Nevada Barr - A Superior Death

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.

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, wider at the bottom than the top, and had ridges at the mouth where a screw cap had once fitted. If there had been a label it had been scrubbed off completely.

“A jar,” Anna said blankly.

“A pickle relish jar…” Damien encouraged her.

Anna began to feel her brain had fogged up somehow. Could there have been something in the tea? Was Tinker a self-styled witch? Damien a warlock hopeful? Or were they merely a couple of eccentrics, the kindhearted flakes she’d thought them to be? One thing was certain: Anna was not making sense of much of what they were saying. If they did have a puzzle, the pieces they offered didn’t seem to fit any picture she could come up with.

“A pickle relish jar,” she repeated.

“Heinz,” Tinker added.

“That”-Damien pointed to the little bottle as if it were something unclean-“is not an isolated incident. The last food order Scotty Butkus sent to Bob’s Foods included an order for an entire case of pickle relish.”

ISRO employees ordered their food for a week at a time, sending lists to several markets in Houghton. Every Tuesday the food was shipped back on the Ranger III .

“That’s a lot of relish,” Anna said, wondering what it was she was agreeing with. “I take it you saw his order form?”

“It was in the trash,” Tinker explained.

From beyond the screened-in window, Anna could hear muted laughter, the dull-edged variety brought on by vodka. Trail crew must have made a late appearance at the party and were now staggering back to their boats for the short ride home to their bunkhouse on Mott.