A Superior Death

by Nevada Barr

  Anna stayed around Rock Harbor just long enough to collect her mail from the Ranger III. As always, there was a letter from Chris to be treasured away for later. As she headed overland toward Lane Cove and her duty station, an unexpected bit of good news came her way.

  Damien ran after her. Boyish again, joyous, he loped along the asphalt path as graceful as a greyhound. “She’s birding again!” he told Anna of his wife. Anna gathered that to bird was to live and was glad that Tinker’s burden had been one that she could ease, if only a little. “We’re spending our weekends at McCargo Cove. If there’s a nesting peregrine, she’ll see it. She sees everything.”

  The stress he gave the word seemed to indicate that Tinker saw both the visible and the invisible, the corporeal and the existential. Anna did not disagree.

  On the walk over Greenstone Ridge Anna dawdled along, enjoying the sense of time and immortality the long summer days engendered. In several places where the island’s backbone had been rubbed free of its fur of trees and shrubs, the trail cut across solid stone, the way picked out only by rock cairns.

  On one such expanse of bare ridge, Anna went off the trail till she was out of sight, divested herself of her pack and lay down. The gray rock soaked up and savored the weak rays of Michigan’s sun, the heat soothing her back and shoulders.

  Her mind wandered back to New York City, the apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, Zachary waiting on tables at a little Mexican restaurant on Ninth Avenue, waiting for his big break. There was no money. Cockroaches scuttled like evil spirits every time a light was switched on. The kids in apartment 1C spray-painted obscenities on the walls of the foyer and smashed the mailboxes. The lady across the air shaft slept all day and screamed at her husband all night. And that was the summer the city was infested with rats. The Post was running headlines on it. Zach reported seeing a rat so big coming down the tracks into the Forty-second Street subway station that nine tourists tried to board, thinking it was the number 7 train.

  Yet Anna had been happy then. There was Zachary and there was hope. It doesn’t take much, she thought. You’d think it would be easier to hang on to.

  She stared up at the sky, felt the stone warm beneath her spine. Playing in her mind, she began replacing her body, molecule by molecule, with bits of the earth.

  There would be peace in shedding one’s humanity, rest in moving to the slower geological rhythms, charm in feeling the skittering of animal feet over one’s chest, the brush of autumn leaves settling in the wrinkles of one’s skin, blankets of snow cooling the body into a long sleep.

  Mosquitoes woke Anna. It was dusk and she was laid out like a smorgasbord. She awakened from her dream of the earth thinking: You can’t get blood from a stone.

  But if any mosquitoes could, it would be the mosquitoes of Isle Royale. Pursued by bloodsucking demons, she ran the last mile through the gathering darkness and escaped out onto the water in the Belle Isle.

  Two days later as she grumbled around Amygdaloid dock with buckets, sluicing off the fish guts some slob fisherman had deposited in her absence, the 3rd Sister motored up the channel and glided effortlessly to her mooring. Without looking, Anna knew that Holly was the pilot.

  She waded through the herring gulls her impromptu bouillabaisse had collected, and helped Hawk tether the lines to the cleats.

  Holly sprang from the deck with a grace born of strength. Both she and her brother looked better than they had since Denny had been killed. Some of the arrogance that was an integral part of their charm was beginning to creep back into their bearing.

  By now Hawk must have told his sister that Anna knew of the incest. Anna suspected that Hawk seldom had a thought he did not share with her; that things did not exist for him until they existed for Holly as well.

  Either Holly didn’t mind, or she was hiding it well. She greeted Anna with the same short sharp smile she always had. “We’ve got the pictures,” she said. “Picked them up in Grand Marais this morning.”

  For a moment Anna was at a loss. Then she remembered they were going to do a bounce dive on the Kamloops to see what they could find.

  Like most underwater photos, those Holly had taken seemed slightly out of focus. Time had been severely limited. She and Hawk had confined themselves to the area along the hull where they had found Denny’s corpse floating. Three of the shots were of the porthole where Jim and Anna had noticed the scratches. The remaining seven were of the surrounding area.

