Before the coming night robbed the fog of the last light, Anna had to make her evening patrol. A moment passed in evil thoughts: a glass of red wine by the stove instead of a blind boat tour, who would know? Tonight, there would be little in the way of visitor contact.
But anyone out could be in trouble if they didn’t know the waters. Anna sighed and shrugged into her Gore-Tex.
The channel was empty. Two boats were snugged in Herring Bay near Belle Isle, a dozen more anchored in the secure waters of McCargo Cove. Anna turned a blinded windscreen back toward home and crept through a mist turning from white to gray with the setting of the sun. As she reached Twelve O’Clock Point, seven miles from Amygdaloid Island, she began to debate whether to pour her wine or divest herself of her uniform first upon reaching home.
These heavy deliberations were interrupted by the sudden coming to life of the Belle Isle’s marine radio.
Three or four crackling pops warned that someone was fiddling with their mike button, then a hesitant, childish voice: “Hello? Hello? SOS. Please. SOS.”
Anna snatched up the mike and waited for the caller to stop keying her radio. Finally the click came. She forced down her transmitter button. “I hear you,” she said clearly. “My name’s Anna. When I stop talking you push down the button on the microphone again, tell me where you are, then let the button up, okay? I’m stopping talking now.”
There was a silence that seemed long because Anna held her breath but it was no more than fifteen or twenty seconds. A few fumbling clicks, then the child’s voice again. “I’m out by the Kamloops,” she said. “My mom’s in trouble. I think she’s dead. Please come.”
“Carrie Ann? Is that you?” Anna demanded.
There was a confusion of clicks as the girl tried to talk at the same time Anna was transmitting. “Carrie Ann?” Anna tried again. This time she got through.
“Yeah?”
“Are you at the Kamloops‘ dive buoy or Kamloops Island?”
“The buoy.”
“And your mom’s in trouble. What kind of trouble?” As she talked Anna changed course. She was less than two minutes from the wreck site. Carrie didn’t respond. Anna tried again but the girl held her silence.
“Two-oh-two, three-oh-two, did you copy that?” Anna put in a radio call to Rock Harbor. Scotty was her only option for backup. Even if she could raise them on her radio, Ralph and Lucas were too deep in the woods to be of any help.
“Ah… negative.”
Anna repeated the gist of the conversation with Carrie. “I’m headed over to the Kamloops now. I’ll keep you posted.” Again Anna tried Ralph Pilcher. There was no response. Scotty was monitoring. He promised to try Ralph from the east side.
Four hours into the wilderness and dark coming on, there was little Ralph or Lucas could do, but it was policy to keep them informed. And, Anna admitted to herself, a comfort to be in radio contact with them when there was an emergency. This situation was double-edged: Patience might genuinely be in trouble, or she might be setting a trap.
Innocent until proven guilty, Anna reminded herself. She didn’t dare ignore a distress call, the lake was too dangerous a place. And she could think of no reason Patience should risk a confrontation; no reason she would think Anna had figured out the deadly business she had undertaken. Anna picked up her radio mike again and called Rock Harbor. “Scotty, there may be more to this. I’ve stumbled across some complications,” she said, being purposely vague since there was no way to keep the conversation private on the airwaves. “If you could start around, I may need the backup.”
There was a silence, then two clicks as if he was fingering his mike uncertainly. “ASAP,” he said after a moment. “Having some engine trouble on the Lorelei.”
“Fuck you,” Anna hissed but not into the mike. Scotty was lying. He couldn’t navigate in the fog and he was trying to cover himself. “Did you get ahold of Ralph or Lucas?”
“Negative.”
Loran took Anna to the buoy. Radar kept her from ramming the Venture. None of the Chris-Craft’s lights were on and she was all but invisible in the fog. Anna rafted the Belle Isle off her starboard side. Taking the precaution of removing her Smith and Wesson from the briefcase and putting it in her raincoat pocket, Anna climbed over the gunwale. “Carrie! Carrie Ann!”
