A Superior Death

guard for all eternity over the submerged treasures of Lake Superior.”

Lucas snorted genteelly. Though he’d brought the subject up, this line of conversation was to be at an end. Anna fell silent and Vega turned his attention to docking the Lorelei.

Bow and stern lines in hand, Anna jumped ashore and tied off while Vega shut down the engines. Through the cabin window she saw him take off the green NPS baseball cap and put on the flat-brimmed straw hat used on official occasions.

Lucas stepped onto the dock, smoothing his coarse black hair where the hat ruffled it. “Stay close,” he said. Obediently, Anna followed him down the dock and stood by as he knocked on the cabin of the 3rd Sister.

The windows were open but all the curtains were drawn, and when there was no answer, Anna wondered if Hawk and Holly had gone ashore for some reason. Lucas knocked again.

Scarcely louder than the squeaking of the boats as they rubbed their fenders between dock and hull, mutterings leaked through the cabin windows. Hawk and Holly were conferring in whispers.

Anna reminded herself that under scrutiny all human foibles appeared to be suspicious behaviors. She exchanged a look with Lucas and he knocked a third time.

The cabin door opened. Hawk, tousled and blinking, looked up at them.

“Sleeping?” Lucas asked politely.

“No.” Hawk looked over his shoulder into the cabin’s interior. “No, we were just…” The words trailed off as if he couldn’t concentrate long enough to finish the sentence. “Sorry. Come aboard if you want. We can put on coffee or something, I guess.”

Anna had seldom heard a less gracious invitation but it seemed borne more of embarrassment than malice.

“Holly, we got company,” Hawk said and they heard a muted scramble from within as he vanished inside. Lucas followed.

“The quarters are cramped. You stay on deck.” The Chief Ranger-half in, half out of the cabin-fixed Anna with a stare to be sure she understood what he wanted.

She did. He closed the door behind him. Through the window Anna heard him saying: “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. Denny’s been killed.” Only silence answered him. Neither Hawk nor Holly asked how or when, neither cried out.

Anna was glad to be on deck. Other people’s angst sawed at the nerves like a dry wind.

Remembering Lucas’s pointed stare, she stopped eavesdropping and began searching the deck; not looking for anything, just looking at what was there and what was not.

Gear was piled in every available place. Besides two bottle caps, a bit of braided black nylon cord, one broken thong sandal, and the usual boat supplies, there was full diving paraphernalia for three people and a portable air compressor-the gasoline-driven kind that was the bane of lovers of quietude-for recharging spent tanks. As a rule divers recharged their tanks immediately after use. Six one-hundred-cubic-foot scuba tanks were piled in a pyramid between the box covering the engine and the hull. An oversized single with a Y valve that Anna recognized as Denny’s had rolled to one side.

She glanced at the pressure gauges. All the one hundreds were fully charged. The single was only half full. There could be a dozen good reasons the single had not been topped off. Hawk or Holly might have used it on a dive earlier that day. Most ISRO dives didn’t require double hundreds. The regulator might have been damaged. They could have run out of fuel for the compressor, or just gotten lazy.

But to a suspicious mind it could suggest that when the Bradshaws had filled the tanks the previous day, they had known Denny would not be needing his.

Lucas’s interview with the twins was neither reassuring nor conclusive: The Bradshaws, he said, reacted as if dead inside. Maybe shock, maybe forewarning-Vega was a ranger, not a shrink.

EIGHT

“Dead bodies seem to follow you around, Anna. Are you sure you never auditioned for Night of the Living Dead when you lived in New York?”

“I saw it,” Alison stuck in. Ally was sitting in Anna’s canvas canoe chair between her mother, who occasionally dipped a paddle off the bow, and Anna, who worked all of the mobile magic from the stern. “There were all these dead people with white faces and black lips who walked like this.”

“Don’t stand up!” Anna and Christina said in unison.

“Like this.” Alison demonstrated from her seat, swinging her arms like a chair-bound Frankenstein’s monster. “They were supposed to be scary but they were just stupid. It was in black and white,” she said as if that explained everything.

“Night of the Living Dead scared the pants off me,” Anna said. “For weeks afterward all my roommates had to do was walk stiff-legged-”

“Don’t stand up!” the two women repeated as Ally squirmed.

“-and I’d turn totally paranoid,” Anna finished.

“What’s paranoid?” Ally asked.

“Being scared of things that aren’t really going to hurt you,” her mother replied. “Pair-ah-noyd. P-a-r…”

When Tuesday’s Ranger III had docked, Chris and Ally had been on it. “We needed to be at One with Nature,” Chris had said but she’d come because Anna’s letters had sounded lonely. Christina hated nature unless it could be pruned into an attractive foundation planting.

Anna smiled. If one couldn’t go home, the next best thing was having home come to the wilderness. Christina Walters, with her soft white hands, deplorable J-stroke, and antipathy toward pit toilets, carried homeyness with her the way lilacs carried perfume. Anna knew one day she would lose her housemates to a sweetheart. Christina would not be single long.

“I wish I were gay,” she said over Alison’s head. Literally over the little girl’s head, not figuratively. At five Ally was more sophisticated than Anna had been at thirty.

“Would you marry Ally and me?” Christina asked.

“In a second.”

“No good.” Christina laughed, caught a crab with her paddle, and splashed her daughter and Anna. “I only go for women with more impressive b-o-s-o-m-s.”

“Et tu, Brute,” Anna grumbled, and: “You do not.”

“You haven’t met Bertie.”

The bicycling friend: Anna might lose them sooner than she had thought. It would be hard not to meet Chris’s date at the door, cross-examine her about her intentions and if she could support Chris and Ally in the manner they had grown accustomed to. Anna smiled wryly. They all three lived on NPS wages. Any greasy-spoon waitress could answer the last question with a resounding “Yes!”

“Don’t worry, Aunt Anna,” Ally was saying. “If Momma and I get married again you can come live with us. If you bring Piedmont,” she added as a condition.

“We’ll adopt you,” Chris said.

“Paddle,” Anna returned. “You guys weigh a ton.”

“An-oh-wreck-see-ah,” Christina said. “No one in the Walters family will ever be skinny. It indicates a stinginess of the spirit. We only accept your meagerness because it comes from being a rotten cook, not a bad person.”

Anna paddled. She had that rare sense of knowing, at the moment it was happening, that she was happy, that life was okay. She stopped talking to better enjoy it. Ally and Christina’s chatter pattered over her like warm rain.

“How much further?” Ally asked after a few minutes.

“When do you bring it up?” Christina said at almost the same instant. “It” meant Denny Castle’s body. Chris knew Denny. She’d met him once in Houghton and again when she’d visited Anna on the island in late May. But Christina chose not to personify death, not to call it by name. Euphemisms-“passed away,” “no longer with us”- came naturally to her.