Dr. Millicent Nebeker McClanahan ignored Kate to focus on Johnny. “Yes?” she said encouragingly. It was the next morning. They were up on the Step, a narrow ledge between valley and plateau that supported a cluster of prefabricated buildings and a skinny airstrip that stood in constant danger of either sliding over the side or being overrun by mountain hemlock. This was Park headquarters for the U.S. Park Service, and they were just down the hall of the man who ran it and who was standing next to Kate at respectful attention. Dan O’Brian was a boyish-faced, burly man with bristly red hair and blue eyes so innocent they aroused instant suspicion in those meeting him for the first time.
“Don’t bat those baby blues at me, young man,” Dr. McClanahan told him.
Dan, somewhere in his late forties, said meekly, “No, ma’am.”
“I know every thought that’s going on in that intellectually challenged pea-sized organ you call a brain,” Dr. McClanahan said, not without relish, “and there isn’t a one of them worth repeating.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Dan had the temerity to grin at her.
She laughed. “I see you’re listening as hard as you always do.” She turned back to Johnny. “Well?”
Dr. Millicent Nebeker McClanahan was five-eleven, maybe 130 pounds, with short, thick white hair indifferently cut, and large gray eyes. She wore jeans, a white turtleneck beneath a ratty fleece pullover that had once been dark green, no makeup, and no jewelry except for small plain gold hoop earrings and the worn gold band on the fourth finger of her right hand. She was constantly in motion even when she was standing still, tucking hair behind an ear, tugging on her earlobe, stuffing her hands in her pockets, taking them out again, fiddling with her collar, shifting from one foot to the other as if impatient to be on the move. She didn’t quite give off sparks, but one imagined she might if any attempt was made to restrain her.
She was a geologist specializing in glaciers, and by good or ill fortune was currently headquartering on the Step as she completed a study for which, Dan informed Kate in a low voice, she seemed to have unlimited funding because she gave every indication of settling in for the summer, and Dan had been instructed by his masters in D.C. to give her every assistance.
The thing was, Johnny was seriously into it. He hung on every word that fell from Dr. McClanahan’s lips. He followed her forefinger intently as it traced a line of glacial moraines on a map. He asked questions. He should have been in school but had insisted on accompanying Kate to the Step, a place in the Park he had yet to visit, and now Kate was glad she had acquiesced.
Dr. McClanahan answered him sensibly, as one equal to another, with no hint of “Run away and play, little boy” in her manner. She was currently describing the state of glaciers in general globally and in Alaska in particular, and Johnny said, “That’s why we’re here, Dr. McClanahan, we-”
She smiled and said, “Why don’t you just call me Millicent, Johnny.”
He flushed with pleasure. “Sure. Millicent.” He stumbled a little over the pronunciation.
She laughed. “See if Millie works better.”
He grinned. “Okay, Millie. Anyway, like I was saying, that’s why we’re here. We need to talk to someone who knows about Grant Glacier.”
“Grant Glacier, hmmmm.” Dr. McClanahan tilted her head to examine the map through the half-glasses perched at the tip of her long thin nose. The map covered most of one wall of the conference room and it was a large room. It was done to a 1/ 50,000 scale and detailed down to the shallowest bend of the smallest creek. Kate located her creek without difficulty, only to be reminded of the ruin on its bank. She wrenched her attention back to Dr. McClanahan, who was pointing at tongues of white on the map and naming them off one at a time. “Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, here we are, Grant Glacier. Hmmm, yes. That was the glacier that thrust forward last summer, wasn’t it?”
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.
But the best full-time, year-round job in Niniltna was that of postmaster. It had more pay and better benefits than any other job within a hundred miles, and the competition for it was fierce. There were families still living in the Park who weren’t speaking because a son of one had beat out the daughter of another for the position, and there were always dark mutterings of nepotism and influence whenever it went to one person over the other.
Bonnie Jeppsen, the current officeholder, had won the job over next-door neighbor Kay Kreuger, from which tiny seed a memorable breakup had grown like chickweed, leading to not one but two shootouts at the Roadhouse involving live ammunition. Kate had been instrumental in the altercation’s resolution, commandeering a D-6 Caterpillar tractor in the process, and she was never quite sure of her welcome when she darkened the post office’s doorstep. Bonnie was unfailingly civil and so far as Kate knew she got all her mail, so she approached the post office now in the hope that enough time had passed that Bonnie would be willing to talk to her about something other than postage.
