The Royal Wulff Murders (5 page)

Follow your dreams, follow your heart
. Stranahan caught himself repeating the clichés, but coming from her, they didn’t sound like clichés at all.

“Are you making fun of me, detective?” She tapped him lightly on the nose.

“Here,” she said. “This is the one I want. That’s you, isn’t it?”

The painting was an earlier, Norman Rockwell–inspired effort, a sepia-toned watercolor of a boy in a rowboat, his small hands gripping the oars while his knees locked around a fishing rod trolling line into the water.

“I’ll keep it where I can look at it, wherever I go,” she said. “This way, I’ll never have to say good-bye to you.”

Stranahan cooked for her, and they slept that second night in the loft, buried in blankets with the window cracked and snow sifting on the sill. Forty-four hours after meeting her on the steps of the Park Plaza, Stranahan dropped her off in front of the architectural firm where she worked.

“I know you told me no tomorrows,” he said before she opened the door, “but if I don’t ask if I can see you again, then I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering.”

She looked at him tenderly, then lifted the corners of her mouth into a sad smile. “In a few days I’m heading to Canada, where my sister lives. I need to get away while I decide what to do. I want you to remember me like this, not as a fifty-year-old woman when you’re still a young man.” She kissed him briefly. Then she opened the door and he watched her walk out of his life.

He had heard from her only once, early the following spring. She had addressed a postcard to the farmhouse. The postmark was Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Stranahan had set aside the letter and examined his hands. He smiled at the umber stains under the fingernails of his brush hand. He taped the letter to the back of the sketch he’d made in the hotel room and framed it in a simple walnut frame. Within three months of meeting Katherine O’Reilly, he had cleared his pending cases and sublet his office, moved to Vermont, and begun to paint full time. He had already had some success in Boston, but it seemed only appropriate that the first painting he sold at a local gallery was derived from the sketch. It was titled
Awakening
, done with broad brushstrokes in pastel flesh tones and dove grays, and fetched him the grand sum of $400. Its subject bore no resemblance to his eventual métier in landscape and angling watercolors, but it was a start, and had led to everything else, including, he thought ruefully, his marriage and divorce and the long drive to Montana.

Tonight, listening to the voice of a stranger, he felt a stirring of intimacy that scared him a little. It was easier to bask in the sad reflections of a lost love, to imagine even that there was still something to go home to after he and Beth had exhausted all the avenues of their escape from each other. But the words of Katherine O’Reilly haunted
him, for, long before the end, most of the words were gone from his own marriage.

Stranahan picked up his beer bottle and carried it back to the bar. It was after one. The bartender was wiping the counter and the only patron left was the logger Phil Halverson.

He looked at Stranahan down his whiskey purpled nose. “That was a helluva woman, voice like a fuggin’ angel. I don’t see the shadder come morning, you just might find me on the second floor, ten toes up, and ten toes down. Yeah,” he said, nodding to himself, “ten toes up, ten toes down! What do you think a that?”

“It’s a starry night. I think you’re going to see the shadow,” Stranahan said.

The logger wiped a finger under the filthy brim of his cap as Stranahan left, then stuck it in his mouth. He chased the taste of salt sweat with another swig of beer.

“Helluva woman,” he said to himself.

CHAPTER SIX

M
artha Ettinger groped for the phone.

“Ettinger.”

“Sheriff, it’s Doc Hanson. Sorry to call so early, but something’s been nagging me about the autopsy.”

“What is it, Bob? He drowned, right?” She glanced at the bed stand clock radio. Five a.m.

“Yeah, he drowned. But, well, there’s a couple a things…. I could explain, but it’d be easier if you came down to the morgue.”

“That where you are now?”

“Yeah, I woke up and got to thinking, so I came on down. He’s on the table in front of me as we speak, the poor fella.”

“Give me forty minutes. I gotta feed the horse and the chickens, or else I’ll have to drive back out here later on.”

“Take your time. He isn’t going anywhere.”

