“Dead bodies seem to follow you around, Anna. Are you sure you never auditioned for Night of the Living Dead when you lived in New York?”
“I saw it,” Alison stuck in. Ally was sitting in Anna’s canvas canoe chair between her mother, who occasionally dipped a paddle off the bow, and Anna, who worked all of the mobile magic from the stern. “There were all these dead people with white faces and black lips who walked like this.”
“Don’t stand up!” Anna and Christina said in unison.
“Like this.” Alison demonstrated from her seat, swinging her arms like a chair-bound Frankenstein’s monster. “They were supposed to be scary but they were just stupid. It was in black and white,” she said as if that explained everything.
“Night of the Living Dead scared the pants off me,” Anna said. “For weeks afterward all my roommates had to do was walk stiff-legged-”
“Don’t stand up!” the two women repeated as Ally squirmed.
“-and I’d turn totally paranoid,” Anna finished.
“What’s paranoid?” Ally asked.
“Being scared of things that aren’t really going to hurt you,” her mother replied. “Pair-ah-noyd. P-a-r…”
When Tuesday’s Ranger III had docked, Chris and Ally had been on it. “We needed to be at One with Nature,” Chris had said but she’d come because Anna’s letters had sounded lonely. Christina hated nature unless it could be pruned into an attractive foundation planting.
Anna smiled. If one couldn’t go home, the next best thing was having home come to the wilderness. Christina Walters, with her soft white hands, deplorable J-stroke, and antipathy toward pit toilets, carried homeyness with her the way lilacs carried perfume. Anna knew one day she would lose her housemates to a sweetheart. Christina would not be single long.
“I wish I were gay,” she said over Alison’s head. Literally over the little girl’s head, not figuratively. At five Ally was more sophisticated than Anna had been at thirty.
“Would you marry Ally and me?” Christina asked.
“In a second.”
“No good.” Christina laughed, caught a crab with her paddle, and splashed her daughter and Anna. “I only go for women with more impressive b-o-s-o-m-s.”
“Et tu, Brute,” Anna grumbled, and: “You do not.”
“You haven’t met Bertie.”
The bicycling friend: Anna might lose them sooner than she had thought. It would be hard not to meet Chris’s date at the door, cross-examine her about her intentions and if she could support Chris and Ally in the manner they had grown accustomed to. Anna smiled wryly. They all three lived on NPS wages. Any greasy-spoon waitress could answer the last question with a resounding “Yes!”
“Don’t worry, Aunt Anna,” Ally was saying. “If Momma and I get married again you can come live with us. If you bring Piedmont,” she added as a condition.
“We’ll adopt you,” Chris said.
“Paddle,” Anna returned. “You guys weigh a ton.”
“An-oh-wreck-see-ah,” Christina said. “No one in the Walters family will ever be skinny. It indicates a stinginess of the spirit. We only accept your meagerness because it comes from being a rotten cook, not a bad person.”
Anna paddled. She had that rare sense of knowing, at the moment it was happening, that she was happy, that life was okay. She stopped talking to better enjoy it. Ally and Christina’s chatter pattered over her like warm rain.
“How much further?” Ally asked after a few minutes.
“When do you bring it up?” Christina said at almost the same instant. “It” meant Denny Castle’s body. Chris knew Denny. She’d met him once in Houghton and again when she’d visited Anna on the island in late May. But Christina chose not to personify death, not to call it by name. Euphemisms-“passed away,” “no longer with us”-came naturally to her.
Once Anna had thought it an affectation. In the year she had known Chris it had persisted to such an extent that she now classified it as, if not a religious taboo, at least a superstition. Molly might well have termed it a neurotic denial of human mortality-but that’s what Molly was paid for. And though Anna believed everything her sister told her on principle, she tended to look askance at the labeling of the less socially ratified personality traits as “illness” and the therapists, quite profitably, as the “cure.”
“Three quarters of a mile and Friday,” she answered cheerfully. Even dark thoughts and tedious practicalities took on a different air when shared.
