A Superior Death (33 page)

Then what? Anna asked as the ducklings followed their mom out of sight around the port side of the
Loon.
One day Donna disappears and Scotty lies about it. Even her sister doesn’t know where she’s gone. Scotty orders a case of pickle relish. Damien swears Scotty is the human personification of the Windigo. Donna’s best friend reports Scotty was “. . . killing Donna . . . eating her alive . . .”

Woman’s intuition or just an unfortunate choice of words?

Scotty and Jim finished their tête-à-tête. Butkus disappeared into the Administration Building. Jim crossed the concrete to where the
Loon
was moored. Both pointedly refused to acknowledge Anna. She had to holler Jim’s name twice before he responded, and then she thought he was going to refuse her a ride to Rock. Good sense, if not manners, prevailed, and he acquiesced.

On the short trip Anna had trouble not staring at him. She’d never seen a pedophile before. In every seminar she’d ever attended on sexual deviants, the instructors had stressed what normal, guy-next-door types they often were, attractive men with good personalities, with wives and children. Jim Tattinger broke with tradition. He looked like a child molester right out of Central Casting’s Obvious Perverts book.

For half the trip she debated the wisdom of letting him know she was aware of his propensity; debated whether it would scare him into walking the straight and narrow, or push him into taking a risk that might be damaging to his latest inamorata.

She chose silence. She would talk with Patience, then the Chief Ranger. After all, that’s what he was paid the big bucks for.

At the lodge, Anna was told Patience and her daughter had gone to the mainland for a few days to get Carrie’s braces tightened. She was glad of the reprieve. This was one hornet’s nest she did not look forward to stirring up.

CHAPTER 23

A
nna stayed around Rock Harbor just long enough to collect her mail from the
Ranger III.
As always, there was a letter from Chris to be treasured away for later. As she headed overland toward Lane Cove and her duty station, an unexpected bit of good news came her way.

Damien ran after her. Boyish again, joyous, he loped along the asphalt path as graceful as a greyhound. “She’s birding again!” he told Anna of his wife. Anna gathered that to bird was to live and was glad that Tinker’s burden had been one that she could ease, if only a little. “We’re spending our weekends at McCargo Cove. If there’s a nesting peregrine, she’ll see it. She sees
everything.
”

The stress he gave the word seemed to indicate that Tinker saw both the visible and the invisible, the corporeal and the existential. Anna did not disagree.

On the walk over Greenstone Ridge Anna dawdled along, enjoying the sense of time and immortality the long summer days engendered. In several places where the island’s backbone had been rubbed free of its fur of trees and shrubs, the trail cut across solid stone, the way picked out only by rock cairns.

On one such expanse of bare ridge, Anna went off the trail till she was out of sight, divested herself of her pack, and lay down. The gray rock soaked up and savored the weak rays of Michigan’s sun, the heat soothing her back and shoulders.

Her mind wandered back to New York City, the apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, Zachary waiting on tables at a little Mexican restaurant on Ninth Avenue, waiting for his big break. There was no money. Cockroaches scuttled like evil spirits every time a light was switched on. The kids in apartment 1C spray-painted obscenities on the walls of the foyer and smashed the mailboxes. The lady across the air shaft slept all day and screamed at her husband all night. And that was the summer the city was infested with rats. The
Post
was running headlines on it. Zach reported seeing a rat so big coming down the tracks into the Forty-second Street subway station that nine tourists tried to board, thinking it was the number 7 train.

Yet Anna had been happy then. There was Zachary and there was hope. It doesn’t take much, she thought. You’d think it would be easier to hang on to.

She stared up at the sky, felt the stone warm beneath her spine. Playing in her mind, she began replacing her body, molecule by molecule, with bits of the earth.

There would be peace in shedding one’s humanity, rest in moving to the slower geological rhythms, charm in feeling the skittering of animal feet over one’s chest, the brush of autumn leaves settling in the wrinkles of one’s skin, blankets of snow cooling the body into a long sleep.

Mosquitoes woke Anna. It was dusk and she was laid out like a smorgasbord. She awakened from her dream of the earth thinking: You can’t get blood from a stone.

But if any mosquitoes could, it would be the mosquitoes of Isle Royale. Pursued by bloodsucking demons, she ran the last mile through the gathering darkness and escaped out onto the water in the
Belle Isle.

T
wo days later as she grumbled around Amygdaloid dock with buckets, sluicing off the fish guts some slob fisherman had deposited in her absence, the
3rd Sister
motored up the channel and glided effortlessly to her mooring. Without looking, Anna knew that Holly was the pilot.

She waded through the herring gulls her impromptu bouillabaisse had collected, and helped Hawk tether the lines to the cleats.

Holly sprang from the deck with a grace born of strength. Both she and her brother looked better than they had since Denny had been killed. Some of the arrogance that was an integral part of their charm was beginning to creep back into their bearing.

By now Hawk must have told his sister that Anna knew of the incest. Anna suspected that Hawk seldom had a thought he did not share with her; that things did not exist for him until they existed for Holly as well.

Either Holly didn’t mind, or she was hiding it well. She greeted Anna with the same short, sharp smile she always had. “We’ve got the pictures,” she said. “Picked them up in Grand Marais this morning.”

