A Superior Death

by Nevada Barr

  Anna wondered if Lucas expected her to make the dive for the body recovery. A dormant claustrophobia began to awaken within her, a cold hard spot just under her breastbone. It was the park’s policy that a ranger was never to tackle a task she or he felt unsafe performing for any reason. She would not be forced to go.

  “Do you feel you’re ready for a dive that technical?” Lucas asked.

  “Sure.”

  He clapped her on the shoulder and went into the cabin.

  Ralph Pilcher, still seated on the engine box, drank his coffee as the Bertram powered up. Anna felt him watching her. She coiled the last of the line and stowed it in its niche in the hull by his knees. Ralph had a crooked smile-rather, his smile was straight but a twice broken nose unbalanced his face till it seemed crooked. His hair, wild from the rubber hood, stood out from his head in a brown tangle. “The lake scare you?” he asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Good. It should. It’s one scary place.”

  Anna stopped what she was doing to look at him. Fit, compact, in his early thirties, he didn’t look afraid of anything. Except perhaps, if the gossip had any truth to it, being tied down to his new baby and his pretty new wife. “Does the lake scare you?” she returned.

  “No. But then it didn’t scare Denny either.” He threw the last of his coffee over the side of the boat. “Why didn’t you tell Lucas you were scared to dive? He’d never razz you about it. He’d give you something else to do, something you’re comfortable with.”

  “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” Anna replied. “Time I made his acquaintance.”

  Pilcher nodded. “We’ll give you all the help you need. Don’t get pigheaded.” He stood up, his feet firm and easy on the moving deck. “And stay a little scared. You’ll live longer.”

  The District Ranger went inside. Anna didn’t want to think anymore of the dive. I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it, she told herself. She lashed the tanks down so they wouldn’t roll, then settled her shoulders against the cabin where she was out of the wind.

  The drizzle had stopped and the sun was piercing through a rent in the clouds above the island, pouring gold down onto the treetops until they glowed a rich green against their shadowed fellows. Sparks of sunshine reached the water. Where they touched, the lake turned emerald and azure. Light, life, color: Anna breathed deeply and knew the breath for a miracle, a celebration, an act of devotion.

  Sandra Fox’s comfortable voice came into her mind, telling her again of a high school girl’s relentless love of a boy. How it molded her career, shaped her life even into her early thirties. A week and a half ago Jo had married her high school boy. Now that boy was dead.

  At the moment, in Jo’s mind, Denny still lived.

  The instant Anna’s husband died, each minute that he had lived became a memory. The good were golden, the bad like an acid that burned in the mind. She hoped Jo’s thoughts these last precious minutes were not the kind that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  By the time they reached Davidson Island the sky was clear and the sun shone down as if it always had. Pilcher and Tattinger had been left at Mott. Anna piloted the Lorelei up to the small wooden dock. A gray jay scolded from the branches of an aspen tree and a mallard swam in and out of the pilings with her downy brood scuttling along in her wake. Anna sidled up to the pier as gently as she could so she wouldn’t overset the ducklings.

  Lucas made the lines fast to the dock cleats and stood in the sun waiting. Both he and Anna did each small unimportant task with a time-consuming precision designed to postpone the inevitable.

  As they walked up the wooded path toward the cabin, three bunnies, new-made and too young to be afraid, hopped out of their way. White baneberry blossoms leaned close and the woods were carpeted ankle-deep in bluebead lilies. A world where rain fell: the abundance of life stunned Anna. This afternoon there was something both reassuring and mocking in such wealth.

  The door of the cabin was open. From within came the sound of a woman’s tuneless humming. Across the honey-colored wooden floors, Anna could see Jo Castle bent over the counter labeling corked test tubes and storing them upright in a wooden rack. The long hair curved out around the oversized glasses frames, then fell till it was forced out again by her wide hips.

  Jo saw them before they had a chance to knock. And she knew there was bad news before they had a chance to speak.

  “What?” she demanded, looking from one to the other. Then more sharply: “What?”

