A Superior Death (8 page)

Anna set in the metal folding chair between the waste-basket and the door, watching Sandra’s fingers pecking at the keys. Each was pocked with dots. One printer printed the text out in braille, a second in regular print. It was the first machine of its kind Anna had ever seen.

“Can I pet Delphi?” she asked.

“Sure.” Sandra went on typing.

The dispatcher’s seeing-eye dog, a seven-year-old golden retriever and, as the only dog allowed on the island, a minor celebrity, lay curled neatly under the table that held the printers. Anna crouched and fondled her ears. She cocked one blond eyebrow and looked up with dark liquid eyes. Her tail thumped softly. The warmth of the fur, the nonjudgmental gaze made Anna realize how much a part of her life Piedmont was, how dear and valued a friend.

“There!” Sandra sighed with satisfaction. “So. You finally got those bozos on the
Low Dollar
afloat. Did they limp back to Grand Marais all right?”

“I guess,” Anna returned. “Nothing washed up on the north shore.” Sandra laughed. Anna wasn’t surprised she knew about the foundered vessel. The dispatcher saw nothing but she heard everything; heard and noted every radio transmission on the island. Rumor had it she used her radio to listen in on phone calls when things got slow—her own version of watching the soaps. Since she kept her own counsel nobody ever called her on it.

“Do you know Donna Butkus, Scotty’s wife?” Anna asked, staying where she was on the cold linoleum so she could enjoy the company of the dog.

Sandra settled back in her chair, folded her hands over her midriff where it rounded out the green fabric of her uniform trousers.

Settling in for a gossip, Anna thought. Good.

“Oh, yes. Scotty brought her back from his trip home last August. He and his third wife were good friends with her parents.” The information was delivered without emotion, but Fox had a lump of tongue in her cheek and the skin around her unseeing eyes crinkled.

“What’s she like?” Anna asked. “Tinker and Damien were talking about her last night. She sounds like an interesting person.”

“Hard to say what somebody’s really like.” Sandra warmed to her subject. Between the radio, the phone calls, and the gossip, Anna guessed people were Sandra’s hobby. “She’s around twenty-nine or thirty, dark hair and eyes.

Pretty in an old-fashioned way. ‘A darling dumpling of a girl’ was how Trixy described her.”

Trixy was the seasonal who headed the Interpretive Program. Winters she taught school in Houghton. For the last six summers she’d worked at ISRO. Anna winced at Trixy’s choice of “dumpling” to describe the woman Tinker and Damien thought to be both meat and drink to her husband.

Sandra smiled mischievously. “All that, of course, is merely hearsay. I didn’t see it with my own eyes. My idea of what Donna’s like is less superficial. She’s got a real gentle voice, and shaking hands with her is like catching a butterfly—all soft and fluttering you’re afraid you’ll crush. Very quiet. I think she feels out of place here. Everybody’s so rough-and-tumble and always talking shop. She and Trixy got fairly close. Both artsy types. I think she pretty much hero-worshiped Scotty. Then she married him. Oops!” Sandra laughed good-humoredly and Anna laughed with her. “Why are you interested? Lucas got you investigating rangers’ wives?”

Anna shook her head. “No. Tinker and Damien hadn’t seen her around and were concerned. I asked Scotty about her this morning and he blew up—something about Denny Castle. Piqued my interest. I’m just being nosy.”

“Um,” Sandra said, the explanation completely satisfactory. “That Denny Castle thing was all the talk this winter. He and Donna spent a lot of time together, I guess. I don’t know if there really was ever anything in it, but a man who marries a woman thirty years younger than himself’s bound to have a few insecurities. Especially if he’s not rich. I guess the romance was mostly on Denny’s side. He made kind of a fool of himself. Following her, that kind of thing. Those deep sensitive types get funny yens. Myself, I like bluff hearty types who swat you on the behind.”

Anna felt she owed Sandra for the information and paid in kind. She told her the details of the reception. The dispatcher had been on duty that evening. Sandra listened with a concentration that flattered most people, including Anna, into telling her things they’d never really intended to.

