A grave denied (15 page)

She tossed the question over her shoulder at Dan, and Dan snapped to attention. “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.”

She grinned. “Do you keep a personal log of Park events?”

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” He escorted them back to the cubbyhole that was his office and selected from a shelf a daily diary the twin of Bobby’s. He paged through it. “Here we are,” he said. “Suddenly, last summer, on June twenty-eighth to be exact, Grant Glacier was noticed to be going the wrong way.”

Dr. McClanahan’s nose twitched. “Any seismic activity in the area prior to the event?”

Dan paged back. “I don’t think—oh, wait a minute. Yeah, there was a shaker that week. But—”

“What?”

“Well, it was four days before. And it was just a baby, five point two according to the Tsunami Warning Center.”

Dr. McClanahan’s nose twitched again. “Hmmm.”

Dan waited. When she made no further noise he said, “Hmmm what?”

“We’ve discussed my paper,” she said.

“You’ve discussed your paper,” he said, “I’ve just been towed unwillingly in the wake of your fanaticism.”

“Nicely put,” she said, complimentarily. “However, enthusiasm would be a more apt description.”

“I was actually thinking zealotry,” he said dryly.

They laughed, and it occurred to Kate that Dan’s social life had been settled on for this summer. She cleared her throat. “So who reported it?”

Dan looked at her, startled, as if only now remembering she was in the room, and his ears got red. “Who,” he muttered, looking back at the diary, “right. Um, yeah.” He flipped back and forth. “Okay. A bunch of ice climbers were on a three-week camping trip up the valley. I think a couple of them were actually on the glacier with axes and pitons when it started moving forward. Scared the hell out of them, especially as they were camped out on the edge of the lake at the mouth. They said it sounded like the world was coming apart beneath their feet.” He showed them the quote. “Anyway, they got the hell off the glacier, struck camp, and headed for Niniltna. George dropped in on his way home from flying them back to Anchorage.”

“When did it go back into recession?” Dr. McClanahan said.

“I don’t know the exact date,” Dan said, and at least appeared crushed when Dr. McClanahan looked disappointed. “I checked on it as often as I could, and I alerted the geologists at the University of Alaska, but no one was all that interested. It wasn’t like when Hubbard thrust forward. Tidewater glaciers are more interesting than piedmont, I guess. The Grant wasn’t cutting off any seals from the open ocean. And let’s face it, the Grant is pretty small potatoes compared to the Hubbard.”

Dr. McClanahan nodded. “And it’s not like watching glaciers is your only job.”

“I got George to drop a flag on the face and mark the position on his GPS. Whenever he had a paying passenger for Tok, he’d do a flyover and take a bearing on the flag.”

“Oh, excellent!” Dr. McClanahan said.

“When did he report it was going into recession again?” Kate said, losing patience.

“Oh.” Dan’s ears got red again and he dove back into the diary. “Uh, yeah, here it is. He first told me it looked like it had started back in late September. Could have been moving slow enough that he didn’t notice it until then.”

“How far did the flag move down altogether?” Johnny said, and earned an approving smile from Dr. McClanahan.

“From the time he dropped it until the first snowfall when he couldn’t find it again, down over five thousand feet.”

“Going on a mile,” Johnny said, awed.

“Don’t forget, last September was pretty warm. A lot of that was melt off.”

“Did you tell anyone that it had started receding again?” Kate said.

Dan shrugged. “Like I said. After the initial excitement, people weren’t that interested. I kept track in the diary until the snow covered up the flag and George couldn’t take any more readings.”

So no one would have known that the glacier wasn’t still moving forward, Kate thought. And someone who wasn’t glacier ept might have thought the mouth of a glacier a great place to hide a body for a long, long time.

“Let’s take a look,” Dr. McClanahan said.

“She needs to be studying something that moves faster than a glacier,” Kate said, panting.

Johnny was too winded even to nod.

Dr. Millicent Nebeker McClanahan bounded up to the mouth of Grant Glacier like a mountain goat, no hands, hopping nimbly from berg to berg. Her voice floated behind her as Kate and Johnny tried to keep up. “You want to be careful near the mouth of a glacier, especially at this time of year. The face may calve at any moment as soon as it begins to warm up and the insulating layer of winter snow melts off.”

