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next to Ralph, Anna noticed how gnarled and scarred her hands and forearms were. She had seen those blue-black marks before. Looking into the glare of the electric candles, she tried to smooth her mind so the memory would come. After a moment’s teasing, it rose to the surface. She’d seen the scars on the arms of a hitchhiker she had given a lift from Santa Barbara to Morro Bay. The man had been an abalone diver. The scars were from where the shells had cut.
    “This is the new Mrs. Castle,” Patience introduced her.
    “Jo.”
    So, the bride, Jo, née God knew what, had opted to be known as Mrs. Denny Castle. Anna thought it an odd choice for a woman with her master’s degree in freshwater biology, and the diving scars to prove it. That bit of information Anna had picked up from a Resource Management memorandum. Funded by the park, Jo Castle would spend the summer researching pollution in ISRO’s inland waters. Originally she had applied to do her Ph.D. thesis on how much impact sport fishing was having on the island’s lake trout population.
    That would have been worth knowing, Anna thought. But the NPS wouldn’t fund that particular study. Sport fishermen had powerful lobbyists. The fishes did not. So Mrs. Denny Castle would count PCBs and swat mosquitoes in the island’s interior for twelve weeks.
    A crash and a curse saved Jo from further scrutiny. Scotty had knocked over his beer. Cigarette butts were floating out of the ashtray and down the white tablecloth on a foaming tide. Anna guessed he was drunk. He had the look of a man who’s been drunk often enough that he’s learned to cover it with a modicum of success. Mopping up the mess with a peach-colored napkin, he was muttering: “Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m not used to eating indoors. No elbowroom. Yes, ma’am”—this to Patience—“I’m sorry as hell. Begging your pardon”—this to Carrie for the rough language. “Let me help you clean up, little lady.”
    The dialogue was clichéd. Anna lost interest. She cast her eye around for some likely reason to excuse herself from the table.
    Damien and Tinker provided it. Damien beckoned with the cock of a wing-shaped eyebrow. Handfast, Tinker’s blond hair permed and repermed into a golden frizz, Damien dressed all in black, they looked like the hero and heroine of an Afterschool Special.
    With a good-bye to Dave, Anna squeaked her chair back, shouldered her daypack, and went over to their table. “Not here,” Damien said. Anna waited while, with an odd little ritual that required three taps on the glass and brass of the candle lantern, Tinker blew out the flame and folded the lantern down to stow in a canvas satchel.
    They led her out of the restaurant and down to the water. At the end of the first in the row of docks, two-by-twelves, destined to be hauled into the wilderness on the backs of trail crew, were stacked. They settled behind these. Anna squatted down on her heels, balanced easily, and waited. This far out on the water the whine of mosquitoes faded. She took a breath as deep as a sigh. Of necessity the three of them were huddled so close between the lumber and the edge of the pier that her breath moved Tinker’s fine hair, silver now in the fluorescent lights over the harbor.
    Tinker said: “I know. It’s not so much the smoke as the need. It gets hard to breathe.”
    To her surprise, Anna understood exactly what Tinker was talking about. The air in the lodge felt thick, oppressive with more than just the fumes from Butkus’s interminable cigarettes. There was a sense of needs unfulfilled, hopes deferred, a generic discontent.
    “People together by necessity, not choice,” Anna said.
    “Makes for strange alliances.”
    “Yes,” Damien said darkly.
    Safe in the inky shadow of the lumber, Anna smiled. Had anyone else dragged her out into the damp to play cloak and dagger she would probably have been annoyed. There was something about Tinker and Damien that disarmed her. Though