A Superior Death (5 page)

“My mother-in-law takes care of that,” Anna said.

“Does Edith still think his ashes are under that god-awful marble slab? Speaking of mental health,” Molly went on without giving Anna time to answer, “do you still have them? Sprinkle them, Anna. Do it. ‘Lake Superior, it is said, never gives up her dead.’ Do it.”

“Don’t you have someplace to go?” Anna asked irritably.

“Right. Stay out of Davey Jones’s locker.”

And the line went dead.

Anna settled the receiver back in the cradle. The heaviness in her chest had grown more oppressive. Maybe she’d been hiding in the wilderness long enough. Maybe it was time to go back to civilization. It would be good to shave her legs, pull on something silk, go to a pretentious party in lipstick and hose.

She looked out the window of the phone box. Damien still inhabited the bench. Not with the air of a man waiting impatiently—or patiently—but of a man with no better place to be. The wide-set eyes were fixed on a pileated woodpecker high in an aspen tree. He watched with the total unaffected concentration of a child.

A red feather floated down through the golden-green leaves and landed a yard or two from his sneakered feet. He picked up the feather and the lovely smile flashed. Not for Anna this time, for the giver of the gift: the woodpecker.

Anna banged open the door of the phone box and the bird flew off in an aerial scramble. “I’m finished,” she announced unnecessarily.

“You’re Anna Pigeon, aren’t you?” Damien’s voice was soft and high. Over the phone he would be mistaken for a child. In person, with the clear greenish eyes and styled dark hair, it didn’t seem inappropriate.

“You’re Damien,” Anna replied.

“There’s a party tonight in the lodge for Denny Castle of the
Third Sister.
Can you come? Tinker and I must talk to you.” He’d dropped his voice to a furtive level and, with a melodramatic flair Anna couldn’t help but admire, glanced over his shoulder.

She didn’t laugh, but it took some effort. “I’ll be there,” she replied. “In my official capacity.”

If Damien knew she was teasing him, he was not affected by it. “Good,” he said, then again, firmly, as if coming to some inner decision: “Good. It is necessary.”

As he turned away and walked to the call box, throwing his shoulders as if a cloak swirled down from them, Anna allowed the smile inside to break the neutral set of her mouth.

 

 

 

 

O
fficially the party would start at half past eight, when Denny Castle was to bring his new bride into the dining room. Unofficially Anna commenced toasting the happy couple shortly after she got off the phone with her sister. Trying, and fairly successfully, to float the heavy weight off her heart, to water down the loneliness with wine.

Sitting on the lodge’s wooden deck, overlooking the harbor, she sipped a mediocre Beaujolais and let the silver of the evening sink into her soul. Sadness didn’t seem half bad when there were no human mirrors at hand to reflect it.

“To Piedmont,” she said and lifted her glass to the paling sky. The Beaujolais had a lovely color, catching the light without dulling it.

“Piedmont?”

The voice was so calm and well modulated that it made scarcely a ripple in Anna’s solitude. “My cat,” she said easily and looked up from the deck chair where she sprawled to see who had addressed her.

A small woman—five foot two or so, shorter than Anna—stood a few yards away, her arms crossed against the coming chill. In the pearly evening light her hair shone a pale gold, almost certainly from a bottle, but so artfully done it was hard to tell. She wore it shoulder-length with bangs blunt-cut just above eyebrow level. Her dress, heavy silk from the way it moved in the breeze, was of nearly the same shade, a color close to that of winter sunlight. Her face was heavily lined. Crow’s-feet fanned out from the corners of her eyes and partway down her cheeks. There was a pronounced parenthesis around her mouth where the nasolabial folds carved their mark. Faint creases, held at bay by lipstick carefully applied and fixed with powder, cut into her lip-line. But for the wrinkles she showed no age at all. Her body was narrow-hipped, slim as a willow wand, her voice resonant, her gaze direct and challenging.

Anna pegged her as a rich tourist. Maybe a doctor’s wife up from the Twin Cities on a tasteful little yacht named the
Kidney Stone
or the
Aqueous Humor.

The woman smiled, a friendly, pretty smile which gave absolutely nothing away. Anna revised her first impression: maybe the woman was the doctor herself.

“Piedmont’s my cat,” Anna said, the mutual assessment over in a heartbeat. “I had to leave him in Houghton with Christina and Ally—my housemates.”