The post office was a brand-new building prefabricated at a shop in Anchorage and freighted in on a flatbed the summer before, yet another new addition to the scenery to which Kate had to accustom herself. It was small, brown-sided, and roofed with what might have been corrugated metal but was probably some kind of plastic. It had two windows in front, a small loading dock in back, and a handicapped-accessible ramp leading to the door. The ramp was probably great for wheelchairs but it was going to be one hell of a slippery slide for feet come winter.
Inside, the building was divided by a counter and mailboxes. Kate heard the faint thuds of mail being slid into mailboxes. “Bonnie?”
Bonnie was a tall, plump blonde, with silky, flyaway hair and pale skin in a constant state of flush. She wore glasses in large bright red frames that framed her sometimes brown eyes like stoplights. She dressed oddly for the Park, in neither jeans nor Carhartts but in loose, flowing dresses with pin-tucked bodices, dropped waists, and tiny flowered prints, draped about with long multicolored scarves made sometimes of silk and sometimes of wool, all fabric she dyed and wove herself, much of it painted with brightly colored flowers. She sold the scarves out of a corner of the post office, probably in defiance of every rule and regulation of the United States Postal Service, and she was eager to explain that all the flowers were indigenous to the area, from the Sitka rose to the forget-me-not and including the wild geranium, the lupine, and the Western columbine, all of which grew in profuse and undisciplined splendor in back of the post office. Kate had a vague notion that Bonnie might make her own dyes from roots and berries of various and also indigenous plants, but that was going far beyond her own ken and she wasn’t interested enough to get it right anyway.
In addition to the painted scarves, Bonnie also sold jewelry and sculpture made from beads, most of it free-form, very little of it representational, and none of it traditional. It was original and striking, looking more like it had grown into existence as opposed to having been created, and even Kate had caught herself spending time in front of the shelf, looking at pieces that didn’t look at all like a wave-washed beach caught midtide, a tidal pool full of finned, clawed, webbed creatures, a driftwood fire mimicking the sunset behind it, a smoking volcano. The rumor was that Bonnie’s pieces were on display in the museum in Anchorage, and Kate, viewing a piece made mostly of what looked like freshwater pearls and a matte beige bead so tiny it looked like a grain of sand, could well believe it.
The aroma of sandalwood incense drifted into the room. “I’m sorry, Kate,” Bonnie said from behind her. “I didn’t hear the bell.”
Kate turned and saw Bonnie with her hands clasped on the counter in front of her. Both arms were braceleted up to the elbow in silver, never repeating the same pattern twice, and large triangular earrings cut from mother of pearl and embellished with tiny leaves made from tinier beads swung from her ears.
Kate shrugged and smiled. “I just got here.” She nodded her head at the earrings. “That’s really nice work.”
Bonnie inclined her head, accepting her due. “Thank you.”
“I don’t know anything about beadwork, traditional or otherwise. But I like your stuff.”
“Thanks. I heard about your cabin. I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how you must feel. It must be horrible.”
“It sucks green donkey dicks big-time,” Kate agreed.
Bonnie didn’t quite know how to take that, and took refuge in business. “Did you want your mail?”
“Sure.” She accepted a handful of envelopes and a box from FATS Auto Parts in Anchorage, the new plugs she’d ordered for the pickup. Good thing her socket wrench set had survived the fire. Not to mention the pickup.
It occurred to her that she was taking the burning of her two-generations family home awfully well. She wondered how worried she should be about that, but right now her focus was on finding who did it and bringing him to justice. Her justice.
She became aware that her lips had thinned and her eyes had narrowed and that the back of her neck was heating up. Bonnie was regarding her with a puzzled and wary eye, and when Kate’s eyes met hers she took an involuntary step back.
Kate pulled herself together. “Thanks, Bonnie.” She tucked the envelopes into a hip pocket and the box under one arm. “Did you know Len Dreyer?”
Bonnie’s face creased with concern. “Of course. I heard what happened to him. That’s just awful.”
“Yeah. Not a fun way to go. He pick up his mail here?”
Bonnie nodded. “He didn’t get much, though.”
“What did he get?”
Bonnie hesitated. “I’m not really supposed to give out any information about the United States mail, or any of the patrons.”
“I’m helping the trooper investigate the events leading up to Len Dreyer’s death.”
Bonnie brightened. “Jim Chopin?” Her eyes behind their bright-rimmed glasses went dreamy and so did her voice. “Well, in that case, of course, Kate, I’m happy to help. Anything you need.”
