Crazy Mountain Kiss (11 page)

“That card you have is the video we made the first night. It maxed out and Maria put in a new card to record the next night; it was her camera. After our . . . intimacies, we heard something. It was cold, but the fire drew better with the window open. Otherwise I don't think we would have noticed.”

“What was it you heard?”

“Like a clattering sound. Maria was shutting down the camera and ran right out the door. She's one of those people who'd walk up to a lion and it would be the lion that backed down. So this is her shooting what she saw. It's shaky because she had her shotgun in her hand.” She pressed the play button.

A shadow, imprinted against the darker forest background, appeared at the center of the screen and seemed to jerk a few steps, as if dragging a leg, then disappeared. The eye of the camera panned up and down. Then a voice—“There's the bastard”—and the camera zoomed to a horizon line at a break in the forest. There was the sound of a shot as the frame jerked wildly. Moments later the camera
steadied to show a circular shape imprinted under the silver orb of a moon a day off the full, the image looking like two-thirds of a two-tone snowman. The opacity blotted out the early stars, then the stars were back and the pelt of snow in the foreground shimmered with an eerie lambency.

“You fucking better be gone!” The voice on the video was scared and full of vitriol at the same time. “Would you believe the nerve, the fucking Tom. Yeah, that's right, I'll shoot you again if you come back.” The camera panned to the porch, littered with quarter rounds that had fallen from a woodpile, then switched off.

“I only heard one shot,” Stranahan said.

“The other one was as soon as she went out the door, before she switched the camera on. I think it bumped into the wood, that's what we heard.”

“Do you think she hit anything?”

“No. She shot the first barrel straight up through the roof and she was shooting with the camera in her hand the second time. I think she just pointed in the vague direction. There wasn't any blood in the snow, anyway.”

“It or he?”

She shrugged. “We ran this a hundred times and you just can't tell. The tracks were just troughs in the snow.”

“Back it up.”

He had her freeze the frame when the orb appeared above the horizon. “It's either a human or a bear standing on his hind legs with his face forward, so you can't see the nose.”

“Wouldn't bears be in hibernation?”

“Most of them,” Stranahan said. “A few are known to stay out all winter, more often now because they can get by scavenging wolf kills. Could you burn this onto a DVD? We have analysts who can do amazing things with video.”

She pulled out a thumb drive from the back of the computer. “I was copying it onto here while you watched. What you're getting is the intruder part, not the other.” She handed him the thumb drive.

“That's all we're interested in. You saw it, right?”

She nodded. “I was standing at the door.”

“Did you take it for a man and later think it could have been a bear, or the other way around?”

“A man. It scared the hell out of me. Maria, too, though she'd never admit it. Her whole body was trembling.”

“You talk about her as if you're a couple. My understanding was the club matched up one-night stands.”

“One-night stands don't have to stay that way.”

“So you're still with her?”

“Four months. She'll be here in about half an hour.” She seemed to anticipate Stranahan's next question. “No, it would not be a good thing if you stayed. She'd be suspicious and you wouldn't get a single thing out of her you haven't already learned. I've betrayed her trust by talking to you at all. I only did it because of the girl. I lost my own daughter. I know how important it is for a family to have closure.”

“So you were married, Eileen?”

“I was many things before I came out.” She regarded Stranahan with a sober expression. “Let me tell you something about the dominant-submissive relationship. The people involved have to be completely open. When you are the submissive, you have to have absolute trust that your dominant will stay within specified bounds, and when you are the dominant, you have to inspire that trust with your actions. People think we're role-playing, but that's a misconception, because you are not playing a part. What you
are
doing is awakening a part of you, a part that you may not even have known you possessed. The intimacy you share, not trust now but honesty, is absolute. It's something most conventional relationships fall far short of.”

She paused. “When you came here, the way you approached me, it's clear you rely on your charisma to get people to open up to you. Correct me if I'm wrong. Now, I'm not going to tell you there's anything wrong with that, it's just a tool and you'd be a fool not to use it, but I also sensed a detachment or disillusionment. Not boredom, but
a sort of recklessness, a hell-with-the-consequences, that I don't see as being you.”

“You've known me a half hour.”

She shook her head. “What's time? You can look into another person's eyes, someone you've only met, and read a story there that the person has never shared with anyone else. Has that never happened to you?”

“I knew a woman named Vareda Beaudreux,” Stranahan said. “It was that way with us.”

“All I'm saying is that when people affect a manner or play the part of someone they aren't, they risk becoming the fiction they've created. Take it from someone who knows. I played a part for more than thirty years. It isn't worth it. Whatever you're going through, just face it by being yourself.”

“What if every person you let yourself get close to sees something that makes them turn away? Isn't that telling you something needs to change?”

“Is that all it is? Why no, young man. That's just called unlucky in love. You have to have the courage to keep stepping up to the plate.”

At the door they shook hands rather formally. It had been a thought-provoking forty minutes and Stranahan said so. “Maybe when this is over we could have a cup of coffee,” he said.

