I faced Jeanne and the long muzzle of the gun. “First tell me what happened to Andy.”
“Good try. You know all that.”
“Do I?”
“Some things just don’t matter anymore.”
“I found the blood samples Wyatt took from Andy’s body.”
She lowered the gun, looked me in the eye. Blinked. “He was already dead. It was all for… science.”
“Jeanne, I’m going to die in there. You have nothing to lose.” I shook so hard I feared Sigrid would fall, but she held tight.
Bit by bit, the gun dipped until it scraped the floor. Jeanne wiped her nose, looked down and away from us. I squeezed the handle of the hammer in my pocket I have to hit her. But I held back. She could have lifted the gun and fired before I freed the weapon from my parka.
“I’m going to tell you this ’cause—okay—you deserve to know. Not for any other reason you say. Only ’cause I got brothers back home and I get it. Andy, he wanted to make this discovery in the worst way, bad as Wyatt. What Odin took or whatever to thaw out alive. So one night they fought pretty bad. Next morning me and Wyatt found Andy outside, frozen. He’d left us a note, said, Thaw me out in so many words. And so we did, and well, he woke up alive, that son of a bitch. Man, he had it figured, whatever it was.”
“He woke up alive?”
Jeanne shifted her weight, set the gun down on her worktable—still aimed at us—and sat on a stool. Her face had gone slack and pale, lost its determination. “Yeah.”
I took a step toward her. Clutched the handle of the hammer, now warm in my pocket. Hit her hit her hit her. But I couldn’t. I had to know. “How did he die?”
“You stay back,” she hissed, fingering the trigger.
I complied.
“It was like this,” she said, entering a kind of reverie. “Wyatt grilled him hard, but Andy? He was tough. He would not let on about what he injected. Just flat-out refused. It was this power thing with those two. But your brother, he… he really got it wrong. Wyatt’s temper, I mean. He should have just spilled the beans. I mean, he was real weak when he came out of it—Andy was—and Wyatt hurt him, he—he cut him, but your brother, he just smiled and smiled like he had the world by the tail—”
I took a step toward her, the hammer half out of my pocket.
She seized the gun and I stumbled backward, the hammer dropping into the recesses of my coat as I struggled to keep Sigrid in my grip. “You get back!” she cried, her voice hoarse with emotion.
She waved the barrel of the gun in my face, forcing me closer to the freezer. Phantoms of cold sank into my back as Sigrid whimpered in my ear. This was her last day, the final circle on all her drawings, torn and bloodied with red ink.
“You have no idea about that morning. You couldn’t imagine it. It was—Everything happened so fast. I couldn’t stop him. I tried, but he just, he lost it. He—he grabbed a cushion and held it over Andy’s face, and I couldn’t—and then he put him back outside, just like we found him. Only he was really dead then. Wyatt said I was part of the whole thing, that I was guilty too.”
“That makes no sense—”
“But it does,” she said, wiping away tears of rage or shame. “When Andy thawed out alive, Wyatt said to get out. Leave them alone. He didn’t want me to know things I wasn’t supposed to know. But I wouldn’t do it, I refused, because I had a bad feeling about what Wyatt was gonna do, and I was right, so you see, if I’d left like he asked me to, maybe he wouldn’t have—”
“Wyatt murders my brother, and you do his dirty business out here with us. Why’s that, Jeanne?”
“Enough.” She shook off any emotional residue and lifted the gun. “You, you get the hell in there.”
“Just let us go, Jeanne.”
“Go?” she snorted. “Where ya gonna go? This is for the best. The best.”
“We could try to find the eels.” I eyed the keys to the snowmobile hanging just over the worktable. “You could help us! Or just let us—”
“Shut your trap.”
“Anything for Wyatt, right? Doesn’t matter what he asks you to do, you just do it—”
“Get in the fucking freezer!”
Every shred of humanity leached from her face as she charged me, poking the barrel of the gun into my belly. I backed away, but she was relentless, jabbing me in the gut over and over, eyes half-mad. I staggered backward, stepping up onto the steel platform of the walk-in, Sigrid’s arms so tight around my neck I was close to choking. The ice cores in their neat rows glittered in the bleached light. Before I could draw a breath, the heavy door slammed shut and the bulb snapped off.