Dana Stabenow - A Grave Denied

They followed the direction indicated by his pointing finger, and out of the dim a figure coalesced, a dark outline, vaguely human, sitting bolt upright with its back to the ice where the ice curved in to meet the gravel. The figure appeared to be clothed. At least no flesh was gleaming whitely at them.

It also wasn’t moving. “Um, hello?” Johnny said.

It didn’t move. “Hello, you there inside the glacier,” Betty said in an unconscious imitation of Ms. Doogan’s authoritarian accents. “You need to come out from under the glacier. It could fall on you.”

At that moment a shard of ice roughly the size of a brontosaurus calved from the face of the glacier and smashed to the earth outside in a thousand pieces, one of which narrowly missed Andrea, which, after her own heart settled down, Vanessa thought was a darn shame. They all jumped and bumped into each other. Johnny swore. Andrea, of course, screamed. “You guys are nuts, you’re all going to get squished! There’s no one in there, no one would be crazy enough to go in there! I’m going back to the lake!”

The other three heard the sound of rapidly receding feet. The opening into the ice was still free. “Hello?” Johnny repeated. “You need to come out of there, whoever you are.”

There was no response.

“Maybe they’re dead,” Vanessa said, articulating the thought uppermost in all their minds. “We should check.” She stepped inside the open mouth of the cave. After a momentary hesitation, Johnny and Betty followed.

As they approached the sitting figure, their eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was a man, dressed in worn jeans and a Carhartt’s jacket. His face was the blue-white of the face of the glacier, veined and mottled.

The hole in his chest was the size of a basketball.

You were idiots to go inside the mouth of the glacier in the first place,“ the trooper told them in a stern voice. ”That’s what I said,“ Andrea said. She was fully aware of Jim Chopin’s many and manifest charms, and she smiled up at him, using all of her own fledgling ones.

“But you did good when you didn’t touch anything, in getting Ms. Doogan to make sure no one else went inside, and in getting Mrs. Lindbeck to come for me.”

“It was Johnny,” Vanessa said. “Johnny did it all.”

Johnny’s shoulders had slumped beneath the trooper’s stern words. Now they straightened.

Jim grinned at him. “You must have picked up some crime scene smarts from your dad.”

They had to step to one side when Billy Mike and his son, Dandy, shuffled by with the body. A nervous titter that must have been equal parts amusement and horror was quickly suppressed. The body was frozen into a sitting position. Billy and Dandy had draped a tarp over the body but the shape itself looked lumpen and grotesque. It didn’t help that the tarp kept slipping, and that the face of the corpse kept peeping out at them, like a child playing hide-and-seek.

“Do you know who it is?” Johnny said. “Was.”

“It’s Mr. Dreyer,” Vanessa said.

Jim looked at her. “What?”

“It’s Mr. Dreyer, the handyman,” Vanessa said. She was pale but resolute. “He came last spring to rototill our garden.”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded. “His face wasn’t… I could see his face. It’s Mr. Dreyer. He helped Uncle Virgil build our new greenhouse, too, so I really do recognize him, sir.”

Billy Mike slammed the door of his Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer, new the year before and now looking as if it had been driven through the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, and walked back up the trail in time to hear Vanessa’s words. “Yeah, it’s Len Dreyer all right,” he said.

“Len Dreyer,” Jim said, writing it down in his notebook. “Vanessa says he’s a handyman?”

“Oh yeah,” Billy said. He pulled out a bright blue bandanna and mopped his forehead. “He does everything. Did everything. Wasn’t a machine he couldn’t run, from a Skil saw to a D-6. Or fix, if it was broken. He cleared my land so I could build my house, and then he installed the kitchen cabinets and appliances for me.” Billy shuddered. “I don’t mess with any kind of gas, not even propane. He did some work on the Association offices, too.”

“So, mostly construction work?”

“No, I said everything and I meant everything. He worked the sluice a while back for Mac Devlin out at the Nabesna Mine. He did some guiding for Demetri, or at least some packing, and Demetri said he was a hell of a cook. He fished when somebody needed a deckhand for a period. He installed the new bleachers in the school gymnasium, and did the electrical for the Native Association’s building. He was all over the Park.”

“Was he married?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Kids?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Where did he live?”

Billy brightened, glad to have a question he could answer definitively. “Got a snug little cabin up the Step road, about two miles north of the village.”

“How long had he lived in the Park?”

Billy shrugged. “Twenty years? Thirty? Like I said, he’s been around a while.” He gave Jim instructions on how to get to Dreyer’s cabin. “So?”

“So, take the body into town and get it on the first plane to Anchorage. Tell George the state’s buying.”

Billy grinned. “He’ll like the sound of that. Especially when he can probably strap this body into a seat.”

Jim became aware of Ms. Doogan standing at his elbow. “Sergeant Chopin?”

“It’s Jim,” he told her.

“Jim,” she said, “I’d like to get my kids back to town.” She indicated the huddle of students halfway up the slope from the beach. They looked subdued. “You know the way the Bush telegraph works. The parents will start showing up any minute now.”

Ms. Doogan was right, and if the news had reached Bobby Clark, chances were it had probably already gone out over Park Air. The last thing Jim wanted was an exercise in crowd control, especially a crowd consisting of anxious parents, who were by definition never on their best behavior. He looked at Johnny. “Only you,”-he consulted his notes – “Vanessa, Andrea, and Betty went anywhere near the ice cave, is that right?”

Johnny and Vanessa both nodded solemnly.

The rest of the class sat huddled together. Jim closed his notebook and raised his voice. “Okay, kids, listen up. Most of you already know me, but for those of you who don’t, I’m Sergeant Jim Chopin of the Alaska state troopers. As you all know, the body of a man was found inside the mouth of the glacier. It looks like he’s been murdered.” He kept his voice matter-of-fact, and waited for the ripple of shock to settle. Andrea had broadcast the news in full voice, according to Johnny, so it wasn’t news to them but it was still a shock to hear the words out loud. “He was probably killed somewhere else and brought here, which means his killer could have dropped something that might give us a clue as to who he or she is. Did any of you find anything while you were wandering around?”

Jim waited long enough for the following silence to get a little uncomfortable. “Okay, then. Anybody who remembers anything later on, doesn’t matter how small or insignificant or downright silly it seems, doesn’t matter when, I want to hear about it. You’re all deputized for the duration, okay?”

“Lame,” somebody muttered.

Jim ignored it. The effective practice of law enforcement required an aptitude for selective hearing. “I’ll go over the ground, but twenty pairs of eyes are always going to be better than one. Chief Billy knows how to get in touch with me.” He stepped back and nodded at Ms. Doogan, and she shepherded her charges to the trail and into a fast clip down the hill.