“Jo’s been around forever,” Sandra said when Anna had finished. “Always finding excuses to work with Denny, or at least get to the island. She’s been chasing after him since high school. Them what’s uncharitable say that’s why he took to the water: to get away from her. Then she went to college—double major in freshwater and marine biology. ‘Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no ocean deep enough,’ I guess. She’s got him now,” Sandra concluded philosophically. “More power to her.”

“Seven-oh-one, one-two-one,” cackled at Sandra’s elbow.

“Duty calls,” she said to Anna.

“I’ve got to go too.” Anna stayed just long enough to hear what 121—Lucas Vega—was calling about. It didn’t concern her, so she gave Delphi a farewell pat and left.

 

 

 

 

D
onna was in Houghton nursing a sister with a ruptured disk.

Case closed.

Despite Tinker and Damien’s wishes, ISRO was simply not a hotbed of crime. The only deaths were those of innocent fishes and that was deemed not only legal but admirable. So much so it surprised Anna that it was not written into every ranger’s job description that he or she was too ooh and aah over the corpses of what had once been flashing silver jewels enlivening the deep.

To Isle Royale fishermen’s credit, Anna forced herself to admit, they almost always ate what they killed—unlike the trophy hunters in Texas who wanted only heads and racks and skins to display on dusty walls.

Anna waited till the
Ranger III
docked at noon, in the hope there would be a note from Christina. Anna had become friends with Chris and her daughter, Alison, in Texas. The desert had never appealed to Christina and she had missed town living. In the weeks Anna had been out on the island there’d been a note with each
Ranger III
docking. A letter this Wednesday would mean a lot and she waited even at the risk of having to kayak Blake’s Point in the dark.

The letter was there. Anna put it away: a treat for later. At the convenience store at Rock she bought half a dozen Snickers bars and two Butterfingers. She didn’t bother to track down Tinker and Damien Coggins-Clarke. Next week would be soon enough to tell them of Donna’s miraculous recovery from connubial cannibalism. Let them enjoy one more week of the game.

 

 

 

 

A
ll morning clouds had been building in the west. White cumulus laced Greenstone Ridge, peeking up over the wooded slopes of Mount Ojibway. As Anna shoved the kayak out into the calm waters of Rock Harbor, she eyed them with concern. Afternoons were no time to start out onto the lake, but the north end of the island, ripped to a stony fringe by glaciation, provided a lot of sheltered coves and harbors. If she could get around Blake’s Point before the water got rough, she could run for the shelter of Duncan or Five Finger Bay.

Anna put her energy into paddling. Between the dock at Rock Harbor and the end of Merrit Lane, she saw nothing of the scenery: she was making time, covering ground. At the tip of Merrit, her little craft held safe between the buffers of Merrit to the southeast and the last of Isle Royale to the northwest, she stopped to rest. Strain burned hot spots into her right elbow and her deltoid muscles where they crossed from arms to back.

Weather moving in from Thunder Bay had reached the island. Out in the lake waves rolled, cresting white with foam. Passage Island, four miles out, had vanished in an encircling arm of fog. Overhead the sun still shone but soon it, too, would be wrapped in cloud.

For long minutes Anna sat in the kayak debating the wisdom of continuing. On the one hand, if she got careless or overtired, she could end up providing a lot of search-and-rescue rangers with a healthy chunk of overtime pay for combing the ragged shores for her body. On the other hand, she could return to Rock and face another grating evening listening to the political maneuvering and gossip inherent in a closed community, and another night mildewing in Pilcher’s floating pigsty.

It was not a tough decision. Anna pulled up the waterproof sleeve that fitted into the kayak like a gasket and snugged it around her waist with a drawstring. If she was careful she would probably be safe enough, but there would be no way to stay completely dry.

For another minute she sat in the lane, her paddle across the bow, while she ate a Snickers bar. Never once had she experienced the sugar rush of energy other people swore by as they downed their Cokes and Hersheys before slamming fire line or hiking that last twenty-five-hundred-foot ascent at the end of the day, but it was as good a reason as any to eat chocolate.

Out in open water Anna found the waves were two and three meters high. The sheer immensity of the lake had warped her perspective. The wind turned from fresh to bitter. It snatched up droplets, hard as grains of sand, and rasped them across her face, exacerbating her sunburn and making her eyes tear.

