“The ‘d’A’: d’Artagnan.”
“Dartanyon?” Christina shook her head.
“The Three Musketeers,” Anna explained. “Porthos, whoever, and d’Artagnan.”
“Yes!” Christina remembered. “Okay. D’Artagnan…?”
“Hawk, Holly, and Denny. One night, just before he got married, Holly called Denny ‘d’Artagnan.’ ”
“So, d’A-the knife was Denny Castle’s?”
“Yes,” Anna said, excited. “Jim found it down there, found it under the porthole. I just thought it was his.”
Christina looked at Anna expectantly. “And?”
“There was a straplike bruise on Denny’s body. A mark left, I’m willing to bet, by his diving harness. It was in the right place. When I first dove, I got panicky and buckled my stuff on way too tight. After an hour or so I had red marks like that on my shoulders.”
“Like girdle marks.”
“Exactly.”
“Denny dove a lot. Wouldn’t he know how to adjust his harness thing?”
“Maybe the tanks or the hoses were pulled around, dragged off him.”
“Then he was killed on the Kamloops! Down under all that water?”
“I think so. I think he was in full dive gear. I think he fought, somehow his tanks were jerked or something, and he dropped his knife. I think he was killed down there.”
“You said he wasn’t wearing dive gear,” Christina said, confused.
“No. When we found him, he wasn’t. He was dressed in this ship captain’s clothes, but when we were ascending bloody bubbles frothed out of his mouth from his lungs. That only happens if the body recovered was breathing compressed air. And I saw his diving gear-tank, fins, the whole nine yards-on the deck of the Third Sister.”
“Goodness.” Chris expelled a long breath. “Oh my goodness. This calls for serious sugar.”
As the two women picked at a shared slice of the cheesecake Christina kept in the freezer for such emergencies, Chris told her news. “Holly Bradshaw is not gay,” she said. “But whatever else Holly may be-Democrat, Sierra Club member, murderess-I can’t say. Maybe you’d better ask Hawk what was so funny about the idea of her and Denny-maybe Denny was gay. Maybe they were triplets separated at birth. But she’s not a lesbian. We’d know.”
Anna nodded. They would know. Chris would know.
“She could be asexual,” Chris suggested hopefully.
Anna shook her head. “There’s vibes, signals, pheromones. If not homo, then hetero, but definitely sexual. It is a motive-the only good one I’ve come up with. The ‘hell hath no fury’ stuff comes up true every now and then.”
“Mmm.” Christina scraped the last of the cheesecake up with the side of her fork and smeared it sensuously on her tongue. “So. She and Denny. Then Denny and Jo. Then Denny and the Lady of the Lake?”
“Maybe,” Anna agreed. “Maybe.”
Anna enjoyed the long drive to Duluth. After two months without so much as seeing an automobile, it was a novelty. She fiddled with the tape deck, sang to herself, and reveled in the true and glorious privacy that could only be had when one was free of tourists and two-way radios. She couldn’t imagine putting a telephone in her car. Or in her bathroom. Some places must remain sacrosanct.
Superior, Duluth’s sister city, located to the east just over the canal, dampened Anna’s spirits somewhat. When the life had gone out of northwest Minnesota’s iron country, the blood of commerce had ceased to flow through this industrial shipping town. Row houses, poor imitations of eastern brownstones, crumbled along streets in need of repair. Men of working age loitered in groups around the entrances to mini-marts. Rusting skeletons whose forms suggested the lifting and moving of great loads scratched the skyline.
Anna fished a scrap of paper out of her pocket. Drawn in Jo’s precise scientific hand were directions to Denny Castle’s childhood home. Mrs. Castle lived on the Duluth side of the canal but just barely. According to Jo’s sketch the house backed up on a waterway. Anna had assumed Mrs. Castle had money. Houses on waterways usually meant prime real estate. But this canal was dying. A thin brackish stream trickled down a muddy causeway pocked with tin cans, used tires and burned-out car bodies.
At 103rd Street Anna turned her old Rambler to the right. Shortly after the intersection the asphalt ended. Small clapboard homes, once identical but diversified over the years by individual abuses, littered one side of the road. On the other, old foundations and lilac bushes framing vanished porches indicated that a like row had once faced them before fire or an aborted land development plan had razed it.
