by Nevada Barr
“Me too,” she said. “Is Ralph around?”
“He got called to Houghton, he and Lucas, I guess. It’s a shame. Mrs. Pilcher and Max”-he wiggled the baby between his hands like a bit of Play-Doh-“just got here yesterday. Max’s mom is over at Rock, visiting. I asked if I could baby-sit.”
Ralph and Lucas were off the island. They’d be gone at least a day and a night and part of the following day. Anna considered going to Frederick Stanton with her burden of proof. But if he clung to the drug-death theory, the 3rd Sister would be impounded as evidence immediately, long before Hawk and Holly were proven guilty. With the ensuing investigation and governmental red tape, there was no telling when she’d be released. Clients would be canceled. Goodwill in a small industry lost. Insurance payments, dock fees, gear maintenance cost, would go unpaid. It wouldn’t take much to break the back of 3rd Sister Dive Adventures, Inc. If, by some chance, Hawk and his sister were innocent, they would have paid a stiff price for her suspicions.
Hawk kissed the baby’s ear.
“Are you free for lunch?” Anna asked.
“Are you cooking?”
“Better. A crowded cafeteria at noon, egg salad, bad coffee.”
“Are you buying?”
“Dutch treat.”
Hawk laughed. “Never go into sales, Anna. How about twelve-thirty? Max’s mom won’t be back till noon.”
“Twelve-thirty.”
At central dispatch Anna left a message for Stanton: “URGENT. MEET ME AT ROCK HARBOR LODGE LUNCHROOM AT 1:30.” Sandra said she’d give it to the Fed if she saw him, but Anna knew behind the joke was the promise to track him down at all cost.
Ninety minutes to kill. Since she was out of uniform, Anna decided to play tourist. She motored back to Rock, took her place on the bench above the harbor, and waited for the eleven o’clock nature walk to begin. Visitors trickled up. Soon the bench was full and half a dozen people milled around on the asphalt path. Anna didn’t talk much. It was restful to be incognito, not to have to feign interest in anybody’s little adventures.
At five of eleven the group perked and stirred meaningfully. The ranger was coming. It was Tinker. She looked markedly older than when Anna had seen her several days before. Her face was thinner and drawn, as if she’d not been eating or sleeping well. Her hair needed shampooing and her uniform shirt, usually worn like a flag of honor, was crumpled. Tinker noted Anna in the group with a disinterest that smacked of lethargy.
The nature walk seemed to pick up her spirits to some degree. Teaching distracted her perhaps from her private terrors. But Tinker’s usual joy, her religious reverence for the natural world, seemed blighted. Something was eating away at her.
After the walk, Anna returned to the Belle Isle and put on her uniform. Body armor came in all sizes and colors. The LAPD had bulletproof vests, Molly had Anne Klein suits, Anna had the green and gray.
At the lodge, she picked a table near a window. Sunlight flooded across the white cloth, splashed into the empty chair. Anna left that seat for Hawk: her back to the wall, the light in his eyes. Clichéd TV choices, Anna thought with a smile, but making them gave her something to do. Stress management, Molly would call it. Dicking around, Anna said to herself.
Hawk was late. Anna flicked all the real and imaginary crumbs from the cloth, checked and rechecked her watch, went through the reasons Hawk might have chosen to stand her up. None of them were reassuring.
At ten of one the Loon, piloted by Tattinger, motored up to the near dock. Through the window, she saw Hawk jump off the boat, wave a thanks, and sprint up the quay. The sun caught his curls where the breeze ruffled them. Cold-blooded killer or not, Anna thought, he was lovely. She did not like to think of the man he would be after a few years in the federal penitentiary.
“Sorry I’m late. Couldn’t cadge a lift,” he said, smiling, folding himself into the chair opposite, whisking up the paper napkin and cracking it open as if it were made of linen. “Will you order for both of us?” Hawk was grinning wickedly. The waitress was standing at their table, pen poised, an interested expression pasted politely on her face.
“Two egg salads, two coffees. No dessert.” Handcuffs were dessert, Anna thought acidly.
“To what do I owe this honor? Is it to be: ‘About last night… I think the world of you but…’? No? Let me guess. You’re married.”
