6

Dear Kate,“ the note on the kitchen table began.

I’m not going back Outside to live with my grandmother. I’m not going to Anchorage to live with my mom. I’m staying in the Park. No judge who doesn’t know me or you or my mom is going to make decisions about my future. It’s my “- ‘my was in capitals and underlined- v future. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I’m in a safe place, I brought my sleeping bag, and I have lots of food.

Kate sighed. “Oh, hell.” There was a P.S.

I’m sorry, but I took the.30-06. I left you the shotgun so you should be okay. I promise I’ll pay you for any ammunition I use.

Kate’s blood didn’t exactly run cold but she could feel frost forming on her veins. “Okay,” she said, letting the note fall to the table.

She stepped to the door. The clearing was void of life. She stepped outside and took a deep breath. “MUUUUUUUTT!”

It took Mutt precisely seventeen seconds, trotting back and forth with her nose to the ground, to pick up Johnny’s scent from the T-shirt Kate held out to her, to where the boy’s smell from it led into the bushes. It took them forty-six minutes, Kate on the four-wheeler with Mutt loping ahead to track him down to his camp in the entrance of the Lost Wife Mine. Kate didn’t know what that was in regular time but she felt she’d aged at least a year door-to-door.

Mutt got to him before Kate did, and by the time Kate killed the engine and climbed off, Johnny was prone beneath an onslaught of sandpapery tongue. “Off! Help! Mutt! Yuck! Get off me!”

Mutt backed off, tail wagging furiously. Johnny got up and brushed pine needles from his jeans. “Traitor,” he told Mutt. She heard what he meant instead of what he said and woofed again.

“Good girl,” Kate said with a laudatory scratch behind the ears. “Go ahead. You’ve earned it.”

In response to a signal, Mutt launched herself into the brush and flushed a bunch of rabbits from a peaceful browse. She wasn’t really hungry, but they didn’t know that and scattered in a starburst of white tails.

Johnny was the first to regain his composure. “Would you like some coffee?”

Kate, now that she could see Johnny had not, after all, shot his eye out with the.30-06, decided firstly that Johnny could live, and secondly that she must retain rights to the grown-up in this situation. As such, she would not lose her temper. She chanted that six or seven times to herself, and when it finally took replied, “Sounds good.”

It was after ten o’clock and the sun was as near to setting as it ever got in May at that latitude. The mine entrance was high on a hill and commanded a sweeping view of the valley leading up to the plateau known as the Step, and the Quilak Mountains beyond. The sky was without color, neither the blue of day nor the black of night, and no stars shone save the faint golden glow of the one setting behind the hill the mine tunneled into.

The camp, Kate had to admit, was a cozy affair. Johnny had built up a sleeping platform on spruce boughs, cushioned with a tarp, a Thermarest, and a sleeping bag, set just inside the overhang of the cave out of the dew and the rain. A little fire pit was lined neatly with flat rocks he must have hauled up from the creek in back of the homestead. Canned goods were lined up like soldiers on a shelf made from two weather-stained Blazo boxes, both of which Kate recognized as having been salvaged from the dwindling stack behind the shop. He’d brought his CD player and a carrier full of CDs. Kate saw a bargain pack of batteries for the player and for his book light, which had been folded into the paperback copy of A Civil Campaign that sat on his sleeping bag.

No way had he moved this much stuff up here in one day. He’d been planning this for some time.

Mutt had interrupted him in the middle of writing in a notebook, which lay open on the ground. Kate picked it up along with the pen she found a few feet away, only to have Johnny remove both from her hands. He wasn’t abrupt about it, or embarrassed, just polite, and firm.

She took a deep breath and reminded herself again that she was the grown-up here.

“Here,” he said, “take my seat.” Gravely, he proffered a rough but recognizable chair, with back, sliced out of a round section of tree trunk with what had probably been her chain saw.

Kate’s sense of humor got the better of her at this point. “Thank you, Mr. Crusoe,” she said. She sat down. Her butt overlapped both sides but it got the job done. She waited while the water boiled in a saucepan, and didn’t offer to help measure coffee into the filter. The resulting brew threatened to remove the enamel from her teeth, but that was okay because that was how she liked it. She added some evaporated milk from a can and sipped. He did, too.

She wondered when he’d moved on from cocoa to coffee. “Nice camp,” she said.

“Thanks,” Johnny said.

“You’ve been planning this for a while.”

He nodded. “Ever since she showed up in the Park last fall.”

“That long? I’m impressed. But then your father was quite a planner, too.”

“He told me patience was the most important thing when you wanted something. He told me not to rush, that rushing just got you nowhere faster.”

