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.
Jim sat on a convenient boulder, facing into the sun, and went over his notes. Len-Leonard? -Dreyer was a white male in his mid to late fifties. He hadn’t had a wallet but that wasn’t unusual in the Park, where there weren’t any ATMs requiring cash cards and where barter was the major method of exchange of goods and services anyway. A driver’s license might be needed once you hit Ahtna and the Glenn Highway, so you wouldn’t necessarily carry it around in your pocket unless you were making a special trip outside the Park. Some Bush rats didn’t bother getting a license at all because they didn’t drive anything bigger than a four-wheeler or a snow machine.
There was a roll of bills totaling $783 and sixty-seven cents in loose change-bet Dreyer didn’t have a bank account, either- a moly bolt, three Sheetrock screws, one metal washer, half a roll of Wintergreen Lifesavers, and one of those miniature screwdrivers with interchangeable heads. There was a well-used Leatherman clipped to his belt.
Whoever had killed him hadn’t gone through his pockets, or the money would have been gone. Or they didn’t care, which made the crime personal. But then when was it ever anything else in the Park. Sometimes Jim thought he’d sell his soul for just one random, faceless welfare mugging, instead of the intermittent internecine warfare practiced by the denizens of the Park. With varying levels of enthusiasm and at different levels of intensity, true, but it was there in every clique, group, and gang nonetheless, white, Native, old, young, male, female, subsistence, sport, or commercial.
Except Bobby. Good old Bobby Clark, a minority of one, a majority of mouth.
And Kate Shugak, a photograph of whom could be found in Webster’s after the word “loner.”
He didn’t envy the medical examiner the task of determining how long Dreyer had been dead. The body had been cold and stiff, but then it had been sitting under a glacier for who knew how long. Rigor set in after twelve hours, held on for another twelve, and passed off in the next twelve, and Jim had a feeling that the body had been there longer than thirty-six hours. He hoped the medical examiner who drew Dreyer liked mysteries, because he was pretty sure finding a time of death wasn’t going to be easy.
Well, if Dreyer was a handyman, he had to make appointments. Jim just hoped Dreyer’s memory was bad enough that he’d had to write them down, and that an appointment book was to be found in his cabin.
“Len Dreyer?” Kate said.
Johnny nodded. “Did you know him?”
To the educated eye Kate would appear to have drooped a little in her chair. “He was the guy.”
“Which guy?”
“The guy. The go-to guy. The guy everybody calls when they need help with a job.”
“What kind of job?”
“Any job. Construction, mechanics, fishing, farming, mining, guiding. He could turn his hand to anything.” She sighed heavily. “I was going to get him to help us build your cabin.”
Johnny’s voice was stern. “Somebody killed him, Kate.”
She pulled herself together. “Yes, of course. Horrible thing to have happen. Awful. Shot, you said?”
“With a shotgun,” Johnny said, not without relish. “In the chest. At point-blank range,” Jim said.
“Jim was there?”
Johnny nodded. “I wouldn’t let anyone else go into the ice cave until he came.”
“Good for you,” Kate said.
“That’s what Jim said. He said I must have picked up some stuff from Dad.”
She looked up to see a smile tucked in at the corners of his mouth, and felt an answering smile cross her face. “He’s right about that,” she said. If nothing else.
He opened a notebook. “I have to write in my journal now.”
“Okay,” she said. “Moose burgers for dinner?”
“Sounds good.”
“Good, because it’s your turn.”
“Kate!”
She laughed but shook her head. “We agreed we’d trade off on the cooking. I cooked last night.” She nodded at the package of ground meat wrapped in butcher paper on the counter. “I got it out of the cache this morning, it’s thawed. But finish your journal first. I’ve got some stuff to do in the yard.”
He made a token grumble, but his head was bent over the journal before she had her jacket on. Mutt had all one hundred and forty pounds pressed up against the cabin door, and she exploded outside as if she had been shot out of a cannon, arrowing across the yard with her nose to the ground, tail straight out behind her like the needle of a compass. She vanished into the brush at the edge of the clearing like wood smoke into a blue sky.