“Sort of,” Anna said. The conversation, planned and rehearsed so carefully in her head, had gotten away from her and was running amok.
“Ohmygod!” One word gusted out on a laugh. “Sort of? Sort of?”
“I’m married. He’s dead. Till death do us part,” Anna explained awkwardly.
“Only sometimes it doesn’t. Dead men are tricky. Memories are tough to beat. They only improve with age.”
“Dead people,” Anna echoed. “Let’s talk about Denny.” So much for smooth segues.
Hawk sobered. Like a light going out, the hazel eyes dimmed, the full lips stilled and thinned. “Okay,” he said evenly. “Denny.”
The waitress came then with two egg salads on white bread, bread-and-butter pickles on the side. Neither was tempted. Coffee came and got a slightly better reception. Hawk sipped. Anna pretended to.
“I went to see Denny’s mother,” she said. “She showed me the trunk in the spare bedroom. There’d been a suit of clothes there-a sea captain’s uniform. It was gone. Mrs. Castle said you and Molly had stolen it. ‘Wild children,’ she called you. Did you take it?”
Hawk thought over his reply. Took a drink of the coffee. “Denny thought a lot of that uniform. He said if he believed in previous lives-which he didn’t-he’d‘ve believed he’d once dressed that way. That’s how he saw himself.”
Not a yes, not a no. Like a character in a Greek tragedy, Anna pushed on with an unpleasant sense of the inevitable. “Denny’s corpse was found dressed in that uniform. No dry suit, no tanks, no mask, just that old sea costume. Mrs. Castle said she showed it to you and Molly around the time Denny died.”
“When did he die?” Hawk asked abruptly. “Exactly?”
“The autopsy will tell us-today, maybe tomorrow. Why?”
Hawk didn’t answer. It was as if he hadn’t heard. He pushed a bit of egg salad around his plate with the edge of a chip but didn’t look as if he was inclined to eat it.
“I saw Denny’s tank-the oversized single-on the Third Sister when Lucas and I came to tell you of the death. Yours and Molly’s were charged but Denny’s was down by nearly half. You’d not bothered to top it.”
“Why should we? Denny was dead.”
“How did you know? At the time you were filling tanks the body had not yet been discovered. And there was a bruise on the body. A mark like one that would be left by a dive harness. My guess is Denny was wearing the tank when he died, or just before.”
“Ah. Gotcha! That it?”
Anna waited, watched his face. Emotions flickered and flooded over the smooth brown skin but she couldn’t separate any one out as stronger than the rest. Unless, perhaps, it was sorrow.
“It’s crossed my mind,” she said, “that Denny was killed by two divers, divers who dressed him in that costume, who retrieved his gear, who stood to inherit his boat and his business.”
Hawk looked up from his plate. His eyes were hard. “The Third Sister has got a load of debt that should sink her. Collateral so we could buy gear for the squirrels. Do you think I’d kill Denny for a boat even if it were free and clear? I can build a damn boat.” The voice was so cold, had Anna not seen him speak she would not have recognized it as his.
“Maybe not for the Third Sister, but for your sister? For Holly.”
Hawk looked blank. “Holly loved Denny,” he said.
“And then there was Jo?”
“No. Nothing like that. Holly couldn’t love Denny like that. Never.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Anna said. A shadow fell across the table, drawing their eyes to the window. It belonged to Frederick the Fed, clad in
a suit and tie reminiscent of a Mormon missionary witnessing door to door. He was heading for the lodge.
Instantly Hawk understood what the apparently coincidental arrival of the Bureau man meant.
“No,” he said hurriedly. “No.”
“Holly’s not gay,” Anna said. “I checked.”
“Gay!” Hawk laughed. “No.” The restaurant door opened. Anna could see Frederick looking around him in that vague half-blind way people seek a familiar face in a crowd. She started to raise her hand to signal him. Hawk caught it and held it. He leaned across the table, his face close to hers.
“There’s never been any man for Holly but me. Never any woman in my world but Holly.”
The truth jarred more deeply than Anna would have admitted, more deeply than if the man she’d slept with had been a murderer. “The vasectomy!”
