A Superior Death

fishermen had powerful lobbyists. The fishes did not. So Mrs. Denny Castle would count PCBs and swat mosquitoes in the island’s interior for twelve weeks.

A crash and a curse saved Jo from further scrutiny. Scotty had knocked over his beer. Cigarette butts were floating out of the ashtray and down the white tablecloth on a foaming tide. Anna guessed he was drunk. He had the look of a man who’s been drunk often enough that he’s learned to cover it with a modicum of success. Mopping up the mess with a peach-colored napkin, he was muttering: “Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m not used to eating indoors. No elbowroom. Yes, ma’am” -this to Patience- “I’m sorry as hell. Begging your pardon” -this to Carrie for the rough language. “Let me help you clean up, little lady.”

The dialogue was cliched. Anna lost interest. She cast her eye around for some likely reason to excuse herself from the table.

Damien and Tinker provided it. Damien beckoned with the cock of a wing-shaped eyebrow. Handfast, Tinker’s blond hair permed and repermed into a golden frizz, Damien dressed all in black, they looked like the hero and heroine of an Afterschool Special.

With a good-bye to Dave, Anna squeaked her chair back, shouldered her daypack, and went over to their table. “Not here,” Damien said. Anna waited while, with an odd little ritual that required three taps on the glass and brass of the candle lantern, Tinker blew out the flame and folded the lantern down to stow in a canvas satchel.

They led her out of the restaurant and down to the water. At the end of the first in the row of docks, two-by- twelves, destined to be hauled into the wilderness on the backs of trail crew, were stacked. They settled behind these. Anna squatted down on her heels, balanced easily, and waited. This far out on the water the whine of mosquitoes faded. She took a breath as deep as a sigh. Of necessity the three of them were huddled so close between the lumber and the edge of the pier that her breath moved Tinker’s fine hair, silver now in the fluorescent lights over the harbor.

Tinker said: “I know. It’s not so much the smoke as the need. It gets hard to breathe.”

To her surprise, Anna understood exactly what Tinker was talking about. The air in the lodge felt thick, oppressive with more than just the fumes from Butkus’s interminable cigarettes. There was a sense of needs unfulfilled, hopes deferred, a generic discontent.

“People together by necessity, not choice,” Anna said. “Makes for strange alliances.”

“Yes,” Damien said darkly.

Safe in the inky shadow of the lumber, Anna smiled. Had anyone else dragged her out into the damp to play cloak and dagger she would probably have been annoyed. There was something about Tinker and Damien that disarmed her. Though eccentric, even theatrical, they seemed of good heart, as if they did as they did because it was the way in which they could deal with a difficult world. She no more felt they wasted her time than the loons who sang away her mornings.

Gentle people seemed somehow a more natural phenomenon than the greedy bulk of humanity.

“What’s the problem?” Anna asked.

“We think Scotty has eaten his wife,” Tinker confided.

THREE

Anna had recovered her composure. She sat on the floor of Tinker and Damien’s room in the old house half a mile back from the harbor. Since it had become too run-down for any other use, it had been converted into a dorm for seasonal employees. A dozen or more candles burned, but even this glamorous aura couldn’t rid the place of its mildew-and-linoleum seediness. Tinker, her soft hair glittering in the many lights, poured herbal tea into tiny, mismatched Oriental bowls.

“It’s made from all natural ingredients,” she said as she handed Anna a red lacquered bowl. “Damien and I gathered them here and on Raspberry.”

Eye of newt and toe of frog, Anna thought but she took a sip to be polite. The tea tasted of mint and honey with a woody undercurrent reminiscent of the way leaves smell when they’re newly fallen. Anna doubted she’d ask for a second cup, but not because the concoction was unpalatable. The strange brew, the black-cloaked boy, the candlelight, put her in mind of other rooms, heavy with incense and dark with Indian-print bedspreads, where the tea and cakes had been laced with more than wild raspberry leaves. She pushed her bowl aside and cleared the cobwebs of the bad old days from her mind.

“So. Scotty’s wife-Donna-hasn’t been around for a few days?”

“Seven,” Damien said, making the number sound like Donna Butkus’s death knell. Tinker nodded, her gossamer hair floating in the warm currents from the candles.

“Seven,” Anna repeated matter-of-factly.

“We went down to the water on the far side of the dock, down through the tangle of new-growth firs. There’s a little cove there where hardly anybody goes. Donna always fed the ducks there mornings,” Tinker said.

Anna raised an eyebrow. Feeding wildlife was strictly taboo.

“Yes, it was opportunistic,” Tinker agreed. “But sometimes Damien and I would go there later in the day to watch the birds she had attracted.” Again Anna was startled at her understanding. Tinker’s mind seemed strangely accessible. Either that or Anna was more transparent than she liked to think she was.

“We saw a red-necked grebe, and once a black scoter came to feed.” For the first time Damien sounded like a boy. Birds, then, were his passion.

“Last Wednesday, after breakfast, we went birding in the cove. Donna wasn’t there. That’s when we first suspected she was missing,” Damien said.

“Maybe she came earlier, fed them, and had already gone,” Anna suggested.

Damien shook his head portentously. “You don’t understand. The ducks were expecting her.” The boy was gone; the wizard was back.

“Did you ask Scotty where she was?”

“He said she’d had the flu and was home watching the soaps and drinking orange juice,” Tinker replied, as if that course of events was too farfetched to fool even a child. She folded the tips of long tapered fingers delicately around the lacquered bowl and raised it to her lips, not to drink but to inhale the sweet-smelling steam.

It crossed Anna’s mind that perhaps O.J. and The Young and the Restless were beyond the pale for Tinker. “Replace the soaps with old Jimmy Stewart movies and that’s what I’d do if I had the flu,” Anna said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“There is no flu going around,” Damien declared flatly.

Tinker said: “Donna had promised to cut my hair. In return I was going to teach her how to use some of the herbs here. Just for small things-nothing dangerous,” she reassured Anna who, till then, hadn’t needed it. “Just hair rinses and facials, decoctions for colds, that sort of thing. Then nothing. Not a word. Not a note. Then we…” She looked to her husband for assistance, clearly coming now to what she considered shaky ground.

“We conducted the surveillance warranted by the seriousness of the situation,” he said firmly. In his airy voice the statement reminded Anna of the sweet but implacable “Because I said so” that Sister Judette had used to such effect on the class of ‘69.

“You watched the house,” Anna said, careful not to sound judgmental. “And?”

“Nothing,” Damien echoed his wife. “Neither days nor nights. We never saw Donna.”

A moment’s silence was slowly filled with suspense, yet Anna did not doubt their sincerity.

“Then this,” Tinker said gravely. She turned to a brick-and-board bookcase filled with field guides to birds, bats, edible plants, herbs, and mammals of Isle Royale, bits of rock, bones, dried plants, and melted candle stubs. From beneath the bookcase she took a small glass container so clean it looked polished. She set it on her palm and offered it up to Anna.

Anna reached for it, then stopped. “May I?” she said, adopting the ceremony that seemed so natural to these two.

“Yes,” Damien replied formally. “We would not have come to you had we not found proof Scotty devoured his wife. It is a serious charge.”

Anna lifted the jar carefully from Tinker’s hand and turned it in the flickering light. It was several inches high,