The weather had hit the big five-oh two weeks before and it had stayed warm ever since. Kate stood for a moment in the center of the yard, face raised to a sun that wouldn’t set for another six hours. She loved spring. The May tree her father had planted was now thirty feet high and the dark green branches of the spruce trees were tipped with new, lighter green growth. A lilac and a honeysuckle were budding even as she watched, and a tamarack, the only evergreen to shed its leaves in the fall, was preparing to put forth new needles and cones. Her father had been a lover of trees, and she was still discovering species not indigenous to the Park that he had planted all over the 160-acre homestead. So were the moose, of course, but Stephan Shugak had planted enough trees to keep a step ahead even of their big bark-stripping teeth.
Forget-me-nots and chocolate lilies and western columbine and shooting stars and Jacob’s ladder and monkshood clustered thickly at the edge of the clearing and around the walls of the semicircle of buildings – cabin, cache, garage, workshop, outhouse-fat with the promise of a colorful month to come. It was going to be one of those summers, she could feel it, a lot of sunshine, just enough rain to keep the garden watered, just warm enough for the wildflowers to run riot, just hot enough to go skinny-dipping in the creek out back.
She’d felt that way during previous springs and been proven wrong. Not this year, though, she was sure of it. She walked around behind the cabin, pausing to tap each of the six fifty-five-gallon drums stacked in a pyramid on a raised stand, connected to the oil stove of the cabin by a thin length of insulated copper tubing. They were all low, but it was coming up on warmer weather and it wouldn’t matter until fall, when the fuel truck made its last runs to Park cabins, businesses, and homesteads. The stand was getting a little rickety with age, and she added replacing it to the mental to-do list that got longer and longer at this time of year.
A trail behind the drums led to a rock perched at the top of the steep path. The path climbed down to the creek below and the swimming hole the creek had carved in the bank. The rock was an erratic dumped there by some itinerant glacier and instead of putting it into orbit with a stick of dynamite, her father had left it where it was, a four-by-six-by-eight-foot misshapen lump of weathered granite. It was streaked here and there with the odd vein of white, glittering quartz that sparkled when the sun got high enough in the sky. The top of the rock was worn smooth from three generations of Shugak butts, into which groove Kate’s fit comfortably. Due to a judicious thinning of trees and the precipitous nature of the cliff, the sun made a comfortable pool of golden warmth in which to sit and contemplate one’s navel, a pastime to which Kate was addicted.
The thinning of trees around the stone seat had been done by Len Dreyer. He’d done a good job of it, had taken just enough trees to let the sun through, not so many as to look as if someone had come through with the blade of a Caterpillar tractor. Stumps had been cut to the ground, drilled and filled with an organic stump-rotting powder, with the result that they were already being overgrown by raspberry and blueberry bushes and wild roses and of course the inevitable fireweed, with horsetail, forget-me-nots, and lupine fighting over what ground was left. Usually the trees and the brush formed a dark undergrowth impenetrable by eye or foot, close, confining, to some even claustrophobic; when Len Dreyer was done, the sun dappled a landscape of trees, shrubs, and flowers that, if it hadn’t been tamed, was at least open to be admired.
That was the last big job Len had done for her. She’d been able to tend to other chores as they cropped up on her own, until Johnny Morgan had appeared on her doorstep and indicated his intention to embrace permanent Park rathood. Her one-room cabin with its sleeping loft was roomy enough for one person. With Johnny, it was getting a little crowded. They’d made it through the winter amicably, more or less, and now it was spring with summer hard on spring’s heels. They’d be spending most of their time out of doors, but autumn would come, when they would be driven back inside, first by rain and then by snow and then by the bitter cold of the long Arctic winter night.
And the Park was rife with stories of lifelong friends, entire families, and couples married and unmarried splitting the blanket over the effects of that long night on the psyche. Kate wasn’t about to let that happen to her and Johnny.
Initially, the plan was to have added a room on to her cabin. The winter together had changed her mind. Or, truthfully, Johnny’s. “Why not my own cabin?”
