A Superior Death (21 page)

Denny’s body was in the
Ranger III
’s frozen foods locker plowing its way toward Houghton and an autopsy. Under the stress of the dive and the oppression of the weather, Anna had longed for her lieu days. Now that they’d arrived, with the implied time of rest and relaxation, she found her mind still rattling on in its workaday rut. With perfect hindsight she knew she should have stayed on the north shore, hidden out in a quiet cove, watched for wolves, and gathered pretty stones along the water’s edge. Those were the things that would have put her right with the world. The bustling atmosphere of Rock bored and stimulated at the same time. Not rest but restlessness was to be the keynote of her weekend.

Anna glanced at her watch. Hours and hours till she could call her sister. At least an hour till the mail would be sorted. Aggravated by the need to be doing something, she sought out Sandra Fox in the dispatcher’s office. Delphi looked up from her place beneath the computer printers and dusted a welcome on the linoleum with her gold tail feathers. Anna flopped down beside the dog and fondled the soft ears.

“Can’t get enough of the Park Service, huh?” Sandra said, her fingernails clicking against the plastic keyboard. “Got to come in on your days off now for a little bureaucratic fix.”

“Quick,” Anna said. “Give me something to fill out in triplicate.”

Sandra finished typing, the printer blatted out a line of braille, and the dispatcher ran a well-manicured fingertip over it. Into the radio mike she read the line of numbers. “One, forty-two, sixty-four . . .” Fire weather. Anna blew gently on the top of Delphi’s head and was chastised with a reproachful stare.

The list complete, Sandra turned with a satisfied sigh and interlocked her fingers over her middle. The signal that chat could commence. “Tinker and Damien were asking after you,” she said. “For some reason they thought I might know where you’d be this weekend.” She chuckled comfortably.

All plans on ISRO made by phone or radio had a way of finding Sandra’s ear. She never broke these unintentionally shared confidences but, like Sherlock Holmes, she took pleasure in amazing people with her arcane knowledge of their lives.

“Ah,” Anna said. “And where am I this weekend? More to the point, where should I be?”

“Grumpy, are we?”

“I guess.”

“Body recovery got you thinking mortal thoughts?”

“It’s got me thinking, at any rate.” Anna was nagged by the floating vision of false life the currents had lent the corpse, of the livid bruise. Until the investigation was complete, however, these were not things that could be discussed.

“I take it you don’t buy the drug-death scenario Officer Frederick Stanton is so fond of,” Sandra remarked.

Anna started and Sandra smiled a Sherlockian smile. “Do you?” Anna asked.

“Nope. Why come to a national park crawling with rangers and red-necked fisherfolk when there’s a million secluded bays and a zillion acres of unpatrolled lake waters to rendezvous in?”

“Stanton seems competent enough,” Anna said.

“Stanton’s a city boy,” Sandra returned. The implication was clear: His mind would make urban profiles of an Isle Royale death. The parks were places apart. Islands of hope, fragments of wilderness in an increasingly developed world, scraps of land trying to be all things to all people: museums, adventures, solitude, recreation, vacation, research, preservation. Different rules, different lusts, different pressures prevailed. People died for different reasons.

“Are you going to see Tinker and Damien?”

Anna had already forgotten about them. She glanced at her pocket watch. Another half hour till the mail. She craved some contact with Chris or Molly, conversation on a meaningful level. Conversation in which she didn’t have to protect herself or take care of anyone else. She flashed briefly on Ralph Pilcher’s words: “The superwoman act works well for you.” It wasn’t an act, it was armor. Like all good armor, it was heavy to carry.

“Tinker and Damien. . . . Did it seem urgent?”

Sandra laughed. “With those two it’s hard to tell. A few days back they were hiking in Moskey Basin. They radioed in a collision with serious injuries. Scotty rushed a couple of the emergency medical technicians out there. Everybody getting overtime. Everybody rushing around with their hair in a knot having a high old time. They get out to find, in a freak accident, a boater had rammed the dock there at the south end. He wasn’t hurt but he’d dislodged a beam under the water level and trapped a young lake otter. Tinker and Damien caught hell but the little otter’s going to remember them fondly.”

Anna smiled. She was remembering that she liked the Coggins-Clarkes.

