McClanahan propped one foot on a chunk of ice, clasped her hands on her knee, and frowned down at them. “It’s the first week of May. From anecdotal reports we know that the glacier stopped thrusting forward in September of last year. My guess would be that the cave has not altered in any substantial way since last fall. The winter temperatures and the insulating layer of winter snowfall would have maintained the interior surface of the cave. Further.” Very much the learned lecturer condensing specialized information for consumption by an amateur audience, she held up one finger to forestall Kate’s comment. “Had the body been placed there this spring, the difference in temperature between the ice and the body would inevitably have left some mark.”
“An outline?” Johnny said.
Kate, remembering the sound of melting water that had surrounded her in the cave, said, “It wouldn’t have melted?”
McClanahan considered this. “Given the difference in temperature between solid ice and human flesh, no matter how dead, and with the temperature outside the cave steadily rising, I believe I would have been able to detect some mark. If, on the other hand, the body had been placed there late last fall, with temperatures already falling steadily, perhaps also with the body already chilled itself, very little impression would have been left, easily erased during spring melt off.”
“So, bottom line,” Kate said. “Was the body placed there last fall or this spring?”
“One cannot say for sure,” McClanahan said. “Or at least this one can’t. But my best guess would be earlier than this spring. Well before breakup, let’s say. How deep was last winter’s snowfall?”
“Why?”
“How long would it take given this spring’s ambient temperatures to melt that much snow, so that the cave would be revealed and someone could deposit a body inside it?”
Kate looked back at the open slash of the cave mouth at the foot of the wide, dirty wall of ice, and had an unwelcome vision of the body of Len Dreyer propped up against the back of the ice cave, sightless eyes staring toward the snow-filled entrance, waiting out the winter until spring and Johnny’s class came to find him. “So, last fall,” she said.
“It’s only a guess,” Millie said, “but I’d say yes.”
Plus, so far no one reported seeing Dreyer after October, Kate thought. Bobby might have been the last one to see him alive.
“What’s your paper going to be about, Millie?” Johnny said.
“ ‘The Effect of Seismic Events and Meteorological Transformation on Glacial Geomorphology in Interior Alaska,”“ McClanahan replied promptly.
Johnny gulped. “What does that mean?”
“You know about earthquake faults?”
“Sure. Everybody in Alaska knows about earthquake faults.”
“You know about the Alaska-Aleutian megathrust subduction zone?”
“Uh, where the two main faults butt up against each other?”
“Not bad,” McClanahan said. “There may be hope for you, Mr. Morgan. My paper examines what effect that zone may or may not have on the thrust and retreat of Alaskan glaciers. With a sidebar on the weather, including global warming.”
“Oh,” Johnny said, and hesitated. “Maybe…”
“Maybe what?”
“Well, maybe I could read it?”
She laughed and cuffed his shoulder. “Sure. I’ll even give you an English/geology dictionary to help you in the translation.”
At that moment the entire face of Grant Glacier seemed to shudder and shift. A second later an immense boom! rocked them back and a piece of ice the size of Gibraltar came crashing down to shatter into a million shards all over the entrance of the ice cave. A splinter whizzed by Kate’s face, and to her everlasting shame she yelped and ducked out of the way.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” McClanahan said.
Steady employment was more the exception than the norm in the Alaskan Bush. Most Park rats lived a subsistence lifestyle, eating what they caught or killed, fishing in summer for money to buy food and fuel. Some trapped, but the competition was stiff and the wildlife not as populous as it used to be, and Dan O’Brian was a fierce enforcer of quotas. A few lucky guys had signed early on to oil spill response training, funded directly by the partial settlement coming out of the RPetCo oil spill in 1989, which made them members of a permanent on-call team, for which they drew a stipend that wasn’t much but was better than nothing. George Perry ran Chugach Air Taxi Service out of the Park, and Demetri Totemoff led hunts for moose and caribou and deer in the fall and bear in the spring, and any help they needed was strictly seasonal. There were a few fur trappers left, and even fewer gold miners.
But by far and away the most jobs were generated by the government, state and federal, and the support services thereof. Auntie Vi started a bed-and-breakfast out of her home in Niniltna because of the need for temporary housing for the fish hawks who came and went with the salmon, and when word got around was inundated with rangers, sports fishermen, hunters, poachers, and the occasional pair of lovers who couldn’t find any privacy in Anchorage. To Auntie Vi’s ill-concealed horror, the word seemed to have spread to the tourists. She tried to discourage them by doubling her rates, but they only went home and told all their friends about this quaint little Eskimo woman who ran a B &B out in the middle of Alaska and who made great fry bread. Kate didn’t know if Auntie Vi was more disgusted at being called an Eskimo, being called quaint, or having to hire two maids to help out, which put her on the wrong side of the Social Security Administration but which also made for two more jobs for the Park.
The previous year the pressure on her kitchen had been so great that Auntie Vi had coerced the Niniltna Native Association into fronting the money for a little cafe on River Street, not that the street was identified as such by anything so unParklike as a street sign. Laurel Meganack was the chief cook and bottle washer, and her menus ran heavily to hamburgers and French fries, but her fountain Cokes were good and, well, there wasn’t really anywhere else to eat out in Niniltna since Bernie refused to get into the selling of any food that didn’t come already shrink-wrapped. That first winter the high school kids took to hanging out there, so they left it open year-round. The fact that Laurel was Niniltna Native Association board member Harvey Meganack’s niece probably had a lot to do with her getting hired in the first place, but it didn’t hurt that she was an extremely nubile twenty-three, had a glimmer of big-city sophistication from having gone to high school in Cordova (a vast metropolis of some two thousand people), and was an Association shareholder herself. Art Totemoff was hired as kitchen help, and so there were two more full-time jobs that hadn’t been there before. There was also a receptionist/secretary position at the Association headquarters, generally filled by a descendent of whoever was the current tribal chief.
But the best full-time, year-round job in Niniltna was that of postmaster. It had more pay and better benefits than any other job within a hundred miles, and the competition for it was fierce. There were families still living in the Park who weren’t speaking because a son of one had beat out the daughter of another for the position, and there were always dark mutterings of nepotism and influence whenever it went to one person over the other.
Bonnie Jeppsen, the current officeholder, had won the job over next-door neighbor Kay Kreuger, from which tiny seed a memorable breakup had grown like chickweed, leading to not one but two shootouts at the Roadhouse involving live ammunition. Kate had been instrumental in the altercation’s resolution, commandeering a D-6 Caterpillar tractor in the process, and she was never quite sure of her welcome when she darkened the post office’s doorstep. Bonnie was unfailingly civil and so far as Kate knew she got all her mail, so she approached the post office now in the hope that enough time had passed that Bonnie would be willing to talk to her about something other than postage.