Kate thought of Jack Morgan, of all the time he’d served for her after she’d left Anchorage, and him. Eighteen months he had waited, until exactly the right event had drawn her back into his orbit, by the time when she’d been willing to allow herself to be drawn. It had worked, too. “Smart man, your father.”

“I think so.”

Mutt came padding back up the hill and flopped down next to Kate with a sigh of satisfaction. Kate let her hand drop down into the thick gray coat. As always, the warm, solid bulk pressed against her side was comfort and consolation, reassurance and support. Mutt was her alter ego, her backup man, her sister, her friend. Her savior, on more than one occasion.

Kate wished Mutt could save her now. She felt as if she were walking through a mine field, that wherever she put a foot down there was the possibility of an explosion that would destroy forever what fragile relationship she had managed to build with Johnny Morgan. She didn’t mind making him mad, but she didn’t want to alienate him. “I’ve been talking to some people today,” she said.

“Yeah? Who?”

“People who knew Len Dreyer.”

He’d all but forgotten the body in the glacier under the pressure of more important affairs. “Len Dreyer?” He caught himself. “Oh. Yeah. The dead guy.”

Kate nodded, and took a sip of coffee.

“So,” Johnny said, curious in spite of himself. “What did they say?”

“Not much,” she said. “It’s weird. Everybody knew him but nobody really knew him. Near as I can figure, he worked at one time or another for pretty much every Park rat with a building or a boat. They all paid him in cash. All of them were referred to him by either Bernie or Bonnie.”

“Who’s Bonnie?”

“The postmistress.”

“Oh. Mrs. Jeppsen.”

“Yeah. Nobody can remember him having a girlfriend. Nobody remembers him having a friend-friend. Nobody can remember him mentioning family. Nobody knows where he came from. Every single person I’ve talked to so far says he showed up when he said he would and he did the work well. Nobody’s complained about him overcharging, so I’m guessing he worked for a reasonable rate.”

“What about where he lives? Have you checked that out? There might be papers and stuff.”

“There might have been, if his cabin hadn’t burned down.”

“Oh. Ohhhhh,” Johnny said, and his eyes brightened, so that he looked more like fourteen calendar years old and less like a wary fourteen going on forty. “You mean someone burned it down so you wouldn’t find out anything about him?”

“Maybe,” Kate said. “I don’t like coincidences. I find someone shooting Len Dreyer and his cabin burning down coincidental in the extreme.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said, his brows knit. “When did the cabin burn down?”

“From the look of what’s left, I’d say last fall. No later than early this spring because it got snowed on after it burned. I found ice when I kicked at the debris.”

“You think the killer burned it down?”

Kate shrugged. “It’s the simplest answer. And in my experience, the simplest answer is usually the correct answer. Not always, of course. But usually.”

“There must have been something there that the killer didn’t want us to find.”

Kate warmed to the “us.” “Or thought there was,” she said.

Johnny wrapped his hands around his mug. The air was growing chilly. It was still May, after all, no matter how long the sun shone and how far inland they were. “Do you think the killer put the body in the glacier to hide it?”

“Not unless the killer was the dumbest person who ever lived. All glaciers are receding. It’s a geologic fact. I think I learned it from Mr. Kaufman in sixth-grade science.”

“But according to what Ms. Doogan was telling us, last year Grant Glacier thrust forward.”

“What?”

“She told us it pushed forward last year, I think a couple of hundred feet.”

“But what about all glaciers being in recession?” Kate said, feeling cheated. Mr. Kaufman, a strict disciplinarian with no sense of humor, had let her down.

“They are, mostly. Except sometimes, one isn’t. You heard about Hubbard Glacier?”

Kate’s brows knit, then cleared. “Oh yeah, Yakutat Bay. The glacier closed off the neck of some fjord.”

“Russell.”

“Whatever.” Kate grinned. “I remember now, I read about it.” Jack Baird’s air taxi in Bering fell heir to newspapers carried by passengers on their way from Anchorage into the Y-K delta. As holed up as she had been the previous summer, she couldn’t help but notice some of the headlines. “The greenies were all bent out of shape because a bunch of, what, seals got caught behind the ice, and the Tlingits in Yakutat were saying, ”Not a problem, the freezer’s a little empty anyway.“ ”

Johnny grinned. “Really?”

“Really. So why did Grant Glacier thrust forward?”

“No one knows why it happens. Last year all of a sudden Grant pushed forward, right over the top of Grant Lake, you know the lake at the edge of the glacier? Ms. Doogan said you couldn’t hardly see the lake at all.”

“When did it move forward?” Kate said.

“July.” Johnny thought. “The first week of July? I don’t know the exact date.”

