A Superior Death (13 page)

“Holly, we got company,” Hawk said and they heard a muted scramble from within as he vanished inside. Lucas followed.

“The quarters are cramped. You stay on deck.” The Chief Ranger—half in, half out of the cabin—fixed Anna with a stare to be sure she understood what he wanted.

She did. He closed the door behind him. Through the window Anna heard him saying: “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. Denny’s been killed.” Only silence answered him. Neither Hawk nor Holly asked how or when, neither cried out.

Anna was glad to be on deck. Other people’s angst sawed at the nerves like a dry wind.

Remembering Lucas’s pointed stare, she stopped eavesdropping and began searching the deck, not looking for anything, just looking at what was there and what was not.

Gear was piled in every available place. Besides two bottle caps, a bit of braided black nylon cord, one broken thong sandal, and the usual boat supplies, there was full diving paraphernalia for three people and a portable air compressor—the gasoline-driven kind that was the bane of lovers of quietude—for recharging spent tanks. As a rule divers recharged their tanks immediately after use. Six one-hundred-cubic-foot scuba tanks were piled in a pyramid between the box covering the engine and the hull. An oversized single with a Y valve that Anna recognized as Denny’s had rolled to one side.

She glanced at the pressure gauges. All the one hundreds were fully charged. The single was only half full. There could be a dozen good reasons the single had not been topped off. Hawk or Holly might have used it on a dive earlier that day. Most ISRO dives didn’t require double hundreds. The regulator might have been damaged. They could have run out of fuel for the compressor, or just gotten lazy.

But to a suspicious mind it could suggest that when the Bradshaws had filled the tanks the previous day, they had known Denny would not be needing his.

Lucas’s interview with the twins was neither reassuring nor conclusive: The Bradshaws, he said, reacted as if dead inside. Maybe shock, maybe forewarning—Vega was a ranger, not a shrink.

CHAPTER 8

“
D
ead bodies seem to follow you around, Anna. Are you sure you never auditioned for
Night of the Living Dead
when you lived in New York?”

“I saw it,” Alison stuck in. Ally was sitting in Anna’s canvas canoe chair between her mother, who occasionally dipped a paddle off the bow, and Anna, who worked all of the mobile magic from the stern. “There were all these dead people with white faces and black lips who walked like this.”

“Don’t stand up!” Anna and Christina said in unison.

“Like this.” Alison demonstrated from her seat, swinging her arms like a chair-bound Frankenstein’s monster. “They were supposed to be scary but they were just stupid. It was in black and white,” she said as if that explained everything.

“
Night of the Living Dead
scared the pants off me,” Anna said. “For weeks afterward all my roommates had to do was walk stiff-legged—”

“Don’t stand up!” the two women repeated as Ally squirmed.

“—and I’d turn totally paranoid,” Anna finished.

“What’s paranoid?” Ally asked.

“Being scared of things that aren’t really going to hurt you,” her mother replied. “Pair-ah-noyd. P-a-r . . .”

When Tuesday’s
Ranger III
had docked, Chris and Ally had been on it. “We needed to be at One with Nature,” Chris had said but she’d come because Anna’s letters had sounded lonely. Christina hated nature unless it could be pruned into an attractive foundation planting.

Anna smiled. If one couldn’t go home, the next best thing was having home come to the wilderness. Christina Walters, with her soft white hands, deplorable J-stroke, and antipathy toward pit toilets, carried homeyness with her the way lilacs carried perfume. Anna knew one day she would lose her housemates to a sweetheart. Christina would not be single long.

“I wish I were gay,” she said over Alison’s head. Literally over the little girl’s head, not figuratively. At five Ally was more sophisticated than Anna had been at thirty.

“Would you marry Ally and me?” Christina asked.

“In a second.”

“No good.” Christina laughed, caught a crab with her paddle, and splashed her daughter and Anna. “I only go for women with more impressive b-o-s-o-m-s.”

“Et tu, Brute,”
Anna grumbled, and: “You do not.”

“You haven’t met Bertie.”

The bicycling friend: Anna might lose them sooner than she had thought. It would be hard not to meet Chris’s date at the door, cross-examine her about her intentions and if she could support Chris and Ally in the manner they had grown accustomed to. Anna smiled wryly. They all three lived on NPS wages. Any greasy-spoon waitress could answer the last question with a resounding “Yes!”

“Don’t worry, Aunt Anna,” Ally was saying. “If Momma and I get married again you can come live with us. If you bring Piedmont,” she added as a condition.

“We’ll adopt you,” Chris said.

“Paddle,” Anna returned. “You guys weigh a ton.”

“An-oh-wreck-see-ah,” Christina said. “No one in the Walters family will ever be skinny. It indicates a stinginess of the spirit. We only accept your meagerness because it comes from being a rotten cook, not a bad person.”

Anna paddled. She had that rare sense of knowing, at the moment it was happening, that she was happy, that life was okay. She stopped talking to better enjoy it. Ally and Christina’s chatter pattered over her like warm rain.

“How much farther?” Ally asked after a few minutes.

“When do you bring it up?” Christina said at almost the same instant. “It” meant Denny Castle’s body. Chris knew Denny. She’d met him once in Houghton and again when she’d visited Anna on the island in late May. But Christina chose not to personify death, not to call it by name. Euphemisms—“passed away,” “no longer with us”—came naturally to her.