Number 1047 had nothing to recommend it but Jo’s assertion that Denny’s mother lived there. Anna pulled up in front of the house and switched off the ignition. For a moment she sat looking at the dead lawn and faltering front porch. The poverty and neglect embarrassed her, as if she’d stumbled across a dirty secret. Denny had evidently taken greater care of things past than things present. Or things wet than things dry.
Lest her sitting there alarm the occupant-the neighborhood was seedy and Anna’s Rambler far from reassuring- she climbed out and let herself in through the garden gate.
Half a minute after her third knock, as she was about to give the house up as empty, she heard the whisper of slippered feet on the inside hall floor. The door opened wide. Behind the torn screen a tiny woman blinked from under thick glasses with dark plastic frames; the kind Medicaid provides for the poor. She was older than Anna would have guessed, maybe in her late eighties or even early nineties. As if in defiance, she wore carmine lipstick, expertly applied, and pink powdered rouge. Bobbed chin-length white hair was held out of her eyes with a child’s barrette: two bears on a pink plastic log.
“Mrs. Castle?” Anna asked. “Denny Castle’s mom?”
“Oh, yes,” the old woman replied, and her smile showed a line of large regular teeth that clicked when she talked. “Denny’s my boy. Do you want to see him?”
Anna wasn’t sure how to respond to that.
“He’s at school,” Mrs. Castle said. “But he should be home around three o’clock.” Her face firmed up and she suddenly looked terribly sad. “Oh dear. Denny’s not at school. Were you a friend of my son’s?”
She asked the question with such sympathy Anna knew she had remembered Denny was dead. “Yes. I worked with him on Isle Royale.”
“Won’t you come in?” Mrs. Castle invited graciously. “Denny will be home from school-oh dear. Come in. Come in. I don’t think I have any Pepsi-Colas. That’s what young people drink now, isn’t it? Pepsi-Cola? Tea? No… tea’s for us oldsters…” Mrs. Castle stopped between the living room and the kitchen, unsure of beverage protocol.
“I don’t need anything,” Anna said gently. “I just came-” She had started to say “to ask you some questions,” but the phrase seemed too abrupt for such a fragile old person. “To visit,” Anna amended.
“Tea…” Mrs. Castle began again on the beverage question.
“That would be fine. Tea would be nice. I like tea.”
“That’s settled then.” Mrs. Castle sighed with relief, showed Anna into the living room, then disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.
Anna began to revise her opinion of Denny-as-son. The inside of the house was neat and well appointed. The sparkling window glass and lack of cobwebs in high places suggested a spryer cleaning lady than Mrs. Castle. The room had been papered in recent years and the furniture, though worn, was of good quality and kept in good repair.
In such a neighborhood the dilapidated exterior could very well have been left as protective coloration to keep the old woman from being the envy-and therefore the target-of her neighbors.
An old-fashioned upright piano took up all of one wall of the living room. The top was covered with framed photographs. Anna studied them. An extended family was represented: lots of group shots with the very old holding the very young on their laps. A young Denny was in many, cutting watermelons, showing off a skateboard, always grinning. Then he disappeared. Photo to photo Anna watched Mrs. Castle growing old without her son. Then he was back; in his thirties now, the grin gone. This was the Denny Anna had known, the one who carried the world on his shoulders, who could not fit watermelons or skateboards into his work schedule.
A few snapshots tucked into the frames of more formal pictures showed Hawk and Holly. There was only one of Jo. She wore an Empire-waisted pink brocade prom dress, her hair, as always, parted in the center and stick-straight. A boy whom Anna didn’t know stood beside her, proud in a rented tux.
Jo was an enigma, Anna thought, seldom remembered but never gone.
Shuffling, slow, careful, Mrs. Castle came in with the tea things. Anna hurried to take the heavy tray. A short struggle ensued. Anna won and set the tea service down on a low coffee table. After the tea had been poured and the packaged cookies discussed, Mrs. Castle said matter-of-factly: “You want to talk about Denny. He’s dead, you know.”
