A Superior Death (39 page)

A kick brought Anna back to the relative freedom of the lake bottom. What fragile light there had been in Michigan’s fog-ridden skies was gone. The surface of the lake no longer showed lighter. But for the lamp she’d retrieved, there was a total absence of light. It was as if she swam in India ink.

Anna looked at the time. Six minutes had elapsed since she had entered the
Kamloops’
engine room; fifteen since she had toppled out of her patrol boat. Ten was the maximum bottom time for a bounce dive, for surfacing with minimal decompression stops.

Vague and fumbling in mind and body, Anna looked for the lifeline, the line that would lead her back up, time her stops. It had been withdrawn: Patience banking on the fact there would be no one left alive needing a road home. Without light from the surface, the water was as directionless as deep space. To swim could be death if one was swimming in the wrong direction.

Anna pushed a button on her low-pressure inflator hose. Slowly she began to ascend. Like Winnie-the-Pooh with his balloon, she thought with the closest approximation to optimism she had felt since tumbling off the
Belle Isle
’s stern.

The small circle of light her lamp cast on the
Kamloops
’s deck dwindled. Finally it no longer touched the dead ship. Anna lost all sense of movement. Try as she might, the effort of watching both timepiece and depth gauge proved too much. She lost count, forgot her numbers. All concept of how fast she was ascending, how long she’d been down, was lost.

From below, where her finger of light poked into the blackness came a white amorphous shape. Anna tried to train the light on it but it moved in and out of the beam as if it chose to be seen only for a second, then to hide in the black recesses. Fear of the known evil of bends or an embolism with blood frothing from her lungs kept Anna from kicking into sudden flight. Then it was upon her; a corpse from the
Kamloops.
Pale. Dead.

Not dead: hands trailing ribbons of saponified flesh reached for her. Before the fingers could close, the body drifted away into the dark. Denny Castle replaced it. He floated near her; not a corpse but alive and clad only in the captain’s uniform.

In and out of dreams, Anna was carried upward. Ralph swam by, looking at her and tapping on the face of a watch she couldn’t read. Formal, a maître d’ in gossamer silks that shimmered around her, Patience offered wine for Anna’s approval. Molly was there but Anna was unsurprised. Always, when she was in trouble, Molly had been there.

Then Anna dreamed fishes were flapping wet tails in her face. Whether she opened her eyes or regained consciousness she was unsure, but the darkness was no longer absolute. The fish tails were waves. She had reached the surface and she was alive. Fog still clamped down on the lake. She began to swim but faltered, not knowing if she swam to or away from the safety of land. And the cold had worked its way through the layers of her dry suit, sapping the vitality from her muscles, wrapping deadening fingers around her already slow-moving thoughts.

To lie back, to sleep, to stop struggling, would be heaven but Molly was nagging at her, something about staying in the game. After she had rested, Anna thought, she would figure out what her sister was babbling about. The fishes flapped their tails and cigar smoke wafted across the water.

Cigar smoke and fishes: the note was jarring. Anna forced herself awake. Fish tails turned back into waves. Cigar smoke remained cigar smoke; sweet and fruity. To shake the hallucination, Anna forced her arms to stroke, her legs to kick. The lake felt as if it had turned to concrete and was setting, heavy and rock-hard around her limbs.

The strange smoke, clear as a beacon, stayed in the air. Blind and deaf and aching in every joint, she floundered on, kicking away the cold, kicking away death for one more minute.

Her mind narrowed to the odor of exotic tobacco and the need to keep moving.

Stay in the game.

Finally death, tired of waiting for life’s leftovers, overtook her. Her leaden arms were pinioned, dragged forward. “No!” she screamed around the mouthpiece that choked her.

Voices were burbling in her ears again. “We’ve got you. Don’t fight. We’ve got you,” they were saying. The voices of the dead in the engine room. Anna fought to come out of the dreams.

