A Superior Death (29 page)

After two Leinenkugels had been poured in and sweated out, and Anna had showered and washed her hair, she felt life was once again worth living.

The fog had not lifted. If anything it lay more heavily over the island than before. Steam boiled off her overheated flesh and Anna felt herself a creature of the mist, no longer oppressed by it but at one with it. Fairy tales of a cloak of invisibility returned to memory and she drifted silently down the wooden steps of the sauna.

Trees, robbed of color by the fog, appeared as black smoke around the NPS housing area. Wooden barracks, built in the thirties by the CCC boys and held together over the years with mouse nests and multitudinous coats of paint, gave the housing the aspect of a ghost town.

A clamor of cowboy laughter added to the sense of a place out of time. There was the ring of booted feet on a wooden floor: Scotty. Wrapped in fog, Anna walked soundlessly toward the source of the racket—trail crew’s bunkhouse.

Perhaps
in vino
there wasn’t always
veritas,
but one could usually count on a lack of discretion. With luck, she might learn something.

Blobs of muted color swam through the mist. Trail crew was cooking out. A barrel cut in half, metal fenceposts welded on for legs, served as their kitchen even when they were not on the trail. The smell of grilled meat warmed the damp. Once it had smelled good to Anna, like food. After years without it, it smelled only like death.

A grating sound, a pop, ragged cheering: another beer bottle opened with Scotty’s teeth. “Now you’re a bachelor again, you going to go with us over to Thunder Bay?” A coarse voice cut through the fog, making Anna wince as if she’d been suddenly exposed. Thunder Bay had one of the best-known houses of ill repute on the lake. From what Anna picked up, it sounded drunken, loud, and cheap. A surefire appeal.

“Naw,” Scotty drawled. “Donna ever found out, she’d skin me alive. She keeps a pretty tight rein on this old stallion.”

A growing nausea began creeping through Anna’s wraithlike detachment.

“Not what I heard . . .” Anna recognized the dissenting voice. An enormous field of purple moved along the darker wall of the barracks. It could only be Pizza Dave. Or Moby Grape. Anna stifled a giggle. Two beers in a sauna had the kick of four anywhere else.

“Now what son of a bitch told you that?” Scotty growled.

“Told me what?” Dave asked innocently.

Scotty wasn’t to be drawn or trapped. “Goddamn little intwerps,” he muttered. Anna could barely make out the words but she knew her cloak of invisibility wouldn’t hold up under closer scrutiny, so she stayed where she was. “Some little hippy-dippy seasonals were trying to drive a wedge between me and my wife,” Scotty explained belligerently. Then he looked sly, an old cow-dog narrowing of the eyes and curling of the lip. “I made ’em an offer they couldn’t refuse,” he said, quoting a movie older than at least two of the boys on the crew. “Tonight I got a reminder for ’em in case they’ve forgotten you don’t fuck with the old stallion.”

There was a satisfied grumble, then laughter. These men were as old as the world, Anna thought. These were the men who’d gone to bear baitings, dogfights, beatings, hangings, witch burnings. Their heyday was over. Now they contented themselves with football and hunting—sports where they could either watch the pain from a safe distance or inflict it on creatures with only teeth and claws with which to defend themselves.

The talk settled on baseball. Fingers of mist moved in from the trees, curled around the hot metal of the grill. When the fingers felt their way back into the surrounding woods, Anna went with them.

 

 

 

Shivering, she let herself into the ranger station and clicked on the electric space heater Sandra Fox kept in the dispatch room. The heat smelled faintly of Delphi’s fur. Anna sat in the dispatcher’s chair, lost in thought. Fog pressed close, blinding the window Sandra would never see out of.

Anna had guessed Scotty was the author of the cryptic Hopkins note; now she was sure. There were several reasons he might have stooped to blackmail. Tinker and Damien could have rubbed him the wrong way once too often. The attention they were focusing on his marital problems could have been too great an embarrassment. But the most compelling reason was that the Coggins-Clarkes were getting too close to a truth Scotty didn’t want brought to light; namely, where his wife had disappeared to.

Despite the capes and incense and Windigo stories, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Tinker’s or Damien’s mind. If they put their heads together they would unravel most knotty mysteries. Scotty might have sensed that.