  Lucas took an audible breath. In the short eternity while he was collecting his thoughts, forming his sentences, Anna could see the strain rip through the muscles of Jo Castle’s face, turning each to stone as it passed.

  “It’s god-awful, Jo,” Anna said. “Denny’s been killed.” And Anna started to cry. Jo Castle left the test tube she’d been labeling on the counter, its contents slowly seeping out, and walked straight into Anna’s arms as if she had always found solace there.

  Sandra Fox and Trixy came over at ten-thirty after Trixy’s evening program. Sandra had a casserole that smelled enticingly of onion and garlic and cheese. Women could sit with grief, hold its hand, watch it pour from the eyes of friends and children, lie down beside it and help it to rest. Their delicate strength would weave a net strong as spun steel, keep the widow Castle from hitting bottom.

  Anna slipped out the kitchen door. She would stay the night in Rock Harbor and check on Jo in the morning before she bummed a ride back to Amygdaloid. For a time Jo would need her. Not because she was a friend, but because Anna, too, had lost her husband. Sandra had only lost her eyes, Trixy her parents. In the arrogance of grief, Jo would not believe that they could understand.

  Evidently Lucas had radioed for a lift back to Mott. He had left the Lorelei so Anna could get back to Rock, and she blessed him for a true gentleman.

  “Tell me a story,” Anna said into the mouthpiece. “I’ve had a real bad day.”

  “What kind of a story?” Molly asked. “One where all the bad guys die?”

  “One where nobody dies and the girl gets Robert Redford.”

  “Is this a New York story, or do they live happily ever after?”

  Anna laughed. “Does anybody?”

  “If they do they never pay me a hundred and fifty bucks an hour to hear about it. What’s wrong, Anna?”

  “Zach’s still dead.”

  “Zach and Franco.”

  “Better make it a story with no plot and great costumes,” Anna said. “Tell me about your Westchester wine soirée.”

  “That turned out to be a hoot. At eight hundred and twenty bucks a pop, I wasn’t allowed to sip the elixir of the gods, of course. Us peons had to settle for some French stuff. But the Palates sipped and swirled and sniffed. Three of them said it was the True Vintage-not unlike, I gathered from their tone, a splinter from the True Cross-and the other two swore it was a hoax. My client was in the hoax contingent, as you might imagine. Nothing makes a bona fide Seeker more neurotic than having one of his fellows stumble across the holy grail before he does.

  “How’s that for a story: mystery, romance, tuxedos. And Zach’s still dead. What’s up, Anna?”

  “A diver who worked here was killed on one of the wrecks. I just got done telling his wife.”

  There was sympathetic silence from New York. In the background Anna could hear police sirens.

  “You know the saddest part?” Anna said. “She hasn’t got a sister to tell her stories.”

  After she got off the phone with Molly, Anna sat awhile in the dark. Some enterprising person had disabled the light beside the waiting bench, so the mosquitoes at least had to find their suppers the old-fashioned way.

  Nights in the desert had never seemed dark to Anna. Here, under the canopy of trees, the darkness was absolute. At first she had hated it. Over the weeks she had come to know it, to hear its many soft voices. This night it soothed her. It was a night one could immerse oneself in: still seeing, still h
earing, still a part of, but unseen. Wrapped in summer darkness, Anna felt safe and alone but not lonely. Shut away from the sometimes forbidding beauty of the heavens, the scent of pine and loam and budding leaves all around her, she felt firmly a part of the earth and it was a comfort.

  Footsteps, muted voices intruded and she stood up, melted into the trees off the path. Two people, walking without a light, came up the trail from the marina. They sat on the bench Anna had vacated. She could hear the whisper of fabric sweeping over the wooden seat. “You go first.”

  Anna recognized Damien’s voice. The whisper was probably his cape. A light flickered as the door to the telephone booth was opened and for a second Tinker was lit like an actor on a stage. Then all was dark again.

  Anna slipped quietly away. She didn’t want to talk with Tinker or Damien tonight. This was not their kind of death. This one had a corpse and a widow.

