A Superior Death (15 page)

Anna had to satisfy herself with that. It wasn’t hard. She didn’t enjoy conversations with Scotty. Whether it was knee-jerk hatred of someone twenty years younger, female, and in competition with him for the next pay raise, or whether she just had an irritating quayside manner, she wasn’t sure, but every time she tried to talk with him, she set him off.

Pilcher, with his man’s man charm and roguish reputation, would probably fare better.

As Anna fired up the
Belle Isle
and headed up Rock Harbor from Mott, she speculated as to whether or not Scotty possessed the courage or the control it would take to murder a wife and her lover.

Scotty and Denny
mano a mano?

It seemed out of character. Scotty had a vindictive streak but it was usually expressed in unsigned letters and backbiting phone calls just before positions were filled or promotions handed out.

But Scotty drank, and alcohol changes character. Had there been a drunken fight, as Jim had said? Not impossible. There was no denying Butkus had retained his upper-body strength. It was evidenced in the line of muscle under his lightweight summer uniform shirts.

If Scotty had killed Denny, why put the body on the
Kamloops
? Why the sailor suit? That was a touch of macabre whimsy more in keeping with the Coggins-Clarkes’ mysticism than Butkus’s good-old-boy approach to life. Unless the sailor suit had special meaning for Scotty—or Donna. Perhaps Scotty wanted her to know her lover was found in the costume on the
Kamloops.
Some sort of personal revenge. What sort of meaning? A lover’s in-joke? Even for Denny Castle, an engine room nearly two hundred feet below the surface of Lake Superior was an unlikely trysting place. And if Tinker and Damien were right, Donna had vanished before Castle was killed. That would destroy any theory that Denny’s bizarre entombment was meant as a message to, or vengeance upon, Donna.

Anna wondered if Scotty could even make a dive as demanding as the
Kamloops.
Physical problems were not the only reason he’d not kept his diving certification. In a rare moment of indiscretion, Lucas Vega had told Anna that Butkus had lost his nerve. From the mix of bravado about the good old days and contempt for the new that Scotty evinced whenever the talk turned to deep diving, Anna suspected Lucas was right.

“Did Denny kill Donna because she rejected him, and then Scotty kill Denny to avenge her?” Anna asked aloud as she used to ask her horse, Gideon, in Texas. The
Belle Isle
didn’t have skin to twitch or ears to rotate to signify interest, but hummed on with mechanical indifference.

Speculation was giving Anna a headache. Briefly, she considered reviewing the facts, but they were few in number and absurd in nature. All that was known for certain was that Denny Castle, dressed in an antique captain’s uniform, was floating in the engine room of a long-dead ship with sixty-four-year-old ghosts for company. And that Scotty Butkus had ordered a case of Heinz sweet pickle relish.

Denny and Donna’s affair, Scotty and Denny’s fistfight, even Donna’s disappearance, were all just hearsay. Donna could have gotten a ride to the mainland on a private vessel. Denny could have given her a lift himself on the
3rd Sister.

Davidson Island swam up on Anna’s right. Impulsively, she turned from the channel and piloted up to the dock. The
Blackduck
was moored there as well as a sixteen-foot skiff used by Maintenance. Anna tied the
Belle Isle
in behind the skiff and walked up the wooded path toward the cabin Jo had shared with her husband for so short a time.

The door stood open, the screen closed to keep out the blackflies that had come into bloom with the spiky pink fireweed in late June. A luna moth, nearly big enough to transport Dr. Dolittle to the moon, clung to the wire above the door handle. Not wanting to disturb it by knocking, Anna cupped her hands around her eyes and peered into the gloom.

“Anybody home?”

“Just us chickens,” came the reply. Anna’s eyes adjusted and she saw who had spoken. Sandra Fox, wearing yellow Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian print shirt, sat at the wooden table in Jo’s kitchen. Salt and pepper and napkins mixed in with samples of pond slime were shoved to one side. A leather-bound portfolio lay open over most of the table. Delphi was circled neatly between the table legs. “Pizza Dave brought us. He’s doing water quality today.” Sandra explained her and the dog’s presence.

