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Scotty would be there no doubt, telling lies and opening beer bottles with his teeth to impress the new recruits. Dave would be eating the pepperoni pizzas he seemed to procure from nowhere. The TV would be blaring. Talk would be of outboard motors, dead fish, or female body parts. Still, needing heat and light, A
Pizza Dave was always good for a beer. If the sauna wasn’t booked she could retreat there with a couple of Leinenkugels, strip down, smell the sweet scent of cedar and feel the dry heat of the desert.
NINETEEN
After two Leinenkugels had been poured in and sweated out, and A
The fog had not lifted. If anything it lay more heavily over the island than before. Steam boiled off her overheated flesh and A
Trees, robbed of color by the fog, appeared as black smoke around the NPS housing area. Wooden barracks, built in the thirties by the CCC boys and held together over the years with mouse nests and multitudinous coats of paint, gave the housing the aspect of a ghost town.
A clamor of cowboy laughter added to the sense of a place out of time There was the ring of booted feet on a wooden floor: Scotty. Wrapped in fog, A
Perhaps in vino there wasn’t always veritas, but one could usually count on a lack of discretion. With luck, she might learn something.
Blobs of muted color swam through the mist. Trail crew was cooking out. A barrel cut in half, metal fenceposts welded on for legs, served as their kitchen even when they were not on the trail. The smell of grilled meat warmed the damp. Once it had smelled good to A
A grating sound, a pop, ragged cheering: another beer bottle opened with Scotty’s teeth. “Now you’re a bachelor again, you going to go with us over to Thunder Bay?” A coarse voice cut through the fog, making A
“Naw,” Scotty drawled. “Do
A growing nausea began creeping through A
“Not what I heard…” A
“Now what son of a bitch told you that?” Scotty growled.
“Told me what?” Dave asked i
Scotty wasn’t to be drawn or trapped. “Goddam little in-twerps,” he muttered. A
There was a satisfied grumble, then laughter. These men were as old as the world, A
The talk settled on baseball. Fingers of mist moved in from the trees, curled around the hot metal of the grill. When the fingers felt their way back into the surrounding woods, A
Shivering, she let herself into the ranger station and clicked on the electric space heater Sandra Fox kept in the dispatch room. The heat smelled faintly of Delphi’s fur. A
A
Despite the capes and incense and Windigo stories, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Tinker’s or Damien’s mind. If they put their heads together they would unravel most knotty mysteries. Scotty might have sensed that.
On impulse, A
A lot of it she already knew. Tinker, thirty-three, and Damien, twenty-four, had been married three years. Both had mentioned on the “previous employment” section that they had been married on the south rim of the Grand Canyon while working at that park. Skills and schools were listed, evaluations from other jobs. “Flaky but fine” seemed to be the consensus, though the District Ranger from Voyageurs had described Tinker as “sensitive, moody,” the implication of instability being unmistakable.
On the final page-the one that invariably threw A
From 1974 to 1980 Tinker had lived in Hopkins, Mi
A
“No wants or warrants out on either Theresa Ly
“Thanks.” A
Name changes and a nontraditional marriage but no warrants out for their arrest, not so much as an unpaid speeding ticket.
Whatever Scotty was threatening them with either wasn’t illegal or was, as yet, unknown to the law. “Dirty laundry,” he had called it. Tinker had said, if not in so many words, that the crime was a bad one. Pilfering? Vandalism? Grand theft auto? Child molestation? Ritual killings? The sheer variety of evils human beings thought up to perpetrate upon their fellows was enough to hint at the existence of a Satan or cast doubt upon the existence of a God.