Anna woke feeling groggy and gummy. The Administration Building on Mott had an employee shower for the use of guests and backcountry rangers on overnight to the “big city.” She paddled her kayak the few miles downchannel and treated herself to a hot shower that wasted enough water to keep her permanently out of the Environmentalists’ Hall of Fame. It was worth it. The heat steamed away the mildew she felt beginning to grow in her hair and rinsed the sweat, mosquito repellent, and sunblock from her skin.
Dried and refreshed, she cadged a cup of bad coffee from the pot the dispatcher always kept hot, then wandered out to the dock to drink it in with the thin sunshine. The day was fair and promised to be warm-or warm for Isle Royale- somewhere in the sixties. A westerly breeze, smelling of pine and the loamy soil of the boreal forests, trickled in over the island.
Anna leaned back against the warming cement of the quay and closed her eyes.
She was down to the last gulp of coffee, the Cremora scum clinging to the Styrofoam, when Scotty Butkus stomped onto the dock, reminding her of her promise to Tinker and Damien. As always when in uniform, Scotty looked natty. The creases in his shirt were as sharp as if he ironed them instead of just snatching them out of the dryer before the permapress became permacrunch. His brass badge sparkled and his cowboy boots were polished to a fine gloss.
The boots were an absurdity. There wasn’t a horse for hundreds of square miles and anything but soft, white-soled shoes were forbidden on boats-they marked up the decks. But Scotty went booted in the Cisco, a nineteen-foot runabout he used for harbor patrol. He’d even worn them in the Lorelei the time Anna had ridden with him and the District Ranger to Windigo.
Scotty was also wearing his side arm. Because of the low crime rate and the ever present danger of death by drowning, wearing defensive equipment on ISRO was optional. Butkus was the only ranger who opted to lug the heavy piece around. In concession to water safety he had struck a compromise that was strictly against regulations: he didn’t wear the full belt with cuffs and reloaders and holster, but just the pistol in a lightweight breakaway holster on the belt of his trousers.
Cowboy, Anna thought. The gun was just for show.
She’d wondered why Pilcher never called him on his boots, why Lucas Vega hadn’t made him adhere to the defensive equipment standards. Then Christina, who worked as a part-time secretary in the main NPS office in Houghton, told her why the brass treated Scotty with kid gloves. When typing the minutes of the last Equal Opportunity meeting, Chris had discovered Scotty was suing ISRO for not giving him Pilcher’s position when he’d applied for it. He accused the park of discriminating against him because of his age.
The way he saw it, the fact that he refused to learn the long-range navigation device all the Bertrams were equipped with, and had let his scuba-diving license lapse was mere detail.
Anna smiled. She knew altogether too much about Scotty Butkus. It was handy having someone on the inside.
“Morning, Scotty,” she said, shading her eyes to look up at him.
“Morning. Lieu day?”
She nodded. He looked awful. His face was gray and puffy and his eyes were bloodshot. The skin on his neck hung loose. He looked like a man who was drinking heavily, sleeping poorly, and was badly hung over. Anna doubted he had eaten his wife. In the shape he was in he probably couldn’t keep vanilla yogurt down, much less a woman.
“Where’s Donna?” Anna asked. “I haven’t seen her around this trip. She missed Denny’s party.”
“God damn him!” Scotty exploded. Anna was so startled by his outburst she twitched the last swallow of coffee onto her trouser leg. “That son of a bitch ask you to nose around? Tell him to look after his own goddam wife for a change.”
“No,” Anna said calmly. “Denny didn’t send me. I was just making polite conversation. Why? What would Denny want to know he couldn’t ask you himself?”
Scotty chose not to answer for a minute. He jumped into the Cisco with surprising agility. Anna could see she’d underestimated his physical abilities. He was killing himself with booze and cigarettes but he had kept his strength. His upper body looked powerful, the arms hard-muscled.
He busied himself checking the fuel levels, the lines, and a few other things that didn’t need checking. Anna sensed he was itching to gossip, to vent what was evidently a longstanding gripe. She watched in silence.
“The s.o.b. was pestering Donna. She put a flea in his ear, by God.” He smiled a crooked, inward smile that Anna could’ve sworn he’d learned from watching Randolph Scott movies. “That little gal he married on the rebound is in for a hell of a life hitched to that bastard.”
