Never to see the sun again,“ Anna grumbled. Standing in sweats and mismatched wool socks, she drank her morning coffee, staring out the window above her kitchen sink. The day presented a bleak and dismal aspect. An overcast sky pressed down to the top of the cliff that backed Amygdaloid Ranger Station. Oily-looking raindrops crawled down the glass.
“Come on down,” Anna hollered. If the clouds settled into fog, obscured the lake, the Kamloops dive would be postponed. As it was, the day managed to be completely without sympathy: cold and damp and dark with perfectly adequate visibility.
Anna crossed to the yellow enameled bureau with its chipped edges and olive-green knobs. Amid the clutter of hairpins and badges was an oval box, the lid carved with monkeys frolicking in a jungle of leaves. The handles formed the graceful upward wings the Balinese put on their temples. Anna lifted off the lid. Inside was a handkerchief edged with lace. The creases were yellowed from being so long folded. In the middle of it was the dull gold of a wedding band.
After Zachary died Anna had taken it off and folded it in the “something old” her mother-in-law had given her. Her hand looked ugly without it, she’d never stopped believing that, but in the first years she’d been unable to answer the questions generated by a ring. “What does your husband do? I see you’re married-is your husband with you?”
At Molly’s suggestion she had taken it off. “It’s nobody’s damn business,” her sister had said.
“People will think I’ve stopped loving him,” Anna worried.
“Fuck ‘em,” had been the psychiatrist’s advice.
Anna thought about putting it back on; a comfort, a talisman for the dive. A thousand times over the years she’d thought of putting it back on. As always, she returned it to its linen nest. She still wasn’t ready to answer those questions.
“Three-oh-two, one-two-one.” Her radio cracked the solitude and Anna shot it a baleful look. “Three-oh-two, one-two-one.”
“Keep your pants on, Lucas.” She crossed through the open door into the ranger station and hit the mike button of the base radio. “Three-oh-two,” she responded.
“What kind of deck you got over there?”
It crossed Anna’s mind to say it was socked in, but she crushed the lie as unworthy-and too easy to detect. “I can see three or four hundred yards. The storm isn’t sitting on the water. Some rain. No wind.”
“The MAFOR promised more of the same. Waves one to two meters.” The MAFOR was shorthand for the marine forecast. All the ranger stations posted the day’s MAFOR before they opened shop in the mornings. On busy days there’d be a line three or four boaters deep waiting to read it before the thumbtacks had even cooled.
“Officer Stanton, Ralph, Jim, Scotty, Jo, and I are about to head out.” Vega’s voice rattled the speaker. “We’ll be to Amygdaloid in thirty minutes or so.”
“I’ll be waiting with bells on,” Anna said.
“One-two-one clear.”
For whom the bell tolls, Anna thought. It tolls for thee. She laughed aloud, relieved by her sheer morbidity. “I’m wasted in the Park Service,” she addressed the mute radio. “Melodrama was my true calling.”
Half an hour later, when the Lorelei pulled up to the dock, Anna was waiting, surrounded by gear. Only one of the boats that had given the place such a festive air the night before still remained. Rain, slow and cold and with apparently no intention of stopping in the foreseeable future, had driven the fisherpeople back to the more protected amusements on the mainland.
The 3rd Sister would still be around somewhere. Hawk and Holly were indifferent to comfort. Only a clear and present danger kept them out of the water. When clients paid the 3rd Sister for an adventure it was not unlike making a contract with the devil. There was almost no way out.
The Lorelei glided up parallel with the dock, and Ralph, green from head to foot in foul-weather gear, came out on deck. Lucas didn’t shut down the engines.
“How time flies when you’d rather be in bed,” Anna said as she handed her air tanks over the gunwale.
Ralph gave her a life vest and she fumbled at the side lacings. ISRO had purchased all Large and Extra Large in the expectation of a future filled with nothing but brawny, strapping rangers. Even having cinched it as tightly as it would go, Anna knew it would probably pop off if she were ever thrown unconscious into the lake.
Lucas motored slowly away from the dock, scrupulous as ever not to create a wake where it could damage another vessel. A crew cut and long brown hair were about all Anna could see of Frederick the Fed and Jo. Scotty and Jim hovered behind the two benches. Ralph stayed out in the rain with Anna. Lightly, he touched her elbow. “How are you doing?”
