Catch Me if Yukon

by Maddy Hunter

  “I believe the justice system realizes the prisoner won’t live that long,” clarified Ennis. “They just want to ensure that he’s never released. He buried his victims in isolated spots near Anchorage and its environs, and to this day the authorities have no idea if they found every victim. The final tally could actually be much higher than forty-nine. And this was just one man. Think how many other bodies could still be out there, killed by men who were never caught.”

  As we stared at him, spellbound, he opened his bag of chips and popped one into his mouth. “The Pacific Northwest boasts a lion’s share of known serial killers. I doubt Tilly will give me any flak about that. But why the cluster in this part of the country? Is it the weather? The isolation? A misguided belief that if someone lives off the grid, he can basically get away with murder without anyone ever finding out? Or is there a different reason entirely? Something more primal. More terrifying. Something that—”

  “Do you have any stories that revolve around something other than serial killers?” I said in a rush of words as the expressions at our table drifted from attentive to alarmed.

  He snapped his mouth shut and smiled self-consciously. “Sorry. I’ve been known to hop onto my soapbox with no encouragement whatsoever. So…why don’t we move along to the theories part of my narrative? I suspect Tilly can back me up here as well.”

  Tilly angled her eyebrows at a stern angle. “We’ll see.”

  “Alaska is so big,” Ennis continued, “with so many impenetrable forests, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility to speculate that there could be creatures, or beings, living in the densest, most isolated areas who never reached the top rung of the evolutionary ladder.”

  “Oh. My. God.” Delpha Spillum burst into laughter. “Are you talking about Bigfoot?”

  Ennis nodded. “Bigfoot. Sasquatch. The Yukon Howler. Thunderfoot. Bushman. The Woodsman. The creature goes by a half-dozen names, but the mythology doesn’t change. Some of Alaska’s indigenous tribes have even incorporated mention of the creature into their religious culture, from as far back as five hundred years. Prospectors. Homesteaders. Miners. They all swear they’ve witnessed the same thing: a creature covered in brown fur, from seven to ten feet tall in an upright stance, who weighs anywhere from four- to twelve-hundred pounds and leaves a footprint twenty- to twenty-four inches long and ten inches wide. If such a creature truly exists and proves to be hostile to the outside world, I think you’ll find the explanation for why so many people vanish without a trace in our forty-ninth state.”

  “This is so bogus!” crowed Delpha. “Why are you passing along such foolishness, Ennis? The legend of Bigfoot is bunk. Hokum. Balderdash. Hogwash. Twaddle.”

  Delpha Spillum was the recently retired editor of the Windsor City Register, so her brain was home to an impressive stockpile of synonyms.

  “You’ve been reading too many folklore articles that aren’t peer-reviewed,” she accused. “Imagine the blowback I would’ve received if I’d written an article in the Register about the veracity of Bigfoot sightings. I would’ve been run out of town on a rail, and rightly so. But here you are, a well-respected academic, filling everyone’s head with all this Sasquatch nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Ennis flashed her an almost intimate smile, disguised as a boyish grin. “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel, Del?”

  Delpha Spillum had devoted her life to the Windsor City Register. A family-run enterprise started by her grandfather, she’d inherited ownership from her father and for forty years had treated the paper as if it were her husband, children, lover, and adored pet. With the shift in culture from print to cyber news, however, the Register lost significant readership and advertising dollars, so, ceding to pressure, she’d sold the business and watched it morph from a daily newspaper to a digital venture, with a print edition appearing only once a week.

  Being a product of strong, psychologically stable Norwegian stock, Delpha didn’t whine about the cannibalization of the family business. Instead, she bought a slew of yoga pants, leggings, speed tights, and jeggings and redirected her energy into a fitness program that included running, spinning, weight training, yoga, and Ironman competitions. At sixty-something, she was buff to the extreme and turned more than one head when she paraded around in her athletic outfits, which she wore as both street and traveling clothes. From what I could tell, her one obvious nod to her former life was her cell phone case, which was a laminated sheet of bold black-and-white newsprint. Custom ordered, no doubt, and infinitely more adult than my own Cinderella case, which had been a gift from Nana.