Martha hung up the phone and sat up in bed. Her cats, Elsa and Sheba, which slept intertwined at the foot of the bed, arched their backs, yawned, and walked up and began to rub their heads against Martha’s shoulders.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Give me a minute.”

She padded on bare feet to the bathroom and opened the hot water spigot in the shower. While she waited for the water to warm, she pulled her flannel nightgown over her head and looked critically at herself in the mirror. Thirty-seven years old, she thought, and wearing
every day for the world to see. Martha Ettinger had a round face that was saved from ordinariness by blue eyes that seemed lit from within; when she smiled, which she didn’t when looking in the mirror, her face took on a glow.

“She’ll have boys flying to her like moths to a flame,” her father had been fond of saying, and that had been the truth. Problem was, they were never the right boys. The boy who might have been right, who had grown up on the neighboring ranch, had been too shy to approach her once she reached puberty. It had always been the football players and the rodeo boys who came on to her. She had lost her virginity at sixteen to a calf roper who wore skintight Wranglers and a belt with a buckle the size of an elk’s hoof. She could remember lying on her back on the rough straw of a horse trailer, the roper’s quarter horse, Charlie, peering down at her from the stall divider while the roper pumped obliviously away. She remembered thinking,
He doesn’t even know I’m here.

Both her attempts at marriage had ended on the same note. When her second husband, Burt, a cattle auctioneer from Miles City, opened his mouth about ten times too often in the Mint Bar one night, she stood screaming while a ranch hand beat him senseless. Flinging herself onto the hand’s back, she was cast aside as if she were a bag of feed. Later, pacing the lobby of the emergency room while her husband’s jaw was wired shut, she found that she was furious at her own helplessness to do anything when the fight started. It wasn’t concern for Burt, who was an asshole and deserved the beating—the marriage had been on its way to the Dumpster for several years—it was her own inadequacy to handle the curves life threw you. She’d been brought up in a tradition of self-reliance, but had the misfortune of being pretty and had allowed herself to be subjected to the wills of alpha males ever since high school, losing most of her self-esteem in the process. She didn’t know exactly how, just yet, but that was going to change.

The day after she filed for divorce she put in an application for the police academy in Billings. She was accepted to fill a gender quota but rose through the ranks on her own merits, which included several marksmanship trophies and a brown belt in karate. Ten years after graduating from the academy, while she was serving as deputy sheriff of Hyalite County, she’d been invited to a dance held annually at the Cottonwood Inn during the August Sweet Pea Festival. By Montana standards it was a gala affair, where schoolmarms in sequined flapper gowns vied for space on the dance floor with cowboys wearing jeans, Stetsons, and tuxedo shirts. A fight broke out over a divorce that one man had assumed to be final and another had assured him wasn’t, and the next thing Martha knew she was standing over a two-hundred-pound drunk with the heel of her shoe dug into his ear hole.

“Move one inch, dirtbag, and you’ll be the first man in Hyalite County to be deceased via a woman’s high-heel shoe,” she had shouted at him. The night before, she’d been watching
Hill Street Blues
resurrected on a cable channel.

Martha was only vaguely aware of a growing circle of dancers, among whom stood several of the city fathers, including the mayor, Stan Vogel. What they saw was an attractive, slightly chunky brunette woman, sweating and braless under a V-neck silk gown, who was totally in control of the situation.

With no handcuffs handy, Martha marched the man outside and stuffed him into the passenger seat of her date’s Jeep Wrangler. Followed outside by a small crowd, she declined invitations for help—“He’s not going to give me any trouble, are you, mister”—and drove away.

“Just like Gary fucking Cooper in
High Noon
,” one of the dancers wrote in a letter to the editor the following day. The newspaper quote, minus the F-word, struck a chord with the city. Cooper was a native Montanan who had actually gone to high school in Bridger back in the 1930s. Two and a half months later, Martha Ettinger won a three-way
race for sheriff by fifteen points. But the dance at the Cottonwood Inn had been the last chance she’d had to wear the blue silk gown.

“H
ow are the boys?” Doc Hanson said by way of a greeting. It came out all one word—“Howrtheboys?”

