A Superior Death (30 page)

For an irrational moment, Anna thought to do it for him.

The bow fender thumped in place. Boots clumped. Anna ducked down under the window and moved to the port side. As the cabin door swung open she got both feet on the narrow gunwale. Using the chrome rail that ran around the cabin roof, she clung to the side of the boat like a barnacle. Scotty hauled the starboard fender dripping onto the deck. He was so close she could smell his heavy cologne.

Anna became acutely aware of the vulnerability of her situation. He had but to pick up a boat hook and shove her into the lake. In the frigid water, she would never make it to shore. He was so close it seemed he must sense her, smell her.

The much touted sixth sense in humans being more evident in the relating of incidents after the fact than the experiencing of them, he didn’t feel her. He secured the fender and, with the tunnel vision common to people who believe themselves alone, returned to the cabin.

Anna pulled herself up onto the roof, out of sight of the windows. She felt the boat turning right. The wake curved away to her left, corroborating the sensation. Dead reckoning said they would reach the mouth of the Rock Harbor marina in a few minutes. Her guess was right—that was where Scotty was headed. The
Lorelei
swung to the starboard, her wake forming a vanishing hook to port. Scotty cut power. Anna lay still, straining her eyes for the first glimpse of the dock.

The
Lorelei
coasted almost to a stop. Then, to the port side, the concrete slab hove into view. Scotty had misjudged, and Anna spent a miserable minute exposed on the cabin roof while he clawed at the shore with a boat hook, his back to her. Using his scrabbling with the metal hook to cover the sound of her own slitherings, she slid back off the roof and perched again on the seaward gunwale. When Scotty turned to go back into the cabin, though he passed within four feet of her, she was no longer in sight.

Within seconds he reappeared, the bundle under his arm, and stepped onto the quay. Anna waited till she heard him step off the concrete and onto the wood-chip path that led up from the water before she swung onto the deck.

In the
Lorelei
’s bow, in a compartment under the bench, she found the District Ranger’s briefcase. Inside, amid brochures and charts, was a loaded .357, handcuffs, and a canister of Mace. Despite the sinister cast of the night, the .357 seemed too melodramatic. As nearly as she could tell, Scotty wasn’t armed. Anna slipped the Mace and cuffs in her hip pockets.

Overhead, silver flickered by in scraps and fragments where the moon poured through the overcast. Anna watched till Scotty reached the tree line, then followed at a trot.

Once they were in the trees, the darkness was absolute. Hand extended like a Hollywood rendition of the blind, Anna inched forward, cringing at the thought that she was walking into Scotty’s waiting hands.

The glare of an intruder light ignited the fog, and she moved more confidently toward it. All residence areas were kept safe from the magic of the night by the intrusive glare of blue floodlights. This one marked the enclave of the seasonals.

From the porch of the house where Tinker and Damien roomed, a yellow light softened the heartless glow. Anna stood still, trying to pierce the fog with eyes and ears. Just when she was beginning to think Scotty had been bound for a different destination, one she had not even guessed at, she heard the complaining screech of a window screen being pried from its seating.

She forgot the cold, her fear. Careful of the placement of each foot, but moving quickly for all of that, she crept to the corner of the house. A scraping sound followed by a thump announced the screen had been jerked clear of the frame and dropped to the ground. For several seconds, Anna stayed where she was, back pressed to the wall. When she looked around the corner, Scotty’s boots were disappearing over the sill into Tinker and Damien’s room.

Anna retreated to the front steps. No lights shone inside. Tinker and Damien’s housemates either were out or had already gone to bed. She tried the door. It was unlocked, as she had expected it to be. Old boards, complaining of abuse, creaked as she crossed the living room. Trailing her fingers lightly along the walls, she moved down the dark hallway. At the second door on her right, she stopped and pressed an ear against the paneling. Furtive scuffling sounds came from within.