The cabin door opened slowly. A kid’s sleeping bag wrapped around her against the chill, Carrie Ann Bittner shuffled out.
“What’s happened?” Anna asked. “Where’s your mother?”
“She went diving,” Carrie replied in the sulky tone Anna was accustomed to. “She dived down a while ago. She must be hurt or caught on something.”
Anna couldn’t see the child’s face clearly and could read nothing from her voice. Without explaining why, she moved past her and checked the cabin. It was empty.
Why would Patience come out in the fog, dragging her daughter with her? The question jogged Anna’s memory and she remembered the click on the line when she was on the phone with Molly-the click Molly had thought was another call but had turned out not to be. Patience could have picked up the phone in Carrie’s room, heard of the death of the gourmet clad in yellow suspenders, and known Anna would put it all together sooner or later.
If Patience did know, it made sense she would rush the last dive, try and get the remainder of the wine out before she was stopped. Carrie must have been brought along in the capacity of prisoner. Left alone, she would undoubtedly have found her way to Mr. Tattinger’s for solace.
“How long has your mom been down?” Anna asked.
“I said,” Carrie grumbled, “awhile. Maybe half an hour.”
At first Anna thought Carrie was unaware that half an hour at depth could be her mother’s death warrant but the girl had said on the radio, “I think she’s dead.”
“Why is she diving here?” Anna asked.
Carrie shrugged. “How would I know?” She sounded more aggrieved than concerned. “Anyway, she’s down there.”
Anna radioed Scotty of her intentions. “I’m going to do a bounce dive,” she said and thanked the gods that her voice did not betray the fear that was spreading through her veins like poison.
“Ten-four,” Scotty replied. “I’ll stay on this damn engine. Hell of a time to have your horse go lame.”
Anna repeated her earlier obscenities. Focusing on anger to keep the terror at bay, she struggled into dry suit, fins, weights, and tanks. “Turn on every light on the Venture,” she ordered Carrie, who’d stood bundled and silent watching the process.
Before she entered the lake, Anna raked the surface carefully with her handheld lamp looking for bubbles, disturbance, anything that smacked of ambush and watery graves. Fog impeded her investigation.
Finally, there was nothing left but to dive. The water was black and looked for all the world like death. Concentrating only on breathing, she clutched her light and rolled backward off the Belle Isle’s stern.
Cold cracked in her sinuses with such force it felt as if her eyes were being gouged out from inside her skull. For several seconds pain left her breathless and disoriented. The universe shrank to the single paralyzing sensation of utter, damning cold.
Forcing her ribs to expand, accepting the icy stabs and letting them pass through her, she righted herself and located the line Patience had dropped. With “follow the yellow brick road” singing irritatingly through her mind, Anna pursued the lemon-colored line down into increasing darkness. Ten seconds, fifteen, two white depth markers flashed by on the line. Anna kept her eyes on her watch and counted. The bright line weaving gently in the probe of light, black pressing close, the world was no bigger than her gauges.
Atmospheres crushed in and terrifying giddiness tried to spin her mind away from counting. An ache started at the base of her skull. Stringing her thoughts together cohesively became increasingly difficult. Fear that had been murmuring at her aboard the Belle Isle shrieked through all the organs of her body. Sixty-three seconds had elapsed since she had left the lake’s surface.
The snaking of the line through liquid space began having a hypnotic effect and Anna found herself forgetting the dangers not only of the icy depths but of the woman she swam to save. Somehow, she must fix her mind on Patience as an enemy, a killer of persons. Denny had not, and Denny’s mind worked better at six atmospheres than hers ever would.
Two minutes, fifty-six seconds: the bottom blocked the beam of her light. She stopped, stood with one hand on the yellow line for security and switched off her lamp. In her years with the Park Service, she’d worked on a dozen or more searches and rescues. Habit demanded she blow a whistle, shout a name. All she had in the malevolent shadow world was light or lack of it. Cloaked in darkness, Anna searched the lake bottom.
