by Nevada Barr
Denny had suspected some depredation. Had followed. Arrogance would have robbed him of the good sense to be frightened of one small woman immersed in his world. So Patience had killed him somehow-drowned him.
One hip on her desk, Anna lost herself in thoughts of the cynical blond woman she was becoming friends with. The courage, the brains, the daring-all the things that made Patience a fascinating companion-must have served her well in her criminal activities. Even a brilliant divorce wouldn’t keep her in silk dresses indefinitely and Patience was a greedy woman. Greed had usurped the higher emotions. Greed had become the driving force. Greed had made theft easy and murder possible.
“One-two-one, three-oh-two,” Anna snapped into her base radio. Three times brought no response. The glacier-broken interior of the island was riddled with places where radios couldn’t reach in or out. Evidently Ralph and Lucas had pitched camp in one of them.
“Damn,” Anna whispered. Mike in hand, she debated the wisdom of broaching the subject over the airwaves with Scotty. Patience was clever, quick. If Scotty botched it, fog or no, she would be gone before anyone had a chance to stop her. And Scotty would botch it. Anna had seen the label, she had heard the story, but as yet there was no real evidence. Scotty wouldn’t have the forbearance to wait and watch without hinting or pseudo heroics. By the time Lucas and Ralph were out of the backcountry, Patience would be long gone.
The situation would keep better without interference, Anna decided. Tomorrow she would go to Rock Harbor. Lucas would be back. They would talk.
She put down the mike, stared out into the fog. The kits were gone.
“How the hell did she get into the captain’s cabin to bring the stuff up?” she demanded of the world at large.
TWENTY SIX
Before the coming night robbed the fog of the last light, Anna had to make her evening patrol. A moment passed in evil thoughts: a glass of red wine by the stove instead of a blind boat tour, who would know? Tonight, there would be little in the way of visitor contact.
But anyone out could be in trouble if they didn’t know the waters. Anna sighed and shrugged into her Gore-Tex.
The channel was empty. Two boats were snugged in Herring Bay near Belle Isle, a dozen more anchored in the secure waters of McCargo Cove. Anna turned a blinded windscreen back toward home and crept through a mist turning from white to gray with the setting of the sun. As she reached Twelve O’Clock Point, seven miles from Amygdaloid Island, she began to debate whether to pour her wine or divest herself of her uniform first upon reaching home.
These heavy deliberations were interrupted by the sudden coming to life of the Belle Isle’s marine radio.
Three or four crackling pops warned that someone was fiddling with their mike button, then a hesitant, childish voice: “Hello? Hello? SOS. Please. SOS.”
Anna snatched up the mike and waited for the caller to stop keying her radio. Finally the click came. She forced down her transmitter button. “I hear you,” she said clearly. “My name’s Anna. When I stop talking you push down the button on the microphone again, tell me where you are, then let the button up, okay? I’m stopping talking now.”
There was a silence that seemed long because Anna held her breath but it was no more than fifteen or twenty seconds. A few fumbling clicks, then the child’s voice again. “I’m out by the Kamloops,” she said. “My mom’s in trouble. I think she’s dead. Please come.”
“Carrie Ann? Is that you?” Anna demanded.
There was a confusion of clicks as the girl tried to talk at the same time Anna was transmitting. “Carrie Ann?” Anna tried again. This time she got through.
“Yeah?”
“Are you at the Kamloops‘ dive buoy or Kamloops Island?”
“The buoy.”
“And your mom’s in trouble. What kind of trouble?” As she talked Anna changed course. She was less than two minutes from the wreck site. Carrie didn’t respond. Anna tried again but the girl held her silence.
“Two-oh-two, three-oh-two, did you copy that?” Anna put in a radio call to Rock Harbor. Scotty was her only option for backup. Even if she could raise them on her radio, Ralph and Lucas were too deep in the woods to be of any help.
“Ah… negative.”
Anna repeated the gist of the conversation with Carrie. “I’m headed over to the Kamloops now. I’ll keep you posted.” Again Anna tried Ralph Pilcher. There was no response. Scotty was monitoring. He promised to try Ralph from the east side.
