A Superior Death

by Nevada Barr

  Lugging the cooler, Anna came last into the clearing. From a low branch of a spruce tree two beady black eyes met hers. Oscar the bear was on watch, protecting Birch Island camp. Ally stood on a stump, a black cloak held vampirelike across the lower half of her face. Their hosts were Tinker and Damien.

  “How did you guys get here?” Anna asked in surprise. “There’s no boat.”

  “Pizza Dave brought us over in the Loon and dropped us off,” Tinker told her. “He was on his way to Thunder Bay on a pizza run.”

  Taking an NPS boat forty miles across open water to get pizza: it was a firing offense. Anna liked Dave. She hoped she wouldn’t be the one to catch him. “I see Oscar’s on duty,” she said.

  “He’s promised not to offer Ally cigars,” Tinker assured her. Anna eyed the woman narrowly but couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.

  Before the first marshmallow had melted off the stick and fallen into the ashes, Anna was glad the Fates had seen fit to put them in the way of the Coggins-Clarkes. Ally was completely taken with Damien. For at least a week Christina would be haunted by “Damien said…” and “Damien thinks…”

  Tinker showed Anna a dead bat she’d found. Anna had heard the faint whistling of bats’ wings as they cut through the air over the dock at night, but she’d never seen more of them than shadows fleeting over the water. Even Christina was drawn in by Tinker’s knowledge and enthusiasm.

  Tinker handled the little animal as if it still lived. Anna thought the creature would get a respectful interment for its unwitting service-probably with an appropriate ritual and a tiny headstone-but after Tinker had studied it she left it high in the crotch of a tree for the scavengers.

  For some reason-maybe the eccentric clothes or the childlike love of ritual magic-Anna consistently underestimated the Coggins-Clarkes. There was nothing wrong with their minds.

  “That reminds me,” Anna said, speaking to her own thoughts. “Did anyone ever tell you what happened to Donna Butkus?”

  “No,” Damien replied and the inflection implied that no one needed to. He and Ally shared a bench at the picnic table. They’d shoved aside all the condiments, and played some gambling game involving pebbles and elbows of dried macaroni. Oscar looked on.

  “The Windigo,” Damien intoned.

  Mentally, Anna rolled her eyes.

  “What’s a Windigo?” Ally demanded.

  “Shall I tell you a story?” Damien asked the child.

  “A scary one,” Ally insisted.

  “I’ll tell the scariest kind of all-the true kind,” he promised.

  “I don’t know…” Christina began.

  “Please,” Ally begged.

  Damien waited. Chris sighed. “The Windigo,” Damien began. With proper flourishes and a creditable French accent, he told Algernon Blackwood’s classic tale of the Windigo, the cannibal spirit who stalked the north woods snatching up unwary travelers and flying them through the air at such incredible speeds their feet were burned away to stumps and their cries echoed through the clear cold skies.

  “That was a long time ago,” Damien finished. “Things have changed. There are no more voyageurs, hardly any Indians. But the Windigo is still here, still all around us. Anywhere men hunger for what they cannot have, anywhere they will devour others to get their bellies filled with pride or money or land or power, that’s where the Windigo waits.”

  Chris applauded. Tinker beamed: she’d heard the story before. Damien told it at evening programs. Ally was transfixed.

  Alison’s eyes were a little too round for Anna’s comfort. It wasn’t a story for a five-year-old. “Does anybody want to know what really happened to Donna Butkus or not?” she asked testily.

  “What happened, Damien?” Ally asked to hear him talk. The name Donna Butkus would mean nothing to her.

  “She was eaten by her husband, Scotty,” Damien explained. “With pickle relish.”

  Ally squealed with delight. “Was Scotty a Windigo?”

  “Yes.”

  Christina said: “Oh for heaven’s sake!”

  Tinker crumbled chocolate into a split banana.

  Oscar was unmoved.

  “I did talk with Scotty,” Anna pushed on doggedly, “the morning after the reception for Denny. Donna’s sister, Roberta, ruptured a disk. Scotty told me Donna went to Houghton to give her a hand.”

  “Scotty said.” Damien pursed his lips. Obviously that carried no weight with him. “And the case of relish?”

  “Didn’t ask,” Anna admitted.

  “Ah.”

