by Nevada Barr
Wishing she were a cat or a shadow or at least sober, Anna lay on the sofa and stared into the dark until unconsciousness finally took pity on her and returned.
When she awoke again it was light but fog hid any trace of the coming sunrise. She looked at her watch: 5:40 a.m. A dull ache at the base of her skull and a parched feeling told her she would be getting no more rest for a while. Giving in to her hard-earned hangover, she got up and stumbled into the kitchen for a glass of water.
The wine bottles were gone and the glasses set tidily on the counter near the sink. Patience must have had as bad a time as she, Anna thought, creeping about her apartment in the dead of night doing domestic chores. Anna drank off half a glass of water standing at the sink, then refilled the glass. Theoretically, rehydration helped a hangover. Theoretically a lot of things helped a hangover. In reality only the passage of time worked out the poisons. Anna looked at her watch again: 5:42. It was going to be a long day.
Molly would be up at six. She always was. A woman of strong habits, Anna’s sister rose with coffee and a cigarette to watch the six o’clock news and went to bed with Scotch and a cigarette and The Tonight Show’s opening monologue.
Anna killed twenty minutes standing under a hot shower. At 6:05, wishing she had coffee but lacking the courage to rummage through Patience’s kitchen, she dialed her sister’s number in New York. Molly picked up on the first ring. “Dr. Pigeon,” she said curtly. The formality threw Anna for a moment.
“It’s me, Anna,” she said. “You sound further up than five minutes. Are you okay?”
“Had a rough night.” The sounds of crockery and metal rattled behind Molly’s words.
“Making coffee?” Anna asked enviously.
“Second pot.” There was a clicking on the line. “Hold,” Molly said. “I’m expecting another call.” She was back within seconds. “False alarm. Nobody there. Phone must be acting up.”
“Migraine?” Anna asked. Her sister had suffered migraines since her twenties but she’d not had one in a while.
“No. That’s for later if this clenched feeling behind my eyes means anything. I lost a patient last night. I thought you might be the police. Lots of questions. I’ve got answers that satisfy them. None that satisfy me.”
“Suicide?” Anna asked. Molly had only had two in twenty years of practice. She’d taken both of them hard for a psychiatrist. Anna loved her the better for it.
“Not exactly. At least I doubt that was the primary motivation. Remember my crazy connoisseur?”
“The disgruntled food writer?”
“Him. He climbed the outside of a three-story building in Brooklyn Heights last night. The man is-was-in his late fifties with the figure of a confirmed food worshiper. He hadn’t climbed more than stairs in the past ten years and never those if there was an elevator nearby.”
“Jumped?”
“The police thought jumped at first, but he fell. All the windows were locked on the inside. He had to have climbed up.”
“Do you know why? I mean, did he live there or something?”
“No. He was trying to get to the food lab and kitchens of his rival. I think he figured if he could get in, he could find something to prove the Great Discovery was a hoax.”
“Jesus,” Anna breathed. “You’d think anybody who can afford you would hire someone to do their stunt work.”
“Not this man. I should have seen it coming. The obsessions amused me, Anna. Amused me. I thought it was funny. I just didn’t see it as something that could drive anybody to do something that desperate. The last couple of sessions he talked of revenge, said the yellow braces weren’t enough. He talked of plans to mock, to expose, even to kill his rival. The plans were all overblown-comic book stuff. You know: plastic explosives on the violent end and intricate Rube Goldberg devices to deliver a public pie in the face on the silly end. Boyish. I wasn’t paying attention. I’ve got that article coming out in Psychology Today and that conference I’m chairing at Princeton in August. Like some damned TV star, I sat there primping while this poor man cried out. The system failed him. I failed him. Dr. Quick Fix. I fell in love with my own glib theories. And Gustav Claben died.”
“I’m sorry,” was all Anna could say. Molly was never to be comforted when she believed she had failed. People found it hard to love a woman to whom they could give nothing. The pain would pass and Molly would never let it happen again, at least not in the same way.