  These weekly runs of hers to the Dollar Store were killing me.

  “C’mon, Del,” Ennis scolded, “don’t be so quick to thumb your nose at the legends. People claim to have witnessed giant apelike creatures with furry pelts just about everywhere on the planet. I suspect Tilly might even back me up on this.”

  Tilly gave her head a reluctant nod. “Ennis is right.” She began ticking off names on her fingers. “The Abominable Snowman, or Yeti, in the Himalayas. Almasty in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia. Yowie in Australia. Wendigo in Canada. Yeren in China. And they all seem to share the same physical characteristics—that of a Cyclopean hominid who’s both hirsute and bipedal.”

  “What’d she say?” asked George.

  “I think she said they ride bicycles,” offered Nana.

  “Translated into laymen’s terms,” Ennis jumped in, “Tilly is talking about an extraordinarily tall man who’s covered in hair and stands on two feet.”

  “I married someone who fit that description,” Bernice said on a wistful note.

  “Was your husband exceptionally tall?” I asked.

  “Five foot two.”

  Orphie frowned. “That’s not tall.”

  “It was back then.”

  “You guys can believe what you want to believe,” concluded Delpha, “but without concrete scientific evidence, this whole legend thing doesn’t fly. My question is, if there have been so many sightings, how come not one of the witnesses has been able to snatch even a hair from the creature’s pelt to test its mitochondrial DNA?”

  “Actually, a geneticist from Oxford University did perform DNA tests,” said Tilly. “Most of the sample hairs were shown to have either horse, bear, or cow DNA. But one sample proved to be a hybrid—combining the genetic markers of a polar bear and something else. But he wasn’t able to prove with any scientific authority what the ‘something else’ was.”

  “Polar bear?” croaked George. “These fellas traipsed all the way to the Arctic?”

  “This is where the mystery becomes even more intriguing,” said Tilly. “The sample was taken from a creature in the Himalayas that was assumed to be a Yeti.”

  “Of course,” needled Delpha. “I see photographs of polar bears scampering over ice floes on Mount Everest all the time, don’t you?”

  “Well, would you lookit that?” Nana’s jaw dropped as she peered across the room. “Florence and Thor’s done eatin’ already. I bet he was hurryin’ her up so’s he could run back up to the observation deck and stake out the best spot to see the glacier.”

  We followed her gaze to watch Thor storm full speed ahead toward the exit while Florence chased behind him, weighed down by a full complement of his photographic equipment.

  Ennis gave his head a disgusted shake. “Remember the month we read that bestseller about the guy who treated his wife like Leona Helmsley treated her employees?”

  “I can’t think of the title, but I remember Thor ranted forever about how much he hated it,” Orphie confided. “Probably hit too close to home.”

  “But he failed to see any similarities between himself and the main protagonist,” added Delpha. “Here we thought a few light bulbs might go on over his head after he read about the tragic but fitting end of a fictional character whose personality mirrored his own, b
ut he simply panned the book. He called it a seamy melodrama with no basis in reality.” She laughed. “The irony of it all. A man who is utterly devoid of self-awareness despises a book’s protagonist for displaying the same obnoxious traits that are the hallmarks of the man’s own personality. Priceless.”

  “Some might call that self-loathing,” suggested Ennis.

  Orphie heaved a sigh as she directed a pathetic look at me. “We don’t like Thor much.”

  “Then why did you invite him to join your book club?”

  “Because we really like Florence,” Delpha answered for her. “Everyone loves Florence. But Thor wouldn’t allow her to join our book club unless he joined too, so we ended up with both of them.”

  “The wheat along with the chaff,” lamented Orphie. “If you watch closely, you’ll notice he rarely lets her out of his sight.”

  “He’s probably afraid she’ll run away if he’s not there to watch her every move,” said Ennis.

  “And then the poor baby might have to carry his own stinking camera equipment,” bristled Delpha.

