A Superior Death (24 page)

“Vasectomy,” Hawk said as if he’d read her mind. He pulled her closer, kissed her hair. “Sleep, Anna.”

She slept without dreaming till sometime after moon-rise. The silvery beam, powerful as a spotlight at the forty-eighth parallel, pouring down through the hatch woke her. Finally the harbor was utterly still. Hawk had rolled away from her on the triangular-shaped sleeping platform and lay curled up as neat and independent as a cat. Anna slipped from under the sleeping bag that covered them both.

She needed to escape the narrow confines of the hull, to get out where she could breathe. I have grown addicted to solitude, she thought as she dragged on Levi’s and a sweatshirt, too many nights alone. Something fell from the pouch pocket of the shirt and rattled to the floor. She scooped it up along with her socks. Not looking at Hawk lest the pressure of her gaze awaken him, she crept to the stern.

The scrubbed deck caught the moonlight, held it like milk in a glass. Anna’s shadow was black, its edges clearly delineated. She looked across the water to the piers lined with fishing boats. Every crack in the concrete was ink-black, every bolt visible. The boats, though colorless, kept no secrets from the night. The moon picked out their names:
Marie III, Gladdest Night, Fisherman’s Home, I.O.U., The Office.
The only one with lights still burning was the
Spirogyra.

Anna sat down on the engine cover to pull on her socks. What had fallen from her pocket was still balled inside them. It was Tattinger’s diving knife, the one he’d handed her when he’d taken the photographs of the porthole in the
Kamloops
’ captain’s cabin. Anna had brought it to Rock to return it.

As she turned it over she felt letters scratched into the plastic handle. Dive knives were all pretty similar. It wasn’t unusual for divers to mark their equipment. Anna ran her thumb over the initials. The letters were not J.T., not R.M. for Resource Management. Not S.C.R. for Submerged Cultural Resources. Tilting the knife in the moonlight, she read the marking: “d’A.” Some computer code, she thought, and, Tattinger is such a dink.

She didn’t realize she’d whispered the last half of the thought until Hawk said: “Casting spells by the light of the moon?”

He stood in the doorway, his dark hair falling over his forehead. The silvery light blessed him as the setting sun had done on Amygdaloid. Instead of bronze, his body shone like living granite.

“You’re a beautiful man,” Anna said.

He looked shy. “What’ve you got there?”

“Nothing. Jim’s dive knife. He gave it to me on the
Kamloops
dive and I forgot to give it back.” Because she could think of nothing else to do, she handed the clasp knife to Hawk.

He turned it in his well-made hands. “It’s a dive knife all right.” He sat down beside her, nude, perfect. “Would you take it wrong if I didn’t spend the night?”

“No,” Anna said and meant it. “We don’t know each other that well.”

He sat a moment longer. Finally he said: “You’re wearing my pants.”

Clad only in a long sweatshirt, Anna stayed on deck while he dressed, then watched him as he walked down the dock, leaving as he had come: noiselessly, privately, in the wee hours like a young girl’s fantasy. There would be no morning stares, no sly remarks, no gossip. He was a good man. Watching him go, Anna wished he were someone she loved.

 

 

 

Waking alone, the sensible light of day a square of gold overhead, Anna took a moment to decide whether Hawk Bradshaw’s night visit had really occurred. When she decided it had, she was unsure how she felt about it. She chose not to worry. She’d ask Christina how she should feel, and if that failed, she’d bring out the big guns: She’d ask Molly.

Physically she felt terrific; relaxed and energized. She pulled on trousers—her own this time—and a red tee-shirt with “Frijole Fire” silkscreened across the front and a line drawing of El Capitan in West Texas. Her hair, incarcerated in two braids, reminiscent of a hundred drawings of Minnehaha, was in need of a shampoo. Anna fired up the
Belle
’s twin engines and motored slowly over to Mott.

Docking, she saw the
Loon,
the boat Jim Tattinger used, and was reminded of her last Rock Harbor chore: returning his knife.

Having secured the Bertram, she climbed back aboard. The knife was gone. In the finite space of cabin and bow, she knew she was not mistaken. The knife was gone. Hawk had taken it.

Anna sat down on the bench in the bow and stared at the small space of linoleum between her feet, the place where the knife had fallen from her pocket the night before. The last she’d seen it, Hawk had it in his hand.

Had he pocketed it by accident? Force of habit? Doubtful, Anna thought. By the time she’d divested herself of his Levi’s and he’d put them on, he would have had to put the knife down somewhere. His taking it had been deliberate. Was his leaving so abruptly merely a way to steal an eleven- or twelve-dollar knife, a knife no different from half a dozen or so he and Holly must own between them? A kleptomaniac? Unlikely—a rash of petty thefts in such a closed society wouldn’t go unnoticed and anything noticed would never go unremarked upon. Hawk disliked Jim. Could the theft have been spite?

“No!” Anna stood abruptly, knocking her head on the low ceiling. All the disparate facts had tumbled into line with this sudden thought: It wasn’t Jim’s knife.

Time had come for a trip to the mainland. Talk with Christina and the lesbian community in Houghton. Pay a visit to Mother Castle in Duluth.

CHAPTER 16

“
T
he ‘d.A’: d’Artagnan.”

“Dartanyon?” Christina shook her head.

“The Three Musketeers,” Anna explained. “Porthos, whoever, and d’Artagnan.”

“Yes!” Christina remembered. “Okay. D’Artagnan . . . ?”

“Hawk, Holly, and Denny. One night, just before he got married, Holly called Denny ‘d’Artagnan.’ ”

“So, d’A—the knife was Denny Castle’s?”

