A Superior Death

by Nevada Barr

  Denny Castle had had a will though he was probably not more than forty-five or forty-six. For a moment that struck Anna as a little suspicious; then she remembered what he did for a living. He would’ve seen many of his friends die at an early age.

  She took another pull on her beer. The Bradshaws both seemed to hold Jo in contempt. Was it because she would, as Hawk had put it, weasel Denny out of diving, out of the Musketeers? And, in the process, weasel the 3rd Sister out from under the Bradshaws? They’d known if Denny died the 3rd Sister was theirs. Was that reason enough to kill him quick, before the weaseling process began?

  They loved Denny. They would have been more likely to kill Jo. Unless there had been a betrayal. To betray one Bradshaw was to betray them both. “Denny’s marriage took me by surprise,” Anna said carefully. “I’d always just assumed he and Holly had a thing going.”

  Hawk snorted. “Holly and Denny? No way.” He laughed. “No way.”

  It didn’t seem so impossible to Anna. It seemed probable: a shared love of diving, a shared living space, a shared business, shared danger, a boy, a girl. More than probable, it seemed mandatory. Hawk’s reaction piqued her curiosity. He’d been amused at the idea. Maybe Holly was gay. Anna made a mental note to ask Christina. The lesbian community in the Upper Peninsula was small, endangered, and therefore close-knit. Christina would have heard.

  “The only person I know of that Denny gave more than a wink and a nod was Donna-Scotty’s wife,” Hawk went on. “I never could see it. Holly thinks she was just old-fashioned enough to catch Denny’s imagination. In some ways he’d been born in the wrong century.

  “That whole scene was strange. Donna was the first time I think Denny had ever fallen in love. He was crazy, like a kid, like a Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story. That crazy obsessive stuff that makes for good fiction but’s pretty hard to maintain in real life.”

  “Especially when Juliet is married,” Anna observed dryly.

  “Yeah. There was that.” Hawk grinned, exposing white teeth, small and strong. Smooth, Anna imagined, under the tip of one’s tongue. She hid her smile with the mouth of the beer bottle.

  “Denny didn’t give old Scotty a thought,” Hawk went on. “Not seriously. It was as if he was an inconvenience, not a husband.”

  “No wonder Scotty hated him. Did Donna feel that way?”

  “I don’t know. That was the one way Denny’s romance differed from kid stuff. It wasn’t something he would talk about. At least not with us.”

  “Us” always meant Hawk and Holly. Anna had been acquainted with them long enough to know that. She wondered if Denny had kept quiet to protect Donna’s reputation or because he knew they wouldn’t approve. They’d clearly not approved of Jo and she was unencumbered by any “inconveniences.” Or, despite Hawk’s protests to the contrary, had he not spoken of it because Holly was in love with him, or even his lover? Anna reminded herself again to ask Christina what she knew about Holly’s sexual preference.

  “Did Denny give Donna a ride to the mainland in the last two weeks?” Anna asked.

  “Not on the Third Sister. Holly and I have had the boat. Denny was pretty tied up with the wedding. Why? Has Donna gone missing?”

  The question was meant as a joke but when Anna made no reply, Hawk asked it again.

  “I don’t know,” she answered truthfully.

  The subject had reached a dead end. For a while they sat in silence.

  “Pilcher’ll go down and Vega-how about you?” Hawk returned to the subject of the body recovery.

  “I’ll dive. So will Jim Tattinger.”

  “Tattinger’s a squirrel.”

  A squirrel was a neophyte diver. It was a grave insult. Anna guessed Hawk and Holly were going to carry on the tradition of animosity between the 3rd Sister and the park’s Submerged Cultural Resources Specialist.

  “I take it you don’t care much for Jim?” Anna invited gossip, hoping for some useful bit of information.

  “If he did his job, I could overlook his naturally repugnant self. He’s a number cruncher, a bean counter. He couldn’t care less about preserving the wrecks.”

  “He used to work in the Virgin Islands.” Anna threw another line in the waters she was fishing.

