Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (29 page)

 

Epilogue

S
tranahan pinched a Crazy Charlie he'd tied in his art studio between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Loops of fly line trailed in the water as his wading shoes lifted puffy clouds of marl from the bottom of the flat. Forty yards away, the surface shivered, marking a school of feeding bonefish. He turned to point out the nervous water to Martinique, who was a vision in her turquoise bikini on the pink sand beach. The cat woman who had been named for a Caribbean island but had never seen one had spent the day snorkeling and had her nose buried in a book.

Stranahan watched her turn a page and deliberately crossed his eyes until a shadow image separated and he was looking at two of her. She would be moving to Corvallis less than a week after they returned to the States. The drive from Bridger to western Oregon was fourteen hours, which he could ill afford to undertake very often with the cost of gasoline and the unslakable thirst of his Land Cruiser. He was thinking about trading the beloved beast for a hybrid to make a long-distance relationship feasible, but then he wasn't sure convention permitted a fisherman to operate a Prius, or how he would haul his raft with one. Sam, he knew, would never let him hear the end of it.

It was Sam who was petsitting for them. He'd balked at taking in the three cats and the dog, warning Sean that Killer would have them for breakfast. But when Stranahan had checked in with him from the club's beach cottage, Sam told him it was Killer who'd been put in his place. Extending an inquisitive muzzle toward the coon cat, he'd received a swat on the nose and dripped a trail of blood into Sam's bedroom, where he'd cowered ever since. “I never thought I'd say it, Kimosabe, but my dog's been pussy-whipped. You paintbrush-pushing excuse of a fly fisherman”—as a New Year's resolution Sam had decided to swear off swearing, “on account of it's time I started sounding more like a fucking human being”—“I'm cleaning kitty litter and freezing my coconuts off while you're fishing in your skivvies.”

“Coconuts, Sam?” Stranahan told him to curl up with the cats and was laughing when he put the phone down. He'd made a note to bring the big fella a bottle of Old Nassau rum.

When he refocused so that Martinique was no longer an abstraction and turned toward the ocean, the school of bonefish had moved out of casting range. A midget barracuda regarded him with a carnivorous grin and Stranahan held its stare. When he lifted his head, there was something different about the flat and he swept his eyes back and forth, the polarized lenses of his glasses cutting through the surface mirror to search for the secrets beneath.
There.
A smoke-colored stick protruded from the flat, a vague shadow wavering underneath it.
A stick that wasn't there before?
Although Stranahan had never seen a tailing bonefish, he knew the stick was the top lobe of its tail, tilted up as the vulpine head rooted in the marl for penaeid shrimp and spider crabs. The tail waved at him, beckoning like a languid finger as Stranahan roll cast the loops of line off the surface, double-hauled, and shot a cast that dropped the fly three feet in front of the tail. He pulsed the Crazy Charlie, the tail folded over and disappeared, pulsed the fly again, the tail came up, and he felt the weight and lifted his hand into the smooth power of the bonefish. The line snapped tight against the arbor of the reel and then began to unspool, the line lifting a sheet of water, and Sean Stranahan, looking out to sea, forgot about secrets unearthed on a Montana mountain, forgot about a cabin unbuilt on a brook trout creek, forgot even about Martinique. He forgot about everything but the bend of the rod and the singing of the taut line and the phantom of the Eleutheran flats.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

L
ast summer, during a Fourth of July celebration, I discovered four baby blackbirds in a nest. The nest had been driven on a flatbed trailer some 150 miles, and it was only after the planting of the tree, a densely branched fir that a friend ordered from a tree farm, that anyone realized a family had been uprooted as well. This occurred in the Madison Valley that is the setting for this book, and I was well into the writing of it when I first heard the nestlings squawk.

With twilight casting a spell over the Gravelly Range, I took a shovel to the river to dig worms. Until that night I had never bought into the concept of novelists as people who lead interesting lives, as writing is largely a business of going into a room and shutting the door and telling lies that would put a politician to shame, engrossing enough to the one doing the lying but hardly the stuff of envy. But as I returned from the river to drop worms down the greedy mouths, I suspected that the writing of
The Gray Ghost Murders
might prove an exception. That was made abundantly clear when I contacted the nearest wild bird rescue person, who told me to call her Captain Marvel. When I asked Captain Marvel if she would take over the rearing of the nestlings—after all, that's what these people do, I naively thought—she said, “Honey, that's how we all start.”

So began the most demanding artistic endeavor of my career, for nestlings must be fed every fifteen minutes and heretofore I had aligned myself with that school of writing championed by Oscar Wilde, whose idea of a morning's work was to insert a coma, and in the afternoon to take it out. With the birds summoning my attention—and the squawking of a Brewer's blackbird is not to be ignored—I found that in order to avoid feeling a total failure I had to insert more than punctuation during the intervals of silence. And so, sitting under a sun umbrella near the chicken-wire enclosure I had built to house the little darlings,
The Gray Ghost Murders
was coaxed to life, and, in the process, I discovered that if you actually put words down as they come into your head, so that you might weigh and weed them later, rather than endlessly editing in your mind before committing so much as a period to the screen, then writing need not be a tortured bloodletting of a drop at a time, but could move and sing through your veins, or at least emerge onto the page in complete sentences.

In three weeks the birds had feathered over to become the terror of the neighborhood, soaring to parts unknown every evening, but usually perched on the top branch of a giant spruce in the morning, four little sentinels sitting side by side. For another month they continued to need supplemental feeding, and I would have to place a hand over my head to avoid being mobbed the moment I walked out the door. But what started as an act of mercy became a privilege as the summer grew short, for not only had these birds taught me a lesson about my craft, but they gave me a gift rarely awarded human beings, a personal glimpse of that indomitable wildness of spirit that is the wonder of nature, and that can be heard not only in the voices of wolves and elk in the mountain folds, but in the songs of our backyards.

By fall the siblings had become part of a larger flock wheeling in the sky, peeling off to visit me once or twice a day, the runt I called Blackie still hopping onto my laptop to take mealworms from my fingers. On October 12, I saw them together for the last time, and two days later Blackie came alone. He spoke in a querulous voice I had never before heard from a blackbird and then he, too, was gone. In the span of several days the raucous singing of the flocks was stilled, as thousands of blackbirds darkened the sky, and were seen no more. I finished the novel later that week.

And so it has been with an eye to the sky that I have worked this summer, hoping for their return. Blackbirds are colony nesters and do not invade town to forage until they have raised their broods; but as the fireworks of Independence Day burst forth and died, my hopes began to fade, and when I sat down to breakfast on July 7, I was resigned to the likelihood of never seeing them again. Compared with most songbirds, a blackbird's voice is unmusical, but to me it is as lovely as the whistling of a thrush, and with the first grating
aawk
I was running to the door. Blackie was perched on top of the cage, showing me his bold white eye. I wanted to tell him that the book was finished and that he and his two brothers and sister deserved credit, but he no longer had much use for a being who couldn't fly, and after letting me admire his iridescent plumage, he flew to the top of the spruce where I had so often seen him herald the dawn. I had but a fleeting glimpse, his fearsome countenance silhouetted against the sky, and then he was gone, this time, perhaps forever.

Keith McCafferty

August 14, 2012

ALSO BY KEITH McCAFFERTY

The Royal Wulff Murders