“Do you have to dive so deep?” Christina asked.
“Yup.”
“Are you scared?”
“Yup.”
“Are you par-ah-noyd?” Ally asked.
“Yup.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Chris asked.
“Nope.”
“Nope,” Ally echoed, popping the p so it sounded like a cork coming out of a bottle.
The weather held all day. The water stayed smooth and flat. Inland it would be humid, buggy, but on the water it was cool. The shoreline in McCargo Cove was just warm enough for a little cautious sunbathing. Christina worked on matching her old tan with her new bathing suit and getting through Ryan’s Daughter because Bertie had recommended it. Anna skipped stones, tracked foxes in the sand, and annoyed caddis fly larvae with Ally.
Midafternoon they launched the canoe and paddled back up the long narrow cove. Sailboats moved slowly in McCargo’s protected waters, their sails as colorful and delicate-seeming as butterfly wings. Three miles long and no more than an eighth of a mile wide, McCargo was a favorite anchorage.
Anna planned an early picnic supper at the Birch campsite. Birch was a pretty little island set at the mouth of Brady Cove, a lagoonlike pocket of water off McCargo. From Birch they could watch the boat traffic and, if they got lucky, Anna could show Chris and Ally a moose. Brady Cove, behind the island, was barely six feet deep and moose often came there to browse. Several boaters had reported seeing a cow with twin calves in the past week.
A more prosaic reason was because fires were allowed on Birch. Open fires had been banned at most of Isle Royale’s camps. The areas got so much use, sites had been stripped bare by campers looking for firewood. In places branches and bark had been torn from trees as high as a man could reach. In a year or two fires would probably be banned park-wide. At present Birch was still legal, and Anna wanted a fire for Ally. Marshmallows, the smell of smoke, gathering twigs, being warned half a dozen times a minute by Mom- the core camping experience.
A thin line of smoke drifting out over the water announced that Birch was occupied. Anna couldn’t hide her disappointment. Hot dogs fried over the roaring invisible flame of her Peak 1 would be a poor substitute.
“We’ll eat down by the water,” Chris said. “That way we can see better. Besides, it’s always less buggy on the shore out of the trees.” She knew Anna and Alison had their hearts set on building a campfire. She was trying to make them feel better. They didn’t.
Alison sulked while Anna dragged the canoe up on shore and unloaded it. Anna tried to keep up her end of the day but she felt a childish resentment that her plans had been disrupted. “I’m the ranger,” she said peevishly.
“That and a dollar won’t even get you a cup of coffee here,‘’ Chris returned. She excused herself to find the ”ladies’ room“ and left Anna and Ally sitting with their legs dangling over the edge of the dock, both steadfastly refusing to play the Pollyanna Glad Game.
Anna had just about mustered up the energy to start behaving like an adult, when Christina returned.
“Anybody want to come eat supper by my fire?” she invited.
Anna’s first uncharitable thought was that the fire had been left unattended and she cursed herself for leaving her citation book back on Amygdaloid.
“Two very nice people said we could share.”
Anna’s anger dissolved. Sharing: the obvious solution and one that never would have occurred to her in a thousand years. Following Chris and Alison, she carried the picnic cooler up the trail. The sun was shining again; the clouds she and Ally had been fomenting cleared in an instant. The air smelled of pine and wild lily of the valley, marsh marigolds put their golden heads together along the boardwalk over the swampy areas. Goldthread nodded wisely in the woods.
“It’s like Disneyland,” Ally reported, running ahead.
Alison had never been to Disneyland but Anna knew exactly what she meant. In June, Isle Royale was very like the artist’s conceptions of the forest where Bambi and Snow White spent the bulk of their days. Now and then mosquitoes whined menacingly from the shadows, but their bloodthirsty hum only served to add the spice of reality.
Lugging the cooler, Anna came last into the clearing. From a low branch of a spruce tree two beady black eyes met hers. Oscar the bear was on watch, protecting Birch Island camp. Ally stood on a stump, a black cloak held vampirelike across the lower half of her face. Their hosts were Tinker and Damien.