Her regulator, the breath of life, was pulled from her numbed lips. She stopped breathing to cheat death another few seconds. Her face mask was ripped away.

“Anna!” came a surprised cry. The sound of her own name startled the hard-won breath from her lungs. She gulped cold living air. “Anna, it’s us.”

Fight faded. Anna’s mind opened. Without her mask, she could see. Tinker Coggins-Clarke was bending over her. She held fast to one arm. Damien clasped the other.

“Don’t flop,” Tinker said gently. “You’ll overturn us. Come into the boat. Death can’t follow you into the boat.”

Anna willed the wood that was her legs to some semblance of action and Damien and Tinker dragged her over the gunwale of the aluminum runabout.

“What’re you doing out in the fog?” Anna demanded faintly, a half-formed idea of citing them for running without lights dissolving unspoken into weary laughter.

“An experiment in sensory deprivation,” Damien told her seriously.

“And Oscar was stinking up the tent,” Tinker added. “I told him if he had to smoke his smelly old cigars, he could brave the elements.”

Anna looked to the bow. Wearing a tiny yellow slicker and lashed to the bow with what looked like a hair ribbon was the brown-eyed teddy bear.

“I’m buying you a case of Havanas,” Anna promised.

“And a red sports car.”

CHAPTER 27

T
he Coggins-Clarkes had been floating in darkness and silence—feeling the lake breathe, they said—several miles off Kamloops Point. Near as Anna could figure, she had swum just over a mile.

Free of tanks, mask, and flippers, but still swaddled in the dry suit, she lay like a landed fish amidships of the little runabout. At his own request—transmitted via Tinker—Oscar had been zipped inside her suit. Not without great risk of wetting his fur, as the little bear had pointed out.

After the surreal quality of the dive, Tinker and Damien arguing good-naturedly with a stuffed bear in a rain jacket didn’t strike Anna as even moderately peculiar. Given the choice between a bat-blind airless dimension nearly two hundred feet below and this gentle insanity, she gave the latter more credence.

Half sitting, she leaned against Tinker’s knees. She could feel the other woman’s long slender fingers resting along the side of her head. To keep it from rolling off, Anna thought foolishly and was comforted. Tinker’s other hand was at the tiller of the seventy-five-horsepower outboard motor.

Anna’s arms and legs felt heavy as stone. She could scarcely move them, yet, without her volition, they twitched occasionally, knocking with loud violence against the side of the aluminum boat. When Anna talked her voice sounded far away and the tale she was telling of Patience and the wine and the
Kamloops
, absurd.

Damien, head bent over a compass strung around his neck on a cord, was navigating the little craft through the black and drifting waterscape. A flashlight duct-taped to the bow provided all they had of running lights.

“Watch it!” Anna barked suddenly. She’d sensed as much as seen a shape in the fog beyond Damien. Immediately Tinker cut what little power the engine produced and helped Anna as she struggled to sit upright.

“Oops!” Damien said cheerfully as the nose of the runabout bumped into the floating obstacle. “A boat,” he announced.

“Of course a boat,” Anna growled peevishly as she tried to get her useless legs folded underneath her.

Tinker noted the cranky tone: “You’re feeling better,” she approved.

Anna laughed and was alarmed at the sharp pain it caused in her left lung, near her heart. “Yes,” she said, her breath coming in a gasp. “Unh!” The grunt was to alleviate the pain in her right knee as she pulled herself up holding on to the gunwale of the vessel they’d run against.

Standing half erect, she could see over the gunwale onto the stern deck. “It’s the
Belle Isle.
She must have been cut loose. Give me a boost.”

Damien wedged a shoulder awkwardly under her rump and managed to spill her over into the Bertram without overturning his own boat. Tinker and he scrambled aboard with more agility and tied the aluminum runabout to the stern cleat.

On unsteady legs, Anna staggered to the helm. Restored to life, the surface, and her patrol boat, her vision had tunneled: She would find Patience Bittner.

