A Superior Death

picture of Denny over at Jo’s today. He was wearing an early-twentieth-century ship captain’s uniform,” Anna said, watching Hawk’s face. His expression never changed, only hardened slightly. But their bodies touched from shoulder to hip and Anna felt a current run through him that he could not hide. “Did you ever see that picture?”

“Yeah. Well, no. I think I remember the uniform. Denny might’ve worn it once or twice.” Hawk’s voice was heavy with indifference and his eyes focused keenly on nothing. He was not a good liar. Anna liked him for that. She doubted she would like the reason he had to lie.

“What happens to the Third Sister now?” she asked. “Does it go to Jo?”

“She’s been wanting to get her hands on it, turn it into a research vessel. A floating freshwater lab,” Hawk said with disgust. Anna imagined he viewed the 3rd-Sister-as-lab much as Jacques Cousteau might view a desk job. “She might’ve eventually weaseled it-and Denny-out of the diving business but Denny left the boat to Holly and me. It’s in his will. He told us so, anyway.”

Denny Castle had had a will though he was probably not more than forty-five or forty-six. For a moment that struck Anna as a little suspicious; then she remembered what he did for a living. He would’ve seen many of his friends die at an early age.

She took another pull on her beer. The Bradshaws both seemed to hold Jo in contempt. Was it because she would, as Hawk had put it, weasel Denny out of diving, out of the Musketeers? And, in the process, weasel the 3rd Sister out from under the Bradshaws? They’d known if Denny died the 3rd Sister was theirs. Was that reason enough to kill him quick, before the weaseling process began?

They loved Denny. They would have been more likely to kill Jo. Unless there had been a betrayal. To betray one Bradshaw was to betray them both. “Denny’s marriage took me by surprise,” Anna said carefully. “I’d always just assumed he and Holly had a thing going.”

Hawk snorted. “Holly and Denny? No way.” He laughed. “No way.”

It didn’t seem so impossible to Anna. It seemed probable: a shared love of diving, a shared living space, a shared business, shared danger, a boy, a girl. More than probable, it seemed mandatory. Hawk’s reaction piqued her curiosity. He’d been amused at the idea. Maybe Holly was gay. Anna made a mental note to ask Christina. The lesbian community in the Upper Peninsula was small, endangered, and therefore close-knit. Christina would have heard.

“The only person I know of that Denny gave more than a wink and a nod was Donna-Scotty’s wife,” Hawk went on. “I never could see it. Holly thinks she was just old-fashioned enough to catch Denny’s imagination. In some ways he’d been born in the wrong century.

“That whole scene was strange. Donna was the first time I think Denny had ever fallen in love. He was crazy, like a kid, like a Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story. That crazy obsessive stuff that makes for good fiction but’s pretty hard to maintain in real life.”

“Especially when Juliet is married,” Anna observed dryly.

“Yeah. There was that.” Hawk grinned, exposing white teeth, small and strong. Smooth, Anna imagined, under the tip of one’s tongue. She hid her smile with the mouth of the beer bottle.

“Denny didn’t give old Scotty a thought,” Hawk went on. “Not seriously. It was as if he was an inconvenience, not a husband.”

“No wonder Scotty hated him. Did Donna feel that way?”

“I don’t know. That was the one way Denny’s romance differed from kid stuff. It wasn’t something he would talk about. At least not with us.”

“Us” always meant Hawk and Holly. Anna had been acquainted with them long enough to know that. She wondered if Denny had kept quiet to protect Donna’s reputation or because he knew they wouldn’t approve. They’d clearly not approved of Jo and she was unencumbered by any “inconveniences.” Or, despite Hawk’s protests to the contrary, had he not spoken of it because Holly was in love with him, or even his lover? Anna reminded herself again to ask Christina what she knew about Holly’s sexual preference.

“Did Denny give Donna a ride to the mainland in the last two weeks?” Anna asked.

“Not on the Third Sister. Holly and I have had the boat. Denny was pretty tied up with the wedding. Why? Has Donna gone missing?”

The question was meant as a joke but when Anna made no reply, Hawk asked it again.

“I don’t know,” she answered truthfully.

The subject had reached a dead end. For a while they sat in silence.

“Pilcher’ll go down and Vega-how about you?” Hawk returned to the subject of the body recovery.

“I’ll dive. So will Jim Tattinger.”

“Tattinger’s a squirrel.”

A squirrel was a neophyte diver. It was a grave insult. Anna guessed Hawk and Holly were going to carry on the tradition of animosity between the 3rd Sister and the park’s Submerged Cultural Resources Specialist.

“I take it you don’t care much for Jim?” Anna invited gossip, hoping for some useful bit of information.

“If he did his job, I could overlook his naturally repugnant self. He’s a number cruncher, a bean counter. He couldn’t care less about preserving the wrecks.”

“He used to work in the Virgin Islands.” Anna threw another line in the waters she was fishing.

“I know.” Hawk opened a beer and took a drink. He looked over the bottle at Anna. His eyes were a clear hazel. He smiled. “Let’s not talk about Jim. It’s worse than taking saltpeter.” In the slanting light his skin was almost a true bronze and his dark hair showed black. Anna was aware of the warmth from his thigh through the worn denim of her trousers. She remembered she was, after all, off duty and she remembered that there were other things to do with bronzed young men than interrogate them.

“What do you do to relax, Anna?”

She smiled at the answers that rattled through her mind and he smiled back. “Music,” she said finally. This evening it was not her first choice but it was the most socially acceptable.

“Put something on the tape deck for me. Anything but a sea chantey.”

Anna stood up and held out her hand. Hawk took it and she pulled him to his feet.

A distant growl in the channel penetrated the warm haze of hops and lust. Her first impulse was to hold tight to Hawk’s hand and run for the relative privacy of her quarters, to bolt the door and draw the curtains; lose herself for an hour or two in the music of West Texas and, if she was reading the signals correctly, the music of the spheres.

But she waited, her eyes on the channel. Before she could dismiss this boat from her mind, she must run through her litany: Was anybody hurt, sick, or lost? Was anybody on board likely to get that way in the near future?

“They’ll have to camp at Belle Isle,” Anna said, naming the little island her boat had been called for. “There’s no room at the inn.” She had dropped Hawk’s hand. It would not do to be seen. There was no comfortable mix of business and pleasure for a woman in her profession. Because of the isolation, the predominance of men in middle and higher management, the usual dangers of gossip and backbiting were multiplied a dozenfold for a woman ranger.

The boat came into view: a natty green runabout trailing a frothy wake. “Looks like Patience Bittner’s boat,” Hawk said.

Anna hadn’t known Patience owned a boat. “Do you know her?”

“Know the boat. We’ve seen it over here three or four times when we’ve been out with clients. She’s always alone, never stops to say hello. Denny thought she was up to something but Holly and I just figured she was a loner.”

“Denny was a little judgmental, it seems,” Anna said cautiously.

Hawk laughed. “One of Denny’s favorite sayings was: ‘It’s hard to work well in a group when you’re omnipotent.’ Denny was always right. He really was. He never cared about himself. Only the lake. It gave him an almost superhuman vision. He saw other people’s twists and bends as clearly as if they’d been laid out on graph paper.”

“That kind of vision won’t get you elected Most Popular Senior Boy,” Anna said.

“Denny didn’t need to be popular. He didn’t need anything but the lake and a jug of air.”

Anna sensed that Hawk needed more than that, and that he perceived it as a weakness, a flaw in his