Mentally, Kate curled her lip. Some women went weak at the knees over any man to come down the pike. Any six-foot-ten, 240-pound blonde. Smart. Built. With blue eyes. And a deep voice. And a great grin. And a charm of manner Casanova would have envied.
She blew out a breath. “When was the last time you saw Mr. Dreyer?”
“I don’t know, I guess that’d be the last time he came in to check his mail.”
“How often did he come in?”
“I don’t know. Maybe once a month.” She thought. “Maybe not even that often.”
“What kind of mail did he get?”
Again Bonnie was uncertain. “Packages mostly, I think. Tools, and parts. Stuff he needed for the work he did.” She brightened. “And catalogues. Lots of catalogues.”
There were probably more catalogues per Park rat than there were trees to make them from. The Park was an exclusively mail-order community. Kate remembered the session at Dinah’s computer. Or it had been. “Is there anything in his box now?”
“Oh, he didn’t have a box, Kate,” Bonnie said, happy to be able to provide at least one definite answer. “He had his mail sent to General Delivery.”
Of course he did, Kate thought glumly. Renting a post office box would require filling out a form. Filling out a form would require revealing personal information. And if there was one overriding characteristic Len Dreyer was revealing to her in this series of interviews, it was his determination to remain completely anonymous. “Any mail holding for him now?”
Bonnie shook her head. “Jim came and got it. It was only a couple of catalogues, and something from Spenard Builder’s Supply.”
“Almost everyone comes in here,” Kate said. “Do a lot of them ask you where they can get work done?”
“Sure,” Bonnie said.
“And did you send them to Dreyer?”
“Of course. He does -did good work. He put in my new toilet.”
“Did he.” A toilet was awfully uptown for the Park. Although Bobby and Dinah had one. Flushed and everything. “When was that?”
“The third weekend in August,” Bonnie replied promptly.
“You’re sure of the date?”
“Oh, yes. They were sending Brian Loy from Anchorage to talk to local businesses about the new services offered on USPS-dot-com. He always stays in my spare bedroom and I wanted the new toilet in before he got here.”
“We have local businesses?” Kate said, momentarily diverted from her quest.
“The Association and the school, I guess.” Bonnie leaned forward and dropped her voice. “I think Brian just wanted to go fishing.”
Wouldn’t be the first time an Anchorageite had manufactured an excuse to get out of town with a fishing pole in hand. “Do you happen to remember all the people you recommended Dreyer to beginning, oh, say early last summer?”
Kate emerged from the post office fifteen minutes later, a list jotted down on the back of one of her envelopes in which she admittedly had little faith. Bonnie’s memory was fragmented at best, frequently interspersed with “I think that’s when I was doing the poppy scarf, do you see over there, the silk one with all the bright orange on it” and “I remember, I was woofing in the blue to the green warp on the wool scarf I was making for my mother.” Or Bonnie might have been warping the green into the blue woof, Kate wasn’t sure.
She needed good coffee and a comfortable chair and someone whose memory was better than Bonnie’s. So she went to Auntie Vi’s.
“What was going on in the Park a year ago?” she said around a mouthful of fry bread. She could have waited until after she swallowed, but since she intended on filling her mouth again immediately, this way saved time. If the fry bread was nectar, then the coffee, rich and dark and strong enough to melt the bowl off a spoon, lightened with Carnation evaporated milk and sweetened with dark brown sugar, was positive ambrosia, and Kate was not silly enough to ignore offerings from the gods.
This particular god was a woman approximately the size of a walnut and much the same color and texture. Her still thick and defiantly black hair was caught in a heavy knot at the base of her neck, her brown eyes were clear and sharp and set in the middle of a sea of wrinkles, and her hands, small but sinewy, were sure and deft as they kneaded an immense mass of bread dough. She paused to sprinkle on a handful of white flour and proceeded to work it in with vigor. “Ayapu,” Auntie Vi said, “you okay, Katya?”
“I’m okay, Auntie,” Kate said. The fry bread and the coffee were soothing in a traditional sort of way. She could almost forget that she was homeless.
“Lucky you not there.”
“Yes,” Kate said. “Very lucky.”
Sharp black eyes examined her shrewdly. “You mad?”
Kate took her time answering. “Yes, Auntie,” she said, proud of how calm she sounded. “I’m mad.”