“How did you guys get here?” Anna asked in surprise. “There’s no boat.”
“Pizza Dave brought us over in the Loon and dropped us off,” Tinker told her. “He was on his way to Thunder Bay on a pizza run.”
Taking an NPS boat forty miles across open water to get pizza: it was a firing offense. Anna liked Dave. She hoped she wouldn’t be the one to catch him. “I see Oscar’s on duty,” she said.
“He’s promised not to offer Ally cigars,” Tinker assured her. Anna eyed the woman narrowly but couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.
Before the first marshmallow had melted off the stick and fallen into the ashes, Anna was glad the Fates had seen fit to put them in the way of the Coggins-Clarkes. Ally was completely taken with Damien. For at least a week Christina would be haunted by “Damien said…” and “Damien thinks…”
Tinker showed Anna a dead bat she’d found. Anna had heard the faint whistling of bats’ wings as they cut through the air over the dock at night, but she’d never seen more of them than shadows fleeting over the water. Even Christina was drawn in by Tinker’s knowledge and enthusiasm.
Tinker handled the little animal as if it still lived. Anna thought the creature would get a respectful interment for its unwitting service-probably with an appropriate ritual and a tiny headstone-but after Tinker had studied it she left it high in the crotch of a tree for the scavengers.
For some reason-maybe the eccentric clothes or the childlike love of ritual magic-Anna consistently underestimated the Coggins-Clarkes. There was nothing wrong with their minds.
“That reminds me,” Anna said, speaking to her own thoughts. “Did anyone ever tell you what happened to Donna Butkus?”
“No,” Damien replied and the inflection implied that no one needed to. He and Ally shared a bench at the picnic table. They’d shoved aside all the condiments, and played some gambling game involving pebbles and elbows of dried macaroni. Oscar looked on.
“The Windigo,” Damien intoned.
Mentally, Anna rolled her eyes.
“What’s a Windigo?” Ally demanded.
“Shall I tell you a story?” Damien asked the child.
“A scary one,” Ally insisted.
“I’ll tell the scariest kind of all-the true kind,” he promised.
“I don’t know…” Christina began.
“Please,” Ally begged.
Damien waited. Chris sighed. “The Windigo,” Damien began. With proper flourishes and a creditable French accent, he told Algernon Blackwood’s classic tale of the Windigo, the cannibal spirit who stalked the north woods snatching up unwary travelers and flying them through the air at such incredible speeds their feet were burned away to stumps and their cries echoed through the clear cold skies.
“That was a long time ago,” Damien finished. “Things have changed. There are no more voyageurs, hardly any Indians. But the Windigo is still here, still all around us. Anywhere men hunger for what they cannot have, anywhere they will devour others to get their bellies filled with pride or money or land or power, that’s where the Windigo waits.”
Chris applauded. Tinker beamed: she’d heard the story before. Damien told it at evening programs. Ally was transfixed.
Alison’s eyes were a little too round for Anna’s comfort. It wasn’t a story for a five-year-old. “Does anybody want to know what really happened to Donna Butkus or not?” she asked testily.
“What happened, Damien?” Ally asked to hear him talk. The name Donna Butkus would mean nothing to her.
“She was eaten by her husband, Scotty,” Damien explained. “With pickle relish.”
Ally squealed with delight. “Was Scotty a Windigo?”
“Yes.”
Christina said: “Oh for heaven’s sake!”
Tinker crumbled chocolate into a split banana.
Oscar was unmoved.
“I did talk with Scotty,” Anna pushed on doggedly, “the morning after the reception for Denny. Donna’s sister, Roberta, ruptured a disk. Scotty told me Donna went to Houghton to give her a hand.”
“Scotty said.” Damien pursed his lips. Obviously that carried no weight with him. “And the case of relish?”
“Didn’t ask,” Anna admitted.
“Ah.”
