by Nevada Barr
“Us two: silt out. Lucas and I’ll watch our big feet so we don’t get lost in a mud storm inside the wreck.”
All this was repetition. Ralph had sought each of them out in the days since the body had been discovered and discussed what they were to do. In true governmental fashion, the plan had been typed up, approved, signed off, and copies given to everyone who needed to know and half a dozen people who didn’t. Yet hearing it again in this reassuring voice was visibly knitting the four divers and two tenders into a unit, a team with a single purpose, a single plan.
“Pay attention. Breathe.” He laughed. He was alive, excited. “Hey, we’re gonna cheat Death,” he finished with a dare that was only partly a joke. Anna breathed. Knots of fear in her belly began to loosen.
Once again Ralph checked the gear. They were diving with air. Some divers used roll-your-own heliox on Kamloops dives. Mixing gases was fundamentally risky business and the National Park Service stayed with air. The mixture of helium and oxygen eliminated the effects of nitrogen narcosis but compounded the effects of hypothermia.
Ralph gave the go-ahead. One by one they rolled off the port gunwale. For a moment the four of them bobbed in the pockmarked water, the only spots of color in a world gone gray. The lake wasn’t just cold but frigging, goddam cold, Anna thought as the frigid water struck her face like the slamming of a two-by-four and her sinuses began to ache. Beneath the layers of suiting she could feel her breasts tighten and shrivel.
With an effort she looked past the pain and concentrated on keeping her mind clear of the flotsam of thoughts washed loose by her intercranial storms.
Tattinger floated into view. With the regulator stretching his rubbery lips and the mask maximizing his watery eyes, he put Anna in mind of Gollum, the pale underearth creature that gave Bilbo Baggins the willies.
Pilcher made eye contact with each of his team, raising his hand in the “okay” signal. In Superior’s frigid water there was no chitchat. It hurt to take the regulator out; the cold drilled into teeth, could form ice in the mouthpiece. Each diver returned Pitcher’s “okay” and he turned his thumb down.
Time to dive.
Anna was unpleasantly aware that in ancient Rome a thumbs-down was a death sentence.
Pilcher turned bottom up. His iridescent blue flippers breached, a sudden flame suddenly quenched. He was gone.
Anna followed.
Without the sun, the lake was not light even near the surface. Below was complete darkness. It was as if she swam through the twilight toward a night in which there were no stars, no moon, no planets. From behind her, the light Lucas carried poked a beam through the water. Sometimes it caught the yellow line Scotty had dropped. As they descended Anna noted the flash of the marker tape every ten feet. Several yards ahead, she could see the flap of blue that marked Ralph’s progress.
Had she been diving alone-or with a less trusted leader- Anna’s eyes would have been darting from marker to watch to depth gauge, timing her descent. She’d timed Ralph on their first dives. Easy dives: eighty feet down on the America, forty to retrieve buoys tethered below ice level, seventy collecting photos. Ralph swam at a steady sixty-nine feet per minute and never glanced at his watch.
A minute passed: seven marks on the line. The uniform darkness of the lake bottom was changing. A pale form was beginning to take shape, a lighter smudge in the murky depths.
The Kamloops.
It was so easy: the swim, finding the wreck, everything. Anna felt quite gay. All the elaborate preparations had been absurd. The dive was a breeze, a piece of cake, a milk run, a pushover. She laughed and air bubbled out, making a chuckling noise near her ears.
Anna was high. Every fifty feet down was like one martini. They were two, maybe three martinis under. She couldn’t remember. She had forgotten to watch the time, count the marks. Two? Or three? How many to put a small woman under the table? Six feet under. The moment of hilarity hardened into rising panic.
Ralph was by the line, standing on the lake floor, looking at his watch like a man waiting for a bus. Anna swam down, stood beside him. He touched her shoulders, looked into her eyes, breathed exaggeratedly. Anna mirrored his breath. He raised a circled thumb and forefinger. She’d be okay. In, out: she breathed again.
Jim arrived, then the poking finger of light with Lucas attached. Pilcher checked them as he had Anna. It was subtle, quick. Anna only noticed because she had needed it.
