Dead Man’s Fancy (6 page)

“Thanks, but I'm fishing tomorrow with Carter Monroe.”

“That's the name of our sheriff.”

Stranahan nodded. “It's why I'm here, actually. He's assisting the Hyalite County sheriff's office with the search for a woman who went missing in the Madison Range a couple days ago.

The man was nodding. “Nicki. I read about it. I sure hope she's okay.”

“So do we.” Stranahan waited.

“I don't know what to tell you. She worked here right up until this summer.” He counted on his fingers—“Four seasons.” He raised his eyebrows. “The newspaper says she was working at a dude ranch. One of the wranglers looking for her fell on a dead elk and got an antler through his gut. That's a hell of a way to go.”

“It is. I'm up here trying to collect some background information.”

“They don't suspect her of having anything to do with that man's death, do they? That wouldn't be the Nicki I know.”

“Not as far as I'm aware. Who was the Nicki you knew?”

“A . . . good . . . kid.” The brown eyes had become hard. “Who did you say you were? I didn't catch the name.”

“Stranahan. Sean Stranahan.” He extended his hand, which the man took after a moment's hesitation. “I work for Sheriff Ettinger in Bridger.”

“Robert Kelly,” the man said. His eyes relaxed. “It's just that you're not the first person who's come here looking. A guy was asking questions about her at the start of the summer, after her dad passed.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“He rode a motorcycle. About your size and build. Younger. Had these little cornflower blue earrings. Long hair. Wore a leather vest unzipped, man had chest hair like a brown bear. But his face was almost delicate, not handsome, but beautiful. Like the
David
. The sculpture.” He tilted his chin in an approximation of the pose. “I'm as hetero as the next guy, but I'm not ashamed to say I was attracted. Not in a sexual way but like a mouse mesmerized by a snake.” He crooked two fingers and jabbed them like fangs. “He had a rawhide shoelace with a pendant about the size of a silver dollar that he wore around his neck. An embossed wolf, facing forward like it was looking at you. It had garnet stones for eyes. I made a comment about it, just to say something, the way you do, and he said ‘The wolf is my brother.' Not like a hippie would say it, ‘The wolf is my bro, man,' but matter of fact. Like you'd say ‘I got a sister from Poughkeepsie.'”

“What can you remember about the motorcycle?”

He shook his head. “I don't know bikes that well. High exhaust, like an off-road bike. I think it had a red gas tank.”

“Montana plates?”

“Maybe. Nothing registered. I might have noticed if it was out of state. He had a girl with him. She sure as hell registered.”

“Oh?”

“They were riding tandem. Just a bitty thing, short black hair, had sort of a scrunched-up face. A pixie doll. But she had eyes, I'm not kidding you, they were the color of a Bloody Mary. More orange than red. You felt like if you were in a room, she'd get up on the mantel and crouch down, stare at you like a cat. A very strong vibe. Never said a word, though. He did the talking.”

“What did he say?”

“Said he was a friend of Nicki's, wanted to know if she still worked for me. I told him she'd left town but he was persistent—where did she go, did I have a number. His questions were . . . direct. Polite but distant, cold. Like he wasn't going to let you see anything but the mask. When he saw he wasn't getting anywhere, they left.”

“Did you see them again?”

“No, but I had a feeling, you know, that maybe there was something up with Nicki. Maybe she hadn't left town like she'd said. I thought if she was at her dad's old place, I should warn her about this guy. So I drove over there and someone had broken a window and trashed the place. I figured it was him. I mean, who else? It wouldn't have been hard to find the address. A lot of people knew Nicki. Just like it was common knowledge she worked for me. Some wrong impressions about that.”

“So she wasn't your girlfriend?” Stranahan kept his voice casual.

“The sheriff tell you that? Well, he's wrong. I'm a married man.”

Stranahan nodded agreeably. “I know for some men that wouldn't be the same as an answer.”

“It is when you're talking to me.” A glitter came into his eyes. “A lot of guys, they leave the door open. They say they'll be faithful, but all it takes is someone to put her foot in the crack. Not me. The door shut the day I took the vows.”

“But Nicki did live here?”

“She lived with her old man. I never saw her in the winter, she went up to B.C. a lot with her dad, but during the busiest fishing months she stayed upstairs here, just more convenient. Sometimes Alfonso would drop by after work. We'd grill burgers on the porch. He was okay then, nobody knew he had the cancer. That man, he'd been a trapper, run sled dogs, survived two bush plane crashes. He was sort of hard to understand, but he could tell you stories.”

“How did Nicki work out?”

“Best move I ever made was hiring her. Most guys, they wander around the shop with their hands in their pockets, maybe buy a few bugs. Nicki would shake that hair of hers, they'd walk out with an Orvis fly rod.” He licked his thumb and imitated someone peeling bills off a wad of cash. “Clients gave her hundred-dollar tips. You're blessed with her DNA, you learn how to use it.”