His kindness irritated because it reminded her of her fear. “Never better,” she retorted.
Ralph laughed. “Anna Pigeon: heart of gold, body of iron, nerves of steel.”
“Oh pshaw!” Anna pronounced all the letters: “puh-shaw.” Next to “damn” it was her sister Molly’s favorite word. It took the place of “expletive deleted.”
Ralph just laughed.
Anna pulled the drawstrings of her Gore-Tex hood close around her face and backed up against the cabin out of the wind. She could put off meeting Officer Stanton a few minutes longer and she preferred the fresh air to the self-inflating chatter Scotty would suffocate the cabin with, given such a prestigious audience.
Besides, she hoped the cold would drive Ralph inside. The last thing she wanted was someone to call her bluff. Two terrors battled for dominance in Anna’s belly: that she would dive and that she wouldn’t. The latter was worse. She was afraid Pilcher would offer her a way out and she would take it.
He leaned against the cabin next to her, the bulk of his body cutting the wind that curled around the side. Boyish brown curls escaped his hood, contrasting oddly with the broken nose and unsettlingly old eyes. Ralph Pilcher wasn’t a handsome man, but Anna guessed it had never stood in his way and she felt a sudden stab of pity for his wife. In sympathy with the unknown woman, she moved a couple inches away from his sheltering warmth.
“A few things,” Ralph said as the Lorelei motored out of Amygdaloid Channel onto the vast gray bosom of Lake Superior. “The superwoman act works well for you, Anna. Good cover. But you don’t need it on a dive. It’ll kill you on a dive. This is a team sport. I’ll be looking after you. Lucas will watch me. We’ll all keep an eye on Jim.”
Anna laughed. She was feeling better. She took back her two inches. The hell with Mrs. Pilcher.
Ralph relaxed back against the cabin wall and for a moment they stood in companionable silence watching the wake fold in on itself and disappear.
“Ever do a body recovery?” Ralph asked after a while.
“A few. Always on dry ground.”
“In Superior they’re not too bad. No smell. Usually we’d take the mask off. If they were diving-breathing compressed air-the change in pressure makes fluids froth out the nose and mouth. The family doesn’t need to see that.”
Denny’s face would be clean when Jo saw him again. No mask. No tanks. No suit. Did Jo know that? Would she be surprised? Could she feign surprise if she was not? Jo had tremendous strength for so small a woman. Years of tramping through forests and swamps with her laboratory on her back had seen to that. She was-or had been-a diver, Anna thought, remembering the distinctive scars on her arms. And she was a determined woman. She had determined to marry Denny Castle and against all odds had finally succeeded. Was removing Donna Butkus a prerequisite for success? Murdering Denny the price of a long madness? Or killing them both revenge for a life squandered on an unrequited love?
The tenor of the engines changed as Lucas throttled down. They were nearing the Kamloops‘ marker buoy. Anna shook her head to clear it of the fog of unanswered questions. First she would dive, just dive.
The Lorelei glided gently up to the buoy and stopped. Anna took an instant away from fretting and dedicated it to admiration only slightly sullied by envy: Lucas Vega could sure drive a boat.
The first man out of the cabin was Frederick Stanton. The crew cut had been an optical illusion. His hair was cut close only in the back and over the ears. He wore the top long. When Anna was in seventh grade that configuration had indicated a fresh-and cheap-haircut. On Stanton it smacked of a mild punk rebellion in white socks and hard leather shoes.
Warmed by the possibility that she’d been wrong, that Frederick the Fed might have some redeeming social attributes after all, Anna started to smile.
“Fred Stanton.” Scotty, only his head poking out of the cabin, introduced the man from behind. Stanton shook, a sudden convulsion of the shoulders as if freeing himself from any proprietary claims Butkus was trying to stake.
“Frederick,” he said clearly and pulled off his glove to shake hands.
“This is Anna Pigeon,” Ralph said as she tried to balance her grip between insipid and faux machismo. “She’ll be on the wet end of the body recovery.”