  Since the body recovery dive, Anna had collected the stats on the Kamloops, garnered not only from the original builder’s specifications but from the findings of the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit out of Santa Fe. Information on the ship was not hard to come by. Like all ISRO’s wrecks, it was quite celebrated.

  Having perfunctorily cleared her desk in the ranger station, Anna spread out a diagram of the ship and the ten photographs the Bradshaws provided. Brother and sister hovered interestedly while she gathered her thoughts.

  As she had guessed, the scratched porthole led into the captain’s quarters. According to the builder’s specs and corroborated by Anna’s memory, the diameter of the opening was just over a foot and a half, 19.6 inches to be exact.

  Anna picked up the photos of the porthole and examined them carefully. Then she took an envelope from her desk, removed two pictures from it, and compared them with the Bradshaws’ photos.

  “Jim took these the day we recovered Denny’s body. Look.” Anna laid both sets of pictures back on the desk. “There’s more scratches. Somebody’s been down there since the murder messing around at that porthole. The latch was broken when Jim and I were down there. There were these scratches. They’re dulled a little in your pictures. Here they’re not so deep. These old ones look like they were made with something sharp. These are new, more like scrapes, as if someone were repeatedly vandalizing this one porthole. Dragging something through.”

  For several moments they all three stared at the photographs. “You couldn’t get through that porthole in tanks,” Anna observed.

  Hawk held the close-up of the scratches so the sunlight illuminated it clearly. “Maybe the marks could have been made with a chain or a wire. Somebody fishing through the hole, fishing something out of the cabin.”

  “What could they be after in the captain’s quarters?” Holly asked. “I mean, there’s the usual trinkets, but nobody dives the Kamloops for trinkets. Too dangerous. All I saw anywhere near the porthole were some busted-up wooden crates and pieces of broken crockery.”

  Anna sorted through the folder of papers she’d collected on the Kamloops and pulled out a Xerox copy of the bill of lading. “Fence wire, machinery from England, pipe, shoes, steel cable,” she began aloud. She ran through the list of goods. The Kamloops was a package freighter, she carried everyday fare. Time and circumstances might have made some of them worth more than they had been originally, but nothing that would be worth repeatedly risking one’s life for, or committing murder for.

  “You’re barking up the wrong list,” Holly said. “If whoever’s stealing artifacts is fiddling around the captain’s cabin, my guess is they’re looking for personal effects.”

  “Gold doubloons,” Hawk said with an exaggerated air of mystery.

  “Wrong century,” Holly retorted.

  “Wrong sea,” Anna said.

  “Right touch of glamour,” he offered.

  “Captains of freighters weren’t rich,” Anna thought aloud. “Contraband?”

  “Maybe,” Holly agreed. “What was contraband in 1927?”

  “We are close enough to Chicago. There was that whole gangster thing. Maybe dirty money, drugs-” Anna began.

  “Guys in cement overcoats,” Hawk interjected.

  The women ignored him.

  “Stocks, bonds, stolen goods: jewelry, gold, silver-”

  “Hooch,” Hawk added unhelpfully.

  “Do you want to go out and play?” Holly asked. Despite her preoccupation, Anna was glad to see Hawk smile.

  “I
’ll be good,” he promised.

  “Whatever it is, it had to be small enough to get through a porthole, close enough to the porthole it could be fished out, and worth a lot to somebody,” Anna went on.

  “You forgot easy,” Hawk said, finally serious. “There’s no time down there. It’s too cold for much in the way of decompression stops. A bounce dive is about it. Maybe twenty minutes max if you know what you’re doing. You’d have to grab the thing and get back to the surface in a short space of time.”

  “Or things,” Anna corrected and pointed to the scratches that indicated more than one attempt at entry. Rubbing her eyes, she leaned back in her chair. Idly, she moved the photos around as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle she was putting together. “I wish this made more sense.”

  “Me too,” Holly said. “Stanton’s been asking questions on the mainland-both at the Voyageur Marina and in Grand Marais. The locals are beginning to look at us funny. It doesn’t take much to lose your reputation in this business.”

  “Better than losing your boat,” Anna said.

  “Without it we won’t need the boat.”

