“That’s a wonderful costume,” she said.

“It’s not a costume,” Jo told her, retrieving the picture from profaning hands as soon as was polite. “It’s authentic. It belonged to Denny’s great-uncle. He sailed the Great Lakes in the twenties.”

“Did he go down on one of the ships?” Sandra asked.

“No. He lives in Florida. He owns a chain of laundromats there, I think. Or did.”

“This picture was taken a while back,” Anna said.

“In 1981.”

“Did Denny keep the uniform?”

“He must’ve. Why?” Jo and Sandra were looking at Anna suspiciously, as if they thought she would offer to buy the dead man’s clothes for a costume party before the corpse was decently in the ground.

Anna ignored Jo’s question. “Do you know where it is?”

“Probably at Mother Gilma’s,” Jo replied coldly. “He left a lot of things in his mom’s attic.” As she replaced the picture in the album, the sleeve of her blouse fell away from her arm and Anna saw again the blue-green scars she’d associated with abalone diving on the west coast. Did Jo dive? The man she loved was making a fool of himself over another man’s wife. It was the best reason Anna could think of for feeding one’s husband to the fishes.

The pathology of humanity, coupled with the smell of decaying food in the kitchen, suddenly threatened to overwhelm. Muttering half-listened-to excuses, Anna stood and let herself out through the screen. The luna moth was still there. The hare and the jay were gone. She trotted to the dock and loosed the Belle Isle from the cleats.

Ralph Pilcher could teach her by example. In less than twenty-four hours she would be donning cold water gear with its claustrophobic layers, diving the deepest she had ever gone. Divers-the ones who lived to be old divers-prepared for a dive mentally as well as physically. A mind cluttered with what-ifs and other people’s heartaches couldn’t tend to the business of survival.

Amygdaloid dock looked like suburbia on a Saturday afternoon. The pier was lined on both sides by boats and one was tethered crosswise at the end. Half a dozen hibachis smoked on the rough planking. Clothes and towels hung from rigging. Beer-bellied men sat in webbed lawn chairs. Two teenage boys played a delicate game of Frisbee over the heads of an unimpressed audience. A little girl tossed bits of hot dog bun to Knucklehead, the camp fox.

Anna counted three minor violations before she’d cut power. Two she would attend to. The black and tan cigarette boat moored in her slot was ousted. The little girl would be educated. The Frisbee players would go unpunished. Park policy insisted Frisbee was an inappropriate activity in the wilderness. Anna knew it for a quick way to Zen and chose to let people worship in their own way.

A couple of fishermen from Two Harbors jumped up from their lawn chairs to tether the Belle’s lines to the dock. They were good boaters, the kind the Park Service could count on to bail out their less qualified brethren. Anna was always glad to see them in ISRO’s waters.

The 3rd Sister was moored near the end of the dock, her deck piled with diving gear. Hawk sat on the bow staring into the water. Anna hoped he wasn’t seeing too much trash on the channel floor. It had been six weeks since she and Ralph dove around the major docking points, trying to clean up new garbage while leaving undisturbed the garbage old enough to have been transmuted by the passing of years into Important Historical Artifacts. In its four-thousand-year human history, ISRO had been farmed and mined and fished, hunted and burned and logged. The areas where refuse was traditionally tossed could be archaeological treasure troves.

Holly, her dark hair curling close around her face, was bent over a grill all but hidden by inch-thick steaks. Three men, all of an age and dressed alike enough to have come off the same page in an Eddie Bauer catalogue, drank Leinenkugels and got in her way.

Despite Denny’s death, Holly and Hawk had gone ahead with the trip. Anna doubted it was callousness. Diving would be their way of bidding him goodbye. And they probably needed the money. Summer concessionaires-the smaller individual businesspeople not backed by the big money of the corporations allowed to run concessions in parks, National Parks Concessionaires Incorporated or T.W. Services-often held on by their fiscal fingertips from one season to the next.

Anna wandered up the dock answering questions, admiring dead fish, and-one of a ranger’s most difficult jobs- declining free beers.

“How’s it going, Hawk?” she asked when she reached the 3rd Sister. His eyes left the water briefly, flicked over her face, and returned to whatever had held them before. “Okay,” Anna said. “I can live with that.” She stood for a moment watching the northern sun play at Midas, turning water and air to burnished gold.

Holly turned the last of the steaks and looked up. “Hawk’s being a jerk,” she said with a touch of genuine malice Anna had never heard before when she spoke of her brother. Hawk shot his sister a black look. Seeing the Bradshaws at odds was like watching two of the faces of Eve snarl at each other.

At a loss for words, Anna polished the toe of her unpolishable deck shoe against the back of her calf and said nothing. “Don’t sulk,” Holly ordered her tartly. “It’ll only encourage him. Want a steak? Sorry. I forgot you are a vegetable-arian. Want a carrot stick?”

“No, thanks,” Anna declined. “I’m just passing through.” She smiled at the young men. They seemed subdued for three Type T personalities out on an expensive adventure and she wondered how long Hawk and Holly had been generating foul weather.

She left them under their dark cloud and walked back into the sunlit picnic that had spread its blanket over the remainder of the dock. She spent a few minutes sitting on the edge of the pier talking with the child who’d been feeding the fox, explaining that Knucklehead had kits hidden in the woods and she needed to teach them to hunt. If they learned only to beg for hot dog buns, come winter, when the bun market crashed, the kits would starve.

It was only a half-truth, but Anna hoped it would suffice. The facts were a little less copacetic with the balance of nature. If the fox became a pest, begging close enough to present the slightest danger of tourists being bitten, of even suffering too many foxy thefts, eventually Lucas Vega would have her killed. Anna told that bedtime story to grown-up perpetrators. Little girls got the whitewashed version. She wanted them all to grow up to be rangers.

“Keeping the faith?” It was Hawk. He watched the girl meandering back toward her home barbecue. “She’s probably going for a fresh supply of hot dog buns.”

“Probably.”

“You’re patient,” Hawk said.

“On the second offense I shoot them.”

Hawk was supposed to laugh but he didn’t. “Sorry I was a jerk. Since Denny died there’s been a lot of that going around.”

“I know what you mean.” Anna was thinking of Scotty’s alcohol-ravaged face, Jo’s eyes swollen with tears shed and unshed, of herself poking at everybody’s boils trying to prod them into telling her something that would make sense out of the chaos in the Kamloops‘ engine room.

“Can I buy you a beer?” Hawk asked.

“Let me slip into something less governmental and you’re on.”

“Meet you at the ranger station,” Hawk said. Finally he smiled.

Midas’s touch turned both the smile and the man to gold. Anna felt a dangerous melting as she watched him walking back toward his boat. Bulk was of no use to divers. Their bodies were lean and wiry, the proportions natural, the endurance of the career divers just short of supernatural. For a dizzy moment, Anna contemplated the ramifications of that endurance.