seat with any serious birder when word came of a rare sighting.
“I haven’t seen any peregrines in McCargo,” Anna replied. “But I haven’t been there all that often in the last couple of weeks.”
“Mmmm.” Tinker seemed to be considering Anna’s viability as a witness. Anna’s suspicion that she’d failed to pass muster was confirmed when Tinker said: “Damien and I will go.” She closed the heavy book-
Anna teased the giant caterpillar, trying to make it climb up onto a twig. Several minutes passed. She tossed her caterpillar stick into the hedge of browsed firs. “Damien says you’ve given up detective work,” she said.
Tinker looked pained. In a Garbo-esque gesture, she pushed the fine ruined hair back from her face with both hands.
A scuffle and a grunt from inside the house took Anna’s attention. “Pizza Dave,” Tinker said, her hands still buried in her hair. “The toilet’s stopped up again.” As if on cue, heroic slurps of a plunger being plied emanated from the shadowy interior.
Anna turned back to Tinker. “Are you okay?” she asked, more sharply than she had intended.
“I’m fine,” Tinker replied and, to Anna’s surprise, she began to cry, hugging her knees, her girlish breasts pushed up against the uncompromising corners of her bird book.
Great gulping sobs made a bellows of the thin back. Images of Heinz pickle relish jars jammed with fingers, ears, and eyeballs flashed through Anna’s mind. “What is it? What?” she demanded.
“Just leave me alone!” Tinker cried out. Springing to her feet, sending
Anna debated the wisdom of following. For whatever reason, for the moment at least, her presence was more alarming than comforting. She restored the book to the porch where the damp wouldn’t ruin it and retreated down the path the way she had come.
Halfway back to the harbor she was overtaken by the roar of machinery. Tractors used by Maintenance were the only land vehicles allowed on the island and even they were banned from Amygdaloid.
The driver was Pizza Dave, returning from his plumbing job. He was the fattest man Anna had ever seen. The tractor seat was lost beneath his vast rump, and the machine, a small four-cylinder John Deere, looked no bigger than a lawn mower. R amp;R, the company that made all the National Park Service uniforms, didn’t come close to carrying his size. Consequently, on duty and off, he lived in bright slogan-sporting tee-shirts, denim trousers, and black high-topped sneakers.
As he drew level with Anna, he engulfed the gearshift knob in a palm the size of a Frisbee and brought the tractor to a halt. “Afternoon,” he called over the roar of the engine.
“Afternoon,” Anna agreed, wishing he’d shut the tractor off. Wishing, not hoping: Dave loved the noise. He was part machine. He never walked. He bragged that there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do given the right equipment.
He was saying something.
Anna shouted: “What?” and he shouted back: “…in the head.” She looked blank, shrugged. “The head, the John, the terlit, the loo,” he shouted. “I couldn’t help hearing. Here. Found this.” He dug something out of his hip pocket and held it out in a closed fist. Both her hands were about the size of one of his. Anna cupped her hands, not daring to think what gem he’d found in the “terlit” that was about to be dropped into her grasp.
Dave’s fingers uncurled and several crumpled slips of paper fluttered out. “Found it tore up,” he hollered over his engine.
“What is it?”
“Can’t hear you. Found it,” he called. Anna suspected he was using the engine’s noise to drown out all the questions he didn’t want to answer. “Donna Butkus is okay,” he said suddenly.
“How do you know?” Anna yelled.
“Gut feeling.” He laughed, passed his hand over an immense expanse of red double-knit. “Can’t ignore a gut this big.” He pushed the gear lever forward and roared on down the trail before Anna had time to respond.
She waited till the aggravation of sound had passed completely away, then crouched down on the trail and pieced together the bits of paper. It was a dot matrix printout. Any computer could have been used. In an odd mixture of metaphors it said: “Before you go looking for skeletons under other people’s rocks don’t forget your own dirty laundry can be dragged out of the closet.” Then the word “Hopkins” and the numbers “ 1978.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Anna muttered. “Nobody writes notes this mysterious.” Then she laughed, thinking of the messages Christina left stuck to the refrigerator with duck-shaped magnets: “Ally tippy-toe. Me in the salt mines. Save yourself.” Meaning: Alison was at ballet class and Chris was working late. Literal translation: Don’t wait dinner. Everything was mysterious when it was unexplained.
Doubly so if a corpse or two was factored in.
Anna read the note again. A threat-you expose mine, I’ll expose yours. Hopkins-the name of person or a town; 1978. At a guess, Tinker or Damien had done something to a person or in a place called Hopkins in 1978 they were ashamed enough of or scared enough about that they would drop their investigation into Donna Butkus’s disappearance to keep it from coming to light. That was thirteen years back. In 1978 Damien would have been eleven or twelve, Tinker maybe twenty. Tinker, then, was probably the threatened party. It would fit with both Damien’s reaction and her own.
Anna folded the bits of paper carefully and buttoned them in her shirt pocket. Who would threaten Tinker? Scotty was the obvious choice. But not the only one. If Donna’s disappearance and Denny’s death were connected- and Scotty didn’t do it-whoever did was definitely in the running.
FOURTEEN
The rest of the afternoon Anna spent taking her medicine. Abandoning the populous marina, she strapped a water bottle to her belt and hiked the trails to Ojibway Tower, six and a half miles from Rock Harbor. Several times her path crossed that of backpackers but she spoke to no one. She was out of uniform, off duty with no obligation to be helpful or even polite. When she heard voices ahead of her on the trail she stepped softly into the trees and, wreathed in silence, watched unseen until they had passed.
On a stony ridge, rising above the green canopy of summer leaves, Anna climbed the old fire tower and stretched her legs in the sun. From Ojibway she could see white sails out on Superior, watch the flashing backs of birds cutting through the air. The sun baked perfume from the pines. She breathed it in like a narcotic and felt her brain losing its ferret ways, ceasing to chase around inside her skull. A breeze, cool, separate from the ambient air, soothed the aches left by invisible burdens.
Near six o’clock, refreshed, her mind clear, she started back.
She was third in line to use the phone at Rock. Sitting on the bench with a redheaded girl of twenty or so and a wide-shouldered natural blonde with jaw-length hair, Anna stared at the occupied phone booth and listened to the desultory conversation of the other women. Most of it centered on the doings of T.O.A.D.s-tourists on a detour-the interpretive rangers’ usually affectionate term for island visitors. One had taken his fiancee down the Minong Trail. They ran out of water, her feet were covered with blisters, her left eye was swollen shut from blackfly bites, the wedding was off. Two boys had wrecked a concession rental on Blake’s Point. The boat looked like a crumpled ball of aluminum foil but, miraculously, the boys were unhurt. There’d been complaints that the
The phone booth door opened. “All yours,” came a voice.
“You want to go next, Trixy?” the red-haired girl asked.
“You go ahead,” replied the blonde.
Trixy, the interpreter, Donna Butkus’s friend: had Anna been a terrier, her ears would have pricked up. She waited till the redhead was dialing. “Trixy, isn’t it? I’m Anna Pigeon.” They shook hands in a manly fashion, Anna, as always, feeling slightly ridiculous.
