A Superior Death

Inside, the age of the building told in many small comfortless ways. It was divided into two large rooms. The front half was the National Park Service office. Under one window was A

The first was of the America, the pleasure/mail/supply ship that serviced the island in its heyday as a resort community. The second was of the America ’s bow thrust up through the ice; a pathetic trophy held in the lake’s wintery grip long after it had struck a shoal and sunk in the North Gap outside Washington Harbor. The third, a long glimmering underwater shot, was of the once sleek-sided ship vanishing into the darkness of the lake.

The bow of the America was still scarcely a yard beneath the surface but her stern rested eighty feet down. On a calm day, when the water was clear, it gave A

None of this paraphernalia had been dusted for at least a year and probably longer than that. Rodent droppings, sifting down from the attic over the long winter when Isle Royale was ice-bound and closed to all human occupation, washed the overhead beams with gray. Cobwebs moved faintly in the drafts.

The rear portion of the house was devoted to living quarters. A second woodstove, half the size of the one in the office, was crowded into one corner. Opposite, along the wall beneath a window that faced the cliff, was a crumbling Formica counter with a sink and hand pump. A two-burner gas stove, a gas refrigerator, and an aluminum shower stall lined the short northern wall. A narrow wooden door led out back past the propane tank to the pit toilet.

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A patchwork coverlet and handmade pillows brightened the bed. Mexican rugs warmed the walls and kept the drafts out. Alison’s contribution-Ally’s taste and her mother’s money-was a see-through shower curtain bedecked with saxophone-playing alligators in tuxedos.

Christina and her daughter had known A

A

Heat and light began to revive her, and overlaid the rickety rooms with a sense of romance. Shelter from the storm, A

The bang of the front door a

Holly was a little drunk-not sloppy drunk, but high. Her eyes burned with alcohol-induced fever and her cheeks were redder than the wind would account for. She carried a bottle of Black amp; White in her coat pocket, the label showing as if she dared anyone to comment on it. Mist had glued her short dark hair to her forehead in sculpted curls. She looked like a creature of storm and sea, a siren ready to sing some modern-day Ulysses onto the rocks.

Hawk, though he took a glass of Scotch when Holly pressed him, was drinking little. His eyes seldom left his sister’s face and he seemed half afraid of the fires that burned so clearly there.

De

There was a legend that in Superior’s storms there sometimes came three waves, each bigger than the last. It was the third that drove ships to their deaths. The waves were called the Three Sisters. It was they, lakers would tell, who had drowned the Edmund Fitzgerald. De

Castle wasn’t drinking at all, nor was he talking. As he ran back out into the night to check on di

Within a couple of minutes De

“D’Artagnan’s last supper. I’ll drink to that,” Holly said. Despite the liquor, her voice was clear and low, but De

“Forgot the salad-” he said and closed himself again into the night beyond the cabin door.

Hawk leaned down and fed sticks into the woodstove. A

“Porthos and Aramis,” A

A tear, colored like blood from the fire’s light, flashed on Holly’s cheek. She swatted it away as if it were a fly. “Always,” she said.

“Seven years,” Hawk defined “always,” but it sounded as if it was always to him as well.