‘I could’ve used you today, Jazz.’ I bent down and he immediately flipped over to present his belly. For a German shepherd who prided himself on guarding our house from the dangers of everything from thieves to seagulls, belly scratches turned him into a grateful pile of ooze.
I obliged him for a while and let my bag slide to the ground. Even though the nights were still warm – practically mid-October and I couldn’t even see my breath – I wasn’t up for our usual evening walk today. Extra petting would have to suffice.
‘Dr Mehta – you remember her? She smelled like cats? Anyway, she asked me to go see a new patient.’
Lucas Blackthorn’s face swam in front of my gaze with that enigmatic expression that seemed oblivious to being pressed to the floor by a half dozen guards and orderlies. He’d been focused only on me and he seemed . . . stunned. Maybe he’d been upset that a girl had thwarted his escape. Maybe he’d been slapped by a moment of lucidity. It was hard to see an expression like that and avoid judgment or assigning meaning where there might be none, or at least none that readily translated outside the labyrinth of a patient’s mind. I shook my head, forcing the image away.
‘Look.’ I tugged down the collar of my hoodie. ‘Look at my neck.’
Jasper obediently smelled my throat, licked the skin, and then snorted abruptly. Apparently the nurse’s ointment wasn’t tasty.
Laughing, I let us inside the house. As soon as the door opened, Jasper flattened me against the jamb, raced through the entryway, and sent up a torrent of barks from the kitchen. I followed in time to see him prancing in front of the table, tail wagging, as a man jumped up and backed around the wall, half behind my father. They could’ve been brothers, the two men both wide-jawed, sun baked, and too big to fit comfortably on the kitchen chairs, but even with one look you knew who was in charge.
‘For Christ sake, Butch. He can’t lick you to death,’ Dad said, picking up his beer for another swig.
‘Come here, Jasper.’ I called the dog to me and patted his neck before telling him to go lie down.
‘How many times do I have to come here before he leaves me alone?’ Butch Nelson crossed his menacing, tattoo covered arms, the tough guy pose at odds with the boyish rose of his perpetually wind-burned cheeks. As the first mate on my dad’s salvage tug, he wasn’t easily disturbed, but he’d been attacked by a stray when he was a kid and refused to see the point of any canine life since. He sat back down, careful to face the kitchen door where the dog waited with hopeful eyes.
‘Jasper became anxiously-attached as a puppy. He has confidence issues.’ Dropping my backpack near the table, I glanced at the depth map covering the spot where I’d planned to write up my incident report with a ramen noodle and Oreo cookie dinner and the house to myself. Today was obviously not the day for plans. ‘What are you guys up to? I thought you were heading to Thunder Bay.’
‘Grant money came through.’ Butch grinned.
‘You got it?’
Dad glanced up from the table, nodding, and I adjusted the hoodie to make sure it covered my neck. A hint of a smile passed over his face, but the logistics of the trip were already crowding it out. He was planning, navigating, submerged in the details.
‘So which ship is it? The Madeira? The Vienna? The Fitzgerald?’
‘The Bannockburn.’
Our eyes met before he turned back to the map, leaving a sudden silence in his wake.
The Bannockburn. The ghost ship. I moved to the kitchen on autopilot and started looking through the cupboards, not sure at all if I had the stomach to eat.
My dad had spent most of his life on the water. His boat provided tugging and towing services in the summer and icebreaking in the winter, plowing the way for the thousand-foot lakers that lumbered in and out of the Duluth and Superior harbors, which – contrary to Minnesota’s seemingly landlocked geography – was the largest freshwater port in the world. No matter how many ships he guided to safety, though, it was what lay underneath the surface that called to him. No one knew exactly how many ships Superior had taken. Most of the official crashes had been documented in the last hundred years, but add in the unregistered boats, the rum-runners during Prohibition, and all the countless vessels sailing before modern navigation or lighthouses and you might as well be looking at something the size of a mass grave and guessing how many bodies it could hold. Dad was just a kid when his father explained to him about the cold temperature of Superior, how the icy water pulled bodies down and kept them there, and he’d been fascinated by the cemetery at the bottom of the lake ever since. Salvage work came rarely because there wasn’t any money in it, so Dad and Butch recently started applying for grants based on the historical and cultural value of the lost ships. Someone must have agreed, giving them a chance to steal back what Superior had swallowed.
They began murmuring, drawing routes and pointing out hazards while I found a brick of ramen noodles and popped it in the microwave. I watched the bowl spin until Dad’s voice cut through my reverie. He’d gotten up for another beer and caught a glimpse of my neck.
‘What the hell happened to you?’
I tugged the zipper on the hoodie higher, trying to cover as much skin as possible. If it looked half as bad as it felt, my neck must have been one solid bruise. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘Maya.’ A two-syllable warning that he wasn’t going to tolerate any bullshit.
I sighed. ‘A patient tried to escape tonight. I was in his way.’
‘He strangled you?’ Butch craned his head to try to see the evidence.
Refusing to make eye contact with either of them, I relayed the fight briefly in the most generic terms possible.
Butch started to ask another question, but I waved him off, telling him I couldn’t discuss a patient’s case. Dad’s eyes shifted from my neck to the depth map, and he took a long drink.
‘We’re not going anywhere. We’ll shelve the trip until spring.’ He cut off Butch’s objections. ‘It’ll give us more time to plan.’
‘Dad, no.’
Ignoring the beep of the microwave, I followed him and planted my hands on the table when he would have folded up the map. ‘You’re going.’
‘Look at your neck, Maya. That’s unacceptable. I’m going to talk to Dr Mehta—’
‘No, you’re not. I’m twenty-three years old and this is what I do. I got the job done tonight, and I’m going back to work tomorrow, and the day after that. Dr Mehta knows what I’m capable of.’
‘She’s—’
‘We talked about this when I agreed to stay here,’ I reminded him.
My fingers spread over the shoals and dug into the dark basins. All their notes and arcs of possible routes had turned the lake into a biology class dissection of something still alive. ‘Dad, it’s the Bannockburn. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for the Bannockburn.’
He drew back. We hadn’t talked about her in years and even then it had been about endings, not beginnings. His hand dropped to the western edge of the lake and brushed over the cliffs and towering pine forests where he’d met my mother.
She’d told me the story, one of the few she shared. A geology
student at University of Minnesota Duluth, she’d been studying how ice formed in the cracks of the North Shore’s basalt face and caused rock slides over time. It was why the world’s largest lake was getting even larger; it ate the land around it. She needed to document the cliffs from the water and hired Brian Stark, a young salvage tug
captain, to pilot her along the shore. He asked her out every time they sailed, as determined as the lake breaking against the rocks, but she didn’t agree until he told her the story of the Bannockburn.