A grave denied (3 page)

“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.