“And she used it.”

“Sure she did. It was her idea to paint a mermaid on the boat. But she would deflect the attention if someone mentioned her looks. I remember when the photographer from
Fly Angler
came here to take her picture, she said, ‘You ought to see my sister, she's much prettier than me.'”

Stranahan inched his head up. “I didn't know she had a sister.”

“Neither did I until then. Nicki told me she was older. Lived in B.C. I guess she didn't make the move when the old man came to the States, but they visited her every winter.”

“We might have to get in touch with next of kin. Do you know how to contact her?”

“All I know is Nicki called her Asena. She said there was a wolf in folklore named Asena.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You know, Nicki herself was big into wolves. Anything environmental. She demonstrated against the vermiculite mine, got herself arrested. I know because it was on the application she gave me.”

“Did she ever say what she planned to do after her dad died?”

“She asked me who to contact to put antifreeze in the pipes, so I knew she was going away. Once she said something about opening a fishing lodge with her sister, up on one of the Skeena tributaries. Up where she was from. But I got the impression that was down the road, a someday kind of thing.”

“When's the last time you heard from her?”

“Not since the memorial, not directly. A fly shop owner on the Madison called for a reference, so I take it she went down there.

Stranahan nodded. “Sam Meslik. He's a friend of mine.”

“Yeah, that's the one. So, did she go to work for him?”

“She guided for him this summer, before she worked at the dude ranch. She stayed in a barn on the property.

He nodded. “Same kind of set-up she had with me. So,” he cocked his head, “this friend of yours, was the door open, or closed?”

“Open.”

“Then maybe he's the one you should be talking to.”

I
t was a Montana Stranahan had passed through but had never spent much time in, a rural hodgepodge of unzoned, anything goes, fly the flag, gun rack in your truck Montana—trailer homes with crude additions, automobile graveyards, Support Our Troops bumper stickers, tool shed businesses that had sold nothing but dreams for forty years. At a crossroads, a defunct bookmobile sat on its rims in the evening gloom, skull and crossbones spray painted over the rust with a sign in pink letters—
METH—NOT EVEN ONCE
.

Stranahan downshifted as the road climbed into solid timber, switchbacking toward a low saddle that marked the watershed. He was looking for a black mailbox stenciled with Martinelli, found it and switched off the Land Cruiser. A No Hunting, No Trespassing sign swung from the center of the chain blocking the dirt access road, the metal punctuated with bullet holes. Stranahan stepped over it, then turned around and went back to the mailbox. It was empty. As he tapped his fingernails against the metal, his eyes were drawn to a smear of white in a drainage ditch. A bone? One of many. The ditch was littered with them, deer skulls with the antlers sawn off, hooves connected to strings of bones, scapulas growing moss. They looked surreal in the dimming light. Between the bones of a rib cage protruded a piece of paper. Stranahan climbed down into the ditch, still muddy from the last rain. It was an envelope from the power company, dated in June. He found more mail, an advertising flyer for tires with a July expiration date, a Lincoln County phonebook, and an NRA propaganda missive—all addressed to Alfonso Martinelli. The only opened piece of mail was a padded Scripts prescriptions envelope postmarked June 15 that Stranahan suspected had held pills. Though it had obviously rained within the past few days, none of the envelopes were swollen by moisture.

Stranahan patted Choti's head—“Better stay here, girl”—got a flashlight and a bear spray canister from the Land Cruiser—he had never owned a gun—and started hiking down the drive, still thinking about the mail. Scattering it seemed a careless act and he tried not to read too much into it beyond the obvious fact that someone had been here quite recently. But stealing pills, what did that mean? Martinelli had suffered from cancer. It was reasonable to assume he'd been on pain medication. So had the same person who raided the mailbox pocketed a vial of Vicodin? Maybe not, he thought. Someone could have opened that envelope at any time over the summer and taken the pills, then put the envelope back into the mailbox. Stranahan watched a garter snake slide like a silk ribbon from one side of the drive to the other. He tried not to read too much into that, either.

Stranahan had proceeded a couple hundred yards, still without seeing the house, when the road bent sharply and dipped toward a creek. What he was looking for were boot prints and he found them at the ford, cutting across old tire tracks. Nothing looked at all new, but then anyone who wanted to approach the cabin unseen, for that's what it was, a one-story log home that he could now see in the distance, would not use the two-track, but bushwhack through the pines. Fat chance of finding a track there, though he suspected Harold Little Feather would say otherwise. Sean had witnessed Harold not only track men across what looked like trackless ground but also tell you the weight of the person who'd passed. “Like you, running a pair of soft hackles through an inside river bend,” he could hear Harold saying, “you've done it so many times you can picture the flies, damn near will a trout into hitting. Same thing with tracking, except the earth is my river. Ground's just a little more reluctant to tell a story when it's hard. Like a woman not sure about taking off her clothes. You got to sweet talk her a little.”

