Crazy Mountain Kiss (19 page)

M
any years ago, at a birthday party, a sweat bee had walked into Sean Stranahan's ear and set up residence for thirty maddening minutes. Once or twice a year something out of the blue would remind him of that buzzing drone. Or in this case from the black. The helicopter sounded underwater, then became a deafening roar as it dropped over the shoulder of a mountain. The searchlight swept the field of snow that Sean and Walt had marked off with strobes. When the chopper kissed the snow, it was enveloped in the whiteout caused by its rotor.

It took them all, hero and nonheroes alike, to get Bill McKutchen onto the stretcher and carry him to the panel door. Joshua Byrne was craggy and affable and said it was like setting down in Afghanistan, except for the shooting-at-you part. His teeth shone, even in moonlight. He said there was room for one more passenger, and Martha was persuaded to board; she could facilitate the paperwork at the other end. She told Sean she'd pick him up in the morning and drive him to Law and Justice, where he'd left his rig.

Katie Sparrow sidled up to Sean, licking at the snow melting on her upper lip.

“Be still my heart,” she said.

Stranahan said he wasn't
that
good-looking.

“You're just jealous.”

They saddled up, and the rest of it was riding out in a sifting, fairytale snow.

 • • • 

D
o you really live in a tipi?” Etta Huntington said.

“It's an eighteen-pole Sioux design. Harold Little Feather lent it to me until I get the house up. I'll give you the tour.”

After loading the horses into the trailers and seeing them off, Etta had offered to drive Sean home, during which they had talked of little else but Bear Paw Bill. Sean assured her that they would swab his cheek for a possible DNA match with the fetus her daughter had carried, that the test would take a few days and beyond that they just had to hope he lived until he was able to talk.

“If he's the one who got her pregnant,” Etta had said, staring through the half moon of windowpane cleared by the windshield wipers, “the thought of that giant and my Cindy . . . I wanted to hate him. I thought if I was alone with him I would kill him. But watching him just trying to breathe and remembering the video, how she'd reached out to him. And him on that awful stump and me with my arm, both of us being in that club. I don't know what to think.”

Sean admitted he didn't either. “This is the turn,” he said.

When he undid the sticks that closed the front flap, Choti bounded out and began to run in circles. Sean ducked inside and lit the lantern, filling the tipi with golden light. He held the flap for Etta to enter, then sat cross-legged behind the fire ring of stones, facing the flap. “Tipis are pitched with the door to the East,” he explained. “Custom dictates that a woman enters to the left and takes her seat on the south side of the lodge, to my right. That is because the south side represents life, the growing of life on the earth.” He patted a folded blanket. “Please sit. Do you want me to make you coffee for the road?”

She remained standing. He watched her make a heart with her lips, considering.

“For the road,” she said, looking at her shadow against the tipi wall.

“Or you could stay here. You can have the cot. I have plenty of blankets, and with a center fire this place warms right up.”

“Aren't you afraid Martha will see my truck? I wouldn't want to put you in an awkward position tomorrow morning.”

“It's not her business.”

“No, but you care what she thinks of you, I know you do.”

“I'm offering.”

She didn't seem to be listening. “And what must she think of me, a heathen who stares at stars?” She was looking at the triangle of sky showing through the vent. Snowflakes swarmed at the opening, snapping out like fireflies. Etta caught a survivor on her tongue. It brought a flicker of smile. Then the shoulders fell as her face worked into the heartrending expression of her grief.

“I was just so sure it was Landon,” she said. “And a part of me thought, ‘Young love,' you know. At least she would have known young love. If they had run away together and met some . . . fate . . . at least they were together. Now, tonight, that man. It could have been my daughter who cut off his foot. Could she really do that? Could she have shot him? She must have gone through something so terrible.”

