Nevada Barr - A Superior Death

Anna picked up her Styrofoam cup. It was time to find out a little more about Donna Butkus. Anna had entered on duty May 3, six days before the early staff had moved to the island. The Butkuses had followed a week or so later. Secreted away on Amygdaloid, she had missed Lucas Vega’s getting-to-know-you potluck. Almost everything she knew about her fellow islanders she’d learned secondhand through Christina’s letters. As a secretary at the headquarters in Houghton, Chris was in on everything.

Anna carried her cup back to the Administration Building.

The architect hadn’t catered to any north woods notion of romantic design. It was purely governmental: a low, boring, wooden building with a concrete walk, a square of exotic grass species mowed short, and a white flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes. Inside, it was made only slightly more interesting by the addition of maps and charts on the walls.

Anna let herself past a counter installed to keep out Unofficial Persons and walked down the linoleum-floored hallway to the third door on the right. The drone of a computer printing out hung in the air like dust and there was the smell of stale coffee. Sandra Fox, ISRO’s dispatcher, sat with her back to the door. Sandra was in her mid-fifties with close-cropped red hair and a comfortably rounded body.

“Come for another cup of your fine coffee,” Anna said to announce herself.

“Hi, Anna,” Sandra said without turning from the keyboard. “Be with you in a sec.”

Anna sat in the metal folding chair between the waste-basket and the door, watching Sandra’s fingers pecking at the keys. Each was pocked with dots. One printer printed the text out in braille, a second in regular print. It was the first machine of its kind Anna had ever seen.

“Can I pet Delphi?” she asked.

“Sure.” Sandra went on typing.

The dispatcher’s seeing-eye dog, a seven-year-old golden retriever and, as the only dog allowed on the island, a minor celebrity, lay curled neatly under the table that held the printers. Anna crouched and fondled her ears. She cocked one blond eyebrow and looked up with dark liquid eyes. Her tail thumped softly. The warmth of the fur, the nonjudgmental gaze made Anna realize how much a part of her life Piedmont was, how dear and valued a friend.

“There!” Sandra sighed with satisfaction. “So. You finally got those bozos on the Low Dollar afloat. Did they limp back to Grand Marais all right?”

“I guess,” Anna returned. “Nothing washed up on the north shore.” Sandra laughed. Anna wasn’t surprised she knew about the foundered vessel. The dispatcher saw nothing but she heard everything; heard and noted every radio transmission on the island. Rumor had it she used her radio to listen in on phone calls when things got slow-her own version of watching the soaps. Since she kept her own counsel nobody ever called her on it.

“Do you know Donna Butkus, Scotty’s wife?” Anna asked, staying where she was on the cold linoleum so she could enjoy the company of the dog.

Sandra settled back in her chair, folded her hands over her midriff where it rounded out the green fabric of her uniform trousers.

Settling in for a gossip, Anna thought. Good.

“Oh, yes. Scotty brought her back from his trip home last August. He and his third wife were good friends with her parents.” The information was delivered without emotion, but Fox had a lump of tongue in her cheek and the skin around her unseeing eyes crinkled.

“What’s she like?” Anna asked. “Tinker and Damien were talking about her last night. She sounds like an interesting person.”

“Hard to say what somebody’s really like.” Sandra warmed to her subject. Between the radio, the phone calls, and the gossip, Anna guessed people were Sandra’s hobby. “She’s around twenty-nine or thirty, dark hair and eyes. Pretty in an old-fashioned way. ‘A darling dumpling of a girl’ was how Trixy described her.”

Trixy was the seasonal who headed the Interpretive Program. Winters she taught school in Houghton. For the last six summers she’d worked at ISRO. Anna winced at Trixy’s choice of “dumpling” to describe the woman Tinker and Damien thought to be both meat and drink to her husband.

Sandra smiled mischievously. “All that, of course, is merely hearsay. I didn’t see it with my own eyes. My idea of what Donna’s like is less superficial. She’s got a real gentle voice, and shaking hands with her is like catching a butterfly-all soft and fluttering you’re afraid you’ll crush. Very quiet. I think she feels out of place here. Everybody’s so rough-and-tumble and always talking shop. She and Trixy got fairly close. Both artsy types. I think she pretty much hero-worshiped Scotty. Then she married him. Oops!” Sandra laughed good-humoredly and Anna laughed with her. “Why are you interested? Lucas got you investigating rangers’ wives?”

Anna shook her head. “No. Tinker and Damien hadn’t seen her around and were concerned. I asked Scotty about her this morning and he blew up-something about Denny Castle. Piqued my interest. I’m just being nosy.”

“Um,” Sandra said, the explanation completely satisfactory. “That Denny Castle thing was all the talk this winter. He and Donna spent a lot of time together, I guess. I don’t know if there really was ever anything in it, but a man who marries a woman thirty years younger than himself’s bound to have a few insecurities. Especially if he’s not rich. I guess the romance was mostly on Denny’s side. He made kind of a fool of himself. Following her, that kind of thing. Those deep sensitive types get funny yens. Myself, I like bluff hearty types who swat you on the behind.”

Anna felt she owed Sandra for the information and paid in kind. She told her the details of the reception. The dispatcher had been on duty that evening. Sandra listened with a concentration that flattered most people, including Anna, into telling her things they’d never really intended to.

“Jo’s been around forever,” Sandra said when Anna had finished. “Always finding excuses to work with Denny, or at least get to the island. She’s been chasing after him since high school. Them what’s uncharitable say that’s why he took to the water: to get away from her. Then she went to college- double major in freshwater and marine biology. ‘Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no ocean deep enough,’ I guess. She’s got him now,” Sandra concluded philosophically. “More power to her.”

“Seven-oh-one, one-two-one,” cackled at Sandra’s elbow.

“Duty calls,” she said to Anna.

“I’ve got to go too.” Anna stayed just long enough to hear what 121-Lucas Vega-was calling about. It didn’t concern her, so she gave Delphi a farewell pat and left.

Donna was in Houghton nursing a sister with a ruptured disk.

Case closed.

Despite Tinker and Damien’s wishes, ISRO was simply not a hotbed of crime. The only deaths were those of innocent fishes and that was deemed not only legal but admirable. So much so it surprised Anna that it was not written into every ranger’s job description that he or she was to ooh and ahh over the corpses of what had once been flashing silver jewels enlivening the deep.

To Isle Royale fishermen’s credit, Anna forced herself to admit, they almost always ate what they killed-unlike the trophy hunters in Texas who wanted only heads and racks and skins to display on dusty walls.

Anna waited till the Ranger III docked at noon, in the hope there would be a note from Christina. Anna had become friends with Chris and her daughter, Alison, in Texas. The desert had never appealed to Christina and she had missed town living. In the weeks Anna had been out on the island there’d been a note with each Ranger III docking. A letter this Wednesday would mean a lot and she waited even at the risk of having to kayak Blake’s Point in the dark.