“Yes,” Anna said, excited. “Jim found it down there, found it under the porthole. I just thought it was his.”

Christina looked at Anna expectantly. “And?”

“There was a straplike bruise on Denny’s body. A mark left, I’m willing to bet, by his diving harness. It was in the right place. When I first dove, I got panicky and buckled my stuff on way too tight. After an hour or so I had red marks like that on my shoulders.”

“Like girdle marks.”

“Exactly.”

“Denny dove a lot. Wouldn’t he know how to adjust his harness thing?”

“Maybe the tanks or the hoses were pulled around, dragged off him.”

“Then he was killed on the
Kamloops
? Down under all that water?”

“I think so. I think he was in full dive gear. I think he fought, somehow his tanks were jerked or something, and he dropped his knife. I think he was killed down there.”

“You said he wasn’t wearing dive gear,” Christina said, confused.

“No. When we found him, he wasn’t. He was dressed in this ship captain’s clothes, but when we were ascending bloody bubbles frothed out of his mouth from his lungs. That only happens if the body recovered was breathing compressed air. And I saw his diving gear—tank, fins, the whole nine yards—on the deck of the
Third Sister.
”

“Goodness,” Chris expelled a long breath. “Oh my goodness. This calls for serious sugar.”

As the two women picked at a shared slice of the cheesecake Christina kept in the freezer for such emergencies, Chris told her news. “Holly Bradshaw is not gay,” she said. “But whatever else Holly may be—Democrat, Sierra Club member, murderess—I can’t say. Maybe you’d better ask Hawk what was so funny about the idea of her and Denny—maybe Denny was gay. Maybe they were triplets separated at birth. But she’s not a lesbian. We’d know.”

Anna nodded. They would know. Chris would know.

“She could be asexual,” Chris suggested hopefully.

Anna shook her head. “There’s vibes, signals, pheromones. If not homo, then hetero, but definitely sexual. It is a motive—the only good one I’ve come up with. The ‘hell hath no fury’ stuff comes up true every now and then.”

“Mmm.” Christina scraped the last of the cheesecake up with the side of her fork and smeared it sensuously on her tongue. “So. She and Denny. Then Denny and Jo. Then Denny and the Lady of the Lake?”

“Maybe,” Anna agreed. “Maybe.”

A
nna enjoyed the long drive to Duluth. After two months without so much as seeing an automobile, it was a novelty. She fiddled with the tape deck, sang to herself, and reveled in the true and glorious privacy that could only be had when one was free of tourists and two-way radios. She couldn’t imagine putting a telephone in her car. Or in her bathroom. Some places must remain sacrosanct.

Superior, Duluth’s sister city, located to the east just over the canal, dampened Anna’s spirits somewhat. When the life had gone out of northwest Minnesota’s iron country, the blood of commerce had ceased to flow through this industrial shipping town. Row houses, poor imitations of eastern brownstones, crumbled along streets in need of repair. Men of working age loitered in groups around the entrances to mini-marts. Rusting skeletons whose forms suggested the lifting and moving of great loads scratched the skyline.

Anna fished a scrap of paper out of her pocket. Drawn in Jo’s precise scientific hand were directions to Denny Castle’s childhood home. Mrs. Castle lived on the Duluth side of the canal but just barely. According to Jo’s sketch the house backed up on a waterway. Anna had assumed Mrs. Castle had money. Houses on waterways usually meant prime real estate. But this canal was dying. A thin brackish stream trickled down a muddy causeway pocked with tin cans, used tires and burned-out car bodies.

At 103rd Street Anna turned her old Rambler to the right. Shortly after the intersection the asphalt ended. Small clapboard homes, once identical but diversified over the years by individual abuses, littered one side of the road. On the other, old foundations and lilac bushes framing vanished porches indicated that a like row had once faced them before fire or an aborted land development plan had razed it.

Number 1047 had nothing to recommend it but Jo’s assertion that Denny’s mother lived there. Anna pulled up in front of the house and switched off the ignition. For a moment she sat looking at the dead lawn and faltering front porch. The poverty and neglect embarrassed her, as if she’d stumbled across a dirty secret. Denny had evidently taken greater care of things past than things present. Or things wet than things dry.

Lest her sitting there alarm the occupant—the neighborhood was seedy and Anna’s Rambler far from reassuring—she climbed out and let herself in through the garden gate.

Half a minute after her third knock, as she was about to give the house up as empty, she heard the whisper of slippered feet on the inside hall floor. The door opened wide. Behind the torn screen a tiny woman blinked from under thick glasses with dark plastic frames; the kind Medicaid provides for the poor. She was older than Anna would have guessed, maybe in her late eighties or even early nineties. As if in defiance, she wore carmine lipstick, expertly applied, and pink powdered rouge. Bobbed chin-length white hair was held out of her eyes with a child’s barrette: two bears on a pink plastic log.

“Mrs. Castle?” Anna asked. “Denny Castle’s mom?”

“Oh, yes,” the old woman replied, and her smile showed a line of large regular teeth that clicked when she talked. “Denny’s my boy. Do you want to see him?”

Anna wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

“He’s at school,” Mrs. Castle said. “But he should be home around three o’clock.” Her face firmed up and she suddenly looked terribly sad. “Oh dear. Denny’s not at school. Were you a friend of my son’s?”

She asked the question with such sympathy Anna knew she had remembered Denny was dead. “Yes. I worked with him on Isle Royale.”

“Won’t you come in?” Mrs. Castle invited graciously.