“Etta—”

“Don't ‘Etta' me. They say the worst thing is the not knowing. But it isn't. The worst thing is that she was in trouble and I wasn't there. I was giving that stupid clinic, teaching teeny-bopper cowgirls how to wear their hats so they wouldn't fall off when they turned the barrel . . . Why didn't I just drive back? If I'd been home earlier, maybe she would have come to me. Maybe”—she gestured with her good arm—“maybe none of this would have happened.”

“You couldn't have known, Etta. You can't beat yourself up over that.”

“Oh, but I can.” She sighed. “Who am I kidding? Cindy didn't share her life with me, not what mattered. Maybe if we could have found her diary. When Jasper discovered that powder horn hidden in Snapdragon's stall, I thought Cindy's diary could be there and he just hadn't looked hard enough. You two were looking at me like I was crazy when I tore out the wall, but I really thought that's where it could be.”

“Why is that?”

“Because that's where I found it before, in a wall in her room. She'd pulled the nails out of the baseboard so she could hide it between the bottom of the wall and the floor. The floors had settled, so there was a gap. I found her on her knees one day and it just seemed an odd place to be. She said she was looking for an earring. Up there, I was hoping maybe that man had it with him, but he didn't.”

A wall.
Sean and Martha had searched the forest cabin, but a recess in the wall might have escaped their attention. Or perhaps in the thatching of the lean-to?

“I suppose you know I'm a wreck,” she said, turning her face away. “They say when women overdose, what they're asking for is attention. But women in Montana, in Alaska, strong independent women, we're more likely to man up and pull the trigger. It's a statistical fact. When I get up in the night, I'm not just searching the universe to find Cindy. I'm trying to find a reason to keep living. I think if I can fixate on a star and convince myself she's watching, that's my tether to the earth. I'm not telling you this to gain your sympathy. It's just a way of saying that the other night, you were an escape for me. I told myself it's okay, Etta, making love is life affirming, he's a gentle man, I can escape from myself for a little while. He won't think less of me, and if he does, he's just the vehicle. I'm being honest with you.”

“You used me. I'm hurt.” Stranahan tried to keep a light note in his voice.

“Yeah. I guess dropping my arm on the floor did the trick. Made me irresistible.”

“Stay here tonight, Etta. Nobody has to use anyone. But I don't want any more of this talk about suicide.”

“That's what people say, don't they? ‘I don't want to hear any more of this talk.' What's that supposed to mean? You don't want to hear the truth?”

“You had to deal with a lot tonight.” Stranahan reached up to take her hand. “We'll figure out how to get through tomorrow, tomorrow.”

She sat beside him and rested her head against his shoulder.
Stranahan could feel her tears against his cheek. After a while he built a fire and she lay beside him on the blankets, burrowing against him for warmth. When he woke up, cramped and stiff, the cold deep in his bones, he saw her staring up through the flap. The snow had stopped to reveal the crystal pepper of the stars. She pointed out two of the four stars that formed the body of Pegasus, the winged horse.

“See that one on the right that pulses in and out? That's Beta Pegasi. It glows when it's hot, then it gets fainter as its surface cools. I lied to you before, when I said that the star I see Cindy in changes every night. It does change, but this is the star I see most often, because it beats like a heart.”

“Why lie?”

“Because it would have revealed too much of me and I didn't know you. Because it was our secret. It was Cindy showing me she was in heaven.”

She rolled onto her side facing away from him, positioned his hand so that it cupped her breast. She was wearing a jacket but it was Etta underneath, and Sean doubted he could fall back asleep but did, breathing to her rhythm, and the next time he awoke he was hearing a droning sound like the helicopter in the distance, and hoped it was a dream, knowing it wasn't.

 • • • 

G
et in, keep your tongue in your mouth, I'm not in the mood for conversation.”

Martha turned the Jeep around, its headlights flaring past the dawn silhouette of Etta Huntington's truck.

“How's the puma this morning? Licking her paws?”

“I thought you weren't in the mood to talk.”

She shook her head. “I shouldn't have said that. I don't want it to be like before. We're friends. We need to be open with each other, even if there are things I don't want to hear. Or see.”

