“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.