  “Out of curiosity,” I asked as I watched Florence struggle to readjust the multitude of straps hanging from her neck, “what kind of tragic end did the protagonist in your book meet?”

  “It was brilliant,” cooed Orphie. “He and his wife take a backcountry hiking trip in the wilds of Montana. His idea, not hers. She comes back. He’s never seen again. Her story? Her husband was attacked by a grizzly and dragged off to God knows where. She claims she barely escaped with her own life, and naturally, the police can’t prove otherwise because the two of them were so far off the grid, no one was around to witness anything.”

  Delpha nodded. “But in the very last paragraph, the wife is back home, trailing a nostalgic finger over the stuff in his office, and she suddenly removes a nine-by-twelve of him from its frame and rips it into a million pieces. And she does it in such a slow, satisfying manner that you know he wasn’t mauled by any grizzly. She killed him herself.”

  “He was such a pompous snot,” spat Orphie.

  I stared after the Thorsens as they exited the galley. “What did Florence think of the book?”

  “She loved it,” said Ennis. “She read it twice to see if she’d missed any clues about how the wife might have knocked him off.”

  “For those of you still in the galley,” the captain announced, “you might want to finish up your meal and head topside because we’re approaching the Aialik Glacier.”

  Mayhem ensued as passengers clambered out of their booths to head for the exits. Ennis and I popped out of our seats to allow our table companions to vacate our booth, then quickly stepped aside to avoid being trampled.

  Iowans shun the practice of being fashionably late, but my guys take it up a notch from there. With them, everything has to be a footrace to the finish, complete with tangled limbs, flying elbows, and bragging rights. In their eyes, punctuality isn’t a virtue; it’s a competitive sport.

  “I’m anxious to see the glacier,” Ennis said, laughing, “but I’m apparently not as hell-bent as the rest of them.”

  “Have you heard from your wife yet?” I asked as we motored into view of a broad expanse of snow nestled between two mountainous slopes. “Florence mentioned that she’d texted Lorraine several times but hadn’t received a response, so she’s worried that something catastrophic has happened.”

  “You mean, something more catastrophic than Lorraine’s mother breaking her hip the day before our tour?” Ennis shook his head. “Lorraine said she’d call me after things quieted down on her end. She doesn’t want to ruin my vacation with medical updates, which is pretty thoughtful of her, but that’s the way Lorraine operates. Her mom’s in good hands with Lorraine running the show, so I’m just going to chill out and wait for details. I think this is one of those cases where no news is good news.”

  “Would you tell that to Florence when you see her? She’s twisting herself into knots over those unanswered texts.”

  “I’ll do it first thing.”

  Climbing the stairs to the observation deck, we joined the scores of other passengers who were vying for plum spots at the rail where they could take selfies using the glacier as a backdrop. To the left of the ice shelf, the sloped cliffs were green with a forest of evergreens, while in the background, from the peaks of higher elevations, waterfalls cascaded downward over ironbound ledges, tumbling into valleys that looked untouched by human exploration. To the glacier’s right, shoulders of unscalable rock hunched together at the water’s edge, dark and forbidding, looking as if they had been thrust forward in a ruthless shove by the hulking, saw-toothed summits that crowded together behind them.

  “The Aialik’s a mile wide,” the captain informed us as we motored closer, “and if you think the snowpack looks like it’s tinted blue, you’re not seeing things. It is. The ice is so dense, it absorbs every color except blue, so that’s the only color visible to the naked eye.”

  “Do you know where your grandmother is, Emily?” Mom came up behind me trussed in an orange life vest that hugged her chest like overinflated bumpers.

  “She­—” I eyed the other life vest that was dangling from her arm. “Is that the surprise?”

  “You bet. I talked some nice young crewman into fetching a couple.” She held it up, scrutinizing the length of the straps. “One size is supposed to fit all, but I’m more than a little skeptical that it’ll fit around your grandmother.” She swiveled her head, searching. “Is she still in the galley?”

  “She’s—” I swirled my hand in the air in the general direction of nowhere. “Actually, I don’t know where she is.”

  “Probably waiting in line for the potty. I’ll just pop down to meet her.”