“Roberta Ingles?” Christina sounded mildly alarmed.
“I don’t know her last name,” Anna replied. “Donna goes by Butkus. God knows why. But Scotty said ‘her sister, Roberta.’ ”
“When did this happen-the disk?” The concern was still on Christina’s face.
“Why?” Anna asked. It all seemed rather far from Chris for her to take such a personal interest.
“Because I went bicycling with Bertie Sunday. She was fine then.”
“Bertie is Roberta, Donna’s sister?”
“Yes. She told me to say hi if I saw Donna.”
“Oh Jesus,” Anna breathed. “And Scotty’s left the island.”
“What is it, Anna?” Chris touched her arm.
“Denny and Donna. Donna disappears. Scotty lies. Castle dies. Scotty leaves the island. Maybe the Houghton police had better start looking for a second body.”
“They won’t find it,” Damien said and he tapped the Durkee relish jar significantly.
“And Scotty never left the island,” Tinker added.
“Did you…” Anna hesitated to use words like “spy” or “snoop.” “…follow up on Donna’s disappearance?”
“Some. Scotty’s been kind of short with us ever since he ate Donna.”
“Sort of spiritual indigestion?” Anna offered. Everyone, including Ally, gave her stern matronly looks. “Sorry. Go on.”
“He’d been kind of nasty to Damien a time or two. But when we heard he’d gone to Houghton for a few days, we thought it would be safe to go through his garbage for recyclables.”
“You know it’s illegal?” Anna asked.
“It’s a greater crime to let resources and energy go to waste,” Damien said earnestly and Anna caught another glimpse of the boyish intensity usually hidden behind his cloak of mystery.
“Okay. So you went through his trash and…”
“For recyclables,” Christina reiterated.
“For recyclables. And…”
“We found a flier that had come in on Saturday’s Ranger Three-we know because everybody got one that day. There was a TV dinner, the kind that come with their own plastic plate and you throw the whole thing out. The leftovers were still fresh. Three Jack Daniel’s bottles and a couple of six-packs of Mickey’s Big Mouths. Dave picks up the garbage on Wednesdays and Saturdays. If Scotty’d gone to Houghton Thursday morning like he said he was going to, his trash would’ve been empty.”
If it was supposed to be empty, Anna wondered, why search for recyclables? But she didn’t say anything. “Any relish bottles?” she couldn’t resist asking.
“Aunt Anna, she’d already been eaten up!” said Ally with exasperation.
“Right. Did you see Scotty?” Anna asked seriously. “Hear anything?”
Tinker and Damien shook their heads.
“He could be hurt or sick. He’s prime heart attack material,” Anna said. “I’ll radio in as soon as we get back to Amygdaloid and get someone over there to check on him.”
“We never thought…” Tinker began and she looked so stricken Anna was afraid she would cry or faint. “I should have thought. I haven’t changed a bit. What if he’s lying there hurt or dead and I didn’t even think to look?” Tinker’s voice had risen to a wail.
Anna sat rooted to the bench. Christina, making crooning sounds, put an arm around Tinker. Damien just hung his head, helpless with misery.
“It wouldn’t be that big a loss,” Anna said in an attempt to soothe Tinker. Christina silenced her with a look.
In a few minutes Tinker had recovered herself but the picnic was over.
As soon as they’d landed at Amygdaloid, Anna radioed two-oh-two, Scotty Butkus’s call number. On the second hail, Scotty answered and Anna canceled her plans to radio Pilcher requesting Butkus’s quarters be checked. “Just making a radio check, Scotty,” Anna said. “I’ve been having some static here.”
“Loud and clear on this end,” he assured her.
Anna signed off wondering what Tinker and Damien were up to.
Christina and Ally spent the night at Amygdaloid Ranger Station. Chris took the bed. Anna and Alison camped out on the floor. “Because we’re tough,” Ally explained. The next morning Anna took them back to Rock Harbor so they could catch the Ranger III. It was a six-hour boat trip to Houghton. Anna did not underestimate what it had cost Chris to make the visit. She’d spent twelve hours cooped up on a boat with a five-year-old child. All the coloring books in the state of Michigan couldn’t have made it smooth sailing.
