A Superior Death (4 page)

Mist lay over Amygdaloid Channel. Humps of pale gray moved lazily over the surface as if ghostly whales swam between air and water. Patches drifted clear and the silver of reflected light glowed till fingers of fog curled back to reclaim the space. To the east, over the green ridges of Belle Isle, the dawn sky was burning into blue, the promise of a beautiful day.

Wrapped against the chill that the forty-eighth parallel would not relinquish even in June, Anna sat on the front steps of the ranger station. Cloaked in a shapeless plaid flannel bathrobe, the tail tucked under her feet to keep them from the dew-bitten planks, she stared through binoculars at the far shore: a thin line of sand and stone, now revealed, now shrouded by the mist. Beside her a mug of coffee curled tiny tendrils of fog into the cold air; a minuscule offering to the gods of the lake.

“Come on,” Anna said softly. “Come out. I know you’re there. And I know you’ve got the baby. Show yourselves.”

From the silence of the channel a loon called and was answered. The sun pierced the pines on the cliff’s top and dyed the mist rose. Open water glittered, bright as new pennies. Again the loon called its haunting liquid warble, this time to be answered by the sound of wings on water.

Now they’ll come, Anna thought. “I’ve seen your tracks,” she whispered. “I know you’re there.”

A shadowy red form darted between her and the dock where gently rocking boats cradled fishermen. She refocused the glasses. The black muzzle of a little fox came into view. Head tilted to one side, pink tongue lolling, she sat less than twenty feet from the station steps ready to beg for her breakfast like a house dog. “Not you, Knucklehead,” Anna murmured and again trained the field glasses on the opposite shore.

Somewhere to the north a power boat growled to life and morning’s spell was broken. Now they wouldn’t come. “Damn.” Anna lowered the binoculars. Isle Royale’s wolves were the shyest of creatures. Some rangers who’d worked the island for years had never so much as glimpsed them. Scat, tracks, howling, confused reports from hikers startled by foxes—that was all most people ever knew of the wolves in summer.

In winter, when the island’s dense foliage dropped its leaves and deep snow made tracking easy, a Winter Study team came to ISRO—Park Service shorthand for Isle Royale—for several weeks and studied the wolf packs. Only two packs remained, twelve wolves in all, with only one new birth in the past year. The wolves were dying and the scientists didn’t know why. There was some indication that an outbreak of canine parvovirus, a disease carried by domestic dogs, was a factor in the decline, but inbreeding was the guess most favored at the moment.

The Park Service was doing all it could to preserve the wolves, even to the extremely unpopular extent of denying visitors and staff the privilege of bringing their pets to the island—or even within the park’s boundaries four and a half miles out. Still, the wolves did not thrive, did not reproduce.

At least it’s not us killing them, not directly, Anna thought, and enjoyed the sense of being one of the good guys, a compatriot instead of a despoiler. It was a proud feeling. And rare as hen’s teeth, added her mind’s resident cynic.

“Tomorrow,” she said to the empty stretch of beach across the channel. “At dawn. Be there or be square. And bring the puppy.”

The roar of the motorboat grew louder, wrecking what remained of tranquillity. A glossy wine-colored bow plowed up the mist in the channel. Anna gathered up her cup and crept back inside. It wouldn’t do for the public to catch the ranger in her pajamas. Besides, it was her lieu day. If she didn’t escape before a tourist happened to her, she’d undoubtedly get roped into some task for which the NPS wouldn’t pay overtime.

During the six months the park was staffed, Lucas Vega frowned on rangers leaving the island on their days off. Superior’s sudden storms had a habit of turning weekends into paid vacations. Consequently, Anna spent a goodly number of her days off selling fishing licenses, cutting fishhooks out of fingers, and listening to fish stories.

“Attitude, Anna, attitude,” she chided herself as she dragged on long underwear and polypropylene trousers, but she had every intention of escaping out the back door unless the approaching vessel could prove problems of a life-and-death nature.

This Tuesday and Wednesday, she’d promised herself a kayak trip, dinner at the lodge, and a phone call to New York. The trip would mix business with pleasure. Anna packed a tent and backcountry gear for several nights out. On the way back, she would spend a couple of days checking the more remote campsites.