“Ah. Yes.” The woman spread her skirt around her in a golden circle and sat gracefully on the step. Anna noticed her sandals matched her dress and hair—exactly. They had been dyed the same shade. “We left Pointer in a kennel in Duluth. Carrie writes him once a week. If any dog can learn to read, it’ll be Pointer. He’s a Lhasa Apso. ‘No Domestic Animals on the Island.’ As if the comforts here weren’t few enough.”

An employee. Anna felt she should be able to place the woman, but her brain was in no mood to be racked for once-seen faces, half-heard names. “I know I’m Anna Pigeon, North Shore Ranger, but I don’t know who you are. Should I?” The sentence construction was a little tipsy but Anna thought the sentiment sounded reasonable enough.

“At least you know who you are,” the woman said and laughed. “That’s more than most of the people here know. These Upper Peninsula types aren’t given much to introspection. I’m Patience Bittner. I manage the lodge. When I’ve been guffawed on, jostled, or growled at one too many times, I escape out here to regain my equilibrium.”

Anna nodded, took a sip of her drink, turned her mind free again to glide out over the water. She must have made a face, because Patience said: “You’re drinking the Beaujolais.”

“Yes,” Anna said neutrally.

“It’s the last of it, I promise. It was ordered without my approval and it seemed a shame to pour it out. It’s such an ordeal getting anything good shipped out here back of beyond. I’ve got quite a decent California red coming in on the
Ranger Three.
Glen Ellen has a nice cabernet sauvignon. Young but nice.”

“Nosy without being precocious?” Anna teased, thinking of Molly and her neurotic gourmet.

Patience smiled. “Do I sound pretentious? Habit. I used to manage a winery outside Napa.”

“Vodka and beer are the booze ordinaire in this part of the country. Not many people will notice your hard work.”

“You will, I expect.”

“Only on the first glass,” Anna said truthfully, and the woman laughed again, a brittle sound but not unpleasant.

“If I get in anything special, I’ll get you in on the first glass.” She looked at her watch, a delicate gold band. “Party time. Pleased to meet you, Anna. I hope you’ll come by and sit on my deck again sometime soon.”

The innkeeper left, trailing a faint scent of perfume. “Privileged,” Anna thought, or “Passion.” Expensive scents, but neither could compete with the mind-clearing draft that was carried over the water from the ground hemlock and fir on Raspberry Island.

With the fading of the light the guardians of the island began to reclaim her shores. A persistent whining burned in Anna’s ear. A stinging itch cut through the thin fabric of her shirt. Again she missed the desert. There, if something bit, one usually died of it. She hated this nickel and diming to death, one bloody sip at a time.

She stood and knocked back the last of her wine. Denny Castle’s wedding reception: it would be rude not to make an appearance. And she needed to wheedle an invitation to sleep on someone’s floor. Failing that, she’d bed down in the
Lorelei,
the boat belonging to the District Ranger, Ralph Pilcher. More damp sleeping bags and pit toilets.

 

 

 

I
nspired—or intimidated—by Patience Bittner’s easy elegance, Anna made a stop in the ladies’ room. Hair hanging in two gray-streaked braids gave her an aging Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm look. She wrapped the plaits around her head and secured them in place with pins from her daypack. Too sunburned to wash her face with the harsh industrial soap in the washroom, she limited her toilette to the new coiffure.

The main dining room at the Rock Harbor Lodge made an attempt at being picturesque. The walls were paneled in light-colored wood, the ceiling cross-hatched with redwood beams, and the chandeliers fashioned from brass conning wheels. Other appropriately nautical bits of decor were scattered around, but boxy fifties construction spoiled the overall effect.

Park people were clustered in one corner. Patience floated around like a golden butterfly, refilling glasses. Coffeepot in hand, an awkward-looking girl with dark hair cut in a Prince Valiant shuffled after her from table to table, eyes fixed on the tops of her shoes. Anna wondered if this was the Carrie who wrote letters to Lhasa Apsos. She appeared to be the right age for a daughter of Patience Bittner—twelve or thirteen.

Tinker was there with Damien. They sat near the others but at a table for two. Their hands were clasped together on the white cloth and, instead of the glaring electric table lamps, they shared a candle-lantern which they obviously supplied themselves. Damien tried to catch Anna’s eye with a dark and pregnant look, but she pretended not to see him.