  Patience Bittner found Anna on the deck halfway down her third burgundy. The night sky was pricked full of light but the velvet darkness on the island remained inviolate. Muffled in a dark sweater and black beret, Anna was part of a living shadow beneath the thimbleberry bushes that overhung the deck.

  Patience swept out through the double doors like a woman pursued. At the railing she stopped, her hands resting on the wood, her head drooping forward. Anna could see the movement of the pale shining hair. Patience wore white trousers and a light-colored shirt of shimmery material. Not a good outfit for hiding, Anna thought, and decided she had better make her presence known before the woman stumbled across her and scared herself to death.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Anna whispered.

  Patience screamed. A short stab of sound.

  “Sorry,” Anna apologized. “I guess coming out of the dark those are three pretty terrifying words. It’s me, Anna Pigeon.”

  “Oh Lord…”

  Anna could hear Patience taking deep breaths, lowering her pulse rate.

  “Do you always creep about like that?” the woman demanded.

  Anna took umbrage. She’d felt it was good of her to have given up a moment of her privacy to save Patience a coronary. The alcohol had made her quite benevolent. “I’m not creeping. I’m sitting and drinking. Not at all the same thing. Creeping suggests the active. I am the personification of the passive. Letting the night soak in.”

  Patience had recovered herself; her irritation at being startled had passed. Using her hands like a woman still night-blind, she shuffled over from the railing and sat down on the deck near Anna. “You work on the other side of the island, don’t you?”

  “Amygdaloid.”

  “Not your days off. I remember.”

  “No,” Anna said. “I was with the group that found Denny. I came back with Lucas to break the news to Jo.”

  “Found? My God. Tell me!” Anna felt strong ringers grabbing at her, strong arms shaking her. Patience’s panic was thick in the air between them and all at once Anna was unpleasantly sober. She caught Patience’s hands and held them with difficulty. It had not occurred to her that Patience would not have heard. The news would have shot through the park community within half an hour of Jim and Ralph’s setting foot on Mott. But Patience was a concessionaire, the lodge manager. She was not on the grapevine. At least not the evening edition.

  “Shh. Shh. It’s okay. You’re okay,” Anna said, wondering what Denny had been to Patience. “Denny’s had an accident. We found his body today. I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”

  “My God,” Patience said again and she moaned, a ghostly creaking in the night. “Where was he?”

  “Inside the Kamloops.”

  Patience twitched. Anna felt it like an electric shock running through her arms and hands. Patience took a breath, a shushing sound. Anna wished she could see her face but the darkness in the shadow of the thimbleberry was absolute. Patience’s hands stopped quivering. She returned Anna’s hold with a firm pressure, then tried to withdraw. There was a sense of gathering, of control; a powerful woman remembering who she was.

  “Denny was very kind to Carrie-and me-when we first got here. We were such city slickers. Afraid of wolves and the Windigo; hadn’t sense enough to come in out of the rain. Denny took us under his wing. That’s not going to be forgotten.”

  Eulogy was the first step toward recovery. Patience Bittner would be all right. Anna loosed her hands.

  “Do you have a place to sleep?” Patience asked.

  “I’ll sleep on the Lorelei.”

  “Ralph’s a sweetheart, but his housekeeping leaves something to be desired. Stay with Carrie and me.” Anna hesitated. “Please,” Patience urged. “I’d like to have someone to talk to.”

  Patience put the lodge to bed at midnight and Anna followed her home. In the last of the four lodge buildings sprinkled along the western shore of Rock Harbor, she shared an apartment with her daughter. There was nothing rustic or romantic about the decor-the furnishings looked to have been borrowed from a doctor’s waiting room-but the sliding glass doors opening out of the living room looked across the harbor to the lush shores of Raspberry Island.

  Carrie Bittner wasn’t home, a fact that irritated her mother. Patience put her domestic disappointments aside, however, and turned on her hostess’s charm. Though it was transparent, it was effective. Patience knew how to put people at their ease, and Anna was glad to have been rescued from a mildewed bed aboard Pilcher’s boat. The hot shower, the strains of Rampal on the compact disc player, and the loan of one of Patience’s flannel gowns were welcome luxuries at the end of a trying day.

