Dead Man’s Fancy (7 page)

Now Stranahan could hear another person breathing besides himself. The sound was muted by the floorboards, but he thought he could hear a crying sob after each inhalation. Something, instinct, kept him from speaking. A feeling of dread swept over him. He could sense anxiety through the floor, as if the person was reaching a breaking point.

He felt the weight of the big Newhouse. Placing the trap on the floor and using nearly all his strength, he pressed down the heavy springs, hoping devoutly that they were oiled. He set the toggle sear by feel. Gingerly, he lifted the trap. The jaws didn't snap shut, as he feared they might.
Setting his feet down so as not to make a sound, and carrying the trap as gingerly as if he were carrying a land mine, he placed it on the bottom step below the trapdoor. It would be in shadow if the door was opened. He figured there was a fifty-fifty chance of someone descending stepping onto the pan. That is, if they didn't first shine a light, in which case the trap could be easily avoided. A slim defense, but better than nothing.

Above him, the breathing seemed to be coming faster, thin inhalations building to a climax. Stranahan backed away from the stairs, inadvertently kicking his heel against the dirt he'd excavated with the trap. He didn't fall, but in bracing his hand against the wall shelves to right himself, several Mason jars clicked together. Instantaneously, a cracking thunder shook the room and a shaft of light, the diameter of a pencil, made a spot against the floor a foot from his left shoe.

Kicking, he scrambled to the other side of the room. Two gallon jars exploded to his right. He felt a spray against his face and began to gag, the air instantly fetid. The love potion had to be the wolf lure Monroe had mentioned, made from God knows what. A third shot kicked up a volcano of earth between Stranahan's boots. Beams from the last two shots placed quarters of light to either side of him. He grappled for the nearest jar that was still intact and hurled it against the stairs. The fourth shot was straight down through the trapdoor. Stranahan could hear Choti barking from the direction of the road.

His mind raced. He could keep trying to trick the shooter into shooting where he wasn't, but it was a small room. A bullet was going to find him. He reached around, patting the ground, trying not to cut his hand on shattered glass. His hand clasped a stick. He kneed toward the steps and tapped down. Another shot, this one behind him. The shooter was catching onto Sean's game of misdirection. He tapped again, the stick depressing the pan of the trap and tripping the jaws.

In the confined space, the sound of the trap snapping shut was a thunderclap.

“I have a gun!” Stranahan shouted. He meant to put a crazy note in his voice. He needn't have. He sounded plenty crazy, even to himself. “The next one's up through the floor. Two can play this game.”

Above him, he heard a sharp intake of breath, a reedy sound. “Oh, no.” A moment of silence, then quick steps. The squeak of the front door opening. Had it been a woman's voice?

Stranahan counted to thirty. His heart was hammering.
Do it, damn it.
He took the steps, pushed up the trapdoor and bolted out the open front door. A sixth sense told him the shooter had gone and wouldn't be back. But he ran anyway, ran without feeling the ground and didn't stop until he was in the dark arms of the forest. He put his hands on his knees and for a time his breath came in wheezing shudders. Slowly, he started to come back into himself. He must be near the road for he could hear Choti barking quite loudly. A motorcycle coughed to life somewhere beyond. He automatically registered that it sounded like a two-stroke. The bike popped away in drawn-out flatulence. Then, nothing.

—

W
hen he heard the rapping against the window, he awoke with a start. He rolled it down. The sound of the Kootenai River poured in; beyond the front windshield, a pearl horizon told him the hour. Choti opened an eye from where she was curled on the passenger seat. Stranahan didn't remember either hiking to his rig or driving to the boat ramp.

Sheriff Monroe's head loomed in the window. Then it pulled back sharply.

“What in the hell is that smell?”

Stranahan had to think a second.

“Love Potion Twenty-nine,” he said.