For a moment Anna was at a loss. Then she remembered they were going to do a bounce dive on the
Kamloops
to see what they could find.

Like most underwater photos, those Holly had taken seemed slightly out of focus. Time had been severely limited. She and Hawk had confined themselves to the area along the hull where they had found Denny’s corpse floating. Three of the shots were of the porthole where Jim and Anna had noticed the scratches. The remaining seven were of the surrounding area.

Since the body recovery dive, Anna had collected the stats on the
Kamloops,
garnered not only from the original builder’s specifications but from the findings of the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit out of Santa Fe. Information on the ship was not hard to come by. Like all ISRO’s wrecks, it was quite celebrated.

Having perfunctorily cleared her desk in the ranger station, Anna spread out a diagram of the ship and the ten photographs the Bradshaws provided. Brother and sister hovered interestedly while she gathered her thoughts.

As she had guessed, the scratched porthole led into the captain’s quarters. According to the builder’s specs and corroborated by Anna’s memory, the diameter of the opening was just over a foot and a half, 19.6 inches to be exact.

Anna picked up the photos of the porthole and examined them carefully. Then she took an envelope from her desk, removed two pictures from it, and compared them with the Bradshaws’ photos.

“Jim took these the day we recovered Denny’s body.

Look.” Anna laid both sets of pictures back on the desk. “There’s more scratches. Somebody’s been down there since the murder messing around at that porthole. The latch was broken when Jim and I were down there. There were these scratches. They’re dulled a little in your pictures. Here they’re not so deep. These old ones look like they were made with something sharp. These are new, more like scrapes, as if someone were repeatedly vandalizing this one porthole. Dragging something through.”

For several moments they all three stared at the photographs. “You couldn’t get through that porthole in tanks,” Anna observed.

Hawk held the close-up of the scratches so the sunlight illuminated it clearly. “Maybe the marks could have been made with a chain or a wire. Somebody fishing through the hole, fishing something out of the cabin.”

“What could they be after in the captain’s quarters?” Holly asked. “I mean, there’s the usual trinkets, but nobody dives the
Kamloops
for trinkets. Too dangerous. All I saw anywhere near the porthole were some busted-up wooden crates and pieces of broken crockery.”

Anna sorted through the folder of papers she’d collected on the
Kamloops
and pulled out a Xerox copy of the bill of lading. “Fence wire, machinery from England, pipe, shoes, steel cable,” she began aloud. She ran through the list of goods. The
Kamloops
was a package freighter; she carried everyday fare. Time and circumstances might have made some of them worth more than they had been originally, but nothing that would be worth repeatedly risking one’s life for, or committing murder for.

“You’re barking up the wrong list,” Holly said. “If whoever’s stealing artifacts is fiddling around the captain’s cabin, my guess is they’re looking for personal effects.”

“Gold doubloons,” Hawk said with an exaggerated air of mystery.

“Wrong century,” Holly retorted.

“Wrong sea,” Anna said.

“Right touch of glamour,” he offered.

“Captains of freighters weren’t rich,” Anna thought aloud. “Contraband?”

“Maybe,” Holly agreed. “What was contraband in 1927?”

“We are close enough to Chicago. There was that whole gangster thing. Maybe dirty money, drugs—” Anna began.

“Guys in cement overcoats,” Hawk interjected.

The women ignored him.

“Stocks, bonds, stolen goods: jewelry, gold, silver—”

“Hooch,” Hawk added unhelpfully.

“Do you want to go out and play?” Holly asked. Despite her preoccupation, Anna was glad to see Hawk smile.

“I’ll be good,” he promised.

“Whatever it is, it had to be small enough to get through a porthole, close enough to the porthole it could be fished out, and worth a lot to somebody,” Anna went on.

“You forgot easy,” Hawk said, finally serious. “There’s no time down there. It’s too cold for much in the way of decompression stops. A bounce dive is about it. Maybe twenty minutes max if you know what you’re doing. You’d have to grab the thing and get back to the surface in a short space of time.”

“Or things,” Anna corrected and pointed to the scratches that indicated more than one attempt at entry. Rubbing her eyes, she leaned back in her chair. Idly, she moved the photos around as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle she was putting together. “I wish this made more sense.”

“Me too,” Holly said. “Stanton’s been asking questions on the mainland—both at the Voyageur Marina and in Grand Marais. The locals are beginning to look at us funny. It doesn’t take much to lose your reputation in this business.”

“Better than losing your boat,” Anna said.

“Without it we won’t need the boat.”

Anna picked up the remaining seven pictures and fanned them out like a poker hand: the hull vanishing into the somber depths, a shot of the hull in the other direction with the vague light of the surface beckoning, mud hills rolling away, the Pepsi can she remembered from her dive, a shot of Hawk by the porthole, and a coffee mug half buried in the lake bottom.

“I wish I hadn’t been so scared when I went down,” Anna said. “It’s hard to remember what, exactly, was there.”

“That’s true of almost everybody on a deep dive,” Holly reassured her.

“Particularly squirrels,” Hawk added.

“I think I liked you better depressed,” Anna countered.

“Why don’t you guys go back to work or whatever it is you do?” She rose from her chair and gathered the papers and pictures together to replace them in the manila folder. “I’ve got things to do.”