Nevada Barr - A Superior Death

“Ah.” He didn’t elaborate and Anna said: “A Submerged Cultural Resource Specialist who doesn’t like diving? What happened? Shark bite you?”

“They made me do it in the Navy,” he said. “It’s a job.”

A secure government job with health and retirement benefits. Easy to get for an ex-Navy man with veteran’s preference in hiring. Dig a comfortable little air-conditioned niche and wait out the years until retirement while hundreds of overqualified people worked as seasonals, scraping by winters doing odd jobs, because they wanted to save the world- or at least one little corner of it.

It wasn’t hard to understand how Denny had come by his contempt for Jim.

Anna picked up Ivanhoe again, determined to answer only in grunts until any further attempts at conversation were effectively squashed.

The respite was short-lived. Ralph and Lucas surfaced. She and Jim helped them crawl aboard. For half a minute the divers lay in a puddle on the boat deck like a couple of unpleasant monsters dragged in with the day’s catch.

With a popping, sucking noise, Vega pulled off his rubber hood and dropped it on the deck. Anna tossed it against the cabin and knelt to help him with his tanks. Vega’s face was almost the same shade of gray as the lake.

“Not a joke?” Anna asked.

Lucas shook his head. “Not a joke. It’s Denny, Denny Castle.”

Anna rocked back on her heels. She felt as if she’d been punched in the solar plexus. It confused her.

She hadn’t known she cared.

Jim Tattinger did most of the talking and he was asking questions that neither Ralph nor Lucas wanted to answer: What did Denny look like? Could they tell what killed him? Did they touch him? Were his eyes open? He talked rapidly and his usually pale skin was flushed up to his ears. He babbled like a man trying to cover up a social faux pas.

As a reaction to the death of a colleague, guilty embarrassment seemed singularly inappropriate. Anna wondered if Tattinger was ashamed of having spoken ill of the dead when the dead floated thirty fathoms beneath his feet.

She and Jim had talked of Castle as if he were alive. In their minds-at least in Anna’s-he had still lived. It was as if no one could die until she had been informed. In a way that was true. Even now, years after Zachary had been killed, Anna would sometimes forget he was dead. She’d think of a joke she wanted to tell him, a place she wanted to show him, and for that moment he would be alive again, utterly alive. So much so that the next moment, when she remembered, was always a fresh grief, though now blessedly shortlived.

Anna made a mental note to tell Jo Castle that things did get better eventually. She did not expect Jo would believe her.

Lucas Vega thought of Denny’s wife at that same moment. He and Ralph were back in dry clothes sitting on the engine box drinking hot coffee from a thermos while Anna and Jim stowed gear and reeled in line. “Anna,” Vega said, “I’d like you to come with me to Davidson and give the news to Jo. I’d like a female officer to be present.”

Anna nodded. She never felt particularly comfortable when called on to be a female officer. Some arcane, instinctual talents were expected and she’d never figured out exactly what they were. “What then?” she asked.

Lucas wiped a fine-boned brown hand over his face, dragging down the flesh of his cheeks. “I’ll call the Feds. This clearly is no accident. The man didn’t bump his head diving off the high board and drown. He’s a couple of hundred feet down floating around in a Halloween costume.

“Then I guess we go get him. It’s a hell of a crime scene to investigate. The standard techniques aren’t going to help much. I doubt there’s an FBI man in a thousand miles who could even get to the scene, much less function after he did. We’re stuck with this one. At least for a while.”

Anna wondered if Lucas expected her to make the dive for the body recovery. A dormant claustrophobia began to awaken within her, a cold hard spot just under her breastbone. It was the park’s policy that a ranger was never to tackle a task she or he felt unsafe performing for any reason. She would not be forced to go.

“Do you feel you’re ready for a dive that technical?” Lucas asked.

“Sure.”

He clapped her on the shoulder and went into the cabin.

Ralph Pilcher, still seated on the engine box, drank his coffee as the Bertram powered up. Anna felt him watching her. She coiled the last of the line and stowed it in its niche in the hull by his knees. Ralph had a crooked smile-rather, his smile was straight but a twice broken nose unbalanced his face till it seemed crooked. His hair, wild from the rubber hood, stood out from his head in a brown tangle. “The lake scare you?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“Good. It should. It’s one scary place.”

Anna stopped what she was doing to look at him. Fit, compact, in his early thirties, he didn’t look afraid of anything. Except perhaps, if the gossip had any truth to it, being tied down to his new baby and his pretty new wife. “Does the lake scare you?” she returned.

“No. But then it didn’t scare Denny either.” He threw the last of his coffee over the side of the boat. “Why didn’t you tell Lucas you were scared to dive? He’d never razz you about it. He’d give you something else to do, something you’re comfortable with.”

“The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” Anna replied. “Time I made his acquaintance.”

Pilcher nodded. “We’ll give you all the help you need. Don’t get pigheaded.” He stood up, his feet firm and easy on the moving deck. “And stay a little scared. You’ll live longer.”

The District Ranger went inside. Anna didn’t want to think anymore of the dive. I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it, she told herself. She lashed the tanks down so they wouldn’t roll, then settled her shoulders against the cabin where she was out of the wind.

The drizzle had stopped and the sun was piercing through a rent in the clouds above the island, pouring gold down onto the treetops until they glowed a rich green against their shadowed fellows. Sparks of sunshine reached the water. Where they touched, the lake turned emerald and azure. Light, life, color: Anna breathed deeply and knew the breath for a miracle, a celebration, an act of devotion.

Sandra Fox’s comfortable voice came into her mind, telling her again of a high school girl’s relentless love of a boy. How it molded her career, shaped her life even into her early thirties. A week and a half ago Jo had married her high school boy. Now that boy was dead.

At the moment, in Jo’s mind, Denny still lived.

The instant Anna’s husband died, each minute that he had lived became a memory. The good were golden, the bad like an acid that burned in the mind. She hoped Jo’s thoughts these last precious minutes were not the kind that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

By the time they reached Davidson Island the sky was clear and the sun shone down as if it always had. Pilcher and Tattinger had been left at Mott. Anna piloted the Lorelei up to the small wooden dock. A gray jay scolded from the branches of an aspen tree and a mallard swam in and out of the pilings with her downy brood scuttling along in her wake. Anna sidled up to the pier as gently as she could so she wouldn’t overset the ducklings.

Lucas made the lines fast to the dock cleats and stood in the sun waiting. Both he and Anna did each small unimportant task with a time-consuming precision designed to postpone the inevitable.

As they walked up the wooded path toward the cabin, three bunnies, new-made and too young to be afraid, hopped out of their way. White baneberry blossoms leaned close and the woods were carpeted ankle-deep in bluebead lilies. A world where rain fell: the abundance of life stunned Anna. This afternoon there was something both reassuring and mocking in such wealth.