“Stop it, you horrid old woman!” she whispered to herself and hurried up to the station feeling neither horrid nor old. She felt better than she had in days, since Chris and Ally had brought their homely comfort into her wilderness. Enjoying being pleasantly foolish, she combed her hair out. Crimped from being confined so long in braids, it fell in waves down around her shoulders. It went against the heat of her mood to put on a lot of clothes, but she’d not yet steeled her thin Texas blood to the northern summer. She pulled on Levi’s and a sweatshirt.

Hawk was sitting on the steps when Anna came out. The long brown necks of four Leinenkugel bottles poked up from a paper sack between his knees. The gloom that had hung about him as he’d hunkered on the 3rd Sister’s bow had gathered round again. Anna could see it pushing down the back of his neck, bowing his shoulders. She gathered the copper mass of hair away from her face and stuffed it down the neck of her sweatshirt.

“So, what’s up?” she asked as she sat beside him. “You look like a man with the bends.”

“Do I?” He opened a bottle of beer and handed it to her but forgot to open one for himself. Anna took a drink. She loved the beers of the Upper Midwest. The Germans had truly mastered the brewer’s art.

Hawk stared down the slope toward the water where it shimmered yellow and blue, the sun still clearing the trees though it was after seven. It crossed Anna’s mind that he had come not so much to be with her but because on her front steps he would not be with Holly and yet not be alone.

Content to drink his beer and fill the emptiness next to him, she shifted mental gears from romance to contemplation of nature. Humans were herd animals, like the moose. Sometimes even the most independent needed to clump up, hip and shoulder touching, protecting their soft flanks from the wolves.

“Ever seen a wolf here?” Anna asked.

“No. Diving’s a noisy business. On shore we’re either jamming jugs or hosting a party.”

Anna nodded. The sound of the air compressor filling scuba tanks or the chatter of humans would keep the wolves deep in the woods.

“You bringing Denny up tomorrow?” Hawk asked, his eyes still on the glittering channel.

“Yeah. Around noon is my guess. There’s an FBI guy flying in from Houghton to be on the scene.”

“A diver?”

“No.”

Hawk shrugged slightly and Frederick Stanton was dismissed as having no real relevance. “I wish you’d leave him there,” Hawk said suddenly. “Jo’ll bury him on land. Plant him down in the dirt like a turnip with a slab of marble at his head to hold him there. That’s not for Denny. His body pumped full of chemicals to keep it from rotting, a Sunday-go-to-meetin‘ suit moldering down around his bones. On the Kamloops he’d float forever, flipping divers the bird and guarding the lake. Leave him.”

“Can’t.” Anna said. “It’s against the law. It’s even illegal to scatter the ashes of a cremated corpse in a national park.”

“Even if they had a Golden Eagle Pass?” Hawk said, but he didn’t smile and bitterness took the humor out of his words.

Anna didn’t reply. She finished her beer and he opened another for her without asking. She took it. “I saw a picture of Denny over at Jo’s today. He was wearing an early-twentieth-century ship captain’s uniform,” Anna said, watching Hawk’s face. His expression never changed, only hardened slightly. But their bodies touched from shoulder to hip and Anna felt a current run through him that he could not hide. “Did you ever see that picture?”

“Yeah. Well, no. I think I remember the uniform. Denny might’ve worn it once or twice.” Hawk’s voice was heavy with indifference and his eyes focused keenly on nothing. He was not a good liar. Anna liked him for that. She doubted she would like the reason he had to lie.

“What happens to the Third Sister now?” she asked. “Does it go to Jo?”

“She’s been wanting to get her hands on it, turn it into a research vessel. A floating freshwater lab,” Hawk said with disgust. Anna imagined he viewed the 3rd-Sister-as-lab much as Jacques Cousteau might view a desk job. “She might’ve eventually weaseled it-and Denny-out of the diving business but Denny left the boat to Holly and me. It’s in his will. He told us so, anyway.”

Denny Castle had had a will though he was probably not more than forty-five or forty-six. For a moment that struck Anna as a little suspicious; then she remembered what he did for a living. He would’ve seen many of his friends die at an early age.

She took another pull on her beer. The Bradshaws both seemed to hold Jo in contempt. Was it because she would, as Hawk had put it, weasel Denny out of diving, out of the Musketeers? And, in the process, weasel the 3rd Sister out from under the Bradshaws? They’d known if Denny died the 3rd Sister was theirs. Was that reason enough to kill him quick, before the weaseling process began?

They loved Denny. They would have been more likely to kill Jo. Unless there had been a betrayal. To betray one Bradshaw was to betray them both. “Denny’s marriage took me by surprise,” Anna said carefully. “I’d always just assumed he and Holly had a thing going.”

Hawk snorted. “Holly and Denny? No way.” He laughed. “No way.”

It didn’t seem so impossible to Anna. It seemed probable: a shared love of diving, a shared living space, a shared business, shared danger, a boy, a girl. More than probable, it seemed mandatory. Hawk’s reaction piqued her curiosity. He’d been amused at the idea. Maybe Holly was gay. Anna made a mental note to ask Christina. The lesbian community in the Upper Peninsula was small, endangered, and therefore close-knit. Christina would have heard.

“The only person I know of that Denny gave more than a wink and a nod was Donna-Scotty’s wife,” Hawk went on. “I never could see it. Holly thinks she was just old-fashioned enough to catch Denny’s imagination. In some ways he’d been born in the wrong century.

“That whole scene was strange. Donna was the first time I think Denny had ever fallen in love. He was crazy, like a kid, like a Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story. That crazy obsessive stuff that makes for good fiction but’s pretty hard to maintain in real life.”

“Especially when Juliet is married,” Anna observed dryly.

“Yeah. There was that.” Hawk grinned, exposing white teeth, small and strong. Smooth, Anna imagined, under the tip of one’s tongue. She hid her smile with the mouth of the beer bottle.

“Denny didn’t give old Scotty a thought,” Hawk went on. “Not seriously. It was as if he was an inconvenience, not a husband.”

“No wonder Scotty hated him. Did Donna feel that way?”

“I don’t know. That was the one way Denny’s romance differed from kid stuff. It wasn’t something he would talk about. At least not with us.”

“Us” always meant Hawk and Holly. Anna had been acquainted with them long enough to know that. She wondered if Denny had kept quiet to protect Donna’s reputation or because he knew they wouldn’t approve. They’d clearly not approved of Jo and she was unencumbered by any “inconveniences.” Or, despite Hawk’s protests to the contrary, had he not spoken of it because Holly was in love with him, or even his lover? Anna reminded herself again to ask Christina what she knew about Holly’s sexual preference.

“Did Denny give Donna a ride to the mainland in the last two weeks?” Anna asked.

“Not on the Third Sister. Holly and I have had the boat. Denny was pretty tied up with the wedding. Why? Has Donna gone missing?”

The question was meant as a joke but when Anna made no reply, Hawk asked it again.

“I don’t know,” she answered truthfully.

The subject had reached a dead end. For a while they sat in silence.

“Pilcher’ll go down and Vega-how about you?” Hawk returned to the subject of the body recovery.