“Too good to be longing for their mother,” Martha said. “Derek’s up in Alaska; he has a summer job with the Forest Service cutting trail. David’s with his father down in Arizona, hawking Navajo turquoise to tourists, cruising the roads at night, looking for rattlesnakes.”

“You don’t say? What’s a high school kid doing looking for snakes, for chrissake?”

“That’s a story for a day when we don’t have to attend business,” Martha said.

“All right, fair enough. Just help yourself to some donuts and coffee and slip into these after.” He handed her a paper suit, mask, and latex surgical gloves.

She decided to skip the donuts. Martha wasn’t squeamish: she saddled her horse every November, stuck her .30-06 in the scabbard, and shot her elk, dressed it, skinned it, hung it in the barn, and butchered it. But the autopsy suite at the morgue, with its cold floor, body fluid drain basins, and copper smell of blood quelled any appetite she might have brought to the double bay doors.

She walked over to where the body was lying on a stainless steel table. Even with the bloating she could see the fine musculature and good cheekbones. Just a couple of days ago, she thought, this had been an attractive young man. Who had dyed his hair, she noted. She tried to avoid looking at the torn eye socket that the stick had gouged.

“Like I told you yesterday, the ocular wound was postmortem,” Hanson said. “No bleeding; he was already dead. It could have happened when he hit that log after drowning, but so close on the heels of his death you’d expect more lividity. Makes one think he could
have been dead awhile before fetching up. The trout fly’s another story. Swelling, bruising. Almost like he’d wrapped his hand around the leader and yanked on it.”

“Or someone else did,” Martha said.

“Or someone else did.”

“You got me out of my feather bed to tell me what I already know, or is there something else? Any signs of struggle? I’m taking shit at the department for hushing the newspaper and making this out to be a suspicious death. If it wasn’t for the stick being downstream from the body, this is an accidental drowning, cut-and-dried. As it stands, I’m looking like a woman who reads too many detective novels.”

“I’ve been accused of being too thorough myself, Martha. But every once in a while it pays off.”

He picked up a surgical tool that looked like a cocaine spoon, lifted the blackened lip, and inserted the spoon into the mouth of the corpse. He scraped deliberately along the inner lining of the esophagus—Ettinger turned her head away, suppressing a gag.

The county medical examiner carried the spoon to a steel counter on which stood an old-fashioned microscope with a squat, matte black body. Hanson deposited a peppercorn of debris onto a glass specimen slide, added a drop of staining solution, then compressed the sample with another slide. He inserted the sample under the microscope lens and made adjustments, talking with his eye glued to the eyepiece.

“My parents bought me this microscope when I was twelve. That was 1963. It was state-of-the-art then. I’ve probably spent more hours looking through this eyepiece than most people have looking at television.”

“What’s your point, Bob? Cut to the chase.”

He ignored her.

“I was fascinated with nature—not just the marquee attractions, the bear and deer and so on, but the world at my feet. Spiders, snakes—that’s why I asked why your son was interested in snakes, ’cause
I was. Insects. Chlorophyll cells in leaves. Whatever I could squish between slides, I looked at with this microscope.”

He glanced up from the lens. “I wanted to be a marine biologist. Naturally, I’d never seen an ocean in my life. But here was Lake Erie practically in the backyard—my dad worked for Dayton Tire—and when I graduated from high school I chose U of M, Michigan, ’cause they had a program in limnology. Dad was a Buckeye to his core; he’s called me a traitor ever since.

“Anyway,” he held up a hand when Martha started to interrupt, “I’m coming to a point here. Limnology is the study of freshwater systems, lakes instead of oceans. I was all set to go on to grad school, but then I had a temporary lapse of sanity. The Vietnam War was coming to a close, and as a child of the sixties I thought I could make more of a difference in the world if I concentrated on helping people instead of writing scholarly papers on the taxonomy of mayflies. I’d already taken all the premed courses and had the grades, so I applied to med school and this part of me”—he patted his chest—“has regretted it ever since.”