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Woman’s intuition or just an unfortunate choice of words?
Scotty and Jim finished their tete-a-tete. Butkus disappeared into the Administration Building. Jim crossed the concrete to where the Loon was moored. Both pointedly refused to acknowledge A
On the short trip A
For half the trip she debated the wisdom of letting him know she was aware of his propensity; debated whether it would scare him into walking the straight and narrow, or push him into taking a risk that might be damaging to his latest inamorata.
She chose silence. She would talk with Patience, then the Chief Ranger. After all, that’s what he was paid the big bucks for.
At the lodge, A
TWENTY THREE
A
Damien ran after her. Boyish again, joyous, he loped along the asphalt path as graceful as a greyhound. “She’s birding again!” he told A
The stress he gave the word seemed to indicate that Tinker saw both the visible and the invisible, the corporeal and the existential. A
On the walk over Greenstone Ridge A
On one such expanse of bare ridge, A
Her mind wandered back to New York City, the apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, Zachary waiting on tables at a little Mexican restaurant on Ninth Avenue, waiting for his big break. There was no money. Cockroaches scuttled like evil spirits every time a light was switched on. The kids in apartment 1C spray-painted obscenities on the walls of the foyer and smashed the mailboxes. The lady across the air shaft slept all day and screamed at her husband all night. And that was the summer the city was infested with rats. The Post was ru
Yet A
She stared up at the sky, felt the stone warm beneath her spine. Playing in her mind, she began replacing her body, molecule by molecule, with bits of the earth.
There would be peace in shedding one’s humanity, rest in moving to the slower geological rhythms, charm in feeling the skittering of animal feet over one’s chest, the brush of autumn leaves settling in the wrinkles of one’s skin, blankets of snow cooling the body into a long sleep.
Mosquitoes woke A
But if any mosquitoes could, it would be the mosquitoes of Isle Royale. Pursued by bloodsucking demons, she ran the last mile through the gathering darkness and escaped out onto the water in the Belle Isle.
Two days later as she grumbled around Amygdaloid dock with buckets, sluicing off the fish guts some slob fisherman had deposited in her absence, the 3rd Sister motored up the cha
She waded through the herring gulls her impromptu bouillabaisse had collected, and helped Hawk tether the lines to the cleats.
Holly sprang from the deck with a grace born of strength. Both she and her brother looked better than they had since De
By now Hawk must have told his sister that A
Either Holly didn’t mind, or she was hiding it well. She greeted A
For a moment A
Like most underwater photos, those Holly had taken seemed slightly out of focus. Time had been severely limited. She and Hawk had confined themselves to the area along the hull where they had found De
Since the body recovery dive, A
Having perfunctorily cleared her desk in the ranger station, A
As she had guessed, the scratched porthole led into the captain’s quarters. According to the builder’s specs and corroborated by A
A
“Jim took these the day we recovered De
For several moments they all three stared at the photographs. “You couldn’t get through that porthole in tanks,” A