A Superior Death by Nevada Barr Read Free Book Online

eccentric, even theatrical, they seemed of good heart, as if they did as they did because it was the way in which they could deal with a difficult world. She no more felt they wasted her time than the loons who sang away her mornings.
    Gentle people seemed somehow a more natural phenomenon than the greedy bulk of humanity.
    “What’s the problem?” Anna asked.
    “We think Scotty has eaten his wife,” Tinker confided.

CHAPTER 3

    A nna had recovered her composure. She sat on the floor of Tinker and Damien’s room in the old house half a mile from the harbor. Since it had become too run-down for any other use, it had been converted into a dorm for seasonal employees. A dozen or more candles burned, but even this glamorous aura couldn’t rid the place of its mildew-and-linoleum seediness. Tinker, her soft hair glittering in the many lights, poured herbal tea into tiny, mismatched Oriental bowls.
    “It’s made from all natural ingredients,” she said as she handed Anna a red lacquered bowl. “Damien and I gathered them here and on Raspberry.”
    Eye of newt and toe of frog, Anna thought but she took a sip to be polite. The tea tasted of mint and honey with a woody undercurrent reminiscent of the way leaves smell when they’re newly fallen. Anna doubted she’d ask for a second cup, but not because the concoction was unpalatable. The strange brew, the black-cloaked boy, the candle-light, put her in mind of other rooms, heavy with incense and dark with Indian-print bedspreads, where the tea and cakes had been laced with more than wild raspberry leaves. She pushed her bowl aside and cleared the cobwebs of the bad old days from her mind.
    “So. Scotty’s wife—Donna—hasn’t been around for a few days?”
    “Seven,” Damien said, making the number sound like Donna Butkus’s death knell. Tinker nodded, her gossamer hair floating in the warm currents from the candles.
    “Seven,” Anna repeated matter-of-factly.
    “We went down to the water on the far side of the dock, down through the tangle of new-growth firs. There’s a little cove there where hardly anybody goes. Donna always fed the ducks there mornings,” Tinker said.
    Anna raised an eyebrow. Feeding wildlife was strictly taboo.
    “Yes, it was opportunistic,” Tinker agreed. “But sometimes Damien and I would go there later in the day to watch the birds she had attracted.” Again Anna was startled at her understanding. Tinker’s mind seemed strangely accessible. Either that or Anna was more transparent than she liked to think she was.
    “We saw a red-necked grebe, and once a black scooter came to feed.” For the first time Damien sounded like a boy. Birds, then, were his passion.
    “Last Wednesday, after breakfast, we went birding in the cove. Donna wasn’t there. That’s when we first suspected she was missing,” Damien said.
    “Maybe she came earlier, fed them, and had already gone,” Anna suggested.
    Damien shook his head portentously. “You don’t understand. The ducks were expecting her.” The boy was gone; the wizard was back.
    “Did you ask Scotty where she was?”
    “He said she’d had the flu and was home watching the soaps and drinking orange juice,” Tinker replied, as if that course of events was too farfetched to fool even a child. She folded the tips of long tapered fingers delicately around the lacquered bowl and raised it to her lips, not to drink but to inhale the sweet-smelling steam.
    It crossed Anna’s mind that perhaps O.J. and The Young and the Restless were beyond the pale for Tinker. “Replace the soaps with old Jimmy Stewart movies and that’s what I’d do if I had the flu,” Anna said. “What’s wrong with that?”
    “There is no flu going around,” Damien declared flatly.
    Tinker said: “Donna had promised to cut my hair. In return I was going to teach her how to use some of the herbs here. Just for small things—nothing dangerous,” she reassured Anna who, till then, hadn’t needed it. “Just