The Royal Wulff Murders (39 page)

They talked a little longer, skimming surfaces. Hanging in the room was the unspoken thought that they might never see each other again. Finally Martha Ettinger extended her hand. He took it in both of his, pressed it.

“By the way,” he said. “Where are you going elk hunting?”

“Bob Marshall Wilderness. It’s God’s country up there. You won’t find anything like it where you came from. You get serious about leaving, you keep that in mind.”

She turned and made good her exit.

Stranahan caught himself frowning at the reverse lettering on his office door. Maybe he’d call the guy and cancel. Think it over some. After all, he’d had a hand in solving the Royal Wulff murders. Nothing like that had ever happened to him in the East. Then too, he’d yet to fish Montana in the spring.

He picked up his brush, dabbed it onto the palette, and touched it to the canvas.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

M
artha Ettinger unfolded the hand-drawn map and stared at the directions scribbled in red ink, her truck idling at the trailhead. It was November 10, snow following snow for two weeks. She shut off the ignition, braced herself for the shock of the cold, and then walked back through a foot of powder to the tailgate of her truck camper. An envelope of steam issued through the slats of the horse trailer she’d hauled from Bridger.

“I’ll be there in a jiff, Petal. Long drive, huh?” She straddled the trailer tongue and opened the camper latch. Saddle, saddle bags, bedroll, Winchester rifle. All there, no turning back now.

The one thing she’d insisted on was her own horse. She told herself she could always ride out if it started to feel awkward. Half of her, the half that sought the comfortable routine, had hoped that Harold Little Feather had forgotten the invitation he’d extended to her to join him, along with his brother Howard and Howard’s wife, Bobby, for a week in elk camp up on the shoulders of the Continental Divide. The half that still remembered the silky feel of a once-worn blue dress had thought of little else as the autumn burned down, the larch trees rusting red and the needles feathering the snow. She told herself this would be elk hunting, nothing more. He’d said they would pack in a fifteen-pole Sioux teepee. One teepee, four hunters, no running water but the Two Medicine River tinkling under a pane of ice. It wasn’t like he’d asked her to join him in Paris. How much trouble could a woman get into?

Snow was spitting when she touched Petal’s ribs. The mare dipped her head, her tack creaking as she walked past the truck with Browning plates that Harold had driven in a couple days before. Up the trail were the sacred hunting grounds of the Blackfeet. Before the clouds closed in, Martha had cricked her neck gazing through the windshield at the swept escarpments and soaring peaks. From experience, she knew how wilderness swallows a person, that the toll it exacts on human confidence is in direct relation to the hours of light left in the sky. It was only a little past noon, but already the day seemed in decline. A pall fell upon her spirits. The deep imprints of the horseshoes that marked the trail left by Harold’s hunting party filled steadily with snow.

An hour up the trail, Martha stopped to layer a down vest under her hunting jacket. She wrapped a silk scarf under her chin. Clucking to Petal, she squinted through eyelashes frosted with ice. According to Harold’s map, she was supposed to take a fork in the trail eight miles from the trailhead, near the saddle of a ridge. A dotted line, bleeding ink where snowflakes had melted on the paper, indicated a path that left the trail to work through stunted aspens to a bench above the river. Harold had written that he’d leave his blaze on a tree at the fork, three slashes on the diagonal. But what if snow was driven against the trunk, obscuring the blaze?

She clucked to Petal. The snow was coming harder. When she stopped to let the mare blow an hour and a half later, she felt the hollowness that foreshadows human panic. She’d reached a saddle on the crest of a ridge—the right saddle, the wrong one, she couldn’t be certain. Harold had written that from the saddle she’d have her first glimpse of Silvertip Peak to the west. But all she could see was wilderness rolling away in a sucking undertow, black timber waves cresting to a foreshortened horizon of falling snow. I can turn around now, she told herself, be out before the truck gets stuck. I can call Harold later and tell him the road to the trailhead drifted in with snow. Go
back to radio static, Walt’s crowing, cats twining at the foot of her bed.

She turned her head to look back at the forest she’d been climbing through, the pines grizzled with snow like the hump of a bear. It was all of a piece, a monotonous slope of dusted black timber. It was behind her and a part of her life now. But ahead the land was new, the air was thinner, the story unwritten. You heard yourself breathe this high.

“Oh for chrissakes, I’m the sheriff,” she whispered to the void. “They gave me seventy percent of the vote.” Gathering courage against several unknowns, she touched Petal’s ribs and moved up the trail.

It was his horse she saw first, the big paint ghosting through a copse of stunted aspens. The arthritic snarl of branches obscured the silhouette of the rider until the horse stepped out onto the trail and turned broadside, steam rising in columns from its nostrils. She’d never seen Harold without his hair braided up. It was longer than she remembered, made his face look less civilized. Three black slashes crossed his sculpted cheek.

“Afternoon, Sheriff,” he said.

“Harold, you look…” She was lost for words.

“Like an Indian? Don’t worry. Just me. Have any trouble?”

“No.”

“Come on, then. Camp’s down the hill. Howard got an elk yesterday, fat spike bull. We’re cooking liver.”

Martha glanced at the scabbard against the paint’s broad withers. Extending from the leather was a weather-beaten rifle stock and the exposed hammer of a lever-action rifle. The receiver had a pewter patina where the bluing had worn off from handling.

“Is that an .86 Winchester?” she said. She felt nervous and giddy, just making talk.

“You know your rifles,” Harold said. “My father’s gun. I had it rebarrelled to .450 Alaskan. Big bullet, but slow.”

“Guess you have to get close.”