On impulse, Anna went into Ralph Pilcher’s office. His desk, as always, looked like a sorting bin for recycled paper. Five minutes’ shuffling turned up the key to his filing cabinet. It had been five minutes wasted: Pilcher had forgotten to lock it. She flipped quickly to the seasonal personnel file and pulled the Coggins-Clarkes’ folders. Crossing her ankles on Pilcher’s desk, she settled in for a good read.

A lot of it she already knew. Tinker, thirty-three, and Damien, twenty-four, had been married three years. Both had mentioned on the “previous employment” section that they had been married on the south rim of the Grand Canyon while working at that park. Skills and schools were listed, evaluations from other jobs. “Flaky but fine” seemed to be the consensus, though the District Ranger from Voyageurs had described Tinker as “sensitive, moody,” the implication of instability being unmistakable.

On the final page—the one that invariably threw Anna into a frustrated rage, the page where the government asked for a list of the addresses of all residences used in the previous ten years—was the information she had been looking for.

From 1974 to 1980 Tinker had lived in Hopkins, Minnesota.

Anna dialed central dispatch at the police department in Houghton, trusting Pilcher would back her when the phone bill came. A woman answered. Anna identified herself and asked if she could run two 10-29s. The answer was yes. Anna read off first Tinker’s, then Damien’s driver’s license numbers and their dates of birth, then waited through several minutes of computer clickings.

“No wants or warrants out on either Theresa Lynn Coggins nor Daryl Thomas Clarke.”

“Thanks.” Anna hung up. She could see why the two of them had changed their names. Theresa and Daryl: under those monikers no cape would swirl, no ritual candle flicker. Coggins and Clarke, no hyphen—the computer had yet to receive input of their marriage, or, more likely, the ceremony hadn’t been formalized through legal channels.

Name changes and a nontraditional marriage but no warrants out for their arrest, not so much as an unpaid speeding ticket.

Whatever Scotty was threatening them with either wasn’t illegal or was, as yet, unknown to the law. “Dirty laundry,” he had called it. Tinker had said, if not in so many words, that the crime was a bad one. Pilfering? Vandalism? Grand theft auto? Child molestation? Ritual killings? The sheer variety of evils human beings thought up to perpetrate upon their fellows was enough to hint at the existence of a Satan or cast doubt upon the existence of a God.

Anna switched off the desk light and opened the window a few inches. Somewhere above the fog the light of a northern moon burned. Nature, in all her stunning beauty, was cruel, Anna knew, cruel but never vindictive. It was a wolf-eat-moose world out there. The storms that ravaged the lake, claimed lives, and the snows that drove men to madness, to cannibalism, did so without malice, without love or hatred. “Mother” Nature was a misnomer. It implied love and nurturing. The freedom Anna felt in the deserts and, now, in the woods of Isle Royale, was freedom from ties that bind, from envy, anger, friendship.

No wonder man was always out to conquer Nature, Anna thought. He can’t bear it that she doesn’t love him, or even hate him. She simply doesn’t give a damn.

Scuffling sounds came in with the fog, then laughter, then laughter receding. Trail crew were settling into their second phase. The light drunks had dined and were wending their still somewhat steady way homeward. The hard core were settling in for the evening’s sodden festivities.

Anna removed her feet from Pilcher’s desk and peered through the mist, which grew more opaque with the coming night, to see who had chosen the better part of valor.

Scotty Butkus passed within a yard or two of the window where Anna sat. His leathery face was twisted in the same sly smile he’d worn when he’d mentioned his intention to deliver a reminder to the “intwerps.”

Tinker and Damien were camped in Moskey. In July, the height of the season, even if they had told anyone of their destination, it would have been impossible to foretell precisely which camp they would find empty when they arrived. Knowing they were well hidden, Anna wasn’t so much afraid for them as curious.

Without taking the time to replace the files or lock the cabinet, she slid the window up the rest of the way and stepped out onto the gravel. Keeping in step with Scotty’s boot-shod stride, she used his noise to cover hers.

Once past the dock he veered left, following a dirt road into the heavily forested center of Mott. On the windblown duff, he made less of a racket and Anna found herself having to fall further behind to remain undetected.

