A Superior Death (11 page)

Lucas Vega thought of Denny’s wife at that same moment. He and Ralph were back in dry clothes sitting on the engine box drinking hot coffee from a thermos while Anna and Jim stowed gear and reeled in line. “Anna,” Vega said, “I’d like you to come with me to Davidson and give the news to Jo. I’d like a female officer to be present.”

Anna nodded. She never felt particularly comfortable when called on to be a female officer. Some arcane, instinctual talents were expected and she’d never figured out exactly what they were. “What then?” she asked.

Lucas wiped a fine-boned brown hand over his face, dragging down the flesh of his cheeks. “I’ll call the Feds. This clearly is no accident. The man didn’t bump his head diving off the high board and drown. He’s a couple of hundred feet down floating around in a Halloween costume.

“Then I guess we go get him. It’s a hell of a crime scene to investigate. The standard techniques aren’t going to help much. I doubt there’s an FBI man in a thousand miles who could even get to the scene, much less function after he did. We’re stuck with this one. At least for a while.”

Anna wondered if Lucas expected her to make the dive for the body recovery. A dormant claustrophobia began to awaken within her, a cold hard spot just under her breastbone. It was the park’s policy that a ranger was never to tackle a task she or he felt unsafe performing for any reason. She would not be forced to go.

“Do you feel you’re ready for a dive that technical?” Lucas asked.

“Sure.”

He clapped her on the shoulder and went into the cabin. Ralph Pilcher, still seated on the engine box, drank his coffee as the Bertram powered up. Anna felt him watching her. She coiled the last of the line and stowed it in its niche in the hull by his knees. Ralph had a crooked smile— rather, his smile was straight but a twice broken nose unbalanced his face till it seemed crooked. His hair, wild from the rubber hood, stood out from his head in a brown tangle. “The lake scare you?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“Good. It should. It’s one scary place.”

Anna stopped what she was doing to look at him. Fit, compact, in his early thirties, he didn’t look afraid of anything. Except perhaps, if the gossip had any truth to it, being tied down to his new baby and his pretty new wife. “Does the lake scare you?” she returned.

“No. But then it didn’t scare Denny either.” He threw the last of his coffee over the side of the boat. “Why didn’t you tell Lucas you were scared to dive? He’d never razz you about it. He’d give you something else to do, something you’re comfortable with.”

“The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” Anna replied. “Time I made his acquaintance.”

Pilcher nodded. “We’ll give you all the help you need. Don’t get pigheaded.” He stood up, his feet firm and easy on the moving deck. “And stay a little scared. You’ll live longer.”

The District Ranger went inside. Anna didn’t want to think anymore of the dive. I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it, she told herself. She lashed the tanks down so they wouldn’t roll, then settled her shoulders against the cabin where she was out of the wind.

The drizzle had stopped and the sun was piercing through a rent in the clouds above the island, pouring gold down onto the treetops until they glowed a rich green against their shadowed fellows. Sparks of sunshine reached the water. Where they touched, the lake turned emerald and azure. Light, life, color: Anna breathed deeply and knew the breath for a miracle, a celebration, an act of devotion.

Sandra Fox’s comfortable voice came into her mind, telling her again of a high school girl’s relentless love of a boy. How it molded her career, shaped her life even into her early thirties. A week and a half ago Jo had married her high school boy. Now that boy was dead.

At the moment, in Jo’s mind, Denny still lived.

The instant Anna’s husband died, each minute that he had lived became a memory. The good were golden, the bad like an acid that burned in the mind. She hoped Jo’s thoughts these last precious minutes were not the kind that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

 

 

 

B
y the time they reached Davidson Island the sky was clear and the sun shone down as if it always had. Pilcher and Tattinger had been left at Mott. Anna piloted the
Lorelei
up to the small wooden dock. A gray jay scolded from the branches of an aspen tree and a mallard swam in and out of the pilings with her downy brood scuttling along in her wake. Anna sidled up to the pier as gently as she could so she wouldn’t overset the ducklings.

Lucas made the lines fast to the dock cleats and stood in the sun waiting. Both he and Anna did each small unimportant task with a time-consuming precision designed to postpone the inevitable.

