A Superior Death Read online

  Her refusal cost her any goodwill she might have earned for bringing them and their boat in off the lake. By the time they were settled in the shelter at Little Todd Harbor with her assurance that she would return with a Homelite pump in the morning, they’d grown almost surly.

  Leaving them to deal with their damaged egos, Anna made her escape. Nine-fifteen p.m.: hers would be a late supper. She’d forgotten she was hungry. So far north, the sun was only just setting. It wouldn’t be full dark for another thirty minutes-later, had there been no overcast. In June the days seemed to go on forever.

  “Three-zero-two en route to Amygdaloid from Todd Harbor,” Anna put in the blind call. The dispatcher in Rock Harbor went off duty at seven, but the call would be taped and, should she go down, at least they’d know where to start diving for the body.

  Involuntarily, she shuddered. A body wouldn’t be alone down there. There were plenty of ships lying on Superior ’s bottom. Nearly a dozen provided scuba-diving attractions in the park: the America , Monarch, Emperor, Algoma, Cox, Congdon, Chisholm, Glenlyon, Cumberland , the Kamloops. Off her port bow a buoy bobbed, marking the deepest of the wrecks: the Kamloops. Her stern rested at one hundred and seventy-five feet, her bow at two hundred and sixty. Divers were discouraged: too deep, too cold, too dangerous.

  Five sailors still stood guard in the engine room. Anna had seen an underwater photograph of them. Deep, cold, protected from currents, no creatures to eat them, they swam like ghosts in the old ship. For fifty years they’d drifted alone in the dark. Then in 1977 divers found the wreck. Years of submersion had robbed the bodies of most of their corporeal selves and they were translucent as wraiths.

  Think of something else, Anna commanded herself. As she entered the familiar channel between Amygdaloid Island and Belle Isle, and saw the ranger station snugged up safe from storms at the foot of the moss-covered cliff, she allowed herself one short dream of cholla cactus and skies without milky veils of moisture, of a sun with fire to it and food hotter even than that.

  After the lion incident at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Anna had felt the need to move on, to start over. At heart, the Park Service was a bureaucracy and, in the wake of the discoveries, there had been much talk and little action.

  Still, Anna had worn out her welcome in West Texas. The next move, she promised as she eased the Bertram up to the dock, would be back to the Southwest, to the desert. And with a promotion; twenty-two thousand dollars a year was getting harder and harder to live on.

  The 3rd Sister, a handsome forty-foot cabin cruiser with a high-ceilinged pilot’s cabin and a flying bridge decked out in red and white pin-striping, was moored across the dock. A hibachi stood unattended on the rough wooden planking of the pier. Anna could smell fish broiling over charcoal.

  As she stepped onto the dock, lines in hand, a lithe form bundled in a heavy woolen shirt and a close-fitting fisherman’s cap leapt from the deck of the diving boat and took the stern line to make the Bertram fast to the dock.

  Anna finished tying the bow, tugging the half-knots snug, then coiling the tail of the line out of tripping distance. “Thanks, Holly,” she called down the length of the boat. The wind took her words and flung them out over the channel. Anna was just as glad. As her helper turned, faced the last light from the western sky, she realized it was Holly’s brother, Hawk, the third man in the Sister’s three-person dive crew.

  Many people made the mistake. The twins were so alike they seemed two sides of a coin; male and female brought together just once to share the same species.

  At thirty-two Hawk’s sister, Holly, was tall, the cut of her features clean without hardness, her dark hair soft but not fine. Her body was lean and well muscled and her shoulders were broad. Yet only someone crippled with sexual insecurity would have called her mannish.

  Hawk was all of this and yet the very essence of masculine. The curve of his shoulders and the blunt efficiency of his wind-chapped hands carried a different message. Where Holly was quick, bright, and strong, he was controlled, thoughtful, exact.

  He dropped the line in a perfect coil and came across the planking.

  The eyes might take Hawk for Holly, Anna thought, the senses, never. One would have to be as neuter as a snail not to feel the difference.

  He stopped beside her, turning to take the sharp edge of the wind onto his own back. “Denny’s made too much salad as usual. Plenty of pike,” he said, nodding toward the hibachi. “Better join us for supper.”

