Free Innocent Murderer by Suzanne F. Kingsmill Page B

of the ice creeping around the hull and squeezing until the rivets shot out and the water rushed in.
    I craned my neck down the length of the ship. I was really restless. It felt like about 8:00, but the clock by my bed said it was 1:30 in the morning. There’s some – thing about a ship at night — even in the land of the midnight sun — that is ghostlike. The ship lay at anchor near Baffin Island, where we were supposed to go ashore to see if we could find some polar bears to ogle, but we couldn’t because of the pack ice. I wondered when the captain would weigh anchor and move us out. Surely it wasn’t a good idea to stay here? I tried sleeping but it was so hard with the light streaming in the window. A couple of sleepless hours went by.
    Finally I got up, thinking I’d heard a knock on my door, but when I opened it there was no one there. The hallway was empty in both directions. I refrained from looking up, blocking out thoughts of a spider-like man clinging to the ceiling. As I stood there in the hallway the door at the aft end banged shut and then eased open and gathered for another bang. I smiled at my own jumpy nerves and went back into my cabin.
    I still couldn’t sleep so I kicked into my sweats and runners and looked around for my winter jacket. I couldn’t find it so I grabbed my rain jacket and toque and went up on deck, past the eerie and sombre orange hulls of the steel life rafts, and around to the port side where the gangway went down to the sea when an expe – dition was afoot.
    As I reached the railing I was surprised to see that the gangway was lowered. I looked out to sea, the wind buf – feting me. The fog was playing tricks with my mind but then I saw a shadow move out on the ice — a little white dog on white ice in a white fog. LuEllen’s little white dog; it had to be, there wasn’t any other little white dog on board. In fact, there were no other dogs on board.
    I’m a real sucker for animals so I left the observation deck to get a better look. I went down the stairs to the gangway where I stopped and surveyed the situation. The dog was about twenty-five feet from the gangway and was eating away at an unappetizing lump of stuff on the ice, which had moved in on the ship. Why hadn’t Jason moved away? It looked like the cook had just dumped a bunch of garbage there. Was that allowed? There was only a one foot gap between the platform and the pack ice and I realized I couldn’t just leave the dog there. The ship could leave him behind.
    I ran down the gangway, stepped onto the ice, and walked over to the dog, still gorging himself on the wind – fall. As I got closer he glanced up but went right back to eating. I approached slowly, so as not to frighten him, and wondered if he liked strangers. Martha had told me he was never out of LuEllen’s arms. Well, he sure was now. I reached down and grabbed him around his stomach; he was so small my fingers met. That’s not all they met. He wanted nothing to do with me and let me know by whip – ping his head around and sinking his teeth into my arm. Predictably, I threw him away from me. He landed in a puddle of ice-cold water and I watched as he struggled to regain his footing. I looked down at my arm and saw a row of indentations in my nice new rain jacket. Who’d have thought such a little dog could act like a pit bull. I looked back at the dog. He was standing now, looking uncertain and very stiff legged.
    As I approached the dog again I heard some piece of machinery, or maybe it was several, come alive in a gentle hum. He’d begun to shiver and this time he let me pick him up without a protest. He was whimpering now, trembling and wet, and I put him inside my jacket where he took up hardly any room, but he felt like a little ice ball next to my heart.
    I stood up and looked over the pack ice, wondering with a shiver what it must have been like to be Franklin, lost