Anna let herself in. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes. Half-consumed edibles littered the countertop. A bee buzzed around a Pepsi can. A torn pizza box was open on the stove. Three slices, curling up at the edges, lay beside a bowl of soggy corn flakes garnished with the lid of a petri dish. Heartbreak was not a good homemaker.

“Glad you’re here,” Sandra said. She sniffed the air and smiled. “The place could use a little swamping out.”

“Looks like home to me,” Anna returned. She sat in the chair next to Sandra. “Where’s Jo?”

“Upstairs getting her other picture albums. I guess there’s quite a few.”

For the first time Anna looked at the book on the table. It was an old-fashioned scrapbook. Affixed to the thick black paper with ornate corner holders, the color snapshots looked anachronistic. None of the people were familiar at first. Then the clothes and the hairstyles peeled away the years and Anna recognized Denny in bell-bottoms and a beard. Jo had changed very little. The seventies had seen the same long straight hair and owl-like glasses. In fifteen years it seemed all Jo had done was exchange her army surplus jacket for a polypropylene Patagonia.

“We’ve been looking at photo albums all afternoon,” Sandra said. “I don’t know whether your life flashes before your eyes the moment before you die, but I’m here to tell you it flashes before everybody else’s the moment after.”

“Must be kind of weird,” Anna said. For a blind woman to sit looking at pictures was the unspoken half of the thought. Unvoiced though it was, Sandra heard it.

“Not really. I’d like to see David, and Joseph Muench’s stuff. I’d give my left tit to see Ansel Adams photographs of Yosemite. But album snapshots are for talking over, not looking at.” Sandra poked a well-manicured index finger randomly at the open book. “ ‘There I am with Aunt Gertie in front of the old Packard. That was my first grown-up dress. Mom had to stuff tissue in my bra so the darts wouldn’t fold over. My first high heels. Look how my ankles buckle.’ ”

Anna laughed. “You’ve made your point. How’s Jo doing?”

“Hard to say. She doesn’t cry. At least not in front of me. She’s not crying over the pictures. She’s proving something to herself. That Denny really loved her, is my guess. All that history’s got to prove something, right?”

“Something besides persistence?”

“Once they’re dead, they can never make it up to you.”

“And you can never make it up to them,” Anna said.

“There’s nothing left but to rewrite history.”

Maybe next weekend, when the
Kamloops
dive was behind her, she would take Zach’s ashes out and sprinkle them in the crystal waters of Five Finger Bay. Molly would be relieved. Christina would cry. What would she do? Anna asked herself. The gesture was purely symbolic. Seven years of memories couldn’t be thrown overboard so easily.

“Got them.” The voice came at the same instant as Jo’s footstep on the stair. Unconsciously Anna and Sandra composed their features into sympathetic lines. “Oh. Hi, Anna. I was just showing Sandra some old pictures of Denny and me.” She set two more albums on a coffee table under the picture window. Outside, a snowshoe hare nibbled at the grass beneath the picnic table. A whiskey jack eating crumbs hopped down the bench just over its neatly folded ears. Grief’s half-finished sandwiches were a boon to somebody, Anna thought.

Jo closed the album on the table as carefully as if it were one of Shakespeare’s original folios and replaced it with another. This one was more what Anna expected to house a young girl’s memories: avocado-green padded leatherette with orange flower decals pasted haphazardly over it.

Jo stood between Sandra and Anna and opened the book. She pointed a finger marred with a broken and blackened nail at the first snap. “That’s me when I was twenty-four. Isn’t that sundress a stitch? That’s the sorority house I lived in in Santa Barbara behind me. We never did fix that broken step.”

Sandra wasn’t missing an image.