Silently, she turned the knob. When she was sure the latch was clear, she opened the door and stepped inside. The light switch was to her left. With the palm of her hand she shoved it on.

Scotty was crouched beside the bunk beds. In front of him on the floor was the package. Anna had come upon him in the act of unwrapping it.

“Howdy, Scotty, what’s happening?”

Anna had expected surprise; she had counted on it. What she’d not bargained for was panic. From his crouched position, Scotty lunged. His considerable weight struck her in the thighs and slammed her against the door so hard her thoughts scattered.

An instant later her mind refocused and she took in the situation as a camera would take a still shot. Near her waist, Butkus’s dark hair beaded with condensation from the fog; one booted foot trailed, the other, coiled beneath him, was lost from sight. His arm was locked behind her back, his shoulder wedged under her rib cage.

When the trailing foot recoiled, Scotty would lunge again, cracking her ribs and maybe her spine against the door.

Anna grabbed a handful of hair and, holding his head fast, gouged her right thumb up under his left ear where the angle of his jaw met his skull. The pressure on her rib cage increased. She dug the thumb deeper.

A little pain goes a long way. Even through his alcoholic haze, he had to be feeling the bite of the compliance hold. “Let go. Let go,” she repeated clearly and she pushed harder. She could feel him becoming paralyzed. “Do as I say. Do it. Let go.”

His arms dropped. He tried to say something. It could have been the word “Okay.”

Still holding his head between her fist and the gouging thumb, Anna eased herself from the door. He fell onto both knees. His hands came up to pry her thumb away, but she screwed her knuckle into the nerve. “Hands down. On the floor. All the way. Do it. Do it.”

Scotty did it. She followed, pressing till he was facedown on the worn linoleum. “Hands on the small of your back. Cross your wrists. Hands back.”

Anna put one knee on his neck and one on his butt, then fished Pilcher’s handcuffs from her pocket. Scotty twitched when he heard the familiar ratcheting noise, but it was too late. She rapped them on his wristbones and quickly made them fast.

Less than a minute had elapsed since she had entered the room. Her heart was pounding and her vision growing fuzzy. Anna sat down on the edge of the bunk. Scotty lay at her feet. One of her peers, a fellow ranger, a commissioned federal law enforcement officer, was bound like a piglet. Anna didn’t know what to do with him. Odds were good she was nearly as surprised at the turn of events as he was. And probably in more trouble.

The National Park Service would not be anxious to believe breaking and entering to further an employee’s blackmailing another employee to keep her from exposing God knew what. If Scotty pieced together a good story—a practical joke, climbed in the wrong window—Anna would end up at best with egg on her face, at worst on charges for assaulting an officer. She fervently hoped either Butkus wasn’t thinking that clearly, or the package contained a severed human head or at least a kilo of something incriminating.

“Jesus, Scotty, what the hell is going on?” she asked peevishly.

“None of your goddamn business,” he said from the floor.

Anna thought about that one. “It is,” she decided. “You’re blackmailing a friend of mine. What’re you holding over Tinker?”

“You can’t prove I know a goddamn thing about those two.”

“Then tell me what you know about the late Denny Castle. Like what made him ‘late’?”

No answer.

“Where’s Donna?” Anna tried. Scotty said something that could’ve been “Goddam intwerps.” Anna was tired. And she was tired of Scotty Butkus. “Leave Tinker alone,” she said. “Stop the blackmail. It’s killing her.”

“The hell I will.” He began to struggle, trying to sit up.

Anna pushed him down with her foot. He banged against the board-and-brick bookcase the Coggins-Clarkes had assembled beneath the room’s one window. Candles rocked precariously. A cheap Instamatic flash camera teetered near the edge.

Anna picked it up. Click! Flash! “Gotcha!” she said. Scotty actually screamed as if the light had burned him. “The ‘old stallion’ knocked down and trussed up like a steer by a rangerette,” Anna said. Click. Flash. Scotty scraped his face away, turning it against the floor. “Too late. Got a good one,” she told him.

