Dead Man’s Fancy (27 page)

“What will happen to her?”

“She gave the name of an uncle in Minot who agreed to pick her up, provided the county paid his travel expenses.”

“Amorak met her only a week after Martinelli went missing.”

Ettinger nodded. “Makes you wonder how many others he went through. Far as I'm concerned, it's good riddance.”

“You don't mean her, you mean him,” Stranahan clarified.

“Right now I'm thinking just about everybody I know.”

I
n November, Stranahan drove north. Winning the lottery at the border crossing north of Sweetgrass, he leaned back against a cinder-block outbuilding while a Canadian guard searched the Land Cruiser. He took an envelope from his shirt pocket and unfolded a single sheet of stationery. The header was a two-inch-deep band of watercolor, a snow-clad mountain overlooking a river with a bankside cabin. The sign on the cabin's facing peak was made of log sections and read Martinelli's Fishing Camp. A nice piece of art, if Stranahan said so himself.

It had taken more than two weeks to track her down. Asena—it was difficult to start calling her by any other name—had once told him that she'd planned to renovate the cabin where she'd grown up and make it a fishing lodge. Though Stranahan suspected that's where she'd gone after skipping the state—by the time he'd given his statement and driven to Sam's fly shack, she'd already packed and hit the highway—he'd had no luck finding an address. He finally bought an online subscription to the
Smithers Interior News
, which he checked periodically on the off-chance her name would pop up. It did—as Nadina Martinelli—in, of all things, a team roster for a coed curling league. He'd sent a letter care of the league president, thinking it would be less threatening to her than if he'd called the man. He wrote that she had nothing to worry about, but that there had been a significant development in the lower forty-eight she'd be interested in, and to get in touch when she could.

There hadn't been a development, unless you counted an official statement from the sheriff's department to the effect that Nicki Martinelli was presumed dead. The newspapers and TV had had a field day with the story about the wolfman who was suspected of feeding Martinelli's hair to captive wolves, but as Amorak was deceased, there was little hope of recovering the woman's body. The DA had accepted Ettinger's recommendation not to prosecute the distraught sister who had shot Amorak, and the only way the case could have dragged on was if one of Amorak's relatives sued her for wrongful death. But any bridges to the McCready or Oddstatter families Amorak had burned long ago. His grave was dug at the county's expense.

A week after weather chased Stranahan from his tipi for good—Sam had been right; Montana was a winter of three-dog nights, and halfway into October Sean was already two dogs short—the phone rang in his studio. He was surprised to hear her voice.

“I was hoping you'd forget about me. I'm . . . very sorry about involving you in my life, passing myself off as someone I wasn't. . . . I suppose Sam told you everything. It's hard to—”

“Asena—”

“People call me Nadina here.”

“Nadina, I know what happened the day your mother and sister drowned. I know you've been confused—”

“No, you don't.”

“If you ever want to talk—”

“If I did it certainly wouldn't be on a phone.”

Silence. Then: “Sean?” The voice had lost its aggressive tone. “When I think about you, the position I put you in, you and Sam both, it's unforgiveable. Up at my dad's house, I . . . after I knocked you into the cellar I ran away and then I came back and shot at you. I thought you were him—you don't know all the things he did to me.”

“You're forgiven. But I'd like for you to clear something up about that night. I was sure I heard a motorcycle. Was that you?”

“No, all I had was my bike. I hadn't gotten Dad's Bronco rewired yet. But the neighbor up the road races motocross. His kids are out half the night sometimes, and . . .”

And so a line of communication opened. Over the next couple weeks he'd spoken with her several times. She asked after Killer. Sean said Killer was back to being Killer, except for a limp. Sam had kept the claws that had been shot off Killer's paw and if she ever came back to Montana, he wanted to give her one, to string on her necklace with the wolf claw. That made her think of the wolves in Papoose Basin. She wondered what had happened to them and was relieved to find that the surviving members of the pack had left the area and hadn't been seen since. She volunteered that she was going ahead with plans to open the fishing lodge and sent him photographs. Would he paint the letterhead? For pay, of course. He agreed. The letter was her response. She'd wanted him to see how well the stationery turned out.

