Patience stopped at the foot of the steps and looked back over her shoulder at Hawk’s retreating form. “Am I interrupting anything?”
“Not a thing.”
“Too bad,” she said and they both enjoyed the view a second longer.
Anna sat down again and waited for Patience to tell her what had brought her to the north shore after eight p.m. Patience sat beside her. The light-colored hair was tied back into a ponytail and bound with a cabbage rose ribbon that matched, exactly, her peach shorts and jersey. Her deck shoes were white, even to the leather laces.
When she returned to Houghton in the fall, Anna promised herself, she would go clothes shopping. Levi’s and sweatshirts were losing their appeal.
“I’m out on a domestic mission tonight,” Patience said. “Carrie’s disappeared.”
Anna hoped it was not along with another case of pickle relish. “A moderately alarming disappearance or a call-out-the-Coast-Guard disappearance?”
“Moderately alarming. Carrie’s started acting out this summer. In ten years some therapist will discover it’s all my fault. In the meantime I’m blaming her. We are not having fun. She’s been coming home at two and three in the morning with that damp, rumpled look. I can’t get a word out of her. She’s turned from a nice little girl into a sullen tramp. God!” Patience rested her head in one hand. “Sorry. I don’t mean that. I’m alternately pissed off and worried sick. It’s very tiring.”
“Do you think she’s out with her boyfriend tonight?”
“I’d bet on it. She was supposed to be home by five-thirty. She knew I had a date. She just doesn’t give a damn about anybody but herself. Oh! I sound like a selfish shrew, don’t I? Vaguely, I seem to remember promising myself I wouldn’t say things like that if I ever became a mom. I just don’t want her getting into trouble. I got married too young. I was seventeen. What a fool! She’s thirteen and only just barely, All she’ll get out of it now is AIDS.”
Anna had forgotten about AIDS. Teenage troubles had taken a dire turn since she’d fumbled in the back seat of Steve Duran’s parents’ Chrysler. “What makes you think she’s on the north shore? I’d think she and the boy would just wander around Rock. There’s plenty of trails.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? If she’s got to be such a little slut-” Anna winced. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I was once a little slut myself. I am just so angry,” Patience apologized. “I just wish she’d stay on land-then my mad wouldn’t be undermined by my worry that some young idiot’s got her killed in one of those aluminum death traps we rent out at thirty dollars a day. I’m rambling. I think she’s on the north shore because two of the kids who work at the lodge said they saw her on Belle Isle. They didn’t put in and she didn’t return their wave, so they could be mistaken but it’s all I’ve got to go on at the moment.”
“You checked Belle?”
“On the way here. And Merrit Lane, Duncan Bay, and Lane Cove,” Patience listed the campgrounds between Rock Harbor and Amygdaloid accessible by water.
“Do you have a marine radio?” Anna asked.
“Yes.”
“What do I call you?”
“The Venture.”
“Why don’t you head back around Blake’s. Watch the coast, check the camps again. The water’s been pretty flat today, even around the point, so I doubt she’s come to any harm. I’ll head down toward McCargo and see what I can find. She may already be home. Radio if you find anything, or if you don’t. We’ll look until it’s dark. If she’s not home by midnight, I’ll call Lucas and Ralph. They’ll stage a search for tomorrow. I doubt it’ll come to that-I need the overtime too badly.”
Patience laughed. “You’re a comfort, Anna.”
“Your tax dollars at work.”
“I’ll tell Lucas,” Patience volunteered.
The dinner date had been with Lucas Vega, Anna realized, and didn’t wonder that Patience was so angry with her daughter.
The glow ignited by Hawk and two beers was gone. All that remained was a mild alcohol-induced lethargy. Anna sluiced as much of it away as she could with cold water, pulled on a Levi jacket and again climbed aboard the Belle Isle.
The dock, though still populated, was quiet: people talking softly, listening to the loons calling down the night. The 3rd Sister was gone. In the distance was the dull thunder of their air compressor filling tanks. Denny had been sensitive about the racket and anchored out when recharging air cylinders. Jamming jugs, he called it. Anna avoided the slang. Where she’d grown up “jugs” did not refer to scuba tanks.
The gold had drained from the water, leaving silver and peach petals of evening on the smooth channel. It was Anna’s favorite time of day. Stillness settled over the islands, the winds died, animals came to drink or play.