The sun was high by the time she shoved off. By Anna’s standards it never got warm—not the deep bone-warming temperatures that baked the poisons out down in the Trans-Pecos—but the weather held jewel-bright. A breeze cooled by thirty-nine-degree waters cut across the bow when she nosed her sea kayak into the open water around Blake’s Point at the island’s northernmost tip, and even through the insulating layers her butt was cold. Hard paddling kept her from feeling the worst of the chill.

Waves, dangerous near the point where shoals broke them, rolled gently half a mile out. Anna kept her bow pointed into the swells and reveled in the sense of being part of the lake instead of a motorized nuisance, a noisy intruder it would shrug from its skin as a horse would twitch free of a fly.

Northeast was Passage Island with its historic light-house. To the south, long fingers of land, rock shredded by fifteen centuries of a glacier’s feints and retreats, reached into the lake. In the spring sunshine, the peninsulas were clothed in rich greens and the water in the coves was tropical blue. Gold-colored stone, broken into blocks ten and twenty feet on a side, glimmered through the crystal water. Timber, blown over from the mainland or toppled from ISRO’s own shores, was scattered like jackstraws on the lake bottom. In places the fissured rock and bleached wood gave the disconcerting illusions of sunken ruins. Castles filled only with fishes, turrets pulled down to make playgrounds for otters.

Anna let the kayak drift down the sheltered channel beside Porter’s Island. Shipping her paddles, she ate a lunch of tortillas and beans. Lying back, her legs free of the enclosed bow, she let the sun paint patterns on her eyelids, as the water tapped its music against the sides of the boat.

When she finally paddled into the wake-raddled bustle of Rock Harbor, it was after five o’clock.

Rock Harbor was a nine-mile stretch of water protected from the storms by a chain of islands: Raspberry, Smith-wick, Shaw, Tookers, Davidson, Outer Hill, Mott, Caribou. The administrative offices of the National Park Service were clustered on Mott Island, the biggest in the chain. A majority of ISRO’s employees were housed there in dormitories or apartments. The island’s somewhat gruesome history—it was named for Charlie Mott, who had tried to eat his wife one long and hungry winter—was all but exorcised by the banal necessities of bureaucratic life.

The niche in Rock Harbor that was thought of as the “real” Rock Harbor was three miles from Mott toward Blake’s Point. It was a doubly protected cove shut in an elbow of land. The lodge was there, along with the Visitors’ Center, the boat rental concession, and a clapboard windowless hall where National Park Service naturalists like to shut the tourists away from moose and fox and thimbleberry, from rain and wind and mosquitoes and show them slides of Nature.

Gasoline and groceries could be had in Rock, and there was a pumping station for boats. During the height of the summer season the
Voyageur
from Grand Marais, Minnesota, called three times a week, the
Queen
brought passengers from Copper Harbor, Michigan, on Mondays and Fridays, and the
Ranger III
carried fares and supplies from Houghton. The lodge was usually booked weeks ahead and backpackers, disembarking from the ships, often had to hike eight or more miles out before finding a camp for the night.

Bustle and busyness, petty crimes and medical problems had earned the port the nickname of Rock Harlem among park and concessionaire employees. Though Anna enjoyed her occasional forays into this heart of commerce, she always found its urbanity jarring after the isolation of Amygdaloid.

As she dragged her kayak up between the docks that lined the harbor, she saw a blond woman in the khaki and green uniform of the Student Conservation Association. SCAs were volunteers, often college students, who traded their time for the experience and the joy of summering in a park.

Anna knew her slightly from the training provided for all seasonal employees the first week in June. Her name was Tenner, or Tinkle. No, Tinker, Anna remembered. She was married to a man of twenty-four, about ten years younger than she was. It had been the gossip for a day or two. He called himself Damien and leaned toward black capes and cryptic statements.

The woman had a vague and whimsical nature, as if she believed, along with Liza Minnelli, that reality was something she must rise above. At present she was leading a score of tourists around the one-mile paved nature trail.

Anna turned her back on the group and stowed her paddles in the kayak’s hull. If it was one of Tinker’s first nature walks, Anna didn’t want to distract her. Thirty-one years afterward Anna still remembered one devastating moment when she’d looked off stage in the middle of her big moment as Jack Frost to see her grandmother waving from the second row.