S
tranahan's inheritance upon the passing of his father, who'd been killed in a car accident when Sean was fifteen, was meager from a monetary perspective. Besides tools—his dad was an auto mechanic—the inheritance consisted of two handcrafted bamboo fly rods and a milling machine his dad had constructed to cut the bamboo strips, an original Remington Bullet knife from the 1930s, a Hardy Perfect fly reel and a Meerschaum pipe with a handsome burl figure. His father had smoked that pipe during fishing trips to the Deerfield River, outings that were among the most vivid recollections of Sean's childhood. Twenty-five years later he could close his eyes and still see the cherry circles come and go in the night, could hear the whistle of his dad's fly line and the hollow thumping of a brown trout coming to net. It was only in the past few months, after Martinique had departed for veterinary school, leaving Sean more lonely than he'd been in years, that he found himself filling a bowl for any other reason than to keep mosquitoes at bay. That evening when he returned to Bridger was one of those times, and as he drew the pipe out of his shirt pocket and started to fill it, Martha Ettinger reached out a hand and took it from him.

Stranahan arched an eyebrow.

“As you were saying,” Martha said.

“What? Are you my mother?”

“Apparently you need one. Did I ever tell you about Burt, my second husband?”

“The cattle auctioneer.”

“You know why he isn't one now?”

“No, but I think you're going to tell me.”

“He got oral cancer from chewing Skoal. Burt doesn't have a lower jaw. You don't sell a lot of heifers when you have to talk out of a hole in your throat.” She knocked the tobacco out of the pipe and handed it back to him. “Wake up. Haven't you seen the ads on TV?”

Sean swirled his hand in the air. “I live in a tipi, Martha. I don't have electricity. And, I should mention that when the host cleans his pipe, it's an indication that the visit is over. Old Indian custom.”

“Fuck custom. I'm serious. And I guarantee you, no woman's going to want to kiss you once you strike a match to that corncob.

“Meerschaum.”

“Same smoke.”

Stranahan put his palms up. “I surrender. But for the record, I don't inhale.”

“You don't have to. Now as you were saying—”

“I was saying, I'm not sure it was Nanika Martinelli.”

“But you said it was a woman's voice, and the figure you saw had long hair. That fits.”

“It does, but you weren't the one in the cellar. I can't be sure. And why would she want to kill me? Look, I'm guessing here, but what I think happened is this person was startled when I knocked on the front door, hid herself/himself and then knocked me down into the cellar. Time passes, I don't know how long, but long enough for me to rub my hands raw digging with the trap, then that person or another person comes back, this time with a gun. From what I've heard about this girl—”

“Woman,” Martha corrected.

“Woman. There's no history of violence.”

“So if it wasn't Martinelli, who do you think?”

Stranahan had been anticipating the question ever since he'd called Ettinger from a pay phone on the drive back. Now they were sitting across the fire ring from each other on folded buffalo blankets. Sean added a stick to the coals, the night setting in cold, and studied the wisp of smoke snaking toward the vent. He stood to adjust the flap poles and spoke without facing her.

“I think it could be the girl who was with the motorcycle guy, the one who came looking for Martinelli.”

“Because you heard a motorcycle.”

“It was a two-stroke. A lot of dirt bikes are two-stroke. The fly shop owner said the guy was riding an off-road bike.”

“You told me the girl had short black hair. That doesn't sound like a Medusa.”

“I could be wrong about the shadow.”

“You could be wrong about the motorcycle, too.”

“No, bikes I know.”

“Since when?”

“My dad restored an Indian 741 Scout, the model used in World War II. There's about ten years after he died that I was lucky to live through. That Indian was only one of the risks I ran.”

“Ah, those lost years. We all have a few.”

“I was lost. I remember the years well enough, the good parts, anyway.”

