Crazy Mountain Kiss (26 page)

He unclamped the paper and replaced it with another sheet to represent the exposure on the right wall of the cave. This panel had fewer pictographs and he completed his work quickly. To represent the granite at the back of the cave, he selected a sheet of black pastel paper that was four feet wide and nearly as tall, the largest one he had. The pictographs here involved a more tedious process of transference, being in color, and Sean worked long into the night. He saved the pictograph of the mother releasing the hearts of her children for last, and then arranged his three easels side by side. He brought the wings of the side panels in at an angle to simulate the depth of the cave. He found that his hands had a tremor. He knew he ought to try to get some sleep, but even when he shut his eyes standing up, the pictographs whirled in his head.

“Snap out of it,” he told himself, which elicited a dog yawn from Choti, who was curled on the futon. Sean brewed a cup of tea and pulled his stool to a position in front of the easels. The panel representing the left-hand wall drew his attention first, as it had in the cave. These were the most simply executed pictographs, consisting, with one exception, of black line drawings on the salmon background. Stranahan guessed that they had been made first, and therefore could well be the most important. Starting at the top and scanning from left to right, he saw the stick profile of a girl or woman with scallops to represent breasts, drawn with long hair trailing from a cowboy hat.
The figure, who Sean supposed was Cinderella, was galloping on horseback and twirling a lariat. In front of her horse ran a short-haired figure—Landon Anker? The second pictograph showed the rope settling over the shoulders of the second figure, the next, drawing it close. To the right was a pictograph of the girl facing out, a tear under each eye, her torso a heart with a line cleaving it.

Sean faced the panel with his hands on his hips. “Girl gets boy, girl loses boy. Humpff. Tell me something I don't know.” His impression of Martha Ettinger left something to be desired, but her sentiment would have been on the money. They already knew that Landon Anker had broken Cinderella's heart.

The pictographs underneath the top row initially puzzled him until he realized they were meant to be sequenced from right to left, in the direction that the profiles pointed. The first showed the girl riding away from a tunnel-like structure—the stables came to mind—then the same figure, on foot, standing under an inverted V, which Sean took to be a mountain. Now she was being pursued, for trailing her silhouette was a horseback figure wearing a cowboy hat. The simple A-frame design of what Sean took to be the Forest Service cabin loomed in the foredistance.

Below these pictographs was one more drawing that completed the panel, and it had haunted him since he'd sketched it in the cave. The image was a chimney with a quarter moon above the opening. The horseback figure wearing the hat had dismounted to stand beside the chimney, where he was joined by a second person, this one wearing a ball cap. Cones of yellow light extended from the hands of the figures. With one exception, the cones were the only color on the entire panel, and Sean would later suspect the color had been added at a later date, when Cinderella had access to pigments. But it wasn't the lights that drew his attention. It was the face that stared from within the chimney, as if looking out through an invisible wall.

The face was the shape of a balloon, the eyes large and round, and below them the mouth was an elongated oval. Tendrils of golden hair spun around the lower part of the face.

The pictograph sent chills through Sean's body. Here was Cinderella's death, painted in her hand or with Bear Paw Bill's help, and yet how could that be? Was it possible that the pictograph had been painted by the mountain man as a record of her death? That seemed unlikely. As far as Sean knew, no one had spoken to Bill of Cinderella's demise before he fled the hospital, and even had he known about the chimney, how could he have climbed from his camp to the headwall and from there to the cave? On one leg? No, Cinderella had painted herself into her grave weeks or months before her demise, and her face, with the mouth open as if to scream, was the image Sean finally fell asleep to sometime after midnight.

W
hat is it?”

Martha sat up in her bed, Sheba stretching her legs to come up beside her head and run a sandpaper tongue across her chin.

“Stop licking me.”

“If you say so.”

“I mean the cat.”

“Are you still in bed?”

“Of course not.”

“I wanted to catch you before you drove to Law and Justice. I'm in my studio. There's something you'll want to see.”

“Give me thirty minutes. No, forty. I got to feed the critters.”

 • • • 

M
artha ran her tongue over her lips. “And you did this from memory?” She inched up her chin.

“No. I had a sketchpad and made notes on colors and backgrounds. Each panel is scaled down, but the pictographs are accurate.”

“I believe you. I just don't recall mention that Cinderella was an artist.”