. . . I already have slots filling for next September and what I need is a boat. With the jet sled restriction, it will have to be a raft or drift boat like we used on the Madison, but the opening's a long way off and I should be able to find a good deal in Terrace. If you ever want to catch a summer-run steelhead. . . .

Stranahan refolded the letter as the crossing guard walked up and handed over his keys.

“Those your paintings in the portfolio?” He had a very round face with a lopsided smile, like a comma.

Stranahan admitted they were.

“That one of the red-haired woman, she could stop a man's heart.”

“She did,” Stranahan said.

—

H
e'd once heard a man speak of a river as being as beautiful as the day it was made. That river drained a different continent and was fished by kings. The one Stranahan found at the end of the turnoff, some thirty miles of bad road south of Houston, was such a river, lack of royalty notwithstanding. The cabin resembled the cabin in her photos, set a little farther back from the bank. No one was home. Well, he hadn't told her he was coming. He walked down to the river and watched the water awhile, the pines, a snow-clad mountain in the distance, wondering if it was the peak that had inspired her name. When he heard the Bronco's motor over the sound of the current, he didn't turn around.

She came to stand beside him, leaning slightly back with her arms crossed. Stranahan gave her a sidelong glance. The tendrils of hair escaping a waxed cotton fishing cap turned in the breeze, like the last leaves of the bankside willows.

“You need a new timing belt,” he said.

“How did you find my place? The Morice is a long river.”

“I'm a detective, if you haven't forgotten. I didn't do it justice, your river.” He nodded to himself. “Never paint from a photograph.”

“I see you trailered one of Sam's boats. I haven't spoken to him since Montana. He must hate me.”

“He doesn't.”

“Does Sam know you're here?”

“No. I told him I was going fishing. Hit a few rivers in B.C. Actually, I have a commission to paint the Kispiox, but I can see I'm too late for the colors.”

“You should paint this river. Come earlier next time, before the leaves fall.”

Their eyes met. “When I do,” Stranahan said, “you'll guide me for free. I've heard you're pretty good.”

She smiled. “Take a walk with me.”

They walked along the river, the grasses grown up between two well-worn ruts that betrayed a bear trail, the spacing an indication of the great breadth of a grizzly's chest.

She told him then, hesitantly at first, then simply remembering, about the girl who watched her sister drown, the blue coat going down into the icy water, her mother already drowned, a nightmare from which she had mercifully been spared those first few weeks, before she'd emerged from the coma. When the veil lifted, the drownings seemed surreal and came in blue waves, pulsing like a heartbeat. She'd be asleep and wake up screaming.

“Five years old. People don't carry many memories from when they're that young. Imagine that being your first lasting memory. It was really difficult with Dad calling me Nadina, acting like I was the one who'd drowned. I actually started to believe it, not really believe, on a basic level I always knew I was Nicki, but in a visual sense. Instead of watching my sister sink in her blue coat, I saw myself drown. She was the one on the surface and I was looking up from underwater. I had always looked up to her in life and now in death I really did look up to her, and that's the image that has both haunted and saved me ever since. For the rest of my life, during my worst times I would reach up for her, the way a drowning person reaches up. She would grab hold of my hand and pull me out of the dark water. I could become her, for a while anyway. Does that make sense?”

They'd reached a widening of the valley where the pines pulled back from the bank and the path wound into chest-high grasses.

“It's easy to surprise a bear in here. A fisherman got between a sow and a cub last year and lost half his face. This is where I usually turn back.”

She walked ahead of him, the words trailing in her wake. “Growing up, the teachers thought I had a split personality. Dissociative identity disorder, they called it. They wanted me to see a psychologist all the way down to Prince Rupert. Dad wouldn't have it. But they were wrong. I always knew who I was, like someone who knows who they are under a mask. All I ever did was trade places with my sister. The worst times were after we moved to Kamloops, when Dad got the job trapping wolves. I hated what he did, and he was gone a lot and I couldn't reach far enough up for Nadina to take ahold of me. By then I was calling her Asena, after the wolf. I went sort of crazy. That's when I demonstrated in front of the ministry building and took my clothes off in the river. But it was a good time, too. I'd never had friends before and people were attracted to me. It was like I exerted a sort of power; one girl, a really smart girl, told me that people looked at me like I was an ornament that shone light and spun around so fast that I radiated a magnetic pull.”

