A Grave Denied

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 Joh

Initially, the plan was to have added a room on to her cabin. The winter together had changed her mind. Or, truthfully, Joh

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, Joh

“You’re kind of solitary,” he said. “You like living alone or you wouldn’t be here on your dad’s homestead in the middle of twenty million acres of national park, with the nearest village twenty-five miles down an unpaved, unmaintained road.” He wasn’t being confrontational or accusatory, exactly. It was more like he’d adopted the impartial air of the scholar. A sociologist, perhaps, come to the Park to examine non-mainstream socioeconomic systems, about which he would then write his thesis, which would then earn him a doctorate, followed by a publishing contract, followed by a visiting chair at UC Berkeley, a college in a state which celebrated alternative lifestyles.

Joh

“Right so far,” she said obediently.

“I want to stay here with you. I’m not going back to Anchorage to live with her, and I’m sure as hell not going back to Arizona to live with my grandmother. I don’t want to be anywhere else but here, so if I’m smart I’m going to a

She couldn’t help laughing a little. “You don’t a

He gri

Amused, she said, “Oh, you are, are you?”

“Yes. It’s why I couldn’t stand Arizona, too many people. Which is why I think I need a cabin of my own.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“It doesn’t have to be as big as this one,” he said quickly. “No loft. Just room enough for a chair, a woodstove, a sink, and a bed. Maybe a desk where I can study. Look,” he said, and pulled out a notebook. “Like this.”

He’d drawn a floor plan that bore a strong resemblance to the cabins at Camp Teddy, and showed signs of having been influenced by Ruthe Bauman, the camp’s owner. Kate had to admit they had done a good job of it.

He took that as an opening. “It’d be a lot easier, a lot less labor-intensive to build a new, separate cabin than to add on to this one,” he said.

“It’ll cost more in materials,” she said, more to test him than to contradict him.

“Not really,” he said. “Look, I found a book on construction in the school library,” and he hauled it out. “You add on, you gotta mess with stuff like the foundation, and then there’s the roof.” He slapped the book shut. “And think about having to live in the mess while the construction’s going on. If we build me my own cabin, we can just live here until it’s done, like we are now. I figure we could get it done this summer, and I could move in in the fall, when school starts.”

He made a good argument. Still. “Joh

“I’ll only be thirty feet away. I measured it last night, come on, take a look,” and he dragged her into the yard. He’d been busy with strings and pegs, laying out a neat square on the other side of the outhouse, and had taken advantage of the mud to draw in the floor plan.

He watched her as she paced it out. She looked up to see the determined expression on his face, the sun slanting across it, making his blue eyes narrow, highlighting the untidy thatch of thick dark hair falling over his forehead, the stubborn chin. The strong resemblance to his father didn’t hurt anymore.

Well. Not as much.

Snow was melting inside the tops of her te

They sat down at the kitchen table over new cups of cocoa. “I don’t know,” she said. “Kids are supposed to live with their parents.”

“Not this kid,” Joh

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, “let’s not go there, okay?”

“I’m not living with her, I don’t care what she does or says.”

“I know, I know, calm down.” Her was Jane Morgan, Jack’s ex-wife, Joh

Kate, deciding that ru

In this, she had the tacit approval of the law in the Park, in the person of state trooper Jim Chopin, who was currently involved in a building project of his own. Yes, the troopers were opening a post in Niniltna, staffed by the aforesaid Chopper Jim, an event that in Kate’s eyes drastically shortened the twenty-five miles of road between the village and the homestead. It seemed to have a distinct effect on the regularity of her heartbeat and respiration, too, so she tried not to dwell on it.

“Okay,” she had said. “We’ll build you your own cabin.”

Joh

She gri

“That works both ways,” he replied smartly.

She got up to rinse out her mug in the sink. “Dream on,” she said to the window, and had hoped that he hadn’t noticed the flush beneath the brown of her skin. The only downside to Joh

She was recalled to the present by the sun going behind the tops of the trees. The stone seat had gone cold, and she slid to her feet and walked back to the cabin. With Len Dreyer dead, she was going to have to put Joh

She was on the doorstep, kicking the mud from her shoes, when a movement caught the corner of her eye. She looked up and saw a tall man enter the clearing. “Oh shit,” she said beneath her breath.