  “No!”

  “What’s with the life jackets?” asked Dick Teig as he circled around us. “Are we having a lifeboat drill or something?”

  “It’s Mom’s surprise,” I quipped. “For Nana.”

  He looked suspicious as he headed toward Dick Stolee. “Emily’s mother’s wearing a life jacket.”

  “Why?”

  Dick Teig shrugged. “You suppose they’re gonna surprise us with a lifeboat drill?”

  “That’d be some surprise,” snorted Dick Stolee. “Maybe you haven’t noticed. There aren’t any lifeboats.”

  “Mom,” I said as I grabbed her arm and navigated her toward the stern, “how about I take your picture in front of the pretty glacier?”

  The captain’s voice rang out again. “You’ll note that the color of the seawater has changed, folks. It’s gone from a deep marine blue to a chalky aquamarine, kinda like what you might see if you stirred a little flour into a bottle of window cleaner.”

  “S’cuse me. S’cuse me,” I said politely as I squeezed Mom into a place near the rail.

  “The change to chalky turquoise occurs when particles from the glacier’s meltwater enter the bay,” the captain continued. “We call it glacial milk. And this is the time of year when ice usually breaks away from the main flow and forms iceb—whoa! Do you hear that?”

  The air suddenly filled with a deep, menacing rumble, like distant thunder…or cannon fire. Powder sloughed off from the glacial wall in a snowy waterfall, and then a towering pinnacle cracked like river ice and broke away from the cliff face, crashing into the surf with an earsplitting roar that sent spray in every direction and an ominous wave rolling in our direction.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” cried Mom.

  “Stay calm,” I soothed. “The captain knows what he’s do—”

  “Stay calm? You’re talking to a woman who saw Titanic fourteen times in surround sound, Emily. I know exactly what’s going to happen next. Iceberg dead ahead!” she cried. “Run for your lives! Save yourselves while there’s still time!” Which caused an immediate panic among the passengers who weren’t wearing life vests.

&nbs
p; They stampeded blindly to left and right, spinning in circles, bumping into each other, their cries of alarm piercing the air as the wave crashed into our hull.

  “Man the lifeboats!”

  “What lifeboats?”

  “Where’s the life jackets?”

  The boat plunged into a trough, pitching and bobbing like a cork before rising onto a swell. The deck lurched. The boat creaked.

  “We’re not in danger!” bellowed the captain. “Stop the commotion. We’re not in the North Atlantic, and you’re not on the Titanic.”

  His assurance was comforting, but since Mom had gone down with the ship fourteen times in surround sound, I doubted she believed him.

  The good news was, at least she hadn’t seen it in 3-D.

  three

  Not only did the newly calved iceberg not tear a gash in the Kenai’s hull, it floated away so innocuously that a group of kayakers enjoyed their own adventure by paddling around the smaller chunks of drift ice in the extensive debris field. We remained at the site long enough to satisfy everyone’s burning desire to include the glacier in their headshots, and then we began the journey back to Seward Harbor, stopping along the way to tuck our nose into coves where sea lions lazed on sun-warmed rocks and gulls screeched overhead.

  Mom was so unnerved by the incident that she spent the rest of the trip in the galley with Dad, so she missed the islands of chiseled rock that were shaped like beehives, daggers, and porcupines; the flocks of sea birds that were perched on granite spires; the cliff-hugging, orange-billed puffins whose white chests and black wings made them look as if they were wearing tiny tuxedoes; and the endless ranges of snow-capped mountain peaks creating vistas so majestic, they looked more photoshopped than real.

  Seward Harbor lay nestled in the protected cul-de-sac of Resurrection Bay, at the base of towering vertical mountains. The harbor marina was glutted with watercraft rarely seen in Iowa—tour boats, catamarans, cabin cruisers, power boats, and schooners whose naked masts resembled a jumble of giant chopsticks. Once back at the dock, we shuffled down the metal gangplank onto the pier, then made our way to the waterfront parking lot, where our coach, with its distinct aurora borealis motif, awaited us.