  As Anna curled up on the sofa, Patience uncorked a bottle of Pinot Noir. Words of protest were in Anna’s mouth but Patience forestalled them.

  “This is an excellent wine,” she said. “It warms without intoxicating. I promise. Tonight we both need it. Wine is important.”

  “You’ve said that before.”

  Patience smiled without embarrassment. “I suppose I have. I’ll probably say it again. Wine is history, comfort and strength, food and drink, art and commerce. You can’t say that about much else.” She handed Anna a small glass of dark purple liquid. She raised hers to the light, met Anna’s eye, and said: “Over the lips and through the gums, look out stomach, here it comes.”

  Anna enjoyed both the wine and the company. She told Patience all she dared of Denny’s whereabouts. The exact details, the 1900s captain’s uniform, the lack of any scuba gear, the precise location, Anna kept to herself. She knew that whoever handled the case would want as much information as possible to be known only to themselves and the killer.

  It was close to one o’clock in the morning when Carrie Bittner came home. She had the flushed, excited look that can only be explained by young love or other covert night actions. As Patience scolded her off to her room, Anna wondered which of the busboys dared to court the boss’s daughter.

  Patience apologized unnecessarily and followed her daughter to bed. Though soothed by wine and warmth, Anna still was not sleepy. For the third time that day she dug in her daypack for Ivanhoe. So much had transpired since last she’d turned its pages, it seemed that Rebecca must surely have perished from old age by now.

  Anna couldn’t concentrate. Putting the book away, she came across Christina’s letter, brought on the Ranger III, unopened, forgotten amid the Sturm and Drang of the past thirty-six hours. She tucked her blankets around her on the sofa and opened the letter. Alison had drawn her a picture of Piedmont. He looked like a yellow and red armadillo but there was an authentic paw print to prove otherwise. Anna smiled at the struggle that must have ensued before Piedmont had let one of his perfect golden paws be pressed into an ink pad, and laughed aloud when she read Christina’s account of trying to scrub vermilion cat tracks off the kitchen counter. Alison was to play Uncle Sam in the Fourth of July pageant, the lilacs were in full bloom, Anna’s order for Justin boots had finally been forwarded from Texas, Christina was going bike riding with Bertie on Sunday, the plumber said the outside faucets needed fros
t-proof somethings. Anna couldn’t make out Chris’s scrawl.

  She put away the letter, looked again at Piedmont-as-armadillo. Christina, as always, had a talent for reaffirming life. She got to the crux of it: Sunday school and plumbers and “What’s for dinner?” Everything else was mere affectation.

  Anna turned off the light. Life would go on. A five-year-old girl was playing Uncle Sam. Universal peace couldn’t be far away.

  SEVEN

  Lucas had wanted a good long surface interval and he got it. The wheels of justice were grinding slow. Not because they ground exceeding fine, Anna thought, but because they were mired down in red tape.

  As Lucas gave Anna a ride back to the north shore he told her of his call to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Assured that the corpse would keep as well at the bottom of the lake as it would in the refrigerator at the morgue, the FBI wanted a man on site when the body was brought up. That man was Frederick Stanton out of Detroit. Frederick (known to his intimates, the FBI secretary told Lucas, as “Frederick”; “Fred” or “Freddy” could undermine any potential for an amicable working relationship) specialized in narcotics violations occurring on the American-Canadian border in the midwest region. Officer Stanton had to give a deposition in New Jersey on Wednesday. Thursday he would fly to Houghton, and Friday take the seaplane to Rock. Only after he arrived could the body be recovered.

  The Chief Ranger speculated that the FBI smelled big-time crime. The Feds couldn’t conceive of any bizarre form of death that wasn’t either mob- or drug-connected, and since everyone knew Italians didn’t dive, that left Denny Castle on the drug connections list.

  Frederick Stanton’s specialty.

  Despite the reports of arrogance, Anna developed a bit of a soft spot for Frederick the Fed: His delays would postpone the dreaded Kamloops dive for five days.