“Dan O’Brian would,” Kate said. “When did it move back?”

“When did the glacier start receding again, you mean?” Johnny said. “I don’t remember.”

“Dan would know that, too,” Kate said.

Johnny said, “You think whoever killed Len Dreyer put the body in front of an advancing glacier? Thinking maybe it was the super-duper deep freeze, that nobody’d ever find it?”

Kate shrugged. “It’s a theory. A crevasse somewhere up on the surface would be better, but I’d guess humping the body of a full-grown man up on top of a glacier, no matter how small that glacier is, wouldn’t be all that easy. Or exactly inconspicuous. How big a deal was it when the glacier jumped forward? Did everybody know about it? Did people in the Park go up to gawk?”

“I don’t know.” Johnny was quick, though. “You’re thinking they did, that everybody knew and went up there. So whoever shoved the body in front of it, maybe he was thinking the glacier would keep coming forward. If he thought that, he must have done it at the same time it actually was moving forward.”

“And you’re thinking that puts a date on when the body was left there,” Kate said.

“Why not?” Johnny said, his eyes wide and excited.

“And you’re also thinking that the murderer wouldn’t have waited too long after he or she had killed Dreyer to dispose of the body.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what you’re saying is, we could narrow down the time of death if we looked up the dates the glacier was moving forward.”

“It wouldn’t be exact,” Johnny said, frowning. “It moved forward for a while. Weeks, I think. Maybe even months.”

“But it’s a place to start.” Kate sipped more coffee. “Not bad, Morgan. We’ll make a detective of you yet.”

He grinned, looking very young in the reflected glows of the setting sun and the campfire. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She was sorry to erase the grin from his face but there was no helping it. “So how long were you thinking of staying up here?”

And there went the grin, to be replaced by a straight, stubborn line with a chin very much in evidence. “As long as it takes.”

Kate nodded. “I see. Well, you’ll be eighteen in four years and no longer a minor, at which time you can tell your mother to take a hike.” She looked around at his camp. “I guess you could stay up here that long.”

He looked annoyed. “I won’t be up here for four years. I just have to hide out long enough for her to get bored and leave me alone.”

Kate laughed a little, and held up a hand when she saw his expression change again. “I’m not laughing at you, Johnny. But I have to say that one thing you inherited from your mother is a whole lot of stubborn. You never let anything go.” She leaned forward. “Johnny, neither does she. For whatever reason, she hates my guts, and the thought of you living with me just fries her to a crisp.”

“She thinks you broke her and Dad up.”

“I didn’t.”

“I know that. She and Dad were way over when he brought you home that first time. You didn’t have anything to do with them. I know that, Kate. I don’t know why she doesn’t know it, too.”

They contemplated the fire together in silence for a moment. “She’s not a monster, Johnny,” Kate said. “She’s a human being. She’s got the same amount of human failings as the rest of us.” And maybe a few more, she thought but didn’t say. “I think so long as your dad wasn’t with somebody else that she was fine.”

“You mean she didn’t want him back until somebody else had him? But that’s so dumb!”

“Maybe. It’s human, though.” She looked at Johnny and smiled. “And I have to tell you, your father wasn’t exactly unattractive to women. Maybe it was like the song says. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. It doesn’t really matter. She doesn’t want you with me.”

“But I want to be here!”

“That just rubs salt into the wound, Johnny. You’re her son, her underage son, I might point out, and you’re telling her you’re going to live where you want to live. That would be enough all by itself to activate the parental authority reflex, but you’re also choosing to live with her sworn enemy. Of course she’s determined to get you back. I’d expect that reaction from any parent.”

“She’s no parent,” he said hotly. “She doesn’t care about what’s best for me, she never cared. I was just something to fight over with Dad. I was like… like… I was like Dad’s allowance.”

“Allowance?”

“Yeah, allowance. If I did all my chores at Dad’s, he’d give me my allowance. If he did everything she wanted him to, he got me.” He ducked his head, and his voice dropped to a mutter. “I heard them fighting about it one night, late, back when I was a kid. They thought I was asleep. She’d been out and she’d dropped me off at his house, and when she came to get me he wanted to know where she’d been and why she didn’t call if she knew she was going to be so late. She started yelling at him, saying she’d given him the kid he wanted, and if he thought she owed him anything else he was wrong.”

Kate listened in silence, her heart wrung for the boy. Her parents had given up hope she’d ever come along and when she had, they had loved her unconditionally. Even with Abel, as crusty and undemonstrative as he had been, she had known that he had cared.

