A Superior Death (18 page)

The
Belle Isle
had eaten up the distance. Anna pulled behind and to the starboard of the smaller vessel. Her spotlight picked out the name on the stern: The
Gone Fishin’
. For a minute or two she trailed the boat. The running lights flicked on: sudden red and green eyes to be seen by.

Since the initial impulse to run, it was the first sign that the pilot knew she was there. Anna wondered if he thought this tardy compliance would appease her and she would just go away. Picking up her radio mike, she tuned it to the hailing frequency. “
Gone Fishin’, Gone Fishin’,
this is the
Belle Isle.
” Three times she called and three times got no response.

Anna turned on the boat’s public address system. “
Gone Fishin’,
this is the National Park Service patrol boat the
Belle Isle.
Please cut your engine. I’m coming alongside.” Ten seconds passed, fifteen. Anna refocused her light on the cabin. Two shadows glared back in the light, reflecting off the boat’s windscreen. Then one fell away, dropped like the falling of a veil, and there was only one.

It could have been a trick of the light, or it could have been someone ducking down, hiding. Anna picked up the pistol and stuck it into the waistband of her Levi’s. Again she took up the P.A. mike. Before she could repeat her command the
Gone Fishin’
slowed. Anna reduced power, pulled to the starboard side, and cut both throttles.

A fender plopped out of the cabin cruiser’s side window, reminding Anna to deploy hers. The boats drifted gently forward eight or ten inches apart. Anna waited half a minute. The pilot did not show himself. “Captain of the
Gone Fishin’
and any others aboard, please come out on deck,” Anna said into the mike. She kept the spotlight trained on the cabin, trying to see past the black ovals of Plexiglas in the rear windows.

The cabin door opened a crack, then closed, then opened again just wide enough to let a pale, slender man creep through. He held both hands over his eyes trying to block the glare of the searchlight.

Anna was aware of thin white arms, a stick of neck, too long and too white, long thin fingers crosshatched over a white face. She had that unpleasant sensation one gets when one turns over the wrong rock.

“What the hell is going on?” the nocturnal creature shouted. “Is that you, Anna?”

The white lattice of fingers dropped and Anna recognized Jim Tattinger. She left her .357 on the seat and walked back to the rear deck.

Jim had grabbed a gunwale and was holding the boats together. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He was angry and letting it show, letting it sharpen on the edge of his voice.

The best defense is a good offense, Anna thought. What could Tattinger be defending?

“Hi, Jim. Your running lights were out.” Anna walked over to the port gunwale and leaned close to him. She could smell no alcohol, none of the sweet cloying scent of marijuana. “I pegged you for a desperado on a midnight drug run.” She smiled into his eyes. They weren’t dilated or pinpointed—no narcotics or amphetamines. They were a little bloodshot but Tattinger’s eyes were usually red, as if in sympathy with his red-tipped ears and carroty hair.

“Whose boat?”

“I borrowed it,” Jim snapped. “Who authorized you to patrol out of uniform? I bet Lucas didn’t.”

Anna ignored that. “What brings you to this neck of the woods in the dead of night without running lights?” she asked conversationally.

“I don’t see that’s any business of yours.”

“What’s that?” She jerked her chin toward the cabin where four scuba tanks and a pair of fins were piled in an untidy heap. Jim twitched like a puppet on too tight a string. His eyes widened as if he—or more likely Anna—had just seen a ghost.

“Doing a little night diving?”

“Oh. The tanks. No,” he retorted and his irritability sounded mixed with relief. Anna wondered how she had let him off the hook—what the hook was. “What are you doing out here?” he demanded. “You can’t use NPS boats for personal stuff, you know.”

“We’ve had a report of a missing child. I was checking the usual spots on the north shore.”

“Oh gosh!” Tattinger puffed. He seemed genuinely concerned. It caught Anna off guard. “What happened?”

“Carrie Bittner didn’t make it home for supper. Patience is worried.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Jim’s anger was back, though Anna couldn’t see why.

