A grave denied (2 page)

There was a blank silence.

“Come on,” she said, and sang, “ ‘Rock and roll is here to stay, it will never die’—come on, you guys, you know this. Unless you’ve been propping your eyes open with toothpicks in class.”

Johnny Morgan finally opened his mouth. “Earthquake.” Anything to keep Ms. Doogan from singing again. Sheryl Crow she wasn’t.

“That’s right, Johnny,” Ms. Doogan said, beaming, “the Good Friday Earthquake of 1964. Nine-point-two on
the
Rich-ter scale. One hundred and twenty-five people were killed, some by the resulting tsunami as far away as Oregon and even Hawaii. The biggest earthquake ever felt in the United States in recorded history. And, by the way, eight of the top ten biggest quakes in U.S. history have had their epicenters in Alaska. Little bit of trivia there for you.”

They knew better. Ms. Doogan’s trivia had a way of showing up on tests. Once more Johnny threw himself into the breach. “How’s that make the glacier black on the bottom?”

“That same quake caused the mountain right next to it to shake into pieces.”

“There is no mountain next to it,” Alan Totemoff said.

“Exactly,” Ms. Doogan said. “The resulting debris fell onto Grant Glacier, in a layer that was three feet thick.” She demonstrated with a hand at midthigh.

Even Betty Freedman was impressed.

Like any good performer, Ms. Doogan had them from that moment and she was quick to press her advantage. “The edge of a glacier is a case study in giving birth.”

Johnny thought of the baby moose and cringed inwardly.

“During the last ice age, glaciers advanced over much of the known land masses of the earth. They are now in recession. Look,” she said, pointing. “Glaciers leave rocks behind, every size from sand to boulder. What’s easiest to grow on rocks?

Come on, we were talking about this on the hike up.“

“Lichens,” Betty said.

“Mosses,” Vanessa said thickly, wrestling the peanut butter into submission.

“Very good. Yes, mosses and lichens, which begin the process of breaking down the rocks to form soil. Not much, at first, but some, enough for—what, to take root?”

“Flowers!” cried Andrea Kvasnikof.

“And grasses,” Johnny Morgan said.

“Like lupine,” said Andrea, who had her eye on Johnny Morgan, if only Vanessa Had-no-right-to-exist Cox would get out of her way.

“Yes, like lupine,” Ms. Doogan said. “Talk to me about lupine. Anybody.”

“They’re purple,” Andrea said after a brief pause.

“They’re members of the legume family,” Vanessa said.

“Which means?”

“Legumes fix nitrogen in the soil.”

“And?”

“Nitrogen makes the soil more habitable for more complex plants,” Betty said.

“Like?”

“Like shrubs.”

“Give me an example of shrubs.”

“Willows.”

“Alders.”

“Cottonwoods!”

“Cottonwoods are trees, doofus.”

“And after the shrubs, what?”

“Trees!”

“Spruce trees!”

“Hemlocks!”

“Birches!”

“Christmas trees!”

Ms. Doogan waited for the laughter to die down. “Think about this, boys and girls,” she said, waving a hand at the glacier.

“Seventy-five years ago? This little strip of beach we’re picnicking on was under the glacier. That’s right, under a big slab of ice just like that one. Your grandmas and grandpas couldn’t have had a school picnic here.” Eyes widened, measured the distance between the face of the glacier, a wall of ice a hundred feet high, and their beachfront picnic site. “Mother Nature doesn’t waste time in the Kanuyaq River basin. How many of you remember last summer, when Grant Glacier thrust forward right over the lake?”

Blank looks all around. Ms. Doogan tried not to let her exasperation show. These kids were living in the middle of a geological experiment in progress. If only she could get some of them to notice, they could go on to make a living from it one day.

They finished lunch and set out to explore. Ms. Doogan insisted that they go in groups of two or larger and stay in sight of her at all times, but beyond that they were free to wander as they chose, which added to the sense of it being more like a day off. Eric Kizzia ripped pages from his notebook and made paper sailboats to float in the lake, gathering other students to make a regatta out of it. Mary Lindbeck sat with her hands clasped around her knees and her face turned up to the sun. Others stretched out, some making notes, some napping.

“Hey, look, here’s a trail,” Johnny said. “It looks like it goes around the lake to the mouth of the glacier. Want to go?”

“Sure,” Vanessa said.

“I’ll go, too,” Andrea said.

“And me,” Betty said.

Andrea scowled.