“She never wanted me, Kate,” he said, his voice low. “She never cared. If she did, she’d have listened when I told her I didn’t want to go Outside. I could have stood it in Anchorage, so long as I got to visit you once in a while.” He paused. “Well, I think I could have. But she wouldn’t listen, she just put me on a plane.” He looked at her. “She doesn’t want me, and she doesn’t know me or what I want. I don’t owe her anything.”

Kate, who knew a lot more about the wrath Jane had visited upon Jack’s head than she was letting on, didn’t have an answer for him that wouldn’t make him feel worse. Whatever indifference he showed to the world, Jane was his mother. Kate’s mother had died when Kate was very young and Kate’s grandmother had been the dominant female figure in her life. Even now, two years after Emaa’s death, Kate still wondered if her grandmother had loved her for herself or because her grandmother saw her as someone with enough strength and ability to follow Emaa into the leadership of their tribe.

She said, “Johnny, I don’t want you to stay up here.”

He bristled. “Why not? I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t. I said I didn’t want you to. I want you to come on back down to the cabin. Tomorrow we’ll lay out the foundation of yours.”

“Ifs better if I stay here. That way if she comes-”

“If she comes, we’ll deal with it. I don’t want you up here alone. I’d worry about you.”

“I’ve got your rifle.”

“You won’t when I leave.”

“I can shoot! Dad taught me!”

“I know, but I haven’t checked you out on this particular rifle myself yet. Not to mention which…” Kate took a deep breath. “Johnny, you don’t ever take someone’s rifle away in the Bush without permission.” She held up a hand and he checked himself, his face red and scowling. “Johnny, there’s another reason, and it’s more important than any of the rest, and it’s this. I don’t want you to learn how to run away.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t want you to learn that running away is an acceptable response to trouble.” She looked at his mutinous expression and laughed a little. “Johnny, you haven’t seen trouble like it’s going to come at you in your life. Everyone runs into trouble sooner or later, if they’re breathing, if they’re conscious, if they’re in the world. How you handle it, when it comes, is what makes you.”

The silence hung heavy over the campfire. Kate let it. At last Johnny stirred and said in a painful rasp, “You think I ran away from Dad dying?”

His words struck at her like a sledgehammer. “I don’t think you ran away from your Dad’s death,” she said when she got her breath back. “I did. I ran away, as far away as I could get, to a place where hardly anybody knew me, and I hid out. All the while pretending I was fine, just fine, when I wasn’t. I could have stayed there the rest of my life, keeping my head down, drifting through life.”

“What happened?”

What the hell had happened? She still wasn’t sure. “Someone who knew me saw me. And there was a… thing. A case. I helped solve it. Sort of. Anyway, it reminded me.” She shrugged. “It’s what I do. Find things out.”

“Catch bad guys,” Johnny said.

“Yeah.”

“Like Dad.”

“Yeah. A lot of people aren’t lucky enough to find that one thing they’re good at. But if you do, I think you should do it. Practice it. Make a living at it if you can. Make a difference, if you can.”

“I don’t have a thing.”

“You will,” she said. “Don’t let it be running away.”

Mutt had been resting her head on her paws, bright eyes traveling back and forth between her two humans. One of her ears twitched toward home. She raised her head and looked in that direction, both ears testing the air like elongated insect antennae.

“What is it, girl?” Kate said, and then she heard it, too, and got to her feet.

It was another four-wheeler. Vanessa Cox was driving it.

A smile spread across Johnny’s face.

Vanessa killed the engine and dismounted.

Johnny got to his feet. “Hey, Van.”

“Hey, Johnny. Hello, Kate.”

“Hi,” Kate said.

“Want some coffee?” Johnny said.

“Cocoa,” Vanessa said, and unstrapped a sleeping bag and a pack from the back of the four-wheeler.

Our girl Friday has arrived, Kate thought. “You bunking out here, too?” she said.

“Uh-huh.” Vanessa unrolled the bag, folded it in thirds, and sat down on it cross-legged. She pulled her pack into her lap and produced a Ziploc bag full of peanut butter cookies. “Have one?” she said to Kate. Her gaze was wide and clear and without a trace of embarrassment.

“Thanks,” Kate said, “I had one earlier.” She finished her coffee, mostly to give herself time to think. “Virgil and Telma know where you are?” she said finally.

“They’re not worried about me,” Vanessa said.

The light from the fire flickered over her face. She looked and sounded tranquil, so much so that Kate decided not to point out that Vanessa hadn’t answered her question.

So Johnny had told someone where he would be. That was good. That someone was a child. That was bad. But now Kate knew where they both were. That was good.

Chances were Vanessa had snuck out of her house without permission. That was bad. They were obviously close friends. That was good. Just how friendly were they?