Again there was a clicking on the line. This time it was another call: the hospital where Molly’s client had been taken. Molly rang off abruptly, leaving Anna with the depressing feeling that she should have done something more, said something wiser. Just once she wished Molly would need something that she was equipped to deliver.
Like what? Anna mocked herself. Need someone arrested for camping out of bounds in Central Park? A horse shod or a boat engine tuned for her Park View practice?
Anna promised herself she would call again soon and make a point to listen more than talk. She had to satisfy herself with that.
When she looked up from the phone, Patience was standing in the hall between the living room and the bath. Her face was twisted, as though she couldn’t decide whether to come ahead into the front room or retreat back to the bedroom.
“It’s all right,” Anna said. “I’m off the phone.”
Patience gave her a hard look, angry-or so it seemed through the medium of a hangover.
“I used my credit card,” Anna said, feeling childish.
The look faded and was replaced by Patience’s usual dry smile. “I’m not worried,” she said lightly. “I know where you live. Carrie!” she called back down the hall.
Carrie Ann plodded slowly out. Her usual sullenness had hardened into a look very near hatred. On so young a person, it was unsettling.
As Patience herded her daughter into a morning blanked with fog, Anna rubbed her face and groaned. Apparently it was destined to be another life’s-a-bitch-and-then-you-die kind of day.
TWENTY FIVE
Fog seemed to penetrate everything, obscure everything. Motoring slowly down the channel toward Mott, her eyes on the radar screen, Anna felt it penetrated her very skull, obscured her thoughts. It was hard to tell where the hangover ended and the fog began. She ached for the clarity of the high desert, strong clean sunshine not filtered through atmospheres of water, air so transparent mountains a hundred miles distant looked as if they were but a day’s walk away.
Another boat loomed suddenly out of the fog behind and just barely to the port of the Belle Isle. Anna shoved her throttles forward to avoid a collision. The leap was unnecessary as it turned out but it had been a close call and she swore under her breath. Slowing, she watched, deciding whether or not to call the other pilot onto the carpet.
The other vessel pulled alongside and Anna reached for the public-address-system mike, but it was the Lorelei, Scotty Butkus piloting.
He cut power, clearly wanting a word. Anna followed suit and walked back to the stern. The water was absolutely flat. Fog hung in close curtains, absorbing all sound, all color. The boats could have been meeting in a vacuum, a windowless white room.
“Hey, Scotty, what’s up?” Anna opened the conversation as he clomped out of the Lorelei’s cabin.
“Just routine. Bound to be some fender benders in this stuff. I’ll be sticking pretty close to Rock today.”
Anna suspected it was less out of concern for the health and welfare of the tourists than because Scotty’d never gotten the hang of Loran, and wasn’t too comfortable running on radar. “It’s soupy all right,” Anna concurred. “I’ll need a red and white cane to find my way back to the north shore.”
Something was different about Scotty. As usual, his shirt was crisply pressed and his boots shiny. It was the set of his shoulders, the cock of his head that was different, Anna decided. He was smug, puffed up. She waited to hear why. He didn’t keep her on tenterhooks.
“Yup.” Scotty narrowed his eyes agai
nst a nonexistent sun and stared into a nonexistent distance. “It’s one hell of a day to be left with half a damn island to look after.” Putting a booted foot on the gunwale, he leaned his elbow on his knee. He would have looked right at home in Texas. Anna wished he were there.
Butkus was waiting for her to ask him why he was in charge of half the island but she wasn’t going to do it. He cracked before she did. “I don’t mind being Acting District Ranger,” he continued. “Hell, I’m used to that. But they don’t pay me enough to be Acting Chief Ranger.”
So that was it. Scotty was in pig heaven: both Ralph and Lucas were off duty. “Where is everybody?”
“Right. I forget. Hidden away over there on Amygdaloid, you miss out. Backcountry Management Group meeting. Be out till tomorrow.”
Several times a season Lucas, Ralph, Marilyn-the Chief Naturalist-and Lyle, the head of Roads and Trails, spent three days in the backcountry camping and hashing out wilderness-management issues.
“Ah. Well, I’d better get on with it before we get run down out here,” Anna said.