Anna and Sandra did all that was required of them, which wasn’t much. They nodded and asked meaningless questions, helping Jo to talk herself out. In the days since her husband’s death, Jo had lost four or five pounds and hadn’t washed her hair. The skin beneath her eyes was puffed and old-looking. Anna touched the gray that ran in zigzag lines through her own braided hair. Death aged people. If they were lucky it left in its wake some grain of wisdom. Usually it left only a sore place, like a weak muscle, a part of the psyche that would buckle first under pressure.

“Here’s another one of Denny,” Jo was saying. Her voice was hard, as if she kept it that way, knowing his name must be said. “We were going to a dance or something. He had this Viking thing. You know, when they died they were put on their ship and the ship was put out to sea and sunk. Only not quite Viking. He wanted to be put aboard a Spanish galleon or an old Civil War gunboat, all decked out, then sunk where there’d once been a reef. He had this mental picture of the fish coming to live on the wreck with him.” She stopped short as if she’d realized the direction her words were going.

Anna snapped out of the trance she’d dropped into. She looked at the photograph that had stimulated the remarks. A young Denny Castle, maybe thirty-one or -two, sporting a handlebar mustache, stood beneath an oak tree in front of a stone building. He was wearing a turn-of-the-century ship captain’s uniform. Anna schooled her voice. The information about how the body was dressed had not yet been released. She, Ralph, Lucas, and Tattinger knew. And whoever had put Denny in the engine room. “May I?” She peeled back the clear plastic that held the pictures on the page, lifted the snapshot out, and held it up to the light. The cap, the jacket with black braid at the cuffs, the eight brass buttons, were the same as she remembered them from Jon and Bobo’s videotape.

“That’s a wonderful costume,” she said.

“It’s not a costume,” Jo told her, retrieving the picture from profaning hands as soon as was polite. “It’s authentic. It belonged to Denny’s great-uncle. He sailed the Great Lakes in the twenties.”

“Did he go down on one of the ships?” Sandra asked.

“No. He lives in Florida. He owns a chain of laundromats there, I think. Or did.”

“This picture was taken a while back,” Anna said.

“In 1981.”

“Did Denny keep the uniform?”

“He must’ve. Why?” Jo and Sandra were looking at Anna suspiciously, as if they thought she would offer to buy the dead man’s clothes for a costume party before the corpse was decently in the ground.

Anna ignored Jo’s question. “Do you know where it is?”

“Probably at Mother Gilma’s,” Jo replied coldly. “He left a lot of things in his mom’s attic.” As she replaced the picture in the album, the sleeve of her blouse fell away from her arm and Anna saw again the blue-green scars she’d associated with abalone diving on the west coast. Did Jo dive? The man she loved was making a fool of himself over another man’s wife. It was the best reason Anna could think of for feeding one’s husband to the fishes.

The pathology of humanity, coupled with the smell of decaying food in the kitchen, suddenly threatened to overwhelm. Muttering half-listened-to excuses, Anna stood and let herself out through the screen. The luna moth was still there. The hare and the jay were gone. She trotted to the dock and loosed the
Belle Isle
from the cleats.

Ralph Pilcher could teach her by example. In less than twenty-four hours she would be donning cold water gear with its claustrophobic layers, diving the deepest she had ever gone. Divers—the ones who lived to be old divers—prepared for a dive mentally as well as physically. A mind cluttered with what-ifs and other people’s heartaches couldn’t tend to the business of survival.

CHAPTER 10

A
mygdaloid dock looked like suburbia on a Saturday afternoon. The pier was lined on both sides by boats and one was tethered crosswise at the end. Half a dozen hibachis smoked on the rough planking. Clothes and towels hung from rigging. Beer-bellied men sat in webbed lawn chairs. Two teenage boys played a delicate game of Frisbee over the heads of an unimpressed audience. A little girl tossed bits of hot dog bun to Knucklehead, the camp fox.

Anna counted three minor violations before she’d cut power. Two she would attend to. The black and tan cigarette boat moored in her slot was ousted. The little girl would be educated. The Frisbee players would go unpunished. Park policy insisted Frisbee was an inappropriate activity in the wilderness. Anna knew it for a quick way to Zen and chose to let people worship in their own way.