A Superior Death (34 page)

“Like gather nuts for the winter?” Hawk asked.

Anna laughed. “A lot like that.”

 

 

 

 

T
hat evening, as most evenings when the tourist trade had died down and the dock had grown quiet, Anna poured herself a glass of wine and carried it out onto the steps of the ranger station to sit and sip and watch the day turn to silver.

Christina’s letter, still unread, was folded in her pocket. Anna took it out along with the packet of underwater photos she’d been meaning to study, and ran a finger under the flap in pleasant anticipation of a touch of home. This note was short and businesslike, scribbled on the back of an old memo. Chris had written it over her lunch break. It started with an apology for the orange thumbprint in the corner. An arrow pointed to the smudge. On the arrow’s tail was written, “Oops. Doritos.” Anna read the rest of the letter, written in Christina’s graceful looping hand. Bertie had finally grown alarmed. Repeated efforts to get information out of Scotty had resulted in conflicting stories and outright lies. Bertie had alerted the Houghton police to her sister’s disappearance. As the waiting period on missing persons was long since past, the investigation had begun. Ally was studying dinosaurs in preschool. Chris was thinking of taking a cooking class on Tuesday evenings. Piedmont was said to be missing Anna.

Piedmont. Anna folded the letter and wished she could have a cat on her lap, an orange tail to pull. As if granting her wish, a flash of reddish fur illuminated the dark green of the thimbleberry not four yards from where she sat.

Knucklehead’s kits were old enough to leave the den. Several times Anna had seen them poking shy black faces out of the bushes. Often at night she heard their sharp cries and muffled tumblings in the thick underbrush. Tonight they had grown quite bold and pounced and tumbled, playing like kittens while their mother watched with her chin on her paws. Knucklehead, however tame, never took her eyes from Anna or any other human being now that her kits had outgrown the safety of the den.

Beside Anna, on the step, were the underwater photographs of the
Kamloops.
A breeze stirred them, and she tucked them under her thigh lest they blow into the dirt. “Maybe I’ll learn something by osmosis,” she said to Knucklehead.

There was so much information, and no one piece of it seemed to connect up with any other. A murder committed in an impossible place, for improbable reasons, by an unidentified person. Maybe Stanton was right, maybe it was drugs: buying or selling or taking.

“Not bloody likely,” Anna said to the fox. She began forcing mismatched facts together, snapping one to the next like pop beads on a child’s necklace. Someone wanted something they knew or believed to be in the captain’s cabin. The broken latch and the scratches attested to the fact that they had attempted or succeeded in dragging that something out through the porthole.

Denny had been found dead by that porthole. Anna married the two bits of information: Therefore Denny had seen whoever doing whatever, and so they had killed him.

The careful, professional Denny had done a solo midnight bounce dive on an extremely dangerous wreck. Denny hadn’t told anyone he was going to dive. Anna hammered the disparate facts into a third: Therefore Denny hadn’t known beforehand that he was going to make the dive, and as there was no radio in the
Blackduck,
he couldn’t broadcast it after he decided to do it.

Denny, then, had followed someone, someone he suspected. After the reception he had followed them in the
Blackduck.
They had dived, he had dived.

Denny Castle was a superb diver. Denny Castle had been killed. Therefore either the murderer was a better diver, was someone Denny was not afraid of, or had caught Denny off guard.

The sound of a scuffle interrupted Anna’s thoughts. The kits were growling, lowering their noses to their paws, their hind ends high in the air in a three-way standoff. The tableau erupted into a spout of fur and Anna laughed. It was hard to remember they were wild things. The desire to pet them, name them, feed them was almost irresistible.

The roar of a motorboat broke up the fray. Flashes of red enlivened the bushes as they all disappeared, running as if they’d not been born and raised with the sound of boat engines.

Anna stood to see who was causing the ruckus. A green and white cabin cruiser was shearing the silver fabric of the channel: Patience Bittner’s boat, the
Venture.
She pulled up at a speed that waked the boats at their moorings and set the fishermen to squawking.

Anna began to run toward the quay.

Patience didn’t disembark. She stood on the deck holding the
Venture
to the dock with her hands. Her usually well-coiffed hair had come loose and hung in strands accentuating the deep lines etched in her face. One of Carrie’s old sweat-shirts rendered her for the first time in Anna’s recollection shapeless and unstylish.