Kate looked up at the wall of ice in front of which they were currently standing. “Johnny, maybe you better go back to the truck.” That was where Dan had stayed, to lean against the grille and watch them through binoculars, the grin on his face visible even from this distance.

Johnny shook his head. “She’s here, and besides, it calved when we were here the other day,” he said, and went after his new hero.

“It what?” Kate said, staring after him.

“What’s the matter, Shugak, can’t keep up?” Dan yelled.

Kate promised retribution with a look and heard him laughing. She followed Johnny, and she did use her hands. By the time she got there, McClanahan and Johnny had vanished inside the mouth. “Johnny, damn it,” she said through clenched teeth, and went after him.

It was dark and cold in the ice cave, and noisy with dripping, trickling, running, and rushing water. It felt like being inside a frozen waterfall that was going to melt away completely at any moment. The tall figure of the geologist and the smaller figure of the boy were standing in the center of the sloping floor of the long narrow cave, following the beam from the flashlight the geologist held as it played over the ice. It wasn’t clear or even white, but dark with the debris it had picked up on its millennial journey down the mountain.

The gravel crunching beneath her feet had been crushed and rolled to a smooth uniform size. Kate tried not to think about the same thing happening to her. “Is this a good idea, Millie?” she said.

“Probably not,” Millie said, not moving.

Kate repressed an urge to get the hell out of there. She would not be outdone in foolhardiness, even if it meant dying in the collapse of a glacier.

“Where was the body?” Millie asked Johnny.

He walked to where the ice left the gravel and began to curve overhead. “Right here.”

“Right in the middle,” Millie said. She knelt down and examined the ice directly behind the spot Johnny indicated in excruciatingly minute detail. Kate tried not to shift from foot to foot. Catching who killed Len Dreyer and burned down her cabin seemed suddenly less compelling.

“The body was upright?”

“Uh-huh.”

“With his back to the wall?”

“Uh-huh.” Johnny’s voice sounded tinny against the surrounding ice.

“Hmmm, yes,” McClanahan said, peering and prodding at the ice. “Yes, well, I think that’s all we’re going to find here.”

She got to her feet and clicked off the flashlight. Stygian gloom fell like a blow. Kate wasn’t especially claustrophobic and even liked the dark, but when she felt rather than saw McClanahan brush by she nearly levitated off the ground. She waited until they were up the slope of gravel and back out into the sunshine before she trusted her voice enough to ask, “What did we find there?”

McClanahan propped one foot on a chunk of ice, clasped her hands on her knee, and frowned down at them. “It’s the first week of May. From anecdotal reports we know that the glacier stopped thrusting forward in September of last year. My guess would be that the cave has not altered in any substantial way since last fall. The winter temperatures and the insulating layer of winter snowfall would have maintained the interior surface of the cave. Further.” Very much the learned lecturer condensing specialized information for consumption by an amateur audience, she held up one finger to forestall Kate’s comment. “Had the body been placed there this spring, the difference in temperature between the ice and the body would inevitably have left some mark.”

“An outline?” Johnny said.

Kate, remembering the sound of melting water that had surrounded her in the cave, said, “It wouldn’t have melted?”

McClanahan considered this. “Given the difference in temperature between solid ice and human flesh, no matter how dead, and with the temperature outside the cave steadily rising, I believe I would have been able to detect some mark. If, on the other hand, the body had been placed there late last fall, with temperatures already falling steadily, perhaps also with the body already chilled itself, very little impression would have been left, easily erased during spring melt off.”

“So, bottom line,” Kate said. “Was the body placed there last fall or this spring?”

“One cannot say for sure,” McClanahan said. “Or at least this one can’t. But my best guess would be earlier than this spring. Well before breakup, let’s say. How deep was last winter’s snowfall?”

“Why?”

“How long would it take given this spring’s ambient temperatures to melt that much snow, so that the cave would be revealed and someone could deposit a body inside it?”

Kate looked back at the open slash of the cave mouth at the foot of the wide, dirty wall of ice, and had an unwelcome vision of the body of Len Dreyer propped up against the back of the ice cave, sightless eyes staring toward the snow-filled entrance, waiting out the winter until spring and Johnny’s class came to find him. “So, last fall,” she said.

