Dana Stabenow - A Grave Denied

Kate thought of Jack Morgan, of all the time he’d served for her after she’d left Anchorage, and him. Eighteen months he had waited, until exactly the right event had drawn her back into his orbit, by the time when she’d been willing to allow herself to be drawn. It had worked, too. “Smart man, your father.”

“I think so.”

Mutt came padding back up the hill and flopped down next to Kate with a sigh of satisfaction. Kate let her hand drop down into the thick gray coat. As always, the warm, solid bulk pressed against her side was comfort and consolation, reassurance and support. Mutt was her alter ego, her backup man, her sister, her friend. Her savior, on more than one occasion.

Kate wished Mutt could save her now. She felt as if she were walking through a mine field, that wherever she put a foot down there was the possibility of an explosion that would destroy forever what fragile relationship she had managed to build with Johnny Morgan. She didn’t mind making him mad, but she didn’t want to alienate him. “I’ve been talking to some people today,” she said.

“Yeah? Who?”

“People who knew Len Dreyer.”

He’d all but forgotten the body in the glacier under the pressure of more important affairs. “Len Dreyer?” He caught himself. “Oh. Yeah. The dead guy.”

Kate nodded, and took a sip of coffee.

“So,” Johnny said, curious in spite of himself. “What did they say?”

“Not much,” she said. “It’s weird. Everybody knew him but nobody really knew him. Near as I can figure, he worked at one time or another for pretty much every Park rat with a building or a boat. They all paid him in cash. All of them were referred to him by either Bernie or Bonnie.”

“Who’s Bonnie?”

“The postmistress.”

“Oh. Mrs. Jeppsen.”

“Yeah. Nobody can remember him having a girlfriend. Nobody remembers him having a friend-friend. Nobody can remember him mentioning family. Nobody knows where he came from. Every single person I’ve talked to so far says he showed up when he said he would and he did the work well. Nobody’s complained about him overcharging, so I’m guessing he worked for a reasonable rate.”

“What about where he lives? Have you checked that out? There might be papers and stuff.”

“There might have been, if his cabin hadn’t burned down.”

“Oh. Ohhhhh,” Johnny said, and his eyes brightened, so that he looked more like fourteen calendar years old and less like a wary fourteen going on forty. “You mean someone burned it down so you wouldn’t find out anything about him?”

“Maybe,” Kate said. “I don’t like coincidences. I find someone shooting Len Dreyer and his cabin burning down coincidental in the extreme.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said, his brows knit. “When did the cabin burn down?”

“From the look of what’s left, I’d say last fall. No later than early this spring because it got snowed on after it burned. I found ice when I kicked at the debris.”

“You think the killer burned it down?”

Kate shrugged. “It’s the simplest answer. And in my experience, the simplest answer is usually the correct answer. Not always, of course. But usually.”

“There must have been something there that the killer didn’t want us to find.”

Kate warmed to the “us.” “Or thought there was,” she said.

Johnny wrapped his hands around his mug. The air was growing chilly. It was still May, after all, no matter how long the sun shone and how far inland they were. “Do you think the killer put the body in the glacier to hide it?”

“Not unless the killer was the dumbest person who ever lived. All glaciers are receding. It’s a geologic fact. I think I learned it from Mr. Kaufman in sixth-grade science.”

“But according to what Ms. Doogan was telling us, last year Grant Glacier thrust forward.”

“What?”

“She told us it pushed forward last year, I think a couple of hundred feet.”

“But what about all glaciers being in recession?” Kate said, feeling cheated. Mr. Kaufman, a strict disciplinarian with no sense of humor, had let her down.

“They are, mostly. Except sometimes, one isn’t. You heard about Hubbard Glacier?”

Kate’s brows knit, then cleared. “Oh yeah, Yakutat Bay. The glacier closed off the neck of some fjord.”

“Russell.”

“Whatever.” Kate grinned. “I remember now, I read about it.” Jack Baird’s air taxi in Bering fell heir to newspapers carried by passengers on their way from Anchorage into the Y-K delta. As holed up as she had been the previous summer, she couldn’t help but notice some of the headlines. “The greenies were all bent out of shape because a bunch of, what, seals got caught behind the ice, and the Tlingits in Yakutat were saying, ”Not a problem, the freezer’s a little empty anyway.“ ”

Johnny grinned. “Really?”

“Really. So why did Grant Glacier thrust forward?”

“No one knows why it happens. Last year all of a sudden Grant pushed forward, right over the top of Grant Lake, you know the lake at the edge of the glacier? Ms. Doogan said you couldn’t hardly see the lake at all.”

“When did it move forward?” Kate said.

“July.” Johnny thought. “The first week of July? I don’t know the exact date.”

“Dan O’Brian would,” Kate said. “When did it move back?”

“When did the glacier start receding again, you mean?” Johnny said. “I don’t remember.”

“Dan would know that, too,” Kate said.

Johnny said, “You think whoever killed Len Dreyer put the body in front of an advancing glacier? Thinking maybe it was the super-duper deep freeze, that nobody’d ever find it?”

Kate shrugged. “It’s a theory. A crevasse somewhere up on the surface would be better, but I’d guess humping the body of a full-grown man up on top of a glacier, no matter how small that glacier is, wouldn’t be all that easy. Or exactly inconspicuous. How big a deal was it when the glacier jumped forward? Did everybody know about it? Did people in the Park go up to gawk?”

“I don’t know.” Johnny was quick, though. “You’re thinking they did, that everybody knew and went up there. So whoever shoved the body in front of it, maybe he was thinking the glacier would keep coming forward. If he thought that, he must have done it at the same time it actually was moving forward.”

“And you’re thinking that puts a date on when the body was left there,” Kate said.

“Why not?” Johnny said, his eyes wide and excited.

“And you’re also thinking that the murderer wouldn’t have waited too long after he or she had killed Dreyer to dispose of the body.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what you’re saying is, we could narrow down the time of death if we looked up the dates the glacier was moving forward.”

“It wouldn’t be exact,” Johnny said, frowning. “It moved forward for a while. Weeks, I think. Maybe even months.”

“But it’s a place to start.” Kate sipped more coffee. “Not bad, Morgan. We’ll make a detective of you yet.”

He grinned, looking very young in the reflected glows of the setting sun and the campfire. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She was sorry to erase the grin from his face but there was no helping it. “So how long were you thinking of staying up here?”

And there went the grin, to be replaced by a straight, stubborn line with a chin very much in evidence. “As long as it takes.”

Kate nodded. “I see. Well, you’ll be eighteen in four years and no longer a minor, at which time you can tell your mother to take a hike.” She looked around at his camp. “I guess you could stay up here that long.”

He looked annoyed. “I won’t be up here for four years. I just have to hide out long enough for her to get bored and leave me alone.”