Four hours into the wilderness and dark coming on, there was little Ralph or Lucas could do, but it was policy to keep them informed. And, Anna admitted to herself, a comfort to be in radio contact with them when there was an emergency. This situation was double-edged: Patience might genuinely be in trouble, or she might be setting a trap.
Innocent until proven guilty, Anna reminded herself. She didn’t dare ignore a distress call, the lake was too dangerous a place. And she could think of no reason Patience should risk a confrontation; no reason she would think Anna had figured out the deadly business she had undertaken. Anna picked up her radio mike again and called Rock Harbor. “Scotty, there may be more to this. I’ve stumbled across some complications,” she said, being purposely vague since there was no way to keep the conversation private on the airwaves. “If you could start around, I may need the backup.”
There was a silence, then two clicks as if he was fingering his mike uncertainly. “ASAP,” he said after a moment. “Having some engine trouble on the Lorelei.”
“Fuck you,” Anna hissed but not into the mike. Scotty was lying. He couldn’t navigate in the fog and he was trying to cover himself. “Did you get ahold of Ralph or Lucas?”
“Negative.”
Loran took Anna to the buoy. Radar kept her from ramming the Venture. None of the Chris-Craft’s lights were on and she was all but invisible in the fog. Anna rafted the Belle Isle off her starboard side. Taking the precaution of removing her Smith and Wesson from the briefcase and putting it in her raincoat pocket, Anna climbed over the gunwale. “Carrie! Carrie Ann!”
The cabin door opened slowly. A kid’s sleeping bag wrapped around her against the chill, Carrie Ann Bittner shuffled out.
“What’s happened?” Anna asked. “Where’s your mother?”
“She went diving,” Carrie replied in the sulky tone Anna was accustomed to. “She dived down a while ago. She must be hurt or caught on something.”
Anna couldn’t see the child’s face clearly and could read nothing from her voice. Without explaining why, she moved past her and checked the cabin. It was empty.
Why would Patience come out in the fog, dragging her daughter with her? The question jogged Anna’s memory and she remembered the click on the line when she was on the phone with Molly-the click Molly had thought was another call but had turned out not to be. Patience could have picked up the phone in Carrie’s room, heard of the death of the gourmet clad in yellow suspenders, and known Anna would put it all together sooner or later.
If Patience did know, it made sense she would rush the last dive, try and get the remainder of the wine out before she was stopped. Carrie must have been brought along in the capacity of prisoner. Left alone, she would undoubtedly have found her way to Mr. Tattinger’s for solace.
“How long has your mom been down?” Anna asked.
“I said,” Carrie grumbled, “awhile. Maybe half an hour.”
At first Anna thought Carrie was unaware that half an hour at depth could be her mother’s death warrant but the girl had said on the radio, “I think she’s dead.”
“Why is she diving here?” Anna asked.
Carrie shrugged. “How would I know?” She sounded more aggrieved than concerned. “Anyway, she’s down there.”
Anna radioed Scotty of her intentions. “I’m going to do a bounce dive,” she said and thanked the gods that her voice did not betray the fear that was spreading through her veins like poison.
“Ten-four,” Scotty replied. “I’ll sta
y on this damn engine. Hell of a time to have your horse go lame.”
Anna repeated her earlier obscenities. Focusing on anger to keep the terror at bay, she struggled into dry suit, fins, weights, and tanks. “Turn on every light on the Venture,” she ordered Carrie, who’d stood bundled and silent watching the process.
Before she entered the lake, Anna raked the surface carefully with her handheld lamp looking for bubbles, disturbance, anything that smacked of ambush and watery graves. Fog impeded her investigation.
Finally, there was nothing left but to dive. The water was black and looked for all the world like death. Concentrating only on breathing, she clutched her light and rolled backward off the Belle Isle’s stern.
Cold cracked in her sinuses with such force it felt as if her eyes were being gouged out from inside her skull. For several seconds pain left her breathless and disoriented. The universe shrank to the single paralyzing sensation of utter, damning cold.