“Patience is rechecking all the sites on the way back to Rock,” Anna told him. “If Carrie doesn’t turn up pretty quick, I’ll call in Lucas and get a search under way as soon as it’s light.”

“For Chr—” Tattinger began his refrain again, then stopped suddenly. “Wait. Bittner? That kid with the brown hair, always hanging around the lodge?”

Anna nodded.

Jim seemed relieved. “I saw her in Lane Cove when I was headed over here. There wasn’t any boat so she must’ve been going back overland on the trail.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know—not too long ago.”

“Was she alone?”

“Jesus! I got better things to do than look after some snot-nosed kid. You’re not Dick Tracy, Anna.” Jim curled his lip till the ruffle of pink showed garish in the searchlight. “Nobody authorized you to interfere with my work.”

The federal government had authorized Anna to interfere where probable cause could be proved, but she let it pass. “I’ll radio Patience,” she said, and: “Leave a running light on for me.”

Running lights on, the
Gone Fishin’
powered away at high speed.

It was after midnight when Anna got the radio message that Carrie had finally wandered home. Later that same day, Anna knew, she must dive the
Kamloops.
Finally she managed sleep but it was troubled with dreams: Denny holding her fast two hundred feet beneath the lake while air trickled from her tanks like the last stars from the night sky.

CHAPTER 12

“
N
ever to see the sun again,” Anna grumbled. Standing in sweats and mismatched wool socks, she drank her morning coffee, staring out the window above her kitchen sink. The day presented a bleak and dismal aspect. An overcast sky pressed down to the top of the cliff that backed Amygdaloid Ranger Station. Oily-looking rain-drops crawled down the glass.

“Come on down,” Anna hollered. If the cloud settled into fog, obscured the lake, the
Kamloops
dive would be postponed. As it was, the day managed to be completely without sympathy: cold and damp and dark with perfectly adequate visibility.

Anna crossed to the yellow enameled bureau with its chipped edges and olive-green knobs. Amid the clutter of hairpins and badges was an oval box, the lid carved with monkeys frolicking in a jungle of leaves. The handles formed the graceful upward wings the Balinese put on their temples. Anna lifted off the lid. Inside was a handkerchief edged with lace. The creases were yellowed from being so long folded. In the middle of it was the dull gold of a wedding band.

After Zachary died Anna had taken it off and folded it in the “something old” her mother-in-law had given her. Her hand looked ugly without it, she’d never stopped believing that, but in the first years she’d been unable to answer the questions generated by a ring. “What does your husband do? I see you’re married—is your husband with you?”

At Molly’s suggestion she had taken it off. “It’s nobody’s damn business,” her sister had said.

“People will think I’ve stopped loving him,” Anna worried.

“Fuck ’em,” had been the psychiatrist’s advice.

Anna thought about putting it back on; a comfort, a talisman for the dive. A thousand times over the years she’d thought of putting it back on. As always, she returned it to its linen nest. She still wasn’t ready to answer those questions.

“Three-oh-two, one-two-one.” Her radio cracked the solitude and Anna shot it a baleful look. “Three-oh-two, one-two-one.”

“Keep your pants on, Lucas.” She crossed through the open door into the ranger station and hit the mike button of the base radio. “Three-oh-two,” she responded.

“What kind of deck you got over there?”

It crossed Anna’s mind to say it was socked in, but she crushed the lie as unworthy—and too easy to detect. “I can see three or four hundred yards. The storm isn’t sitting on the water. Some rain. No wind.”

“The MAFOR promised more of the same. Waves one to two meters.” The MAFOR was shorthand for the marine forecast. All the ranger stations posted the day’s MAFOR before they opened shop in the mornings. On busy days there’d be a line three or four boaters deep waiting to read it before the thumbtacks had even cooled.

“Officer Stanton, Ralph, Jim, Scotty, Jo, and I are about to head out.” Vega’s voice rattled the speaker. “We’ll be to Amygdaloid in thirty minutes or so.”