She made the mistake of looking up. Auntie Vi nodded once, satisfied. “Good. But you be careful.”
“I will.”
“I mean it, Katya,” Auntie Vi said sternly. “You have that boy looking to you now. You keep him safe. You build a cabin with more room, make it his cabin, too.”
“I will.” Although for the life of her she didn’t know where the money was coming from. She’d earmarked last year’s earnings to fight off Jane’s custody suit. She wouldn’t touch it. But the kid had to have a place to sleep.
“Good.” Another sharp nod. “Good. Now. What you want to know?”
“You know I was gone last summer.”
“Humph. I know.” Auntie Vi waited, clearly not going to make it easy for Kate. She didn’t approve of running; she was a stand-and-fight kind of woman, always had been. She had survived three husbands; nine children, two of whom had died of cancer, one in a car wreck on the Glenn, and one of drowning; thirty-two grandchildren; and a home that had changed hands from Native to federal to state and back to Native again, all in the span of her lifetime. She’d fought for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and had sopped up oil on the beaches of Prince William Sound after the RPetCo oil spill. She served on the board of the Niniltna Native Association and on the board of their regional corporation, as well. She fished subsistence and owned and operated her own business, the bed-and-breakfast whose kitchen they were in now.
In fact, there wasn’t much Auntie Vi couldn’t have survived if she made up her mind to. In spite of every effort to ignore it, Kate felt a sense of shame at her headlong flight from the Park the year before. She remembered the conversation she’d had with Johnny. I don’t want you to learn that running away is an acceptable response to trouble. He had shown up on her doorstep the day of her return, and she didn’t know if he’d been told how long she’d been gone.
Well, he could just learn to do as she said and not as she did. She firmed up her jaw and said, “I’m trying to trace Len Dreyer’s movements last year, Auntie. It’s hard because he worked for everyone, all over the Park.”
Auntie Vi grunted. “What you know so far?”
Kate produced her notebook, and Auntie Vi produced some reading glasses that when donned didn’t make her look anything like Millicent Nebeker McClanahan.
An hour later Kate’s head was reeling and she had the frustrated sense of having gone over the same ground for the third time in a row. Auntie Vi never missed a tangent when it presented itself. “You know those Drussells?”
“Gary and Fran? Sure.”
“They move to town.”
“I didn’t know that.”
She endured a less than tolerant glance her way. “You not here. How could you know?”
“Why are Gary and Fran selling their place?”
“Gary, he like everybody, not making a living with the fish. He go back to school, he say, learn computers, get a job in Anchorage.”
Kate thought of the tall, raw-boned man with hair bleached blond by the sun and a perpetual sunburn, dressed eternally in ragged, oil-stained, scaly overalls, and tried to imagine him in a button-down shirt with a tie, sitting in front of a computer terminal in one of those little cubicles on the fourth floor of one of those office buildings in Anchorage where the closest you got to the outdoors was the view of Knik Arm through the window. She shuddered and looked back at her list. “Gary was on Bonnie’s list, Auntie. He passed a message to Len Dreyer last May that he needed some work done on his homestead.”
Auntie Vi nodded sagely. “Spruce the place up, get a better price for it.”
“Who did Gary sell it to?”
“Not sold yet.”
“How much is he asking for it?”
“Too much.”
“Don’t any of the girls want it?”
The Drussells had three daughters, all in high school, although the oldest one might be out by now. Maybe the two eldest, Kate couldn’t remember. Auntie Vi shook her head. “Girls go to school in Anchorage, too.”
Auntie Vi cut the bread into fourths and began shaping it into loaves. “Gary, he want to fix up his house before he put it on the market. To get a better price, you know.”
“I know, Dandy already told me he and Dreyer worked on it together.”
Auntie Vi glared at her. “If you already know everything, why ask?”
“Well, Auntie, I – ” Sentences to Auntie Vi that began “Well, Auntie, I – ” had an historic tendency to run on forever and end up with Kate apologizing for her own stupidity and for wasting her aunt’s valuable time. Kate folded her lips down over her teeth and shut up.
Auntie Vi greased four loaf pans and patted the loaves into them. “You know this brother of Bobby’s?”
“No. I haven’t met him. Not yet.”
Auntie Vi said something in Aleut that sounded highly uncomplimentary, but then Aleut spoken properly was full of a lot of rich, back-of-the-throat gutturals that just naturally lent themselves to insult. Kate caught a word here and there, enough to inspire a devout hope to see Jeffrey Clark coming so that she could head in the other direction. When she ran down, Auntie Vi switched back to English. “Len Dreyer put a new roof on Bobby’s house in October.”