“That's the difference between us. You're an optimist.” Her hand crept up to her jaw and they sat in comfortable silence. She stroked her throat. “Well, okay,” she said slowly. “If you think it could be the girl, then that seems like a valid line of investigation. Frankly, I've got my hands full with the wrangler your buddy Sam beat up. I told you he stepped in a trap, didn't I? A wolf trap. Probably not much different than the one you set off in that cellar.” She shook her head. “As if someone with an antler through his gut isn't enough to keep a story in headlines.”

“Strange coincidence, me digging with a trap, the wrangler getting caught in one.”

“A wolf runs through it.” Ettinger nodded her head. “Where's your bathroom?”

“It's back in the woods. You take a path from that rock I told you about where I get my mail.”

“I'll hold it.” She rolled her eyes. “That path is reason number two no self-respecting woman wants to kiss you. So, how is . . . Mar-tin-ique?” She didn't want to hear Sean Stranahan talk about his girlfriend any more than she wanted to hear Harold Little Feather talk about his ex-wife, but she couldn't help herself. Why didn't either of the men who made her feel like a woman realize there was a heart under the badge.
I'm right here
, she wanted to say.

“I haven't spoken with her since coming back from B.C.,” Stranahan said.

“Is there a problem?”

“I don't know. I thought this business of working as a bikini barista would be over once she went to vet school, and it is over, but now she's got a second cell phone she uses to seduce men, like a nine hundred number. She's up front with me about it, says the phone can't be traced and it's easy money.”

“So you aren't the only one she talks dirty to.”

“That's the thing. She never did. She's”—he searched for a word—“bashful.”

“Are you two still . . . together?”

“I think so. But I'll tell you the truth. I'm worried. This guy who runs the phone service, his name is Red. A Cajun guy named Red who plays the ponies, a professional gambler. He gave her a phone name, calls her Caramel Candy. She says she's going to work only until the holiday break, that she'll be too busy next semester and one of the men she's been talking to is beginning to creep her out. Now what do you think the chances are of a graceful exit from this business when you work for a guy named Red?”

“Right now,” Martha stifled a yawn, “I think about the same as me making the connection between a missing person case and a body in Doc Hanson's cooler. I'm going to hit the hay. I can't imagine how tired you are, so get some sleep. Tomorrow I'd like you to come with me to the Culpepper Ranch, meet a cousin of mine.”

“I didn't know you had a cousin in the valley.”

“Our ranch was up out of White Sulfur. I have kin from Great Falls to Pocatello. We'll have a look at where this happened. Can you sit a horse?”

Stranahan's nod was unemphatic.

“I repeat the question.”

“You climb on from the left. Right?”

Ettinger sighed. “We'll put you on one that's pawing at the door to the glue factory. I'll pick you up at seven.”

“Just knock on the flap. I don't have a watch.”

“You don't have a cell phone. You don't have a watch. Your mailbox is under a rock and you smell like a dead cat. Oh, and the toilet is down a path. Seems to me you're entering another one of those lost years. Yet I hear myself asking for your help.”

“Sorry about the wolf lure,” Stranahan said. “I guess to a wolf, dead cat smells like nectar.”

After she'd left, he made up his bed, which amounted to unzipping the sleeping bag on his cot. He pumped up his lantern and opened the book he'd found in the cabin. He leafed to the index. Asena, he read, was a she-wolf that figured in Turkish mythology. According to fable, the wolf had a sky-blue mane and rescued a Mongol boy who was the only survivor of an invasion by Chinese soldiers. The wolf nursed the boy back to health, became his lover and bore him ten half-wolf, half-human children, one of whom became the first khan.

A wolf runs through it,
Ettinger had said.

Shutting the book, Stranahan turned off the lantern and watched the color slowly drain from the mantles.

“S
o I'm to stay in the background and observe.”

“No, you're to stand beside me and observe. What did I tell you?”

“Okay, Martha. It just seems . . . I don't know. Why the cloak and dagger? Who am I, by the way? How do you introduce me?”

