Dead Man’s Fancy (9 page)

S
am Meslik told Ettinger that he'd first met Nanika Martinelli at a Trout Unlimited banquet the previous winter, having caught her eye during a bidding war for a box of sculpin patterns tied by the late Al Troth. It had been one of those across-a-crowded-room glances where the eyes linger longer than needed to acknowledge a shared interest, for they both wanted the box, though she'd fallen out of the bidding early on. Spurred by the scent of the chase—this was during one of Sam's hiatuses from Darcy, his on-again, off-again—the burly fishing guide found the hand holding his paddle raised once and once more against his better judgment. He was some two hundred dollars poorer when he lumbered over to the woman's table and ceremoniously presented her with the fly box. “I had just enough left over to buy you a drink,” he said, handing her a plastic cup of single malt. In fact he'd poured the whiskey from the flask hidden in his sport coat, which he'd worn for the express purpose. The tattered houndstooth, a gift from an Irish client, was the only presentable garment Sam had in a wardrobe consisting mainly of T-shirts; that night's sartorial selection perversely read “Whitefish Can't Jump—Trout Can't Either if You Hit Them on the Head.”

Sam said the woman reminded him of a tawny lioness. She had laughed when he showed her the shirt and shaken her mane of hair, which later that night Sam found dragging across his chest in the cramped bedroom of his trailer. He'd roared like the king of the jungle himself, and when he woke up she was gone. Drinking his hair of the dog, his bleary eyes found the note she'd left on the Formica tabletop. “Thank you kind stranger.” Nothing more. He realized he didn't even know her name.

“Wham bam thank you, Sam,” was the way he summarized the night to Martha. It was about a month later that he opened his subscription copy of
Fly Angler
and saw a photo of her with the caption: “Fly Fishing Venus Hooks Anglers on Kootenai River.”

Ettinger asked if Martinelli had said why she was in Bridger that night, Libby being in the northwest corner of the state, a solid seven-hour drive away. Sam sipped from his glass. “If she did, I don't recall. I'd had a little whiskey.” He pinched his fingers. “Just a wee sip.”

When was the next time he'd seen her? Not until she'd come to his shop this summer. He was sorry for lying earlier, saying it was the first time they'd met. He'd been afraid if he admitted the truth, that they'd known each other, however fleetingly, Ettinger might think that Martinelli had sought Sam out to establish herself in the valley and that . . . well, he didn't know, but it might implicate her some way in the wrangler's death.

Suddenly he hurled his glass against the wall of the clubhouse. It shattered with enough force that in a few moments Stranahan appeared at the door. He was shining the Carnivore tracking light he'd won from Ettinger with the only good hand he'd drawn all night.

“Turn that goddamned thing off,” Sam said.

“I thought maybe you two were killing each other and I'd have to follow a blood trail. Martha, you don't have a shirt on.”

Ettinger peered down at her bra. She remembered
thinking
about taking the shirt off, just to take Sam's dare, but she didn't remember actually
doing
it. Who'd drunk who under the table was no longer clear.

She sought to preserve what dignity remained. “I'm getting a moon tan,” she said. “Why don't you take off your pajamas and join us? Sam's going to tell us what made him so upset.”

“I don't know what got into me,” Sam said. He dropped his chin onto the mat of hair sprouting from his collarbone. When he raised his head it was silhouetted against the moon's pale halo, a man in the moon, or—Ettinger squinted at the image—the Wolfman.
I must be very drunk
, she thought.

“I was in love with her,” Sam said. His voice was barely audible. “I thought I'd get over it. I'd been trying for weeks to get over it, and I figured once she went to the ranch it would be easier. And then that dude came into the Dollar, wanting to fight me for her honor, and it wasn't over.”

“How's that?” Ettinger had shrugged back into her shirt and was buttoning up, her fingers casual while she inwardly cringed at her inexcusable behavior.

“I wanted to hit him so hard his head would explode.”

Martha and Sean exchanged a quick glance. Martha leaned forward. Her tone was empathetic, her Martha-from-Portland-with-feelings voice. “What happened on Papoose Mountain? Was it an accident? Just tell us. You'll feel a lot better.”

