A Superior Death

by Nevada Barr

  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.

  Donna 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 to ooh and ahh 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.

  All 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 schoolteachers from Duluth who visited the island every summer to watch birds.

  The next day Anna kayaked Pickerel Cove and Robinson 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 arou
nd 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 ignominious 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.

  The two men were waiting for her when she reemerged into the office area. Anna lit a kerosene lamp. The station had Colemans but she didn’t plan to spend enough time with the Canadians to make the effort of lighting one worthwhile.

  Cold water divers were, of necessity, lovers of equipment. Anna noticed that “Bobo”-the taller of the two but just barely, his round face darkened by a well-trimmed beard- wore a watch that had everything in it but a micro fax machine.

  She got the forms from her desk. “Where do you want to dive?”

  “The Emperor.”

  Anna started her spiel on danger and difficulty, but the one called Bobo cut her off. “We heard the lecture from the ranger in Windigo. We dove the Kamloops today.”

  The Kamloops was the most dangerous dive on the island. At depths from one hundred and seventy-five to two hundred and sixty feet, the wreck was beyond the reach of all but the most experienced divers. Or outlaw divers; people who threw caution-and sometimes their lives-to the wind.

  “You’ve racked up some bottom time,” Anna said. “Is this going to give you a long enough surface interval?” The pressures at the depths where the Kamloops dwelt were such that oxygen and nitrogen were forced into solution in the human body, dissolved in the blood and fatty liquids much as carbon dioxide is forced under pressure into soda pop. When divers surfaced, returning to the lesser pressure above the water, those gasses re-formed from a liquid to a gaseous state much like the fizz when a soda pop is opened. If divers surfaced slowly, according to established ascent stages, the gasses worked out slowly and were exhaled harmlessly. If not, they formed bubbles in the bloodstream causing symptoms called the bends which were painful and occasionally fatal.

  Regardless of the timing of the ascent, there was always a small residue of nitrogen still in the body. Twelve hours was the rule of thumb between dives more than a couple of atmospheres down.

  “We know our numbers,” Bobo said.

  Anna shrugged and wrote “Emperor” in the space provided.

  “Did you know there were bodies down there?” Jon asked as Anna handed him a copy of the permit. “On the Kamloops?” Bobo looked annoyed, as if Jon were telling family secrets.

  “Yeah,” Anna returned and Bobo looked disappointed. “Part of the crew was trapped on board when she went down.”

  “They’re weird-looking,” Jon said. “Like wax.”

  “The corpses are saponified,” Anna told him. “It’s called an adipocere formation. It’s fairly common with submerged bodies. The soft tissues get converted to a waxy stuff. Don’t ask me how. Their still being like that after over sixty years is a little strange, but it’s happened before in the Great Lakes.”

  For divers accustomed to the sometimes centuries-old wooden-hulled vessels in the Caribbean, the preservation of Superior’s treasures often surprised them. Geology and geography conspired to entomb the ships in an almost ageless death. In the deep, still, cold, freshwater canyons beneath the lake’s surface no coral could grow, no surf could batter.

  “Everything on the ship is like that-in a time warp,” Jon went on. “We must’ve seen a hundred pairs of shoes. They looked like if you dried them out you could wear them home.”

  “Did you try them on?” Anna asked casually.

  Both divers looked offended. “We did not try them on,” Bobo said with cold dignity.

  “Just asking.” Taking artifacts from shipwrecks was a sport-a business for some. Before Isle Royale was made a national park in 1940, it wasn’t illegal. By the time most of the wrecks were protected a lot of their scientific and historical value had been destroyed by treasure hunters. As had some of the joy of discovery for the divers who came after the depredations were committed. Vandalism and theft continued to be a problem. The Kamloops, so inaccessible, so long lost, was like a time capsule. The Park Service hoped to keep her that way.

  “One of the bodies was incredible,” Jon said. “He looked like he’d drowned yesterday. Clothes like new, hair-everything was still perfect.”

  Anna doubted that. The bodies were recognizable as human but in a featureless kind of way. One’s head was missing, several had limbs from which the flesh had dissolved away, leaving only stumps of bone protruding. The clothing was preserved but by no stretch of the imagination “like new.”