“It’s only a guess,” Millie said, “but I’d say yes.”

Plus, so far no one reported seeing Dreyer after October, Kate thought. Bobby might have been the last one to see him alive.

“What’s your paper going to be about, Millie?” Johnny said.

“ ‘The Effect of Seismic Events and Meteorological Transformation on Glacial Geomorphology in Interior Alaska,”“ McClanahan replied promptly.

Johnny gulped. “What does that mean?”

“You know about earthquake faults?”

“Sure. Everybody in Alaska knows about earthquake faults.”

“You know about the Alaska-Aleutian megathrust subduction zone?”

“Uh, where the two main faults butt up against each other?”

“Not bad,” McClanahan said. “There may be hope for you, Mr. Morgan. My paper examines what effect that zone may or may not have on the thrust and retreat of Alaskan glaciers. With a sidebar on the weather, including global warming.”

“Oh,” Johnny said, and hesitated. “Maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

“Well, maybe I could read it?”

She laughed and cuffed his shoulder. “Sure. I’ll even give you an English/geology dictionary to help you in the translation.”

At that moment the entire face of Grant Glacier seemed to shudder and shift. A second later an immense
boom!
rocked them back and a piece of ice the size of Gibraltar came crashing down to shatter into a million shards all over the entrance of the ice cave. A splinter whizzed by Kate’s face, and to her everlasting shame she yelped and ducked out of the way.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” McClanahan said.

Steady employment was more the exception than the norm in the Alaskan Bush. Most Park rats lived a subsistence lifestyle, eating what they caught or killed, fishing in summer for money to buy food and fuel. Some trapped, but the competition was stiff and the wildlife not as populous as it used to be, and Dan O’Brian was a fierce enforcer of quotas. A few lucky guys had signed early on to oil spill response training, funded directly by the partial settlement coming out of the RPetCo oil spill in 1989, which made them members of a permanent on-call team, for which they drew a stipend that wasn’t much but was better than nothing. George Perry ran Chugach Air Taxi Service out of the Park, and Demetri Totemoff led hunts for moose and caribou and deer in the fall and bear in the spring, and any help they needed was strictly seasonal. There were a few fur trappers left, and even fewer gold miners.

But by far and away the most jobs were generated by the government, state and federal, and the support services thereof. Auntie Vi started a bed-and-breakfast out of her home in Niniltna because of the need for temporary housing for the fish hawks who came and went with the salmon, and when word got around was inundated with rangers, sports fishermen, hunters, poachers, and the occasional pair of lovers who couldn’t find any privacy in Anchorage. To Auntie Vi’s ill-concealed horror, the word seemed to have spread to the tourists. She tried to discourage them by doubling her rates, but they only went home and told all their friends about this quaint little Eskimo woman who ran a B&B out in the middle of Alaska and who made great fry bread. Kate didn’t know if Auntie Vi was more disgusted at being called an Eskimo, being called quaint, or having to hire two maids to help out, which put her on the wrong side of the Social Security Administration but which also made for two more jobs for the Park.

The previous year the pressure on her kitchen had been so great that Auntie Vi had coerced the Niniltna Native Association into fronting the money for a little cafe on River Street, not that the street was identified as such by anything so unParklike as a street sign. Laurel Meganack was the chief cook and bottle washer, and her menus ran heavily to hamburgers and French fries, but her fountain Cokes were good and, well, there wasn’t really anywhere else to eat out in Niniltna since Bernie refused to get into the selling of any food that didn’t come already shrink-wrapped. That first winter the high school kids took to hanging out there, so they left it open year-round. The fact that Laurel was Niniltna Native Association board member Harvey Meganack’s niece probably had a lot to do with her getting hired in the first place, but it didn’t hurt that she was an extremely nubile twenty-three, had a glimmer of big-city sophistication from having gone to high school in Cordova (a vast metropolis of some two thousand people), and was an Association shareholder herself. Art Totemoff was hired as kitchen help, and so there were two more full-time jobs that hadn’t been there before. There was also a receptionist/secretary position at the Association headquarters, generally filled by a descendent of whoever was the current tribal chief.