“You're a tracker contracted by the department. You're going to ride up to the scene and see if you can find anything Harold missed. I have a lot of faith that you can. Can you do that?”

“I can act the part. I can't see myself finding anything Harold missed.”

“I know damned well you won't, but I want Bucky to think you might. There's a card I'm going to play. You don't need to know anything more than that.”

They turned under the yoke-style gate. It was a blue-sky morning, the big solar panels on the Culpepper mansion's south-facing roof hauling in the wattage. Ettinger turned onto a road that wound past the guest cabins. The ranch manager's house was tucked back into an aspen stand with a half-ton Silverado in front, but no one answered Ettinger's knock. She led Stranahan around the house to a barn. He wasn't there, either. She tried the sliding door. A gutted mule deer buck hung from a block and tackle attached to a rafter beam. Nothing else but hay.

“Bucky's a bow hunter,” Ettinger said. She examined the arrows on the quiver mounted to a recurve bow that was hanging from a nail. They heard the staccato roar of an ATV coming up from the manor.

As they shut the barn door and walked back to the house, Ettinger spoke out of the side of her mouth. “Wasn't all that long ago cowboys rode horses.”

In the ringing silence after he'd shut off the quad, Bucky Anderson helloed and strode toward them, listing slightly to the side and rubbing at his stomach. He tilted his straw Stetson back in a form of salute. He was a big man with a very broad face, clean shaven. His Carhartt jacket was barely soiled. Stranahan noticed a C-shaped scar on his right cheek.

Despite meaty hands burned to a deep ochre color, Anderson's initial grip was tentative. Then, as Stranahan began to withdraw his hand, the bone crusher.
So, one of those.
It told him more about the man than he would have gleaned rifling his medicine cabinet.

“I was just telling Sean,” Ettinger said, “the irony of the new Montana, where the only hay-eating horses are on dude ranches. You go to a ranch that runs cattle, all the horses are under the hood.”

“Isn't that a fact?” Anderson said. He had a high-pitched voice that seemed incongruous with the brute strength his body betrayed.

“Bucky's ranch manager here,” Martha said unnecessarily. “Going to marry the widow Culpepper, have his initials on the branding iron next summer.”

“We tie the knot June twenty-one. I'll admit I'm a little nervous.” He had a smile. Stranahan guessed he was one of those men who always had a smile. He recognized something else he couldn't put his finger on, but made the muscles tighten in his abdomen.

“If the little woman will still have me after what happened Tuesday,” Anderson said.

Ettinger turned to Stranahan. “She's out on the coast, whiling away the ‘R' months with Pilates and Pinot Gris.” It seemed a harsh assessment. Stranahan wondered if she was trying to provoke Anderson.

His expression didn't change. “Now Martha, that's not fair. But you're right. Much as I'd like to have her here, I'm glad she missed out on our high-country drama.” There was the smile again.

“Where are you going to get married?” Stranahan continued the string of pleasantries, feeling a little absurd.

Anderson spread his hands like a preacher. “You're looking at it.”

Below them, the aspens gave ground to grasslands that rolled away toward the ribbon of the Madison River. Stranahan could see the West Fork bridge, but the island downstream, where two years earlier a drowning victim had caught up under a pile of driftwood and one of Sam's clients had accidentally hooked the body with a trout fly, was obscured by bankside pines. For a moment Stranahan thought about the arc his life had taken since then.
I'm right where I should be
, he thought. Maybe the lost years really were over.

He looked at Ettinger, who had her hands on her hips and was bringing Anderson up to date on the search or, rather, what was left of it. They were eighty-six hours in, down from a hundred ground pounders on day two to less than half that number, hopes beginning to die. They'd keep the plane in the air another day or two, go through the motions while the cadaver dogs worked their noses. But the fact was at this point in the search, the most prominent member of SAR was no longer the incident commander. It was the Reverend Marcus Miles, the county chaplain, whose job was to act as a liaison between the grieving family and the sheriff's department. He was the one who would gain the family's trust simply by being there, by listening to all the words and saying the right ones himself, who was the shoulder for women and strong men alike to cry on. Ettinger and Anderson were talking about the family now, the sister, Asena, whom Nicki had provided a phone number for and was listed as next of kin on her application to the ranch.