  “Mmm,” she murmured, willing them to take their permit and go away.

  “The other five were a little the worse for wear, eh?” Jon said.

  “There’s just the five,” Anna said. “Total.”

  “No,” Bobo returned, sounding pleased to correct her. “There are six.”

  “Did you manage to open the stern room?” Anna asked. She couldn’t imagine they had. The entrance was blocked with tons of debris. But the NPS Submerged Cultural Resources Unit out of Santa Fe speculated that there could be as many as a dozen more corpses there-men trapped when the ship foundered.

  “This was the engine room,” Bobo said, his tone daring her to challenge his knowledge of anything underwater.

  “Six?” Anna said. “Well, stranger things have happened…” She was too tired to stand and argue. Nitrogen narcosis, shadows, imagination-at a hundred and seventy-five feet who knew what they thought they saw? Anna didn’t really care.

  Her agreeing without believing stung Bobo. “You wait,” he commanded and trotted out the door. Jon shrugged his heavy shoulders in a gesture that was so French as to be a parody.

  Anna waited, thinking of the wine on the counter, of her flannel sheets. The hands on the desk clock found one another at midnight. Jon hummed a little song to himself and poked through the rack of brochures.

  Bobo came back with an underwater videocamera. He pushed the machine at Anna. “Look,” he demanded. Anna pressed her eye to the viewfinder. “Body number one,” he announced and she saw a pale headless apparition lit by the unforgiving glare of an underwater lamp. Bobo took the camera back and pushed fast forward, his attention fixed on a digital readout window. “Body number two.” He thrust the camera into Anna’s hands once again. A drift of amorphous remains clad in what looked to be overalls floated on the tape. “Number three,” Bobo said after repeating the fast-forwarding process. Another dead Pillsbury doughboy in dark clothes. Anna smiled. The fingers of the left hand had been folded down, all but the middle finger. She’d heard divers sometimes flipped a ma
cabre and ghostly bird to the next guy down. “Four and five,” Bobo said, working his video magic again. Two more remnants, faceless, one with no arms. “And six.” Bobo handed Anna the camera a final time.

  She pressed her eye to the viewfinder until black clouds troubled her vision. Then she set the camera carefully on the desk. “I’m going to need this tape,” she said. She reached over the desk and lifted the permit from Jon’s fingers. “And I’m going to have to ask that you do not dive the Emperor tomorrow morning, that you remain here. I’m sure the Chief Ranger will have some questions to ask you.”

  Again she lifted the camera and pressed her eye to the viewfinder. Number six was indeed well preserved. Though the clothing was right for a sea captain of the early part of the twentieth century, it looked new. Shadows hid most of the face but the lips and chin were sharply defined and a cloud of light-colored hair floated out from beneath the cap the figure wore.

  Number six had not gone down in the storm of 1927.

  FIVE

  Like I said, I couldn’t tell who it was-or supposed to be,“ Anna told Lucas Vega. ”Caucasian from the color of the hair. Male attire, if that means anything. It was impossible to tell size from the video. It was just a dark body floating against a darker background. There was nothing close enough-and in focus-to compare it with.“

  Lucas didn’t say anything. He and Anna stood on the deck of the Lorelei watching the white vee-shaped wake plowing a furrow in the lake. Diving gear was stacked against the cabin behind them. Pilcher piloted the boat and Jim Tattinger, ISRO’s Submerged Cultural Resources Specialist, rode inside as was his custom whenever possible. A light drizzle fell from an iron-gray sky hanging low over the lake. There was no wind and the water was flat and dark.

  Anna pulled herself deeper inside her Gore-Tex jacket, keeping her back to the wash of air around the cabin. Vega, bareheaded in the rain, his arms crossed over the green bulk of his life preserver, was lost in thought. Lucas Vega was what Anna considered an Old World ranger. He believed in wilderness, in the Park Service, in the sanctity of the NPS credo: “… to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such a manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” A graduate of Stanford with an advanced degree in archaeology, he worked for peanuts. Lucas Vega also believed in noblesse oblige. He could afford to. Lucas was the only son of a woman who owned seventy-five hundred acres of San Diego County, one of the last existing Spanish land grants in southern California.