A Superior Death

sifting down from the attic over the long winter when Isle Royale was ice-bound and closed to all human occupation, washed the overhead beams with gray. Cobwebs moved faintly in the drafts.

The rear portion of the house was devoted to living quarters. A second woodstove, half the size of the one in the office, was crowded into one corner. Opposite, along the wall beneath a window that faced the cliff, was a crumbling Formica counter with a sink and hand pump. A two-burner gas stove, a gas refrigerator, and an aluminum shower stall lined the short northern wall. A narrow wooden door led out back past the propane tank to the pit toilet.

Anna’s bed, dresser, and closet were against the inside wall. Beside the bed, where the cracked blue-and-red- speckled linoleum came to a curling end, was a faded oval rag rug. When Anna’s housemate, Christina, had visited from Houghton, she had stood on that rug as a woman might stand on an island in a rising sea of offal and remarked: “How charming. A Great Room divided into conversation areas.” She’d laughed though, and before she and Alison- her five-year-old daughter-had left, she’d managed to make it a home for Anna.

A patchwork coverlet and handmade pillows brightened the bed. Mexican rugs warmed the walls and kept the drafts out. Alison’s contribution-Ally’s taste and her mother’s money-was a see-through shower curtain bedecked with saxophone-playing alligators in tuxedos.

Christina and her daughter had known Anna less than a year. When she had left Guadalupe, where Chris had been a secretary, they had come with her. Now Anna divided her year between the island in the summer and the park headquarters in Houghton, Michigan, in the winter, where she shared a house with Chris and Ally. When she’d come out to the island in early May, Anna had been surprised at how much she missed them. She’d always thought of herself as a loner.

Anna lit the oil lamps and laid fires in both stoves, opening dampers and vents to give them a head start. On this drizzly June day the whole place smelled of damp and rat droppings.

Heat and light began to revive her, and overlaid the rickety rooms with a sense of romance. Shelter from the storm, Anna thought as she peeled off the layers of gray and green and pulled on dry fleecy pants and a top with a hood. Given time-and a decent red wine-she believed she might even come to like the place.

The bang of the front door announced the arrival of the 3rd Sister’s crew and Anna yelled a superfluous “Come in” as Hawk, Holly, and Denny Castle gusted into the outer office. The wind that carried them smelled of mesquite smoke and whiskey.

Holly was a little drunk-not sloppy drunk, but high. Her eyes burned with alcohol-induced fever and her cheeks were redder than the wind would account for. She carried a bottle of Black amp; White in her coat pocket, the label showing as if she dared anyone to comment on it. Mist had glued her short dark hair to her forehead in sculpted curls. She looked like a creature of storm and sea, a siren ready to sing some modern-day Ulysses onto the rocks.

Hawk, though he took a glass of Scotch when Holly pressed him, was drinking little. His eyes seldom left his sister’s face and he seemed half afraid of the fires that burned so clearly there.

Denny Castle, captain of the 3rd Sister dive concession, a private venture permitted by the NPS, was older than the Bradshaw twins, close to Anna’s age she would have guessed, though he might have been as old as forty-five or as young as thirty-five. Life on the water and under it had weathered his face until it was aged and ageless, like wood that’s been worn almost smooth. There was no gray in his hair, but in hair so blond, it would scarcely show as anything more than a subtle fading. He wore it long in the fashion of General Custer. The resemblance to the fabled Indian fighter ended there. No mustache, no beard. Denny Castle’s face reflected a deep and abiding care. It was a look that drew women to him like moths to a flame, only to find themselves scorched by his indifference. The care was for the lake; abiding love for Superior in all her moods.

There was a legend that in Superior’s storms there sometimes came three waves, each bigger than the last. It was the third that drove ships to their deaths. The waves were called the Three Sisters. It was they, lakers would tell, who had drowned the Edmund Fitzgerald. Denny liked to say he had met the third sister and married her. If gossip could be trusted, he had spent more time on board the 3rd Sister over the past eleven years than at any woman’s breakfast table.

Castle wasn’t drinking at all, nor was he talking. As he ran back out into the night to check on dinner, Anna poured herself a glass of Mondavi red and, wondering what the hell was going on, settled close to the stove. The air had an electric feel to it, fueled by alternating currents between the three divers. Anna didn’t ask what was up. She had little doubt that some revealing sparks would soon begin to fly.

Within a couple of minutes Denny ducked in out of the drizzle, a plate of blackened fish in his hands. Lamplight caught beads of water on his hair and they flickered orange, a jeweled halo around his face. “Supper,” he announced.

“D’Artagnan’s last supper. I’ll drink to that,” Holly said. Despite the liquor, her voice was clear and low, but Denny winced as if she had shrilled at him.

“Forgot the salad-” he said and closed himself again into the night beyond the cabin door.

Hawk leaned down and fed sticks into the woodstove. Anna guessed that whatever gnawed at Holly was eating him. Once more she had the sense that they were two aspects of one person. This night it was the Holly aspect that spoke. Hawk stood back, a reservoir of strength for her to draw on.

“Porthos and Aramis,” Anna said aloud. Watching the two faces, so alike, she had put the allusion together. “How long have the three of you been diving together?”

A tear, colored like blood from the fire’s light, flashed on Holly’s cheek. She swatted it away as if it were a fly. “Always,” she said.

“Seven years,” Hawk defined “always,” but it sounded as if it was always to him as well.

“Since we knew what diving was about. Since the Three Sisters were in pinafores. Since we quit fucking around,” Holly said sharply. “Always.”

Anna waited but there was no more. Denny came back with the salad and, seeming to take it for granted that he was to wait on them, cleared Anna’s desk and set out plates and flatware. Anna was too tired to help and Hawk and Holly seemed determined to let him serve. When he was finished, he sat down on a stool he’d pulled up. He was the only one at the table, the only one interested, it seemed, in the food.

“This is a celebration,” he said, looking not at them but down at his empty plate. “I’m getting married tomorrow.”

“To a regular woman?” Anna asked, taken by surprise.

Holly began to laugh.

Hawk turned his face away from Denny, from his sister. There was as much pain in his look as there had been in Holly’s laughter.

Anna stood, drained her glass, shook off their misery. She was tired. She was hungry. Maybe they’d been on one too many dives. The deep addled people’s brains. She carried her wine bottle to the desk and sat down in the wooden swivel chair. Supper was made and it was free.

“Congratulations, Denny,” she said equitably. “Please pass the salad.”

TWO

Mist lay over Amygdaloid Channel. Humps of pale gray moved lazily over the surface as if ghostly whales swam between air and water. Patches drifted clear and the silver of reflected light glowed till fingers of fog curled back to reclaim the space. To the east, over the green ridges of Belle Isle, the dawn sky was burning into blue, the promise of a beautiful day.

Wrapped against the chill that the forty-eighth parallel would not relinquish even in June, Anna sat on the front steps of the ranger station. Cloaked in a shapeless plaid flannel bathrobe, the tail tucked under her feet to keep them from the dew-bitten planks, she stared through binoculars at the far shore: a thin line of sand and stone, now revealed, now shrouded by the mist. Beside her a mug of coffee curled tiny tendrils of fog into the cold air; a minuscule offering to the gods of the lake.

“Come on,” Anna said softly. “Come out. I know you’re there. And I know you’ve got the baby. Show yourselves.”

From the silence of the channel a loon called and was answered. The sun pierced the pines on the cliff’s top