“I’ll be waiting with bells on,” Anna said.

“One-two-one clear.”

For whom the bell tolls, Anna thought. It tolls for thee. She laughed aloud, relieved by her sheer morbidity. “I’m wasted in the Park Service,” she addressed the mute radio. “Melodrama was my true calling.”

Half an hour later, when the
Lorelei
pulled up to the dock, Anna was waiting, surrounded by gear. Only one of the boats that had given the place such a festive air the night before still remained. Rain, slow and cold and with apparently no intention of stopping in the foreseeable future, had driven the fisherpeople back to the more protected amusements on the mainland.

The
3rd Sister
would still be around somewhere. Hawk and Holly were indifferent to comfort. Only a clear and present danger kept them out of the water. When clients paid the
3rd Sister
for an adventure it was not unlike making a contract with the devil. There was almost no way out.

The
Lorelei
glided up parallel with the dock, and Ralph, green from head to foot in foul-weather gear, came out on deck. Lucas didn’t shut down the engines.

“How time flies when you’d rather be in bed,” Anna said as she handed her air tanks over the gunwale.

Ralph gave her a life vest and she fumbled at the side lacings. ISRO had purchased all Large and Extra Large in the expectation of a future filled with nothing but brawny, strapping rangers. Even having cinched it as tightly as it would go, Anna knew it would probably pop off if she were ever thrown unconscious into the lake.

Lucas motored slowly away from the dock, scrupulous as ever not to create a wake where it could damage another vessel. A crew cut and long brown hair were about all Anna could see of Frederick the Fed and Jo. Scotty and Jim hovered behind the two benches. Ralph stayed out in the rain with Anna. Lightly, he touched her elbow. “How are you doing?”

His kindness irritated because it reminded her of her fear. “Never better,” she retorted.

Ralph laughed. “Anna Pigeon: heart of gold, body of iron, nerves of steel.”

“Oh pshaw!” Anna pronounced all the letters: “puhshaw.” Next to “damn” it was her sister Molly’s favorite word. It took the place of “expletive deleted.”

Ralph just laughed.

Anna pulled the drawstrings of her Gore-Tex hood close around her face and backed up against the cabin out of the wind. She could put off meeting Officer Stanton a few minutes longer and she preferred the fresh air to the self-inflating chatter Scotty would suffocate the cabin with, given such a prestigious audience.

Besides, she hoped the cold would drive Ralph inside. The last thing she wanted was someone to call her bluff. Two terrors battled for dominance in Anna’s belly: that she would dive and that she wouldn’t. The latter was worse. She was afraid Pilcher would offer her a way out and she would take it.

He leaned against the cabin next to her, the bulk of his body cutting the wind that curled around the side. Boyish brown curls escaped his hood, contrasting oddly with the broken nose and unsettlingly old eyes. Ralph Pilcher wasn’t a handsome man, but Anna guessed it had never stood in his way and she felt a sudden stab of pity for his wife. In sympathy with the unknown woman, she moved a couple inches away from his sheltering warmth.

“A few things,” Ralph said as the
Lorelei
motored out of Amygdaloid Channel onto the vast gray bosom of Lake Superior. “The superwoman act works well for you, Anna. Good cover. But you don’t need it on a dive. It’ll kill you on a dive. This is a team sport. I’ll be looking after you. Lucas will watch me. We’ll all keep an eye on Jim.”

Anna laughed. She was feeling better. She took back her two inches. The hell with Mrs. Pilcher.

Ralph relaxed back against the cabin wall and for a moment they stood in companionable silence watching the wake fold in on itself and disappear.

“Ever do a body recovery?” Ralph asked after a while.

“A few. Always on dry ground.”

“In Superior they’re not too bad. No smell. Usually we’d take the mask off. If they were diving—breathing compressed air—the change in pressure makes fluids froth out the nose and mouth. The family doesn’t need to see that.”