Tourists, hunched over bourbons and beers, pricked their ears for any sound of adventure. Anna crouched on the pier, eye-level with Patience standing in the boat. “What is it? Carrie?” As she asked and was answered with a grim nod, Anna suffered a stab of guilt. Denny Castle’s murder, Donna’s disappearance—both damage already done—had absorbed her attention so completely she had forgotten her primary duty: to protect and preserve. She had forgotten Jim Tattinger and his proven penchant for little girls, forgotten Carrie Bittner and her sullen and secretive affair with the mysterious beau.

“She’s run off,” Patience said. “She was supposed to be busing in the dining room. I was busy with the inventory brought on the
Ranger Three
and was at the dock. My night manager said Carrie left for supper and never came back. I’ve looked everywhere I can think of. I came to the north shore because that’s where she ran to the last time—Lane Cove, remember? She left this at the apartment. It must’ve been about an hour before I got home.”

Anna took the paper Patience pulled from the pocket of her trousers. On a piece of stationery with little faceless girls in oversized bonnets brightening one corner, written with pencil so dull that at first Anna thought it was crayon, were the words: “Living with you is like being in jail. You think you’re the only person that deserves a life. Not everybody thinks I’m a little kid anymore. Like you made my childhood so great! I’m going to end it and you can pretend to all your friends that it’s a big deal.”

“I wasn’t paying attention,” Patience said, and water started in eyes already reddened. “I’ve had so much on my mind this summer. Carrie’s boy troubles were a complication I didn’t have time for. She was sulky but I didn’t think she was depressed. I know she won’t kill herself—she’s too big a baby—but even to leave a note . . .” Patience’s throat closed with tears and she stopped talking rather than break down.

“What day is it?” Anna demanded.

The unexpected nature of the question startled Patience momentarily from her fears. “Friday.” She waited for an explanation.

“Tattinger’s lieu day,” Anna said. “My guess is when Carrie said she was going to ‘end it’ she meant her childhood, not her life.” Anna dropped into the
Venture
and dragged a life vest out from under the seat. As she buckled it on she told Patience what she had learned of Tattinger.

“The first time she ran off it was Jim who told me where she was,” Anna said. “He was acting fishy, but I wrote it off to general assholery, and after Denny was found, I figured his running without lights and creeping around had something to do with that. Carrie was with him, I’m willing to bet. That’s what he was hiding. She was the second shadow I thought I saw in the cabin.”

“What kind of boy could be so unacceptable?” Patience repeated her question of several weeks before. “A boy pushing forty. I’ll kill her.”

Had she been a mother, Anna thought, her first impulse would have been to kill Jim Tattinger. Tattinger couldn’t charm, dominate, or compete with women, so he’d turned his sexual attention to girls so young he could still wow them with his wisdom and maturity. Carrie Ann, awkward, plain, wanting to grow up sooner than her mother thought fit, would be the perfect choice.

Anna said: “Unless you saw a light-colored cabin cruiser called the
Gone Fishin’
on your way here, head south. That’s where I found him that first time. I expect he’s scouted out some little cove.” Patience turned south down Amygdaloid Channel. “I wouldn’t blame Carrie,” Anna said.

“I’m going to kill her for lying and for scaring her mother half to death,” Patience explained. “I’m going to kill Jim Tattinger for the good of the human race.” She shoved the throttle to full and the
Venture
leapt forward with a speed that took Anna by surprise. Clearly the engine had been overhauled, souped up. It was more powerful by far than the engine in a standard Chris-Craft cabin cruiser.

The roar ripped the stillness of the evening as the keel ripped the stillness of the water. Habitually watchful for snags and other water hazards, Anna kept her eyes on the channel. Her mind rattled on the Fate Worse Than Death they raced to stop, or interrupt. End her childhood: “Do you think Carrie was a virgin?” Anna asked.

“Yes. I’m pretty sure of it. She’s not boy-crazy at all. And it’s not like the seventh-grade boys were lining up to walk her home. Eighth grade was scaring her. They start having dances, dates, all that. God!” Patience exploded. “Barely thirteen. Eight weeks ago she was twelve. I will rip Tattinger in two. It’s not like she’s a Lolita. She’s just a goofy-looking little girl.”

