A Superior Death (31 page)

Anna found herself wishing Patience would address her insults/parables/whatevers to her daughter instead of banking them like an expert billiard player off Anna. No such thing as a free lunch, she reminded herself. She was to be had for a meal and a bed.

“More star-crossed disappearances?” Anna said to say something.

“In spades,” Patience replied.

“Oh God!” Carrie Ann rolled her oversized brown eyes.

“What speech now? AIDS or ‘when I was your age’?”

“Shut up!” her mother snapped. To Anna she said: “Get your tubes tied.”

Anna began to wonder if partaking in this dispute was going to be too much to pay for a dry bed.

Shortly after they reached the Bittners’ apartment, Carrie disappeared into her room.

“Gad!” Patience threw herself onto the vinyl of an institutional rendition of an overstuffed chair. “I need a drink. Need, not want: the point when connoisseur becomes addict. Can I pour you something?”

“Whatever,” Anna replied. She wanted the hot shower, the flannel gown, the sofa Patience had lent her in the past, but, ever mindful of her beggar-not-chooser status, she schooled herself to listen to anything from confession to kvetching.

“Wine! Lord, what would we do without it?” Patience asked rhetorically. “Wine is about the only thing you can count on. Too bad you can’t choose vintage children. Can’t say, ‘Ah, yes, ’78, that was an excellent year for children. Sweet, a little precocious, but not impertinent.’ Do you remember Prohibition?”

“Not firsthand,” Anna replied. “I’ve seen the movies.

Loved Sean Connery in
The Untouchables.
”

“It almost killed the California wine industry. A crippling blow.” Patience brought two glasses of red wine over to the couch where Anna huddled dreaming of dry flannel gowns. “Some kept going in secret—like the Catholics in Communist Russia or the secular artists during the Inquisition—artists smuggling their art out of a repressive country.”

“Mmm.” Anna drank of the red. It slid down rich, uncompromising. “California?” she guessed.

“No!” Patience laughed. “Hungarian. Who cares?” she said with a sudden change of attitude. “Wine’s wine. It’ll get you there.”

“ ‘There’s’ not where it used to be,” Anna said wearily and, with the words, realized she’d probably consumed enough alcohol for one night.

“You sound like a woman who’s had a long day,” Patience observed.

“Long day,” Anna agreed. She found she didn’t want to talk about it, about Jo, Stanton and his pointed questions, about Scotty or blackmail or blue plastic baby dolls. What she wanted, she realized, was to watch TV. Preferably something familiar, something without too much violence.

“Isn’t
Murder, She Wrote
on tonight?” she asked. “I haven’t looked at television for a while.”

CHAPTER 21

A
good night’s sleep had cleared Anna’s head. Sitting on Patience’s couch, warm in a tangle of bedclothes, she turned the doll between her hands. It was fairly realistic: The legs bowed, the arms were pudgy, the glassy blue eyes closed when the little body was placed on the horizontal. There were no marks of violence, no tiny broken legs, no doll-sized knife in its back. Nothing that Anna could see to indicate a threat. The blue was the only abnormality.

Blue to indicate death by suffocation or drowning, immersion in the icy waters of Superior; a death, or a burial like Denny Castle’s? Then why the “Hopkins” in the blackmail note?

Anna put the toy back in its garbage bag. “Patience, can I use your phone?” she hollered. From behind the bathroom door came a muffled affirmative.

A private phone: Anna felt the luxury of it as she lifted the receiver. Dutifully she recited her credit card number to a user-friendly AT&T operator and was channeled through long-distance information to the Hopkins Public Library.

An efficient-sounding woman answered on the first ring.

Anna introduced herself. “I’m doing a background check on a Theresa Coggins,” she told the librarian. “She lived in Hopkins from 1974 to 1980. Is there any way you could check the local paper for any reference to her during those years?”

Normally, no, but it wasn’t a busy morning and the librarian had always wanted to be a park ranger, so yes, this once. She would call back.

Patience emerged from the bath in a cloud of commercial scent. Her slender frame was draped with tasteful elegance in dove-gray linen with shoes to match. “How do you do it?” Anna asked.

“Perhaps I didn’t marry well,” Patience said with a wink, “but I divorced brilliantly. Carrie Ann!”

Looking dull as an ox beside her mother, Carrie trudged up the hall and was taken off to the lodge in maternal custody.

Anna showered with the bathroom door open so she could hear the phone. As she was toweling dry, it rang. Mindful of her guest manners, she answered, “Bittner residence, Anna Pigeon speaking.”

It was the librarian from Hopkins. Yes, there had been a number of articles on Theresa Coggins published in the newspaper between 1978 and 1980. Ms. Coggins and her husband, David Coggins, had been on trial for manslaughter. They had been accused of the wrongful death of their daughter, Constantina, aged ten months, twelve days.

“Whoa!” Anna breathed.

“What?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“They were finally acquitted,” the librarian said, sounding mildly disappointed. “That’s everything, except a wedding announcement two years later: David Coggins marrying a woman named Agnes Larson. Nothing else on Theresa Coggins. She may have left town or changed her name.”

“Do you have a fax machine?” Anna asked abruptly.

“There’s one at the post office.”

Anna gave the librarian the park’s fax number and her own profuse thanks.

 

 

 

T
he newspaper articles beat her to the ranger station on Mott. Seventeen articles in all, covering the death of the child, the trial, the public outcry, the acquittal.of

The first paragraph of the first article told the story. “During last Sunday’s cold snap, when temperatures were hovering at thirteen below with a windchill factor in the minus forties, David and Theresa Coggins went cross-country skiing on Winetka Lake near their home in south Hopkins. They took their ten-month-old daughter, Constantina, along in a backpack worn by Mrs. Coggins. Exertion kept David and Theresa from feeling the cold, but the baby, confined to the backpack froze to death.