This time Kate kept her mouth shut.
Auntie Vi gave her a sharp look. “You not writing this down?”
Kate snatched up her pencil. “Of course. Bobby’s roof, you said? October? Very important, very important information indeed.” A glance from Auntie Vi told her that she might be overdoing it. She picked another topic at random. “Johnny’s made a friend.”
“Boy or girl?”
That was Auntie Vi, cutting right to the chase. “Girl. But not like that.”
Auntie Vi cast her eyes up to heaven, pleading for help in the face of this idiocy on the part of her niece. “It always like that between a boy and a girl.”
“They’re just kids.”
Auntie Vi looked at her with a raised brow. “And you just a kid when Ethan come home from college.”
Kate made a face. “I talked to him.”
“Good.” Auntie Vi slid the loaves into the oven and set the timer. “Which girl is Johnny’s friend?”
“Vanessa Cox.”
“Ah.” Auntie Vi, wiping down the breadboard, nodded sadly. “Poor girl.”
“Why poor?”
“She lose her parents in a car wreck Outside. That make anyone a poor girl.”
Kate couldn’t argue with that. “At least she had somewhere to go.”
Auntie Vi made a face. “The Hagbergs.”
“What’s wrong with the Hagbergs?”
“Nothing,” Auntie Vi said, “nothing. But she is young. They old. And that Virgil, he don’t care nothing about nothing except Telma. And Telma, she care nothing about nothing, I don’t think.” She fixed a stern look on Kate. “You watch out for that girl, Katya. She start feeling lonely, she start being around your boy more, and you know what happen then.”
“She’s Johnny’s friend,” Kate said. “I’m not going to forbid her on the premises.”
“Didn’t say you should,” Auntie Vi said promptly. “Who said I said you should do that? Maybe a good thing, that, with her and your boy. Both not from Park.” She ruminated in silence for a moment. “I hear something about Virgil Hagberg,” she said, her brows knit. “I think he selling the homestead.”
“You’re kidding. I was just out there yesterday, Auntie. He didn’t say a word about it.”
“Virgil thinking since they don’t have kids they leave the homestead to that land conservancy Ruthe run.”
“Really,” Kate said. “I bet Ruthe loves that plan.”
“They talking to her about it. Virgil, he anxious that the land stay as it is, and that they don’t trade it down the line for something better.”
“Ruthe wouldn’t do that.”
Auntie Vi gave her a look. “Ruthe Bauman do anything and everything she can to carve out the biggest chunk of leave-it-alone in the state, Katya.”
“Yes, Auntie,” Kate said. “What else?”
What else was, Budd Davies getting collared by Dan O’Brian for taking too many beavers the winter before last. Kate winced. “Ouch. What’d Dan do to him?”
“Not too bad. Take the pelts, confiscate Budd’s traps, and fine him five thousand dollars.”
“No jail time?”
Auntie Vi shook her head. “No jail. Dan says that Budd get no lawyer, pay up without whining, Budd and him are good.”
Kate had to laugh. Justice, Park style. “Is Budd pissed?”
Auntie Vi gave this judicious consideration, and shook her head. “No.” A glimmer of a smile. “I see Harvey on my last trip into Ahtna. He say Budd has order for more traps.”
What else was, the security guard who was patrolling the TransAlaska Pipeline on his snow machine getting caught in a whiteout February before last, flipping his machine, breaking his leg, and crawling two miles to the road for help, where he got run over by a vanload of college students taking the scenic route from the University of Alaska Fairbanks to a basketball game with perennial rival University of Alaska Anchorage. The guard had only recently recovered the ability to speak and to sit up. Opinion was divided in the Park as to whether his wife thought that was a good thing, since in the interim she had taken up with a freight handler for Frontier Airlines in Atka.
What else was all this and more, and Kate tried to correlate the inundation of information with what she had learned from Bonnie Jeppsen and what she had picked up from her previous interviews. Budd and the security guard didn’t show up on Bonnie’s list so she tentatively eliminated them, which reduced the list of people she was going to have to talk to, but not by much. She sighed.
“If it was easy, everybody do it,” Auntie Vi said. She pulled the second bowl of dough off the back of the stove where it had been set to rise. “You want some more fry bread?”
There was never a time when Kate didn’t.