Forcing her ribs to expand, accepting the icy stabs and letting them pass through her, she righted herself and located the line Patience had dropped. With “follow the yellow brick road” singing irritatingly through her mind, Anna pursued the lemon-colored line down into increasing darkness. Ten seconds, fifteen, two white depth markers flashed by on the line. Anna kept her eyes on her watch and counted. The bright line weaving gently in the probe of light, black pressing close, the world was no bigger than her gauges.
Atmospheres crushed in and terrifying giddiness tried to spin her mind away from counting. An ache started at the base of her skull. Stringing her thoughts together cohesively became increasingly difficult. Fear that had been murmuring at her aboard the Belle Isle shrieked through all the organs of her body. Sixty-three seconds had elapsed since she had left the lake’s surface.
The snaking of the line through liquid space began having a hypnotic effect and Anna found herself forgetting the dangers not only of the icy depths but of the woman she swam to save. Somehow, she must fix her mind on Patience as an enemy, a killer of persons. Denny had not, and Denny’s mind worked better at six atmospheres than hers ever would.
Two minutes, fifty-six seconds: the bottom blocked the beam of her light. She stopped, stood with one hand on the yellow line for security and switched off her lamp. In her years with the Park Service, she’d worked on a dozen or more searches and rescues. Habit demanded she blow a whistle, shout a name. All she had in the malevolent shadow world was light or lack of it. Cloaked in darkness, Anna searched the lake bottom.
A flash, another, then burning steady: Patience was on the south side of the wreck. Without relighting her own lamp Anna swam toward the light.
As she closed the distance down the side of the ship, she could see that Patience’s lamp had been set on the hull. In the wedge-shaped beam it threw, Patience-or at least a heavily suited person she assumed was Patience Bittner- was kneeling, slipping efficiently into dive tanks. The tanks were unlike any Anna had ever used. They fit singly, one to each side of the dive harness. Beside Patience was a net bag filled with dark objects.
For a moment Anna’s nitrogen-befuddled brain refused to grasp the situation. Then, with a suddenness that made her feel a fool, it fell into place. The porthole into the captain’s cabin was too small to get through in tanks. Patience, hardly bigger than a child even in the bulky dry suit, used side-mounted tanks, each with its own regulator, and clipped on for easy removal. They were the kind worn by cave divers who needed to squeeze through small spaces. She could take them off, feed them through one at a time, then follow them.
Anna’s flippered foot trailed against the hull, making a faint metallic sound as the buckle scraped the ship’s skin. Patience’s head jerked and Anna stopped her glide, waited, realized she had stopped breathing, began again.
Bittner’s flicker of interest was only momentary. With the mask and the darkness it was impossible to tell, but Anna didn’t think Patience realized she was no longer alone.
Dive tanks in place, Patience grasped the neck of the sack and began swimming up the hull. Her light was trained toward the tilting deck. She was obviously in no need of rescue, nor did she look as if she was expecting company. Clearly she had not been down half an hour. Like Anna, she would have chosen bounce dives. Dangerous but doable for the kind of money she would get for the wine in the net bag. Bottom time would have dictated more than one dive; one load at a time. Carrie had never been worried for her mother, she had informed on her, getting revenge for the loss of her first lover.
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth, Anna thought.
With time so short, Anna assumed Patience would head immediately back to the surface with her prize, but she swam for the deck.
Safe in her shroud of darkness, Anna followed, grateful for once for the depths. Stalking in absolute silence was not difficult.
Without pausing even an instant at the lightless portal, Patience swam into the engine room.
Anna glided up to the right of the door, shielded from view from within, and waited. One minute passed, then two. From far back in the tangle of equipment and narrow passages, she could see a flicker of light on the bulkhead.
There could be little of value in the engine room, nothing worth the precious time Patience was spending. Anna wondered what she needed to do with a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of wine and five sixty-four-year-old corpses. She looked at her watch: in minutes her bottom line time would be used up. Any longer and she would be into twenty to forty minutes’ decompression time.