“So she hasn't called back?” Bucky asked.

Ettinger said, “I got in touch last night and gave her my personal number, but no, not yet. She was still on the other side of the border, so I suppose she could show any time, depending on how hard she's pressing the pedal. I told her the ranch had set aside a guest cabin for her, free of charge.”

Anderson nodded. “It's the least we can do. When do you think you'll start wrapping it up?”

“So things can get back to normal?”

“No, I don't mean it that way.”

“How did you mean it?”

Anderson shrugged.

Ettinger shrugged back at him. “Sometimes what happens after our funding dries up is the family hires out privately to continue the search, but in this case the sister's the only relative and I don't know what her resources are. To my knowledge, she isn't married. She may have no pocket to pick but her own.”

“Jason Kent told me she was older,” Anderson said. He'd taken off his hat. Stranahan saw that his hair was thinning in front, twin bays of pink scalp intruding upon a spit of hair that would soon become an island.

“That's my understanding,” Ettinger said. “It wasn't a long conversation.”

Stranahan put his hands in his jeans pockets and leaned back on his heels. Despite the big-dog handshake, Bucky Anderson seemed to be just who he portrayed himself to be, a concerned ranch manager wanting to help, shaking his head at the tragedy that had unfolded on property he was responsible for.

“We did find something interesting yesterday,” Ettinger said. “A couple things.”

“Oh, what was that?” Anderson's mouth was smiling, but his eyes had drawn into folds of flesh.

“Our tracker found a hat under the headwall, a few hundred yards above the elk kill. It's a straw cowboy with some trout flies stuck in it and we're pretty sure it's hers. Good chance she was bucked by her horse.”

“What else did you find?”

“An arrow. About a third of a mile from the carcass. The biologist who examined the elk found a nick in the rear ribs consistent with the wound made by a broadhead. So what it looks like is whoever shot the elk hit it too far back for a clean kill and either didn't follow up the blood trail or lost it. Then the wolves finished the elk off. Or it died and the wolves scavenged the carcass, one or the other.”

So this is the card,
Stranahan thought.

“How do you know it's the same arrow that killed the elk?” Sean said. The words were out before he realized and he saw Ettinger bite on her lower lip. She'd told him not to interfere.

“Yes,” Anderson echoed the doubt. “There must be quite a few arrows lost during bow season.”

“Well, the arrow has elk blood on it and the blood's about five days old, according to our forensic analyst. Pretty strong circumstantial.” Ettinger scratched her chin with the backs of her fingernails. “You're a traditional archer, aren't you, Bucky? Somebody told me you shoot a recurve, fletch your own arrows. What do you use for shafts, Sitka spruce? Harold, one of our deputies, that's what he uses.”

“I use different kinds of wood.”

“Harold, he puts his own sign on the arrows, three slashes on the diagonal. Do you put your initials on your arrows?”

Stranahan saw color come into Anderson's neck, then flush up across his cheeks, the half moon scar standing out whitely. Anderson turned his head and Stranahan saw the cauliflowering of the right ear. The man had been a fighter, the scar from a broken beer bottle, Sean would bet on it. The smile on Anderson's face had become a grimace.

“Did you shoot a bull elk last week, Bucky? I want you to think about the consequences of lying to an officer of the law and hindering an investigation before you answer.”

“I didn't know this was an investigation.”

Martha didn't comment. She'd let him squirm. She was good at it.

“What do you want me to say?” Anderson's hands spread apart; he turned his palms up in supplication. It was nearly the same gesture he'd used before to encompass the richness of the land that would become his kingdom. Except now his face was red and there was menace, a submerged fury that radiated like heat from his body. Stranahan's instinct was to step back. Ettinger took one step closer, looked unblinkingly into the broad face.