  “Roberta Ingles?” Christina sounded mildly alarmed.

  “I don’t know her last name,” Anna replied. “Donna goes by Butkus. God knows why. But Scotty said ‘her sister, Roberta.’ ”

  “When did this happen-the disk?” The concern was still on Christina’s face.

  “Why?” Anna asked. It all seemed rather far from Chris for her to take such a personal interest.

  “Because I went bicycling with Bertie Sunday. She was fine then.”

  “Bertie is Roberta, Donna’s sister?”

  “Yes. She told me to say hi if I saw Donna.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Anna breathed. “And Scotty’s left the island.”

  “What is it, Anna?” Chris touched her arm.

  “Denny and Donna. Donna disappears. Scotty lies. Castle dies. Scotty leaves the island. Maybe the Houghton police had better start looking for a second body.”

  “They won’t find it,” Damien said and he tapped the Durkee relish jar significantly.

  “And Scotty never left the island,” Tinker added.

  “Did you…” Anna hesitated to use words like “spy” or “snoop.” “…follow up on Donna’s disappearance?”

  “Some. Scotty’s been kind of short with us ever since he ate Donna.”

  “Sort of spiritual indigestion?” Anna offered. Everyone, including Ally, gave her stern matronly looks. “Sorry. Go on.”

  “He’d been kind of nasty to Damien a time or two. But when we heard he’d gone to Houghton for a few days, we thought it would be safe to go through his garbage for recyclables.”

  “You know it’s illegal?” Anna asked.

  “It’s a greater crime to let resources and energy go to waste,” Damien said earnestly and Anna caught another glimpse of the boyish intensity usually hidden behind his cloak of mystery.

  “Okay. So you went through his trash and…”

  “For recyclables,” Christina reiterated.

  “For recyclables. And…”

  “We found a flier that had come in on Saturday’s Ranger Three-we know because everybody got one that day. There was a TV dinner, the kind that come with their own plastic plate and you throw the whole thing out. The leftovers were still fresh. Three Jack Daniel’s bottles and a couple of six-packs of Mickey’s Big Mouths. Dave picks up the garbage on Wednesdays and Saturdays. If Scotty’d gone to Houghton Thursday morning like he said he was going to, his trash would’ve been empty.”

  If it was supposed to be empty, Anna wondered, why search for recyclables? But she didn’t say anything. “Any relish bottles?” she couldn’t resist asking.

  “Aunt Anna, she’d already been eaten up!” said Ally with exasperation.

  “Right. Did you see Scotty?” Anna asked seriously. “Hear anything?”

  Tinker and Damien shook their heads.

  “He could be hurt or sick. He’s prime heart attack material,” Anna said. “I’ll radio in as soon as we get back to Amygdaloid and get someone over there to check on him.”

  “We never thought…” Tinker began and she looked so stricken Anna was afraid she would cry or faint. “I should have thought. I haven’t changed a bit. What if he’s lying there hurt or dead and I didn’t even think to look?” Tinker’s voice had risen to a wail.

  Anna sat rooted to the bench. Christina, making crooning sounds, put an arm around Tinker. Damien just hung his head, helpless with misery.

  “It wouldn’t be that big a los
s,” Anna said in an attempt to soothe Tinker. Christina silenced her with a look.

  In a few minutes Tinker had recovered herself but the picnic was over.

  As soon as they’d landed at Amygdaloid, Anna radioed two-oh-two, Scotty Butkus’s call number. On the second hail, Scotty answered and Anna canceled her plans to radio Pilcher requesting Butkus’s quarters be checked. “Just making a radio check, Scotty,” Anna said. “I’ve been having some static here.”

  “Loud and clear on this end,” he assured her.

  Anna signed off wondering what Tinker and Damien were up to.

  Christina and Ally spent the night at Amygdaloid Ranger Station. Chris took the bed. Anna and Alison camped out on the floor. “Because we’re tough,” Ally explained. The next morning Anna took them back to Rock Harbor so they could catch the Ranger III. It was a six-hour boat trip to Houghton. Anna did not underestimate what it had cost Chris to make the visit. She’d spent twelve hours cooped up on a boat with a five-year-old child. All the coloring books in the state of Michigan couldn’t have made it smooth sailing.