  “I know.” Hawk opened a beer and took a drink. He looked over the bottle at Anna. His eyes were a clear hazel. He smiled. “Let’s not talk about Jim. It’s worse than taking saltpeter.” In the slanting light his skin was almost a true bronze and his dark hair showed black. Anna was aware of the warmth from his thigh through the worn denim of her trousers. She remembered she was, after all, off duty and she remembered that there were other things to do with bronzed young men than interrogate them.

  “What do you do to relax, Anna?”

  She smiled at the answers that rattled through her mind and he smiled back. “Music,” she said finally. This evening it was not her first choice but it was the most socially acceptable.

  “Put something on the tape deck for me. Anything but a sea chantey.”

  Anna stood up and held out her hand. Hawk took it and she pulled him to his feet.

  A distant growl in the channel penetrated the warm haze of hops and lust. Her first impulse was to hold tight to Hawk’s hand and run for the relative privacy of her quarters, to bolt the door and draw the curtains; lose herself for an hour or two in the music of West Texas and, if she was reading the signals correctly, the music of the spheres.

  But she waited, her eyes on the channel. Before she could dismiss this boat from her mind, she must run through her litany: Was anybody hurt, sick, or lost? Was anybody on board likely to get that way in the near future?

  “They’ll have to camp at Belle Isle,” Anna said, naming the little island her boat had been called for. “There’s no room at the inn.” She had dropped Hawk’s hand. It would not do to be seen. There was no comfortable mix of business and pleasure for a woman in her profession. Because of the isolation, the predominance of men in middle and higher management, the usual dangers of gossip and backbiting were multiplied a dozenfold for a woman ranger.

  The boat came into view: a natty green runabout trailing a frothy wake. “Looks like Patience Bittner’s boat,” Hawk said.

  Anna hadn’t known Patience owned a boat. “Do you know her?”

  “Know the boat. We’ve seen it over here three or four times when we’ve been out with clients. She’s always alone, never stops to say hello. Denny thought she was up to something but Holly and I just figured she was a loner.”

  “Denny was a little judgmental, it seems,” Anna said cautiously.

  Hawk laughed. “One of Denny’s favorite sayings was: ‘It’s hard to work well in a group when you’re omnipotent.’ Denny was always right. He really was. He never cared about himself. Only the lake. It gave him an almost superhuman vision. He saw other people’s twists and bends as clearly as if they’d been laid out on graph paper.”

  “That kind of vision won’t get you elected Most Popular Senior Boy,” Anna said.

  “Denny didn’t need to be popular. He didn’t need anything but the lake and a jug of air.”

  Anna sensed that Hawk needed more than that, and that he perceived it as a weakness, a flaw in his character.

  There was no place left on the dock and the runabout pulled alongside the 3rd Sister and rafted off. Patience, her pale hair dyed red by the sinking sun, crossed the deck and stepped onto the dock.

  “Amygdaloid gets any more popular and we’ll have a floating city to rival Hong Kong’s,” Anna said. It was too much to hope, she knew, that Patience had just stopped by to use the pit toilet. Her fear was confirmed: the woman walked straight down the dock and turned up the hill toward the ranger station.

  “Looks like I’ve got company,” Anna said ruefully.

  “I’d better check on Holly. Those three clotheshorses think she’s part of their adventure.” Briefly, Hawk touched Anna’s arm. “Rain check?”

  “Sure.” I’ll pray for foul weather, Anna
thought as she watched him walk down the trail. She found herself thinking Hawk Bradshaw would be perfect: he was only in town once or twice a week and would vanish like the honeysuckle when the first snows fell.

  Suddenly Anna shuddered. She wasn’t sure she cared for the woman who had come to use people in such a calculating way.

  ELEVEN

  Patience stopped at the foot of the steps and looked back over her shoulder at Hawk’s retreating form. “Am I interrupting anything?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Too bad,” she said and they both enjoyed the view a second longer.

  Anna sat down again and waited for Patience to tell her what had brought her to the north shore after eight p.m. Patience sat beside her. The light-colored hair was tied back into a ponytail and bound with a cabbage rose ribbon that matched, exactly, her peach shorts and jersey. Her deck shoes were white, even to the leather laces.