“You don't believe . . . You can't . . .
Nothing
happened. I was never up there, I'll take a polygraph if you want. I told you the truth the first time. I felt bad after I hit him. He was just another poor sap who fell for her and couldn't think straight. I'm sure she's left a trail of us. You had to know her, she was like a mythical creature. You know how most guides have a foam patch on the boat they keep their working flies on, the patterns you tie onto your client's tippet most often? She had them hooked to her shirt. Like she was the river and the flies were the hatch. She'd reach down and select one, back the hook out, let's just say some men had a hard time keeping their mind on the fishin.' And her hair, these little wavelike things that floated around on it, I don't know what you call them—”

“Ringlets,” Martha said.

“Yeah, I guess. Ethereal, man, like they say about mayflies. All the way down to her butt.”

“But it wasn't just her looks.”

“No.” He shook his head. “She glowed from the inside. She just glowed.” He set his wineglass on the porch railing. The careful hand of a man who's been drinking. “It's weird, though.”

“What's weird?” Martha was leaning forward. Her mind had become quite clear.

“That night at the banquet, she seemed like a woman who was sure of herself, a very put-together lady. I had to screw up my courage to talk to her. And, uh, in bed, she was in charge, said we needed a safe word in case things got crazy. I said, ‘How about
no
?' She says, ‘
No
means yes.' ‘What about
don't
?' ‘No,
don't
means do.' So we agreed on
Red Serendipity
, in honor of her hair. Like the fly pattern,” he added for Ettinger's benefit.

“I know what a Serendipity is. But wouldn't that be a little hard to remember in the heat of the moment?”

“I think that was the point.” Sam fell silent, thinking back to that night. He turned to Stranahan. “I felt a bit used, my brother.”

“So you're saying she changed?” Ettinger prompted. “This . . . put-together lady.”

“Yeah, I mean, she knew what she wanted, which was a job and a place to stay, and she let me know she was willing to sleep with me to get it, but it was like a front. She wasn't as sure of herself as she acted. Our first time, I mean our second but our first at my new place, she made me turn out the lights. It's like you meet people and they come across this one way, and then when you get to know them they're not what you expected. The first Nicki, the one from the TU banquet, she was a fellow traveler, but the second Nicki”—Sam sat back in the chair and stared for a time at the heavens—“I fell for that Nicki.”

He said that she'd been clingy at first, would reach out and take his hand, look at him with a shy smile that came at unexpected moments and was a more intimate gesture, somehow, than sex. He couldn't believe that this angelic person had made him the center of her world, and he was falling for her even as the river dropped into shape and she began to assert herself as a guide. Sam felt her leaving the security he offered to bask in her own confidence, in time, to regard him more as a brother than as a lover. And there was something else. A wistfulness came over her; he could hear a note of loss in her voice. It was as if she'd somehow aged ten years in two months, and had lost something that could never be regained. But then, quite abruptly, the confidence was gone and she returned to Sam's bed. But just for a couple nights. A week later she told him that she'd been offered a job as a naturalist and fishing guide at the dude ranch.

“You know how I felt, Kimosabe?” He turned to Stranahan. “I felt like I did when I raised that mallard duckling after Killer killed the hen. You get all invested and then you open your hand and it flies away. No good-bye. Gone. Unrequited love, man. It's a bastard.”

“Sam, look at me,” Martha said.

He did and said, “You put your shirt on. I didn't want to embarrass you before, but what I said about you being a man under your clothes, it isn't true. You're all woman. That big Indian you were going around with—he doesn't know what he's missing. I'm just saying—”

“Sam, listen to me. We're trying to find Nicki. Was there anything about her, an interest of hers, anyone she met, that might help us do that?”

“You don't think I've been asking myself the same question? The truth is I didn't know her as well as you think. She told me about growing up in B.C. a little, how her dad was a trapper and she rebelled against that, but she got close to him at the end. It meant a lot to her that she was his daughter again.”

“Did she ever say why she came down here from Libby?”

“No, I thought maybe she just wanted to wipe the slate clean after he passed.”