“Better you than me,” Stanton said. His voice was light and gentle for a man. Pleasant and probably misleading, Anna thought. The FBI was a big stick and Stanton may have learned the value of walking softly.
“Excuse me.” Lucas was making his way past Scotty, who still hung in the narrow doorway. Butkus, muttering cowboy apologies, clomped to the stern. Vega’s eye followed his steps with a sour look, watching for black heel marks on the white deck.
Jim bumped out from the cabin and the Chief Ranger’s attention snapped back to the dive. “Ralph?” Raising a dark wing-shaped eyebrow, he officially turned the dive over to the District Ranger.
Quietly, efficiently, Ralph began directing traffic on the crowded deck, lending a hand where buckles needed buckling, rubber hoods straightening. He managed to suit up himself, keep Scotty’s great booted feet off the damageable goods, and exchange a few sentences with Jo.
With fingers that tingled, Anna pulled on the bulky suit with boots and hood. The anxiety that was robbing her fingers of feeling filled her throat with a bitter taste. The more she swallowed, the more nauseated she became. Her mind raced with cowardly alternatives: if she dropped a tank and broke her foot, she’d not have to dive; if she stumbled over a fin and rapped her head on the gunwale, she’d be excused with honor intact.
Still, she pulled and jerked and buckled and finally, without mishap, she was encased in gear. Humpbacked, orange-skinned, blue-flippered, they all looked like creatures from an unlikely lagoon.
“Okay,” Pilcher said. “Tasmanian cluster fuck.” From the corner of her eye, Anna saw a jolt of what could’ve been alarm or amusement electrify the FBI man’s dark eyes. Of the seven people on board, he alone had never before experienced Pilcher’s predive ritual. At another time, in another place, Lucas would have said a quiet word against the obscenity. But Pilcher was a first-rate dive leader. Vega was a manager first and a gentleman second: his District Ranger was free to establish trust and camaraderie any way that worked.
Anna, Ralph, Jim, Lucas, even Scotty and Jo closed ranks, forming a tight circle like a football huddle. Through the insulating layers, Anna could feel the bones of Jo Castle’s shoulder against hers. A fine mist beaded in her long straight hair, cloaking her in shifting silver. When Anna took her hand it felt clammy. Though it was probably due to the weather, Anna hoped Scotty would have enough sense to monitor Jo for shock.
Ralph’s hand closed over Anna’s, warm and dry. “Denny’s in the engine room,” he said, his voice somehow different without in any way being artificial. The pitch was slightly lower, the pace a little slower. Anna could almost feel everyone’s heartbeats slowing, respirations evening out.
Everyone except Jim Tattinger. His pale eyes, watery in their pink rims, wandered restlessly. Anna could see his limp fingers refusing to meet the pressure of Lucas’s hand on one side and Jo’s on the other. If Frederick Stanton was the noticing kind, being unaware this behavior pattern was Jim’s usual, he might find the actions suspicious.
Ralph was speaking. “We’ll go down pretty quick. I’ll lead, Anna will follow me, Jim follows Anna. Lucas, you bring up the rear. We keep each other in sight. Keep me in sight. I get lonely down there. We’ve plenty of time. We’ll be down an hour and twenty-nine minutes. Twenty-two minutes on the bottom’s all we got. And we all come up together. Lucas and I will go inside, photograph as best we can, look around a little, and bring Denny out. Jim, you and Anna will check the outside. Go no deeper than the engine room. Take pictures. Look. Stay together. Watch the time. We meet at the line twenty-two minutes exactly after we leave it. Dangers: You two”-he looked at Anna and Jim-“never deviate from the plan. Never lose sight of each other or the time.
“Us two: silt out. Lucas and I’ll watch our big feet so we don’t get lost in a mud storm inside the wreck.”
All this was repetition. Ralph had sought each of them out in the days since the body had been discovered and discussed what they were to do. In true governmental fashion, the plan had been typed up, approved, signed off, and copies given to everyone who needed to know and half a dozen people who didn’t. Yet hearing it again in this reassuring voice was visibly knitting the four divers and two tenders into a unit, a team with a single purpose, a single plan.
