“I’ll dive. So will Jim Tattinger.”

“Tattinger’s a squirrel.”

A squirrel was a neophyte diver. It was a grave insult. Anna guessed Hawk and Holly were going to carry on the tradition of animosity between the 3rd Sister and the park’s Submerged Cultural Resources Specialist.

“I take it you don’t care much for Jim?” Anna invited gossip, hoping for some useful bit of information.

“If he did his job, I could overlook his naturally repugnant self. He’s a number cruncher, a bean counter. He couldn’t care less about preserving the wrecks.”

“He used to work in the Virgin Islands.” Anna threw another line in the waters she was fishing.

“I know.” Hawk opened a beer and took a drink. He looked over the bottle at Anna. His eyes were a clear hazel. He smiled. “Let’s not talk about Jim. It’s worse than taking saltpeter.” In the slanting light his skin was almost a true bronze and his dark hair showed black. Anna was aware of the warmth from his thigh through the worn denim of her trousers. She remembered she was, after all, off duty and she remembered that there were other things to do with bronzed young men than interrogate them.

“What do you do to relax, Anna?”

She smiled at the answers that rattled through her mind and he smiled back. “Music,” she said finally. This evening it was not her first choice but it was the most socially acceptable.

“Put something on the tape deck for me. Anything but a sea chantey.”

Anna stood up and held out her hand. Hawk took it and she pulled him to his feet.

A distant growl in the channel penetrated the warm haze of hops and lust. Her first impulse was to hold tight to Hawk’s hand and run for the relative privacy of her quarters, to bolt the door and draw the curtains; lose herself for an hour or two in the music of West Texas and, if she was reading the signals correctly, the music of the spheres.

But she waited, her eyes on the channel. Before she could dismiss this boat from her mind, she must run through her litany: Was anybody hurt, sick, or lost? Was anybody on board likely to get that way in the near future?

“They’ll have to camp at Belle Isle,” Anna said, naming the little island her boat had been called for. “There’s no room at the inn.” She had dropped Hawk’s hand. It would not do to be seen. There was no comfortable mix of business and pleasure for a woman in her profession. Because of the isolation, the predominance of men in middle and higher management, the usual dangers of gossip and backbiting were multiplied a dozenfold for a woman ranger.

The boat came into view: a natty green runabout trailing a frothy wake. “Looks like Patience Bittner’s boat,” Hawk said.

Anna hadn’t known Patience owned a boat. “Do you know her?”

“Know the boat. We’ve seen it over here three or four times when we’ve been out with clients. She’s always alone, never stops to say hello. Denny thought she was up to something but Holly and I just figured she was a loner.”

“Denny was a little judgmental, it seems,” Anna said cautiously.

Hawk laughed. “One of Denny’s favorite sayings was: ‘It’s hard to work well in a group when you’re omnipotent.’ Denny was always right. He really was. He never cared about himself. Only the lake. It gave him an almost superhuman vision. He saw other people’s twists and bends as clearly as if they’d been laid out on graph paper.”

“That kind of vision won’t get you elected Most Popular Senior Boy,” Anna said.

“Denny didn’t need to be popular. He didn’t need anything but the lake and a jug of air.”

Anna sensed that Hawk needed more than that, and that he perceived it as a weakness, a flaw in his character.

There was no place left on the dock and the runabout pulled alongside the 3rd Sister and rafted off. Patience, her pale hair dyed red by the sinking sun, crossed the deck and stepped onto the dock.

“Amygdaloid gets any more popular and we’ll have a floating city to rival Hong Kong’s,” Anna said. It was too much to hope, she knew, that Patience had just stopped by to use the pit toilet. Her fear was confirmed: the woman walked straight down the dock and turned up the hill toward the ranger station.

“Looks like I’ve got company,” Anna said ruefully.

“I’d better check on Holly. Those three clotheshorses think she’s part of their adventure.” Briefly, Hawk touched Anna’s arm. “Rain check?”

“Sure.” I’ll pray for foul weather, Anna thought as she watched him walk down the trail. She found herself thinking Hawk Bradshaw would be perfect: he was only in town once or twice a week and would vanish like the honeysuckle when the first snows fell.

Suddenly Anna shuddered. She wasn’t sure she cared for the woman who had come to use people in such a calculating way.

Patience stopped at the foot of the steps and looked back over her shoulder at Hawk’s retreating form. “Am I interrupting anything?”

“Not a thing.”

“Too bad,” she said and they both enjoyed the view a second longer.

Anna sat down again and waited for Patience to tell her what had brought her to the north shore after eight p.m. Patience sat beside her. The light-colored hair was tied back into a ponytail and bound with a cabbage rose ribbon that matched, exactly, her peach shorts and jersey. Her deck shoes were white, even to the leather laces.

When she returned to Houghton in the fall, Anna promised herself, she would go clothes shopping. Levi’s and sweatshirts were losing their appeal.

“I’m out on a domestic mission tonight,” Patience said. “Carrie’s disappeared.”

Anna hoped it was not along with another case of pickle relish. “A moderately alarming disappearance or a call-out-the-Coast-Guard disappearance?”

“Moderately alarming. Carrie’s started acting out this summer. In ten years some therapist will discover it’s all my fault. In the meantime I’m blaming her. We are not having fun. She’s been coming home at two and three in the morning with that damp, rumpled look. I can’t get a word out of her. She’s turned from a nice little girl into a sullen tramp. God!” Patience rested her head in one hand. “Sorry. I don’t mean that. I’m alternately pissed off and worried sick. It’s very tiring.”

“Do you think she’s out with her boyfriend tonight?”

“I’d bet on it. She was supposed to be home by five-thirty. She knew I had a date. She just doesn’t give a damn about anybody but herself. Oh! I sound like a selfish shrew, don’t I? Vaguely, I seem to remember promising myself I wouldn’t say things like that if I ever became a mom. I just don’t want her getting into trouble. I got married too young. I was seventeen. What a fool! She’s thirteen and only just barely, All she’ll get out of it now is AIDS.”

Anna had forgotten about AIDS. Teenage troubles had taken a dire turn since she’d fumbled in the back seat of Steve Duran’s parents’ Chrysler. “What makes you think she’s on the north shore? I’d think she and the boy would just wander around Rock. There’s plenty of trails.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? If she’s got to be such a little slut-” Anna winced. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I was once a little slut myself. I am just so angry,” Patience apologized. “I just wish she’d stay on land-then my mad wouldn’t be undermined by my worry that some young idiot’s got her killed in one of those aluminum death traps we rent out at thirty dollars a day. I’m rambling. I think she’s on the north shore because two of the kids who work at the lodge said they saw her on Belle Isle. They didn’t put in and she didn’t return their wave, so they could be mistaken but it’s all I’ve got to go on at the moment.”

“You checked Belle?”

“On the way here. And Merrit Lane, Duncan Bay, and Lane Cove,” Patience listed the campgrounds between Rock Harbor and Amygdaloid accessible by water.