“Is that why Donna didn’t come to the reception?” Anna persisted.
Suddenly Scotty looked wily, his eyes narrowing in an almost cartoon fashion. Suspicious, Anna thought, but it could’ve just been the hangover biting down. “Donna’s gone back to the mainland. Her sister, Roberta, has a ruptured disk. Donna’s looking after the kids till she gets on her feet again.” He turned the key and the Cisco responded with a rattling lawn mower noise. Anna got up and untied his lines for him. “See ya,” he said as she dropped them over the side. Without a backward look, he motored out toward the main channel.
Anna picked up her Styrofoam cup. It was time to find out a little more about Donna Butkus. Anna had entered on duty May 3, six days before the early staff had moved to the island. The Butkuses had followed a week or so later. Secreted away on Amygdaloid, she had missed Lucas Vega’s getting-to-know-you potluck. Almost everything she knew about her fellow islanders she’d learned secondhand through Christina’s letters. As a secretary at the headquarters in Houghton, Chris was in on everything.
Anna carried her cup back to the Administration Building.
The architect hadn’t catered to any north woods notion of romantic design. It was purely governmental: a low, boring, wooden building with a concrete walk, a square of exotic grass species mowed short, and a white flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes. Inside, it was made only slightly more interesting by the addition of maps and charts on the walls.
Anna let herself past a counter installed to keep out Unofficial Persons and walked down the linoleum-floored hallway to the third door on the right. The drone of a computer printing out hung in the air like dust and there was the smell of stale coffee. Sandra Fox, ISRO’s dispatcher, sat with her back to the door. Sandra was in her mid-fifties with close-cropped red hair and a comfortably rounded body.
“Come for another cup of your fine coffee,” Anna said to announce herself.
“Hi, Anna,” Sandra said without turning from the keyboard. “Be with you in a sec.”
Anna sat in the metal folding chair between the waste-basket and the door, watching Sandra’s fingers pecking at the keys. Each was pocked with dots. One printer printed the text out in braille, a second in regular print. It was the first machine of its kind Anna had ever seen.
“Can I pet Delphi?” she asked.
“Sure.” Sandra went on typing.
The dispatcher’s seeing-eye dog, a seven-year-old golden retriever and, as the only dog allowed on the island, a minor celebrity, lay curled neatly under the table that held the printers. Anna crouched and fondled her ears. She cocked one blond eyebrow and looked up with dark liquid eyes. Her tail thumped softly. The warmth of the fur, the nonjudgmental gaze made Anna realize how much a part of her life Piedmont was, how dear and valued a friend.
“There!” Sandra sighed with satisfaction. “So. You finally got those bozos on the Low Dollar afloat. Did they limp back to Grand Marais all right?”
“I guess,” Anna returned. “Nothing washed up on the north shore.” Sandra laughed. Anna wasn’t surprised she knew about the foundered vessel. The dispatcher saw nothing but she heard everything; heard and noted every radio transmission on the island. Rumor had it she used her radio to listen in on phone calls when things got slow-her own version of watching the soaps. Since she kept her own counsel nobody ever called her on it.
“Do you know Donna Butkus, Scotty’s wife?” Anna asked, staying where she was on the cold linoleum so she could enjoy the company of the dog.
Sandra settled back in her chair, folded her hands over her midriff where it rounded out the green fabric of her uniform trousers.
Settling in for a gossip, Anna thought. Good.
“Oh, yes. Scotty brought her back from his trip home last August. He and his third wife were good friends with her parents.” The information was delivered without emotion, but Fox had a lump of tongue in her cheek and the skin around her unseeing eyes crinkled.
“What’s she like?” Anna asked. “Tinker and Damien were talking about her last night. She sounds like an interesting person.”
“Hard to say what somebody’s really like.” Sandra warmed to her subject. Between the radio, the phone calls, and the gossip, Anna guessed people were Sandra’s hobby. “She’s around twenty-nine or thirty, dark hair and eyes. Pretty in an old-fashioned way. ‘A darling dumpling of a girl’ was how Trixy described her.”