“Bill McKutchen was, though. The artwork on the powder horn has the same aboriginal quality. Perhaps he helped her, but I don't think there's any doubt that this is her life.”

Martha nodded. “They're extraordinary. Have you drawn any conclusions?”

“I thought maybe you'd want to draw your own, then we could compare.”

“You thought wrong.” She glanced at her watch. “I've got a meeting with the DA at nine. I can give you twenty minutes, so shoot. Start with that one.” She tapped the pictograph of the face in the chimney.

“Well, it raises the obvious question. I've had a day and a night to think about it, and the more I do, the more I'm convinced that it's meant to be taken literally. The pictographs leading up to it”—he pointed to the sequence on the opposing panel—“tell the story of Cinderella running from the stables and being pursued. They're straightforward. And when you look at this panel, which I think is the second she completed—”

“What makes you think it's the second?”

“Because it tells the continuation of the story. And I don't think she worked on the back wall until later because it was black and the charcoal wouldn't show up. She had to wait until Bill made the pigments. That night I was with him, he said, ‘She tell you in car-coal. I made her color.'”

“How do you make colors?”

“You can make pigments from gumbo clay, hematite, mix in blood to tint it, use saliva as a binding agent—”

Martha spread her fingers. “I'm on board.”

“Okay. On the right-hand panel, the next pictograph in the sequence, she's standing on top of the roof. That tells me the two men didn't find her; she got out of the chimney and escaped. Then here, she's walking on top of the mountains, and in the next she's joined by a giant with wild hair. We know who that is. Here's the lean-to, and here they are hunting deer. She's even stroked in smoke billowing from the muzzle-loader. You aren't convinced?”

“I'm saying it's a lot to, ah, intuit. These are stick figures.”

“Granted, but they make sense. Regardless of what made her flee from the stables, if she was heading to McKutchen's camp, she only had two routes to choose from. She could ride out in back like Etta and I did yesterday, or she could strike out south, which is what I
think she did, which puts the forest cabin right on her way. From there the trail takes her where it took us when we found Bill, up the bald ridge and down into the South Fork. That's the way I would go if I had to travel at night.”

Martha pinched her lower lip. “She's on foot in this one.” Martha pointed. “Why did she leave her horse?”

“If she knew she was being tracked, she did it to put her followers on the wrong trail.”

“Then what were they doing at the cabin, shining flashlights?”

“I don't know. Maybe they only knew the direction she'd taken and the cabin was in that direction.”

“There's a lot you don't know.”

“Thanks for pointing that out.”

Martha nodded to herself. “So who are they?”

“Charles Watt was a railroad man, he wears a cap with pinstripes. So I think he's this guy. The one wearing the cowboy hat is Jasper Fey.”

“And they were in cahoots?”

“They did everything else together. ‘Controlled hell inside the arena and raised it on the outside,' as Jasper put it. Remember what Cindy wrote over top of that entry in the guest log? ‘THE CLOWNS ARE HERE
.'
Charles Watt had a clown tattoo. I'd bet money Jasper Fey has one, too.”

“You're painting a picture of monsters.”

“Cinderella dying where she'd hidden from them last fall, there's a tragic logic to it. If she had hidden in the chimney once and managed to climb back out, she'd have a false sense of security about doing it again.”

“Only the second time she wasn't so lucky.”

“Or maybe it was the third time, or the tenth. She was up there all winter and they survived on what, a couple deer Bill shot? People who rent out the cabin don't pack out their food sometimes. The place could be empty a lot during the middle of the week. Maybe she knew that, or Bill did, and they raided it on a regular basis. My guess is either she was trying to break in to find food when she died, or she was
heading out to try to get help for Bill's leg and got stuck in a snowstorm. I looked up the weather for the time frame of her death and there were two storms, back to back. She decided to shelter in the cabin. Start a fire and warm up.”

Martha shook her head. “You're forgetting something.”

Sean waited. “By the way,” he said. “I let you get away with touching the paper once. If you do it again, I'll have to kill you. I haven't applied a fixative yet.”

But she didn't respond and he knew the look, Martha staring into the middle distance of her own world, oblivious to the sundry mutterings of the planet.

“What is it I'm forgetting?” he said.

