Nevada Barr - A Superior Death

“You can’t let her sink,” he said pitifully. “She’s not paid for.”

For a moment they stood in silence, the deck rocking gently. There was scarcely any wind, but thin lines of foam whipping white on the water beyond the Low Dollar never let them forget they were only there on sufferance.

“I can’t tow it any further,” Anna said. “I’ve pushed my equipment-and my luck-more than I should have already. Let’s pull her up, untie the tow.” She pointed to the ragged shoreline where a finger of rock thrust out parallel to Isle Royale, the main island. In the directionless light it was almost indiscernible from the green of the cliffs and the gray of the water. “Behind that’s a cove with a sandy bottom. I think I can nudge your boat in there. It’ll settle in shallow water and you can salvage her when there’s more daylight.”

Having unloosed the towline, Anna took the Bertram around behind the Low Dollar and, bow to stern, rooted her into the cove like a pig rooting a bucket through the mud. The Low Dollar rested on the sand, keeled over on her side. Anna sent Hal wading ashore to tether the boat to a tree so the lake wouldn’t work her loose and lure her back to the deep during the night.

Watching him flounder through the frigid waters, Anna was unsympathetic. It was his boat. He could get his own shoes and socks wet. She looked out past Kamloops Island where waves rolled toward Canada, over the waters she had still to traverse before she would be “home.”

“I’m not used to so much water all in a row,” she said to Kenny, who had finally ventured out on deck.

He looked past her, then returned to the cabin without a word.

Hal scrambled back on board with an armload of canned goods. Their camp gear was all under a foot of water in the hold. “You won’t freeze,” Anna promised. There were half a dozen spare sleeping bags on the Belle Isle and as many army surplus woolen blankets. In hypothermia country it wasn’t excessive.

Halfway around the hump of land that separated the cove from Todd Harbor Camp, Kenny came out of his stupor and demanded they return to the Low Dollar to retrieve some “personal” things. After medication, food, and shelter had been eliminated, Anna guessed it was booze and, though she could empathize with the need for a good stiff drink, she refused to go back in the rain and growing dusk to fetch it.

Her refusal cost her any goodwill she might have earned for bringing them and their boat in off the lake. By the time they were settled in the shelter at Little Todd Harbor with her assurance that she would return with a Homelite pump in the morning, they’d grown almost surly.

Leaving them to deal with their damaged egos, Anna made her escape. Nine-fifteen p.m.: hers would be a late supper. She’d forgotten she was hungry. So far north, the sun was only just setting. It wouldn’t be full dark for another thirty minutes-later, had there been no overcast. In June the days seemed to go on forever.

“Three-zero-two en route to Amygdaloid from Todd Harbor,” Anna put in the blind call. The dispatcher in Rock Harbor went off duty at seven, but the call would be taped and, should she go down, at least they’d know where to start diving for the body.

Involuntarily, she shuddered. A body wouldn’t be alone down there. There were plenty of ships lying on Superior ’s bottom. Nearly a dozen provided scuba-diving attractions in the park: the America , Monarch, Emperor, Algoma, Cox, Congdon, Chisholm, Glenlyon, Cumberland , the Kamloops . Off her port bow a buoy bobbed, marking the deepest of the wrecks: the Kamloops . Her stern rested at one hundred and seventy-five feet, her bow at two hundred and sixty. Divers were discouraged: too deep, too cold, too dangerous.

Five sailors still stood guard in the engine room. Anna had seen an underwater photograph of them. Deep, cold, protected from currents, no creatures to eat them, they swam like ghosts in the old ship. For fifty years they’d drifted alone in the dark. Then in 1977 divers found the wreck. Years of submersion had robbed the bodies of most of their corporeal selves and they were translucent as wraiths.

Think of something else, Anna commanded herself. As she entered the familiar channel between Amygdaloid Island and Belle Isle, and saw the ranger station snugged up safe from storms at the foot of the moss-covered cliff, she allowed herself one short dream of cholla cactus and skies without milky veils of moisture, of a sun with fire to it and food hotter even than that.

After the lion incident at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Anna had felt the need to move on, to start over. At heart, the Park Service was a bureaucracy and, in the wake of the discoveries, there had been much talk and little action.

Still, Anna had worn out her welcome in West Texas. The next move, she promised as she eased the Bertram up to the dock, would be back to the Southwest, to the desert. And with a promotion; twenty-two thousand dollars a year was getting harder and harder to live on.

The 3rd Sister , a handsome forty-foot cabin cruiser with a high-ceilinged pilot’s cabin and a flying bridge decked out in red and white pin-striping, was moored across the dock. A hibachi stood unattended on the rough wooden planking of the pier. Anna could smell fish broiling over charcoal.

As she stepped onto the dock, lines in hand, a lithe form bundled in a heavy woolen shirt and a close-fitting fisherman’s cap leapt from the deck of the diving boat and took the stern line to make the Bertram fast to the dock.

Anna finished tying the bow, tugging the half-knots snug, then coiling the tail of the line out of tripping distance. “Thanks, Holly,” she called down the length of the boat. The wind took her words and flung them out over the channel. Anna was just as glad. As her helper turned, faced the last light from the western sky, she realized it was Holly’s brother, Hawk, the third man in the Sister’s three-person dive crew.

Many people made the mistake. The twins were so alike they seemed two sides of a coin; male and female brought together just once to share the same species.

At thirty-two Hawk’s sister, Holly, was tall, the cut of her features clean without hardness, her dark hair soft but not fine. Her body was lean and well muscled and her shoulders were broad. Yet only someone crippled with sexual insecurity would have called her mannish.

Hawk was all of this and yet the very essence of masculine. The curve of his shoulders and the blunt efficiency of his wind-chapped hands carried a different message. Where Holly was quick, bright, and strong, he was controlled, thoughtful, exact.

He dropped the line in a perfect coil and came across the planking.

The eyes might take Hawk for Holly, Anna thought, the senses, never. One would have to be as neuter as a snail not to feel the difference.

He stopped beside her, turning to take the sharp edge of the wind onto his own back. “Denny’s made too much salad as usual. Plenty of pike,” he said, nodding toward the hibachi. “Better join us for supper.”

Standing so close, Anna could see the dark stubble on his jaw. A delicate and somehow pleasing scent of Scotch whiskey warmed his breath. She hesitated. Relief at regaining solid ground had released her fatigue.

“No clients today,” he added as an incentive. “We dove the Cox . Just swam around the bow to get our feet wet. Too rough for tourists. Besides, we needed the dive alone.”

“Supper would be good,” Anna said. “Bring it inside? I’ll light a fire and pour a suitable libation.”

Hawk nodded and dropped over the gunwale of the 3rd Sister as Anna trotted, wind at her back, up the dock and onto the shore of Amygdaloid Island. Home, she thought sourly, but she was glad enough to be there.