Frozen Solid: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

changed. “Poor Dr. Durant. No. That man flew out several days ago. I am a winterover.”
    She would want to see all his certifications and credentials, but not now. “We can talk about the diving later. I really need to get some sleep.”
    He flipped both bags up onto his shoulders. Forty pounds each, she thought. “So let us go find your room.”
    She gathered up her ECW gear and followed. Sensors turned overhead lights on as they approached and off again when they had passed. It was like flowing in a luminous bubble through dark tunnels. Similar to cave diving, in fact. They saw only three people. One had his head down and appeared to be talking to himself. The other two went right on by, slack-jawed, eyes fixed in thousand-yard stares.
    After they passed, Guillotte said, “I heard what happened in the galley.”
    “I saw it,” Hallie said.
    “Is it true that Dr. Lanahan was vomiting blood?”
    “Probably not vomiting. A hemorrhage, more likely.”
    “This is so tragic,” he said. “In just a few days she would have been flying back to home.”
    “What’s it like? Living here, I mean?”
    He looked thoughtful, considered before answering. “A good question to ask. It is strange at first. A place where everything you know is not true.”
    “How so?”
    “Here the sun comes up once and goes down once in a year, for starters. It all flows from there.”
    “Oh.” She hadn’t thought of that.
    “After some time, you adjust. Or, some people, not.”
    Room A-237 was in the middle of one of the second-level dorm wings. Guillotte opened the door with one hand. The bags stayed balanced on his shoulders.
    “Unlocked?” she asked.
    “Apparently so. The cleaners probably forgot after they are finished.” He followed her in, set the bags down gently, switched on the room light.
    “Thank you very much,” she said. “I could have gotten them myself, but—”
    “Of course you could have. Clearly you are in very fit shape. But this was better, I think. Until you are acclimatized.”
    “You’re right. I’m grateful.”
    “And I am happy to help. Maybe I can show you around later. There are many unusual things here in this Pole place.”
    Alone, she leaned back against the door, too tired to wonder how he had known her name and which room was hers. It was tight even by Motel 6 standards—no bigger than a supermax cell, really—and furnished like a college dorm: white acoustic-tile drop ceiling; single, high bunk bed with drawers underneath; a tall, narrow window that could have been a sheet of black marble. Under it sat a tiny desktop with a computer monitor and keyboard. The computer’s boxy CPU was on the floor beneath the desk.
    She knew what she
should
do: email Don Barnard, her boss, and Wil Bowman. Her last contact with Barnard had been by email at Christchurch, so he wouldn’t know she’d arrived. Her last with Bowman had been the previous Thursday and less than pleasant. As such scenes are wont to do, this one kept replaying in her mind despite her best efforts to make it stop. It was like trying not to think of a camel after someone says, “Don’t think of a camel.”
    Bowman drove her to Dulles. Minutes from the departures area, she said, without preamble, “I have always been regular as a clock. Every four weeks on the dot. This time, I was eight days late. Until night before last. I really was starting to think …” She let the rest of it trail off.
    “Why didn’t you say anything before?” It took a great deal to discomfit Wil Bowman, but her statement clearly had.
    “I wanted to be sure.”
    Something in her tone must have caught his ear. “That wasn’t the only reason, though.”
    “No, it wasn’t the only one,” she said. She knew he was waiting for her to say more, and she knew, as well, that she should. Why couldn’t she? And why hadn’t she told him sooner? She wasn’t really afraid that he would be angry. In their year together, she’d seen him genuinely angry only