  When she returned to Houghton in the fall, Anna promised herself, she would go clothes shopping. Levi’s and sweatshirts were losing their appeal.

  “I’m out on a domestic mission tonight,” Patience said. “Carrie’s disappeared.”

  Anna hoped it was not along with another case of pickle relish. “A moderately alarming disappearance or a call-out-the-Coast-Guard disappearance?”

  “Moderately alarming. Carrie’s started acting out this summer. In ten years some therapist will discover it’s all my fault. In the meantime I’m blaming her. We are not having fun. She’s been coming home at two and three in the morning with that damp, rumpled look. I can’t get a word out of her. She’s turned from a nice little girl into a sullen tramp. God!” Patience rested her head in one hand. “Sorry. I don’t mean that. I’m alternately pissed off and worried sick. It’s very tiring.”

  “Do you think she’s out with her boyfriend tonight?”

  “I’d bet on it. She was supposed to be home by five-thirty. She knew I had a date. She just doesn’t give a damn about anybody but herself. Oh! I sound like a selfish shrew, don’t I? Vaguely, I seem to remember promising myself I wouldn’t say things like that if I ever became a mom. I just don’t want her getting into trouble. I got married too young. I was seventeen. What a fool! She’s thirteen and only just barely, All she’ll get out of it now is AIDS.”

  Anna had forgotten about AIDS. Teenage troubles had taken a dire turn since she’d fumbled in the back seat of Steve Duran’s parents’ Chrysler. “What makes you think she’s on the north shore? I’d think she and the boy would just wander around Rock. There’s plenty of trails.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? If she’s got to be such a little slut-” Anna winced. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I was once a little slut myself. I am just so angry,” Patience apologized. “I just wish she’d stay on land-then my mad wouldn’t be undermined by my worry that some young idiot’s got her killed in one of those aluminum death traps we rent out at thirty dollars a day. I’m rambling. I think she’s on the north shore because two of the kids who work at the lodge said they saw her on Belle Isle. They didn’t put in and she didn’t return their wave, so they could be mistaken but it’s all I’ve got to go on at the moment.”

  “You checked Belle?”

  “On the way here. And Merrit Lane, Duncan Bay, and Lane Cove,” Patience listed the campgrounds between Rock Harbor and Amygdaloid accessible by water.

  “Do you have a marine radio?” Anna asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What do I call you?”

  “The Venture.”

  “Why don’t you head back around Blake’s. Watch the coast, check the camps again. The water’s been pretty flat today, even around the point, so I doubt she’s come to any harm. I’ll head down toward McCargo and see what I can find. She may already be home. Radio if you find anything, or if you don’t. We’ll look until it’s dark. If she’s not home by midnight, I’ll call Lucas and Ralph. They’ll stage a search for tomorrow. I doubt it’ll come to that-I need the overtime too badly.”

  Patience laughed. “You’re a comfort, Anna.”

  “Your tax dollars at work.”

  “I’ll tell Lucas,” Patience volunteered.

  The dinner date had been with Lucas Vega, Anna realized, and didn’t wonder that Patience was so angry with her daughter.

  The glow ignited by Hawk and two beers was gone. All that remained was a mild alcohol-induced lethargy. Anna sluiced as much of it away as she could with cold water, pulled on a Levi jacket and again climbed aboard the Belle Isle.

  The dock, though still populated, was quiet: people talking softly, listening to the loons calling down the night. The 3rd Sister was gone. In the distance was the dull thunder of their air compressor filling tanks. Denny had been sensitive about the racket and anchored out when recharging air cylinders. Jamming jugs, he called it. Anna avoided the slang. Where she’d grown up “jugs” did not refer to scuba tanks.

  The gold had drained from the water, leaving silver and peach petals of evening on the smooth channel. It was Anna’s favorite time of day. Stillness settled over the islands, the winds died, animals came to drink or play.