Betty blinked.

Johnny and Vanessa exchanged martyred looks. Johnny led off, with Vanessa behind. Somewhere along the route Andrea elbowed Vanessa to the rear. She tried to walk next to Johnny but the trail was too narrow, so instead she relied on tripping and slipping a lot. “Thanks,” she said, the third time it happened. She smiled up at him as she used his hand to pull herself upright.

“Sorry to be so clumsy.” She turned the smile on Vanessa, who looked more than usually wooden of face.

The next time Andrea tripped, Johnny stepped nimbly out of reach and Andrea went down on both knees. She didn’t mind bleeding as much as she minded getting blood on her brand-new Gap khakis. Her language was unladylike.

“Sorry about that,” Johnny said, only he didn’t sound sorry at all. “Hey, Van, look at this. Is this a lupine?”

Betty shoved past both of them and peered at the slender green shoots, comparing them to the copy of Pratt’s
Field Guide to Alaskan Wildflowers
she held open before her on the palms of both hands, like a priest consulting a sacred scroll.
“Lupinus arcticus,
she announced in the manner of one handing down a prophecy. ”Of the pea or
Fabaccae
family. A perennial, which means it comes back every year.“

They gazed at her, stunned into silence by an oblivious self-assurance that allowed Betty to be convinced that they were as spellbound by the subject as she was. “The arctic lupine grows ten to sixteen inches tall, prefers dry slopes, fields, and roadsides, and is not to be confused with the Nootka lupine, which grows in Southeastern, Southcentral, and on the Chain.” She frowned down at the plants. “I can’t tell which this is. The pictures only show them in bloom.” She displayed the book accusingly.

“Tup, that’s lupine,” Johnny said, and Vanessa quickly followed his lead. “Lupine, definitely.”

Once more Andrea brushed ineffectually at the knees of her khakis and muttered dire imprecations to the fashion gods. Johnny watched her for a moment, and said, “Want to get closer to the glacier?”

“Sure,” Vanessa said, measuring the distance. “Can we?”

“Sure, the trail looks like it goes right up to it.”

“It could fall on us,” Andrea said.

“We won’t get that close,” Johnny said. Andrea hesitated, and he shrugged and turned, saying over his shoulder, “Stay behind if you want.”

Vanessa and Betty swung out onto the path behind him. Andrea bit her lip, and followed.

It was rough and rocky going, with treacherous bits of ice cleverly hidden by glacial silt only revealing themselves when trodden upon. A faint, translucent fog seemed to be rising up out of the face of the glacier, looming large and blue in front of them.

They heard a faint cry, and looked around to see Ms. Doogan waving at them from the beach. “Did you hear her?” Johnny said.

“Hear who?” Vanessa said.

“We’d better go back, we could get in trouble,” Andrea said.

Betty, caught between a natural inclination to succumb to authority and a congenital compulsion to amass scientific data, wavered.

“Come on,” Johnny said. “We’re almost there.”

In the end the four of them approached the foot of the glacier together. Where the moraine ended, the leading edge of ice had eroded into a yawning black cave, shallow, dark from the silt and dirt embedded in it, an enormous, engulfing shadow in ominous contrast to the bright, sunny day a few feet away. It was melting so fast that the runoff sounded like rain. The gravel beneath, rounded smooth by millennia of glacial erosion, was wet and shiny. The cold and the moisture hit their faces like a slap.

“It’s like standing in front of an open refrigerator,” Andrea said.

Johnny didn’t look at Vanessa, the same way she didn’t look at him. Andrea lived in Niniltna, where they had electricity coming out of every wall plug. She didn’t live on a homestead, like he did, or on a defunct roadhouse site like Vanessa, or in the middle of a bison farm like Betty. Townies just had no clue.

Johnny peered into the interior. “Whoa,” Betty said. “You don’t want to get too close.” She pointed. “The face is calving all the time. Look at all that fallen stuff. Some of those pieces are pretty big. You don’t want to get hit.”

“Darn right we don’t,” Andrea said tartly. “Okay, we’ve been here, done that, let’s go back.”

“There’s someone in there,” Johnny said.

“Oh, come on,” Andrea said with a playful slap at his shoulder. “Stop kidding around.”

“I’m not kidding,” Johnny said, “there’s somebody inside, under the glacier.”

“What?” Betty and Vanessa crowded next to him, peering into the gloom. “Where?”

“Right there.”

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.

₂

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.