A grave denied by Dana Stabenow Page A

the look of what’s left, I’d say last fall. No later than early this spring because it got snowed on after it burned. I found ice when I kicked at the debris.”
     
    “You think the killer burned it down?”
     
    Kate shrugged. “It’s the simplest answer. And in my experience, the simplest answer is usually the correct answer. Not always, of course. But usually.”
     
    “There must have been something there that the killer didn’t want us to find.”
     
    Kate warmed to the “us.” “Or thought there was,” she said.
     
    Johnny wrapped his hands around his mug. The air was growing chilly. It was still May, after all, no matter how long the sun shone and how far inland they were. “Do you think the killer put the body in the glacier to hide it?”
     
    “Not unless the killer was the dumbest person who ever lived. All glaciers are receding. It’s a geologic fact. I think I learned it from Mr. Kaufman in sixth-grade science.”
     
    “But according to what Ms. Doogan was telling us, last year Grant Glacier thrust forward.”
     
    “What?”
     
    “She told us it pushed forward last year, I think a couple of hundred feet.”
     
    “But what about all glaciers being in recession?” Kate said, feeling cheated. Mr. Kaufman, a strict disciplinarian with no sense of humor, had let her down.
     
    “They are, mostly. Except sometimes, one isn’t. You heard about Hubbard Glacier?”
     
    Kate’s brows knit, then cleared. “Oh yeah, Yakutat Bay. The glacier closed off the neck of some fjord.”
     
    “Russell.”
     
    “Whatever.” Kate grinned. “I remember now, I read about it.” Jack Baird’s air taxi in Bering fell heir to newspapers carried by passengers on their way from Anchorage into the Y-K delta. As holed up as she had been the previous summer, she couldn’t help but notice some of the headlines. “The greenies were all bent out of shape because a bunch of, what, seals got caught behind the ice, and the Tlingits in Yakutat were saying, ”Not a problem, the freezer’s a little empty anyway.“ ”
     
    Johnny grinned. “Really?”
     
    “Really. So why did Grant Glacier thrust forward?”
     
    “No one knows why it happens. Last year all of a sudden Grant pushed forward, right over the top of Grant Lake, you know the lake at the edge of the glacier? Ms. Doogan said you couldn’t hardly see the lake at all.”
     
    “When did it move forward?” Kate said.
     
    “July.” Johnny thought. “The first week of July? I don’t know the exact date.”
     
    “Dan O’Brian would,” Kate said. “When did it move back?”
     
    “When did the glacier start receding again, you mean?” Johnny said. “I don’t remember.”
     
    “Dan would know that, too,” Kate said.
     
    Johnny said, “You think whoever killed Len Dreyer put the body in front of an advancing glacier? Thinking maybe it was the super-duper deep freeze, that nobody’d ever find it?”
     
    Kate shrugged. “It’s a theory. A crevasse somewhere up on the surface would be better, but I’d guess humping the body of a full-grown man up on top of a glacier, no matter how small that glacier is, wouldn’t be all that easy. Or exactly inconspicuous. How big a deal was it when the glacier jumped forward? Did everybody know about it? Did people in the Park go up to gawk?”
     
    “I don’t know.” Johnny was quick, though. “You’re thinking they did, that everybody knew and went up there. So whoever shoved the body in front of it, maybe he was thinking the glacier would keep coming forward. If he thought that, he must have done it at the same time it actually was moving forward.”
     
    “And you’re thinking that puts a date on when the body was left there,” Kate said.
     
    “Why not?” Johnny said, his eyes wide and excited.
     
    “And you’re also thinking that the murderer wouldn’t have waited too long after he or she had killed Dreyer to dispose of the body.”
     
    “Uh-huh.”
     
    “So what you’re