She turned to him. “You're forgetting that she wasn't a little girl anymore. She was a young woman who was pregnant. She felt an obligation to the life inside her.” She pointed to one of the color pictographs. “Don't worry, I'm not going to touch it. But look, that peanut inside her belly is her baby. No, she was going home. All these pictographs on the back wall”—she swept her hand—“almost all of them, the horses, the house, the figures here, they're her friends. This is a longing for home. Home and her mother who held her heart in her hand. She was going home even if it meant facing her rapist
and
her stepfather.”

“What makes you think these figures are her friends?”

“Because that one is my son. That's David.” She pointed to a painting of a boy wearing light-colored chaps, who was holding his hat upside down while a horse dipped his head to eat out of the crown. “David wore chaps that were made from sheepskin. When you put somebody you haven't seen for six or seven years into a piece of art, it means you long for the past.”

“Is your son still coming up this summer? I was looking forward to taking him fishing.”

“He's flying in at the end of the month.”

She turned away and produced her cell phone. “Yeah, Hunt, call
Bowers and tell him I'll run a little late . . . No, Hunt, you're not in trouble, but next time you're watching a potential runner and you got to hit the john, pucker up.” She holstered the phone. “Where were we?”

“Talking about your son.”

“Yeah, well, we'll see how it goes. Anything else? You really did good work here.”

“Thanks. There's a few of the pictographs I can't decipher. One I keep coming back to is here, on the back wall. I think the figure is Landon Anker, but I don't know how to explain it.”

Martha peered. The pictograph was a cluster of horses, perhaps a dozen. Half of the horses were lying on their backs with their legs in the air, while others were in the act of jumping over a sickle moon. Only one of the leaping horses carried a rider, and a similar figure was lying on the ground among the supine horses. She looked over at Sean.

“Landon, huh?”

“He's riding a painted horse with a white mane and tail. Etta Huntington gave me some old photos of Cinderella and he's in a couple of them, sitting on a paint with a white mane and tail.”

“So this is him what—dead?” She pointed to the figure with the supine horses. “And this is him ascending to heaven?” She pointed to the figure on horseback.

She drummed her thumb against the grips of her revolver. “I gotta go,” she said. “I'm going to ask you not to show this to Etta.”

“Why? She's the only one who might be able to see something we missed.”

“I know that, and I'm still asking. Remember Asena Martinelli? That guy she shot, she knew where to find him, or how to lure him to her. You told her, you didn't tell her, at this point I don't want to know. The fact of the matter is she got information she shouldn't have and somebody got dead on my watch. I don't want Etta going dark angel, do something like shoot her husband.”

“She's the one who's buying my gas, not the county.”

“I don't care.”

He returned her stare. A centimeter nod. “Okay, I won't say anything. For now. But if this doesn't take us anywhere, I will.”

“Then make sure it takes us somewhere.” She found her jacket where she'd hung it on a chair. “You know,” she said, “we're getting along. I like it better when we get along.”

“I liked it better when you left the light on.”

B
oot Hill,
Jasper Fey's western TV series, was better than its premise, a twenty-first-century pipe dream of a West that wasn't, complete with a sheriff who had to duck under doorframes, a deputy who doubled as a tribal elder on the nearby reservation, and a fallen angel who flashed turquoise rings and had quite the time of it keeping her body under wraps for a full sixty minutes.

“They're all so good-looking I wouldn't know who to screw first,” Sam said. “Be like hunting water with a divining rod. Shut your eyes and start drilling where the stick hits the ground.” He popped the cap off a bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale. The horned devil on the label reminded Sean of the mask Charles Watt wore in the Mile and a Half High Club video, which reminded him of why he was here, sitting in the littered living room of Sam's house-slash-fly-shack on a bench overlooking the Madison River, halfway through season one.

The truth was he'd been without direction or morning coffee when Martha Ettinger left his studio, and after brewing a cup and adding wings made from a crow feather to a half-tied wet fly clamped into his vise, he'd called Sam, who said he hadn't got around to watching the video yet. Sean had invited himself over just to be doing something while he considered his next move.

 • • • 

S
am hit the pause button. “I got to water the garden,” he said. Sean followed him outside and walked to the edge of the property while Sam unzipped. The Madison had come up ten inches in twenty-four
hours and looked like chocolate milk. He heard Sam say, “Shaking it, boss,” then the big man hitched up beside him, spinning underarm hair around his forefinger through a hole in a Rodriguez T-shirt that read
I
WONDER
on the front, and on the back of which Sam had penned
BUT
I
REALLY
DON
'
T
GIVE
A
SHIT
. in magic marker.