Trixy was the seasonal who headed the Interpretive Program. Winters she taught school in Houghton. For the last six summers she’d worked at ISRO. Anna winced at Trixy’s choice of “dumpling” to describe the woman Tinker and Damien thought to be both meat and drink to her husband.
Sandra smiled mischievously. “All that, of course, is merely hearsay. I didn’t see it with my own eyes. My idea of what Donna’s like is less superficial. She’s got a real gentle voice, and shaking hands with her is like catching a butterfly-all soft and fluttering you’re afraid you’ll crush. Very quiet. I think she feels out of place here. Everybody’s so rough-and-tumble and always talking shop. She and Trixy got fairly close. Both artsy types. I think she pretty much hero-worshiped Scotty. Then she married him. Oops!” Sandra laughed good-humoredly and Anna laughed with her. “Why are you interested? Lucas got you investigating rangers’ wives?”
Anna shook her head. “No. Tinker and Damien hadn’t seen her around and were concerned. I asked Scotty about her this morning and he blew up-something about Denny Castle. Piqued my interest. I’m just being nosy.”
“Um,” Sandra said, the explanation completely satisfactory. “That Denny Castle thing was all the talk this winter. He and Donna spent a lot of time together, I guess. I don’t know if there really was ever anything in it, but a man who marries a woman thirty years younger than himself’s bound to have a few insecurities. Especially if he’s not rich. I guess the romance was mostly on Denny’s side. He made kind of a fool of himself. Following her, that kind of thing. Those deep sensitive types get funny yens. Myself, I like bluff hearty types who swat you on the behind.”
Anna felt she owed Sandra for the information and paid in kind. She told her the details of the reception. The dispatcher had been on duty that evening. Sandra listened with a concentration that flattered most people, including Anna, into telling her things they’d never really intended to.
“Jo’s been around forever,” Sandra said when Anna had finished. “Always finding excuses to work with Denny, or at least get to the island. She’s been chasing after him since high school. Them what’s uncharitable say that’s why he took to the water: to get away from her. Then she went to college- double major in freshwater and marine biology. ‘Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no ocean deep enough,’ I guess. She’s got him now,” Sandra concluded philosophically. “More power to her.”
“Seven-oh-one, one-two-one,” cackled at Sandra’s elbow.
“Duty calls,” she said to Anna.
“I’ve got to go too.” Anna stayed just long enough to hear what 121-Lucas Vega-was calling about. It didn’t concern her, so she gave Delphi a farewell pat and left.
Donna was in Houghton nursing a sister with a ruptured disk.
Case closed.
Despite Tinker and Damien’s wishes, ISRO was simply not a hotbed of crime. The only deaths were those of innocent fishes and that was deemed not only legal but admirable. So much so it surprised Anna that it was not written into every ranger’s job description that he or she was to ooh and ahh over the corpses of what had once been flashing silver jewels enlivening the deep.
To Isle Royale fishermen’s credit, Anna forced herself to admit, they almost always ate what they killed-unlike the trophy hunters in Texas who wanted only heads and racks and skins to display on dusty walls.
Anna waited till the Ranger III docked at noon, in the hope there would be a note from Christina. Anna had become friends with Chris and her daughter, Alison, in Texas. The desert had never appealed to Christina and she had missed town living. In the weeks Anna had been out on the island there’d been a note with each Ranger III docking. A letter this Wednesday would mean a lot and she waited even at the risk of having to kayak Blake’s Point in the dark.
The letter was there. Anna put it away: a treat for later. At the convenience store at Rock she bought half a dozen Snickers bars and two Butterfingers. She didn’t bother to track down Tinker and Damien Coggins-Clarke. Next week would be soon enough to tell them of Donna’s miraculous recovery from connubial cannibalism. Let them enjoy one more week of the game.
All morning clouds had been building in the west. White cumulus laced Greenstone Ridge, peeking up over the wooded slopes of Mount Ojibway. As Anna shoved the kayak out into the calm waters of Rock Harbor, she eyed them with concern. Afternoons were no time to start out onto the lake, but the north end of the island, ripped to a stony fringe by glaciation, provided a lot of sheltered coves and harbors. If she could get around Blake’s Point before the water got rough, she could run for the shelter of Duncan or Five Finger Bay.
