In response to a signal, Mutt launched herself into the brush and flushed a bunch of rabbits from a peaceful browse. She wasn’t really hungry, but they didn’t know that and scattered in a starburst of white tails.

Johnny was the first to regain his composure. “Would you like some coffee?”

Kate, now that she could see Johnny had not, after all, shot his eye out with the.30-06, decided firstly that Johnny could live, and secondly that she must retain rights to the grown-up in this situation. As such, she would not lose her temper. She chanted that six or seven times to herself, and when it finally took replied, “Sounds good.”

It was after ten o’clock and the sun was as near to setting as it ever got in May at that latitude. The mine entrance was high on a hill and commanded a sweeping view of the valley leading up to the plateau known as the Step, and the Quilak Mountains beyond. The sky was without color, neither the blue of day nor the black of night, and no stars shone save the faint golden glow of the one setting behind the hill the mine tunneled into.

The camp, Kate had to admit, was a cozy affair. Johnny had built up a sleeping platform on spruce boughs, cushioned with a tarp, a Thermarest, and a sleeping bag, set just inside the overhang of the cave out of the dew and the rain. A little fire pit was lined neatly with flat rocks he must have hauled up from the creek in back of the homestead. Canned goods were lined up like soldiers on a shelf made from two weather-stained Blazo boxes, both of which Kate recognized as having been salvaged from the dwindling stack behind the shop. He’d brought his CD player and a carrier full of CDs. Kate saw a bargain pack of batteries for the player and for his book light, which had been folded into the paperback copy of A Civil Campaign that sat on his sleeping bag.

No way had he moved this much stuff up here in one day. He’d been planning this for some time.

Mutt had interrupted him in the middle of writing in a notebook, which lay open on the ground. Kate picked it up along with the pen she found a few feet away, only to have Johnny remove both from her hands. He wasn’t abrupt about it, or embarrassed, just polite, and firm.

She took a deep breath and reminded herself again that she was the grown-up here.

“Here,” he said, “take my seat.” Gravely, he proffered a rough but recognizable chair, with back, sliced out of a round section of tree trunk with what had probably been her chain saw.

Kate’s sense of humor got the better of her at this point. “Thank you, Mr. Crusoe,” she said. She sat down. Her butt overlapped both sides but it got the job done. She waited while the water boiled in a saucepan, and didn’t offer to help measure coffee into the filter. The resulting brew threatened to remove the enamel from her teeth, but that was okay because that was how she liked it. She added some evaporated milk from a can and sipped. He did, too.

She wondered when he’d moved on from cocoa to coffee. “Nice camp,” she said.

“Thanks,” Johnny said.

“You’ve been planning this for a while.”

He nodded. “Ever since she showed up in the Park last fall.”

“That long? I’m impressed. But then your father was quite a planner, too.”

“He told me patience was the most important thing when you wanted something. He told me not to rush, that rushing just got you nowhere faster.”

Kate thought of Jack Morgan, of all the time he’d served for her after she’d left Anchorage, and him. Eighteen months he had waited, until exactly the right event had drawn her back into his orbit, by the time when she’d been willing to allow herself to be drawn. It had worked, too. “Smart man, your father.”

“I think so.”

Mutt came padding back up the hill and flopped down next to Kate with a sigh of satisfaction. Kate let her hand drop down into the thick gray coat. As always, the warm, solid bulk pressed against her side was comfort and consolation, reassurance and support. Mutt was her alter ego, her backup man, her sister, her friend. Her savior, on more than one occasion.

Kate wished Mutt could save her now. She felt as if she were walking through a mine field, that wherever she put a foot down there was the possibility of an explosion that would destroy forever what fragile relationship she had managed to build with Johnny Morgan. She didn’t mind making him mad, but she didn’t want to alienate him. “I’ve been talking to some people today,” she said.

“Yeah? Who?”

“People who knew Len Dreyer.”

He’d all but forgotten the body in the glacier under the pressure of more important affairs. “Len Dreyer?” He caught himself. “Oh. Yeah. The dead guy.”

Kate nodded, and took a sip of coffee.

“So,” Johnny said, curious in spite of himself. “What did they say?”

“Not much,” she said. “It’s weird. Everybody knew him but nobody really knew him. Near as I can figure, he worked at one time or another for pretty much every Park rat with a building or a boat. They all paid him in cash. All of them were referred to him by either Bernie or Bonnie.”

“Who’s Bonnie?”

“The postmistress.”

“Oh. Mrs. Jeppsen.”

“Yeah. Nobody can remember him having a girlfriend. Nobody remembers him having a friend-friend. Nobody can remember him mentioning family. Nobody knows where he came from. Every single person I’ve talked to so far says he showed up when he said he would and he did the work well. Nobody’s complained about him overcharging, so I’m guessing he worked for a reasonable rate.”

“What about where he lives? Have you checked that out? There might be papers and stuff.”

“There might have been, if his cabin hadn’t burned down.”

“Oh. Ohhhhh,” Johnny said, and his eyes brightened, so that he looked more like fourteen calendar years old and less like a wary fourteen going on forty. “You mean someone burned it down so you wouldn’t find out anything about him?”

“Maybe,” Kate said. “I don’t like coincidences. I find someone shooting Len Dreyer and his cabin burning down coincidental in the extreme.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said, his brows knit. “When did the cabin burn down?”

“From 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.“ ”