“You’re the North Shore Ranger,” Trixy identified her. She had a slightly fruity voice that could easily slip into a singsong pattern.
Anna admitted that she was and cast about for a comfortable way to bring the subject around to Donna Butkus’s disappearance. “I’m Scotty’s counterpart on the north shore,” she said finally. “You must know Scotty. This is your fifth season at Rock, isn’t it?”
“Sixth,” Trixy said, then added grimly: “I know Scotty.”
Anna took the grimness as a good sign. It invited Pandora to open the gossip box. “You sound a little sour on the subject of Mr. Butkus.” Anna turned the key and the box popped open.
“Scotty Butkus is an asshole,” Trixy said. “I hope he’s not a friend of yours…”
Anna laughed. “I give him a pretty wide berth. Good old boys make me nervous. I’ve met his wife a couple of times though. She seemed pretty straightforward. Haven’t seen her around for a while.”
“Her sister Roberta hurt her back. Donna had to go look after her,” Trixy volunteered.
“Scotty tell you that?” Anna kept her voice neutral but still Trixy reacted with some alarm.
“Yes. He did. Said Donna had to leave in a rush. Why? Have you heard something to the contrary?”
“There’s nothing wrong with Roberta’s back,” Anna said carefully. “She’s a good friend of my housemate in Houghton.”
“What an asshole!” Trixy snapped.
“I assume you mean Scotty. What did he do-besides lie to you?”
“Oh, he and Donna had a big fight. He knocked her around some. Not that that was all that unusual. But Donna came over crying. She had a big shiner and a split lip. That was unusual. Usually he’d hit her where she’d be embarrassed to show anybody the bruises. Scotty was drunk. Mega-asshole.”
“Did she say she was going anywhere?”
“No. She was going back to Scotty. She can put up with a lot. I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or not. Scotty is killing her. He does that pedestal thing: In public he brags about her in front of her like she’s this thing he won. Then when they’re alone he picks and undercuts till she doesn’t know if she’s a princess or a prick-tease. I guess he didn’t start smacking her till fairly recently. A couple months. Donna covers for him. She’s everything a good South Texas wife is supposed to be: supportive, warm, covers up his flaws, takes his abuse, and still looks pretty.”
“Like a handwoven Navajo rug,” Anna said.
“You got it.”
The phone booth door opened. The redhead stepped out. As Trixy rose to make her call, Anna asked one last question. “Did you see Donna after that night? The night they had the fight?”
“Nope. I had to go do an evening program. She was pretty upset. I gave her some ice for her eye. Dave said he’d walk her home. That was it.”
Trixy’s call was short. The redhead waited with Anna on the bench; then the two interpreters left together. Anna shut herself up in the booth and dialed New York. After innumerable clicks and whirs-the sound of her paycheck going down the drain-a machine answered. “Nobody’s here. Leave a message,” was the command. Anna waited for the beep.
“It’s me,” she said. “Are you lying doggo?”
A click and a fumble. “ ‘Lying doggo’?” Molly said. “Is that a law enforcement term: ‘The perpetrators were found in Macy’s lingerie department
“I’m backsliding. They don’t have a support group in Houghton for women suffering from colloquialisms.” The familiar hush, the sigh of air. Anna hated it. “Can’t you talk on the phone without a cigarette?”
“Can’t. Hipbone connected to the thighbone-it’s like that with cigarettes and phones. Oral fixation, premature potty training, early childhood trauma, can’t help myself. How did the corpse dive go?”
Anna told her, glad to be able to drag out all her fears and panics, expose them to Molly’s harsh, reasoning mind.
She told her sister of the corpse’s half life, the bubbles and the floating hands, the porthole vandalism, about Donna, about Scotty.
“What an asshole!” was Dr. Pigeon’s concurring diagnosis.
“Do you think he could’ve killed her?” Anna asked.
“Sure. Emergency rooms are full of battered wives. Some die. I see the rich ones who live. They come to me to find out what’s wrong with them, why they keep making a good man act so bad. That’s not saying this Butkus individual did kill his wife. He may just be a batterer and an asshole.”
“Donna’s not the type to press charges and there’s no law against assholery,” Anna said.
“If it weren’t so profitable for psychiatrists, I’d lobby for one.”
“How about eating the body?” Anna asked.
“The old Hannibal Lecter thing? Cannibalism? Pretty unlikely. It’s a very rare form of psychosis. Very rare. And even the loonies don’t eat the bones and hair and eyeballs and fingernails. They have their favorite cuts. Usually something visceral-heart, liver. Like Dracula’s Renfield, they’re often trying in some way to gather life or power from the victim and into themselves.”
“What if he wasn’t psychotic? What if he just ate her to dispose of the corpse?”
“Anna, you’ve been out in the woods too long. If he ate her, for whatever reason, doesn’t that seem a teensy- weensy bit psycho to you?”
“I guess,” Anna conceded.
“I guess,” Molly confirmed.
Anna listened to a second cigarette being lit. Molly was going to die first, leave Anna to flounder through life without a guide. Half a dozen cancer-related remarks danced on the tip of her tongue but she didn’t give them voice. It would only elicit remarks in kind about cirrhosis of the liver. Who was going to die first was an old argument, one neither of them wanted to win.
“I don’t suppose you’d come visit me?” Anna asked. “I’d get you a room with an ashtray and a flush toilet.”
“From the sound of things, I could hang out my shingle there and do a pretty good business.”
“Not at a hundred and fifty dollars an hour. You make more between coffee breaks than the average ranger takes home in a week.”
“Jesus! No wonder you eat your spouses. Not psychosis: lunch. With just enough salary left over to buy a decent table wine. Speaking of which, remember my ten o’clock? The gourmet with vintage envy?”
“I remember.”
“He’s taken a turn for the worse.” Molly laughed. “Another reason I can’t come to Wherever right now. He’s developed a fashion disorder. He’s taken to wearing canary-yellow suspenders with his Armani suits. Buttons them right over a belt of some no doubt endangered reptile.”
“Here in Wherever we’d call him careful, not crazy.”
“You’re forgetting motive, Anna. You of all people. He’s smug about it. He’s doing it in the belief it will infuriate his rival. He’s so pleased with this deviltry he won’t tell me how this particular brand of revenge is supposed to wreak its havoc. Maybe he’ll start a new trend.”
Anna laughed. “Remind me to tell you about Frederick Stanton, next time,” she said, thinking of his Joe- Friday-goes-Hawaiian outfit. “I gotta go. The line is forming to the left.” Two shadows had come to darken the waiting bench outside the phone booth.
“Ciao,” Molly said. “Or is it ‘Happy trails’? Stay off the menu.”
Before the line went dead, Anna just had time to squeeze in, “Okay, bye.”
Lest her sister should precede her through the pearly gates by too great a margin, Anna decided to work on her cirrhosis. Instead of a glass, she bought a bottle. Ordinarily Patience sold only house wine and only by the glass. For Anna she’d found a bottle of Graves Villages, 1984. At eighteen dollars Anna guessed she was getting it at cost.
The sharp flinty taste was a perfect accompaniment to the night. Out on the patio behind the lodge, the air was full of moisture and lay on her skin like damp velvet.
She relaxed into the Adirondack-style lounge chair, enjoying the gentle bite of the wooden slats across her back and thighs. Taking a sip of the Graves, she held it in her mouth, letting her tongue savor the taste, her body