As they walked up the wooded path toward the cabin, three bunnies, new-made and too young to be afraid, hopped out of their way. White baneberry blossoms leaned close and the woods were carpeted ankle-deep in blue-beard lilies. A world where rain fell: the abundance of life stunned Anna. This afternoon there was something both reassuring and mocking in such wealth.

The door of the cabin was open. From within came the sound of a woman’s tuneless humming. Across the honey-colored wooden floors, Anna could see Jo Castle bent over the counter labeling corked test tubes and storing them upright in a wooden rack. The long hair curved out around the oversized, glasses frames, then fell till it was forced out again by her wide hips.

Jo saw them before they had a chance to knock. And she knew there was bad news before they had a chance to speak.

“What?” she demanded, looking from one to the other.

Then more sharply: “What?”

Lucas took an audible breath. In the short eternity while he was collecting his thoughts, forming his sentences, Anna could see the strain rip through the muscles of Jo Castle’s face, turning each to stone as it passed.

“It’s god-awful, Jo,” Anna said. “Denny’s been killed.” And Anna started to cry. Jo Castle left the test tube she’d been labeling on the counter, its contents slowly seeping out, and walked straight into Anna’s arms as if she had always found solace there.

Sandra Fox and Trixy came over at ten-thirty after Trixy’s evening program. Sandra had a casserole that smelled enticingly of onion and garlic and cheese. Women could sit with grief, hold its hands, watch it pour from the eyes of friends and children, lie down beside it and help it to rest. Their delicate strength would weave a net strong as spun steel, keep the widow Castle from hitting bottom.

Anna slipped out the kitchen door. She would stay the night in Rock Harbor and check on Jo in the morning before she bummed a ride back to Amygdaloid. For a time Jo would need her. Not because she was a friend, but because Anna, too, had lost her husband. Sandra had only lost her eyes, Trixy her parents. In the arrogance of grief, Jo would not believe that they could understand.

Evidently Lucas had radioed for a lift back to Mott. He had left the
Lorelei
so Anna could get back to Rock, and she blessed him for being a true gentleman.

 

 

“
T
ell me a story,” Anna said into the mouthpiece. “I’ve had a real bad day.”

“What kind of a story?” Molly asked. “One where all the bad guys die?”

“One where nobody dies and the girl gets Robert Red-ford.”

“Is this a New York story, or do they live happily ever after?”

Anna laughed. “Does anybody?”

“If they do they never pay me a hundred and fifty bucks an hour to hear about it. What’s wrong, Anna?”

“Zach’s still dead.”

“Zach and Franco.”

“Better make it a story with no plot and great costumes,” Anna said. “Tell me about your Westchester wine soiree.”

“That turned out to be a hoot. At eight hundred and twenty bucks a pop, I wasn’t allowed to sip the elixir of the gods, of course. Us peons had to settle for some French stuff. But the Palates sipped and swirled and sniffed. Three of them said it was the True Vintage—not unlike, I gathered from their tone, a splinter from the True Cross—and the other two swore it was a hoax. My client was in the hoax contingent, as you might imagine. Nothing makes a bona fide Seeker more neurotic than having one of his fellows stumble across the holy grail before he does.

“How’s that for a story: mystery, romance, tuxedos.

And Zach’s still dead. What’s up, Anna?”

“A diver who worked here was killed on one of the wrecks. I just got done telling his wife.”

There was sympathetic silence from New York. In the background Anna could hear police sirens.

“You know the saddest part?” Anna said. “She hasn’t got a sister to tell her stories.”

 

 

 

 

A
fter she got off the phone with Molly, Anna sat awhile in the dark. Some enterprising person had disabled the light beside the waiting bench, so the mosquitoes at least had to find their suppers the old-fashioned way.

Nights in the desert had never seemed dark to Anna. Here, under the canopy of trees, the darkness was absolute. At first she had hated it. Over the weeks she had come to know it, to hear its many soft voices. This night it soothed her. It was a night one could immerse oneself in: still seeing, still hearing, still a part of, but unseen. Wrapped in summer darkness, Anna felt safe and alone but not lonely. Shut away from the sometimes forbidding beauty of the heavens, the scent of pine and loam and budding leaves all around her, she felt firmly a part of the earth, and it was a comfort.