A flash, another, then burning steady: Patience was on the south side of the wreck. Without relighting her own lamp Anna swam toward the light.
As she closed the distance down the side of the ship, she could see that Patience’s lamp had been set on the hull. In the wedge-shaped beam it threw, Patience-or at least a heavily suited person she assumed was Patience Bittner- was kneeling, slipping efficiently into dive tanks. The tanks were unlike any Anna had ever used. They fit singly, one to each side of the dive harness. Beside Patience was a net bag filled with dark objects.
For a moment Anna’s nitrogen-befuddled brain refused to grasp the situation. Then, with a suddenness that made her feel a fool, it fell into place. The porthole into the captain’s cabin was too small to get through in tanks. Patience, hardly bigger than a child even in the bulky dry suit, used side-mounted tanks, each with its own regulator, and clipped on for easy removal. They were the kind worn by cave divers who needed to squeeze through small spaces. She could take them off, feed them through one at a time, then follow them.
Anna’s flippered foot trailed against the hull, making a faint metallic sound as the buckle scraped the ship’s skin. Patience’s head jerked and Anna stopped her glide, waited, realized she had stopped breathing, began again.
Bittner’s flicker of interest was only momentary. With the mask and the darkness it was impossible to tell, but Anna didn’t think Patience realized she was no longer alone.
Dive tanks in place, Patience grasped the neck of the sack and began swimming up the hull. Her light was trained toward the tilting deck. She was obviously in no need of rescue, nor did she look as if she was expecting company. Clearly she had not been down half an hour. Like Anna, she would have chosen bounce dives. Dangerous but doable for the kind of money she would get for the wine in the net bag. Bottom time would have dictated more than one dive; one load at a time. Carrie had never been worried for her mother, she had informed on her, getting revenge for the loss of her first lover.
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth, Anna thought.
With time so short, Anna assumed Patience would head immediately back to the surface with her prize, but she swam for the deck.
Safe in her shroud of darkness, Anna followed, grateful for once for the depths. Stalking in absolute silence was not difficult.
Without pausing even an instant at the lightless portal, Patience swam into the engine room.
Anna glided up to the right of the door, shielded from view from within, and waited. One minute passed, then two. From far back in the tangle of equipment and narrow passages, she could see a flicker of light on the bulkhead.
There could be little of value in the engine room, nothing worth the precious time Patience was spending. Anna wondered what she needed to do with a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of wine and five sixty-four-year-old corpses. She looked at her watch: in minutes her bottom line time would be used up. Any longer and she would be into twenty to forty minutes’ decompression time.
Switching on her light, she followed Patience into the interior of the Kamloops.
Claustrophobia met her just inside the portal. The engine room was low-ceilinged and the passages were narrow. Bulkheads showed gray in the beam of her light. To the right the passage opened into a space filled with machinery separated by walkways just wide enough to accommodate a man. Ahead, the corridor branched into several narrower passages fanning out amid the once working organs of the dead ship.
In the clear, still waters at one hundred and ninety-five feet, the wrecks were amazingly clean, as if they’d settled just weeks before. Still, over everything was a softening shroud of silt so fine it scarcely dulled the outlines of the machinery. Each flick of her feet stirred up eddies in the fine-grained mud and Anna swam with great delicacy.
Keeping her light trained on the floor so it wouldn’t alert Patience to her presence, Anna trailed down the passage. Knowing somewhere five corpses kept vigil, she had a sense of being watched, a prickling feeling down her back that at any second a half-fleshed hand would clutch at her.
The circle of light that Patience’s lamp produced continued to flicker on the bulkhead at the end of the passage. Tricky, unnatural, the light flitted here and there, always on bulkhead or machinery, always in sight, as if Patience shined it constantly behind her looking for pursuers. Like a will-o‘-the-wisp, it vanished as Anna reached the corner. Like a will-o’-the-wisp it led her down another, smaller walkway.