  Anna remained on dock waving till the Ranger III cleared the harbor. Christina had insisted on it on her first visit. “It’s the closest a government secretary may ever come to leaving for Europe aboard the Queen Elizabeth,” she’d said. Anna had made a point of doing it ever since.

  Finding Scotty wasn’t difficult. He liked to be on hand when the Ranger III or the Queen set sail. When Anna saw him he was across the harbor indulging in his favorite pastime on duty: swapping fish stories for fishing stories.

  For a long time, she sat aboard the Belle Isle trying not to look like a cheap detective on a stakeout. She wasn’t watching Scotty, but trying to think of a way to get answers to her questions without appearing to interrogate a fellow officer. Till she had more conservative proof than Tinker and Damien’s testimony, she would not go to Ralph or Lucas.

  When inspiration did not come, she decided to play it by ear. As she walked down the pier to where Scotty stood, one booted foot on someone’s gunwale, talking to a red-faced man in an orange tractor cap, she could hear the tones that usually heralded tall tales. “I kid you not, that son of a bitch was at least…”

  “Hey ya, Scotty,” she said and sauntered up beside the two men. The fisherman took the interruption as an opportunity to escape, made a quick excuse, and trotted away. “How was Houghton?”

  Scotty looked a little shamefaced. “To tell you the truth, I never made it,” he said with a dry chuckle. He laughed through tight lips. He always laughed like that, as if at an off-color joke he’d tell if it weren’t for the presence of a lady.

  Anna treated him to the friendly silent stare she had been taught in law enforcement school. Eyes wide, brows slightly elevated, she was ready to hang on his every word. She half expected him to stare right back if for no other reason than to let her know she couldn’t get away with pulling that trick on him.

  “I was a little under the weather. Holed up a few days,” he told her.

  “Flu?” Anna asked solicitously.

  “One hell of a bug. I was flat on my back.”

  Anna thought of the three Jack Daniel’s bottles and the beer. “My mom always said there’s nothing for the flu but to drink plenty of liquids,” she said.

  That scared up Scotty’s Wile E. Coyote look, half embarrassed, half proud. Anna wondered what it meant, but he was done volunteering information. “I’m trying to track down Donna,” she said suddenly. “She’s not with her sister. Do you know where I can get in touch with her?”

  “I’m getting tired of this,” Scotty snapped. “Those little shits better not fuck with me.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You heard me. Tell them to stay the hell away from me and Donna.”

  “What little shits?”

  “Look, you can pull that innocent act all you want but it’s not going to work on me. I’ve been in this business one hell of a lot longer than you have. I can smell a rat a mile away and that little poof and his wife stink to high heaven. They got a hair up their ass about Donna. I can’t prove it, but I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts they’ve been through my garbage, peeking in my windows. If I catch them at it, I’ll wring their necks for them. They’re not harmless little woo-woos. I’ve seen that Tinker before. I don’t remember where, but she wasn’t calling herself Tinker then. Satanism-devil worship-is my guess. They had Donna putting together all kinds of muck from leaves and moss. I was about half scared they’d poison her. That’s one of the reasons I sent her to stay with her sister.”

  Anna waited but the outburst was at an end. “Donna’s not at her sister’s,” she reminded him.

  “You got something to say to Donna, you say it to me,” he growled. When Anna said nothing, he stomped off down the dock. A couple of tourists watched with delight: better than an evening program on wildflowers any day. Anna smiled crookedly and followed Scotty off the quay.

  She had a few calls to make. Checking the egress from Isle Royale wasn’t difficult. The Voyageur, Queen, Ranger III, and the seaplane from Houghton were the only ways out of Rock Harbor.

  Donna Butkus hadn’t booked passage on any of them.

  Anna wished she’d asked Scotty about the case of pickle relish.

  NINE

  Anna had done her duty: She had reported Donna’s absence to the District Ranger. Her report had omitted Tinker and Damien’s cannibalism-and-reincarnation theory. Pilcher had been given the bare bones: Donna had not been seen on the island for nearly two weeks; Scotty had lied about where she was; there was no record of her leaving ISRO by commercial carrier.

  Ralph Pilcher seemed singularly unmoved by the information. His mind was occupied with the imminent arrival of Frederick the Fed on the next morning’s seaplane, plans for recovering Denny’s body, and investigating a submerged crime scene.

