A Superior Death

by Nevada Barr

  Inspired-or intimidated-by Patience Bittner’s easy elegance, Anna made a stop in the ladies’ room. Hair hanging in two gray-streaked braids gave her an aging Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm look. She wrapped the plaits around her head and secured them in place with pins from her daypack. Too sunburned to wash her face with the harsh industrial soap in the washroom, she limited her toilette to the new coiffure.

  The main dining room at the Rock Harbor Lodge made an attempt at being picturesque. The walls were paneled in light-colored wood, the ceiling cross-hatched with redwood beams, and the chandeliers fashioned from brass conning wheels. Other appropriately nautical bits of decor were scattered around, but boxy fifties construction spoiled the overall effect.

  Park people were clustered in one corner. Patience floated around like a golden butterfly, refilling glasses. Coffeepot in hand, an awkward-looking girl with dark hair cut in a Prince Valiant shuffled after her from table to table, eyes fixed on the tops of her shoes. Anna wondered if this was the Carrie who wrote letters to Lhasa Apsos. She appeared to be the right age for a daughter of Patience Bittner-twelve or thirteen.

  Tinker was there with Damien. They sat near the others but at a table for two. Their hands were clasped together on the white cloth and, instead of the glaring electric table lamps, they shared a candle-lantern which they obviously supplied themselves. Damien tried to catch Anna’s eye with a dark and pregnant look, but she pretended not to see him.

  Scotty Butkus was sitting at the head of the main table smoking a cigarette, two bottles of Mickey’s Big Mouth at his elbow. Scotty, like Anna, was a permanent law enforcement ranger, her counterpart in Rock Harbor. Butkus fancied himself an old cowboy who’d been a ranger when it was still a good job. To hear him talk, he’d helped clean up Dodge City. But he wasn’t more than fifty-nine or sixty at most, still a GS-7 making the same salary as Anna.

  A few of the younger people thought he was a semiromantic has-been. Anna suspected he was a never-was, drinking and talking to rectify a personal history that was a disappointment. He’d been busted down from somewhere and was starting over: new park, new job, new young wife. The new wife wasn’t in evidence.

  Next to Butkus was Jim Tattinger, the park’s Submerged Cultural Resources Specialist. Anna knew very little about him except that, according to the crew of the 3rd Sister, he spent all his time playing with computers and never dove any of the wrecks himself. Tattinger looked like a textbook nerd, right down to his skinny neck, thick glasses, and thinning red hair. Anna moved down the table so she wouldn’t have to sit opposite him. When he talked or smiled his thin lips stretched too far, turning a moist pink ruffle of nether lip out into the light of day. She didn’t want to know him that well.

  Between Pizza Dave, the four-hundred-and-fifty-pound maintenance man, and Anna’s boss, Ralph Pilcher, the District Ranger for Rock Harbor, she found an empty chair. Lucas Vega wasn’t there. One of the perks of being Chief Ranger was being spared some of the employee get-togethers.

  Holly and Hawk Bradshaw were conspicuous by their absence.

  The pooped-party feel did not surprise Anna. Living in such isolated places, NPS managers felt a responsibility to instill a sense of “family” into their employees and, accordingly, planned endless potlucks, Chrismooses, chocolate pig-outs, and receptions. Usually these attempts at building an esprit de corps failed. People came because there was nothing else to do and left as early as good manners-or good politics-allowed.

  This get-together had a couple of things going for it. People wanted to see Denny’s new wife, and it was held in the lodge within hailing distance of a fully stocked bar.

  As Anna wriggled into her chair, Denny Castle and his wife entered the front door, triggering desultory applause. A handful of lodge guests joined in and the sound swelled to a respectable level.

  As the popping of hands thinned, and Butkus began another story of how it used to be, Patience took the bride’s arm with a natural hostess’s charm and walked her and Denny across toward the party.

  Denny’s wife was five five or six with narrow shoulders and disproportionately wide hips. Lusterless brown hair fell from a center part to below her waist. Her round face was expressionless behind oversized red-framed glasses. As she pulled out the chair next to Ralph, Anna noticed how gnarled and scarred her hands and forearms were. She had seen those blue-black marks before. Looking into the glare of the electric candles, she tried to smooth her mind so the memory would come. After a moment’s teasing, it rose to the surface. She’d seen the scars on the arms of a hitchhiker she had given a lift from Santa Barbara to Morro Bay. The man had been an abalone diver. The scars were from where the shells had cut.