Footsteps, muted voices intruded and she stood up, melted into the trees off the path. Two people, walking without a light, came up the trail from the marina. They sat on the bench Anna had vacated. She could hear the whisper of fabric sweeping over the wooden seat. “You go first.”

Anna recognized Damien’s voice. The whisper was probably his cape. A light flickered as the door to the telephone booth was opened, and for a second Tinker was lit like an actor on a stage. Then all was dark again.

Anna slipped quietly away. She didn’t want to talk with Tinker and Damien tonight. This was not their kind of death. This one had a corpse and a widow.

 

 

 

 

P
atience Bittner found Anna on the deck halfway down her third burgundy. The night sky was pricked full of light, but the velvet darkness on the island remained inviolate. Muffled in a dark sweater and black beret, Anna was part of a living shadow beneath the thimbleberry bushes that overhung the deck.

Patience swept out through the double doors like a woman pursued. At the railing she stopped, her hands resting on the wood, her head drooping forward. Anna could see the movement of the pale shining hair. Patience wore white trousers and a light-colored shirt of shimmery material. Not a good outfit for hiding, Anna thought, and decided she had better make her presence known before the woman stumbled across her and scared herself to death.

“Don’t be afraid,” Anna whispered.

Patience screamed. A short stab of sound.

“Sorry,” Anna apologized. “I guess coming out of the dark those are three pretty terrifying words. It’s me, Anna Pigeon.”

“Oh Lord . . .”

Anna could hear Patience taking deep breaths, lowering her pulse rate.

“Do you always creep about like that?” the woman demanded.

Anna took umbrage. She’d felt it was good of her to have given up a moment of her privacy to save Patience a coronary. The alcohol had made her quite benevolent. “I’m not creeping. I’m sitting and drinking. Not at all the same thing. Creeping suggests the active. I am the personification of the passive. Letting the night soak in.”

Patience had recovered herself; her irritation at being startled had passed. Using her hands like a woman still night-blind, she shuffled over from the railing and sat down on the deck near Anna. “You work on the other side of the island, don’t you?”

“Amygdaloid.”

“Not your days off. I remember.”

“No,” Anna said. “I was with the group that found Denny. I came back with Lucas to break the news to Jo.”

“Found? My God. Tell me!” Anna felt strong fingers grabbing at her, strong arms shaking her. Patience’s panic was thick in the air between them and all at once Anna was unpleasantly sober. She caught Patience’s hands and held them with difficulty. It had not occurred to her that Patience would not have heard. The news would have shot through the park community within half an hour of Jim and Ralph’s setting foot on Mott. But Patience was a concessionaire, the lodge manager. She was not on the grapevine. At least not the evening edition.

“Shh. Shh. It’s okay. You’re okay,” Anna said, wondering what Denny had been to Patience. “Denny’s had an accident. We found his body today. I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”

“My God,” Patience said again and she moaned, a ghostly creaking in the night. “Where was he?”

“Inside the
Kamloops.
”

Patience twitched. Anna felt it like an electric shock running through her arms and hands. Patience took a breath, a shushing sound. Anna wished she could see her face but the darkness in the shadow of the thimbleberry was absolute. Patience’s hands stopped quivering. She returned Anna’s hold with a firm pressure, then tried to withdraw. There was a sense of gathering, of control; a powerful woman remembering who she was.

“Denny was very kind to Carrie—and me—when we first got here. We were such city slickers. Afraid of wolves and the Windigo; hadn’t sense enough to come in out of the rain. Denny took us under his wing. That’s not going to be forgotten.”

Eulogy was the first step toward recovery. Patience Bittner would be all right. Anna loosed her hands.

“Do you have a place to sleep?” Patience asked.

“I’ll sleep on the
Lorelei.
”

“Ralph’s a sweetheart, but his housekeeping leaves something to be desired. Stay with Carrie and me.” Anna hesitated. “Please,” Patience urged. “I’d like to have someone to talk to.”