“Whatever your business is here, finish it up pronto,” Scotty said, enjoying himself. “I need you on the north shore on a day like today.”
“Will do.”
Inside and out of Anna’s head, the fog grew denser. Scotty and the Lorelei faded like specters come sunup. The Belle Isle fired up at a touch and Anna cracked the throttles. In the thick mist there was no sensation of movement. Following the jagged green map on her radar screen, she felt her way into the little harbor at Mott Island and inched up to the dock. The Loon, the Blackduck, and Pizza Dave’s little aluminum runabout were all snugged up to the concrete. No one who didn’t have to would be out on the water today.
Anna tied off her lines and followed the gravel path to the Administration Building, invisible thirty yards away.
“Coffee…” she croaked at the door of the dispatch room and Sandra returned a throaty chuckle.
“Fresh pot,” she said without turning from her keyboard.
“When you die you shall be canonized,” Anna promised. Secure in the knowledge the Chief Ranger was deep in the woods, she took Lucas’s personal coffee cup, a white mug with “Smokey the Bear’s a Communist” emblazoned on it in red. Fresh coffee in a real cup; the day was beginning to look less bleak.
“Not your cup,” Sandra admonished as Anna poured, and she realized she’d given herself away by the tiny clicking sound the neck of the pot made when it touched the rim of the cup.
“I’m using Lucas’s,” she confessed.
“That’s tantamount to sitting in the emperor’s chair,” Sandra warned. She’d finished whatever she’d been working on and turned to face Anna.
“I’ll polish my prints off when I’m finished.” Anna took a drink and sighed with satisfaction.
“Are you working over here today so Scotty won’t be all by his lonesome? Terrible to be all dressed up and nobody to boss.”
“Nope. Already got my marching orders from the Acting Chief: back to Amygdaloid ASAP. Suits me fine. I just came by to dish the dirt.”
By way of repayment for the information Sandra had provided, Anna told her of the Jim and Carrie affair and that it had been stopped. The dispatcher echoed Patience’s reaction with a shocked “Counseled!” But being less cynical than either Carrie’s mother or Anna, Sandra put her faith in Lucas Vega.
“He’ll come up with something,” she said confidently. “His mother owns half of San Diego County. There’s bound to be a few pocket senators or congressmen he can lean on to lean on somebody.”
Over a second cup of coffee Anna asked after Jo. Sandra had seen her several times, had her over to dinner once. “She’s working hard,” the dispatcher said. “Talks about PCBs and fish and slime and percentages of whatever in the whatever. She’s nailed down every minute of every day.”
“Whatever works,” Anna said, but she wondered how Jo fared during the endless minutes of her nights.
Tinker and Damien provided the only good news. Evidently Scotty had ceased his blackmail and they were of good cheer. Sandra said they were haunting McCargo Cove every spare minute in search of the mythical peregrine.
“They won’t find it today,” Anna said.
“Rumor has it it’s foggy.”
Anna drained her coffee cup. “Come on, Delphi,” she said. “Lead me back to Amygdaloid.”
Coming around Blake’s Point, eyes glued to the Loran, Anna was half sorry the water was so flat. Even the slamming of the hull against hard water would have been preferable to the absolute nothing she felt.
Between Blake’s Point and Steamboat Island, Anna executed a turn to the 248-degree heading dictated by experience and charting. Amygdaloid Channel, usually a narrow comforting waterway, took on a different aspect when neither shore was visible. She threaded her way carefully down the center.
The dock at the ranger station was deserted. Having eased the Belle Isle into her space, Anna disembarked.
Indoors, with four cluttered walls and a fire roaring in the woodstove, the fog seemed less malevolent. Anna took a couple of Advil for her head, made a pot of strong tea, and sat down at her desk to catch up on the month’s paperwork. How many diving permits issued, how many fishing licenses sold, how much in revenues to be sent to the Michigan Fish and Game. She wrote up a 10-343 Case Incident Report on two fire rings she’d destroyed and rehabilitated on Green Island and a half-page on the removal of the fishhook from the Minneapolis man’s thigh. There was a short form to be completed on two visitor complaints that the party boat, the Spirogyra, had been making undue noise after quiet hour. For Ralph’s amusement, Anna included one visitor’s statement that the denizens of the Spirogyra were calling down aliens from outer space. She deliberated on whether or not to write up a 10-343 Case Incident Report on the Jim Tattinger situation or a 10-344 Criminal Incident Record. Knowing Lucas would wish to decide along with Patience and the Superintendent whether or not to treat the incident as a criminal act, she contented herself with writing a summary narrative that could be typed on either form later on.