“Well, I’m a tracker, Martha,” he said, and turned to ride down the path. The words came over his shoulder. “The way I feel about elk hunting, it’s like making love. You ought to do it face-to-face.” A pause, the blood flushing through Martha’s cheeks. “’Bout four times out of five, anyways,” he said.

She felt the heat of her horse rise through her. She watched the black hair shifting in the hollow formed between Harold’s shoulders, was aware of her breathing and the muffled clop of hooves. He had what looked like an eagle’s feather tied into his hair, fluttering in the breeze.

When they came into the clearing, she saw the second teepee, the one Harold hadn’t told her about. She saw it right off.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

I
n Montana, the first blush of spring arrives with the greening of riverbank willows. Stranahan felt the current swelling against his legs, the river running full and clouded with the blood of snowmelt. For the second time that afternoon, he peered down at his fly box. With the water cold, he knew he’d have to fish deep to coax a trout from its torpor. A bead-head Prince nymph had been his first choice. It had brought the whitefish out of their introspection, one after the other. Maybe, he thought, the answer was a bigger fly.

Wading to the bank, he sat down on an old drift log. Not a soul in sight. One thing you could say about a weekday in April, you owned the river, even the Madison. He pulled an apple out of his vest pocket and ate it, staring contemplatively at the water.

Winter had been a season of decompression for him, and a long time passing. Sometime after Christmas he’d finally gotten through to Vareda on the phone. She had seemed distant, her voice so soft he could hardly hear her. “Did you get my painting?’ he’d asked. Yes, she’d said, but she wondered about the expression. “Do I look that sad to you?” she had said. He’d tried to make a joke, telling her that she was his Mona Lisa, and she had replied that he didn’t know her at all. “I’m not sure that I want to talk to you,” she said, and then a lilt had come into her voice, and she had said maybe, if he asked her nicely, she could change her mind. He heard her throaty laughter. It was a side of her that came and went like light reflected in a revolving chandelier.

After that his phone would ring late at night every other week or so. They would talk through the small hours, so that the next day became a hollow time when the town looked foreign and a long distance seemed to separate him from familiar faces. This would be followed by a lull. He’d immerse himself back into work and after a few days it would be Vareda who seemed far away. Maybe he could come down in May, she said once. She could show him where the redfish swam. Take him on a walk where the fireflies flickered under the willows. But was it just the hour speaking? He didn’t know—most days he doubted he’d ever see her again.

In the meantime, he’d completed nine of the dozen paintings Summersby had commissioned. And, miracle of miracles, two watercolors he’d been shopping for limited edition prints were accepted by a respected agency with an office in the Flatiron district in New York City. He’d flown there in early March, ingratiated himself with the avant-garde colorist who condescended to manage the agency, and bar-hopped with the man’s friends in Chelsea. Afterward, he had rented a car and driven to Vermont. He’d dreaded seeing Beth, but it was something that had to be faced. The expected pang of longing when she answered the door of the old farmhouse was akin to standing at the edge of a cliff.

Beth looked as lovely as ever, with stray hairs escaping from her curls and her arms crossed over a Norwegian-pattern sweater. She’d released her grip on herself long enough to peck him on the cheek. She invited him inside. It was no longer his house, he realized. They’d managed a civilized conversation over a cup of coffee. Afterward, she had followed him about the house, talking of this and that as he gathered up rolls of canvas and odds and ends of art supplies he hadn’t been able to fit into the Land Cruiser when they’d separated. When he’d asked her, with rather transparent nonchalance, if she was seeing anyone, she shook her head no, and for an instant she fought back tears.

At the door, her face clouded over and she hugged him for a long minute, burying her face against his shoulder. Her expression, when she pulled back to hold him at arm’s length, her cheeks glinting, was
Aren’t we a pair?
But there was more sadness than love in her eyes, and in the end he’d felt relief to fly back to Montana, where he could feed his office mouse crumbs of a croissant, flirt with Sheriff Ettinger when their paths crossed, and shoot pool with Sam at the Cottonwood Inn.

S
tranahan returned his attention to the river. He patted the outside of his vest. The box of nymphs and streamer flies that Vareda’s father had tied was still zipped in a pocket. Nothing else seemed to be working. Why not try one? He opened the box and picked out a sculpin imitation with enough lead wire wrapped under the body to tap bottom. The first fish to grab the fly was a brown, hollow-bellied from the winter but athletic enough for a trout this early in the season. A few more casts and he had another, a chunky rainbow with dull silver sides. It surprised him a little. He’d expected that most of the rainbows would be up the feeders to spawn, that the river would be claimed by their Old World cousins. A second rainbow and then a third disavowed him of the presumption, and as he admired the fourth, which had brute shoulders and was perhaps a shade under three pounds, his eyebrows furrowed. A shallow V-shaped notch scarred its adipose fin. The fin had healed over with a thin white line edging the scar, but the V remained sharp-sided, as if it had been cut with the scissors of a fisherman’s tool. Stranahan didn’t have a camera and thought briefly of killing it, but what would that prove? He couldn’t imagine sending Vareda a dead fish. She’d believed her father’s story about marking the trout he caught—it was Stranahan who had needed convincing. Still, it seemed a bit of a miracle. She’d want to know.

Slipping the hook from the jaw hinge, he held the fish in the
current so that the water worked over its gills. The rainbow marked the end of a story that had begun nearly nine months ago and he was reluctant to open his hand. Trout are the ghosts of moving waters, gone like the dreams one longs to remember. When this one glimmered away, he felt as if he’d caught smoke or that it had never been there in the first place.

Walking to the bank, he piled up a cairn of stones to commemorate the trout. He hooked the fly into the cork of his rod grip. Then he began his hike up the hill to retrieve the coffee can of ashes from the
truck.