Tinker and Damien settled quietly on the bench across from the pilot’s and, hands intertwined, watched the drama unfold with great interest but no apparent surprise or concern. Soon Anna forgot they were there.

Her mind, usually a fairly tractable organ, was hardly clearer on the surface than it had been under the confusing effects of Martini’s Law at thirty-two fathoms. Waves of dizziness shook her and it seemed as though her eyesight was blurred at the edges, though it was difficult to tell with the sinuous fog moving through her running lights. She didn’t care to hazard a guess which problems were internal and which external. Definitely internal was the intense, sharp aching in her knee and left shoulder. The bends: Anna had been down too long, gotten too cold, ascended too fast.

Trusting the radar to keep her from ramming any night-crawling fools, she nudged the throttles further open. Never had time been so much of the essence as it had been this day. Ascent time, bottom time, decompression time, time immersed in frigid water, now—if she’d been down much too long, or come up much too fast—time till she could reach a recompression facility. For deep-water divers,
tempus
not only
fugit
ed but killed.

“I’ll leave you in Rock.” Anna remembered her passengers as she rounded Blake’s Point and started down the protected channel between Edwards Island and Isle Royale.

“We’ll stay till you’ve got somebody else,” Tinker said.

“You’ll get out at Rock,” Anna reiterated.

“No.”

Anna didn’t pursue it. She’d seen women like Tinker, fragile, gossamer creatures, chain themselves to trees, lie down in front of bulldozers, tangle themselves in the nets of tuna boats till it took half a dozen burly policemen to dislodge them.

“Two-oh-two.” Anna tried to raise Scotty on the radio. He didn’t respond and she glanced at her pocket watch tethered to the depth finder where she’d left it for safe-keeping when she’d donned her diving gear. “Past cocktail hour,” she observed sourly. “He’s turned his radio off.”

“Somebody else, then,” Tinker suggested.

Refocusing on her radar screen, Anna forbore comment. The fog in her peripheral vision was definitely internal and she was unable to blink or wish it away.

Rock Harbor was as quiet as she had seen it since early in the season. Half a dozen boats, as still in the flat water as if they were set in concrete, lined the dock. The only one showing any sign of life was the
Spirogyra.
Her rear deck was strung with paper lanterns that made diffused spots of pink and yellow and green in the fog. Disembodied laughter floated from her direction.

The low growl of an engine starting up intruded. The sound was clean and high-pitched: a motor that had been souped up. “The
Venture,
” Anna guessed aloud. “She decided not to hang around until the body turned up.” She glanced sharply at Tinker and Damien on the bench still handfast like teenagers on a date.

“No,” Tinker said firmly.

“Damn,” Anna breathed. Undoubtedly Patience would be headed for Canada with a good chunk of cash and all the evidence in an improbable—and, without the wine, possibly unprovable—theft of historical artifacts. Even with the evidence, Denny’s death would be tough to pin on Bittner beyond a reasonable doubt. A good defense attorney could easily make the attempt on Anna’s life sound like an accident.

“Damn,” Anna said again.

“Go,” Damien urged. “The Windigo has found modern form: greed. It feeds on the human spirit.” His eyes were sparking, more boy than magician at the thought of this adventure.

“Cut that damn sea anchor loose,” Anna ordered and he ran to loosen the runabout.

Shifting one engine to reverse, the other forward, Anna turned the
Belle Isle
in a tight, hard circle and was rewarded by yelps of protest emanating from the heavily waked and fog-bound
Spirogyra.

There was just the one moving blip on the radar screen. She followed. Either Patience had holed up in the few seconds it had taken to turn the
Belle Isle
and been replaced by another vessel, or the lime-green blot moving south down Rock Harbor was the
Venture.
As Anna pushed the throttle forward, she sent up a prayer to a god so vague it and hope had come to mean the same thing, that the waterway harbored no half-submerged snags.