Like a will-o‘-the-wisp, Anna thought and suddenly knew, like other unwary travelers, she was intentionally being led astray. Patience must have seen her light as she descended from the Belle Isle, and had lured her into the ship.
Anna stopped. The feeling of clutching hands grew till she could feel her heart pounding in her ears and wondered if the sound carried through water. Slowly, warily, keeping an eye on the light beckoning her still deeper into the wreck, she swam back the way she had come. Corpses no longer seemed of any consequence. Compared to the living, they were benevolent.
Something was wrong with Patience’s lamp.
The light, once a clear stabbing white, began to fade, then diffuse in a strange fog. Silt. Patience was silting out the engine room. An impenetrable fog was boiling down the corridor. Panic rising, Anna fled.
Patience had circled round, found her way through the twisting passageways until she was between Anna and the door. The brownish-gray wall swept down, blotting out everything. In seconds, Anna’s light was rendered useless. The water was thick with silt. Bulkhead, deck, engine parts half a foot away, were hidden behind liquid mud.
The world dwindled, closed in. Lake and ship and now the very space she moved through crushed down. There was no way out, no choices left to make. A scream built in Anna’s chest, pressing hard against her sternum until the pain brought tears to her eyes. Fear flushed through her bowels and she was weak with it. Air gulped through her mouthpiece burned her throat with icy slush and her head spun. The need to run like a wild thing blindsided her and Anna kicked hard, swam madly through the opaque waters.
A racking pain took her in the left shoulder. Kicking free, she hit her knees on an unyielding surface. Wildly, she scrabbled her hands over it. The deck. She had swum hard into the floor of the passage. Equilibrium was gone, sight was gone, hearing, everything. Nothing was left to tell her if she swam deeper into the ship, up toward the ceiling, or sideways into the maze of machine parts that cut the engine room into winding passages. With blunt, gloved fingers, Anna clawed at the metal of the decking, or was it the bulkhead? The ceiling?
The insanity of the act caught her mind, held it still long enough so she could think. Forcing herself to stillness, she retreated back to basics, to Ralph’s remembered instructions: Breathe. Concentrating on the mechanics of her diaphragm drawing down, her rib cage lifting and expanding, air pulling through the rubber hose filling the vacuum, Anna breathed in, breathed out. Her lips had lost feeling, her mouth felt like a snow cone. In. Out. Rational thought, not opposable thumbs, is what makes us more dangerous than the apes, she thought.
Rational thought. First she must discover, microscopically, where she was in the ship. She stopped even the gentle movement of her flippered feet and waited, feeling time, the essence she had less of than air, slipping away. Slowly, in her stillness, the weight she wore to counteract her buoyancy sought its natural state and she began to settle. Her knees, then her hands struck the deck.
You’re no longer lost, she told herself, mostly because she needed the reassurance of banal conversation. You are on the deck of the Kamloops‘ engine room. Not the ceiling. Not the bulkhead. Good.
Closing her eyes to shut away the brown haze that seemed the physical manifestation of pure confusion, Anna mentally retraced the path she had taken following Patience. Into the ship, then down a corridor walled on the left, open on the right where machinery was housed, past one doorway on the left, then a left turn, another passage, narrower, left again at an open door.
Careful not to lose contact with the deck, she spread-eagled herself. Her left hand hit the bulkhead, her right, nothing. Changing the light over to her right hand and keeping her belly pressed to the deck, she pushed her left hand into the angle where bulkhead met deck, and began to work her way back down the short hallway. At least she hoped she headed back and had not turned herself around in her frenzy and was now swimming deeper into the ship. Her hand lost contact and she felt a spark of hope. It would be the right place for the door she had seen as she turned up the last passage in pursuit of Patience. Inching to the right, she felt along the deck till her lamp collided with the bulkhead on that side. Again she switched the useless light to her free hand. Fingers trailing, she made the first turn, then a second.