She didn’t have a lot of experience raising kids, so she said unwisely, “Because I said so.”
“That’s not good enough,” he told her, and, impressed by the lack of temper in the statement, she shut up and listened. They had been sitting across the table from one another, Kate sprawled back with her hand wrapped around a mug of cocoa, Johnny sitting up straight, torso precisely perpendicular to the edge. Kate was beginning to recognize Johnny’s body language. This posture meant business.
“You’re kind of solitary,” he said. “You like living alone or you wouldn’t be here on your dad’s homestead in the middle of twenty million acres of national park, with the nearest village twenty-five miles down an unpaved, unmaintained road.” He wasn’t being confrontational or accusatory, exactly. It was more like he’d adopted the impartial air of the scholar. A sociologist, perhaps, come to the Park to examine non-mainstream socioeconomic systems, about which he would then write his thesis, which would then earn him a doctorate, followed by a publishing contract, followed by a visiting chair at UC Berkeley, a college in a state which celebrated alternative lifestyles.
Johnny had continued to tick off items on his list, and Kate had reined in her imagination. “Even Dad only visited, or you visited him in Anchorage, you never lived together. Right?”
“Right so far,” she said obediently.
“I want to stay here with you. I’m not going back to Anchorage to live with her, and I’m sure as hell not going back to Arizona to live with my grandmother. I don’t want to be anywhere else but here, so if I’m smart I’m going to annoy you as little as possible.”
She couldn’t help laughing a little. “You don’t annoy me, Johnny.”
He grinned. “Thanks, Kate. That’s so sweet of you,” and then had to duck when she’d thrown a spatula at him. “To tell you the truth, Kate, I’m feeling a little cramped myself.”
Amused, she said, “Oh, you are, are you?”
“Yes. It’s why I couldn’t stand Arizona, too many people. Which is why I think I need a cabin of my own.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“It doesn’t have to be as big as this one,” he said quickly. “No loft. Just room enough for a chair, a woodstove, a sink, and a bed. Maybe a desk where I can study. Look,” he said, and pulled out a notebook. “Like this.”
He’d drawn a floor plan that bore a strong resemblance to the cabins at Camp Teddy, and showed signs of having been influenced by Ruthe Bauman, the camp’s owner. Kate had to admit they had done a good job of it.
He took that as an opening. “It’d be a lot easier, a lot less labor-intensive to build a new, separate cabin than to add on to this one,” he said.
“It’ll cost more in materials,” she said, more to test him than to contradict him.
“Not really,” he said. “Look, I found a book on construction in the school library,” and he hauled it out. “You add on, you gotta mess with stuff like the foundation, and then there’s the roof.” He slapped the book shut. “And think about having to live in the mess while the construction’s going on. If we build me my own cabin, we can just live here until it’s done, like we are now. I figure we could get it done this summer, and I could move in in the fall, when school starts.”
He made a good argument. Still. “Johnny, I don’t like this idea of a fourteen-year-old boy living by himself.”
“I’ll only be thirty feet away. I measured it last night, come on, take a look,” and he dragged her into the yard. He’d been busy with strings and pegs, laying out a neat square on the other side of the outhouse, and had taken advantage of the mud to draw in the floor plan.
He watched her as she paced it out. She looked up to see the determined expression on his face, the sun slanting across it, making his blue eyes narrow, highlighting the untidy thatch of thick dark hair falling over his forehead, the stubborn chin. The strong resemblance to his father didn’t hurt anymore.
Well. Not as much.
Snow was melting inside the tops of her tennis shoes. “Let’s go back inside.”
They sat down at the kitchen table over new cups of cocoa. “I don’t know,” she said. “Kids are supposed to live with their parents.”
“Not this kid,” Johnny said.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, “let’s not go there, okay?”
“I’m not living with her, I don’t care what she does or says.”
