Frozen Solid: A Novel by James Tabor

Leland.”
    “Actually, I’m not.” Having taken his measure yesterday, Hallie had made a point of being precisely on time this morning. She held up her wristwatch as proof. “Twelve noon.”
    Graeter held up both hands. He wore two watches, one on each wrist. “My time is Pole time,” he said. “I have you two minutes late. You might want to synchronize your watch with mine.”
    “Pole time,” she said. “Sounds like a beer commercial.” She didn’t touch her watch. He was a never-good-enough man, but he would get no bowing or scraping from her. Might mean butting heads, but she would rather butt than bow any day.
    “Sleep well?” Graeter asked.
    “Is that a joke?”
    “It’ll pass. Or maybe not. Some never adjust.”
    “I know altitude. But my mouth feels like I gargled with acid. Do people get sick that quickly here?”
    “You’re probably not sick. Yet. It’s frostbite. When you stepped out of the plane, you went from sixty above to about seventy below. Sucked in air. Involuntary, like what happens if you jump into freezing water. It heals in a few days. Usually.”
    “Comforting.”
    “Have you—”
    “Did you find out anything more about the women who died?” she asked.
    “I thought we covered this yesterday.”
    “We didn’t cover the possibility that some pathogen might have killed them. If that’s the case, it could happen to others.”
    “That wasn’t it,” he said, much too casually for her mood just then.
    “How could you know that? Just about everybody I’ve talked to so far has been sick with one thing or another.”
    “Doc called. He said Lanahan had some kind of operation on her throat. Montalban had surgery, too—a C-section.”
    The same things Merritt had said.
    Should I tell him?
    Merritt could not have been the killer; the one piece of real information Hallie had—thanks to Emily’s video—was that the killer was a man. Graeter—more likely than Merritt, obviously. She would tell him nothing.
    He glanced at the watch on his left wrist again. “Let’s go. I have a station to run here.”
    He brushed past her and was out the door before she could protest.
    A few minutes later, they were walking along the main corridor when Rockie Bacon approached. She wore bunny boots and black insulated Carhartt coveralls over a red plaid shirt. She held a smartphone in one palm and was texting as she walked, oblivious to Hallie and Graeter.
    “Good afternoon, Bacon,” Graeter said.
    “Good afternoon to you, Mr. Graeter,” she said, no great pleasure in her voice. To Hallie: “We just can’t stop bumping into each other, can we?”
    “Are you headed for the early grading?” Graeter asked.
    “That’s right.”
    “How’s the cold?”
    “Can’t seem to shake it.”
    “I could get Landis or Richards to handle it this morning.”
    “Thanks, but it takes more than that to keep me off my Cat.”
    After Bacon walked away, Hallie said, “I thought it was too cold for planes to land now.”
    “It is.”
    “So why send her out there, sick as she is, to grade the runway?”
    “Not runway. Iceway.”
    “To grade the iceway.”
    “SORs say it gets graded twice a day. So we grade it twice a day.”
    They walked on. As Graeter led them to the first level, Hallie asked, “Why are all the stairs yellow?”
    “Human factors experts said fewer people would fall down them.”
    “Did they do the decorating, too?” She was referring to the irregular polygons in clashing colors—deep blue, fire orange, blood-red, sharp purple—that covered the corridors’ walls and ceilings.
    “Sort of. They also claimed that asymmetrical patterning warded off depression. In a place that goes dark for eight months, it’s a serious problem.”
    “Reminds me of a badly lit elementary school decorated with paintings by disturbed children. Does it work?”
    “Not hardly.”
    They moved in their pool of light down dark corridors, past a grimy gym and weight room, offices, storage chambers.