A Superior Death (10 page)

“It’s a vessel all right. A little runabout. Maybe sixteen, eighteen feet long. Black fiberglass hull, red upholstery. I can’t see the name, but unless there’s another just like it, that’s the
Blackduck.
” The
Blackduck
was the Resource Management Department’s boat. They had lent her to Jo Castle for the duration of her research on the island.

“Tell Ralph to change course.” Lucas never altered the tone of his voice, never raised it, but there was that about the man that when he wished to be obeyed instantly, he was. Anna went back into the cabin and pointed the vessel out to the District Ranger. “Shit,” he whispered, cut left throttle and pushed full right to turn the
Lorelei
more sharply.

Anna rejoined Lucas on deck. He kept the field glasses, giving a running report as they neared the vessel. “She’s not swamped. There’s some water on the seats and the dash from this drizzle, but the deck’s not awash. There doesn’t seem to be any damage to the hull. Maybe some scratches where she’s been nudging against the rocks.”

The timbre of the inboards changed as Ralph eased the
Lorelei
gingerly into the shallower water along the base of the cliff. Anna and Lucas each took a side of the boat and stared intently down at the unrevealing surface for any tell-tale shadows of submerged snags or boulders.

Ralph cut power completely and the boat drifted slowly forward. “That’s it,” he shouted. “I’m afraid to take her any further in.”

“Close enough,” Lucas replied.

A few yards off the
Lorelei
’s bow, moving up and down on the Bertram’s fading wake, the
Blackduck
sat in the water. Her outboard motor made a delicate scratching sound as it scraped against a rock.

Feet on the gunwale, Anna eased around the cabin using the chrome railing on the roof to steady herself. Vega passed her the boat hook and she knelt to fish up the
Blackduck
’s bow line where it trailed down from the cleat. She pulled it dripping from the shallows and Lucas secured it to the
Lorelei
’s stern. As Anna worked her way back aft, the Chief Ranger reeled in their catch.

The
Blackduck
had one full tank of fuel; the other was a quarter full. The engine fired up at a touch of the starter. There was no damage to the hull or the propeller. A complete complement of life jackets was stowed under the pilot’s seat. She appeared simply to have been abandoned, left to drift.

They hooked her to the tow line and Pilcher started back out toward the burial place of the
Kamloops.
The light-haired mannequin in the engine room no longer seemed a practical joke.

Pilcher took the
Lorelei
to the long-range navigational, or loran, coordinates where the buoy marking the
Kamloops
’ location was secured. Once again Anna and Lucas studied the water.

Pocked by fine rain, the water looked to be made of granite. Anna was glad she was not going down. Technically she was qualified, but she knew there were miles of road between “qualified” and “ready.” The scrap of paper with its gold curlicues and typed-in names that certified her as a diver was merely a promissory note. One day, with practice and experience, she might become a diver.

With luck, Anna thought, she’d make it back to a desert park before that fate befell her.

Jim Tattinger dropped a two-hundred-foot line marked off at ten-foot intervals with bright blue bands. When the body swam through cold dark waters and the brain swam through six of Neptune’s martinis, getting lost or ascending faster than the prescribed feet per minute were very real dangers. The line helped orientation and timing. On a longer dive it would also hold spare tanks at intervals along the way.

Ralph and Lucas began the cumbersome process of suiting up. Both wore polypropylene long johns and two pairs of heavy socks. Over these they zipped khaki-colored quilted overalls, then added balaclavas. To Anna they resembled nothing so much as Peter Pan’s little lost boys. All that was missing were the round ears and fuzzy tails. Next came the thick rubber dry suits with attached booties and rubber hoods, then flippers, weight belts, masks, tanks, gloves. Blue-and-black-bodied, faceless, humped with yellow metal cylinders as they were, all trace of humanity was buried under layers of protective gear.

Anna eyed them askance. She didn’t much care to go someplace Mother Nature had gone to such lengths to keep her out of.

Pilcher rolled off the waterline deck at the
Lorelei
’s stern and was swallowed by the liquid granite. Seconds later he surfaced and Anna handed him the underwater light. Vega settled his mask and mouthpiece and followed Pilcher into the lake. When he bobbed back up, Anna gave him the still camera. Tattinger, leaning over the starboard gunwale, deployed the red and white flag that indicated there were divers down. He was remaining on the surface with Anna as a dive tender.

