A Superior Death

“What’s happened?” A

“She went diving,” Carrie replied in the sulky tone A

A

Why would Patience come out in the fog, dragging her daughter with her? The question jogged A

If Patience did know, it made sense she would rush the last dive, try and get the remainder of the wine out before she was stopped. Carrie must have been brought along in the capacity of prisoner. Left alone, she would undoubtedly have found her way to Mr. Tattinger’s for solace.

“How long has your mom been down?” A

“I said,” Carrie grumbled, “awhile. Maybe half an hour.”

At first A

“Why is she diving here?” A

Carrie shrugged. “How would I know?” She sounded more aggrieved than concerned. “Anyway, she’s down there.”

A

“Ten-four,” Scotty replied. “I’ll stay on this damn engine. Hell of a time to have your horse go lame.”

A

Before she entered the lake, A

Finally, there was nothing left but to dive. The water was black and looked for all the world like death. Concentrating only on breathing, she clutched her light and rolled backward off the Belle Isle’s stern.

Cold cracked in her sinuses with such force it felt as if her eyes were being gouged out from inside her skull. For several seconds pain left her breathless and disoriented. The universe shrank to the single paralyzing sensation of utter, damning cold.

Forcing her ribs to expand, accepting the icy stabs and letting them pass through her, she righted herself and located the line Patience had dropped. With “follow the yellow brick road” singing irritatingly through her mind, A

Atmospheres crushed in and terrifying giddiness tried to spin her mind away from counting. An ache started at the base of her skull. Stringing her thoughts together cohesively became increasingly difficult. Fear that had been murmuring at her aboard the Belle Isle shrieked through all the organs of her body. Sixty-three seconds had elapsed since she had left the lake’s surface.

The snaking of the line through liquid space began having a hypnotic effect and A

Two minutes, fifty-six seconds: the bottom blocked the beam of her light. She stopped, stood with one hand on the yellow line for security and switched off her lamp. In her years with the Park Service, she’d worked on a dozen or more searches and rescues. Habit demanded she blow a whistle, shout a name. All she had in the malevolent shadow world was light or lack of it. Cloaked in darkness, A

A flash, another, then burning steady: Patience was on the south side of the wreck. Without relighting her own lamp A

As she closed the distance down the side of the ship, she could see that Patience’s lamp had been set on the hull. In the wedge-shaped beam it threw, Patience-or at least a heavily suited person she assumed was Patience Bittner- was kneeling, slipping efficiently into dive tanks. The tanks were unlike any A

For a moment A

A

Bittner’s flicker of interest was only momentary. With the mask and the darkness it was impossible to tell, but A

Dive tanks in place, Patience grasped the neck of the sack and began swimming up the hull. Her light was trained toward the tilting deck. She was obviously in no need of rescue, nor did she look as if she was expecting company. Clearly she had not been down half an hour. Like A

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth, A

With time so short, A

Safe in her shroud of darkness, A

Without pausing even an instant at the lightless portal, Patience swam into the engine room.

A

There could be little of value in the engine room, nothing worth the precious time Patience was spending. A

Switching on her light, she followed Patience into the interior of the Kamloops.

Claustrophobia met her just inside the portal. The engine room was low-ceilinged and the passages were narrow. Bulkheads showed gray in the beam of her light. To the right the passage opened into a space filled with machinery separated by walkways just wide enough to accommodate a man. Ahead, the corridor branched into several narrower passages fa