“I know,” Anna replied, glad Mrs. Castle was lucid for the moment. “It’s his death I want to talk about. We’re trying to find out all we can about it.”
“So it won’t happen again?”
“Something like that.”
Mrs. Castle nodded approvingly. Anna sipped her tea and turned over in her mind ways to approach her question. “I was looking at your picture collection while you made tea,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Oh, no.” Mrs. Castle got up and carried her tea over to the piano. She was so small she had to look up to see the photographs. “I’m very proud of them. They are my family now.”
The way she said it made Anna wonder how many of them were dead. “I was looking at Jo’s pictures the other day,” Anna began.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Castle interrupted. She set down cup and saucer and stood on tiptoe to retrieve the picture of the girl in the prom dress. “This is it. It’s the only one left. I used to have more, but Denny got in one of his moods and took them all down one Sunday after church. He never gave them back. Jo sent me this one.”
Mrs. Castle brought it over to the sofa and held it out for Anna to look at but not to touch. “Who’s the boy?” Anna asked to be polite.
“I don’t know his name. He’s the boy who took Jo to the winter formal the year Denny wouldn’t. He could be a stinker sometimes. I think maybe Jo sent me this hoping Denny would see it and get jealous. That’s why I kept it out. I don’t think Denny ever did notice it, but I got kind of attached to it. Jo’s got a pretty dress on, don’t you think?”
Anna admired the dress. “I recognized Hawk and Holly Bradshaw in some of the snaps,” she said.
“They’re good kids. Wild though,” Mrs. Castle said sadly. “They came to visit me a while back.”
“When?” Anna realized she’d spoken too abruptly. Mrs. Castle looked startled, as if her thoughts had fled.
“I don’t know really…”
Anna worried she had frightened the old lady back out of a reality in which she’d not been too firmly rooted in the first place. She changed the subject, trying her original tack a second time. “Jo was showing me some pictures she had of Denny. One was particularly nice. It was Denny in a ship captain’s uniform.”
“That was my brother’s,” Mrs. Castle said, pleased either with the memory or with her ability to recall it.
“Do you still have it? The uniform?”
“Why yes! Yes, I do. Those kids wanted to play with it. It’s with Denny’s old things in the upstairs bedroom. Do you want to see it?”
That was exactly what Anna wanted. She was grateful her prying seemed to give the woman some pleasure.
Denny’s upstairs bedroom had long been out of use for anything but storage and had taken on the dust-and-dead-flies smell of an attic. Old clothes hung on racks. Tattered books and ruined long-playing records were stacked along the walls. There were boxes of shoes and belts and a shelf of dusty vases. Mrs. Castle wended her way though these relics to a blue plastic and aluminum trunk-a cheap recreation of an old steamer trunk.
“Denny’s. He wanted to be a seafaring man since he was a little boy,” she said as she opened the trunk. “Oh dear.”
Anna came to look over her shoulder. The trunk was very nearly empty. Only a half-dozen books and a child’s cowboy hat remained. It reeked of mothballs.
“I was sure it was in this trunk.” Mrs. Castle’s hands began to flutter, her eyes to wander over the clutter.
“Was it here when you showed it to the kids-to Hawk and Holly?” Anna asked gently. “When they came to visit you.”
“Why yes! Yes, it was.”
“Maybe they borrowed it,” Anna suggested.
“No,” Mrs. Castle said firmly. “I would have remembered. They stole it. They’re wild, those two. They’re horrid bad children. They were playing up here and they took it. They’ll not play with any of Denny’s toys again until they apologize.”
Denny was once again alive in his mother’s mind. Anna was glad to leave it that way.
On the drive back the facts lined themselves up oppressively in Anna’s mind. Holly was not gay and could have been Denny’s lover. The bruise indicated that Denny had been wearing his diving gear; the bloody froth, that he had been breathing compressed air; and the knife, that he had dived the Kamloops. It was logical to assume he had been killed there. That meant he had been killed by another diver, an experienced one. He had been found in a costume Hawk and Holly had stolen. Anna had seen his gear back aboard the 3rd Sister.
She remembered the night aboard the Belle Isle, remembered Hawk’s tears on her throat, and wondered if he cried for his sins.