Well, Harold wasn't here.

You're stalling,
Stranahan told himself. He strode briskly down the track and up the steps onto a porch of unfinished pine boards. One of the two front windows was boarded from the outside. He rapped sharply on the screen door. Silence.

Stranahan tried the door. It creaked open on unoiled hinges. A shaft of twilight striped the floor, the light swarming with dust particles. Stranahan's eyes fell on the floorboards, which were coated with dust and showed, as clearly as if they were cut with glass, the imprints of shoe soles. He fitted the elastic strap of his headlamp around his forehead and switched it on. The tracks indicated an aggressive tread with the outside heels smudged from mild pronation. Stranahan wore a ten and a half. He placed a foot beside one of the tracks. Quite a bit smaller. He opened the door all the way to let in what was left of the light and saw that the tracks were everywhere floorboards were exposed.

The beam of his flashlight bobbing before him, he followed the intruder's tracks into every room, feeling his chest expand as he opened the doors, his thumb on the safety tab of the pepper spray. It was a small dwelling with Victor traps placed in the corners of the rooms, scenes of minor tragedy marked by skeletal mice with intact tails. Robert Kelly had said he'd restored some order to the chaos, putting papers back in the desk, organizing the furniture. Stranahan figured he'd been the one who boarded up the window, as well. That had been nearly four months ago. In his brief tour, Stranahan saw no disarray beyond an unmade bed in what he took to be Nicki's old room, from the odds and ends of clothing hanging in an armoire.

Stranahan opened the slatted cover of the desk to look for a piece of paper to sketch the footprints before they were obliterated by his own. Had he heard something, or was it just the rollered slats rubbing against each other? No, he'd heard something, but then maybe it was nothing. Wood talked to itself sometimes. Still, a little more exploration was advisable. The bedroom he'd identified as Nicki's was closest to the living area and he shone his light into it. Crumpled sheets on a mattress and bedspring set on the floor, two pillows without pillowcases. The room had been drywalled and painted, showing rectangular patches of lighter color where paintings or photos had been removed. In the armoire stood cracked cowgirl boots embroidered with roses. Stranahan opened the drawers in a fiberboard bureau. He found some frayed jeans in a size eight, a denim shirt with pearl snaps, the seams shot, and a tie-dyed T-shirt. That and a few pieces of underwear told him nothing beyond that Nicki was a substantial woman who wore a 36C cup underwire and stood five eight or so. About the same size as Martha Ettinger, he thought.

Stranahan found himself standing at the foot of the bed, feeling fatigued. When he'd heard the sound his heart rate had come up, but he was in a wash of inertia now and sat down on the bed, his butt coming up against something hard under the covers. It was a book, the light revealing a cover with a wolf howling at the moon.
Killer or Kindred Spirit?: The Lore and Allure of the Wolf
, by Barbara Barr. In the other bedroom, which he assumed to be Nicki's father's, the bedstand had been littered with Louis L'Amour paperbacks, old dime novels of a West that never was. He opened the wolf book and found that it was scholarly and densely written. Nicki's?

Suddenly it bothered him, not the book so much as the bed. Why would someone shutting a house down for an indefinite period as Nicki had leave everything shipshape but her bed. And if the reason it looked unmade was because the man on the motorcycle had mussed it looking for something, why hadn't the fly shop owner at least pulled the comforter over it?

Stranahan itched at his ten-day beard as he walked toward the back of the house. Alfonso's room was dominated by a gun case, no guns but there was a workbench with a reloading press and two shelves with gear—powder tins, primer packets, unprimed brass and die sets for a half dozen rifle and pistol calibers. The press held a brass cartridge case in a bullet-seating die, poured three-quarters full of powder. Beside the press were a half dozen cast-lead bullets ready to be seated and three already loaded into cases. Without really thinking about it, Stranahan pocketed a couple of the bullets. He turned his attention to the far end of the bench. More tools—a firebrick, an acetylene torch setup for melting metal, bullet molds. He reached his hand into his pocket and rolled the heavy chunks of lead with his fingers. The man had been a serious hand loader, but considering his profession, that was unremarkable. What was odd was that the table looked to have been abandoned in the middle of a reloading session. It didn't add up, the way the unmade bed didn't add up.

