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A Superior Death

Page 3

by Nevada Barr


  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 lighthouse. 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 illusion 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-riddled 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, Smithwick, 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 liked 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 tugboat. 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.

  “ParkView 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 yea
rs 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 winetasting.”

  “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.”

  “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.

  Officially 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.

 

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