Switching on her light, she followed Patience into the interior of the Kamloops.
Claustrophobia met her just inside the portal. The engine room was low-ceilinged and the passages were narrow. Bulkheads showed gray in the beam of her light. To the right the passage opened into a space filled with machinery separated by walkways just wide enough to accommodate a man. Ahead, the corridor branched into several narrower passages fanning out amid the once working organs of the dead ship.
In the clear, still waters at one hundred and ninety-five feet, the wrecks were amazingly clean, as if they’d settled just weeks before. Still, over everything was a softening shroud of silt so fine it scarcely dulled the outlines of the machinery. Each flick of her feet stirred up eddies in the fine-grained mud and Anna swam with great delicacy.
Keeping her light trained on the floor so it wouldn’t alert Patience to her presence, Anna trailed down the passage. Knowing somewhere five corpses kept vigil, she had a sense of being watched, a prickling feeling down her back that at any second a half-fleshed hand would clutch at her.
The circle of light that Patience’s lamp produced continued to flicker on the bulkhead at the end of the passage. Tricky, unnatural, the light flitted here and there, always on bulkhead or machinery, always in sight, as if Patience shined it constantly behind her looking for pursuers. Like a will-o‘-the-wisp, it vanished as Anna reached the corner. Like a will-o’-the-wisp it led her down another, smaller walkway.
Like a will-o‘-the-wisp, Anna thought and suddenly knew, like other unwary travelers, she was intentionally being led astray. Patience must have seen her light as she descended from the Belle Isle, and had lured her into the ship.
Anna stopped. The feeling of clutching hands grew till she could feel her heart pounding in her ears and wondered if the sound carried through water. Slowly, warily, keeping an eye on the light beckoning her still deeper into the wreck, she swam back the way she had come. Corpses no longer seemed of any consequence. Compared to the living, they were benevolent.
Something was wrong with Patience’s lamp.
The light, once a clear stabbing white, began to fade, then diffuse in a strange fog. Silt. Patience was silting out the engine room. An impenetrable fog was boiling down the corridor. Panic rising, Anna fled.
Patience had circled round, found her way through the twisting passageways until she was between Anna and the door. The brownish-gray wall swept down, blotting out everything. In seconds, Anna’s light was rende
red useless. The water was thick with silt. Bulkhead, deck, engine parts half a foot away, were hidden behind liquid mud.
The world dwindled, closed in. Lake and ship and now the very space she moved through crushed down. There was no way out, no choices left to make. A scream built in Anna’s chest, pressing hard against her sternum until the pain brought tears to her eyes. Fear flushed through her bowels and she was weak with it. Air gulped through her mouthpiece burned her throat with icy slush and her head spun. The need to run like a wild thing blindsided her and Anna kicked hard, swam madly through the opaque waters.
A racking pain took her in the left shoulder. Kicking free, she hit her knees on an unyielding surface. Wildly, she scrabbled her hands over it. The deck. She had swum hard into the floor of the passage. Equilibrium was gone, sight was gone, hearing, everything. Nothing was left to tell her if she swam deeper into the ship, up toward the ceiling, or sideways into the maze of machine parts that cut the engine room into winding passages. With blunt, gloved fingers, Anna clawed at the metal of the decking, or was it the bulkhead? The ceiling?
The insanity of the act caught her mind, held it still long enough so she could think. Forcing herself to stillness, she retreated back to basics, to Ralph’s remembered instructions: Breathe. Concentrating on the mechanics of her diaphragm drawing down, her rib cage lifting and expanding, air pulling through the rubber hose filling the vacuum, Anna breathed in, breathed out. Her lips had lost feeling, her mouth felt like a snow cone. In. Out. Rational thought, not opposable thumbs, is what makes us more dangerous than the apes, she thought.
Rational thought. First she must discover, microscopically, where she was in the ship. She stopped even the gentle movement of her flippered feet and waited, feeling time, the essence she had less of than air, slipping away. Slowly, in her stillness, the weight she wore to counteract her buoyancy sought its natural state and she began to settle. Her knees, then her hands struck the deck.