A worm of fear twisted in Stranahan's gut. There had been a sound; he'd been a fool to dismiss it.
But he'd checked all the rooms, hadn't he?
Unholstering the pepper spray, he went back to the living room. Mountain cabins often included unfinished cellars accessed by trapdoors. Near the desk was an Indian print area rug and Stranahan bent over to pull one end back. “What do you know,” he muttered. The door was there, with a circular iron latch recessed into the wood. Stranahan flipped it up. Rough-hewn wood steps descended into darkness, and as he peered down, he felt rather than heard the floorboards creak behind him. Spinning around, his headlamp came off and spun across the floor, its beam glancing up to reveal the ceiling shadow of a distorted human figure, a chimera with a head that seemed to swarm with snakes. He felt searing pain at the back of his head and a light began to flicker behind his eyes, ticking like the blank tape at the beginning of an old movie reel. The square hole in the floor started to shake. It seemed to take forever to fall and he felt the bullets hard against his fingers as he landed on his hand. His head hit and bounced up. The light flashed into brilliance, then raced to a point and flickered out.

—

I
n his amateur boxing career, which ended with Stranahan outpointed in the finals of the Silver Mittens Tournament in Lowell, Massachusetts, a match that nearly twenty years later he still believed in his heart that he'd won, he had never been knocked out. Now he knew what it was like to come to from a blow, with his brain seeming to shift sludgelike in his skull. He reached behind his head and his hand came away wet.

The darkness was absolute. A moldy organic smell invaded his nostrils. He spoke into the blackness and got no response. His voice didn't seem to belong to him, and the sound made his head hurt. He finally withdrew the hand cramped in his pocket. He flexed his fingers. No bones seemed to be broken. The act gave him a thought, but the thought floated out of his consciousness. Some time later, it could have been a minute or an hour, he had the thought again and reached into his jeans' pocket to retrieve his key ring, which had a small Swiss Army knife with a press-and-hold light. Stranahan clamped it between his teeth.

It was a root cellar. He rose cautiously to his feet, for the cabin floor had protruding nails and he couldn't stand straight without spiking his head. He shone the single LED. The room was about six feet by ten feet with sets of shelves against both long walls. The shelves were lined with Mason jars sealed in wax. Beets, jams, onions, kokanee salmon—French spellings with dates that went back about eight years. At the back of the room were a half dozen plastic gallon containers with pressure locks. He brought the light closer. Potion
L'Amour #29. Love potion? He had no idea what to make of it.

At the other end of the cellar were the rough timber stairs leading to the trapdoor. He remembered that the door had no lock, but was unsurprised to find it had no give, either, even after pounding up at it with a piece of two-by-four he found on the earthen floor. No doubt whoever had knocked him into the root cellar had pulled something heavy over the door. The desk was handy and would have done the trick. There remained digging his way out, but with what? Besides a few odd boards left over from the construction of the shelves, there were the stairs themselves, which were studded with rusty nails. He might be able to pry up a step. A dull metallic glint caught his eye. The cellar was shallower at this end and he had to bend over to peer behind the steps. Hanging from stout ceiling hooks were a dozen or so leghold traps with large, offset jaws. Some had teeth. In a box were a jumble of smaller traps. He removed the largest trap from the hooks. Etched into the pan was the number 4½ under “S. Newhouse.” A stout drag chain ended in pronged hooks that would dig into the ground to keep an animal from carrying the trap away. Sean knew something about traps, having long ago befriended a woodsman who was his grandfather's neighbor in the Berkshire Mountains. The old man, whom everyone called Smithy, had shown the young boy how to set a trap by depressing the springs and pinning the toggle sear to the pan. Sean remembered setting one off with a stick and jumping backward when the jaws snapped shut.

Stranahan carried the trap to the east-facing wall, where two three-inch diameter PVC pipes with shut-off valves protruded into the cellar at chest height. He jammed the jaws of the trap into the wall. A few bits of earth crumbled and dropped away. Again. A little more. In ten minutes his arms ached and he'd dug out no more earth than would fill a coffee can. Hot spots on his palms promised blisters if he kept at it. He sat back, shone his light on the trap and wondered what he'd been using for brains. The pronged grappling hook at the end of the drag chain was comfortable to hold and he began to dig with it, first taking his shirt off and wrapping it around his hand to reduce friction. It was slow going, but an intermittent stream of moldy earth pouring out of the wall assured him of progress. The irony of using a trap to dig out of a trap brought a grim smile.

Abruptly, he stopped smiling. A sound like a door creaking. A single step. Silence.

Stranahan felt for the pepper spray on his hip. It wasn't there. He only vaguely remembered falling and realized the spray must have slipped out of his hand when he was hit. He relaxed his jaws. The LED light he'd been gripping in his teeth went out. He listened to himself breathe. Then, a scraping noise, like chalk on a blackboard. Incrementally, a rectangle of indistinct light, thin as string, revealed the outline of the trapdoor. Someone had moved the desk covering it.