“Pay attention. Breathe.” He laughed. He was alive, excited. “Hey, we’re gonna cheat Death,” he finished with a dare that was only partly a joke. Anna breathed. Knots of fear in her belly began to loosen.
Once again Ralph checked the gear. They were diving with air. Some divers used roll-your-own heliox on Kamloops dives. Mixing gases was fundamentally risky business and the National Park Service stayed with air. The mixture of helium and oxygen eliminated the effects of nitrogen narcosis but compounded the effects of hypothermia.
Ralph gave the go-ahead. One by one they rolled off the port gunwale. For a moment the four of them bobbed in the pockmarked water, the only spots of color in a world gone gray. The lake wasn’t just cold but frigging, goddam cold, Anna thought as the frigid water struck her face like the slamming of a two-by-four and her sinuses began to ache. Beneath the layers of suiting she could feel her breasts tighten and shrivel.
With an effort she looked past the pain and concentrated on keeping her mind clear of the flotsam of thoughts washed loose by her intercranial storms.
Tattinger floated into view. With the regulator stretching his rubbery lips and the mask maximizing his watery eyes, he put Anna in mind of Gollum, the pale underearth creature that gave Bilbo Baggins the willies.
Pilcher made eye contact with each of his team, raising his hand in the “okay” signal. In Superior’s frigid water there was no chitchat. It hurt to take the regulator out; the cold drilled into teeth, could form ice in the mouthpiece. Each diver returned Pitcher’s “okay” and he turned his thumb down.
Time to dive.
Anna was unpleasantly aware that in ancient Rome a thumbs-down was a death sentence.
Pilcher turned bottom up. His iridescent blue flippers breached, a sudden flame suddenly quenched. He was gone.
Anna followed.
Without the sun, the lake was not light even near the surface. Below was complete darkness. It was as if she swam through the twilight toward a night in which there were no stars, no moon, no planets. From behind her, the light Lucas carried poked a beam through the water. Sometimes it caught the yellow line Scotty had dropped. As they descended Anna noted the flash of the marker tape every ten feet. Several yards ahead, she could see the flap of blue that marked Ralph’s progress.
Had she been diving alone-or with a less trusted leader- Anna’s eyes would have been darting from marker to watch to depth gauge, timing her descent. She’d timed Ralph on their first dives. Easy dives: eighty feet down on the America, forty to retrieve buoys tethered below ice level, seventy collecting photos. Ralph swam at a steady sixty-nine feet per minute and never glanced at his watch.
A minute passed: seven marks on the line. The uniform darkness of the lake bottom was changing. A pale form was beginning to take shape, a lighter smudge in the murky depths.
The Kamloops.
It was so easy: the swim, finding the wreck, everything. Anna felt quite gay. All the elaborate preparations had been absurd. The dive was a breeze, a piece of cake, a milk run, a pushover. She laughed and air bubbled out, making a chuckling noise near her ears.
Anna was high. Every fifty feet down was like one martini. They were two, maybe three martinis under. She couldn’t remember. She had forgotten to watch the time, count the marks. Two? Or three? How many to put a small woman under the table? Six feet under. The moment of hilarity hardened into rising panic.
Ralph was by the line, standing on the lake floor, looking at his watch like a man waiting for a bus. Anna swam down, stood beside him. He touched her shoulders, looked into her eyes, breathed exaggeratedly. Anna mirrored his breath. He raised a circled thumb and forefinger. She’d be okay. In, out: she breathed again.
Jim arrived, then the poking finger of light with Lucas attached. Pilcher checked them as he had Anna. It was subtle, quick. Anna only noticed because she had needed it.
The Kamloops rested on her port side, her stern on the top of a slope, her bow one hundred and ninety feet away at the bottom-two hundred and sixty feet below the lake’s surface. Very few divers ventured there. Most of the information the NPS had on that end of the wreck-and it wasn’t much-they’d gleaned via a remote-control robot camera.
The increasing depth and darkness swallowing the bow gave the wreck the illusion of incredible length. One of the Kamloops‘ twin smokestacks lay across midships. Lines tangled amid hundreds of feet of metal pipe that had spilled when the ship went down. Portholes and doors gaped black. Broken metal showed like bones. The Kamloops was a scabby old ghost, one whose soul seemed not to rest. Anna wasn’t disappointed that she and Jim would not be prying too deeply into her secrets, would not be the ones to snatch her most recently acquired corpse.