 

 

 

D
amien was on the paved trail between the lodge and the Visitors’ Center at Rock Harbor. Hands folded behind his back, eyes on the ground, he was pacing. Soundlessly, his lips formed words. Clad in the khaki Student Conservation Association’s shirt and green uniform trousers, he looked uncharacteristically benign. And young. In Anna’s soured mood, he looked about ten years old.

“Damien!” A look of what could have been alarm flitted across his face. His answering wave, a short flick of wrist and fingers, was anything but welcoming.

She walked up to a nearby bench. He continued to pace. She leaned on the back and waited for his next pass. “I’ve got a nature walk,” Damien said ungraciously as he checked his watch. “In seven minutes.”

This brusque, nervous fellow was so unlike the cloaked and candlelit boy that Anna was taken aback. It reminded her that she really knew very little about the Coggins-Clarkes.

“Sandra said you wanted to see me,” she said easily.

“This is a bad time. I’ll catch Tinker.” She began moving away.

“Don’t bother,” he said sharply.

Anna turned, raised an eyebrow.

Under her gaze, the rudeness vanished. “I’m sorry,” he said with his old boyish grace. “I got up on the wrong side of the universe this morning. We just wanted to tell you we’ve stopped with the Donna Butkus thing.”

“Ah.” Ten minutes before, had she been asked, Anna would have said nothing could have pleased her more. Tinker and Damien’s collecting pickle relish jars and general cloak and daggering struck her as just the brand of nonsense that would get them in hot water. Now that they had stopped, she found it more alarming than reassuring.

“Why?”

Damien looked past her. A small group was straggling up the pavement. “People for my tour,” he said. As he walked away, his tourists all in a row behind like ducklings, Anna wondered why he’d dodged the question, why he didn’t just tell a convenient lie. If it had been banal enough, she probably would have believed it and that would have been the end. Evasion was to a law enforcement ranger what undeclared funds were to the IRS.

On some level had he wanted to set her mental alarms off? One of those unspoken cries for help her sister Molly was paid a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to listen for? Or was Damien incapable by choice or disposition of telling a lie?

“Dream on,” Anna said aloud. In forty years, she had never met a man, woman, or child who was incapable of lying.

Whether his wish she not speak with Tinker was honest or not, it was in vain. He’d piqued her interest—and on a day when she’d been wanting a little piquing. With renewed energy, she walked down the paved trail and onto the wooded path that led to the seasonals’ quarters.

Tinker was sitting on the porch steps of the weathered old house that served as a dormitory. With her head bent over a book she held across her knees, her face was lost in a cloud of blond permed frizz. Hidden somewhere in the draping curtains of fir that glamorized the dilapidated building, a squirrel chattered a warning at Anna’s approach and Tinker looked up.

“Sandra said you wanted to see me,” Anna said.

“Yes. I wanted to ask if you’d seen peregrines nesting in McCargo.”

Isle Royale was one of the many places peregrine falcons were being reintroduced. Resource Management had had some success on the southwest end of the island but the north shore had proved inhospitable. Anna shook her head.

“We’ve had a sighting.”

Anna sat down on the bottom step. A great green caterpillar with electric-blue markings hunched along in the roots of the ferns. Damien said they’d wanted to see her about stopping the Butkus investigation. Tinker said peregrines. Had Anna been inclined to believe either, she would’ve chosen the falcons. Murder would take a back seat with any serious birder when word came of a rare sighting.

“I haven’t seen any peregrines in McCargo,” Anna replied. “But I haven’t been there all that often in the last couple of weeks.”

“Mmmm.” Tinker seemed to be considering Anna’s viability as a witness. Anna’s suspicion that she’d failed to pass muster was confirmed when Tinker said: “Damien and I will go.” She closed the heavy book—
Bent’s Life Histories of North American Birds,
Volume 10: Birds of Prey, Part 1—and smiled benignly at the woods.

Anna teased the giant caterpillar, trying to make it climb up onto a twig. Several minutes passed. She tossed her caterpillar stick into the hedge of browsed firs. “Damien says you’ve given up detective work,” she said.

Tinker looked pained. In a Garbo-esque gesture, she pushed the fine ruined hair back from her face with both hands.

