way toward Houghton and an autopsy. Under the stress of the dive and the oppression of the weather, Anna had longed for her lieu days. Now that they’d arrived, with the implied time of rest and relaxation, she found her mind still rattling on in its workaday rut. With perfect hindsight she knew she should have stayed on the north shore, hidden out in a quiet cove, watched for wolves and gathered pretty stones along the water’s edge. Those were the things that would have put her right with the world. The bustling atmosphere of Rock bored and stimulated at the same time. Not rest but restlessness was to be the keynote of her weekend.
Anna glanced at her watch. Hours and hours till she could call her sister. At least an hour till the mail would be sorted. Aggravated by the need to be doing something, she sought out Sandra Fox in the dispatcher’s office. Delphi looked up from her place beneath the computer printers and dusted a welcome on the linoleum with her golden tail feathers. Anna flopped down beside the dog and fondled the soft ears.
“Can’t get enough of the Park Service, huh?” Sandra said, her fingernails clicking against the plastic keyboard. “Got to come in on your days off now for a little bureaucratic fix.”
“Quick,” Anna said. “Give me something to fill out in triplicate.”
Sandra finished typing, the printer blatted out a line of braille, and the dispatcher ran a well-manicured fingertip over it. Into the radio mike she read the line of numbers. “One, forty-two, sixty-four…” Fire weather. Anna blew gently on the top of Delphi’s head and was chastised with a reproachful stare.
The list complete, Sandra turned with a satisfied sigh and interlocked her fingers over her middle. The signal that chat could commence. “Tinker and Damien were asking after you,” she said. “For some reason they thought I might know where you’d be this weekend.” She chuckled comfortably.
All plans on ISRO made by phone or radio had a way of finding Sandra’s ear. She never broke these unintentionally shared confidences but, like Sherlock Holmes, she took pleasure in amazing people with her arcane knowledge of their lives.
“Ah,” Anna said. “And where am I this weekend? More to the point, where should I be?”
“Grumpy, are we?”
“I guess.”
“Body recovery got you thinking mortal thoughts?”
“It’s got me thinking, at any rate.” Anna was nagged by the floating vision of false life the currents had lent the corpse, of the livid bruise. Until the investigation was complete, however, these were not things that could be discussed.
“I take it you don’t buy the drug-death scenario Officer Frederick Stanton is so fond of,” Sandra remarked.
Anna started and Sandra smiled a Sherlockian smile.
“Do you?” Anna asked.
“Nope. Why come to a national park crawling with rangers and red-necked fisherfolk when there’s a million secluded bays and a zillion acres of unpatrolled lake waters to rendezvous in?”
“Stanton seems competent enough,” Anna said.
“Stanton’s a city boy,” Sandra returned. The implication was clear: His mind would make urban profiles of an Isle Royale death. The parks were places apart. Islands of hope, fragments of wilderness in an increasingly developed world, scraps of land trying to be all things to all people: museums, adventures, solitude, recreation, vacation, research, preservation. Different rules, different lusts, different pressures prevailed. People died for different reasons.
“Are you going to see Tinker and Damien?”
Anna had already forgotten about them. She glanced at her pocket watch. Another half hour till the mail. She craved some contact with Chris or Molly; conversation on a meaningful level. Conversation in which she didn’t have to protect herself or take care of anyone else. She flashed briefly on Ralph Pilcher’s words: “The super woman act works well for you.” It wasn’t an act, it was armor. Like all good armor, it was heavy to carry.
“Tinker and Damien… Did it seem urgent?”
Sandra laughed. “With those two it’s hard to tell. A few days back they were hiking in Moskey Basin. They radioed in a collision with serious injuries. Scotty rushed a couple of the emergency medical technicians out there. Everybody getting overtime. Everybody rushing around with their hair in a knot having a high old time. They get out to find, in a freak accident, a boater had rammed the dock there at the south end. He wasn’t hurt but he’d dislodged a beam under the water level and trapped a young lake otter. Tinker and Damien caught hell but the little otter’s going to remember them fondly.”
Anna smiled. She was remembering that she liked the Coggins-Clarkes.
Damien was on the paved trail between the lodge and the Visitors’ Center at Rock Harbor. Hands folded behind his back, eyes on the ground, he was pacing. Soundlessly, his lips formed words. Clad in the khaki Student Conservation Association’s shirt and green uniform trousers, he looked uncharacteristically benign. And young. In Anna’s soured mood, he looked about ten years old.
“Damien!” A look of what could have been alarm flitted across his face. His answering wave, a short flick of wrist and fingers, was anything but welcoming.
She walked up to a nearby bench. He continued to pace. She leaned on the back and waited for his next pass. “I’ve got a nature walk,” Damien said ungraciously as he checked his watch. “In seven minutes.”
This brusque, nervous fellow was so unlike the cloaked and candlelit boy that Anna was taken aback. It reminded her that she really knew very little about the Coggins-Clarkes.
“Sandra said you wanted to see me,” she said easily. “This is a bad time. I’ll catch Tinker.” She began moving away.
“Don’t bother,” he said sharply.
Anna turned, raised an eyebrow.
Under her gaze, the rudeness vanished. “I’m sorry,” he said with his old boyish grace. “I got up on the wrong side of the universe this morning. We just wanted to tell you we’ve stopped with the Donna Butkus thing.”
“Ah.” Ten minutes before, had she been asked, Anna would have said nothing could have pleased her more. Tinker and Damien’s collecting pickle relish jars and general cloak and daggering struck her as just the brand of nonsense that would get them in hot water. Now that they had stopped, she found it more alarming than reassuring. “Why?”
Damien looked past her. A small group was straggling up the pavement. “People for my tour,” he said. As he walked away, his tourists all in a row behind like ducklings, Anna wondered why he’d dodged the question, why he didn’t just tell a convenient lie. If it had been banal enough, she probably would have believed it and that would have been the end. Evasion was to a law enforcement ranger what undeclared funds were to the IRS.
On some level had he wanted to set her mental alarms off? One of those unspoken cries for help her sister Molly was paid a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to listen for? Or was Damien incapable by choice or disposition of telling a lie?
“Dream on,” Anna said aloud. In forty years, she had never met a man, woman, or child who was incapable of lying.
Whether his wish she not speak with Tinker was honest or not, it was in vain. He’d piqued her interest-and on a day when she’d been wanting a little piquing. With renewed energy, she walked down the paved trail and onto the wooded path that led to the seasonals’ quarters.
Tinker was sitting on the porch steps of the weathered old house that served as a dormitory. With her head bent over a book she held across her knees, her face was lost in a cloud of blond permed frizz. Hidden somewhere in the draping curtains of fir that glamorized the dilapidated building, a squirrel chattered a warning at Anna’s approach and Tinker looked up.
“Sandra said you wanted to see me,” Anna said.
“Yes. I wanted to ask if you’d seen peregrines nesting in McCargo.”
Isle Royale was one of the many places peregrine falcons were being reintroduced. Resource Management had had some success on the southwest end of the island but the north shore had proved inhospitable. Anna shook her head.
“We’ve had a sighting.”
Anna sat down on the bottom step. A great green caterpillar with electric-blue markings hunched along in the roots of the ferns. Damien said they’d wanted to see her about stopping the Butkus investigation. Tinker said peregrines. Had Anna been inclined to believe either, she would’ve chosen the falcons. Murder would take a back