Ralph tapped his watch and flashed twenty-two: open hands twice, then two fingers. They would meet back at the line in twenty-two minutes. Anna flicked on her light. Jim would handle the underwater camera. Without looking at her, he swam off. She followed.
The ship was tipped to the north, the exposed keel line sloping west and sharply downhill. The lake bottom rolled away in every direction. The effect was dizzying. Tattinger moved quickly. He kicked up past the tilted propeller and swam along the hull. The flattened keel of the freighter dropped away into the darkness.
In such a shadowed world, there was little Anna could see at the pace Jim set. As she carried the light, he would be seeing even less. Evidently, his idea of an investigation was limited to feeding data into a computer.
Deliberately, she slowed, moved her beam from his trajectory and played it along the side of the ship, then down to the barren lake floor. No plants, no fishes, even very few stones. The sand lay smooth and untracked like the desert after a windstorm. A red and blue Pepsi-Cola can winked a vivid eye when the light struck it. Anna made no move to swim the fifteen yards to retrieve the litter. “No deviations,” Ralph had warned. “That’s when accidents happen.” Anna believed him and fear made her utterly obedient. Her light picked out a single shoe, colorless but in apparently good condition. It was an old-fashioned work boot, one that had fallen or been carried from the shipment on board. A coffee mug lay half buried in the sand. Bits of metal that had once served some purpose were strewn about. There was more pipe and a wooden crate broken in half with a bright paper sticker still intact.
A jarring clang brought her head up. Tattinger had rapped on the Kamloops‘ hull with the butt of a diving knife. He was hovering near a porthole crooking an admonitory finger. Though she couldn’t see his face behind the rubber and plastic, she imagined his scowl.
Once again, she trained the light in his path and he swam on. The beam raked along the hull just ahead of him, across the portholes: blind eyes weeping rust. Between them, near where Tattinger had rapped the hull, something gleamed. Anna kicked once, floated nearer the hull. The rust around one of the portholes had been scraped away. Bright silver scratches as if someone had been hacking at the port with a sharp object. She felt around the edges of the porthole cover. There was just enough purchase to work a fingertip under it.
Jim, losing the light, had returned and hung at her elbow. Pushing Anna’s hands aside, he opened the blade of the red-handled knife he still held, and levered it under the metal. The porthole swung in easily. Whoever had pried it open before had broken the latch.
Monstrous and fish-eyed behind their masks, Jim and Anna exchanged a look. The hole was little more than eighteen or twenty inches in diameter. Too small for anybody in tanks to get through. Anna peered inside: the captain’s quarters. An out-of-reach heaven for thieves and vandals, but someone had made the effort.
Jim tapped his watch. Seven minutes. Anna tapped his camera, then the porthole. He hesitated, hating to use the film, she knew. Jim was as miserly with government property as he was with his own. He stockpiled everything from toilet paper to engine oil, kept lists of how many of each. Numbers with which to feed his insatiable database programs.
Anna tapped the porthole again and he handed her his diving knife. She held it and the light while he clicked two careful shots.
Four minutes. With efficient haste, they started to swim back. At depth, exertion was a thing to be avoided lest one treble the effects of nitrogen narcosis.
The stern, with its tangle of pipe, rolled by beneath. Anna swept the light in an arc through the water. The snaking yellow of the line did not reflect back and panic pricked again at the back of her throat. Then, at the far right, she saw the faint yellow gleam. Jim saw it in the same instant and they swam.
One minute. Now that the time to ascend was near, Anna felt a crushing impatience. The knowledge that another sixty-four minutes must be spent incarcerated in gear, enveloped in the cold embrace of the lake, seemed almost insupportable. The U.S. Navy Standards would have insisted only on fifty minutes’ ascent time but Ralph had chosen to play it safe.
Anxious thoughts began circling in Anna’s mind like vultures smelling a corpse. If Ralph and Lucas had kicked up a silt storm and gotten lost, she doubted she would have the courage to go and look for them. Cold ached in the bones of her head.
