Crazy Mountain Kiss (29 page)

“I said, ‘Charlie, let's check the cabin.' It's only another mile or so along, thinking maybe that's where she'd gone. Back when I caretaked the place, I'd pay Cindy to do things like sweep up after people, reset mousetraps, chop wood. Tomboy chores. She liked to play house in it with her friends. But she wasn't there and Charlie keeps harping on we got to bury the body, that there's no blood so all we have to do is straighten up the stalls and it's like it never happened. People will think he ran away with Cindy. Charlie's got his .30-30 in the scabbard and I realize now that if we actually had found Cindy, he was going to have to kill both of us.”

Fey stopped. The small dog had come up to him and Fey rubbed his forehead against the top of its head. “What I'd give for the life of a dog,” he said. His hat had fallen off and he left it on the ground, the inside of the crown up. The little dog curled into it, spilling over the sides. “Where was I?” Fey said.

“Charlie was going to have to kill both of you.”

“And he would have. I almost wish he had. But of course we didn't find her, my girl was gone. That ride back to the stables, I didn't even feel the horse under me. It was almost morning by then, I could see Snapdragon in the meadow, she returned before we did. I knew if we went through with Charlie's plan I'd be beholden to him the rest of my life, but I couldn't see a way out of it. Not any way that didn't mean
prison. So that's what we done, buried him right where your feet are settin'. That's him over there, what's left, that pile of earth. And I got the blood on my hands and it's never going to wash off. But all these months, I never once thought Charlie did what he done to Cindy. My best friend, a man who took a horn for me . . . I never dreamed . . .”

He fell silent. After a minute he set the rifle down and raised his hands over his head, as if imploring the heavens, then let them drop to his sides. He sat back on his heels.

“I gave him money. I even let him take my place in the club. But not once did I think he'd hurt my girl.”

“It's voluntary manslaughter, Jasper. You believed you were protecting your daughter from rape; to a judge that's a powerful mitigating circumstance. You might not even do time.”

“No, there's where you're wrong. I've been doing time ever since that night. I don't know what I'm doing now. Since they found her, time doesn't seem an adequate description. Penance, I guess. Maybe I could have lived with killing that boy. Maybe I can live with losing Etta, too. But I can't live knowing what I did killed my little girl.”

“Jasper, you didn't put her in that chimney.”

“But if that night never happened, she wouldn't have run away. So you see, I did kill her. I had just as much hand in it as Charlie.”

“How does killing me make it better?”

“It doesn't. But you start down a path, it gets so what happens along it doesn't matter. It isn't a justification. It's an explanation. You take the path, the path takes you.”

A note of finality had crept into Fey's voice.

Where the hell is Martha?

Sean's cheek flexed, an involuntary contraction. He felt a prickling sensation. Insect legs were crawling from the dirt onto his face, the feelers light as feathers. Now the legs were tickling the corner of his mouth. He blew at the creature, sticking out his lower lip.

“It's a carrion beetle. He's just a little ahead of schedule. I'll get it.”

Fey picked up the rifle and kneed forward. He jabbed the muzzle
against Sean's mouth. As the foresight slid across his cheek, Sean released his grip on the hay hook and shot out his hand, grabbing for the rifle barrel and jerking it from Fey's grasp. Even as Fey scrabbled for it, Sean knew that there was no way to win a tug-of-war, not with one hand. As Fey's hand closed over the wrist of the stock, Sean abruptly let go his hold on the barrel, then reached his hand back under the hide of the horse and felt the smooth handle of the hook. With every ounce of his strength, he swung it. The point hit home and Jasper, the rifle in his hand, recoiled violently, yanking the hook from Sean's grasp. He lifted his left arm to look down at his side. Fey's right hand, the lobster hand that was half again as large as his left, pinched tentatively at the handle. He inched his face up to look at Stranahan, his expression incredulous. Then he looked back at the handle. Deliberately he set the rifle down and grasped the handle. He clenched his facial muscles and jerked at it, not to dislodge it, but as if trying to bury it deeper. It crossed Sean's mind that Fey didn't really know what had happened, or what he'd been hit with. An expression of air grunted from Fey's body. He jerked the handle again, his body lurching in spasm.

Slowly then, as if he was moving independently of thought, he rose to his knees, got to one leg, then the other. He stood, teetering. “I'll be back,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. He turned and walked, hitching to the side of his injury, to the tractor. He tried to pull himself up onto the seat and fell back. He stood, waited, and tried again, swinging up onto the tractor saddle. Sean heard the engagement of the gears and the tractor began to move, the bucket scraping at the small mound of earth, then lifting its grisly burden.
He's going to dump it on me,
Sean thought, and clenched the muscles in his neck to take the impact. But the tractor had turned and was lurching away. It tilted back and forth where the ground was uneven, like a drunk stumbling from a bar. The gears ground as the headlights rose, the tractor climbing a rise in the land. Then it pitched forward and to the side, out of sight, and as Sean heard it tip over, the milky eyes of the headlights careened across the universe.

