A Superior Death

The look faded and was replaced by Patience’s usual dry smile. “I’m not worried,” she said lightly. “I know where you live. Carrie!” she called back down the hall.

Carrie Ann plodded slowly out. Her usual sullenness had hardened into a look very near hatred. On so young a person, it was unsettling.

As Patience herded her daughter into a morning blanked with fog, Anna rubbed her face and groaned. Apparently it was destined to be another life’s-a-bitch-and-then-you-die kind of day.

TWENTY FIVE

Fog seemed to penetrate everything, obscure everything. Motoring slowly down the channel toward Mott, her eyes on the radar screen, Anna felt it penetrated her very skull, obscured her thoughts. It was hard to tell where the hangover ended and the fog began. She ached for the clarity of the high desert, strong clean sunshine not filtered through atmospheres of water, air so transparent mountains a hundred miles distant looked as if they were but a day’s walk away.

Another boat loomed suddenly out of the fog behind and just barely to the port of the Belle Isle. Anna shoved her throttles forward to avoid a collision. The leap was unnecessary as it turned out but it had been a close call and she swore under her breath. Slowing, she watched, deciding whether or not to call the other pilot onto the carpet.

The other vessel pulled alongside and Anna reached for the public-address-system mike, but it was the Lorelei, Scotty Butkus piloting.

He cut power, clearly wanting a word. Anna followed suit and walked back to the stern. The water was absolutely flat. Fog hung in close curtains, absorbing all sound, all color. The boats could have been meeting in a vacuum, a windowless white room.

“Hey, Scotty, what’s up?” Anna opened the conversation as he clomped out of the Lorelei’s cabin.

“Just routine. Bound to be some fender benders in this stuff. I’ll be sticking pretty close to Rock today.”

Anna suspected it was less out of concern for the health and welfare of the tourists than because Scotty’d never gotten the hang of Loran, and wasn’t too comfortable running on radar. “It’s soupy all right,” Anna concurred. “I’ll need a red and white cane to find my way back to the north shore.”

Something was different about Scotty. As usual, his shirt was crisply pressed and his boots shiny. It was the set of his shoulders, the cock of his head that was different, Anna decided. He was smug, puffed up. She waited to hear why. He didn’t keep her on tenterhooks.

“Yup.” Scotty narrowed his eyes against a nonexistent sun and stared into a nonexistent distance. “It’s one hell of a day to be left with half a damn island to look after.” Putting a booted foot on the gunwale, he leaned his elbow on his knee. He would have looked right at home in Texas. Anna wished he were there.

Butkus was waiting for her to ask him why he was in charge of half the island but she wasn’t going to do it. He cracked before she did. “I don’t mind being Acting District Ranger,” he continued. “Hell, I’m used to that. But they don’t pay me enough to be Acting Chief Ranger.”

So that was it. Scotty was in pig heaven: both Ralph and Lucas were off duty. “Where is everybody?”

“Right. I forget. Hidden away over there on Amygdaloid, you miss out. Backcountry Management Group meeting. Be out till tomorrow.”

Several times a season Lucas, Ralph, Marilyn-the Chief Naturalist-and Lyle, the head of Roads and Trails, spent three days in the backcountry camping and hashing out wilderness-management issues.

“Ah. Well, I’d better get on with it before we get run down out here,” Anna said.

“Whatever your business is here, finish it up pronto,” Scotty said, enjoying himself. “I need you on the north shore on a day like today.”

“Will do.”

Inside and out of Anna’s head, the fog grew denser. Scotty and the Lorelei faded like specters come sunup. The Belle Isle fired up at a touch and Anna cracked the throttles. In the thick mist there was no sensation of movement. Following the jagged green map on her radar screen, she felt her way into the little harbor at Mott Island and inched up to the dock. The Loon, the Blackduck, and Pizza Dave’s little aluminum runabout were all snugged up to the concrete. No one who didn’t have to would be out on the water today.

Anna tied off her lines and followed the gravel path to the Administration Building, invisible thirty yards away.

“Coffee…” she croaked at the door of the dispatch room and Sandra returned a throaty chuckle.

“Fresh pot,” she said without turning from her keyboard.

“When you die you shall be canonized,” Anna promised. Secure in the knowledge the Chief Ranger was deep in the woods, she took Lucas’s personal coffee cup, a white mug with “Smokey the Bear’s a Communist” emblazoned on it in red. Fresh coffee in a real cup; the day was beginning to look less bleak.

“Not your cup,” Sandra admonished as Anna poured, and she realized she’d given herself away by the tiny clicking sound the neck of the pot made when it touched the rim of the cup.

“I’m using Lucas’s,” she confessed.

“That’s tantamount to sitting in the emperor’s chair,” Sandra warned. She’d finished whatever she’d been working on and turned to face Anna.

“I’ll polish my prints off when I’m finished.” Anna took a drink and sighed with satisfaction.

“Are you working over here today so Scotty won’t be all by his lonesome? Terrible to be all dressed up and nobody to boss.”

“Nope. Already got my marching orders from the Acting Chief: back to Amygdaloid ASAP. Suits me fine. I just came by to dish the dirt.”

By way of repayment for the information Sandra had provided, Anna told her of the Jim and Carrie affair and that it had been stopped. The dispatcher echoed Patience’s reaction with a shocked “Counseled!” But being less cynical than either Carrie’s mother or Anna, Sandra put her faith in Lucas Vega.

“He’ll come up with something,” she said confidently. “His mother owns half of San Diego County. There’s bound to be a few pocket senators or congressmen he can lean on to lean on somebody.”

Over a second cup of coffee Anna asked after Jo. Sandra had seen her several times, had her over to dinner once. “She’s working hard,” the dispatcher said. “Talks about PCBs and fish and slime and percentages of whatever in the whatever. She’s nailed down every minute of every day.”

“Whatever works,” Anna said, but she wondered how Jo fared during the endless minutes of her nights.

Tinker and Damien provided the only good news. Evidently Scotty had ceased his blackmail and they were of good cheer. Sandra said they were haunting McCargo Cove every spare minute in search of the mythical peregrine.

“They won’t find it today,” Anna said.

“Rumor has it it’s foggy.”

Anna drained her coffee cup. “Come on, Delphi,” she said. “Lead me back to Amygdaloid.”

Coming around Blake’s Point, eyes glued to the Loran, Anna was half sorry the water was so flat. Even the slamming of the hull against hard water would have been preferable to the absolute nothing she felt.

Between Blake’s Point and Steamboat Island, Anna executed a turn to the 248-degree heading dictated by experience and charting. Amygdaloid Channel, usually a narrow comforting waterway, took on a different aspect when neither shore was visible. She threaded her way carefully down the center.

The dock at the ranger station was deserted. Having eased the Belle Isle into her space, Anna disembarked.

Indoors, with four cluttered walls and a fire roaring in the woodstove, the fog seemed less malevolent. Anna took a couple of Advil for her head, made a pot of strong tea, and sat down at her desk to catch up on the month’s paperwork. How many diving permits issued, how many fishing licenses sold, how much in revenues to be sent to the Michigan Fish and Game. She wrote up a 10-343 Case Incident Report on two fire rings she’d destroyed and