As she counted her curses she became aware of a nonstop trickle of air through her regulator. It had frozen open. It had happened once before early in the season when she and Ralph dove the docks clearing out rubbish. Once open, it wouldn’t take long before the escaping air would fill her mouth with icy slush, numbing her lips with cold until she could no longer feel them to keep them on the mouthpiece.
“Come on, goddammit!” she demanded of Lucas.
Poking her light through the viscous twilight, she strained her eyes in the direction of the engine room. Twenty seconds bottom time left. The darker block that marked the doorway wavered, changed shape, then broke into two separate shadows. Ralph and Lucas swam toward the line. With them was Denny Castle. Eight days dead, he looked the most natural of the three. Jaunty in the uniform, relaxed, he drifted through the water between them, his eyes open and unblinking. The cap was still on his head, the shine still on the black leather boots.
Lucas took Denny. With watch and depth gauge, Ralph swam slowly to thirty feet below the surface. He stopped there, hung in the water. Ten fingers flashed. They waited.
The currents caused by their flippers made Denny’s dead hands move as if he, too, grew restless with the waiting. Anna couldn’t take her eyes off him. A childish fear that if she looked away he would reach out and touch her kept scuttling through her mind, trailing a nightmare quality.
Martini’s Law must have been coined before the advent of Timothy Leary, she thought. For her the experience was proving reminiscent of an acid trip threatening to go sour rather than a good honest drunk.
She glanced at her watch. Another thirty seconds to wait. She looked back at Castle’s body.
The dead eyes had not changed expression but the jaw was dropping. Denny was opening his mouth as if to speak. A froth of reddish-colored bubbles spewed forth and rose toward the lake’s surface.
Anna’s mind spun. She reached out instinctively for the person next to her as she’d done in countless dark movie theaters when blobs, mummies, and killer lepuses made their moves. Then she remembered: Ralph had warned her. In deep-water body recoveries they removed the mask before the corpse reached the surface to let the water wash away fluids brought forth by the changing pressure.
The phenomenon lasted only a few seconds. Ralph kicked once and floated up the line. Glad to be moving, Anna followed, leaving Jim, Lucas, and the mute but expressive Denny Castle to follow as they might.
Twenty minutes at twenty feet. As the silver of the promised sky grew closer so did Anna’s impatience to see it, to breathe deep of air filled with rain, gusts and eddies, boat exhaust. To breathe again of the varying moods of life that cannot be canned.
The last wait, thirty-four minutes only ten feet below the surface, was provoking enough to amuse and Anna forgot the cold pooling inside her suit, stabbing at the fillings in her teeth, the vacant stare of Denny’s corpse.
Finally they reached the surface. Even Scotty’s cowboy countenance was a welcome sight. Jo Castle, wan and frightened, reaffirmed if only by way of pain that life went on. Thirty fathoms down, it had seemed a distant and fragile concept.
Jim Tattinger flippered over to the Lorelei’s water-level deck and was hauled over the stern like a landed fish by Jo and Officer Stanton. Anna was next, lifted clear of the water’s grasp. Ralph pulled himself up as far as the low deck and planted his butt on the two-by-four slats. Gently he took Denny’s body from Lucas and held it cradled in his arms while the Chief Ranger floundered on board.
Anna, sitting on deck, a flippered foot held clumsily between two gloved hands, was watching Jo as her wiry brown arms gathered her husband into a one-way embrace. The expression on Jo Castle’s face was familiar. Once Anna had seen it on Christina. She was watching her daughter sleep when Ally had been racked by a fever. A look that was equal parts tenderness and grief.
Either Jo was a complete psychotic, or she had not killed Denny. Remembering the strength in Jo’s arms as she had pulled her from the lake, Anna fervently hoped it was the latter.
Awkwardly, Jo bent and kissed her husband. Faint bruises ringed Denny’s mouth in blue. The captain’s cap, absurd now in the drizzling light of day, fell from his hair. Brass buttons winked as the collar of the uniform fell open. There was no shirt beneath the double-breasted jacket and the flesh of Denny’s shoulder was exposed. A livid bruise cut down between neck and shoulder. The discolored flesh was jarring on skin so white, and Anna turned away as if she would protect Denny’s modesty.