  Standing so close, Anna could see the dark stubble on his jaw. A delicate and somehow pleasing scent of Scotch whiskey warmed his breath. She hesitated. Relief at regaining solid ground had released her fatigue.

  “No clients today,” he added as an incentive. “We dove the Cox. Just swam around the bow to get our feet wet. Too rough for tourists. Besides, we needed the dive alone.”

  “Supper would be good,” Anna said. “Bring it inside? I’ll light a fire and pour a suitable libation.”

  Hawk nodded and dropped over the gunwale of the 3rd Sister as Anna trotted, wind at her back, up the dock and onto the shore of Amygdaloid Island. Home, she thought sourly, but she was glad enough to be there.

  The North Shore Ranger Station just missed being utterly charming. Standing foursquare to the dock, the outside was picturesque with a peaked roof and walls of red-brown board and battens. The paint had weathered to almost the same shade as the cliff that backed the building. A central door, flanked by many-paned windows, gave it a look of olde-tyme honesty. Two stovepipes, tilted and tin-hatted against the wind, added a sense of roguish eccentricity.

  Inside, the age of the building told in many small comfortless ways. It was divided into two large rooms. The front half was the National Park Service office. Under one window was Anna’s desk, a marine radio, and a vintage 1919 safe where the revenues from the state of Michigan fishing licenses were kept, as was Anna’s.357 service revolver when it was not on board the Belle. Across from the desk three Adirondack-style easy chairs nosed up to a cast-iron woodstove. A crib made of lath held firewood and kindling. Maps and charts shared wall space with relics that had accumulated over the years: an oar engraved with the names of two long-dead fishermen who had worked out of the Edison Fishery on the south side of the island, scraps of iron recognizable only to students of lake travel, bits of weathered wood, and three framed, faded photographs.

  The first was of the America, the pleasure/mail/supply ship that serviced the island in its heyday as a resort community. The second was of the America ’s bow thrust up through the ice; a pathetic trophy held in the lake’s wintery grip long after it had struck a shoal and sunk in the North Gap outside Washington Harbor. The third, a long glimmering underwater shot, was of the once sleek-sided ship vanishing into the darkness of the lake.

  The bow of the America was still scarcely a yard beneath the surface but her stern rested eighty feet down. On a calm day, when the water was clear, it gave Anna vertigo to look down at the old wreck. The last photo captured that dizzy sense of pitching into space.

  None of this paraphernalia had been dusted for at least a year and probably longer than that. Rodent droppings, sifting down from the attic over the long winter when Isle Royale was ice-bound and closed to all human occupation, washed the overhead beams with gray. Cobwebs moved faintly in the drafts.

  The rear portion of the house was devoted to living quarters. A second woodstove, half the size of the one in the office, was crowded into one corner. Opposite, along the wall beneath a window that faced the cliff, was a crumbling Formica counter with a sink and hand pump. A two-burner gas stove, a gas refrigerator, and an aluminum shower stall lined the short northern wall. A narrow wooden door led out back past the propane tank to the pit toilet.

  Anna’s bed, dresser, and closet were against the inside wall. Beside the bed, where the cracked blue-and-red-speckled linoleum came to a curling end, was a faded oval rag rug. When Anna’s housemate, Christina, had visited from Houghton, she had stoo
d on that rug as a woman might stand on an island in a rising sea of offal and remarked: “How charming. A Great Room divided into conversation areas.” She’d laughed though, and before she and Alison- her five-year-old daughter-had left, she’d managed to make it a home for Anna.

  A patchwork coverlet and handmade pillows brightened the bed. Mexican rugs warmed the walls and kept the drafts out. Alison’s contribution-Ally’s taste and her mother’s money-was a see-through shower curtain bedecked with saxophone-playing alligators in tuxedos.

  Christina and her daughter had known Anna less than a year. When she had left Guadalupe, where Chris had been a secretary, they had come with her. Now Anna divided her year between the island in the summer and the park headquarters in Houghton, Michigan, in the winter, where she shared a house with Chris and Ally. When she’d come out to the island in early May, Anna had been surprised at how much she missed them. She’d always thought of herself as a loner.