“That's when you got your little group of ecoterrorists together,” Sean said.

She smiled. “It was harmless. Crazy as she was, I sort of miss that girl who swam with the salmon.”

They hiked in silence awhile. “Here, I want to show you something.”

She led him down to the riverbank cobbles. Upstream the river made a bend, turning out of the pines to burble over submerged boulders before smoothing into a mirror below.

“Looks like good steelhead water,” Sean remarked.

“That big rock with the heavy swirl over it, we called it Daddy's Rock. Every fish that comes up from the rapids rests behind that rock. The first steelhead I ever caught on a fly rod, I got here. That's back when you were allowed to kill a wild fish and I dragged it all the way back to the cabin. Daddy was real proud of me. Of course, he called me Nadina. I really did love him though.”

Her voice was reflective. “When we moved to Montana, we had a few good years before he got sick. I'm so glad we had that, being father and daughter in the best way. I grew up in Libby. I could be Nicki without the craziness, without a frantic need to be everywhere at once. Today they would say I had attention deficit disorder or I was bipolar or something else you need drugs for. All I knew was that for the first time since I was little, I didn't have to take on a different identity to empower myself, just to cope, you know. That's when I got the job guiding on the Kootenai and people started calling me the Fly Fishing Venus.”

She let out a long breath. She said quietly, “I know you want me to explain about Fen. It's hard because I try not to think about him. He just took me over, maybe that's the best way to put it. He was attracted to one part of me, and I turned back into being a confused little girl for him. He was a master at keeping people off balance. One minute he'd tell me how beautiful I was and then the next how much I disappointed him. He'd make me do these . . . things. I lost my self-respect. He'd be around all summer and then he'd go away, and I'd feel dirty and try to become pure again by turning into Asena. I actually do have a degree in counseling and worked the winters up here in the rural schools. I still do, for that matter. Dad came with me and it would be like rolling back the clock. I'd almost manage to forget about Fen. But then he'd show up again, either drive here or wait for me to go back to Montana in June to guide. He'd do this thing where he'd hold out a knife and tell me the difference between love and hate was balanced on the blade. If I made the knife turn like this, and he'd turn the blade over, then he'd have to do this, and he'd cut the palm of his hand and put it on top of my head. He'd wash my head with his blood, then he'd lick it and start taking my clothes off. He'd be gentle. It was . . . so confusing.

“That night in Papoose Basin, I couldn't help going back to him. ‘I've got to get to the ranch,' I said that over and over like a mantra, but my legs just kept going straight down the mountain, no matter how hard I tried to stop, my legs just kept going. I don't know when I got to the river, it had to have been midnight, but he was awake, standing outside the tent like he'd been waiting for me. My head was all bloody after falling. I think that's when he got the idea of feeding my hair to the wolves. He took me in the tent and I thought he'd lick my wound and then have sex with me, that it would be like before, but he started pulling my hair out in big clumps. It hurt like you can't believe. Look at what he did to me.”

She removed her hat to part her hair. Patches were missing and there was an ugly welt behind her ear where she'd hit her head falling off the horse.

“I must have screamed my head off. I don't remember, but there was nobody else in the camp, so it wouldn't have mattered anyway. He told me if I wanted him to take me back, I had to pass a test. He was going to take me to a wolf den and tie me to a tree with nothing but a CamelBak so I could suck water, and if the pack or a bear didn't kill me and I was still alive in a week, then it would be a sign that I was worthy. He tried to prop me up on the back of his motorcycle, but I was so out of it I kept falling off. Finally he carried me back into the tent and I passed out. But then the pain would keep waking me up. He'd shine a flashlight, I'd see the light behind my eyelids, but I kept my eyes closed like I was asleep. Finally I heard the motorcycle and knew he'd left. He was going to get the van from his work so he could load me into it, I know that now, at least that's what I think, but back then all that mattered was he was gone. How I got down to the river I'll never know. But I washed myself off and wrapped my head up and got to the highway, and a guy who'd sold weathervanes and scarecrows and all kinds of stuff to ranch people back in the fifties picked me up. He told me the story of his life and kept me awake all the way to Libby, bless his heart.”