That could be seriously bad. They had school tomorrow. Ah-hah. “You’ve got school tomorrow,” she said.

“We’ll go from here,” Johnny said.

Vanessa nodded. “I brought my books with me.”

Kate wondered what would happen if she ordered them to strike camp and follow her back to the homestead.

There was an old attorney proverb, something about never asking a witness a question to which you didn’t already know the answer.

She tested the air, trying to estimate the sexual tension between the two. She didn’t sense any, but that didn’t mean diddly. Adolescents were past masters at hiding things from adults, it came with the job description. She’d had the Talk with Johnny the previous winter, so it wasn’t like he didn’t know where babies came from.

She remembered something she’d heard Emaa tell the mother of a teenaged boy who was worrying over sending him to college Outside. “You bring them up good, you teach them all the right things, and you let them go. Nothing else to be done.”

It all came down to trust. She got to her feet and dusted off her jeans. “Thanks for the coffee,” she said to Johnny. “And the consultation.” She was rewarded by a look of surprise on Johnny’s face, and had to suppress a smile. What did he think she would do, yell and carry on? Tackle him and carry him home over her shoulder? Aside from the fact that she wasn’t sure she could, it would cause permanent damage to everyone’s dignity, and Kate didn’t think such an extreme sacrifice was, as yet, called for.

If and when she did, she’d come back with a rope.

She handed him the mug. “Will you think about what I said?”

“I am thinking about it.”

“Where’s the rifle?”

He looked as if he might protest, and then gave in and fetched it from where it was leaning inside the entrance to the mine. It was loaded. The safety was on.

“I told you,” he said, watching her. “Dad taught me.”

“I know he did,” Kate said, shouldering the rifle. “Mutt. Stay.”

Mutt ducked her head and sneezed.

“Oh no, Kate.” For the first time, Johnny showed dismay. “You don’t have to leave Mutt here.”

“Yeah, I do.”

Mutt gave a soft whine when she saw Kate climb on the four-wheeler. “Stay,” Kate repeated. To Johnny she said, “You can send her home in the morning when you leave for school.”

“Kate!”

She caught a glimpse of his expression as she turned the four-wheeler, and waited until she was facing away from him to let the grin spread across her face.

Kate was never without Mutt. Mutt was never without Kate. It was the only other given in the world besides death and taxes, and Johnny was well acquainted with it. Kate didn’t want to leave Mutt with him, but she was doing it because she’d taken back the rifle. Kate would be alone on the homestead. And Mutt, bless her melodramatic heart, was adding to the effect as she gazed yearningly after Kate as if her last hope of heaven was vanishing down the hill before her very eyes.

Kate felt smug as she put-putted her way home through the dusk. Not for nothing had she learned at the knee of that champion layer-on of guilt, Ekaterina Moonin Shugak.

Later, she would berate herself for being so self-involved that she hadn’t noticed the glow of the flames against the sky.

Later she would curse her failure to hear the crackle of the fire.

Later she would not be able to understand how she had not felt the sheer heat of it radiating outward, that she hadn’t even smelled smoke.

All this she would think and more, later and all too late, but when she rolled into the clearing and saw the interior of the cabin filled with a hungry, red-orange glow, heard the angry snarl of the flames, felt the vicious heat upon her face, felt the sharp sting of smoke in her nostrils, all she could think was “Johnny!” and all she could feel was a sharp spear of terror so abrupt, so visceral, and so overwhelming that her legs buckled beneath her when she tried to dismount.

She staggered and nearly fell before reason reasserted itself. No, she thought, in one of the few clear thoughts she was to hold dear that night, no, Johnny, wonderfully, marvelously prescient Johnny was safe and whole and unburned, tucked into his bedroll at the entrance to the Lost Wife Mine, kept company by an equally wonderful Vanessa and guarded by even more wonderful Mutt. She knew a moment of absolute relief as overwhelming as the moment of sheer terror that had preceded it, and her legs did give way this time, pitching her forward onto her hands and knees, utterly undone, vulnerable as she had never been in her life. She stared, dumbstruck, unable to move, struck motionless by disbelief.

There was an ominous creak and a small pop! of sound, and through the window she could see the flames lick higher, higher, tickling at the ladder to the loft and then the loft itself.

This was her father’s house. He had built it and brought her mother home to it, Kate had lived there all her life, and now it was going, eaten alive by a ravenous, red-maned beast.

The next thing she knew she was on her feet and moving forward.

“No,” she said out loud, and she was at the door.

“Don’t do this,” she said, and the door, already open, swung wide.

“Stop right now, you idiot!” she screamed, and she was inside.

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