“No half-wit children,” Hawk said bitterly.
“Why did you go to bed with me?”
“You for me; the three clotheshorse clients for Holly. Denny was our savior, our cover; after he died we tried to go straight. You were my best bet. But it was too lonely. Holly’s my other self. If, after I die, I burn in hell for it, I burn in hell. I won’t live in hell now.”
“Denny?”
“We found him,” Hawk said. “Two days before you did. Floating near the ship. His gear was on him, there was air in his tank. Maybe ecstasy of the deep. Stupidity. Accident. It doesn’t matter-not even if it was murder. We gave him the burial he wanted in the grave he would have chosen. We owed him at least that.”
“Howdy, howdy, howdy.” Frederick Stanton had arrived at their table. Somewhere along the way he had picked up a coffeepot, and proceeded to refill their cups. “Nothing for me, thanks,” he said when an irritated waitress steamed over to retrieve her pot.
Anna was too stunned to speak. Stanton flopped down in the chair beside Hawk and leaned back. His carefully blank eyes moved between the two of them. Anna doubted he missed a thing. Hawk began wolfing down his sandwich, his face burning red under the tan. Anna had lost what little appetite she had. The sight of egg salad nauseated her. So did the sight of Hawk.
Watching the boats come and go in the harbor, she stared out of the window. Nothing broke the silence but Hawk’s muffled chewing. Stanton had grown so good at waiting Anna scarcely even felt him there.
Twins and lovers. Denny knew. Denny was their employer, protector. Denny understood. They had risked imprisonment to give him the burial he had wanted.
Stanton caught her eye. She smiled. “Sorry to drag you all the way down here. I just wondered if the autopsy report had come back.”
The FBI man’s look of expectancy evaporated. “Ah. Well. Meet me in Ralph’s office.” Looking crestfallen, a disappointed child, he rose from the table.
Anna felt a stab of guilt. “There are some things I’d like to talk over with you.” He brightened. Anna wondered what technique he used on other people. Whatever worked, probably. “An hour okay?” She looked at her watch. “Around two-thirty?”
“Two-thirty it is.” For a moment he hovered near the table. “You going to eat that sandwich?” he said finally.
“It’s all yours.” Anna pushed the plate toward him and he shoveled the entire sandwich onto one flat palm and wandered out, eating as he walked.
Hawk stopped chewing as abruptly as he had begun but remained staring down at his plate. “I’m sorry, Anna. We were so young. We never knew better. Then we knew better and we tried to quit. Holly broke hearts. I made a lot of women hate me. Holly and I cried and fought. I drank. Holly did coke. We’d sit across the room from each other at parties, some pretty boy panting over her, some bimbo hanging on me. It was sick, Anna, sicker a hundred times more than anything we could ever do together. Denny hired us. Out on the lake days at a time, the world kind of fades. Old rules seem like nonsense. We made new rules. Our parents are dead. We’ll never have kids. New rules for a new world. Who were we hurting?”
“Denny knew?”
“Denny was our friend.”
“Jo?”
“Nobody. Just Denny.”
“Now me.” A number of stock phrases marched across the tip of Anna’s tongue: How could you? You lied to me. You used me. But he hadn’t lied and she had used him. And to the same ends: to forget, for a moment, a love that had come to hurt more than it healed. “It’s okay,” she said.
“Is it really?” Hawk sounded as if her answer genuinely mattered to him.
“ ‘Okay’ is relative, I guess,” Anna said. “But yeah.”
EIGHTEEN
Frederick was in Ralph’s chair, tilted back, his ankles crossed atop the clutter on the desk. In the cheap suit he presented a perfect parody of the 1930 shamus. Anna couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not.
She finished her story: “So they dressed Denny in his favorite clothes, stuck him in the engine room, and left him to his eternal rest.”
“That was two days before those divers-Whosis and Bozo-discovered the body.”
“Two days.”
Stanton picked up a blue For Your Eyes Only envelope and tapped it without showing the contents to Anna. “The autopsy says Denny died the day before that.”
“Four? Four days before the Canadians found him?”
“Yup. Nobody reported him missing? Nobody wondered where he was?”