  “This is the new Mrs. Castle,” Patience introduced her. “Jo.”

  So, the bride, Jo, nee God knew what, had opted to be known as Mrs. Denny Castle. Anna thought it an odd choice for a woman with her master’s degree in freshwater biology, and the diving scars to prove it. That bit of information Anna had picked up from a Resource Management memorandum. Funded by the park, Jo Castle would spend the summer researching pollution in ISRO’s inland waters. Originally she had applied to do her Ph.D. thesis on how much impact sport fishing was having on the island’s lake trout population.

  That would have been worth knowing, Anna thought. But the NPS wouldn’t fund that particular study. Sport fishermen had powerful lobbyists. The fishes did not. So Mrs. Denny Castle would count PCBs and swat mosquitoes in the island’s interior for twelve weeks.

  A crash and a curse saved Jo from further scrutiny. Scotty had knocked over his beer. Cigarette butts were floating out of the ashtray and down the white tablecloth on a foaming tide. Anna guessed he was drunk. He had the look of a man who’s been drunk often enough that he’s learned to cover it with a modicum of success. Mopping up the mess with a peach-colored napkin, he was muttering: “Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m not used to eating indoors. No elbowroom. Yes, ma’am” -this to Patience- “I’m sorry as hell. Begging your pardon” -this to Carrie for the rough language. “Let me help you clean up, little lady.”

  The dialogue was clichéd. Anna lost interest. She cast her eye around for some likely reason to excuse herself from the table.

  Damien and Tinker provided it. Damien beckoned with the cock of a wing-shaped eyebrow. Handfast, Tinker’s blond hair permed and repermed into a golden frizz, Damien dressed all in black, they looked like the hero and heroine of an Afterschool Special.

  With a good-bye to Dave, Anna squeaked her chair back, shouldered her daypack, and went over to their table. “Not here,” Damien said. Anna waited while, with an odd little ritual that required three taps on the glass and brass of the candle lantern, Tinker blew out the flame and folded the lantern down to stow in a canvas satchel.

  They led her out of the restaurant and down to the water. At the end of the first in the row of docks, two-by-twelves, destined to be hauled into the wilderness on the backs of trail crew, were stacked. They settled behind these. Anna squatted down on her heels, balanced easily, and waited. This far out on the water the whine of mosquitoes faded. She took a breath as deep as a sigh. Of necessity the three of them were huddled so close between the lumber and the edge of the pier that her breath moved Tinker’s fine hair, silver now in the fluorescent lights over the harbor.

  Tinker said: “I know. It’s not so much the smoke as the need. It gets hard to breathe.”

  To her surprise, Anna understood exactly what Tinker was talking about. The air in the lodge felt thick, oppressive with more than just the fumes from Butkus’s interminable cigarettes. There was a sense of needs unfulfilled, hopes deferred, a generic discontent.

  “People together by necessity, not choice,” Anna said. “Makes for strange alliances.”

  “Yes,” Damien said darkly.

  Safe in the inky shadow of the lumber, Anna smiled. Had anyone else dragged her out into the damp to play cloak and dagger she would probably have been annoyed. There was something about Tinker and Damien tha
t disarmed her. Though eccentric, even theatrical, they seemed of good heart, as if they did as they did because it was the way in which they could deal with a difficult world. She no more felt they wasted her time than the loons who sang away her mornings.

  Gentle people seemed somehow a more natural phenomenon than the greedy bulk of humanity.

  “What’s the problem?” Anna asked.

  “We think Scotty has eaten his wife,” Tinker confided.

  THREE

  Anna had recovered her composure. She sat on the floor of Tinker and Damien’s room in the old house half a mile back from the harbor. Since it had become too run-down for any other use, it had been converted into a dorm for seasonal employees. A dozen or more candles burned, but even this glamorous aura couldn’t rid the place of its mildew-and-linoleum seediness. Tinker, her soft hair glittering in the many lights, poured herbal tea into tiny, mismatched Oriental bowls.