On the short walk up from the water, Anna deliberated between a drink and a phone call. The phone call won. ISRO was connected to the mainland by radiophone, and anybody with the right frequency and a passing interest could tune in. But it was the only link with the outside world and Anna was glad to have it.

The booth provided for NPS employees was built of pecky cedar, but after years of use it smelled like a dirty ashtray. Set off in a small clearing in the spruce trees, windows on all four sides, it had the look of the bridge on a tug-boat. Several yards away, next to a sixty-watt bulb on a metal post, was a bench for people waiting to use the phone.

Line forms to the right, Anna thought, but she was in luck. There was no one in the booth, and she slipped inside. She shooed a spider off the counter and dragged the phone over. Crackling and whispers grated in the darkness of her inner ear—then finally, faintly, the burr of a phone ringing on the fourteenth floor above Park Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street.

“Park View Clinic,” came a toneless voice. But for twelve years of experience, Anna would have waited for the machine’s beep.

“Is Dr. Pigeon in?” Anna asked formally. “It’s her sister.”

“One moment please.” Never a spark of recognition, never an “Oh, hello, Anna” in all the years. Hazel—a name Anna found at odds with the cold telephone persona—was the ideal receptionist, Molly said. A woman with an imagination wouldn’t have lasted a week in the position.

“Will you hold?” pierced through the static.

“I’ll hold.” Music, Yo Yo Ma on cello, drifted down the wires through the white noise.

A young man came and sat down on the waiting bench. He had dark thick hair that seemed both wild and well coiffured, the envy of any girl. His eyes were wide-set above chiseled cheekbones. Anna prepared herself to ignore him. Her rare phone calls were too precious to be spoiled by the pressuring eyes of a too-pretty boy. Before she had time to edit him out of her world, he flashed her a smile and she recognized him: Tinker’s husband, sans cape.

“Can’t talk long. Give me the news.”

Molly’s voice, sudden and startling, seemed to speak from inside Anna’s head. It sounded so faint, so rushed, her isolation felt more complete. A heaviness grew in her chest. She had no news. She was just making contact, drilling a long-distance hole in her loneliness. “You’re at the office late,” she said.

“My four o’clock had a lot on her mind today. Still afraid her husband will leave her. Been coming to me twice a week for eleven years about it. I must be one hell of a shrink.”

“You do her good.”

“Maybe. If not for my fees, her husband could’ve afforded a divorce in 1986. This connection is bloody awful, Anna. Have you found someplace even more godforsaken than West Texas? Tell me you’ve got flush toilets.”

Anna laughed. “Sorry.”

“Seven minutes, Anna.” There was a short sucking silence; Molly lighting a cigarette.

“Those things’ll kill you,” Anna said.

“This from a woman who carries a gun,” Molly returned.

“Not anymore. It would be more likely to drown you here than save you from the bad guys. I carry it in a briefcase like any self-respecting Manhattan drug dealer.”

Molly laughed, almost a cackle. “Six minutes . . . nope. Four.”

“Why? What’s up?” Anna forced herself to ask, though suddenly she knew she didn’t want to hear of any glittering social event, any cozy gathering.

“Promised to go to a function up in Westchester. A political wine tasting.”

“Wine’s not your drink.”

“Not like it’s yours.”

Anna ignored that.

“Two reasons: A client of mine is obsessing on it. Can’t name names but you’ll find his byline in the Girls’ Sports section of Sunday’s
Times.
” Anna laughed—that was how Molly always referred to the Style section. Molly continued: “A rediscovered batch of very pricey long-lost stuff. Supposedly made during Prohibition, the year of the perfect weather in California. When the sun, the grapes, the soil, had reached the mythical moment. Twenty cases were bottled, then mysteriously vanished. Last month a couple of the prodigal bottles returned. My client is most distraught. Swears it’s a hoax. As you may have guessed, he wasn’t the one to rediscover it.

“Secondly: It’s in Westchester County. I haven’t been there for a while. I thought I’d stop by Valhalla—” Molly interrupted herself with a snort of laughter. “Valhalla. A good Christian cemetery, no doubt. Look up Zachary. See if the eternal flame still burns or whatever.”