“You haven't changed, have you? Not really.”

“I haven't had a drink in six years. I'm a different man now. You want me to say ‘Yes, I shot an elk.' Yes, I shot an elk. It's bow season. It's legal. He lurched when I released and I didn't double lung him like I'd intended. I tracked him until dark. I went back the next morning and couldn't pick up his trail.” He shrugged. “I lost him.”

“Why didn't you tell me the night we found the body?”

“What difference does it make? I didn't have anything to do with that poor boy's death.”

“You knew we found a body pinned on the antlers of an elk you shot and didn't think to tell me. It makes me feel like you have something to hide.”

“I wasn't even sure it was the same elk. I mean I shot a bull, yes, but this bull, another bull. A lot of elk pass through Papoose Basin.”

“Not a lot of them that big.”

“Look.” His hands weren't so far apart now, but straight out from the elbows at midtorso, palms facing each other. A politician's posture.
Let's be reasonable men
. “Martha, I'm sorry. I should have said something. But you have to understand my position. The Culpeppers, let's just say the brothers aren't so wild about me marrying in. I cut into the pie, so that's a threat. Evelyn's stood up for me from the start, she's a rock, but if this comes out, that I'm involved even though I had nothing to do with what happened up there. . . . You see what I'm saying? People are wanting me to slip up, anything to change her mind. I'm walking on eggshells here.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell us? The truth's going to come out, that I can guarantee you.”

“You've had it in for me ever since—”

“Ever since when? Since the first guy you put in the hospital. Or maybe that college kid who had to have his face reconstructed and bags groceries at Town and Country because he can't add up numbers to run a cash register. What one was he—five, or six?”

“He started that.”

Ettinger's eyes never left Anderson's face. “You see,” she was speaking for Stranahan's benefit, “they were the ones who always started it. Bucky would come into the bar all smiling like he is now, find some guy with a girl and step in between them, tell her how pretty she was, keep looking over at the guy, the bigger the guy the better the chance he'd take the bait, keep it up until the poor sap had to call him out to save face. Then he'd beat the crap out of him in the alley. Picked on ranch hands, didn't you Bucky, 'cause you knew they'd cowboy up and not press charges? Smile the whole goddamned time you turned their faces into hamburger.”

Anderson's cheeks had become the color of vein blood. For a moment Stranahan thought he was going to hit her and stepped forward, measuring him, knowing Anderson had him by forty pounds and he'd have to rely on his speed, see how much rust was in his hands.
Too much
, he thought. But then, unexpectedly, the moment passed. Anderson took a step back. He replaced his hat and pinched the brim with two fingers.

“I'm sorry we've met under these circumstances,” he said, looking at Sean. “And Martha, I'm sorry you still harbor such resentment. But I can't change the past.” He opened his hands. “I can only do what I'm doing, keep trying to make myself a better person.”

“Spoken like a man in therapy.”

“I am in therapy. It helps.”

Ettinger's face stayed stony. “We'll need your statement. I want to know everything that happened, starting with waking up on the morning you shot that elk. I'll send someone around.”

Anderson nodded. “There's nobody wants to have the disappearance of this young woman cleared up more than I do. The poor thing, she'd just started here at the ranch. None of us had time to know her, but she was well thought of. I just feel like hell about it.”

They left him standing on his porch, feeling like hell about it, and drove away toward the trailhead. Stranahan sat Big Mike competently enough that in little more than an hour they had reached the timberline on the headwall of the basin. Ettinger dismounted and pointed out the timber a quarter mile down the basin, where she'd discovered the wrangler's body. Except for a muttered “asshole” when they were in the Jeep, she had uttered not a word about the encounter with Bucky Anderson.

Stranahan rubbed his butt with balled fists.