“ ‘I thought she was sleeping,’ said the nineteen-year-old mother. ‘Then she just wouldn’t wake up.’ ”

Anna leaned back and rested her head against the wall in the dispatch room. A blue baby doll: “Scotty should have his heart cut out with a dull Boy Scout knife.”

“Put me on your list of volunteers,” Sandra Fox said, never taking her fingers from the printout she was reading. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re a shit, you know that, Anna Pigeon?”

“I’m just postponing the inevitable. You always find out everything eventually. Think of it as a challenge.”

“I hate that damn fax machine,” Sandra said without rancor. “Messages blatting in and out of my dispatch and I can’t read them.”

Anna chuckled aloud to let Sandra know she knew it was a joke. Sandra went on with her reading, fingers keeping her place when she was interrupted by the phone or the radio. Anna slipped off her shoe and buried her toes in Delphi’s warm fur. The dog thumped the floor with her tail.

Scotty was blackmailing Tinker to stop her and her husband from investigating the disappearance of his wife, the alleged lover of the dead man.

Damning as it was, Anna was not convinced Scotty had killed Denny. She could see Scotty, in a drunken rage, accidentally killing his wife. But the Castle murder appeared calculating, dangerous, clever.

“Scotty hasn’t got the balls,” she muttered.

“Beginning, middle, and end,” Sandra said, “or I don’t want to hear any of the story.”

Anna relapsed into thought. If not Scotty, who? Jim Tattinger, because he was a creep? Because Castle was a threat to him professionally? Tattinger had left the Virgin Islands under a pall. Had Denny known why? Had Tattinger been suspected of plundering the shipwrecks? Suspected but not proven guilty, so the accusation was never made public? Or, more likely, to avoid bad press had the NPS decided to “handle it from within”?

Was Tattinger continuing those activities at ISRO?

“Sandra, do me a favor?”

“No. No way. Not possible. Tit for tat. Eye for an eye.

You scratch my back, et cetera.”

“Find out why Jim Tattinger left the Virgin Islands.”

“Is Jim being investigated in the Castle thing?”

“No,” Anna admitted. “There’s not a scrap of evidence against him. That’s why I need you to find out for me. Personnel, the District Ranger—the official channels will be closed.”

“Island dispatcher to island dispatcher?” Sandra said with a smile. “The centers through which all information flows? You want me to abuse my position of trust to wheedle gossip from an unsuspecting peer?”

“That’s it in a nutshell.”

“Tit for tat,” Sandra replied.

Anna told her what she could of the circumstantial evidence built up around Tattinger, of finding him sneaking around near where the
Kamloops
went down after the murder but before the body recovery. She wanted to hint at Jo’s and the Bradshaws’ innocence, but until they were officially cleared by the FBI, she didn’t dare. It wasn’t much, but Sandra took it as a sign of good faith.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she promised.

Anna thanked her and left for the sunshine on the dock. The fog had burned away and the day promised to reach close to seventy degrees. She was anxious to get back to the north shore, resume her routine duties.

The
Belle Isle
needed refueling, and Anna’s supply of candy bars was perilously low, so she made a stop at Rock. Pacing in front of the bench above the harbor was Damien Coggins-Clarke, preparing for his nature walk. Anna jogged up the path in his direction. Once again she was given a less than enthusiastic greeting.

“It’s okay,” Anna said gently. “There’ll be no more threats. The past won’t be dragged out. It’s been taken care of.”

Damien stopped pacing and looked at her squarely for the first time. “The Windigo is so powerful. People eaten up with fear. They must devour others but they’ll never be sealed. I thought I could take care of her,” he added simply. “But all I could do was love her.”

“In the end that will be all she’ll remember ever needing,” Anna said.

Damien paced the length of the bench again, his eyes on something farther away than the mountains. “Is it over?” he asked when he’d returned to where Anna was standing.

“The blackmail is over,” Anna replied. For a mother the death of a child would never be over.

Two beats of silence passed in which Damien’s face slowly lit up from within. “I want to give you something.”

Inwardly, Anna began to squirm. Gifts made her uncomfortable. Before she could voice her concern and wriggle away, Damien had fished something out of his trouser pocket. “Here. It’s a greenstone. We found it out from shore,” he assured Anna. Collecting greenstones on the island was illegal but off shore the practice was allowed. “It’s the nicest one I’ve ever found.” He pushed it into her hands.

Anna looked at the glossy jade-colored rock fitting as neatly as a robin’s egg in her palm. It was a beautiful specimen, rounded from years of wave action, deep clear green with veins of a lighter color running through it in an uncharacteristic pattern.

“You were always supposed to have it,” Damien said earnestly, as if afraid she was going to give it back. “I just didn’t know till today. When I brought it up, Tinker said, ‘Look how the gray zigzags, like the gray through Anna’s braids.’ See? It’s always been yours.”

“Thank you,” Anna said, and closed her fingers around the stone.

Damien looked pleased. Behind him a noisy group of mostly teenage girls was coming up from the lodge. “Looks like your audience is arriving,” Anna said.

“I want to run and tell Tinker the good news—will you take my nature walk, Anna?”

He enjoyed the look of stark terror on her face for a moment before he said: “Just kidding.”

As Anna made her escape she heard Damien’s girlish voice calling “Thanks!” after her and: “Oscar says you are one stout fella.”

Oscar, it seemed, could communicate telepathically over fairly good distances. The whimsy pleased Anna.

CHAPTER 22