“You'd have better luck catching snakes in Ireland than trout in this soup.” Sam shook his head. “I'm so fuckin' depressed I couldn't get excited about pulled pork.”

For a man without an appetite, Sam managed to get interested enough in the pizza Sean had picked up on the drive down. He put away half of it in the time it took the sheriff to kill a good man gone wrong, the deputy to mutter Native American wisdom about the meaning of life, and the love interest to pop peyote and run topless through a field of lupine.

Sam flipped a bottle cap. “I like six-guns and sweater venison as much as the next fella, but I don't see what any of this has to do with that.” He jutted his chin toward the pictograph panels that Sean had set up near the television set.

“Let's take a look at the extra features,” Sean said.

Sam reached a hand to pat Killer's broad forehead. The two men were sitting on Sam's couch with the stuffing coming out, two dogs between them with their heads on their masters' laps.

“You know what this is, Kemosabe? Couple bros watching the tube with man's best friends? It's a Montana double date.”

Sean grunted his acknowledgment, his mind elsewhere. He clicked on deleted scenes. Nothing there. He clicked on “The Making of
Boot Hill
,” still not knowing what he was looking for and not finding it. The last of the features was a running commentary with the director and lead actor, who bantered in film school shorthand as they dissected the pilot episode. The opening shot was Boot Hill, a treeless burial ground outside the fictional town of Malice, Montana, where a nineteenth-century gunslinger named Pinky “Fast Finger” Stubbs was said to be buried. In the opening scene a young couple with a bottle of hooch for fortification decided to make love among the dead,
in a grave slated for tenancy the next day. The young woman had insisted on lining the grave with a blanket, which the man objected to on principle but didn't argue too hard about. The sex was off camera, and the scream didn't have anything to do with ecstasy. The camera zoomed into the grave, the girl cowering under the blanket in her lover's arms, the focus shifting to a finger that protruded from the wall of the grave. The finger beckoned, then a hand appeared to reach out of the grave, spreading against a red sunset as the credits rolled.

“What a great opening shot, mate,” the actor said in his Aussie accent. Upon which the director, who had written the pilot, said, “Credit where credit due. The hand was suggested by Jasper Fey, he's our western expert. Jasper had all kinds of ideas for unearthing bodies. One was by erosion where the Musselshell River ate away the bank; we used that in episode five. Another was to have a body in a pit grave where ranchers bury livestock. Jasper said if you buried a body underneath a horse or a cow carcass, then if a cadaver dog sniffed it, the CSIs would find the animal and decide it was a false positive and quit digging. Perfect crime. I liked it, but you'd have to mock up the carcass, and that's ten grand for maybe five seconds' screen time. We don't have the budget. Now this next scene, this is shot with that new tracking dolly . . .”

Sean hit the pause button. He turned to Sam. Sam's side of the couch was next to a fly rod rack, and he reached a hirsute hand for the longest, an eleven-foot-seven-inch Meiser, and tapped the tip against the pictograph in the lower left corner of the back panel, where the horses lay on their backs with their hooves in the air.

“Do I have to say ‘burial pit,' or are you thinking along the same lines as Uncle Sam?”

Sean didn't say anything. He couldn't believe what he'd just seen. Could Jasper Fey have described the very crime he would later commit? Would he be that careless? But then he remembered that Jasper claimed he hadn't watched the DVD. He may not have known anything about the director's comments in the special features.

“If you know where the pit is, I got the shovels,” Sam said.

Sean scratched at the stubble on his jaw. “Maybe later, Sam. I better think this over. Would you mind taking Choti till tomorrow?”

“Be that way. Leave Sam out of it. All he did was step off a fucking cliff for you.”

“I knew you'd understand.” Sean scratched Choti's ears and stood up.

“Hey, that fly on your hat, you name it?” Sam said.

“I just tied it this morning. I was thinking Crazy Mountain Special, but then I remembered this secret kiss Etta Huntington had with her daughter. So I'm going to call it the Crazy Mountain Kiss.”

Sam grunted his approval. “Has a ring,” he said. “I like the red throat.”