A great blue heron, the color of the sky, stood on a stone several feet from shore. Two female mergansers sharing a brood of eighteen or twenty ducklings paddled in the shallows. Once Anna had seen two moose swimming the channel, only their magnificent heads above the water. According to the naturalists, the moose population-or the seeds of it- had swum the eighteen miles from the mainland to Isle Royale. It seemed incredible but fishermen had reported seeing the beasts as much as twenty miles out in the lake.
Puttering down the silent channel, Anna realized she was enjoying herself. It was a pleasure to be looking for someone who wasn’t being devoured by a cannibalistic husband, wasn’t floating with old corpses, someone who, at worst, was probably having illicit sex with the busboy.
Darkness gathered. Near Kamloops Island, Anna switched on her running lights. Carrie would not be found tonight unless she chose to be. It was time to head for home.
The last fragile light of day glowed in the western sky. Overhead the stars were coming into their own. Anna shut down her engines and went out on deck to enjoy the coming dark. On summer nights in Texas, in Mexico, now here, she promised herself that one day she would learn the constellations. Could she love them better for knowing their human names?
A faint offshore breeze brought her the sweet complex smell of land and she thought how heady that perfume must have been to sailors months at sea. The smells of the desert had come one at a time: a clear stream of sage on a dry wind, a gust of rain-damp earth on the last hurrah of a sudden thunderstorm. In the vegetation-rich north country Anna could seldom separate out the myriad scents. Layers of wealth and promise, secrets deep under the moss.
The breeze freshened and carried a new fragment of news: the grumbling of a vessel. By the low-pitched sound and the high rev of the engine, Anna guessed it was a small outboard, a hundred to a hundred and seventy-five horsepower. She scanned the water between her and the shoreline. But for an occasional flash of a wave catching the improbable light of the stars, the darkness was unbroken. The growl of the unseen boat continued, a steady hum, growing louder. The boat was coming closer and still Anna saw no running lights.
Traveling after sundown without running lights was dangerous, illegal, and stupid. It was the last of these considerations as much as the first two that decided Anna to give up her meditations.
Having fetched her field glasses from the cabin, she stood in the stern, her eyes trying to follow the cues her ears were receiving. Finally she spotted the perpetrator: a light-colored cabin cruiser just barely big enough to go by that grand title. The boat was powering slowly along just out from the cliffs between Twelve O’Clock Point and Hawk Island. As she watched, it made an apparently senseless dogleg out from the shore, then, squaring the corner, in again.
Whoever the pilot was, he knew there were three barely submerged boulders on that section of shore. No one that well versed in underwater topography would be foolish enough to run without lights. Unless they were up to something-or their electrical system was on the fritz, Anna thought more prosaically.
Though ISRO seldom got involved in the Drug Enforcement Agency’s business, this close to the Canadian border, drug running was a reality of life.
Anna took the time to radio in her location and her intended visitor contact before she took her side arm from its briefcase in the bow and laid it next to the radar screen.
The roar of the Belle’s inboards swallowed all other sounds. Deafened by her technology, Anna kept the unlit vessel in visual contact.
She switched on the Belle’s searchlight and spotlit the cruiser, picking the fiberglass hull out in a circle like the star of a stage show. The vessel speeded up as if the pilot had decided to make a run for it. Anna felt a clutch of fear or excitement tighten her stomach. Then it slowed again to its labored pace. The clutch in her middle did not loosen its grip. In every law enforcement class she’d taken, in every refresher course, instructors in bulletproof vests had exhorted students never to lose the edge fear gave when approaching an unknown. Any officer making a routine traffic stop could be pulling over an armed and wanted felon. One who knows if a radio call is made, he’ll be sent back to the penitentiary.
Anna rocked gently on the balls of her feet, her eyes compassing the cruiser in search of anything that was not as it should be. If she saw a crate of Uzis or baggies bursting with white powder, she’d stay back and call for help. There were, she thought with a smile, people for that.
The Belle Isle had eaten up the distance. Anna pulled behind and to the starboard of the smaller vessel. Her spotlight picked out the name on the stern: the Gone Fishin‘. For a minute or two she trailed the boat. The running lights flicked on: sudden red and green eyes to be seen by.
Since the initial impulse to run, it was the first sign that the pilot knew she was there. Anna wondered if he thought this tardy compliance would appease her and she would just go away. Picking up her radio mike, she tuned it to the hailing frequency. “Gone Fishin‘, Gone Fishin’, this is the Belle Isle.” Three times she called and three times got no response.