Once Anna had thought it an affectation. In the year she had known Chris it had persisted to such an extent that she now classified it as, if not a religious taboo, at least a superstition. Molly might well have termed it a neurotic denial of human mortality—but that’s what Molly was paid for. And though Anna believed everything her sister told her on principle, she tended to look askance at the labeling of the less socially ratified personality traits as “illness” and the therapists, quite profitably, as the “cure.”

“Three quarters of a mile and Friday,” she answered cheerfully. Even dark thoughts and tedious practicalities took on a different air when shared.

“Do you have to dive so deep?” Christina asked.

“Yup.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yup.”

“Are you par-ah-noyd?” Ally asked.

“Yup.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Chris asked.

“Nope.”

“Nope,” Ally echoed, popping the
p
so it sounded like a cork coming out of a bottle.

The weather held all day. The water stayed smooth and flat. Inland it would be humid, buggy, but on the water it was cool. The shoreline in McCargo Cove was just warm enough for a little cautious sunbathing. Christina worked on matching her old tan with her new bathing suit and getting through
Ryan’s Daughter
because Bertie had recommended it. Anna skipped stones, tracked foxes in the sand, and annoyed caddis fly larvae with Ally.

Midafternoon they launched the canoe and paddled back up the long narrow cove. Sailboats moved slowly in McCargo’s protected waters, their sails as colorful and delicate-seeming as butterfly wings. Three miles long and no more than an eighth of a mile wide, McCargo was a favorite anchorage.

Anna planned an early picnic supper at the Birch campsite. Birch was a pretty little island set at the mouth of Brady Cove, a lagoonlike pocket of water off McCargo. From Birch they could watch the boat traffic and, if they got lucky, Anna could show Chris and Ally a moose. Brady Cove, behind the island, was barely six feet deep and moose often came there to browse. Several boaters had reported seeing a cow with twin calves in the past week.

A more prosaic reason was because fires were allowed on Birch. Open fires had been banned at most of Isle Royale’s camps. The areas got so much use, sites had been stripped bare by campers looking for firewood. In places branches and bark had been torn from trees as high as a man could reach. In a year or two fires would probably be banned park-wide. At present Birch was still legal, and Anna wanted a fire for Ally. Marshmallows, the smell of smoke, gathering twigs, being warned half a dozen times a minute by Mom—the core camping experience.

A thin line of smoke drifting out over the water announced that Birch was occupied. Anna couldn’t hide her disappointment. Hot dogs fried over the roaring invisible flame of her Peak 1 would be a poor substitute.

“We’ll eat down by the water,” Chris said. “That way we can see better. Besides, it’s always less buggy on the shore out of the trees.” She knew Anna and Alison had their hearts set on building a campfire. She was trying to make them feel better. They didn’t.

Alison sulked while Anna dragged the canoe up on shore and unloaded it. Anna tried to keep up her end of the day but she felt a childish resentment that her plans had been disrupted. “I’m the ranger,” she said peevishly.

“That and a dollar won’t even get you a cup of coffee here,” Chris returned. She excused herself to find the “ladies’ room” and left Anna and Ally sitting with their legs dangling over the edge of the dock, both steadfastly refusing to play the Pollyanna Glad Game.

Anna had just about mustered up the energy to start behaving like an adult, when Christina returned.

“Anybody want to come eat supper by my fire?” she invited.

Anna’s first uncharitable thought was that the fire had been left unattended and she cursed herself for leaving her citation book back on Amygdaloid.

“Two very nice people said we could share.”

Anna’s anger dissolved. Sharing: the obvious solution and one that never would have occurred to her in a thousand years. Following Chris and Alison, she carried the picnic cooler up the trail. The sun was shining again; the clouds she and Ally had been fomenting cleared in an instant. The air smelled of pine and wild lily of the valley, marsh marigolds put their golden heads together along the boardwalk over the swampy areas. Goldthread nodded wisely in the woods.

“It’s like Disneyland,” Ally reported, running ahead.

Alison had never been to Disneyland, but Anna knew exactly what she meant. In June, Isle Royale was very like the artist’s conceptions of the forest where Bambi and Snow White spent the bulk of their days. Now and then mosquitoes whined menacingly from the shadows, but their bloodthirsty hum only served to add the spice of reality.

Lugging the cooler, Anna came last into the clearing. From a low branch of a spruce tree two beady black eyes met hers. Oscar the bear was on watch, protecting Birch Island camp. Ally stood on a stump, a black cloak held vampirelike across the lower half of her face. Their hosts were Tinker and Damien.

“How did you guys get here?” Anna asked in surprise.

“There’s no boat.”

“Pizza Dave brought us over in the
Loon
and dropped us off,” Tinker told her. “He was on his way to Thunder Bay on a pizza run.”

Taking an NPS boat forty miles across open water to get pizza: it was a firing offense. Anna liked Dave. She hoped she wouldn’t be the one to catch him. “I see Oscar’s on duty,” she said.

“He’s promised not to offer Ally cigars,” Tinker assured her. Anna eyed the woman narrowly but couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.

Before the first marshmallow had melted off the stick and fallen into the ashes, Anna was glad the Fates had seen fit to put them in the way of the Coggins-Clarkes. Ally was completely taken with Damien. For at least a week Christina would be haunted by “Damien said . . .” and “Damien thinks . . .”

Tinker showed Anna a dead bat she’d found. Anna had heard the faint whistling of bats’ wings as they cut through the air over the dock at night, but she’d never seen more of them than shadows fleeting over the water. Even Christina was drawn in by Tinker’s knowledge and enthusiasm.