Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (11 page)

“We're from Abilene,” the boy said. “What's your name?”

Sean told him.

“I saw you catch three fish.” The tone was accusatory.

“And three more downriver,” Sean said.

“What are they biting on?”

Sean showed him the size 18 crippled parachute Adams hooked to his stripping guide.

“What's your rod made out of? I didn't think they made wood rods.”

“It's bamboo.”

“Can you help me pick out a better fly?” He pulled a foam fly box out of his hip pocket—he was wading wet and didn't wear a vest. Sean examined the mishmash of flies, a couple dozen that were well tied alongside a couple dozen cheap, general-store patterns, thread and tinsel unraveling, none of them properly dried after fishing so that the hooks had rusted, streaking the white foam copper and staining the bodies and wings of the patterns. He snapped the box shut and handed it back, snipped off his own Adams, knotted a fresh 5X tippet onto the boy's leader, and tied on the fly. He coached him into a small trout and then a fairly good one, which the boy lost. The boy had thorough command of the proper idiom to use upon losing a good one, managing to stain the air over the river with a number of epithets. He said his name was Sid, “not Sidney, which is gay.” Sean gave him a half dozen of his own flies when they parted.

“Will you be fishing tomorrow? My uncle doesn't fish so I don't have no one to go with.”

“I think so. But only if you promise not to swear on the river.”

“Okay, mister, I'll keep it clean. I'll see you.”

Sean walked back to lunch and told Willoughby he'd met the Huckleberry Finn of the Madison River.

“Huck Finn was a watermelon thief if memory serves me right. Did he steal our flies?”

“He's rough around the edges, but I wouldn't go as far as calling him a thief. I think I'm going to be a good influence on him.”

“I'm glad you're putting our money to such a philanthropic endeavor.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Shifting Polarity

T
he week progressed; Sean's investigation didn't. He canvassed the neighborhood one last time on Saturday, purple storm clouds riding the teeth of the Madison Range, and checked off two more of the neighboring properties. One belonged to an air traffic controller from Reno, Nevada, named Bart Glenn, who like Senator Crawford was a big-game hunter and had a spacious living room hung with elk, Coues deer, and javelina trophies, the mantel of honor presided over by a full curl desert bighorn. Glenn had Sean by five inches, combed his thinning silver hair straight back, and had an air of authority bordering on arrogance. Sean noticed a glass-front gun cabinet that had racks for six long guns with only one in attendance, a scoped bolt-action rifle with a diamond-shaped inlay in the stock. When Sean inquired on the pretense of being a gun nut himself, Glenn said it was a .300 Weatherby. His family was up only through July—his wife and younger daughter had driven into Ennis for the rodeo—but he'd be coming back the last week in October for an elk hunt, and had booked Emmitt Cummings to act as his guide.

“I met Emmitt yesterday,” Sean allowed.

“Let me tell you something about the man,” Glenn said. “I hunted with him last fall up on Specimen Ridge and never heard so many ‘Yes, sirs' and ‘No, sirs' in my life, and I'm USMC retired. When I missed a shot at a bull that we'd put a two-hour stalk on, E.J. just placed his hand on my shoulder and said don't let it bother you, these things happen, we'll get a chance at another. And by God we did.” He held up his thumb and jerked his hand over his shoulder so that the digit pointed toward a six-point bull collecting cobwebs on the stucco wall. “Why if I had an unmarried daughter, I'd do anything short of throwing her under his belt buckle to get 'em hitched. Money isn't everything, Mr. Stranahan. Instead, my Mary Jen took up with a goddamned divorce lawyer who has billboards plastered up and down Virginia Street. I got three rules when it comes to marriage. One, never marry anyone who has more troubles than you do. Two, never marry a twin. Three, never marry anyone who would put his boot to an animal. This lawyer fellow—I never let the bastard's name cross my lips—is an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler, and I've personally seen him kick his dog. Now if I was to learn he had a twin, I'd be on a plane tomorrow and give him one in the balls with the Weatherby. As it stands, he's just making my daughter miserable, running all over the strip and sticking his John Henry into any keno girl who will lie still for it, and there's not a goddamn thing I can do 'cause Mary won't listen.”

Glenn seemed to have assumed that Stranahan had knocked just to introduce himself as a neighbor. When he stopped talking long enough to learn the real reason he was there, he looked around for something hard to pound his fist on and had to walk ten feet away to the dining room table.

“I can't abide a thief,” he said. “That's rule number four, by the way.”

Sean left by the front door, noting an NRA cap hanging on the antler tines of a mule deer skull that served as a hat rack and mentally marking an X by Bart Glenn's name.

