Nevada Barr - A Superior Death

Anna killed twenty minutes standing under a hot shower. At 6:05, wishing she had coffee but lacking the courage to rummage through Patience’s kitchen, she dialed her sister’s number in New York. Molly picked up on the first ring. “Dr. Pigeon,” she said curtly. The formality threw Anna for a moment.

“It’s me, Anna,” she said. “You sound further up than five minutes. Are you okay?”

“Had a rough night.” The sounds of crockery and metal rattled behind Molly’s words.

“Making coffee?” Anna asked enviously.

“Second pot.” There was a clicking on the line. “Hold,” Molly said. “I’m expecting another call.” She was back within seconds. “False alarm. Nobody there. Phone must be acting up.”

“Migraine?” Anna asked. Her sister had suffered migraines since her twenties but she’d not had one in a while.

“No. That’s for later if this clenched feeling behind my eyes means anything. I lost a patient last night. I thought you might be the police. Lots of questions. I’ve got answers that satisfy them. None that satisfy me.”

“Suicide?” Anna asked. Molly had only had two in twenty years of practice. She’d taken both of them hard for a psychiatrist. Anna loved her the better for it.

“Not exactly. At least I doubt that was the primary motivation. Remember my crazy connoisseur?”

“The disgruntled food writer?”

“Him. He climbed the outside of a three-story building in Brooklyn Heights last night. The man is-was-in his late fifties with the figure of a confirmed food worshiper. He hadn’t climbed more than stairs in the past ten years and never those if there was an elevator nearby.”

“Jumped?”

“The police thought jumped at first, but he fell. All the windows were locked on the inside. He had to have climbed up.”

“Do you know why? I mean, did he live there or something?”

“No. He was trying to get to the food lab and kitchens of his rival. I think he figured if he could get in, he could find something to prove the Great Discovery was a hoax.”

“Jesus,” Anna breathed. “You’d think anybody who can afford you would hire someone to do their stunt work.”

“Not this man. I should have seen it coming. The obsessions amused me, Anna. Amused me. I thought it was funny. I just didn’t see it as something that could drive anybody to do something that desperate. The last couple of sessions he talked of revenge, said the yellow braces weren’t enough. He talked of plans to mock, to expose, even to kill his rival. The plans were all overblown-comic book stuff. You know: plastic explosives on the violent end and intricate Rube Goldberg devices to deliver a public pie in the face on the silly end. Boyish. I wasn’t paying attention. I’ve got that article coming out in Psychology Today and that conference I’m chairing at Princeton in August. Like some damned TV star, I sat there primping while this poor man cried out. The system failed him. I failed him. Dr. Quick Fix. I fell in love with my own glib theories. And Gustav Claben died.”

“I’m sorry,” was all Anna could say. Molly was never to be comforted when she believed she had failed. People found it hard to love a woman to whom they could give nothing. The pain would pass and Molly would never let it happen again, at least not in the same way.

Again there was a clicking on the line. This time it was another call: the hospital where Molly’s client had been taken. Molly rang off abruptly, leaving Anna with the depressing feeling that she should have done something more, said something wiser. Just once she wished Molly would need something that she was equipped to deliver.

Like what? Anna mocked herself. Need someone arrested for camping out of bounds in Central Park? A horse shod or a boat engine tuned for her Park View practice?

Anna promised herself she would call again soon and make a point to listen more than talk. She had to satisfy herself with that.

When she looked up from the phone, Patience was standing in the hall between the living room and the bath. Her face was twisted, as though she couldn’t decide whether to come ahead into the front room or retreat back to the bedroom.

“It’s all right,” Anna said. “I’m off the phone.”

Patience gave her a hard look, angry-or so it seemed through the medium of a hangover.

“I used my credit card,” Anna said, feeling childish.

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.

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.”