The Kamloops rested on her port side, her stern on the top of a slope, her bow one hundred and ninety feet away at the bottom-two hundred and sixty feet below the lake’s surface. Very few divers ventured there. Most of the information the NPS had on that end of the wreck-and it wasn’t much-they’d gleaned via a remote-control robot camera.
The increasing depth and darkness swallowing the bow gave the wreck the illusion of incredible length. One of the Kamloops‘ twin smokestacks lay across midships. Lines tangled amid hundreds of feet of metal pipe that had spilled when the ship went down. Portholes and doors gaped black. Broken metal showed like bones. The Kamloops was a scabby old ghost, one whose soul seemed not to rest. Anna wasn’t disappointed that she and Jim would not be prying too deeply into her secrets, would not be the ones to snatch her most recently acquired corpse.
Ralph tapped his watch and flashed twenty-two: open hands twice, then two fingers. They would meet back at the line in twenty-two minutes. Anna flicked on her light. Jim would handle the underwater camera. Without looking at her, he swam off. She followed.
The ship was tipped to the north, the exposed keel line sloping west and sharply downhill. The lake bottom rolled away in every direction. The effect was dizzying. Tattinger moved quickly. He kicked up past the tilted propeller and swam along the hull. The flattened keel of the freighter dropped away into the darkness.
In such a shadowed world, there was little Anna could see at the pace Jim set. As she carried the light, he would be seeing even less. Evidently, his idea of an investigation was limited to feeding data into a computer.
Deliberately, she slowed, moved her beam from his trajectory and played it along the side of the ship, then down to the barren lake floor. No plants, no fishes, even very few stones. The sand lay smooth and untracked like the desert after a windstorm. A red and blue Pepsi-Cola can winked a vivid eye when the light struck it. Anna made no move to swim the fifteen yards to retrieve the litter. “No deviations,” Ralph had warned. “That’s when accidents happen.” Anna believed him and fear made her utterly obedient. Her light picked out a single shoe, colorless but in apparently good condition. It was an old-fashioned work boot, one that had fallen or been carried from the shipment on board. A coffee mug lay half buried in the sand. Bits of metal that had once served some purpose were strewn about. There was more pipe and a wooden crate broken in half with a bright paper sticker still intact.
A jarring clang brought her head up. Tattinger had rapped on the Kamloops‘ hull with the butt of a diving knife. He was hovering near a porthole crooking an admonitory finger. Though she couldn’t see his face behind the rubber and plastic, she imagined his scowl.
Once again, she trained the light in his path and he swam on. The beam raked along the hull just ahead of him, across the portholes: blind eyes weeping rust. Between them, near where Tattinger had rapped the hull, something gleamed. Anna kicked once, floated nearer the hull. The rust around one of the portholes had been scraped away. Bright silver scratches as if someone had been hacking at the port with a sharp object. She felt around the edges of the porthole cover. There was just enough purchase to work a fingertip under it.
Jim, losing the light, had returned and hung at her elbow. Pushing Anna’s hands aside, he opened the blade of the red-handled knife he still held, and levered it under the metal. The porthole swung in easily. Whoever had pried it open before had broken the latch.
Monstrous and fish-eyed behind their masks, Jim and Anna exchanged a look. The hole was little more than eighteen or twenty inches in diameter. Too small
for anybody in tanks to get through. Anna peered inside: the captain’s quarters. An out-of-reach heaven for thieves and vandals, but someone had made the effort.
Jim tapped his watch. Seven minutes. Anna tapped his camera, then the porthole. He hesitated, hating to use the film, she knew. Jim was as miserly with government property as he was with his own. He stockpiled everything from toilet paper to engine oil, kept lists of how many of each. Numbers with which to feed his insatiable database programs.
Anna tapped the porthole again and he handed her his diving knife. She held it and the light while he clicked two careful shots.
Four minutes. With efficient haste, they started to swim back. At depth, exertion was a thing to be avoided lest one treble the effects of nitrogen narcosis.