“It was two in the morning. I told her she could sleep in the tipi, ‘sleep' being the operative word.”

“Then sleep it was. I thought we'd swing by the hospital on the way, see if the Hulk's awake. When I called, the doctor was prepping to operate.”

 • • • 

S
ean, always a pleasure.”

Arjun Anand had an oily forehead, liquid eyes the color of cocoa, and a close shave on a beard that would make a razor surrender after a dozen strokes. His voice rattled like pebbles in a tin can. He took in the others with a glance, bowed his head curtly, and said he'd be only a minute.

When he disappeared behind the curtain, Walt rolled his eyes.

“What?” Martha said. “You exercising your corneal muscles?”

“Just recalling there was a time you said Indian people in Montana knew who you were talking about. It's an observation.”

“Uh-huh. Like referring to him as Sabu a minute ago.” She frowned at Sean. “How do you two know each other?”

“Arjun is a fellow fly tier. He consulted on Patrick Willoughby's knee last summer, you know, from the Liars and Fly Tiers Club.”

“Humpff.”

The doctor was back. He placed his hands, one crossed over the other, on his slight potbelly.

“This man is very grave,” he said. “He has had a perforation of his small intestine for days, maybe weeks. It is a miracle he lives.”

“What was it caused by?” Martha moved her hand to her throat.

“A blade. I extracted six shotgun pellets as well. Four point five seven millimeter.”

“That's BB shot,” Walt said, nodding. “Goose load.”

Martha frowned. “Are you saying he had lead poisoning?”

“No.” Anand shook his head. “Lead poisoning from shotgun pellets is rare, in this case impossible. It is steel shot.”

“So what happened? He was trying to remove the shot and accidentally punctured his intestine?”

“Using a knife, it is possible.”

“Or he was stabbed,” Walt said.

“That is also possible.”

“What about the foot?” Martha tapped her foot.

“The stump was cauterized. I was told he was camping, so by a burning stick, perhaps? But he has lost very much blood, more than five pints. So much that in a person of ordinary size he would be dead.”

“Can you tell me anything about the amputation?”

“The leg was severed cleanly, perhaps an ax, or a maketti.”

“Machete,” Walt corrected.

“Perhaps that. A week ago, two weeks, by the progress of the encrustation. I'm told the foot was transported with the victim and is in a refrigeration unit. The medic told me it looked gangrenous and had a puncture wound under the arch. Surgical reattachments are difficult in the best scenario. In this case, too much time has passed even if the tissues were healthy. And the load-bearing requirements on the tibia . . .”

“I'll send someone from the department for it,” Martha said. “Dr. Anand, we need to talk to this man.”

“That is not possible. He is very heavily sedated. Not out of the woods, as one says.”

“But he'll live?”

“The body is an enormously powerful engine. This morning, he squeezed my hand. This hand.” He held his right hand up. “This hand is my occupation, yes?” He spread his fingers. “I must be careful not to let it happen again. So yes, with transfusion, antibiotics, I think he lives.”

He nodded. “Sean, please give my salaams to Patrick. Someday you will travel to Kumaon as my guest and we will resolve this issue of the mahseer.”

The liquid eyes moved to Martha. “Sean and I have an argument about the greatest fish for the fly rod. I say the golden mahseer of the Himalaya. He insists it is the Pacific steelhead. As I have not caught a steelhead and he has not caught the mahseer, our disagreement is specious.”

It was time to continue his rounds.

“You'll let us know when he can speak?” She handed him her card.

 • • • 

L
et's stop for coffee and kick this thing around,” Martha said.

Ten minutes later she switched the engine off and opened the window to drink in the sound of the Gallatin River. “I'm seeing two scenarios.” She held up one finger. “First possibility. Cinderella Huntington experienced something so horrible that rather than go to her mother or stepfather, she ran away into the mountains to be with Bear Paw Bill. Or”—she held up a second finger—“Bear Paw Bill was so intoxicated by her visit that he went down into the valley and kidnapped her.”

“We've been over this ground before.”