If her mind map was accurate she would come to another doorway. A break in the wall: she began to believe she might escape and swam on with more confidence. Another twenty-five feet or so and she should swim free into the lake.
Keeping her hand firmly in the angle of the bulkhead and deck, she swam. No change in the silt miasma heralded open water. No slightly lighter square in the hopeless darkness relieved her eyes.
The bulkhead ended in another. No open door, no freedom, another wall made a ninety-degree angle to the left.
Panic, held at bay by hope and action, flooded back. Anna couldn’t breathe. The mechanism of her tanks had malfunctioned. Air wasn’t coming through the mouthpiece. She fought down the urge to rip her mask off, to get some space around her.
“Breathe,” Ralph said clearly.
Her mouth was completely numb with cold inside and out. She grabbed her lips with gloved fingers and pressed them down, molding them around a regulator she could no longer feel. Sitting with her back to the wall, Anna breathed. There was air. She took it in; let it go. I will die calmly, she thought. And preferably not today.
The map she’d drawn in her head was shattered. Exploring the unexpected bulkhead with her hands, she felt for something that would jog her memory, give her a place to begin drawing a new map. One that would take her out of this hell and back to the world of the living.
A seam ran up vertically eight inches out from the corner. Anna pursued it with fingers grown clumsy with cold and fear. The seam made a right angle, then another. A door: her mental map had not failed her. Patience had closed the door to the engine room. A lever, slanting down at a forty-five-degree angle, was located to the left and center. Anna’s hand closed on the metal. For a second or two she hesitated. If the door didn’t open, she would die.
With a control that both surprised and reassured her, Anna pressed down. The lever didn’t move. Control slipping, she jerked the metal handle upward. It was ungiving, jammed in place. A desperate moment passed as she struggled with iron forged to withstand storms a thousand thousand times greater than any human arms could foment.
Exertion at depth began to take its toll. The darkness without was becoming a darkness within. Anna felt her hands drifting from the lever, her mind receding as a light would vanish in the night. She was falling back, her flippered feet losing touch with the reality of the decking. Strength born of desperation closed her fingers and she clung to the metal lever. Still she drifted, still she fell away into mud-blanketed darkness, the lamp at her feet kicked aside by a trailing flipper.
As from a great distance, Anna found herself staring at the tumbling light. The beam was losing the gray-brown dullness of the silt fog, gaining clarity, sharpness. She blinked, breathed, fought to stay awake and so alive. Her back bumped gently against something and her fall was stopped. Against all logic, she was still clinging to the door handle.
As the mud fog cleared, so did Anna’s brain. The lever had been welded in the open position by more than half a century of immersion in Superior’s waters. Patience had closed the door but been unable to lock it. Had Anna died, her corpse would have been found floating against an unlocked door, forever mysterious: the woman who had chosen death behind an open portal.
A kick brought Anna back to the relative freedom of the lake bottom. What fragile light there had been in Michigan’s fog-ridden skies was gone. The surface of the lake no longer showed lighter. But for the lamp she’d retrieved, there was a total absence of light. It was as if she swam in India ink.
Anna looked at the time. Six minutes had elapsed since she had entered the Kamloops‘ engine room; fifteen since she had toppled out of her patrol boat. Ten was the maximum bottom time for a bounce dive, for surfacing with minimal decompression stops.
Vague and fumbling in mind and body, Anna looked for the lifeline, the line that would lead her back up, time her stops. It had been withdrawn: Patience banking on the fact there would be no one left alive needing a road home. Without light from the surface, the water was as directionless as deep space. To swim could be death if one was swimming in the wrong direction.
Anna pushed a button on her low-pressure inflator hose. Slowly she began to ascend. Like Winnie-the-Pooh with his balloon, she thought with the closest approximation to optimism she had felt since tumbling off the Belle Isle’s stern.