Anna didn’t doubt that that attitude had done half of Tattinger’s work for him, but she didn’t say anything.

Finding Carrie and Jim together, the ensuing scene—certainly if the scandal was made public—the fuss and notoriety, might do Carrie more harm than simply waiting for her to return and dealing with it quietly in the morning. Unless Jim was exerting undue pressure, unless she’d been resisting because she’d not felt ready to commit her body to anyone, unless she was planning on “ending it” tonight not because she wished to enter into a sexual relationship at thirteen but to spite her mother. And at thirteen, does one know the difference?

“Do you think Carrie Ann has had sex with Jim yet? Has she seemed different, said anything?” Anna asked.

“How would I know? I’m only her mother,” Patience snapped. The anger momentarily vented, she gave the question due thought. “Carrie seems dull but she’s not stupid and she feels things. She’s never been any good at hiding things either. If she’d been sexually active I think she’d either have gone religious and remorseful or smug and insufferable—depending on how it went. Mostly she’s just been sulky. My guess is no, she’s too scared, too confused. Damn him! She hasn’t even had her first period.”

No fear of pregnancy, Anna thought. Somehow it made things worse, not better. It made Carrie such a child.

Silence was drummed deep by the throb of the engine.

The
Venture
carried her cargo of anger and worry forward, the peace of the summer night descending in her wake.

“I know it seems like I stopped caring,” Patience said without looking at Anna. “But I didn’t. I just got tired. Single parenting: the formula for guilt. I got tired of feeling guilty because I wasn’t Supermom. I took the last year off, I guess. Kind of a sabbatical from motherhood. Bad timing, but I just ran out of gas.”

There was nothing Anna could say. Merely looking at Carrie Ann shuffling sullen-faced through puberty had made Anna tired. Still, she pitied the girl. Nobody chooses to be from a broken home. Maybe Carrie Ann just needed a dad, and Tattinger had chosen to exact a price for playing the part.

“Little girls should never have to pay for love,” Anna said, but she’d spoken only to herself and Patience didn’t hear over the noise of the engine.

They found the
Gone Fishin’
anchored in Little Todd Harbor. A white light bobbed dutifully at the stern. Tattinger was taking no chances on this rendezvous getting interrupted for a petty maritime misdemeanor.

No one was on deck but there was a faint glow from the cabin. Anna wasn’t surprised. Tattinger harbored no affection for nature. He would choose the civilized discomfort of a cramped but man-made cabin to the glories of a summer night.

Patience headed the
Venture
straight for the side of the anchored vessel and didn’t cut power. For a sickening moment, Anna thought she meant to ram the other boat.

With an accuracy that would have done Holly Bradshaw credit, Patience pulled up short, came alongside, and caught the
Gone Fishin’
with her stern line before the wake could wash it out of reach.

“Let me handle this,” she said as Anna belatedly deployed the fenders.

Anna was more than happy to let her do the honors. She put herself in the stern of the
Venture
where she had a clear view, and settled in to watch the fireworks.

Patience stopped at the cabin door and drew her five feet two inches up to what appeared a quite formidable height. Anna was glad it was not she who was about to be discovered in flagrante delicato.

Patience knocked, opened the door a crack, and softly called: “Carrie, honey, it’s Mom.” Then she waited a few moments as if to give her daughter time to drag on enough clothes to cover the worst of her embarrassment.

From within the cabin came a frantic scuffling that, despite the situation, made Anna smile. One of her least favorite aspects of being a park ranger was coitus interruptus. She’d inadvertently waded into more than one wilderness frolic.

The cabin light flicked out. Patience pushed open the door and stepped inside. “It’s me, baby. You’re not in any trouble,” Anna heard her say. Seconds later a huddled form was pushed gently out. Patience followed. She tried to put her arms around her daughter, but the girl shrugged them violently off.

At some point in the two hours it had taken to locate Carrie, she had lost her blouse. She crossed her arms protectively over her flat chest. She’d retained black denim trousers, and her high-topped sneakers were on and still laced. They’d arrived in time to save her, if not from sex, Anna thought uncharitably, then from the memory of having had it with Jim Tattinger.