The last house on Stranahan's circuit was built of blond logs below a metal roof sun-blanched to a robin's egg blue. Aside from the original ranch house, it was the smallest of the structures on the old Anderson spread and stood on the bluff closest to the hexagonal mansion belonging to Congressman Crawford. Though a million-dollar property in its own right, it could easily have been mistaken for the politician's detached bunkhouse. Sean noticed a cheap fly rod standing in a corner of the porch, with his fly still tied to the tippet. At his knock, the boy Sid cracked the door and beamed a smile, then called out that the man who had helped him catch a fish was here. Sean heard the oak floorboards creaking. The creaking stopped, then picked up again, and stopped just inside the door. Sean heard a wheezing sound as a man caught his breath.

“Tell that gentleman, ‘Come on in.' I ain't hiding no wetbacks on the premises.”

The man who extended his hand had a smile plastered on his face that exposed a row of small, very neat bottom teeth. John Deevers—“everybody calls me J.D.”—was of medium height, fortysomething, sloppy around the middle and sloppy in the face, with a red wine complexion under a shining pate that reflected the light streaming in the east-facing windows. Sean had seldom so disliked a man on sight and for a moment stepped back from himself to ask why. It wasn't just the racial slur. It was the transparency of expression, the shrewd pig eyes in the fat folds of flesh, the nearly hairless lids that narrowed to assess Sean's ethnicity, and his ascension of the totem pole in order that he might place him in the pantheon of acceptable acquaintance. In the depth of those eyes, Sean saw himself falling short of the mark. There was just too much infusion of Mediterranean blood under his sun-darkened skin for him to sit at table with the gatekeeper of strict Deevers society.

“Sidney, I thought I tol' you skedaddle on down to the mailbox.”

“But the mail don't come on Saturday, Uncle John.”

“But the mail do come on Friday and it's still setting there. Git now, 'fore I unbuckle this belt.”

When the boy had dashed out the door, Deevers said, “That's my brother's boy and I can't blame him for his father's shortcomings. But some of these kids ain't worth a shit today. I just say ignore him he bugs you on the river. He got into a wrong crowd. Caught selling that Mary Jane, the boy not even ten years old. I had to twist a woman's tit 'til she pulled down Judge Dawkins's zipper, else that boy would be stewing in juvy. I took him up here to tone him down a notch.”

He showed Sean his bottom teeth again, then hollered for his wife to get their neighbor a beer. Sean made a mental sketch of the wife before she appeared and was off by no more than a brushstroke. A proper lady at a glance, with a pleasant face under a Laura Bush hairdo, but a bit of tremor in her jaw and eyes that never quite settled. She handed Sean a Coors in a can and stepped back, hovering at the periphery of her husband's theater of hands as he punctuated his opinions on everything Texas, specifically taxes, private property rights, and immigration. He allowed, just one good American to another, mind you, that every time he swerved the car to smash an armadillo, he made the sign of the cross and said, “By the grace of God, there goes another ‘Meh-he-can.'”

Sean thought of Mrs. Deevers as a fighter who danced around the ring. She stayed out of reach and covered up the best she could, but probably got caught with hard hands nonetheless. Stranahan felt his antipathy for the man grow. He understood that alpha males were the norm in ranchette country. You had to have money to move in when the natives sold out. And with money came self-importance and power. But the men who looked north to Montana for a summer home came because they liked to fish, or to hunt, or simply to turn steaks on the grill, sit with their feet on the porch rail, and toast their kingdom of mountains and sky. They might not be as affable or deferential as an Emmitt Cummings, but they appreciated life, and liquor tended to make them happy, not mad. Sean had friends who fell into the category. They were the bread-and-butter clientele who hung his paintings. Throwback bullies like Deevers seemed out of place.

Out the window, Sean could see Sid scuffing back up the drive. The boy opened the door, dropped a few pieces of mail on an end table, and walked with his head down to a stuffed chair at the far end of the living room. He flopped down and looked at his hands. Sean took his leave a few minutes later without looking in that direction, sensing in Sid's body language a plea for him to make no further reference to their meeting on the riverbank.

When Sean glanced back at the house from his rig, Sid was standing at the front window. Sean pointed down the hill toward the river—
I'll meet you there
—but the boy didn't smile back and he didn't come down to the river that afternoon.

•   •   •

O
n Sunday, the club members had booked guides to float the Big Hole, a blue-ribbon tributary of the Jefferson River some one hundred miles in the direction of the sunset. The famed salmonfly hatch had run its course, but golden stoneflies and caddis were still in enough abundance to make the trout kiss the surface. Willoughby made a pouty face when Sean declined his offer to join them, on the basis that it would require the club to book a third boat. Besides, he'd been hired to do a job and had one more avenue to explore concerning the missing flies.