Keeping the nose of the kayak directly into the wind, she dug her way forward. Water carried her up till the kayak balanced high on an uncertain escarpment. Around her were the ephemeral mountain ranges of Lake Superior. As one can from a hilltop, she saw the island spreading away to the south, bibbed now with a collar of white where waves pouring in from Canada broke into foaming lace against the shoals.

The hill of water sank, fell as if to the center of the world. Mountainous slippery-sided waves rose up past the boat, past Anna’s head, up till it seemed they must overbalance and crash down on her, driving her meager craft to the bottom with the great metal ships like the
Glenlyon
and the
Cox,
or the
Monarch,
her massive wooden hull broken on the Palisades. But the kayak stayed afloat, climbed hills and slid through valleys with a structural certainty of design that lent her courage. She stroked with clocklike regularity, taking deep, even bites of the lake.

Shoulders ached. Elbows burned. Anna pushed herself harder. There were times that hurting was a part of, times the fatigue and the fear were necessary ingredients: fires to burn away the dead wood, winds to blow away the chaff, closing the gap between body and brain.

 

 

 

That night Anna shared a camp in Lane Cove with half a dozen Boy Scouts from Thief River Falls, Minnesota, who couldn’t grasp the concept that it was no longer politically correct to cut boughs for beds and saplings to fashion camp tables.

The following night she spent a more pleasant if less productive night on Belle Isle with two retired school-teachers from Duluth who visited the island every summer to watch birds.

The next day Anna kayaked Pickerel Cove and Robin-son Bay. Backcountry patrol—days in the wilderness—those were the assignments Anna lived for, times it made her laugh aloud to think it was being called “work” and she was being paid to do it.

An hour shy of midnight of the third day she finally slid the kayak up onto the shingle at Amygdaloid. The western sky was washed in pale green, enough light to see by. Overhead stars shone, looking premature, as if they’d grown impatient waiting for the sun to set and had crept out early.

It was June 21, Anna realized. The longest day of the year. For a few minutes she sat in the kayak, steadying the little vessel by bracing her paddle against the gravel. Her muscles felt limp and warm. Her butt was numb and her legs were stiff from their long imprisonment. There was a good chance she would fall over when she tried to extricate herself from the boat she had worn like a body stocking for the last eight hours.

“Need some help, eh?”

A squat round-bodied man stood above her on the dock. He had a Canadian look. The closest Anna had come to describing it was “voyageur.” Many of the Canadian fishermen who frequented the island had the powerful, compact build of the voyageurs she had seen pictured in woodcuts from the trading days. More telling: he spoke with a distinct Canadian accent.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Anna replied.

Landing lightly as a cat, he jumped down the four feet from the pier to the shore. Anna untied the drawstring of the waterproof sleeve around her middle. He caught her under the arms, lifted her out of the kayak, and set her up on the dock as easily as she could have lifted the five-year-old Alison.

“Thanks.” Rolling over, she pushed herself up on hands and knees, then eased herself to her feet.

“I’m Jon. Are you the ranger here?” the Canadian asked. He had bounced back up onto the dock to stand next to her.

“Just barely.” Anna hobbled up the dock like an old woman. “I will be tomorrow.”

“Ranger station closed, eh?” Jon followed her off the dock and stood balanced on a rock, his hands in his pockets, watching as she pulled the kayak up onto dry land.

“Yup. Opens at eight tomorrow morning.” Anna retrieved her pack and started up the slope toward a bed made with clean flannel sheets.

The Canadian was right on her heels. “Is it too late to get a diving permit? We want to get an early start tomorrow.”

Anna gave up. After all, he had plucked her out of her boat and saved her an ignomious end to a glorious paddle. “I’ll write you a permit. Give me a minute to unlock and put on some dry clothes.”

He trotted happily down the dock to where a well-worn but clean little cabin cruiser nosed gently against her fenders. Her aft deck was piled with scuba gear: tanks and dry suits, flippers, masks, and fins.

“Bobo!” the Canadian called into the cabin window.

“She’ll do it.”

Anna let herself into the ranger station. It was too late to build a fire to drive out the damp. She took half a bottle of Proprietor’s Reserve Red out of the refrigerator, poured a glass, and left it on the counter to warm while she changed and wrote the dive permit.