  “It’s made from all natural ingredients,” she said as she handed Anna a red lacquered bowl. “Damien and I gathered them here and on Raspberry.”

  Eye of newt and toe of frog, Anna thought but she took a sip to be polite. The tea tasted of mint and honey with a woody undercurrent reminiscent of the way leaves smell when they’re newly fallen. Anna doubted she’d ask for a second cup, but not because the concoction was unpalatable. The strange brew, the black-cloaked boy, the candlelight, put her in mind of other rooms, heavy with incense and dark with Indian-print bedspreads, where the tea and cakes had been laced with more than wild raspberry leaves. She pushed her bowl aside and cleared the cobwebs of the bad old days from her mind.

  “So. Scotty’s wife-Donna-hasn’t been around for a few days?”

  “Seven,” Damien said, making the number sound like Donna Butkus’s death knell. Tinker nodded, her gossamer hair floating in the warm currents from the candles.

  “Seven,” Anna repeated matter-of-factly.

  “We went down to the water on the far side of the dock, down through the tangle of new-growth firs. There’s a little cove there where hardly anybody goes. Donna always fed the ducks there mornings,” Tinker said.

  Anna raised an eyebrow. Feeding wildlife was strictly taboo.

  “Yes, it was opportunistic,” Tinker agreed. “But sometimes Damien and I would go there later in the day to watch the birds she had attracted.” Again Anna was startled at her understanding. Tinker’s mind seemed strangely accessible. Either that or Anna was more transparent than she liked to think she was.

  “We saw a red-necked grebe, and once a black scoter came to feed.” For the first time Damien sounded like a boy. Birds, then, were his passion.

  “Last Wednesday, after breakfast, we went birding in the cove. Donna wasn’t there. That’s when we first suspected she was missing,” Damien said.

  “Maybe she came earlier, fed them, and had already gone,” Anna suggested.

  Damien shook his head portentously. “You don’t understand. The ducks were expecting her.” The boy was gone; the wizard was back.

  “Did you ask Scotty where she was?”

  “He said she’d had the flu and was home watching the soaps and drinking orange juice,” Tinker replied, as if that course of events was too farfetched to fool even a child. She folded the tips of long tapered fingers delicately around the lacquered bowl and raised it to her lips, not to drink but to inhale the sweet-smelling steam.

  It crossed Anna’s mind that perhaps O.J. and The Young and the Restless were beyond the pale for Tinker. “Replace the soaps with old Jimmy Stewart movies and that’s what I’d do if I had the flu,” Anna said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “There is no flu going around,” Damien declared flatly.

  Tinker said: “Donna had promised to cut my hair. In return I was going to teach her how to use some of the herbs here. Just for small things-nothing dangerous,” she reassured Anna who, till then, hadn’t needed it. “Just hair rinses and facials, decoctions for colds, that sort of thing. Then nothing. Not a word. Not a note. Then we…” She looked to her husband for assistance, clearly coming now to what she considered shaky ground.

  “We conducted the surveillance warranted by the seriousness of the situation,” he said firmly. In his airy voice the statement reminded Anna of the sweet but implacable “Because I said so” that Sister Judette had used to such effect on the class of ‘69.

  “You watched the house,” Anna said, careful not to sound judgmental. “And?”

  “Nothing,” Damien echoed his wife. “Neither days nor nights. We never saw Donna.”

  A moment’s silence was slowly filled with suspense, yet Anna did not doubt their sincerity.

  “Then this,” Tinker said gravely. She turned to a brick-and-board bookcase filled with field guides to birds, bats, edible plants, herbs, and mammals of Isle Royale, bits of rock, bones, dried plants, and melted candle stubs. From beneath the bookcase she took a small glass container so clean it looked polished. She set it on her palm and offered it up to Anna.

  Anna reached for it, then stopped. “May I?” she said, adopting the ceremony that seemed so natural to these two.

  “Yes,” Damien replied formally. “We would not have come to you had we not found proof Scotty devoured his wife. It is a serious charge.”

  Anna lifted the jar carefully from Tinker’s hand and turned it in the flickering light. It was several inches high, wider at the bottom than the top, and had ridges at the mouth where a screw cap had once fitted. If there had been a label it had been scrubbed off completely.

  “A jar,” Anna said blankly.