“This camera is Tinker’s. So is the film. I’ll see that she gets it. If you bother her, if whatever her big secret is leaks out in any way, I’ll encourage her to have the negatives blown up poster-size and put on trail crew’s bunkhouse door.”

For a moment Scotty neither spoke nor moved, and Anna began to be afraid the shock had been too much and he’d died of a massive coronary.

“You’ll pay for this,” he growled finally. Despite the threat, she was relieved to hear him speak. “I got friends in damn near every park in this country. Every one of ’em’s getting a call from me. I’ll by God smear your name from Acadia to Joshua Tree. You want a career in the Park Service? After this little stunt, you haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell. Not a hope.”

“These people known you long?” Anna asked.

“Damn right they have.”

“Then I can always hope they’ll consider the source.”

Scotty struggled to his knees. Anna let him. “Unlock

these goddamn cuffs,” he demanded.

Anna just looked at him, not rising from the bed where she sat. “Ralph keeps the key in his briefcase on the
Lorelei.
I didn’t bring it.” She got up then, held open the bedroom door. Scotty crawled through and she watched as he worked his way to his feet using the walls of the narrow hallway.

She closed and locked the door. Scotty would get the cuffs off, but it would take him a while. It would keep him away from her.

Suddenly too tired to stand, she sat back down on the bottom bunk. At her feet was the plastic-wrapped bundle Scotty had come across land and water to leave in Tinker’s way.

A growing dread would not allow her to open it slowly, scientifically. Grabbing two corners, Anna yanked the bag and shook it. The body of a baby tumbled out, and she screamed.

But it wasn’t a baby. It was a plastic baby doll and it had been painted blue from head to foot.

CHAPTER 20

A
nna clicked through the rest of the pictures in Tinker’s Instamatic. She took two of the doll and two of the torn screen. When the film was used up, she rewound it and dropped the roll into her pocket. Tinker could not be trusted to be sufficiently hard-hearted. Anna could.

She wrapped the blue baby in its plastic shroud, then glanced at the clock: a rhinestone Sylvester, tail and eyes twitching off the seconds. After ten P.M. and she was marooned in Rock Harbor with no food, no wine, no dry clothes, no change of underwear, and no place to sleep.

Patience would just be closing the restaurant at the lodge. All Anna needed to do was look moderately pitiful and she would provide everything but the underwear. Anna bundled herself and the baby out the window, replaced the screen, and set off through the fog at a trot.

The lights of the lodge glowed a warm welcome. Coming out of the darkness of the trees, Anna felt as if she’d been lost in the wilderness for a month. “I once was lost, but now am found.” Whistling the old hymn, she felt her spirits rise.

Two parties, one of six and one of eight, still lingered in the dining room. Though they were subject to the glares of a waitress and two busboys, Anna was grateful to them. They had forced the kitchen to stay open. And the bar. She ordered pasta Alfredo and a glass of Chianti. The pasta was gooey and the bread reheated but, glad to be in a warm well-lit place where nice people brought food, she was not inclined to be picky.

Patience, looking tired but well groomed, had drifted over to Anna’s table and been wheedled out of an invitation to sleep on her sofa. By the time a pretty young waiter, angling for a tip, brought over a second glass of Chianti, Anna had begun to feel downright expansive. Even the snufflings of Carrie Ann, trying to chip the crockery at the sideboard, seemed more homey than sullen.

Near eleven the larger party called for their check, and Patience felt she could go home. Carrie Ann in tow, she came by Anna’s table. Scarcely into her teens, Carrie was already taller and bigger than her mother.

“We are practicing togetherness.” Patience explained Carrie’s late hours as Anna pushed up out of her chair, then finished the last swallow of Chianti. “Surveillance in the guise of Motherly Love has taken the place of trust and ‘do your own thing.’ Certain persons of the childish persuasion seemed to think three A.M. was a good hour to retire.”