Anna turned on the boat’s public address system. “Gone Fishin‘, this is the National Park Service patrol boat the Belle Isle. Please cut your engine. I’m coming alongside.” Ten seconds passed, fifteen. Anna refocused her light on the cabin. Two shadows glared back in the light, reflecting off the boat’s windscreen. Then one fell away, dropped like the falling of a veil, and there was only one.
It could have been a trick of the light, or it could have been someone ducking down, hiding. Anna picked up the pistol and stuck it into the waistband of her Levi’s. Again she took up the P.A. mike. Before she could repeat her command the Gone Fishin‘ slowed. Anna reduced power, pulled to the starboard side, and cut both throttles.
A fender plopped out of the cabin cruiser’s side window, reminding Anna to deploy hers. The, boats drifted gently forward eight or ten inches apart. Anna waited half a minute. The pilot did not show himself. “Captain of the Gone Fishin and any others aboard, please come out on deck,” Anna said into the mike. She kept the spotlight trained on the cabin, trying to see past the black ovals of Plexiglas in the rear windows.
The cabin door opened a crack, then closed, then opened again just wide enough to let a pale, slender man creep through. He held both hands over his eyes trying to block the glare of the searchlight.
Anna was aware of thin white arms, a stick of neck, too long and too white, long thin fingers crosshatched over a white face. She had that unpleasant sensation one gets when one turns over the wrong rock.
“What the hell is going on?” the nocturnal creature shouted. “Is that you, Anna?”
The white lattice of fingers dropped and Anna recognized Jim Tattinger. She left her.357 on the seat and walked back to the rear deck.
Jim had grabbed a gunwale and was holding the boats together. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He was angry and letting it show, letting it sharpen on the edge of his voice.
The best defense is a good offense, Anna thought. What could Tattinger be defending?
“Hi, Jim. Your running lights were out.” Anna walked over to the port gunwale and leaned close to him. She could smell no alcohol, none of the sweet cloying scent of marijuana. “I pegged you for a desperado on a midnight drug run.” She smiled into his eyes. They weren’t dilated or pinpointed-no narcotics or amphetamines. They were a little bloodshot but Tattinger’s eyes were usually red, as if in sympathy with his red-tipped ears and carroty hair.
“Whose boat?”
“I borrowed it,” Jim snapped. “Who authorized you to patrol out of uniform? I bet Lucas didn’t.”
Anna ignored that. “What brings you to this neck of the woods in the dead of night without running lights?” she asked conversationally.
“I don’t see that’s any business of yours.”
“What’s that?” She jerked her chin toward the cabin where four scuba tanks and a pair of fins were piled in an untidy heap. Jim twitched like a puppet on too tight a string. His eyes widened as if he-or more likely Anna-had just seen a ghost.
“Doing a little night diving?”
“Oh. The tanks. No,” he retorted and his irritability sounded mixed with relief. Anna wondered how she had let him off the hook-what the hook was. “What are you doing out here?” he demanded. “You can’t use NPS boats for personal stuff, you know.”
“We’ve had a report of a missing child. I was checking the usual spots on the north shore.”
“Oh gosh!” Tattinger puffed. He seemed genuinely concerned. It caught Anna off guard. “What happened?”
“Carrie Bittner didn’t make it home for supper. Patience is worried.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake!” Jim’s anger was back, though Anna couldn’t see why.
“Patience is rechecking all the sites on the way back to Rock,” Anna told him. “If Carrie doesn’t turn up pretty quick, I’ll call in Lucas and get a search under way as soon as it’s light.”
“For Chr-” Tattinger began his refrain again, then stopped suddenly. “Wait. Bittner? That kid with the brown hair, always hanging around the lodge?”
Anna nodded.
Jim seemed relieved. “I saw her in Lane Cove when I was headed over here. There wasn’t any boat so she must’ve been going back overland on the trail.”
“When was that?”
“I don’t know-not too long ago.”
“Was she alone?”
“Jesus! I got better things to do than look after some snot-nosed kid. You’re not Dick Tracy, Anna.” Jim curled his lip till the ruffle of pink showed garish in the searchlight. “Nobody authorized you to interfere with my work.”
The federal government had authorized Anna to interfere where probable cause could be proved, but she let it pass. “I’ll radio Patience,” she said, and: “Leave a running light on for me.”
Running lights on, the Gone Fishin‘ powered away at high speed.
It was after midnight when Anna got the radio message that Carrie had finally wandered home. Later that same day, Anna knew, she must dive the Kamloops. Finally she managed sleep but it was troubled with dreams: Denny holding her fast two hundred feet beneath the lake while air trickled from her tanks like the last stars from the night sky.