Over a tuna fish sandwich and soggy potato chips, Anna opened the packet of interoffice mail she’d brought back from Mott. There was a memo regarding the Backcountry Management Group meeting dated four days earlier, and an announcement for the coming Chrismoose festivities held on the island every twenty-fifth of July. One memorandum piqued her interest for a moment. Lucas had written up a report on the FBI’s investigation of the Castle murder. No new information, it said, and ended with the vague threat: “Frederick Stanton will continue to head the ongoing investigation.”
Tea, food, and routine paperwork had a normalizing effect. Anna’s brain no longer felt so fog-choked. Relief at this modest clarity was soon paid for with the nagging sense of something forgotten. Pushing away the papers that cluttered her desktop, she put her feet up and teetered back in her chair, her fingers intertwined and cradling her head. It had always been her private contention that this was the pose Rodin should have chosen for The Thinker.
Staring into the blankness beyond the window, Anna let her mind wander back over the day. The sense of uneasiness stemmed from her early-morning conversation with her sister.
Molly was her arbiter of sanity, her rock, anchor, and reality check. Without a doubt, Anna knew she owed Molly her life. There were days after Zachary had died when only the knowledge that her death would make her sister angry beyond recovery had kept Anna from taking her wine-wrung grief out on the Henry Hudson Parkway at eighty miles an hour.
Molly didn’t hold with suicide. “You’ve got to stay in the game. Your luck’s bound to change. Be a shame to miss it,” she liked to say.
And this morning, when her sister was in trouble, all Anna had found to say was: “Gee, gosh, I’m real sorry…”
Somewhere in the conversation there must have been a word or a phrase that should have meant more to Anna than it did. Molly based her practice on the belief that if you listened hard
enough and long enough even the most troubled person could tell you how to help them.
The sense of something missed might have been the squandered chance to repay even a fraction of the debt she owed her sister. Anna rocked her chair down. Next time she would listen harder, longer.
Beyond the window dusk was robbing the world of light. Two of Knucklehead’s kits had come to play near the clearing. Their red-orange fur provided the only color on the scene. The smaller of the two stood up on his hind legs and danced, trying to reach a fat bunch of thimbleberries. The pose was so like that of the fox trying for the “sour” grapes in Aesop’s Fables that Anna laughed.
Her laughter came to an abrupt stop. Grapes. All at once she knew what it was that she’d missed in Molly’s conversation, what had plagued her all afternoon. It had nothing to do with her sister’s peace of mind. It was the dead gourmet’s braces, his yellow suspenders worn to mock his rival. Canary-yellow suspenders tying up a bunch of purple-black grapes. That was what had seemed so familiar about the wine label she’d seen in Patience’s apartment. Anna recalled the bottle. Moonlight shining through the window; an outline of black grapes, lines, robbed of color, traced over it, ending in the familiar Y of old-fashioned men’s suspenders.
Pacing the cluttered office, Anna pushed her mind back to the story Molly had told her of the winetasting in Westchester, of the rivalry between the two connoisseurs. A rare California wine had been spirited out of the Napa Valley during Prohibition, a shipment that had vanished on its way out of the country. A wine so rare it had become almost mythical. So rare it retailed for thousands of dollars a bottle. So rare Molly’s client had been willing to risk-and lose- his life rather than admit a rival had actually found the lost shipment.
But the shipment must have been found, tracked down by a woman who worked in a California winery, who lived and breathed wine, who wanted money more than just about anything. Patience had tracked the missing vintage to the Kamloops. It wasn’t on the bill of lading because it was contraband being smuggled into Canada among the personal effects of the captain.