Gideon Oliver was beginning to wonder if coming along with Julie to her training session had been such a good idea. It had made sense when they'd planned it. His fall classes at the University of Washington-Port Angeles would not start for another week, and his notes were fully prepared. He had finally finished the proto-hominid evolution monograph on which he'd been working for most of the summer and sent it in to the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The one case he was handling for the FBI (two skeletons buried under the parking lot of a membership discount department store in Tacoma) was on hold; he'd finished his analysis and wouldn't be called as an expert witness until the case came to trial in November, if then.

So why not use the unaccustomed free time to accompany Julie on a trip to the pristine far north, to Glacier Bay, Alaska, which neither of them had seen before? Wouldn't it be better than being separated for a week? Her days would be taken up, of course: She would be attending the five-day Glacier Search and Rescue training course. But he could spend his days in long, cool, solitary walks, and look at icebergs floating in the bay, and maybe take one of the excursion boats up Tarr Inlet to see the glaciers calving. Or read a novel. Or just relax and do nothing for a change. And the evenings and nights would be all theirs. This would be a great vacation, a tonic for both of them.

Only it wasn't going to work out. There were only two trails in the thickly wooded vicinity of the lodge, totaling three and a quarter miles; he had already been around them twice. They had forgotten to bring any novels and none were available at the lodge, the newsstand having closed when the tourist season ended a week earlier. And there wasn't an iceberg to be seen; the nearest ones floated out of sight, thirty miles beyond the Beardslees, in the bay's northern reaches. And the excursion boats to the glaciers had, of course, closed down along with the newsstand.