“Did she mention her sister?” Stranahan said. He'd been following the conversation but unlike Ettinger, who had her second wind, he was asleep on his feet. The question was thrown out only because she hadn't asked it.

“No, man. I didn't know she had a sister. She had a sister?”

“She'll be here tomorrow morning.”

Sam shook his head. He looked up as a shooting star fell from the heavens, trailing a path of silver glitter.

“Stars every fuckin' where you look. God, there must be a million of them.”

They were silent a few minutes until he spoke again. “A man would have to be a goddamned fool to leave Montana, you know it, Stranny?”

—

A
t eight in the morning, Martha Ettinger listened to the motor of the Cherokee ping down after the thirty-mile drive from the motel. She laid her head on the steering wheel and didn't raise it until she heard the clubhouse door open and saw Stranahan standing on the porch, holding a cup of steaming coffee. “Breakfast's on the table,” he called out.

Martha blew out a long breath. She tilted the rearview. “I can't believe I took off my shirt,” she said to the image that stared back at her. She shook her head. “Get a grip, Martha. What in the hell is happening to you?”

Kenneth Winston had made bacon, eggs and cinnamon toast. Patrick Willoughby fussed over her. Everybody had clothes on and she cheered up a little. Mercifully, Sam Meslik was still asleep. Maybe he'd been so drunk he wouldn't remember.

She heard a toilet flush. Sam appeared at the door of the bunkhouse. He had on boxers and scratched at the hair on his chest, a Neanderthal hunter waking up to a Starbucks morning. He offered a gap-toothed grin, having taken his bridgework out before hitting the feathers.

“Hey there, thirty-six C,” he said.

Martha felt the color run right up into her roots.

F
our young men who'd been part of the initial hasty team search were gathered around a map spread on the hood of Jason Kent's diesel 4 x 4. A type—waists like carpenter ants', rock climbers' arms, a certain way of holding the body. Been-there-done-that men. Kent made the introductions. They were going to climb over the crest of the Madison Range to drop into the Hilgard Lakes Basin. It was off the search grid, but if the missing woman was trying to get as far from the source of her fright as she could, if in fact she'd been frightened but uninjured, the pass the men were taking was a natural line of retreat. Kent was driving them to the trailhead, and as the men threw their backpacks into the bed of the pickup and vaulted in, he turned to Martha and said the sister had been briefed on the search and was waiting for them at the corral. She wanted to ride the trail Nicki had taken as soon as possible.

“I don't think the fact of the matter has registered,” he said. “Usually by the third day they just want to scream. Or cry. Or sleep, finally.” Or even have sex, he had discovered. Even a man as plain as Jason Kent had found himself the subject of uneasy attention when a single mother began to give up her son for dead. “But this sister,” he shook his head, “we're five days in and she seems to be locked in the initial phase of denial.”

“Any impression of her?”

His face was impassive. Kent was always hard to read. “Nothing you won't see for yourself,” he said.

—

F
rom fifty feet, Asena Martinelli was a broad shouldered, trim figure under a Stetson, sitting tall in the saddle. She dismounted the bay quarter horse when Sean and Martha drove up and handed the lead to the assistant wrangler who'd helped her with the tack. Turning, she placed her hands on her iliac crests and regarded them with a cool expression.

Martha felt her abdomen press against her belt. Too much worry, too little exercise, too many pieces of MacKenzie River Pizza. She spoke out of the side of her mouth.

“That woman couldn't give birth to a well-fed gerbil.”

“Now Martha,” Stranahan said. “She still might have a harelip.”

She did not have a harelip. Rather, her lips were perfectly even, with commas of smile lines in her cheeks that deepened as she approached. Later, Sean would believe that she was one of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen, but it was the eyes that registered first. They were a pale, cold green, a color he associated with frozen waterfalls. The eyes flashed from Martha to Sean and back again to Martha.

“Hello.” She shook Martha's hand. “I'm Nadina.”

“We'd heard it was Asena,” Stranahan said.

“It's both.” Her handshake was firm. “My sister and I were named for mountains where we grew up, the Nadina and Nanika peaks.”

“What should we call you?”