  A great blue heron, the color of the sky, stood on a stone several feet from shore. Two female mergansers sharing a brood of eighteen or twenty ducklings paddled in the shallows. Once Anna had seen two moose swimming the channel, only their magnificent heads above the water. According to the naturalists, the moose population-or the seeds of it- had swum the eighteen miles from the mainland to Isle Royale. It seemed incredible but fishermen had reported seeing the beasts as much as twenty miles out in the lake.

  Puttering down the silent channel, Anna realized she was enjoying herself. It was a pleasure to be looking for someone who wasn’t being devoured by a cannibalistic husband, wasn’t floating with old corpses, someone who, at worst, was probably having illicit sex with the busboy.

  Darkness gathered. Near Kamloops Island, Anna switched on her running lights. Carrie would not be found tonight unless she chose to be. It was time to head for home.

  The last fragile light of day glowed in the western sky. Overhead the stars were coming into their own. Anna shut down her engines and went out on deck to enjoy the coming dark. On summer nights in Texas, in Mexico, now here, she promised herself that one day she would learn the constellations. Could she love them better for knowing their human names?

  A faint offshore breeze brought her the sweet complex smell of land and she thought how heady that perfume must have been to sailors months at sea. The smells of the desert had come one at a time: a clear stream of sage on a dry wind, a gust of rain-damp earth on the last hurrah of a sudden thunderstorm. In the vegetation-rich north country Anna could seldom separate out the myriad scents. Layers of wealth and promise, secrets deep under the moss.

  The breeze freshened and carried a new fragment of news: the grumbling of a vessel. By the low-pitched sound and the high rev of the engine, Anna guessed it was a small outboard, a hundred to a hundred and seventy-five horsepower. She scanned the water between her and the shoreline. But for an occasional flash of a wave catching the improbable light of the stars, the darkness was unbroken. The growl of the unseen boat continued, a steady hum, growing louder. The boat was coming closer and still Anna saw no running lights.

  Traveling after sundown without running lights was dangerous, illegal, and stupid. It was the last of these considerations as much as the first two that decided Anna to give up her meditations.

  Having fetched her field glasses from the cabin, she stood in the stern, her eyes trying to follow the cues her ears were receiving. Finally she spotted the perpetrator: a light-colored cabin cruiser just barely big enough to go by that grand title. The boat was powering slowly along just out from the cliffs between Twelve O’Clock Point and Hawk Island. As she watched, it made an apparently senseless dogleg out from the shore, then, squaring the corner, in again.

  Whoever the pilot was, he knew there were three barely submerged boulders on that section of shore. No one that we
ll versed in underwater topography would be foolish enough to run without lights. Unless they were up to something-or their electrical system was on the fritz, Anna thought more prosaically.

  Though ISRO seldom got involved in the Drug Enforcement Agency’s business, this close to the Canadian border, drug running was a reality of life.

  Anna took the time to radio in her location and her intended visitor contact before she took her side arm from its briefcase in the bow and laid it next to the radar screen.

  The roar of the Belle’s inboards swallowed all other sounds. Deafened by her technology, Anna kept the unlit vessel in visual contact.

  She switched on the Belle’s searchlight and spotlit the cruiser, picking the fiberglass hull out in a circle like the star of a stage show. The vessel speeded up as if the pilot had decided to make a run for it. Anna felt a clutch of fear or excitement tighten her stomach. Then it slowed again to its labored pace. The clutch in her middle did not loosen its grip. In every law enforcement class she’d taken, in every refresher course, instructors in bulletproof vests had exhorted students never to lose the edge fear gave when approaching an unknown. Any officer making a routine traffic stop could be pulling over an armed and wanted felon. One who knows if a radio call is made, he’ll be sent back to the penitentiary.

  Anna rocked gently on the balls of her feet, her eyes compassing the cruiser in search of anything that was not as it should be. If she saw a crate of Uzis or baggies bursting with white powder, she’d stay back and call for help. There were, she thought with a smile, people for that.

  The Belle Isle had eaten up the distance. Anna pulled behind and to the starboard of the smaller vessel. Her spotlight picked out the name on the stern: the Gone Fishin‘. For a minute or two she trailed the boat. The running lights flicked on: sudden red and green eyes to be seen by.