ she said.
    Derek smiled. ‘The girl’s eighteen. What you think is serious and what she thinks is, are probably two totally different things right now.’
    Edie frowned. ‘I had this weird dream about her on Saturday night.’ The stirred feelings from the dream hadn’t gone away.
    Derek pulled his chin towards his neck and gave her a long-suffering look. ‘Oh, you should have said.’ He went on, his voice laced with the banal sarcasm of the sceptic.
    Edie stopped listening. She’d heard it all before, most recently from Chip. Instead, she gazed out of the window to the muddy road and further, to the rotting snow banks piled up against the fishing shacks, and thought about the girl.
    Derek was pulling on his jacket now.
    â€˜I need to get back to that shed. Martha’ll be fine, you’ll see. Let’s wait this one out a bit.’
    â€˜You’re probably right,’ she murmured.
    He smiled to himself. ‘It has been known.’
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    She made for the pile of sleeping skins at the back of her tent. For a while she lay down and stared at the soft light filtering through the canvas. She was beginning to realize that neither her head nor her heart had yet fully recovered from the ordeal of the spring, when she’d first stumbled on the dead child in Alaska. She was conscious of feeling raw and oversensitive, like some nocturnal creature suddenly broughtout into the midday sun. The midnight sun too, come to that. Sometimes it felt exhilarating to be around so much light, other times only painfully exposing. Maybe Derek was right about Martha. Maybe a dream was just a dream. She pictured the girl’s face, the black hair tinted raven-blue, the eyes wide with life, and she thought of herself at the same age, heard her voice saying,
Going somewhere special?
The words repeating themselves over and over in her mind.
    No, she thought, she wasn’t prepared to let this one slide. She got up, walked back out into the white, crystalline light towards the lemming shed and called Derek’s name. His head appeared from around the roof of the shed.
    â€˜Remember last spring?’
    He turned, squinting at her.