Someone had burned down her cabin, her home, all her belongings, her clothes, her music. Her books.
But all that was only by-product. Someone had snuck up to her house in the middle of the night with intent to commit murder, and it wasn’t their fault that they hadn’t been successful twice over.
Johnny snorted and shifted into another impossible position. People had made attempts on her life before. It came with the territory. Stick your nose into someone else’s business, especially in Alaska, where maintaining one’s privacy came somewhere between a vocation and a religion, you ran the danger of getting that nose lopped off. It was an acceptable risk, but it was a risk of which she was always aware and one she had been willing to take for the sake of the greater good.
But this time, Johnny had been put at risk. Her eyes narrowed. Putting a child’s life in danger was not allowed. Someone must be brought to a realization of the error of his ways. Someone must be swiftly and surely punished for it, punished so severely that they knew just how badly they had transgressed, punished so memorably that no one else ever got the idea they could behave the same way.
But first she had to find them. She bent her head back over her task, and not even the creak of bedsprings and the whisper of wheelchair tires distracted her.
The long black arm reaching around and snatching the notepad out of her hands did. Bobby, face like a thundercloud, rifled through the pages and tossed the notepad back in her lap. “Somebody already tried to kill you once,” he said in a furious whisper that had Johnny stirring. “You gonna keep at this until they get the job done?”
Kate picked up the notepad and shook the pages into place without replying.
“Jim fired you off this case, Kate. I heard him. Dinah heard him, Johnny heard him, I think the whole fucking Park might have heard him. He’s not going to be happy when he hears you didn’t stay fired.”
Kate looked him straight in the eye and said calmly, “I find who killed Dreyer, I find who burned down my cabin. You really think I’m going to bother telling Jim when I do?”
She turned back to the list, and Bobby, recognizing a hopeless cause, returned to bed. He lay awake a long time, listening to the scratching of pencil on paper, and didn’t sleep until the light in the living room clicked off.
Dawn came far too early for everyone.
8
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.”