The small circle of light her lamp cast on the Kamloops‘ deck dwindled. Finally it no longer touched the dead ship. Anna lost all sense of movement. Try as she might, the effort of watching both timepiece and depth gauge proved too much. She lost count, forgot her numbers. All concept of how fast she was ascending, how long she’d been down, was lost.
From below, where her finger of light poked into the blackness came a white amorphous shape. Anna tried to train the light on it but it moved in and out of the beam as if it chose to be seen only for a second, then to hide in the black recesses. Fear of the known evil of bends or an embolism with blood frothing from her lungs kept Anna from kicking into sudden flight. Then it was upon her; a corpse from the Kamloops. Pale. Dead.
Not dead: hands trailing ribbons of saponified flesh reached for her. Before the fingers could close, the body drifted away into the dark. Denny Castle replaced it. He floated near her; not a corpse but alive and clad only in the captain’s uniform.
In and out of dreams, Anna was carried upward. Ralph swam by, looking at her and tapping on the face of a watch she couldn’t read. Formal, a maitre d‘ in gossamer silks that shimmered around her, Patience offered wine for Anna’s approval. Molly was there but Anna was unsurprised. Always, when she was in trouble, Molly had been there.
Then Anna dreamed fishes were flapping wet tails in her face. Whether she opened her eyes or regained consciousness she was unsure, but the darkness was no longer absolute. The fish tails were waves. She had reached the surface and she was alive. Fog still clamped down on the lake. She began to swim but faltered; not knowing if she swam to or away from the safety of land. And the cold had worked its way through the layers of her dry suit, sapping the vitality from her muscles, wrapping deadening fingers around her already slow-moving thoughts.
To lie back, to sleep, to stop struggling, would be heaven but Molly was nagging at her, something about staying in the game. After she had rested, Anna thought, she would figure out what her sister was babbling about. The fishes flapped their tails and cigar smoke wafted across the water.
Cigar smoke and fishes: the note was jarring. Anna forced herself awake. Fish tails turned back into waves. Cigar smoke remained cigar smoke; sweet and fruity. To shake the hallucination, Anna forced her arms to stroke, her legs to kick. The lake felt as if it had turned to concrete and was setting, heavy and rock-hard around her limbs.
The strange smoke, clear as a beacon, stayed in the air. Blind and deaf and aching in every joint, she floundered on, kicking away the cold, kicking away death for one more minute.
Her mind narrowed to the odor of exotic tobacco and the need to keep moving.
Stay in the game.
Finally death, tired of waiting for life’s leftovers, overtook her. Her leaden arms were pinioned, dragged forward. “No!” she screamed around the mouthpiece that choked her.
Voices were burbling in her ears again. “We’ve got you. Don’t fight. We’ve got you,” they were saying. The voices of the dead in the engine room. Anna fought to come out of the dreams.
Her regulator, the breath of life, was pulled from her numbed lips. She stopped breathing to cheat death another few seconds. Her face mask was ripped away.
“Anna!” came a surprised cry. The sound of her own name startled the hard-won breath from her lungs. She gulped cold living air. “Anna, it’s us.”
Fight faded. Anna’s mind opened. Without her mask, she could see. Tinker Coggins-Clarke was bending over her. She held fast to one arm. Damien clasped the other.
“Don’t flop,” Tinker said gently. “You’ll overturn us. Come into the boat. Death can’t follow you into the boat.”
Anna willed the wood that was her legs to some semblance of action and Damien and Tinker dragged her over the gunwale of the aluminum runabout.
“What’re you doing out in the fog?” Anna demanded faintly, a half-formed idea of citing them for running without lights dissolving unspoken into weary laughter.
“An experiment in sensory deprivation,” Damien told her seriously.
“And Oscar was stinking up the tent,” Tinker added. “I told him if he had to smoke his smelly old cigars, he could brave the elements.”
Anna looked to the bow. Wearing a tiny yellow slicker and lashed to the bow with what looked like a hair ribbon was the brown-eyed teddy bear.
“I’m buying you a case of Havanas,” Anna promised. “And a red sports car.”