Anna put her energy into paddling. Between the dock at Rock Harbor and the end of Merrit Lane, she saw nothing of the scenery: she was making time, covering ground. At the tip of Merrit, her little craft held safe between the buffers of Merrit to the southeast and the last of Isle Royale to the northwest, she stopped to rest. Strain burned hot spots into her right elbow and her deltoid muscles where they crossed from arms to back.
Weather moving in from Thunder Bay had reached the island. Out in the lake waves rolled, cresting white with foam. Passage Island, four miles out, had vanished in an encircling arm of fog. Overhead the sun still shone but soon it, too, would be wrapped in cloud.
For long minutes Anna sat in the kayak debating the wisdom of continuing. On the one hand, if she got careless or overtired, she could end up providing a lot of search-and-rescue rangers with a healthy chunk of overtime pay for combing the ragged shores for her body. On the other hand, she could return to Rock and face another grating evening listening to the political maneuvering and gossip inherent in a closed community, and another night mildewing in Pilcher’s floating pigsty.
It was not a tough decision. Anna pulled up the waterproof sleeve that fitted into the kayak like a gasket and snugged it around her waist with a drawstring. If she was careful she would probably be safe enough, but there would be no way to stay completely dry.
For another minute she sat in the lane, her paddle across the bow, while she ate a Snickers bar. Never once had she experienced the sugar rush of energy other people swore by as they downed their Cokes and Hersheys before slamming fire line or hiking that last twenty-five-hundred-foot ascent at the end of the day, but it was as good a reason as any to eat chocolate.
Out in open water Anna found the waves were two and three meters high. The sheer immensity of the lake had warped her perspective. The wind turned from fresh to bitter. It snatched up droplets, hard as grains of sand, and rasped them across her face, exacerbating her sunburn and making her eyes tear.
Keeping the nose of the kayak directly into the wind, she dug her way forward. Water carried her up till the kayak balanced high on an uncertain escarpment. Around her were the ephemeral mountain ranges of Lake Superior. As one can from a hilltop, she saw the island spreading away to the south, bibbed now with a collar of white where waves pouring in from Canada broke into foaming lace against the shoals.
The hill of water sank, fell as if to the center of the world. Mountainous slippery-sided waves rose up past the boat, past Anna’s head, up till it seemed they must overbalance and crash down on her, driving her meager craft to the bottom with the great metal ships like the Glenlyon and the Cox, or the Monarch, her massive wooden hull broken on the Palisades. But the kayak stayed afloat, climbed hills and slid through valleys with a structural certainty of design that lent her courage. She stroked with clocklike regularity, taking deep, even bites of the lake.
Shoulders ached. Elbows burned. Anna pushed herself harder. There were times that hurting was a part of, times the fatigue and the fear were necessary ingredients: fires to burn away the dead wood, winds to blow away the chaff, closing the gap between body and brain.
That night Anna shared a camp in Lane Cove with half a dozen Boy Scouts from Thief River Falls, Minnesota, who couldn’t grasp the concept that it was no longer politically correct to cut boughs for beds and saplings to fashion camp tables.
The following night she spent a more pleasant if less productive night on Belle Isle with two retired schoolteachers from Duluth who visited the island every summer to watch birds.
The next day Anna kayaked Pickerel Cove and Robinson Bay. Backcountry patrol-days in the wilderness-those were the assignments Anna lived for, times it made her laugh aloud to think it was being called “work” and she was being paid to do it.
An hour shy of midnight of the third day she finally slid the kayak up onto the shingle at Amygdaloid. The western sky was washed in pale green, enough light to see by. Overhead stars shone, looking premature, as if they’d grown impatient waiting for the sun to set and had crept out early.
It was June 21, Anna realized. The longest day of the year. For a few minutes she sat in the kayak, steadying the little vessel by bracing her paddle against the gravel. Her muscles felt limp and warm. Her butt was numb and her legs were stiff from their long imprisonment. There was a good chance she would fall over when she tried to extricate herself from the boat she had worn like a body stocking for the last eight hours.
“Need some help, eh?”
A squat round-bodied man stood above her on the dock. He had a Canadian look. The closest Anna had come to describing it was “voyageur.” Many of the Canadian fishermen who frequented the island had the powerful, compact build of the voyageurs she had seen pictured in woodcuts from the trading days. More telling: he spoke with a distinct Canadian accent.
