A Superior Death

room and back up. If they stayed down much longer they would have to make prolonged stops on the ascent or they’d risk the bends. The only cure was to go into a hyperbaric chamber and start the long re-compression process. The nearest chamber was in Minneapolis, two hours away by low-flying plane.

As the abandoned Blackduck, Jo’s boat, bobbed gently to the starboard, Jim tried to raise Mrs. Castle on the radio. Sandra Fox answered, reminding him Jo had not yet been issued a handheld Motorola radio.

“Try Scotty,” Anna suggested. “He could stop by Davidson and see if she’s there.” Davidson Island had a lovely rustic cabin the NPS set aside for visiting researchers. Permanent NPS staff had more prosaic quarters with flush toilets and electricity on Mott. Seasonal rangers had lusted after the Davidson house but it was much too nice for seasonals.

“Scotty’s off today,” Jim said. His voice was nasal and fiat, so much in keeping with his traditional nerd exterior that Anna wondered if all the pencil-neck-geek genes were housed on the same chromosome.

“He got yesterday and today off and he took another day of annual leave so he could go to Houghton and have his ear looked at.”

“What’s wrong with his ear?” Anna asked because Jim expected her to.

“Scotty’s part deaf in his left ear. He wears one of those little bitty hearing aids in it. Did you know that?” Jim asked so sharply Anna wondered if he was telling Scotty’s secrets.

“Nope.” She’d guessed Scotty was hard of hearing on one side by the way he cocked his head and the number of times he asked people to repeat things, but she’d never given it any thought.

“That damn Denny Castle hit him on his bad ear,” Tattinger went on. “Scotty had that little thing in there and it hurt him.” Jim sounded angry but had a vocal range that expressed perpetual discontent and Anna wasn’t sure if he had something against Denny or was just making conversation.

“How did Denny happen to hit him?”

“He didn’t happen to hit him,” Jim snapped. Anna didn’t take offense. Jim had never learned how to win friends and influence people. “Castle hit him on purpose. After that stupid reception, Castle came over to Mott. I wasn’t there, but I guess he was looking for Donna. Scotty wasn’t taking any of his crap.”

And Scotty was drunk, Anna thought. “A fight?”

“More like a shoving match. Denny Castle doesn’t have the gonads to fight.”

“Gonads.” Not “balls.” Anna swallowed a smile. She pictured a little, skinny, red-haired Jimmy Tattinger practicing swearing in the bathroom mirror and never managing to get it quite right.

For a while they sat without talking. Anna got her daypack and dug out a paperback copy of Ivanhoe. It produced a book’s inevitable effect. In cats it stimulated the urge to sit on the pages. In humans it stimulated conversation.

“I feel sorry for Jo,” Jim said, staring out the window to where the Blackduck had nudged up beside the Lorelei. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this was no accident, if she got upset and came out here and killed herself. It’d be one way of getting away from that damned Denny Castle.”

Anna was a little surprised at his vehemence and at his echoing Scotty’s words. Why was Tattinger so down on Denny? Jim didn’t have any wife to steal. Maybe it was enough that Denny openly expressed the opinion that Tattinger was a lousy diver, an incompetent manager, and showed no concern for the resources he was hired to protect.

She decided to prod a little. “I don’t know why anybody would feel sorry for Jo,” she said. “There’s not many women who’d throw Denny Castle out of bed for eating crackers.”

Jim snorted, a sound like old pug dogs make. “Oh, women fall for that crap Denny dishes out.”

The insult to Denny and all of womankind seemed to be in about equal proportions. Jim exposed a moist ruffled underlip as he smiled at a delicious memory.

A number of retorts came to mind but Anna left them unsaid. She wondered if Jim was trying to needle her into an argument. For a moment she just watched him; the pale restless eyes staring at the gray nothing beyond the windscreen, the bored wanderings of his white-skinned fingers picking at the vinyl seat cover where it was worn through.

No, she decided, he wasn’t trying intentionally to provoke her. He was just naturally irritating. At his age- somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-he probably knew he rubbed people the wrong way. Anna suspected he’d never figured out why and somewhere along the line had given up trying and retreated into his computers.

“I used to work on St. John in the Caribbean,” he said suddenly. “I didn’t mind diving so much there. It’s warm.”

“Why did you leave the Virgin Islands National Park?” Anna asked. Tattinger was a GS-5 making less than nineteen thousand a year, an entry-level position, so it hadn’t been for a promotion.

“The District Ranger was a prick,” he said succinctly.

“Ah.” He didn’t elaborate and Anna said: “A Submerged Cultural Resource Specialist who doesn’t like diving? What happened? Shark bite you?”

“They made me do it in the Navy,” he said. “It’s a job.”

A secure government job with health and retirement benefits. Easy to get for an ex-Navy man with veteran’s preference in hiring. Dig a comfortable little air-conditioned niche and wait out the years until retirement while hundreds of overqualified people worked as seasonals, scraping by winters doing odd jobs, because they wanted to save the world- or at least one little corner of it.

It wasn’t hard to understand how Denny had come by his contempt for Jim.

Anna picked up Ivanhoe again, determined to answer only in grunts until any further attempts at conversation were effectively squashed.

The respite was short-lived. Ralph and Lucas surfaced. She and Jim helped them crawl aboard. For half a minute the divers lay in a puddle on the boat deck like a couple of unpleasant monsters dragged in with the day’s catch.

With a popping, sucking noise, Vega pulled off his rubber hood and dropped it on the deck. Anna tossed it against the cabin and knelt to help him with his tanks. Vega’s face was almost the same shade of gray as the lake.

“Not a joke?” Anna asked.

Lucas shook his head. “Not a joke. It’s Denny, Denny Castle.”

Anna rocked back on her heels. She felt as if she’d been punched in the solar plexus. It confused her.

She hadn’t known she cared.

SIX

Jim Tattinger did most of the talking and he was asking questions that neither Ralph nor Lucas wanted to answer: What did Denny look like? Could they tell what killed him? Did they touch him? Were his eyes open? He talked rapidly and his usually pale skin was flushed up to his ears. He babbled like a man trying to cover up a social faux pas.

As a reaction to the death of a colleague, guilty embarrassment seemed singularly inappropriate. Anna wondered if Tattinger was ashamed of having spoken ill of the dead when the dead floated thirty fathoms beneath his feet.

She and Jim had talked of Castle as if he were alive. In their minds-at least in Anna’s-he had still lived. It was as if no one could die until she had been informed. In a way that was true. Even now, years after Zachary had been killed, Anna would sometimes forget he was dead. She’d think of a joke she wanted to tell him, a place she wanted to show him, and for that moment he would be alive again, utterly alive. So much so that the next moment, when she remembered, was always a fresh grief, though now blessedly shortlived.

Anna made a mental note to tell Jo Castle that things did get better eventually. She did not expect Jo would believe her.

Lucas Vega thought of Denny’s wife at that same moment. He and Ralph were back in dry clothes sitting on the engine box drinking hot coffee from a thermos while Anna and Jim stowed gear and reeled in line. “Anna,” Vega