through fiery hoops. It doesn’t make it a Flying Wallenda,” she said ungraciously.
“Nope, but it sure can make folks scratch.” Flapping the autopsy envelope he’d carried from the boat, he said gleefully: “Got a time of death. Now I can check alibis. I like doing alibis. Makes me feel sleuthy.”
The fog swallowed up his ambling form and muffled the crunch of his hard-soled shoes on the gravel.
Much of the day’s last light had been swallowed as well. Anna was cold and depressed. The
“Cut that shit out,” Anna said aloud. In the fog, her voice sounded strange.
Laughter percolated incongruously through the cold mist. Trail crew. Or the maintenance men. Both had bunkhouses on Mott. Both drank enough vodka to qualify for detox on either coast. On the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where most of them hailed from, it was just a way to unwind, let off a little steam.
Scotty would be there no doubt, telling lies and opening beer bottles with his teeth to impress the new recruits. Dave would be eating the pepperoni pizzas he seemed to procure from nowhere. The TV would be blaring. Talk would be of outboard motors, dead fish, or female body parts. Still, needing heat and light, Anna gravitated toward the noise.
Pizza Dave was always good for a beer. If the sauna wasn’t booked she could retreat there with a couple of Leinenkugels, strip down, smell the sweet scent of cedar and feel the dry heat of the desert.
NINETEEN
After two Leinenkugels had been poured in and sweated out, and Anna had showered and washed her hair, she felt life was once again worth living.
The fog had not lifted. If anything it lay more heavily over the island than before. Steam boiled off her overheated flesh and Anna felt herself a creature of the mist, no longer oppressed by it but at one with it. Fairy tales of a cloak of invisibility returned to memory and she drifted silently down the wooden steps of the sauna.
Trees, robbed of color by the fog, appeared as black smoke around the NPS housing area. Wooden barracks, built in the thirties by the CCC boys and held together over the years with mouse nests and multitudinous coats of paint, gave the housing the aspect of a ghost town.
A clamor of cowboy laughter added to the sense of a place out of time There was the ring of booted feet on a wooden floor: Scotty. Wrapped in fog, Anna walked soundlessly toward the source of the racket-trail crew’s bunkhouse.
Perhaps
Blobs of muted color swam through the mist. Trail crew was cooking out. A barrel cut in half, metal fenceposts welded on for legs, served as their kitchen even when they were not on the trail. The smell of grilled meat warmed the damp. Once it had smelled good to Anna, like food. After years without it, it smelled only like death.
A grating sound, a pop, ragged cheering: another beer bottle opened with Scotty’s teeth. “Now you’re a bachelor again, you going to go with us over to Thunder Bay?” A coarse voice cut through the fog, making Anna wince as if she’d been suddenly exposed. Thunder Bay had one of the best-known houses of ill repute on the lake. From what Anna’d picked up, it sounded drunken, loud, and cheap. A sure-fire appeal.
“Naw,” Scotty drawled. “Donna ever found out, she’d skin me alive. She keeps a pretty tight rein on this old stallion.”
A growing nausea began creeping through Anna’s wraith-like detachment.
“Not what I heard…” Anna recognized the dissenting voice. An enormous field of purple moved along the darker wall of the barracks. It could only be Pizza Dave. Or Moby Grape. Anna stifled a giggle. Two beers in a sauna had the kick of four anywhere else.
“Now what son of a bitch told you that?” Scotty growled.
“Told me what?” Dave asked innocently.
Scotty wasn’t to be drawn or trapped. “Goddam little in-twerps,” he muttered. Anna could barely make out the words but she knew her cloak of invisibility wouldn’t hold up under closer scrutiny, so she stayed where she was. “Some little hippy-dippy seasonals were trying to drive a wedge between me and my wife,” Scotty explained belligerently. Then he looked sly, an old cow-dog narrowing of the eyes and curling of the lip. “I made ‘em an offer they couldn’t refuse,” he said, quoting a movie older than at least two of the boys on the crew. “Tonight I got a reminder for ’em in case they’ve forgotten you don’t fuck with the old stallion.”
There was a satisfied grumble, then laughter. These men were as old as the world, Anna thought. These were the men who’d gone to bear baitings, dogfights, beatings, hangings, witch burnings. Their heyday was over. Now they contented themselves with football and hunting-sports where they could either watch the pain from a safe distance or inflict it on creatures with only teeth and claws with which to defend themselves.
The talk settled on baseball. Fingers of mist moved in from the trees, curled around the hot metal of the grill. When the fingers felt their way back into the surrounding woods, Anna went with them.
Shivering, she let herself into the ranger station and clicked on the electric space heater Sandra Fox kept in the dispatch room. The heat smelled faintly of Delphi’s fur. Anna sat in the dispatcher’s chair, lost in thought. Fog pressed close, blinding the window Sandra would never see out of.
Anna had guessed Scotty was the author of the cryptic Hopkins note; now she was sure. There were several reasons he might have stooped to blackmail. Tinker and Damien could have rubbed him the wrong way once too often. The attention they were focusing on his marital problems could have been too great an embarrassment. But the most compelling reason was that the Coggins-Clarkes were getting too close to a truth Scotty didn’t want brought to light; namely, where his wife had disappeared to.
Despite the capes and incense and Windigo stories, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Tinker’s or Damien’s mind. If they put their heads together they would unravel most knotty mysteries. Scotty might have sensed that.
On impulse, Anna went into Ralph Pilcher’s office. His desk, as always, looked like a sorting bin for recycled paper. Five minutes’ shuffling turned up the key to his filing cabinet. It had been five minutes wasted: Pilcher had forgotten to lock it. She flipped quickly to the seasonal personnel file and pulled the Coggins-Clarkes’ folders. Crossing her ankles on Pilcher’s desk, she settled in for a good read.
A lot of it she already knew. Tinker, thirty-three, and Damien, twenty-four, had been married three years. Both had mentioned on the “previous employment” section that they had been married on the south rim of the Grand Canyon while working at that park. Skills and schools were listed, evaluations from other jobs. “Flaky but fine” seemed to be the consensus, though the District Ranger from Voyageurs had described Tinker as “sensitive, moody,” the implication of instability being unmistakable.
On the final page-the one that invariably threw Anna into a frustrated rage, the page where the government asked for a list of the addresses of all residences used in the previous ten years-was the information she had been looking for.
From 1974 to 1980 Tinker had lived in Hopkins, Minnesota.
Anna dialed central dispatch at the police department in Houghton, trusting Pilcher would back her when the phone bill came. A woman answered. Anna identified herself and asked if she could run two 10-29s. The answer was yes. Anna read off first Tinker’s, then Damien’s driver’s license numbers and their dates of birth, then waited through several minutes of computer clickings.
“No wants or warrants out on either Theresa Lynn Coggins nor Daryl Thomas Clarke.”
“Thanks.” Anna hung up. She could see why the two of them had changed their names. Theresa and Daryl: under those monikers no cape would swirl, no ritual candle flicker. Coggins and Clarke, no hyphen-the computer had yet to receive input of their marriage, or, more likely, the ceremony hadn’t been formalized through legal channels.
Name changes and a nontraditional marriage but no warrants out for their arrest, not so much as an unpaid