  Anna lit the oil lamps and laid fires in both stoves, opening dampers and vents to give them a head start. On this drizzly June day the whole place smelled of damp and rat droppings.

  Heat and light began to revive her, and overlaid the rickety rooms with a sense of romance. Shelter from the storm, Anna thought as she peeled off the layers of gray and green and pulled on dry fleecy pants and a top with a hood. Given time-and a decent red wine-she believed she might even come to like the place.

  The bang of the front door announced the arrival of the 3rd Sister’s crew and Anna yelled a superfluous “Come in” as Hawk, Holly, and Denny Castle gusted into the outer office. The wind that carried them smelled of mesquite smoke and whiskey.

  Holly was a little drunk-not sloppy drunk, but high. Her eyes burned with alcohol-induced fever and her cheeks were redder than the wind would account for. She carried a bottle of Black amp; White in her coat pocket, the label showing as if she dared anyone to comment on it. Mist had glued her short dark hair to her forehead in sculpted curls. She looked like a creature of storm and sea, a siren ready to sing some modern-day Ulysses onto the rocks.

  Hawk, though he took a glass of Scotch when Holly pressed him, was drinking little. His eyes seldom left his sister’s face and he seemed half afraid of the fires that burned so clearly there.

  Denny Castle, captain of the 3rd Sister dive concession, a private venture permitted by the NPS, was older than the Bradshaw twins, close to Anna’s age she would have guessed, though he might have been as old as forty-five or as young as thirty-five. Life on the water and under it had weathered his face until it was aged and ageless, like wood that’s been worn almost smooth. There was no gray in his hair, but in hair so blond, it would scarcely show as anything more than a subtle fading. He wore it long in the fashion of General Custer. The resemblance to the fabled Indian fighter ended there. No mustache, no beard. Denny Castle’s face reflected a deep and abiding care. It was a look that drew women to him like moths to a flame, only to find themselves scorched by his indifference. The care was for the lake; abiding love for Superior in all her moods.

  There was a legend that in Superior’s storms there sometimes came three waves, each bigger than the last. It was the third that drove ships to their deaths. The waves were called the Three Sisters. It was they, lakers would tell, who had drowned the Edmund Fitzgerald. Denny liked to say he had met the third sister and married her. If gossip could be trusted, he had spent more time on board the 3rd Sister over the past eleven years than at any woman’s breakfast table.

  Castle wasn’t drinking at all, nor was he talking. As he ran back out into the night to check on dinner, Anna poured herself a glass of Mondavi red and, wondering what the hell was going on, settled close to the stove. The air had an electric feel to it, fueled by alternating currents between the three divers. Anna didn’t ask what was up. She had little doubt that some revealing sparks would soon begin to fly.

  Within a couple of minutes Denny ducked in out of the drizzle, a plate of blackened fish in his hands. Lamplight caught beads of water on his hair and they flickered orange, a jeweled halo around his face. “Supper,” he announced.

  “D’Artagnan’s last supper. I’ll drink to that,” Holly said. Despite the liquor, her voice was clear and low, but Denny winced as if she had shrilled at him.

  “Forgot the salad-” he said and closed himself again into the night beyond the cabin door.

  Hawk leaned down and fed sticks into the woodstove. Anna guessed that whatever gnawed at Holly was eating him. Once more she had the sense that they were two aspects of one person. This night it was the Holly aspect that spoke. Hawk stood back, a reservoir of strength for her to draw on.

  “Porthos and Aramis,” Anna said aloud. Watching the two faces, so alike, she had put the allusion together. “How long have the three of you been diving together?”

  A tear, colored like blood from the fire’s light, flashed on Holly’s cheek. She swatted it away as if it were a fly. “Always,” she said.

  “Seven years,” Hawk defined “always,” but it sounded as if it was always to him as well.

  “Since we knew what diving was about. Since the Three Sisters were in pinafores. Since we quit fucking around,” Holly said sharply. “Always.”

  Anna waited but there was no more. Denny came back with the salad and, seeming to take it for granted that he was to wait on them, cleared Anna’s desk and set out plates and flatware. Anna was too tired to help and Hawk and Holly seemed determined to let him serve. When he was finished, he sat down on a stool he’d pulled up. He was the only one at the table, the only one interested, it seemed, in the food.

