Edie Kiglatuk's Christmas by M. J. McGrath Page B

the school yearbook from that time stored away, a sentimental habit. An easy find, too, as it turned out. She opened up the book and found Willie’s picture, the tell-tale distortion of his right pupil, a little outgrowth in it, the blackness seeping like a tiny hand reaching out. You could easily miss it, most likely you would miss it, but once you noticed, it stayed with you. Likes: hunting, sledding. Voted boy most likely to graduate.
    He’d started getting into trouble at school not long after the picture was taken, turning up loaded or failing to turn up at all, then he dropped out. Before then, he’d been a sweet, conscientious kid, a little on the shy side, maybe. Not the most obvious candidate for teenage rebellion. His generation were the first to grow up with TV and computer games. While many spent their teens piling on the pounds, Willie had taken care to stay lean and fit and kept himself that way in the winter by tending trap lines and, in the summer, by paddling out in his kayak. What happened to that kid? Edie rubbed a finger along the image. The old, two-to-the-penny lethal cocktail of a bad family and teenage hormones, she guessed. At the time, she remembered hoping he’d somehow grow out of it.
    But the only direction Willie grew was wilder. As the drinking took hold of him, he spent less time out on the land and more time exercising his fists. By the time he hit fifteen he’d morphed into an all-round troublemaker. Went to live with his aunt, but she kicked him out and, after a year or so sleeping on floors, he wound up alone and homeless. This low point in the kid’s life happened to coincide with Edie’s own time of struggle. She’d sworn off booze, left her marriage and gone to live alone. When Willie was made homeless, she took him in on the strict understanding that they each respect the other’s need to stay clean and sober; so when Willie reneged on his side of the bargain and came home boozed up one day, she’d reluctantly asked him to leave. She’d spent so long trying to fix the kid, she realized, that she no longer really knew him. The boy must have hit rock bottom then because the next she heard, he’d found himself a place at the halfway house on the other side of the settlement and for a few months it looked as though he’d managed to pull his life around. The drinking stopped, he started a twelve-step programme and was even showing his face at the church.
    But that was a few months ago. The only time she’d seen him since then was when he’d turned up at her door several weeks back after the halfway house had thrown him out, loaded and refusing to talk about it. During the few days he’d stayed with her, she’d sent him to old man Koperkuj to pick up some Qaujimajatuqangit , old-timer Inuit ways, while she worked on Freddie, the super, to take him back. She had some back history with Koperkuj, had rescued him from a bad situation one time. He’d not forgotten.
    Willie had returned from the old man’s schooling brighteyed and babbling at all the traditional knowledge he’d picked up and anxious to get himself back on track. A couple times she’d seen him heading out on foot on the track which led to the old man’s house and he’d smiled and waved. This time she really thought he’d cleaned up his act.
    And now he’d gone missing, four days before Christmas, with a possible murder rap and temperatures hovering on the wrong side of -45°C, or -55°C if you accounted for the wind chill.
    It was hard not to draw the conclusion that Willie Killik was one righteous fool.
    â–  ■ ■
    The snowmobile ride out to old man Koperkuj’s cabin wasn’t far, yet by the time she arrived, Edie was breathless and out of sorts, the super-frozen air boiling in her lungs, the hair in her nostrils pinching, little rocks of ice sitting at the openings to her tear ducts. The old man was slouched in