In a pale roiling of bubbles, Pilcher and Vega were gone. There was nothing more to do but wait. Anna went into the cabin where it was dry and, relatively speaking, warm. She settled lengthwise on the bench, her back against the cold plastic of the side window. The divers would be down only ten to twelve minutes. Descending at sixty-five to seventy feet per minute, they’d be at the wreck in about four minutes, then in and out of the engine room and back up. If they stayed down much longer they would have to make prolonged stops on the ascent or they’d risk the bends. The only cure was to go into a hyperbaric chamber and start the long recompression process. The nearest chamber was in Minneapolis, two hours away by low-flying plane.

As the abandoned
Blackduck,
Jo’s boat, bobbed gently to the starboard, Jim tried to raise Mrs. Castle on the radio. Sandra Fox answered, reminding him Jo had not yet been issued a handheld Motorola radio.

“Try Scotty,” Anna suggested. “He could stop by Davidson and see if she’s there.” Davidson Island had a lovely rustic cabin the NPS set aside for visiting researchers. Permanent NPS staff had more prosaic quarters with flush toilets and electricity on Mott. Seasonal rangers had lusted after the Davidson house, but it was much too nice for seasonals.

“Scotty’s off today,” Jim said. His voice was nasal and flat, so much in keeping with his traditional nerd exterior that Anna wondered if all the pencil-neck-geek genes were housed on the same chromosome.

“He got yesterday and today off and he took another day of annual leave so he could go to Houghton and have his ear looked at.”

“What’s wrong with his ear?” Anna asked because Jim expected her to.

“Scotty’s part deaf in his left ear. He wears one of those little bitty hearing aids in it. Did you know that?” Jim asked so sharply Anna wondered if he was telling Scotty’s secrets.

“Nope.” She’d guessed Scotty was hard of hearing on one side by the way he cocked his head and the number of times he asked people to repeat things, but she’d never given it any thought.

“That damn Denny Castle hit him on his bad ear,” Tattinger went on. “Scotty had that little thing in there and it hurt him.” Jim sounded angry but had a vocal range that expressed perpetual discontent, and Anna wasn’t sure if he had something against Denny or was just making conversation.

“How did Denny happen to hit him?”

“He didn’t
happen
to hit him,” Jim snapped. Anna didn’t take offense. Jim had never learned how to win friends and influence people. “Castle hit him on purpose. After that stupid reception, Castle came over to Mott. I wasn’t there, but I guess he was looking for Donna. Scotty wasn’t taking any of his crap.”

And Scotty was drunk, Anna thought. “A fight?”

“More like a shoving match. Denny Castle doesn’t have the gonads to fight.”

“Gonads.” Not “balls.” Anna swallowed a smile. She pictured a little, skinny, red-haired Jimmy Tattinger practicing swearing in the bathroom mirror and never managing to get it quite right.

For a while they sat without talking. Anna got her daypack and dug out a paperback copy of
Ivanhoe.
It produced a book’s inevitable effect. In cats it stimulated the urge to sit on the pages. In humans it stimulated conversation.

“I feel sorry for Jo,” Jim said, staring out the window to where the
Blackduck
had nudged up beside the
Lorelei.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this was no accident, if she got upset and came out here and killed herself. It’d be one way of getting away from that damned Denny Castle.”

Anna was a little surprised at his vehemence and at his echoing Scotty’s words. Why was Tattinger so down on Denny? Jim didn’t have any wife to steal. Maybe it was enough that Denny openly expressed the opinion that Tattinger was a lousy diver, an incompetent manager, and showed no concern for the resources he was hired to protect.

She decided to prod a little. “I don’t know why anybody would feel sorry for Jo,” she said. “There’s not many women who’d throw Denny Castle out of bed for eating crackers.”

Jim snorted, a sound like old pug dogs make. “Oh,
women
fall for that crap Denny dishes out.”

The insult to Denny and all of womankind seemed to be in about equal proportions. Jim exposed a moist ruffled underlip as he smiled at a delicious memory.

A number of retorts came to mind but Anna left them unsaid. She wondered if Jim was trying to needle her into an argument. For a moment she just watched him; the pale restless eyes staring at the gray nothing beyond the windscreen, the bored wanderings of his white-skinned fingers picking at the vinyl seat cover where it was worn through.

No, she decided, he wasn’t trying intentionally to provoke her. He was just naturally irritating. At his age—somewhere in the neighborhood of forty—he probably knew he rubbed people the wrong way. Anna suspected he’d never figured out why and somewhere along the line had given up trying and retreated into his computers.

“I used to work on St. John in the Caribbean,” he said suddenly. “I didn’t mind diving so much there. It’s warm.”

“Why did you leave the Virgin Islands National Park?” Anna asked. Tattinger was a GS-5 making less than nineteen thousand a year, an entry-level position, so it hadn’t been for a promotion.

“The District Ranger was a prick,” he said succinctly.

“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.

CHAPTER 6

J
im 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 short-lived.

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