Scotty Butkus was sitting at the head of the main table smoking a cigarette, two bottles of Mickey’s Big Mouth at his elbow. Scotty, like Anna, was a permanent law enforcement ranger, her counterpart in Rock Harbor. Butkus fancied himself an old cowboy who’d been a ranger when it was still a good job. To hear him talk, he’d helped clean up Dodge City. But he wasn’t more than fifty-nine or sixty at most, still a GS-7 making the same salary as Anna.

A few of the younger people thought he was a semiromantic has-been. Anna suspected he was a never-was, drinking and talking to rectify a personal history that was a disappointment. He’d been busted down from somewhere and was starting over: new park, new job, new young wife. The new wife wasn’t in evidence.

Next to Butkus was Jim Tattinger, the park’s Submerged Cultural Resources Specialist. Anna knew very little about him except that, according to the crew of the
3rd Sister,
he spent all his time playing with computers and never dove any of the wrecks himself. Tattinger looked like a textbook nerd, right down to his skinny neck, thick glasses, and thinning red hair. Anna moved down the table so she wouldn’t have to sit opposite him. When he talked or smiled his thin lips stretched too far, turning a moist pink ruffle of nether lip out into the light of day. She didn’t want to know him that well.

Between Pizza Dave, the four-hundred-and-fifty-pound maintenance man, and Anna’s boss, Ralph Pilcher, the District Ranger for Rock Harbor, she found an empty chair. Lucas Vega wasn’t there. One of the perks of being Chief Ranger was being spared some of the employee get-togethers.

Holly and Hawk Bradshaw were conspicuous by their absence.

The pooped-party feel did not surprise Anna. Living in such isolated places, NPS managers felt a responsibility to instill a sense of “family” into their employees and, accordingly, planned endless potlucks, Chrismooses, chocolate pigouts, and receptions. Usually these attempts at building an esprit de corps failed. People came because there was nothing else to do and left as early as good manners—or good politics—allowed.

This get-together had a couple of things going for it. People wanted to see Denny’s new wife, and it was held in the lodge within hailing distance of a fully stocked bar.

As Anna wriggled into her chair, Denny Castle and his wife entered the front door, triggering desultory applause. A handful of lodge guests joined in and the sound swelled to a respectable level.

As the popping of hands thinned, and Butkus began another story of how it used to be, Patience took the bride’s arm with a natural hostess’s charm and walked her and Denny across toward the party.

Denny’s wife was five five or six with narrow shoulders and disproportionately wide hips. Lusterless brown hair fell from the center part to below her waist. Her round face was expressionless behind oversized red-framed glasses. As she pulled out the chair next to Ralph, Anna noticed how gnarled and scarred her hands and forearms were. She had seen those blue-black marks before. Looking into the glare of the electric candles, she tried to smooth her mind so the memory would come. After a moment’s teasing, it rose to the surface. She’d seen the scars on the arms of a hitchhiker she had given a lift from Santa Barbara to Morro Bay. The man had been an abalone diver. The scars were from where the shells had cut.

“This is the new Mrs. Castle,” Patience introduced her.

“Jo.”

So, the bride, Jo, née God knew what, had opted to be known as Mrs. Denny Castle. Anna thought it an odd choice for a woman with her master’s degree in freshwater biology, and the diving scars to prove it. That bit of information Anna had picked up from a Resource Management memorandum. Funded by the park, Jo Castle would spend the summer researching pollution in ISRO’s inland waters. Originally she had applied to do her Ph.D. thesis on how much impact sport fishing was having on the island’s lake trout population.

That would have been worth knowing, Anna thought. But the NPS wouldn’t fund that particular study. Sport fishermen had powerful lobbyists. The fishes did not. So Mrs. Denny Castle would count PCBs and swat mosquitoes in the island’s interior for twelve weeks.

A crash and a curse saved Jo from further scrutiny. Scotty had knocked over his beer. Cigarette butts were floating out of the ashtray and down the white tablecloth on a foaming tide. Anna guessed he was drunk. He had the look of a man who’s been drunk often enough that he’s learned to cover it with a modicum of success. Mopping up the mess with a peach-colored napkin, he was muttering: “Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m not used to eating indoors. No elbowroom. Yes, ma’am”—this to Patience—“I’m sorry as hell. Begging your pardon”—this to Carrie for the rough language. “Let me help you clean up, little lady.”