“Nicki started calling me Asena when we were kids. It's stuck.” Her head tilted a fraction. Something in Stranahan's face or voice seemed to have surprised her.

Sean, who was never conscious of his appearance, was conscious of his appearance.

“I'm sorry for staring, but you remind me of someone. I usually don't forget a face.” Her voice had a slight French Canadian accent, with the rising inflections that turned a declaration into a question.

And to Ettinger: “I got here as fast as I could.”

Martha, having done the math, let it pass. Had the woman left for Bridger even twenty-four hours after the department tracked her down, she should have been here two days ago.

“I'd like to see where this happened,” she said, her tone assertive.

“And we'll take you there,” Martha said, “but you have to understand . . .” She began to give the talk, the talk you gave to the husband, to the wife, to the sister, to the one who couldn't envision life without the person who'd gone missing and so refused to admit it could happen.

Stranahan used the opportunity to study the woman. Only once had he met Nicki Martinelli, at a boat launch—she was taking out, he was putting in—an encounter of a few minutes, but vivid in his mind. Like everyone else he'd been struck by her beauty, by her bubbly, playful personality, shy and bold at the same time, and, of course, her hair. The woman standing before him was obviously older, at least she acted older and her face seemed to have weathered more of life, but the physical resemblance was striking. Martha had been dead wrong. Asena Martinelli exuded fertility and shared the same body with her sister, if not the same posture. Where Nicki was comfortable in the ripeness of her flesh and did not show it off as much as not care how it was shown, that was part of her allure, this woman stood the way ranch women stand who have worn Stetsons with rain protectors and shown horses half their lives—mannishly upright, bandana knotted just so, a careful presentation of themselves to the world, with much held in reserve. If there was a noticeable difference in the faces, beyond the severity of expression, it was that this woman's skin looked thinner, stretched to reveal the sculpture of the bones. The hair was the same autumn flame, but cropped short under the shade of the wide-brimmed hat.

As Stranahan observed her, she took her hands off her hips and folded them defiantly across her chest. She'd undoubtedly heard the same talk from Jason Kent that she was hearing from Ettinger.

Stranahan took the lead from Martha and discussed the most likely scenarios, the possibility of injury, the odds of her having walked off the search grid—lost-person behavior was a science, and a woman of Nicki's age and physical fitness might travel quite far when gripped by panic, farther than they would if they were much younger or somewhat older. Was there a chance, Stranahan wanted to know, that for whatever reason she had disappeared on purpose or found her way out of the wilderness and not reported the incident?

No, that wasn't possible.

“This is grizzly country, this close to Yellowstone, isn't it.” The woman made it a statement. “And wolves. One of the people I talked to this morning, Mr. Anderson, told me that wolves were in the wilderness where my sister disappeared.”

“The odds of attack are very slim,” Ettinger said.

“But it's a possibility.” Again, a statement.

“It has to be considered.”

—

I
n a search, relatives of the missing got in the way. They wanted to help, which meant if you couldn't dissuade them from going into the forest you had to take someone off the search to act as a bodyguard. One person missing was bad enough, let a city slicker have his head and you had two. Asena Martinelli was no city slicker, but it was clear she wasn't to be denied looking for her sister. Ettinger, letting exasperation show in her voice, went off to saddle Petal and Big Mike. She'd taken up Bucky Anderson's offer to stable them at the ranch until the search effort was over.

“I'll help you,” Stranahan said, waiting for her cue.

“Nah, Big Mike will just barrel his chest if you try to put a sternum strap on him. He knows better than to try that foolishness with me.” Meaning, I want you to stay with her and report your impressions later.

Martinelli turned an appraising eye on Stranahan, her gaze level and very cool, and said, “What exactly is it you do, Mr. Stranahan? You don't look very . . . official.”

“I used to be a private detective,” he said. “Now I consider myself a Renaissance man. I guide during the trout season, I write for the fishing magazines a bit, and paint in the winter; actually I paint whenever I get a commission.”

“So you're an investigator for the department, like a freelancer,” she said.

“More like a helper-outer. I'm another set of eyes on the ground when there aren't enough to see around the corners.”