A scuffle and a grunt from inside the house took Anna’s attention. “Pizza Dave,” Tinker said, her hands still buried in her hair. “The toilet’s stopped up again.” As if on cue, heroic slurps of a plunger being plied emanated from the shadowy interior.

Anna turned back to Tinker. “Are you okay?” she asked, more sharply than she had intended.

“I’m fine,” Tinker replied and, to Anna’s surprise, she began to cry, hugging her knees, her girlish breasts pushed up against the uncompromising corners of her bird book.

Great gulping sobs made a bellows of the thin back. Images of Heinz pickle relish jars jammed with fingers, ears, and eyeballs flashed through Anna’s mind. “What is it? What?” she demanded.

“Just leave me alone!” Tinker cried out. Springing to her feet, sending
Bent’
s sprawling onto the moss, she rushed inside the house.

Anna debated the wisdom of following. For whatever reason, for the moment at least, her presence was more alarming than comforting. She restored the book to the porch where the damp wouldn’t ruin it and retreated down the path the way she had come.

Halfway back to the harbor she was overtaken by the roar of machinery. Tractors used by Maintenance were the only land vehicles allowed on the island and even they were banned from Amygdaloid.

The driver was Pizza Dave, returning from his plumbing job. He was the fattest man Anna had ever seen. The tractor seat was lost beneath his vast rump, and the machine, a small four-cylinder John Deere, looked no bigger than a lawn mower. R&R, the company that made all the National Park Service uniforms, didn’t come close to carrying his size. Consequently, on duty and off, he lived in bright slogan-sporting tee-shirts, denim trousers, and black high-topped sneakers.

As he drew level with Anna, he engulfed the gearshirt knob in a palm the size of a Frisbee and brought the tractor to a halt. “Afternoon,” he called over the roar of the engine.

“Afternoon,” Anna agreed, wishing he’d shut the tractor off. Wishing, not hoping: Dave loved the noise. He was part machine. He never walked. He bragged that there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do given the right equipment.

He was saying something.

Anna shouted: “What?” and he shouted back: “. . . in the head.” She looked blank, shrugged. “The head, the john, the terlit, the loo,” he shouted. “I couldn’t help hearing. Here. Found this.” He dug something out of his hip pocket and held it out in a closed fist. Both her hands were about the size of one of his. Anna cupped her hands, not daring to think what gem he’d found in the “terlit” that was about to be dropped into her grasp.

Dave’s fingers uncurled and several crumpled slips of paper fluttered out. “Found it tore up,” he hollered over his engine.

“What is it?”

“Can’t hear you. Found it,” he called. Anna suspected he was using the engine’s noise to drown out all the questions he didn’t want to answer. “Donna Butkus is okay,” he said suddenly.

“How do you know?” Anna yelled.

“Gut feeling.” He laughed, passed his hand over an immense expanse of red double-knit. “Can’t ignore a gut this big.” He pushed the gear lever forward and roared on down the trail before Anna had time to respond.

She waited till the aggravation of sound had passed completely away, then crouched down on the trail and pieced together the bits of paper. It was a dot matrix printout. Any computer could have been used. In an odd mixture of metaphors it said: “Before you go looking for skeletons under other people’s rocks don’t forget your own dirty laundry can be dragged out of the closet.” Then the word “Hopkins” and the numbers “1978.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Anna muttered. “Nobody writes notes this mysterious.” Then she laughed, thinking of the messages Christina left stuck to the refrigerator with duck-shaped magnets: “Ally tippy-toe. Me in the salt mines. Save yourself.” Meaning: Alison was at ballet class and Chris was working late. Literal translation: Don’t wait dinner. Everything was mysterious when it was unexplained.

Doubly so if a corpse or two was factored in.

Anna read the note again. A threat—you expose mine, I’ll expose yours. Hopkins—the name of a person or a town; 1978. At a guess, Tinker or Damien had done something to a person or in a place called Hopkins in 1978 they were ashamed enough of or scared enough about that they would drop their investigation into Donna Butkus’s disappearance to keep it from coming to light. That was thirteen years back. In 1978 Damien would have been eleven or twelve, Tinker maybe twenty. Tinker, then, was probably the threatened party. It would fit with both Damien’s reaction and her own.