“I'd like that. Maria tolerates my male friends, but just barely. And she's always packing. I tell men my friendship comes with the advice to buy a flak jacket. But then as you say, trouble seems to find you, so it would be nothing new. You stay right here, I want to give you something.” She returned to hand him a glazed coffee cup with a line of elk around the center. Sean knew nothing about pottery but liked the angular lines of the elk.

“It looks like cave art,” he said.

“It's based on pictographs I saw up on the Smith River. An archaeologist I was with said it was probably a place where Indian boys went on vision quests.”

She shook hands with him. “I hope you find out what happened to that girl.”

A flock of spotted guinea fowl escorted Stranahan to his Land Cruiser and he was a mile down Schoolhouse Road when he realized he hadn't asked Barnes if she had put the Santa hat inside the geocache. A rusted Suburban was approaching from the other direction and he slowed and raised a forefinger in salute. All he could see of the driver as the Suburban sped past, a sting of gravel clattering off the Land Cruiser, was a flash of dark hair under a hat tilted to the bridge of the nose.

“Good morning to you, too, Maria,” Stranahan said under his breath, and reached for the knob of the radio.

S
o whatcha thinkin', somebody was burning boards with nails sticking out of them?”

Katie Sparrow, standing before the fireplace at the Forest Service cabin, blew at her bangs as she worked a hand under her undershirt. Sean didn't need to see the chain to know that she was fingering a locket that carried a photograph of her fiancé, who had died in an avalanche ten years earlier. It was watching the search dogs work to find his body that persuaded her to become a handler.

“It makes sense,” Stranahan said. “When she climbed down the chimney, she wouldn't be able to see where she set her feet when she got to the bottom.”

“But why would anybody burn boards when there's enough firewood stacked in this place to heat the Old Faithful Inn?” Katie shook her head. “Let me put my thinking cap on.” She took the bill of her ball cap between her right thumb and forefinger and swiveled it from the back to the front.

Stranahan raised an eyebrow.

“Haven't you ever seen someone do that before? It's like the Montana dress code. You wear your cap backwards on your way to work, then when you step out of the truck you turn it around so you're presentable.”

“Just switch that machine on and prove me wrong.”

When Stranahan had left the memorial service the afternoon before, he'd called Katie at her home outside West Yellowstone—her day job was as a park ranger—and invited her to breakfast at Josie's in
Bridger. Katie was the only person Stranahan knew who owned a metal detector, and he thought if he could find the source for the nail that Cinderella Huntington had lodged in her foot, it might shed light on the circumstances of her death. Besides, Katie brought a level head to a search, not to mention a Class III tracking-trailing dog in Lothar, her German shepherd. It was worth parting with a little of Loretta Huntington's money to have her along.

“I'd do it for a French kiss,” she'd told him over the phone. Their flirtation was the basis of their relationship.

Now she was peering at the fireplace skeptically. “Looks like the techs swept it,” she said.

“Wilkerson bagged the ashes, but I was thinking if there were old rusty nails, one could have fallen into the cracks of the concrete.”

“Okay.” She tapped at the keypad of the detector and swept the coil over the fireplace. “I got it set to all metals, so if this doesn't beep it isn't there.”

No more than a few seconds passed before Stranahan cocked his ear. “There's something, huh?”

Katie plugged a headphone set into the detector and fiddled with the keypad to isolate the source. She nodded and took off the headphones.

“There's something down there all right, but it's steel. You said the nail was iron.”

“That's what Ettinger told me. Let's get it out.”

Katie removed a heavy magnet from her pack. After a bit of maneuvering, she withdrew the lid of a can from a crack at the base of the fireplace.

“Folks throw what-all into the fire so they don't have to pack out the trash.” Katie, whose face reminded Stranahan of an inquisitive wren, looked pensive, then she nodded. “Let's try outside. I got an idea.”

The cabin was built on the west-facing slope of the range and still held troughs of snow along the northern and eastern walls, where accumulations from winter storms had slid off the roof. The snow was
too rotted to hold her weight, so Katie took the broom from the cabin and used its long handle to etch lines on the snow into a grid pattern.

“You got to be methodical with these things,” she explained. “Go keep Lothar company and I'll call if I get a hit.”

Stranahan had no more than sat down on a chopping block and worked his fingers into the dense hair on the shepherd's neck when he heard Katie's whistle.

“Hey, I think I got something,” she called out. “Get the shovel from the cabin.”

When Sean got to her side, he saw where she'd used the broom handle to open a trough in the snow. “Whatcha think?” Katie said. “She wouldn't be going anywhere quick after driving that into her foot.”

Sean cleared the snow from a line of nails protruding about three inches from a piece of wood. A few minutes of digging uncovered a rectangle of warped boards nailed together with crosspieces. The rectangle was roughly three feet by four feet and had corroded nails pounded through it; it was as heavily quilled as a porcupine.