  Anna picked up the remaining seven pictures and fanned them out like a poker hand: the hull vanishing into the somber depths, a shot of the hull in the other direction with the vague light of the surface beckoning, mud hills rolling away, the Pepsi can she remembered from her dive, a shot of Hawk by the porthole, and a coffee mug half buried in the lake bottom.

  “I wish I hadn’t been so scared when I went down,” Anna said. “It’s hard to remember what, exactly, was there.”

  “That’s true of almost everybody on a deep dive,” Holly reassured her.

  “Particularly squirrels,” Hawk added.

  “I think I liked you better depressed,” Anna countered. “Why don’t you guys go back to work or whatever it is you do?” She rose from her chair and gathered the papers and pictures together to replace them in the manila folder. “I’ve got things to do.”

  “Like gather nuts for the winter?” Hawk asked.

  Anna laughed. “A lot like that.”

  That evening, as most evenings when the tourist trade had died down and the dock had grown quiet, Anna poured herself a glass of wine and carried it out onto the steps of the ranger station to sit and sip and watch the day turn to silver.

  Christina’s letter, still unread, was folded in her pocket. Anna took it out along with the packet of underwater photos she’d been meaning to study, and ran a finger under the flap in pleasant anticipation of a touch of home. This note was short and businesslike, scribbled on the back of an old memo. Chris had written it over her lunch break. It started with an apology for the orange thumbprint in the corner. An arrow pointed to the smudge. On the arrow’s tail was written, “Oops. Doritos.” Anna read the rest of the letter, written in Christina’s graceful looping hand. Bertie had finally grown alarmed. Repeated efforts to get information out of Scotty had resulted in conflicting stories and outright lies. Bertie had alerted the Houghton police to her sister’s disappearance. As the waiting period on missing persons was long since past, the investigation had begun. Ally was studying dinosaurs in preschool. Chris was thinking of taking a cooking class on Tuesday evenings. Piedmont was said to be missing Anna.

  Piedmont. Anna folded the letter and wished she could have a cat on her lap, an orange tail to pull. As if granting her wish, a flash of reddish fur illuminated the dark green of the thimbleberry not four yards from where she sat.

  Knucklehead’s kits were old enough to leave the den. Several times Anna had seen them poking shy black faces out of the bushes. Often at night she heard their sharp cries and muffled tumblings in the thick underbrush. Tonight they had grown quite bold and pounced and tumbled, playing like kittens while their mother watched with her chin on her paws. Knucklehead, however tame, never took her eyes from Anna or any other human being now that her kits had outgrown the safety of the den.

  Beside Anna, on the step, were the underwater photographs of the Kamloops. A breeze stirred them and she tucked them under her thigh lest they blow into the dirt. “Maybe I’ll learn something by osmosis,” she said to Knucklehead.

  There was so much information and no one piece of it seemed to connect up with any other. A murder committed in an impossible place, for improbable reasons, by an unidentified person. Maybe Stanton was right, maybe it was drugs: buying or selling or taking.

  “Not bloody likely,” Anna said to the fox. She began forcing mismatched facts together, snapping one to the next like pop beads on a child’s necklace. Someone wanted something they knew or believed to be in the captain’s cabin. The broken latch and the scratches attested to the fact that they had attempted or succeeded in dragging that something out through the porthole.

  Denny had been found dead by that porthole. Anna married the two bits of information: Therefore Denny had seen whoever doing whatever and so they had killed him.

  The careful, professional Denny had done a solo midnight bounce dive on an extremely dangerous wreck. Denny hadn’t told anyone he was going to dive. Anna hammered the disparate facts into a third: Therefore Denny hadn’t known beforehand that he was going to make the dive, and as there was no radio in the Blackduck, he couldn’t broadcast it after he decided to do it.

  Denny, then, had followed someone, someone he suspected. After the reception he had followed them in the Blackduck. They had dived, he had dived.

  Denny Castle was a superb diver. Denny Castle had been killed. Therefore either the murderer was a better diver, was someone Denny was not afraid of, or had caught Denny off guard.