“I see,” she said cautiously. It was clear she didn't. She offered a brief smile. “You have a funny way of talking,” she said. Then the resolution he'd read in her face seemed to crack to reveal her vulnerability. The eyes that were the color of waterfalls warmed somewhat; they deepened to a green that reminded Stranahan of storm waves in the sea.

“I suppose you think I'm crazy, thinking I can find her when all of you can't. But I have to. She's my little sister. She's all I have.”

“We appreciate your help,” Sean said. “You know her better than we do, how she might act in a stressful situation. Knowing her tendencies can help give us direction.”

“You aren't just saying that?” Her tone was hopeful, but as they saw Ettinger come around the stable leading the horses, bitterness crept in. “Your sheriff thinks the time's past when we have any chance to find her. She didn't say that, but I could tell. That big man I talked to this morning, Mr. Kent, he made it pretty clear.”

“I find it's best to try not to think too much, but just keep at it. If she's out there, we'll find her.”

“That's easy for you to say.” She turned her back and walked to her mount, swinging effortlessly into the saddle. The wrangler who'd been holding the lead for her cocked his hat and walked away with his hands in his back pockets, trying to look like a cowboy for the pretty woman.

—

S
he'd obviously spent time in the stirrups. Stranahan, in line behind her as the horses reached the timberline, eyed the rhythmic motion of her buttocks not with lust but envy; his own butt, still sore from the ride the other day, bounced hard off the saddle with every step.

Ettinger reined Petal to a stop. “That copse of whitebark pine,” she pointed to the clump of trees about a quarter mile downslope, “that's where we found the wrangler's body. Her hat was found on a line between those trees and where we are now. We figure she got bucked. Maybe the horse smelled the wolves.”

“It's big country,” Martinelli said. “But not as big as B.C. Nicki wouldn't be intimidated by a few trees.”

Martha turned a sober face to the slide rock at the timberline.
What are we doing up here?
Her “Let's go look at the scene” lacked conviction.

The scene told them nothing it hadn't already, but had a pronounced affect on Asena Martinelli. She became silent and for a time appeared oblivious to Stranahan's and Ettinger's presence, wiping almost angrily at two tears that ran crookedly down the planes of her left cheek.

“Do you think he suffered?”

Ettinger nodded for Stranahan to answer.

“The medical examiner said he bled to death. He said it was quick.”

“I was told it was an accident. Is that the truth?”

Ettinger swallowed. “We don't know.”

“Do you think my sister saw . . . this?”

“We think she was here, but we don't know what she saw. It snowed that night. The tracks were covered and hard to read.”

The hopelessness of the situation seemed to befall her at once. “I don't know what to do,” she said in a small voice. “Tell me what to do.”

“Miss Martinelli,” Ettinger said, “I'm terribly sorry about this. You think I don't care because I didn't want to ride up here and you're half right. I didn't want to come here because I don't think it will get us any closer to finding your sister. But you're wrong that I don't care. Just because the physical search has a time limit doesn't mean I do. I'll find your sister, I promise.”

It was midafternoon by the time they returned to the corral. Stranahan went to get the Jeep while the two women brushed down the horses. Martha had wanted a little time with her alone.

“So what's your impression?” he said, when Ettinger climbed into the passenger seat.

“I told her someone from the department searched her father's cabin, didn't say it was you. Didn't mention any shooting. I meant to, but I sat on it and I don't know why. Maybe because it would be a distraction. But she deserved to know we were looking other places than the mountain. My impression? It struck me as odd that she seemed more concerned about Grady Cole's fate than the disappearance of her sister.”

“Oh, I didn't pick up on that.”

“You don't have the antennae I do.”

“I did notice you told her you were going to find Nicki. The Martha I know doesn't build false hope.”

“I was sorry as soon as I said it. It's a part of the job I could do better. But we will find her. It fell below freezing that night. She's either dead of hypothermia three days ago, dead of hypothermia two days ago, or dead of hypothermia yesterday. The dogs will find her. Or else she deliberately disappeared, in which case I'll find her just so I can strangle her.”

“Aren't you the pessimist?” Stranahan said. “Comes with the badge, huh?”

Ettinger grunted. “More like with two divorces.”