  “This is a celebration,” he said, looking not at them but down at his empty plate. “I’m getting married tomorrow.”

  “To a regular woman?” Anna asked, taken by surprise.

  Holly began to laugh.

  Hawk turned his face away from Denny, from his sister. There was as much pain in his look as there had been in Holly’s laughter.

  Anna stood, drained her glass, shook off their misery. She was tired. She was hungry. Maybe they’d been on one too many dives. The deep addled people’s brains. She carried her wine bottle to the desk and sat down in the wooden swivel chair. Supper was made and it was free.

  “Congratulations, Denny,” she said equitably. “Please pass the salad.”

  TWO

  Mist lay over Amygdaloid Channel. Humps of pale gray moved lazily over the surface as if ghostly whales swam between air and water. Patches drifted clear and the silver of reflected light glowed till fingers of fog curled back to reclaim the space. To the east, over the green ridges of Belle Isle, the dawn sky was burning into blue, the promise of a beautiful day.

  Wrapped against the chill that the forty-eighth parallel would not relinquish even in June, Anna sat on the front steps of the ranger station. Cloaked in a shapeless plaid flannel bathrobe, the tail tucked under her feet to keep them from the dew-bitten planks, she stared through binoculars at the far shore: a thin line of sand and stone, now revealed, now shrouded by the mist. Beside her a mug of coffee curled tiny tendrils of fog into the cold air; a minuscule offering to the gods of the lake.

  “Come on,” Anna said softly. “Come out. I know you’re there. And I know you’ve got the baby. Show yourselves.”

  From the silence of the channel a loon called and was answered. The sun pierced the pines on the cliff’s top and dyed the mist rose. Open water glittered, bright as new pennies. Again the loon called its haunting liquid warble, this time to be answered by the sound of wings on water.

  Now they’ll come, Anna thought. “I’ve seen your tracks,” she whispered. “I know you’re there.”

  A shadowy red form darted between her and the dock where gently rocking boats cradled fishermen. She refocused the glasses. The black muzzle of a little fox came into view. Head tilted to one side, pink tongue lolling, she sat less than twenty feet from the station steps ready to beg for her breakfast like a house dog. “Not you, Knucklehead,” Anna murmured and a
gain trained the field glasses on the opposite shore.

  Somewhere to the north a power boat growled to life and morning’s spell was broken. Now they wouldn’t come. “Damn.” Anna lowered the binoculars. Isle Royale’s wolves were the shyest of creatures. Some rangers who’d worked the island for years had never so much as glimpsed them. Scat, tracks, howling, confused reports from hikers startled by foxes-that was all most people ever knew of the wolves in summer.

  In winter, when the island’s dense foliage dropped its leaves and deep snow made tracking easy, a Winter Study Team came to ISRO-Park Service shorthand for Isle Royale-for several weeks and studied the wolf packs. Only two packs remained, twelve wolves in all, with only one new birth in the past year. The wolves were dying and the scientists didn’t know why. There was some indication that an outbreak of canine parvovirus, a disease carried by domestic dogs, was a factor in the decline, but inbreeding was the guess most favored at the moment.

  The Park Service was doing all it could to preserve the wolves, even to the extremely unpopular extent of denying visitors and staff the privilege of bringing their pets to the island-or even within the park’s boundaries four and a half miles out. Still, the wolves did not thrive, did not reproduce.

  At least it’s not us killing them, not directly, Anna thought, and enjoyed the sense of being one of the good guys, a compatriot instead of a despoiler. It was a proud feeling. And rare as hen’s teeth, added her mind’s resident cynic.

  “Tomorrow,” she said to the empty stretch of beach across the channel. “At dawn. Be there or be square. And bring the puppy.”

  The roar of the motorboat grew louder, wrecking what remained of tranquillity. A glossy wine-colored bow plowed up the mist in the channel. Anna gathered up her cup and crept back inside. It wouldn’t do for the public to catch the ranger in her pajamas. Besides, it was her lieu day. If she didn’t escape before a tourist happened to her, she’d undoubtedly get roped into some task for which the NPS wouldn’t pay overtime.