Anna remained on dock waving till the Ranger III cleared the harbor. Christina had insisted on it on her first visit. “It’s the closest a government secretary may ever come to leaving for Europe aboard the Queen Elizabeth,” she’d said. Anna had made a point of doing it ever since.
Finding Scotty wasn’t difficult. He liked to be on hand when the Ranger III or the Queen set sail. When Anna saw him he was across the harbor indulging in his favorite pastime on duty: swapping fish stories for fishing stories.
For a long time, she sat aboard the Belle Isle trying not to look like a cheap detective on a stakeout. She wasn’t watching Scotty, but trying to think of a way to get answers to her questions without appearing to interrogate a fellow officer. Till she had more conservative proof than Tinker and Damien’s testimony, she would not go to Ralph or Lucas.
When inspiration did not come, she decided to play it by ear. As she walked down the pier to where Scotty stood, one booted foot on someone’s gunwale, talking to a red-faced man in an orange tractor cap, she could hear the tones that usually heralded tall tales. “I kid you not, that son of a bitch was at least…”
“Hey ya, Scotty,” she said and sauntered up beside the two men. The fisherman took the interruption as an opportunity to escape, made a quick excuse, and trotted away. “How was Houghton?”
Scotty looked a little shamefaced. “To tell you the truth, I never made it,” he said with a dry chuckle. He laughed through tight lips. He always laughed like that, as if at an off-color joke he’d tell if it weren’t for the presence of a lady.
Anna treated him to the friendly silent stare she had been taught in law enforcement school. Eyes wide, brows slightly elevated, she was ready to hang on his every word. She half expected him to stare right back if for no other reason than to let her know she couldn’t get away with pulling that trick on him.
“I was a little under the weather. Holed up a few days,” he told her.
“Flu?” Anna asked solicitously.
“One hell of a bug. I was flat on my back.”
Anna thought of the three Jack Daniel’s bottles and the beer. “My mom always said there’s nothing for the flu but to drink plenty of liquids,” she said.
That scared up Scotty’s Wile E. Coyote look, half embarrassed, half proud. Anna wondered what it meant, but he was done volunteering information. “I’m trying to track down Donna,” she said suddenly. “She’s not with her sister. Do you know where I can get in touch with her?”
“I’m getting tired of this,” Scotty snapped. “Those little shits better not fuck with me.”
“Pardon?”
“You heard me. Tell them to stay the hell away from me and Donna.”
“What little shits?”
“Look, you can pull that innocent act all you want but it’s not going to work on me. I’ve been in this business one hell of a lot longer than you have. I can smell a rat a mile away and that little poof and his wife stink to high heaven. They got a hair up their ass about Donna. I can’t prove it, but I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts they’ve been through my garbage, peeking in my windows. If I catch them at it, I’ll wring their necks for them. They’re not harmless little woo-woos. I’ve seen that Tinker before. I don’t remember where, but she wasn’t calling herself Tinker then. Satanism-devil worship-is my guess. They had Donna putting together all kinds of muck from leaves and moss. I was about half scared they’d poison her. That’s one of the reasons I sent her to stay with her sister.”
Anna waited but the outburst was at an end. “Donna’s not at her sister’s,” she reminded him.
“You got something to say to Donna, you say it to me,” he growled. When Anna said nothing, he stomped off down the dock. A couple of tourists watched with delight: better than an evening program on wildflowers any day. Anna smiled crookedly and followed Scotty off the quay.
She had a few calls to make. Checking the egress from Isle Royale wasn’t difficult. The Voyageur, Queen, Ranger III, and the seaplane from Houghton were the only ways out of Rock Harbor.
Donna Butkus hadn’t booked passage on any of them.
Anna wished she’d asked Scotty about the case of pickle relish.