The stern, with its tangle of pipe, rolled by beneath. Anna swept the light in an arc through the water. The snaking yellow of the line did not reflect back and panic pricked again at the back of her throat. Then, at the far right, she saw the faint yellow gleam. Jim saw it in the same instant and they swam.
One minute. Now that the time to ascend was near, Anna felt a crushing impatience. The knowledge that another sixty-four minutes must be spent incarcerated in gear, enveloped in the cold embrace of the lake, seemed almost insupportable. The U.S. Navy Standards would have insisted only on fifty minutes’ ascent time but Ralph had chosen to play it safe.
Anxious thoughts began circling in Anna’s mind like vultures smelling a corpse. If Ralph and Lucas had kicked up a silt storm and gotten lost, she doubted she would have the courage to go and look for them. Cold ached in the bones of her head.
As she counted her curses she became aware of a nonstop trickle of air through her regulator. It had frozen open. It had happened once before early in the season when she and Ralph dove the docks clearing out rubbish. Once open, it wouldn’t take long before the escaping air would fill her mouth with icy slush, numbing her lips with cold until she could no longer feel them to keep them on the mouthpiece.
“Come on, goddammit!” she demanded of Lucas.
Poking her light through the viscous twilight, she strained her eyes in the direction of the engine room. Twenty seconds bottom time left. The darker block that marked the doorway wavered, changed shape, then broke into two separate shadows. Ralph and Lucas swam toward the line. With them was Denny Castle. Eight days dead, he looked the most natural of the three. Jaunty in the uniform, relaxed, he drifted through the water between them, his eyes open and unblinking. The cap was still on his head, the shine still on the black leather boots.
Lucas took Denny. With watch and depth gauge, Ralph swam slowly to thirty feet below the surface. He stopped there, hung in the water. Ten fingers flashed. They waited.
The currents caused by their flippers made Denny’s dead hands move as if he, too, grew restless with the waiting. Anna couldn’t take her eyes off him. A childish fear that if she looked away he would reach out and touch her kept scuttling through her mind, trailing a nightmare quality.
Martini’s Law must have been coined before the advent of Timothy Leary, she thought. For her the experience was proving reminiscent of an acid trip threatening to go sour rather than a good honest drunk.
She glanced at her watch. Another thirty seconds to wait. She looked back at Castle’s body.
The dead eyes had not changed expression but the jaw was dropping. Denny was opening his mouth as if to speak. A froth of reddish-colored bubbles spewed forth and rose toward the lake’s surface.
Anna’s mind spun. She reached out instinctively for the person next to her as she’d done in countless dark movie theaters when blobs, mummies, and killer lepuses made their moves. Then she remembered: Ralph had warned her. In deep-water body recoveries they removed the mask before the corpse reached the surface to let the water wash away fluids brought forth by the changing pressure.
The phenomenon lasted only a few seconds. Ralph kicked once and floated up the line. Glad to be moving, Anna followed, leaving Jim, Lucas, and the mute but expressive Denny Castle to follow as they might.
Twenty minutes at twenty feet. As the silver of the promised sky grew closer so did Anna’s impatience to see it, to breathe deep of air filled with rain, gusts and eddies, boat exhaust. To breathe again of the varying moods of life that cannot be canned.
The last wait, thirty-four minutes only ten feet below the surface, was provoking enough to amuse and Anna forgot the cold pooling inside her suit, stabbing at the fillings in her teeth, the vacant stare of Denny’s corpse.
Finally they reached the surface. Even Scotty’s cowboy countenance was a welcome sight. Jo Castle, wan and frightened, reaffirmed if only by way of pain that life went on. Thirty fathoms down, it had seemed a distant and fragile concept.
Jim Tattinger flippered over to the Lorelei’s water-level deck and was hauled over the stern like a landed fish by Jo and Officer Stanton. Anna was next, lifted clear of the water’s grasp. Ralph pulled himself up as far as the low deck and planted his butt on the two-by-four slats. Gently he took Denny’s body from Lucas and held it cradled in his arms while the Chief Ranger floundered on board.