  “A pickle relish jar…” Damien encouraged her.

  Anna began to feel her brain had fogged up somehow. Could there have been something in the tea? Was Tinker a self-styled witch? Damien a warlock hopeful? Or were they merely a couple of eccentrics, the kindhearted flakes she’d thought them to be? One thing was certain: Anna was not making sense of much of what they were saying. If they did have a puzzle, the pieces they offered didn’t seem to fit any picture she could come up with.

  “A pickle relish jar,” she repeated.

  “Heinz,” Tinker added.

  “That”-Damien pointed to the little bottle as if it were something unclean-“is not an isolated incident. The last food order Scotty Butkus sent to Bob’s Foods included an order for an entire case of pickle relish.”

  ISRO employees ordered their food for a week at a time, sending lists to several markets in Houghton. Every Tuesday the food was shipped back on the Ranger III.

  “That’s a lot of relish,” Anna said, wondering what it was she was agreeing with. “I take it you saw his order form?”

  “It was in the trash,” Tinker explained.

  From beyond the screened-in window, Anna could hear muted laughter, the dull-edged variety brought on by vodka. Trail crew must have made a late appearance at the party and were now staggering back to their boats for the short ride home to their bunkhouse on Mott.

  Suddenly voices were raised in anger: a brawl, quickly hushed. On Mott they were allowed more freedom; here in the lap of the tourist trade the hard-drinking crew were kept in line.

  Another burst of noise, invective. “Rock Harlem” seemed terribly apt at the moment. Anna had a dizzying sense of having been transported to a basement apartment in a bad section of New York City.

  “You went through his trash.” This time Anna didn’t bother to school her voice. Her nerves were becoming frayed. With an effort, she focused on Tinker. She looked hurt. Even her hair seemed to droop. A flower blasted by the cold. Anna felt a stab of remorse. She ignored it.

  “We were seeking recyclable materials,” Damien said stiffly. “The Butkuses’ trash customarily provides seven to ten pounds of recyclable glass and aluminium.” He pronounced the word “al-yew-min-ee-um.”

  “I’ll bet,” Anna said. Scotty would be a veritable Philemon’s pitcher of bottles and cans. Pickle relish wasn’t the only thing he ordered by the case. The repetition of thought triggered unders
tanding. “ Twenty-seven Bottles of Relish!” Anna exclaimed. It was a short story about a man who had consumed the evidence of his wife’s murder, with relish as the condiment.

  “That’s what we think,” Tinker said. She had brightened again, Anna’s disapproval a cloud that had passed.

  With comprehension, the fog began to lift from Anna’s mind and she was mildly ashamed she’d suspected the drugging of her tea. To clear Tinker of an accusation never made, she took a swallow. Cold, it tasted more of earth and root than of mint and honey. She set it aside.

  “You’ve got expectant ducks and an empty pickle jar,” Anna summed up the evidence. She knew she sounded abrupt but she was getting tired. Under her collar, her sunburn had begun to chafe and the smoke from the candles was making her eyes water.

  “We also have photographs,” Damien said. He rose, swirling his calf-length cape alarmingly near the open flames, and took down a tin box from the jumble of bags and boxes that filled the top of the two bunk beds.

  Anna’s interest pricked up. She eased her back, forcing herself to sit a little straighter.

  “We’ll need artificial light for this,” Damien apologized. Anna was grateful. She could use the nice healthy glare of the overhead electric. Disappointment soon followed: Damien took a flashlight from the upper bunk. Anna allowed herself a small sigh. It was barely even a change in her breathing pattern, but Tinker caught it. She lay one tapered finger on Anna’s sleeve as if to lend her patience. Or faith.

  Damien sat on the floor again, tailor fashion, the black cape billowing around his knees, then settling like a dark mist. He opened the box with the lid toward Anna so she couldn’t see its contents. Some rummaging with the flashlight produced two snapshots. For a long irritating moment he studied them, then handed the first to Anna.

  She took it and the flashlight from his hands. The Polaroid was of Scotty Butkus in his NPS uniform standing on the dock in Houghton. Behind him the hull of the Ranger III rose like a blue wall. Suitcases and boxes and canoes littered the pier. Apparently it was loading day; the day most of the staff moved to the island for the season.