“It's a bear window,” Katie said. “Back in the day, they used to nail these things over the windows so mister grizzly bear would think twice before inviting himself to dinner. Same with the doors. This is what I thought we might find, but I didn't get my hopes up 'cause folks take them for souvenirs. You think the techs could get blood off the boards for a match?”

“Maybe.” Stranahan fingered his chin, a subconscious habit he'd picked up from Ettinger. “But it's not like I have a free pass to the lab.”

“Call Martha. She could make it happen. She's got the hots for you.”

“Who says that?”

“Everybody. The both of you living up in that canyon, Martha knocking on the door of your tipi asking you got any sugar, when what she really needs is salt. That woman's desperate for love. Or at least some buck-nekkid howling at the moon.”

“Let's concentrate on Cinderella,” Sean said.

“Hey, I'm sorry I brought it up. You know how people talk.”

“I do.”

“Even if this is what she stepped on, it still doesn't tell you what she was doing here.”

“No, it doesn't.”

Katie shrugged. “Maybe she was scared of that Bigfoot creature. She was running and that's when she stepped on the nail. She climbs up the ladder and down the chimney to get away.”

They had moved to the porch and were sitting at either end of a bench with Lothar between them, his head on Katie's lap. Sean looked up. Eileen Barnes had mentioned a shot going through the roof. He noticed a ragged hole and climbed onto the splitting block. Digging with his knife, he freed a shotgun pellet that was stuck in the wood, put it in his pocket. He told Katie the story of the maybe man, maybe bear that the lovers had seen.

Katie frowned. “Maybe her being in the chimney has something to do with the sex club. Maybe it isn't a coincidence that she dies only a few feet from the bed where these people were doing the nasty.”

“No, I can't see Cinderella Huntington involved in something like that.”

“Can't or don't want to?”

“Either. Doc told Martha she was covered in filth, not from being in the chimney but from living rough, like a homeless person. Except for the jacket, she was wearing the same clothes she'd had on when she disappeared. Or that's the assumption. Anyway, it's not exactly being dressed for sex.”

They sat and mulled it over, ball cap bills forward.

Katie said, “Did I ever tell you I tried to patent a sex move?”

“I think I would have remembered that.”

“Yeah. You know how girls are when they get together.”

“Not really.”

“Well, they're no different than guys, trust me. Back after Colin died I went through a phase when I got a little wild, and I was with some friends and we were talking the way girls talk, and I said this guy told me I had a sex move that ought to be against the law. I think
he meant this twisty thing I did to get him off. He said I ought to patent it. This guy, he was funny. After we'd have sex, he'd break out these candy cigarettes and we'd lie there acting like we were smoking and talking, like, philosophically. I wonder whatever happened to him?” She was quiet a moment. “Anyway, I told the girls, and one of them, Heather, she said her brother-in-law was a patent lawyer and she flips open her phone, it's two in the morning but he picks up and she tells him. He says to put me on, wants me to describe it for him. Wants details. Pretty soon he's asking what I'm wearing. I say use your imagination. We got him on speaker and the girls are just rolling, they're laughing so hard. He wants to ask me out, yeah.” Katie had started laughing.

“So what did you say?”

“I told him he only wanted me for my move and hung up. He never did say if it was patentable.”

“As opposed to someone like me,” Stranahan said, “who only wants you for your dog biscuits.”

“No, you want me for my move, too, you're just not ready for it. But I'll share a biscuit with you. I baked them last night.”

Katie reached into her chest pocket and cracked a biscuit shaped like a heart into thirds, handed a piece to Sean, and gave another to Lothar. Among the search-and-rescue hasty team she was known as Dog Breath because she snacked on dog biscuits while Lothar worked the trail. Sean had helped her bake a batch at her place in West Yellowstone once, knowing it might lead to something, and it almost had, then didn't.

“Not bad,” he said, and he was chewing when a shot echoed off the ridge behind the cabin.

They looked at each other. Katie swallowed. “Spring bear hunter,” she said, taking a swig of water from a bottle. “Somebody just got himself a rug.”

“If it's a bear hunter, wouldn't we have seen his rig? This is the only public access.”

Katie shook her head. “No, you can drive roundabout and get into
this country from the north, up Sunlight Creek. But hey”—she shrugged her slight shoulders—“it's Montana. Gunshot's part of the soundtrack. Back when I worked in the Forest Service I could tell you the caliber, the difference, say, between a .270 that sounds like the crack of whip echoing away and the boom of a .35 Whelan that's more like rolling thunder.”

“What did we just hear?”

“A deep boom. A rifle that shoots a heavy bullet at a low muzzle velocity. Like a .45-70 or .444 Marlin.”

“You can say that with certainty?”

“Nah, it's a guess. But that doesn't mean anything. People hunt bears with a bunch of different guns.”

“What else is in season?”

“Just turkeys. And cheatin' boyfriends. They're always fair game.”