A Superior Death

decompression stops. A bounce dive is about it. Maybe twenty minutes max if you know what you’re doing. You’d have to grab the thing and get back to the surface in a short space of time.”

“Or things,” Anna corrected and pointed to the scratches that indicated more than one attempt at entry. Rubbing her eyes, she leaned back in her chair. Idly, she moved the photos around as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle she was putting together. “I wish this made more sense.”

“Me too,” Holly said. “Stanton’s been asking questions on the mainland-both at the Voyageur Marina and in Grand Marais. The locals are beginning to look at us funny. It doesn’t take much to lose your reputation in this business.”

“Better than losing your boat,” Anna said.

“Without it we won’t need the boat.”

Anna picked up the remaining seven pictures and fanned them out like a poker hand: the hull vanishing into the somber depths, a shot of the hull in the other direction with the vague light of the surface beckoning, mud hills rolling away, the Pepsi can she remembered from her dive, a shot of Hawk by the porthole, and a coffee mug half buried in the lake bottom.

“I wish I hadn’t been so scared when I went down,” Anna said. “It’s hard to remember what, exactly, was there.”

“That’s true of almost everybody on a deep dive,” Holly reassured her.

“Particularly squirrels,” Hawk added.

“I think I liked you better depressed,” Anna countered. “Why don’t you guys go back to work or whatever it is you do?” She rose from her chair and gathered the papers and pictures together to replace them in the manila folder. “I’ve got things to do.”

“Like gather nuts for the winter?” Hawk asked.

Anna laughed. “A lot like that.”

That evening, as most evenings when the tourist trade had died down and the dock had grown quiet, Anna poured herself a glass of wine and carried it out onto the steps of the ranger station to sit and sip and watch the day turn to silver.

Christina’s letter, still unread, was folded in her pocket. Anna took it out along with the packet of underwater photos she’d been meaning to study, and ran a finger under the flap in pleasant anticipation of a touch of home. This note was short and businesslike, scribbled on the back of an old memo. Chris had written it over her lunch break. It started with an apology for the orange thumbprint in the corner. An arrow pointed to the smudge. On the arrow’s tail was written, “Oops. Doritos.” Anna read the rest of the letter, written in Christina’s graceful looping hand. Bertie had finally grown alarmed. Repeated efforts to get information out of Scotty had resulted in conflicting stories and outright lies. Bertie had alerted the Houghton police to her sister’s disappearance. As the waiting period on missing persons was long since past, the investigation had begun. Ally was studying dinosaurs in preschool. Chris was thinking of taking a cooking class on Tuesday evenings. Piedmont was said to be missing Anna.

Piedmont. Anna folded the letter and wished she could have a cat on her lap, an orange tail to pull. As if granting her wish, a flash of reddish fur illuminated the dark green of the thimbleberry not four yards from where she sat.

Knucklehead’s kits were old enough to leave the den. Several times Anna had seen them poking shy black faces out of the bushes. Often at night she heard their sharp cries and muffled tumblings in the thick underbrush. Tonight they had grown quite bold and pounced and tumbled, playing like kittens while their mother watched with her chin on her paws. Knucklehead, however tame, never took her eyes from Anna or any other human being now that her kits had outgrown the safety of the den.

Beside Anna, on the step, were the underwater photographs of the Kamloops. A breeze stirred them and she tucked them under her thigh lest they blow into the dirt. “Maybe I’ll learn something by osmosis,” she said to Knucklehead.

There was so much information and no one piece of it seemed to connect up with any other. A murder committed in an impossible place, for improbable reasons, by an unidentified person. Maybe Stanton was right, maybe it was drugs: buying or selling or taking.

“Not bloody likely,” Anna said to the fox. She began forcing mismatched facts together, snapping one to the next like pop beads on a child’s necklace. Someone wanted something they knew or believed to be in the captain’s cabin. The broken latch and the scratches attested to the fact that they had attempted or succeeded in dragging that something out through the porthole.

Denny had been found dead by that porthole. Anna married the two bits of information: Therefore Denny had seen whoever doing whatever and so they had killed him.

The careful, professional Denny had done a solo midnight bounce dive on an extremely dangerous wreck. Denny hadn’t told anyone he was going to dive. Anna hammered the disparate facts into a third: Therefore Denny hadn’t known beforehand that he was going to make the dive, and as there was no radio in the Blackduck, he couldn’t broadcast it after he decided to do it.

Denny, then, had followed someone, someone he suspected. After the reception he had followed them in the Blackduck. They had dived, he had dived.

Denny Castle was a superb diver. Denny Castle had been killed. Therefore either the murderer was a better diver, was someone Denny was not afraid of, or had caught Denny off guard.

The sound of a scuffle interrupted Anna’s thoughts. The kits were growling, lowering their noses to their paws, their hind ends high in the air in a three-way standoff. The tableau erupted into a spout of fur and Anna laughed. It was hard to remember they were wild things. The desire to pet them, name them, feed them was almost irresistible.

The roar of a motorboat broke up the fray. Flashes of red enlivened the bushes as they all disappeared, running as if they’d not been born and raised with the sound of boat engines.

Anna stood to see who was causing the ruckus. A green and white cabin cruiser was shearing the silver fabric of the channel: Patience Bittner’s boat, the Venture. She pulled up at a speed that waked the boats at their moorings and set the fishermen to squawking.

Anna began to run toward the quay.

Patience didn’t disembark. She stood on the deck holding the Venture to the dock with her hands. Her usually well-coiffed hair had come loose and hung in strands accentuating the deep lines etched in her face. One of Carrie’s old sweatshirts rendered her for the first time in Anna’s recollection shapeless and unstylish.

Tourists, hunched over bourbons and beers, pricked their ears for any sound of adventure. Anna crouched on the pier, eye-level with Patience standing in the boat. “What is it? Carrie?” As she asked and was answered with a grim nod, Anna suffered a stab of guilt. Denny Castle’s murder, Donna’s disappearance-both damage already done-had absorbed her attention so completely she had forgotten her primary duty: to protect and preserve. She had forgotten Jim Tattinger and his proven penchant for little girls, forgotten Carrie Bittner and her sullen and secretive affair with the mysterious beau.

“She’s run off,” Patience said. “She was supposed to be busing in the dining room. I was busy with the inventory brought on the Ranger Three and was at the dock. My night manager said Carrie left for supper and never came back. I’ve looked everywhere I can think of. I came to the north shore because that’s where she ran to the last time-Lane Cove, remember? She left this at the apartment. It must’ve been about an hour before I got home.”

Anna took the paper Patience pulled from the pocket of her trousers. On a piece of stationery with little faceless girls in oversized bonnets brightening one corner, written with pencil so dull that at first Anna thought it was crayon, were the words: “Living with you is like being in jail. You think you’re the only person that deserves a life. Not everybody thinks I’m a little kid anymore. Like you made my childhood so great! I’m going to end it and you can pretend to all your friends that it’s a big deal.”

“I wasn’t paying attention,” Patience said and water started in eyes already reddened. “I’ve had so much on my mind this summer. Carrie’s boy troubles were a complication I didn’t have time for. She was sulky but I didn’t think she was depressed. I know she won’t kill herself-she’s too big a baby-but even to leave a note…” Patience’s throat closed with tears and she stopped talking rather than break down.

“What day is it?” Anna demanded.