  The sound of a scuffle interrupted Anna’s thoughts. The kits were growling, lowering their noses to their paws, their hind ends high in the air in a three-way standoff. The tableau erupted into a spout of fur and Anna laughed. It was hard to remember they were wild things. The desire to pet them, name them, feed them was almost irresistible.

  The roar of a motorboat broke up the fray. Flashes of red enlivened the bushes as they all disappeared, running as if they’d not been born and raised with the sound of boat engines.

  Anna stood to see who was causing the ruckus. A green and white cabin cruiser was shearing the silver fabric of the channel: Patience Bittner’s boat, the Venture. She pulled up at a speed that waked the boats at their moorings and set the fishermen to squawking.

  Anna began to run toward the quay.

  Patience didn’t disembark. She stood on the deck holding the Venture to the dock with her hands. Her usually well-coiffed hair had come loose and hung in strands accentuating the deep lines etched in her face. One of Carrie’s old sweatshirts rendered her for the first time in Anna’s recollection shapeless and unstylish.

  Tourists, hunched over bourbons and beers, pricked their ears for any sound of adventure. Anna crouched on the pier, eye-level with Patience standing in the boat. “What is it? Carrie?” As she asked and was answered with a grim nod, Anna suffered a stab of guilt. Denny Castle’s murder, Donna’s disappearance-both damage already done-had absorbed her attention so completely she had forgotten her primary duty: to protect and preserve. She had forgotten Jim Tattinger and his proven penchant for little girls, forgotten Carrie Bittner and her sullen and secretive affair with the mysterious beau.

  “She’s run off,” Patience said. “She was supposed to be busing in the dining room. I was busy with the inventory brought on the Ranger Three and was at the dock. My night manager said Carrie left for supper and never came back. I’ve looked everywhere I can think of. I came to the north shore because that’s where she ran to the last time-Lane Cove, remember? She left this at the apartment. It must’ve been about an hour before I got home.”

  Anna took the paper Patience pulled from the pocket of her trousers. On a piece of stationery with little faceless girls in oversized bonnets brightening one corner, written with pencil so dull that at first Anna thought it was crayon, were the words: “Living with you is like being in jail. You think you’re the only person th
at deserves a life. Not everybody thinks I’m a little kid anymore. Like you made my childhood so great! I’m going to end it and you can pretend to all your friends that it’s a big deal.”

  “I wasn’t paying attention,” Patience said and water started in eyes already reddened. “I’ve had so much on my mind this summer. Carrie’s boy troubles were a complication I didn’t have time for. She was sulky but I didn’t think she was depressed. I know she won’t kill herself-she’s too big a baby-but even to leave a note…” Patience’s throat closed with tears and she stopped talking rather than break down.

  “What day is it?” Anna demanded.

  The unexpected nature of the question startled Patience momentarily from her fears. “Friday.” She waited for an explanation.

  “Tattinger’s lieu day,” Anna said. “My guess is when Carrie said she was going to ‘end it’ she meant her childhood, not her life.” Anna dropped into the Venture and dragged a life vest out from under the seat. As she buckled it on she told Patience what she had learned of Tattinger.

  “The first time she ran off it was Jim who told me where she was,” Anna said. “He was acting fishy but I wrote it off to general assholery, and after Denny was found, I figured his running without lights and creeping around had something to do with that. Carrie was with him, I’m willing to bet. That’s what he was hiding. She was the second shadow I thought I saw in the cabin.”

  “What kind of boy could be so unacceptable?” Patience repeated her question of several weeks before. “A boy pushing forty. I’ll kill her.”

  Had she been a mother, Anna thought, her first impulse would have been to kill Jim Tattinger. Tattinger couldn’t charm, dominate, or compete with women, so he’d turned his sexual attention to girls so young he could still wow them with his wisdom and maturity. Carrie Ann, awkward, plain, wanting to grow up sooner than her mother thought fit, would be the perfect choice.

  Anna said: “Unless you saw a light-colored cabin cruiser called the Gone Fishin‘ on your way here, head south. That’s where I found him that first time. I expect he’s scouted out some little cove.” Patience turned south down Amygdaloid Channel. “I wouldn’t blame Carrie,” Anna said.