“Couldn’t hurt,” Anna replied.
Landing lightly as a cat, he jumped down the four feet from the pier to the shore. Anna untied the drawstring of the waterproof sleeve around her middle. He caught her under the arms, lifted her out of the kayak, and set her up on the dock as easily as she could have lifted the five-year-old Alison.
“Thanks.” Rolling over, she pushed herself up on hands and knees, then eased herself to her feet.
“I’m Jon. Are you the ranger here?” the Canadian asked. He had bounced back up onto the dock to stand next to her.
“Just barely.” Anna hobbled up the dock like an old woman. “I will be tomorrow.”
“Ranger station closed, eh?” Jon followed her off the dock and stood balanced on a rock, his hands in his pockets, watching as she pulled the kayak up onto dry land.
“Yup. Opens at eight tomorrow morning.” Anna retrieved her pack and started up the slope toward a bed made with clean flannel sheets.
The Canadian was right on her heels. “Is it too late to get a diving permit? We want to get an early start tomorrow.”
Anna gave up. After all, he had plucked her out of her boat and saved her an ignominious end to a glorious paddle. “I’ll write you a permit. Give me a minute to unlock and put on some dry clothes.”
He trotted happily down the dock to where a well-worn but clean little cabin cruiser nosed gently against her fenders. Her aft deck was piled with scuba gear: tanks and dry suits, flippers, masks and fins.
“Bobo!” the Canadian called into the cabin window. “She’ll do it.”
Anna let herself into the ranger station. It was too late to build a fire to drive out the damp. She took half a bottle of Proprietor’s Reserve Red out of the refrigerator, poured a glass, and left it on the counter to warm while she changed and wrote the dive permit.
The two men were waiting for her when she reemerged into the office area. Anna lit a kerosene lamp. The station had Colemans but she didn’t plan to spend enough time with the Canadians to make the effort of lighting one worthwhile.
Cold water divers were, of necessity, lovers of equipment. Anna noticed that “Bobo”-the taller of the two but just barely, his round face darkened by a well-trimmed beard- wore a watch that had everything in it but a micro fax machine.
She got the forms from her desk. “Where do you want to dive?”
“The Emperor.”
Anna started her spiel on danger and difficulty, but the one called Bobo cut her off. “We heard the lecture from the ranger in Windigo. We dove the Kamloops today.”
The Kamloops was the most dangerous dive on the island. At depths from one hundred and seventy-five to two hundred and sixty feet, the wreck was beyond the reach of all but the most experienced divers. Or outlaw divers; people who threw caution-and sometimes their lives-to the wind.
“You’ve racked up some bottom time,” Anna said. “Is this going to give you a long enough surface interval?” The pressures at the depths where the Kamloops dwelt were such that oxygen and nitrogen were forced into solution in the human body, dissolved in the blood and fatty liquids much as carbon dioxide is forced under pressure into soda pop. When divers surfaced, returning to the lesser pressure above the water, those gasses re-formed from a liquid to a gaseous state much like the fizz when a soda pop is opened. If divers surfaced slowly, according to established ascent stages, the gasses worked out slowly and were exhaled harmlessly. If not, they formed bubbles in the bloodstream causing symptoms called the bends which were painful and occasionally fatal.
Regardless of the timing of the ascent, there was always a small residue of nitrogen still in the body. Twelve hours was the rule of thumb between dives more than a couple of atmospheres down.
“We know our numbers,” Bobo said.
Anna shrugged and wrote “Emperor” in the space provided.
“Did you know there were bodies down there?” Jon asked as Anna handed him a copy of the permit. “On the Kamloops?” Bobo looked annoyed, as if Jon were telling family secrets.
“Yeah,” Anna returned and Bobo looked disappointed. “Part of the crew was trapped on board when she went down.”
“They’re weird-looking,” Jon said. “Like wax.”
“The corpses are saponified,” Anna told him. “It’s called an adipocere formation. It’s fairly common with submerged bodies. The soft tissues get converted to a waxy stuff. Don’t ask me how. Their still being like that after over sixty years is a little strange, but it’s happened before in the Great Lakes.”