Trees pressed like shadows onto the road. Without them it would have been possible to lose one’s way even on a track rutted by two-wheeled carts. Fog robbed Anna of any sense of direction. She concentrated on the ever fainter sound of Scotty’s footfalls.

The road forked. The left fork led up to the water tank that served the island. The right fork led to the permanent employees’ apartments. It seemed years since she had walked that road, found Hawk in the District Ranger’s yard playing with a baby, but it had been less than twelve hours.

Scotty passed Pilcher’s door, passed the Chief of Interpretation’s apartment. He was going home. To drink himself to sleep, probably, Anna thought as he went inside.

The hunt was finished. She turned to retrace her steps but a sense that the evening’s activities were not over stopped her. The gift of the cloak of invisibility had been bestowed for a reason, and that reason had yet to manifest itself. “You’re getting as bad as Tinker,” Anna grumbled, but she stepped off the road, leaned against a tree, and slid down to wait in the cold.

Mudroom, hall, living room: a trail of light preceded Scotty through the apartment. Though Anna’d never been inside the Butkus residence, she could picture it in her mind: ruffled throws, pictures hung, artsy-craftsy attempts to soften the edges of government architecture. These feminine touches would be made pathetic now by a litter of beer cans, cigarette butts, and dirty underwear.

The overhead in the bedroom came on, and the parade of lights was at an end. Anna’s butt was growing damp from the loam, and the bark was beginning to bite through her shirt.

Scotty might have passed out, she reasoned, though he’d not seemed nearly that drunk. More likely he’d wandered back into the living room and was settled comfortably in front of the television while she refrigerated her posterior out in the dark.

With a sigh, she pulled herself to her feet. It was time to go home, and the
Belle Isle,
however unappealing, was home.

Twenty yards up the trail, she heard a door slam. Once again the fog became her friend. She stepped off the path into the shrouded darkness. Footsteps, sounding stealthy only because she waited in stealth, came up from the dwellings. Booted feet: Scotty Butkus passed her. He’d changed into dark clothing and carried a bundle a little larger than a human head under his left arm.

Windigo stories flooded Anna’s mind and her flesh began to creep. Things that seemed laughable by the light of day took on a more forbidding aspect on a foggy night. She fell into step twenty or thirty paces behind him.

He stopped. Anna stopped. She almost believed she could feel him listening, feel him groping around in the fog with his mind. Feet planted in crushed gravel, she didn’t dare move. Her breath rasped at the silence like a crosscut saw. Logically, she knew Scotty was at least eight or ten yards ahead of her, knew he couldn’t move without noise any more than she could. Yet in the thick darkness she waited for the sudden hand clutching at her throat.

Scotty began to move away from her. Whatever had been the cause of his halt, the result must’ve been reassuring. He went on with a confident step. Anna went with him.

The fog moved in sinuous waves, some so dense she could see scarcely two yards, some thinning till she could see him in the glare of the few intruder lights scattered along the path.

Scotty kept on till he reached the docking area in front of the Administration Building. Showing more sneakiness than he had to date, he studied the dock, peered at the office, then, satisfied he was alone, boarded the
Lorelei.

Anna understood the sudden increase in caution. Blackmail was one thing, but using a government vehicle for personal reasons was serious business. Leeway was given to the North and South Shore Rangers due to the isolated nature of their duty stations, but in Rock Harbor Lucas held a hard line. It was a firing offense.

The
Lorelei
’s running lights flicked on, then the engines. Anna knew she’d never be able to follow in the
Belle Isle
without being detected. Even in the fog Scotty would recognize the familiar growl of the Bertram’s engines.

She ran lightly across the quay, her rubber-soled shoes making no sound on the concrete. Just as the
Lorelei
eased away from the dock Anna sprang aboard. Two of the cabin windows faced the stern; between them was the door. Quick as a cat, she stepped to the door and put her back against it. In the cabin’s blind spot she would be safe.

Faint green light glowed from the windows. Radar was on. The
Lorelei
crept out of the little harbor. In the middle of the channel, shores invisible in the fog, Scotty pulled back the throttles to an idle. A click: The cabin window slid open. Soft bumping—the rubber fenders. Scotty had forgotten them. Now he was pulling them in. In less than a minute he would come out on deck to pull up the stern fender.