A Grave Denied

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.

Joh

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.”

Joh

She pulled herself together. “Yes, of course. Horrible thing to have happen. Awful. Shot, you said?”

“With a shotgun,” Joh

“Jim was there?”

Joh

“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 di

“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 ca

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 ski

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, co

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 thi

The thi

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 Joh