“You cut me to the quick,” Willoughby said.

“You'll think otherwise if you find those flies mounted on the wall when you get back,” he said, regretting the remark as soon as he'd said it. True, he had thought of another avenue to explore, but harbored scant hope it would pay off.

The members were up before daylight. Sean waited until the headlights were glancing over the sagebrush, said “Sorry boys” under his breath, and began a detailed search of the clubhouse. He had not bought Martha Ettinger's assertion that it was an inside job any more than he had bought his own earlier suspicions of the same, but having eliminated most of the nearby residents as likely suspects, his eyes had drawn a closer focus.

Before the sun discovered the surface of the river, Sean learned that Willoughby suffered from hemorrhoids, that Jonathon Smither powdered his nose—if the substance in the folded wax paper was what Sean thought it was—that Robin Hurt Cowdry was reading an espionage novel by Steve Pieczenik, and that Polly Sorenson's toilet bag contained two nitroglycerin inhalers. He opened various fly boxes that were strewn across the tying table, stacked on shelves, crammed into duffels. Willoughby had shown him a photograph of a Theodore Gordon–tied dry fly in a book, had pointed out the forward cock of the wings ahead of the hackle and the squarish bend of the vintage iron hook. None of the flies he examined came close. Feeling dirty after rummaging through his friends' personal belongings, for friends were what Willoughby and the others had become as they fished together and played wee-hours poker, he shifted mental gears and laced up his hiking boots. Forty minutes later he was clucking to the long-haired cat that Katie Sparrow's dog had run up a tree a few days before. The cat retreated into a clump of serviceberry bushes when the Land Cruiser pulled up, and regarded Sean with alarmed eyes. At the first step he made in its direction, the cat vanished.

Stranahan noted two rigs parked in the campground adjacent to the Forest Service station and another three at the trailhead turnaround: a mud-spattered Dodge Ram, a Subaru Forester, and a vintage Volvo wagon with a peace sticker that Sean pegged for out-of-state even before glancing at the California plates, based on the fact that diesel fuel without the proper additive turned to jelly in Montana winters. As he grabbed his pack and rod case, two women trailed by a terrier with his tongue lolling came clomping down toward the trailhead, bear sprays holstered on their hips. The women were “XX Montana hardbodies,” as Sean had heard Sam Meslik brand the type—crinkly-eyed, small-busted, hold-the-makeup women with ropy muscles and year-round tans, who weren't afraid to show sweat or a stubble of underarm hair, and who trekked like sherpas in summer and skied like bats out of hell all winter. They were the granolas who had arrived in the big immigration waves of the '70s and '80s and '90s, and came to include Montana's waitresses, receptionists, and hairdressers, as well as her doctors, attorneys, fly fishing guides, and university scientists. They came, they stayed, they worked, they played. They might have the same problems with the men in their lives as the sisters they had left behind, but the rivers were their Xanax and the mountains were their wine, and the sun that leathered their faces kept their hearts supple. If the idealism with which they had crossed the border was tested by the staunch conservatism of the old guard, it had not disappeared so much as been replaced by pragmatism. Theirs was a world with an environment worth fighting for, and they had learned how to fight for it. Sean thought the state was better for them, smiled hello, greeted the panting terrier, and started up the trail.

It was an hour hike to the trail junction in the meadow, where Sean paused to flick a grasshopper fly here and there in the Trail Fork of Bear Creek. It was too early for hoppers at this elevation, but trout that eked out a living in the pocket water of mountain streams didn't have the luxury of discrimination, and Stranahan caught and released a half a dozen six-inch rainbows that were silver as minted coins. He was breaking down his fly rod for the long hike up to the saddle when a sensation that was like a wind tickling the skin below his ear caused him to jerk his head up.

Stranahan had spent enough time in bear country that he had developed mental antennae similar to those of prey animals, who could not only scent, hear, and see the minutest indications of danger, but also could feel it as a shifting of magnetic poles. In the fall, fishing the Copper River in British Columbia, he had hesitated to walk downstream to the next good steelhead run, and questioning his reaction but not disobeying it, had watched as a boar grizzly with silver guard hairs emerged from a willow thicket fifty yards below him, then ambled down the bank in search of dying salmon. Here, experiencing the same sensation, he felt for the safety tab on his bear spray and looked around him. To his right was the creek bottom where he'd been fishing, to his left rose a long timbered ridge near the top of which was an outcropping of white rick, behind him was the timbered canyon he'd climbed through. He felt the hairs on his bare forearms briefly pimple with dread. He could actually hear his heart beating. Then the wind that was not a wind subsided, the urgency vanished, and he told himself he was just being foolish.