  The body recovery and investigation created an interesting problem. It all had to be done in twenty-five minutes of bottom time. More than that and the ascent time began to creep upwards of an hour and a half to decompress. Even in a dry suit, a diver was faced with hypothermia if exposed too long in frigid waters.

  Ralph pointed out that Donna had not officially been reported as missing by any of her friends or her family, and he hinted that Tinker and Damien were not among the most highly reliable of sources. After the Castle corpse was recovered and the investigation firmly in the hands of the FBI, he promised, he would nose around, talk with Scotty and Trixy. Trixy was Donna’s best friend on the island.

  Anna had to satisfy herself with that. It wasn’t hard. She didn’t enjoy conversations with Scotty. Whether it was knee-jerk hatred of someone twenty years younger, female and in competition with him for the next pay raise, or whether she just had an irritating quayside manner, she wasn’t sure, but every time she tried to talk with him, she set him off. Pilcher, with his man’s man charm and roguish reputation, would probably fare better.

  As Anna fired up the Belle Isle and headed up Rock Harbor from Mott, she speculated as to whether or not Scotty possessed the courage or the control it would take to murder a wife and her lover.

  Scotty and Denny mano a mano? It seemed out of character. Scotty had a vindictive streak but it was usually expressed in unsigned letters and backbiting phone calls just before positions were filled or promotions handed out.

  But Scotty drank and alcohol changes character. Had there been a drunken fight, as Jim had said? Not impossible. There was no denying Butkus had retained his upper-body strength. It was evidenced in the line of muscle under his lightweight summer uniform shirts.

  If Scotty had killed Denny, why put the body on the Kamloops? Why the sailor suit? That was a touch of macabre whimsy more in keeping with the Coggins-Clarkes’ mysticism than Butkus’s good-old-boy approach to life. Unless the sailor suit had special meaning for Scotty-or Donna. Perhaps Scotty wanted her to know her lover was found in the costume on the Kamloops. Some sort of personal revenge. What sort of meaning? A lover�
�s in-joke? Even for Denny Castle, an engine room nearly two hundred feet below the surface of Lake Superior was an unlikely trysting place. And if Tinker and Damien were right, Donna had vanished before Castle was killed. That would destroy any theory that Denny’s bizarre entombment was meant as a message to, or vengeance upon, Donna.

  Anna wondered if Scotty could even make a dive as demanding as the Kamloops. Physical problems were not the only reason he’d not kept his diving certification. In a rare moment of indiscretion, Lucas Vega had told Anna that Butkus had lost his nerve. From the mix of bravado about the good old days and contempt for the new that Scotty evinced whenever the talk turned to deep diving, Anna suspected Lucas was right.

  “Did Denny kill Donna because she rejected him and then Scotty kill Denny to avenge her?” Anna asked aloud as she used to ask her horse, Gideon, in Texas. The Belle Isle didn’t have skin to twitch or ears to rotate to signify interest, but hummed on with mechanical indifference.

  Speculation was giving Anna a headache. Briefly, she considered reviewing the facts, but they were few in number and absurd in nature. All that was known for certain was that Denny Castle, dressed in an antique captain’s uniform, was floating in the engine room of a long-dead ship with sixty-four-year-old ghosts for company. And that Scotty Butkus had ordered a case of Heinz sweet pickle relish.

  Denny and Donna’s affair, Scotty and Denny’s fistfight, even Donna’s disappearance, were all just hearsay. Donna could have gotten a ride to the mainland on a private vessel. Denny could have given her a lift himself on the 3rd Sister.

  Davidson Island swam up on Anna’s right. Impulsively, she turned from the channel and piloted up to the dock. The Blackduck was moored there as well as a sixteen-foot skiff used by Maintenance. Anna tied the Belle Isle in behind the skiff and walked up the wooded path toward the cabin Jo had shared with her husband for so short a time.

  The door stood open, the screen closed to keep out the blackflies that had come into bloom with the spiky pink fire-weed in late June. A luna moth, nearly big enough to transport Dr. Dolittle to the moon, clung to the wire above the door handle. Not wanting to disturb it by knocking, Anna cupped her hands around her eyes and peered into the gloom.