For divers accustomed to the sometimes centuries-old wooden-hulled vessels in the Caribbean, the preservation of Superior’s treasures often surprised them. Geology and geography conspired to entomb the ships in an almost ageless death. In the deep, still, cold, freshwater canyons beneath the lake’s surface no coral could grow, no surf could batter.
“Everything on the ship is like that-in a time warp,” Jon went on. “We must’ve seen a hundred pairs of shoes. They looked like if you dried them out you could wear them home.”
“Did you try them on?” Anna asked casually.
Both divers looked offended. “We did not try them on,” Bobo said with cold dignity.
“Just asking.” Taking artifacts from shipwrecks was a sport-a business for some. Before Isle Royale was made a national park in 1940, it wasn’t illegal. By the time most of the wrecks were protected a lot of their scientific and historical value had been destroyed by treasure hunters. As had some of the joy of discovery for the divers who came after the depredations were committed. Vandalism and theft continued to be a problem. The Kamloops, so inaccessible, so long lost, was like a time capsule. The Park Service hoped to keep her that way.
“One of the bodies was incredible,” Jon said. “He looked like he’d drowned yesterday. Clothes like new, hair-everything was still perfect.”
Anna doubted that. The bodies were recognizable as human but in a featureless kind of way. One’s head was missing, several had limbs from which the flesh had dissolved away, leaving only stumps of bone protruding. The clothing was preserved but by no stretch of the imagination “like new.”
“Mmm,” she murmured, willing them to take their permit and go away.
“The other five were a little the worse for wear, eh?” Jon said.
“There’s just the five,” Anna said. “Total.”
“No,” Bobo returned, sounding pleased to correct her. “There are six.”
“Did you manage to open the stern room?” Anna asked. She couldn’t imagine they had. The entrance was blocked with tons of debris. But the NPS Submerged Cultural Resources Unit out of Santa Fe speculated that there could be as many as a dozen more corpses there-men trapped when the ship foundered.
“This was the engine room,” Bobo said, his tone daring her to challenge his knowledge of anything underwater.
“Six?” Anna said. “Well, stranger things have happened…” She was too tired to stand and argue. Nitrogen narcosis, shadows, imagination-at a hundred and seventy-five feet who knew what they thought they saw? Anna didn’t really care.
Her agreeing without believing stung Bobo. “You wait,” he commanded and trotted out the door. Jon shrugged his heavy shoulders in a gesture that was so French as to be a parody.
Anna waited, thinking of the wine on the counter, of her flannel sheets. The hands on the desk clock found one another at midnight. Jon hummed a little song to himself and poked through the rack of brochures.
Bobo came back with an underwater videocamera. He pushed the machine at Anna. “Look,” he demanded. Anna pressed her eye to the viewfinder. “Body number one,” he announced and she saw a pale headless apparition lit by the unforgiving glare of an underwater lamp. Bobo took the camera back and pushed fast forward, his attention fixed on a digital readout window. “Body number two.” He thrust the camera into Anna’s hands once again. A drift of amorphous remains clad in what looked to be overalls floated on the tape. “Number three,” Bobo said after repeating the fast-forwarding process. Another dead Pillsbury doughboy in dark clothes. Anna smiled. The fingers of the left hand had been folded down, all but the middle finger. She’d heard divers sometimes flipped a macabre and ghostly bird to the next guy down. “Four and five,” Bobo said, working his video magic again. Two more remnants, faceless, one with no arms. “And six.” Bobo handed Anna the camera a final time.
She pressed her eye to the viewfinder until black clouds troubled her vision. Then she set the camera carefully on the desk. “I’m going to need this tape,” she said. She reached over the desk and lifted the permit from Jon’s fingers. “And I’m going to have to ask that you do not dive the Emperor tomorrow morning, that you remain here. I’m sure the Chief Ranger will have some questions to ask you.”
Again she lifted the camera and pressed her eye to the viewfinder. Number six was indeed well preserved. Though the clothing was right for a sea captain of the early part of the twentieth century, it looked new. Shadows hid most of the face but the lips and chin were sharply defined and a cloud of light-colored hair floated out from beneath the cap the figure wore.
Number six had not gone down in the storm of 1927.