“He was on his honeymoon,” Anna replied a little defensively. “You expect people to disappear on their honeymoon.”
“Three days.”
“He died on his wedding night!” Anna realized aloud.
“You’d think the bride would have noticed,” Stanton said.
Jo was camped up on Lake Richie just southwest of Moskey Basin, working on her freshwater quality study. When Denny died, the NPS had offered her any length of leave she required to settle personal business. Jo had taken just enough time to finalize the plans for planting Denny’s body deep in Michigan’s soil where, as Holly put it one bitter evening, he could never drift away from her.
Within a couple of days Jo had been back on Isle Royale working. Anna understood. It was what she would have done. Had done, once she’d sobered up.
Jo’s camp was a two-mile hike in. The trail was muddy. Blackflies, tiny airborne carnivores called “all-jaws” by the local Michigan children, bit without warning. Mosquitoes and Frederick Stanton whined.
“Tell me about the autopsy report,” Anna said, hoping to distract him. Or hoping the bugs would’ve distracted him enough he’d accidentally tell her something worth knowing.
“Good of you to come along, Anna. Oh, ish!”
Anna looked back. Stanton was staring ruefully at one black leather shoe, brown now with mud. She laughed. “If you’re for real, you’re scary.”
He looked the offended innocent.
“The autopsy…” she led in.
“Dead since the seventeenth of June, four days before the Canadians discovered the body. Cause of death: drowning.”
“Drowning? With his tank nearly full?”
Stanton chuckled. “The corpse wasn’t wearing a tank.”
Anna made no comment. She walked on, listening for the rest of the report. “What about the bruises?” she asked when nothing more was forthcoming.
“You knew about that, too? Jeez, Anna. Why ask? You tell me.”
“There was a bruise across his shoulder where his harness would’ve been. He was in dive gear when he died. That’s my guess anyway.”
“Wow.” Stanton sounded genuinely impressed. “Gee, you think?”
“Occasionally.” Anna was losing patience.
“Remind me not to deal drugs in your park.”
“You don’t buy that anymore.”
Stanton neither agreed nor disagreed.
Anna stopped, turned. “Do you want to work together, or do you want to keep dicking around?”
Stanton looked at his shoes, at the canopy of aspen closing overhead. He grinned, he shrugged, he shuffled.
Anna wa
s unimpressed. “You never bought it, did you? You just hoped by threatening to impound the Third Sister, you’d get somebody setting out to clear the Bradshaws. Or convict them.”
“I swear by local talent,” he said at last. “They know where the bodies are buried, who’s sleeping with whom.”
“Help me then.”
Stanton seemed to weigh the efficacy of interagency cooperation. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Castle drowned. Water was in his lungs. If you’re right about the bruise being caused by his harness, he drowned with plenty of breathing air on him. Too weird for me.”
Anna told him about the knife. If there’d been any kind of struggle at that depth, Denny could have blacked out. His assailant could have pulled off his mouthpiece.
“Left him to wake up dead?”
“That’s what crossed my mind,” Anna said.
“Why?”
“Beats me.” She turned and began walking again, the moisture-laden thimbleberry branches slapping dark patterns on her trousers.
“Drugs,” Stanton said. “When you’ve ruled out the impossible, whatever’s left, however improbable, is drugs.”
“One-size-fits-all motive?”
“It’s perfect,” Stanton said, and: “Damn!” The sound of slapping, a mosquito or blackfly departing the quick and joining the dead. “I’m all for drugs,” he babbled on. “Takes the guesswork out of law enforcement.”
They found Jo’s camp on a rocky bluff overlooking Lake Richie. Set like an orange Easter egg amid the froth of wild sarsaparilla, her tent was pitched on the hardened site.
Frederick crawled halfway inside. “Not searching,” he called out. “Can’t search without a warrant. Checking for guns and bombs. Officer safety.”
Anna sat down on a rock screened by Juneberry bushes where she could see the trail that wound up from the lake. Search finished, Stanton came and curled his long body neatly down beside her, hugging his bony knees to his chest. Despite his grumbling the hike hadn’t even winded him.
“Do you think Jo killed Denny?” Anna asked impulsively.
“The spouse is always a prime suspect.”