A Superior Death

“Can’t get enough of the Park Service, huh?” Sandra said, her fingernails clicking against the plastic keyboard. “Got to come in on your days off now for a little bureaucratic fix.”

“Quick,” A

Sandra finished typing, the printer blatted out a line of braille, and the dispatcher ran a well-manicured fingertip over it. Into the radio mike she read the line of numbers. “One, forty-two, sixty-four…” Fire weather. A

The list complete, Sandra turned with a satisfied sigh and interlocked her fingers over her middle. The signal that chat could commence. “Tinker and Damien were asking after you,” she said. “For some reason they thought I might know where you’d be this weekend.” She chuckled comfortably.

All plans on ISRO made by phone or radio had a way of finding Sandra’s ear. She never broke these unintentionally shared confidences but, like Sherlock Holmes, she took pleasure in amazing people with her arcane knowledge of their lives.

“Ah,” A

“Grumpy, are we?”

“I guess.”

“Body recovery got you thinking mortal thoughts?”

“It’s got me thinking, at any rate.” A

“I take it you don’t buy the drug-death scenario Officer Frederick Stanton is so fond of,” Sandra remarked.

A

“Do you?” A

“Nope. Why come to a national park crawling with rangers and red-necked fisherfolk when there’s a million secluded bays and a zillion acres of unpatrolled lake waters to rendezvous in?”

“Stanton seems competent enough,” A

“Stanton’s a city boy,” Sandra returned. The implication was clear: His mind would make urban profiles of an Isle Royale death. The parks were places apart. Islands of hope, fragments of wilderness in an increasingly developed world, scraps of land trying to be all things to all people: museums, adventures, solitude, recreation, vacation, research, preservation. Different rules, different lusts, different pressures prevailed. People died for different reasons.

“Are you going to see Tinker and Damien?”

A

“Tinker and Damien… Did it seem urgent?”

Sandra laughed. “With those two it’s hard to tell. A few days back they were hiking in Moskey Basin. They radioed in a collision with serious injuries. Scotty rushed a couple of the emergency medical technicians out there. Everybody getting overtime. Everybody rushing around with their hair in a knot having a high old time. They get out to find, in a freak accident, a boater had rammed the dock there at the south end. He wasn’t hurt but he’d dislodged a beam under the water level and trapped a young lake otter. Tinker and Damien caught hell but the little otter’s going to remember them fondly.”

A

Damien was on the paved trail between the lodge and the Visitors’ Center at Rock Harbor. Hands folded behind his back, eyes on the ground, he was pacing. Soundlessly, his lips formed words. Clad in the khaki Student Conservation Association’s shirt and green uniform trousers, he looked uncharacteristically benign. And young. In A

“Damien!” A look of what could have been alarm flitted across his face. His answering wave, a short flick of wrist and fingers, was anything but welcoming.

She walked up to a nearby bench. He continued to pace. She leaned on the back and waited for his next pass. “I’ve got a nature walk,” Damien said ungraciously as he checked his watch. “In seven minutes.”

This brusque, nervous fellow was so unlike the cloaked and candlelit boy that A

“Sandra said you wanted to see me,” she said easily. “This is a bad time. I’ll catch Tinker.” She began moving away.

“Don’t bother,” he said sharply.

A

Under her gaze, the rudeness vanished. “I’m sorry,” he said with his old boyish grace. “I got up on the wrong side of the universe this morning. We just wanted to tell you we’ve stopped with the Do

“Ah.” Ten minutes before, had she been asked, A

Damien looked past her. A small group was straggling up the pavement. “People for my tour,” he said. As he walked away, his tourists all in a row behind like ducklings, A

On some level had he wanted to set her mental alarms off? One of those unspoken cries for help her sister Molly was paid a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to listen for? Or was Damien incapable by choice or disposition of telling a lie?

“Dream on,” A

Whether his wish she not speak with Tinker was honest or not, it was in vain. He’d piqued her interest-and on a day when she’d been wanting a little piquing. With renewed energy, she walked down the paved trail and onto the wooded path that led to the seasonals’ quarters.

Tinker was sitting on the porch steps of the weathered old house that served as a dormitory. With her head bent over a book she held across her knees, her face was lost in a cloud of blond permed frizz. Hidden somewhere in the draping curtains of fir that glamorized the dilapidated building, a squirrel chattered a warning at A

“Sandra said you wanted to see me,” A

“Yes. I wanted to ask if you’d seen peregrines nesting in McCargo.”

Isle Royale was one of the many places peregrine falcons were being reintroduced. Resource Management had had some success on the southwest end of the island but the north shore had proved inhospitable. A

“We’ve had a sighting.”

A

“I haven’t seen any peregrines in McCargo,” A

“Mmmm.” Tinker seemed to be considering A