Anna, sitting on deck, a flippered foot held clumsily between two gloved hands, was watching Jo as her wiry brown arms gathered her husband into a one-way embrace. The expression on Jo Castle’s face was familiar. Once Anna had seen it on Christina. She was watching her daughter sleep when Ally had been racked by a fever. A look that was equal parts tenderness and grief.
Either Jo was a complete psychotic, or she had not killed Denny. Remembering the strength in Jo’s arms as she had pulled her from the lake, Anna fervently hoped it was the latter.
Awkwardly, Jo bent and kissed her husband. Faint bruises ringed Denny’s mouth in blue. The captain’s cap, absurd now in the drizzling light of day, fell from his hair. Brass buttons winked as the collar of the uniform fell open. There was no shirt beneath the double-breasted jacket and the flesh of Denny’s shoulder was exposed. A livid bruise cut down between neck and shoulder. The discolored flesh was jarring on skin so white, and Anna turned away as if she would protect Denny’s modesty.
THIRTEEN
Anna was thinking about the bruise on Denny’s shoulder. Usually on her lieu days she liked to loose her mind from the often paranoia-inducing mental fetters of rangering. Not rangering, she reminded herself: law enforcement. It saddened her that the line between the two grew thinner every year. But recent events were too intrusive to allow her peace of mind.
Postmortem lividity left bruiselike marks on corpses. Blood, no longer circulating, pooled at the lowest point on the body. In Denny, supported by water, pressurized on all sides, lividity might possibly have shown faintly in the lowest extremities but not in hash marks across his chest. The autopsy would tell how much force had been used, if the bruise had been caused by a blow, and if the instrument of trauma had been edged. But it probably wouldn’t be able to tell what that instrument had been: baseball bat, crowbar, or just walking into a door.
What was troubling Anna was that the bruise configuration seemed familiar. So, motoring across sparkling blue waters on her day off, she busied her mind flipping back through the endless slides of corpses paraded before her in law enforcement classes. Coroners, policemen, arson investigators, body recovery experts, all with color pictures, each picture telling a story of violent death. Anna dredged up the images, hoping to decode the story Denny’s corpse was trying to tell.
At the northern end of Five Finger Bay, the sheer beauty of the day drove the blood and gore from her thoughts. The shores were snowy with thimbleberry blossoms, a lacy skirting between the blue of the water and the green of the trees. The sky had cried itself out the night before and smiled down clear and warm. Anna pushed the Belle Isle’s throttles wide and enjoyed the sense of speed.
And of being on the lake’s surface, not its floor.
Rock Harbor was bustling. Compared to the great ports of the world, it was a mere hole in the island, but after a week on t
he north shore it felt like New York Harbor on the Fourth of July.
Heading for the slips reserved for NPS vessels on Mott, Anna maneuvered the Belle Isle down the narrow channel between a yacht and the wake of an impertinent eighteen-foot runabout. Only one slip was empty. Effectively preventing her from docking there was a tourist. He was sitting on the quay, white legs dangling over the side. “A tourist’s tourist,” Anna muttered, noting the soft fishing hat, madras shirt, Bermudas, white socks, and black leather shoes.
It was Frederick the Fed.
Government-issue punk; his superiors must be eternally off balance, unsure whether Stanton merely had bad taste or really was poking fun at them.
“Officer Stanton,” she called out the open window. He scrambled ungracefully to his feet and proceeded to louse up her docking efforts with his good intentions. She barely managed to shove her fenders out before he dragged the Bertram into the pilings.
“Yo, Anna,” he said as she stepped onto the dock. Anna had never heard anyone actually use “yo” except in jest. Maybe she still hadn’t. Stanton’s face was deadpan.
“Morning,” she replied neutrally as she tied off to a cleat.
The clatter of leather soles brought him up next to her. His features were overly large but finely shaped, giving him the appearance of a badly carved heroic figure. The goofy hat, the fifties shirt, the hard shoes-everything about him was a study in incongruity. It struck Anna that it might be intentional; it’s hard to know a man who defies patterns.
“I’ve been hoping to get a word with you,” he said.
“It’s my day off.”
“Good. Mine too. We’ll have oodles of time.”