'Damn right I am,” Gideon said, and snatched it off the plate before John could make his grab.
* * * *
Shirley Yount stopped them on the boardwalk outside by standing squarely in their way, hands on hips, elbows akimbo, feet planted. A formidable figure.
'I understand that little fart says I stole his diary.'
'Yes. ma'am, you could say that,” John said.
She glared at John, very nearly eye to eye. “Well, I didn't,” she said.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter 15
* * * *
The daily turnaround flight between Juneau and Gustavus is surely one of the most spectacular jet flights in America. Going southeast, toward Juneau, you leave the flat Gustavus plain, with Glacier Bay tilting on your left, rise quickly over Icy Strait and the huddled green Chilkat Mountains, and wing out over the Inside Passage. Below, in the muted blue water, are the thousand forested, uninhabited islands of the Alexander Archipelago, and a few miles to the east the rearing, gleaming white chain of the Boundary Range. Beyond them, in British Columbia, appears the even grander, whiter mass of the great Coast Range, stretching out of sight to the north and south. Toward the end of the flight, the vast Juneau ice field comes into view (larger than the state of Rhode Island, the pilot informs you over the public-address system), and, finally, as the plane wheels and drops toward Juneau Airport, the colossal, frozen river that is Mendenhall Glacier, impressive even after Glacier Bay.
All this in twelve minutes’ air time, in a 727 that never gets more than four thousand feet off the ground and seems to float between the two airports like a dirigible with wings. Few passengers do anything during the twelve minutes but stare out the windows, struck dumb. But Julie and Gideon hadn't even glanced up, hadn't stopped talking.
They hadn't stopped talking since he'd met her boat at the pier at a little after four, Persuading her to play hooky for a day had taken all of thirty seconds. Trying to explain what was going on had taken the rest of the two hours, even with John's help on the drive to Gustavus. Small wonder. When she'd started off that morning the only mystery had been the pierced skull from 1960, and that had been mystery enough. But by the time Gideon saw her again nine hours later, Tremaine had been found dead; the manuscript had disappeared; Burton Wu had come, made his pronouncements, and gone; Elliott Fisk's journal had been stolen; and dark, old motives were popping to the surface like fizz in a glass of Alka-Seltzer.
It had been a hell of a day.
'So what's your working hypothesis?” Julie asked as the wheels touched down. “That Tremaine was killed to keep him quiet about the other murder?'
'Who has a working hypothesis?” Gideon pushed back into his seat against the strain of the backthrust as the plane touched down, and waited for the engine roar to quiet. “But if I had one, I guess that'd be it.'
'But who would even know what happened out there, besides Tremaine? Everybody else was killed in—” She made one of her pitiful attempts at snapping her fingers. “I forgot. John thinks Dr. Judd might not really have been that sick, that he might have followed them out there and killed Steven Fisk himself and then gotten back out before the avalanche.'
'No, that's just an outside possibility. I don't think he really believes it.'
Julie unstrapped her seat belt as the plane rolled to a stop, and stood up.
'What do
'I don't think it's too likely either.” He flicked open his seat belt, stretched, and stood up too. “What are we saying—'
Her hand went out. “Gideon—'
But she was too late. Straightening, he thumped his head on the overhead rack. “Damn!'
'It's just amazing,” she said. “You do it every time. You never miss. Some physical anthropologist in five hundred years is probably going to go bonkers trying to figure out how your skull got so lumpy.'
Wincing, Gideon rubbed his head. “Thank you for your concern,” he grumbled, and looked at his hand. “No blood, anyway.'
A flicker of worry crossed her face, like a shadow. “You're all right, aren't you?'
'Sure,” he said with a quick smile, “I built up a callus there years ago.” He reached up for their bags and squeezed her hand as they headed out of the near-empty plane. Julie squeezed back.
'Anyway,” he said, “what would we be saying Judd did? Went sneaking over the glacier after them? You can't sneak over a glacier like Tirku, not without being seen. So, if not for a fortuitous avalanche, which he couldn't have predicted, there would have been three witnesses to the murder, or at least three people who saw him there.'
Julie nodded. “That's so. And Tremaine himself was right there. Why would he keep quiet about it all these years? From what John said, there wasn't any love lost between the two of them.'
They entered the terminal building ('Wipe your feet,” the no-nonsense sign on the door told them), walked past the ten-foot-high stuffed polar bear that greets incoming passengers, and went out into the misty drizzle.
The fifteen-minute trip downtown was made in Juneau's version of an airport limousine, an old school bus painted blue, with MGT (for Mendenhall Glacier Transport) on the side. The route took them through the Mendenhall wetlands, a bleak silt plain left behind by the retreating glacier, then along Gastineau Channel, Juneau's sole avenue to the Inside Passage and the outside world. As with Glacier Bay—as with much of coastal Alaska—the only ways in or out of the state capital were by air and by water. The one highway out of Juneau led thirty-six miles to Auke Bay. And back.