“I know, I know, calm down.” Her was Jane Morgan, Jack’s ex-wife, Johnny’s mother and Kate’s sworn enemy. Jane had placed Johnny with his grandmother in Arizona when his father had died, and he had liked it so much that he had hitchhiked all the way back to Alaska the previous fall. Kate, who had worked as a public investigator specializing in sex crimes for five and a half of the longest years of her life, knew exactly and precisely every awful thing that could have happened to a young boy on that journey. She still couldn’t think of it without a chill running down her spine. He’d shown up in August with Jane hot on his heels. Somehow Jane had learned the location of Kate’s homestead, so Kate had tucked Johnny away with Ethan Int-Hout, but Ethan’s wife had returned with their two daughters and had returned Johnny to Kate with more haste than grace, citing a wholly imaginary lack of space. Johnny would have had hurt feelings had not the antipathy been wholly mutual.
Kate, deciding that running from Jane was not the answer, had settled him in on her homestead and prepared for a probably legal and undoubtedly expensive siege. Unskilled at saving money, nevertheless she had made an obscene salary the previous year working security for an election campaign. She was prepared to spend it all if necessary to get and keep custody of Johnny. “Look out for Johnny for me, okay?” his father, her lover, had asked her the day he had died in her arms. It never occurred to her to do anything else.
In this, she had the tacit approval of the law in the Park, in the person of state trooper Jim Chopin, who was currently involved in a building project of his own. Yes, the troopers were opening a post in Niniltna, staffed by the aforesaid Chopper Jim, an event that in Kate’s eyes drastically shortened the twenty-five miles of road between the village and the homestead. It seemed to have a distinct effect on the regularity of her heartbeat and respiration, too, so she tried not to dwell on it.
“Okay,” she had said. “We’ll build you your own cabin.”
Johnny had been prepared for everything but capitulation. “What?”
She grinned. “But,” she said, and she leveled a forefinger for emphasis, “you eat here, you hang mostly here, and I’m consulted if and when there are any overnight guests.”
“That works both ways,” he replied smartly.
She got up to rinse out her mug in the sink. “Dream on,” she said to the window, and had hoped that he hadn’t noticed the flush beneath the brown of her skin. The only downside to Johnny living with her was that now she had a witness when she embarrassed herself.
She was recalled to the present by the sun going behind the tops of the trees. The stone seat had gone cold, and she slid to her feet and walked back to the cabin. With Len Dreyer dead, she was going to have to put Johnny’s cabin up herself. This would require a rearrangment of her summer to-do list, some of which might have to be put off until the following year. She’d like to catch whoever killed Len Dreyer herself, and roast him – or her-over a slow fire.
She was on the doorstep, kicking the mud from her shoes, when a movement caught the corner of her eye. She looked up and saw a tall man enter the clearing. “Oh shit,” she said beneath her breath.
Mutt burst from the clearing and launched a joyful assault. The man laughed, trying to dodge out of the way of an enthusiastic tongue. When Mutt liked, she liked.
“What?” Johnny said, appearing in the doorway, a pen behind his ear, one finger marking his place in his journal.
“We’ve got company,” she said, and opened the door wide.
The far-too-familiar shark’s grin flashed out at her. “Hey, Kate.”
“Jim,” she said.
The grin, if anything, widened. “Your lack of enthusiasm is duly noted,” he told her. “Hey, Johnny.”
“Hey, Jim.”
Kate, noticing the answering smile on Johnny’s face, thought sourly that Johnny was still young enough to be impressed by the crisp blue and gold of the state trooper uniform, not to mention the Smokey the Bear hat. Although, come to think of it, she hadn’t seen Jim in his Smokey hat since before… well, since before last summer in Bering. He was wearing a dark blue ball cap with the trooper insignia on the crown and a noticeable lack of gold braid. And while he wore the uniform shirt, it was tucked into a pair of faded blue jeans, and the shiny half boots had given way to shoepacks, scuffed and muddy.
She looked up and saw him watching her. One dark blond eyebrow raised ever so slightly. She couldn’t help it, the flush crept right up her neck, over the thin white roped scar stretching almost from ear to ear, and into her face.
For some reason, it didn’t amuse him. The smile faded from his face and he said briskly, “I’ve got a job for you, if you’ve got the want ads out.”