Sean tried to move, but except for his right arm, he might as well have been encased in cement. He clawed at the dirt with his fingernails, then stopped, overcome by exhaustion. It was cold in the earth, but the air was colder still.
Just lie here awhile, get your strength back. It's over now.

But was it? Sean kept his eyes on the silhouette of the hill that the tractor had climbed, half expecting Fey to appear, brandishing the bloody hook.

He didn't appear. After what Sean thought must be an hour, the tractor idled unevenly, coughed, and died. The smear of the headlights gradually faded, then died abruptly, leaving him in darkness that was total. He felt drops of rain on his face. It stopped. Then started again. The dog had run away in the melee and came back from the direction of the tractor. Sean could hear the patter of its feet. Finally it lay down again on the hat. He spoke to it, a dog in the rain, whimpering.

When the headlights came searching, Sean recognized the motor as being the truck Harold Little Feather had borrowed from his sister. He heard the door open, the lights switched off, then nothing.

“I'm here, Harold.”

The beam of Harold's flashlight played over the pit, crossed Stranahan's face, then came back. Harold walked up for a better look and squatted down, the butt of his Winchester lever-action on the ground, in much the same position Jasper Fey had assumed. Sean realized how he must look, buried to his neck in earth and worse.

Harold turned to call back toward the truck. “It's all right, Katie. You can come on over.”

Then, to Stranahan: “Not what I expected to find. Are you okay?” His face moved to Fey's bolt-action rifle lying a few feet away.

“Sure,” Sean said. “There's a fine horse under me.”

L
ater, Stranahan would see the chain of events leading to that moment as a manifestation of Murphy's law. When Katie Sparrow received the SPOT message on her cell phone, she'd called Martha's number and, not receiving an answer, had tried Harold, who heard the ringtone but ignored it, as he was busy winching a Datsun sedan out of a barrow pit, which the driver had veered into when he was, quote, “arranging my junk in my BVDs.” Harold's eyes had traveled to the sullen bottle blonde smoking a cigarette by the side of the road. He had arrested her once for solicitation and shook his head. He was still shaking his head when he got back to his sister's house and remembered the missed call. He hit the redial and told Katie to slow down while mouthing to Janice to make him a cup of instant.

“Where are you so I can pick you up?” Then to Janice: “I'm going to need to borrow your truck again,” and a muttered “only white people dig up bodies” as he headed for the door.

 • • • 

H
ow long have you been in the hole?” Harold said.

“Maybe a couple hours.”

“What do you think, Sparrow? Will it take that long to get him out?”

It didn't, but they were stripped to T-shirts, sweating in forty-degree weather, before digging the last shovelfuls to set Sean free.

“Do you think you can walk?” Katie said.

Sean nodded.

“Stay three paces behind, the both of you,” Harold said.

The tractor had tipped onto its side, the backhoe curled in an attitude of supplication. Something was half spilled out of the bucket. Rotting clothes, a slime of tissue over bone, a face, or what was once. A few wisps of the hair that Cinderella had longed to twirl in her fingers. Harold shone his light over the tractor. No one in the saddle, but a snail trail of blood led down the hillside. Jasper Fey had made it as far as a ditch, where he had curled into himself like a kitten. The hay hook was still buried in his side.

“He's all bled out,” Harold noted. “Like you make a heart shot on a buck. Deer takes off and dies in stride, you open him up, the body cavity's a pool of blood. You don't even need to stick him in the neck.”

He reached for his radio as Sean unfolded his knife and cut the sleeve of Fey's shirt. He wanted to see the tattoo. It was there.
Shirley
in the banner, a tear on each painted cheek.

“Ettinger's on the way,” Harold said. Finally, a smile. “Fine horse, huh?”

Sean nodded. “I think it was a bay.”

 • • • 

M
artha didn't see the humor. She had climbed out of the Cherokee to award Sean her patented headshake, hands on her utility belt, elbows cocked. It was the Martha who had flashed behind Sean's eyes when the dirt covered him and his blood was starved for oxygen.

“I'm glad it's dark so I don't have to look at you,” she said. “That goes for you, too, Katie. What were you thinking? No, you weren't thinking. How naive of me to think you'd be thinking.”

“If it hadn't been for the dog—”

“Wake up, Stranny. You're in Montana. There's
always
a dog.”

She had a point, and two hours later, having given his statement for Harold's digital recorder and with the beast in question sitting shotgun in the Land Cruiser, he drove to the Bar-4 to break the news.

Etta Huntington was already up, sitting down to coffee in her kitchen.

“What you're smelling is a livestock burial pit,” he told her. “It might be better to talk on the porch.”

The clouds that fed the intermittent rain had broken up and she hugged herself with her good arm. “It's the starless mornings that are hardest,” she said, setting her coffee on the rail. “Sometimes I think if I can't see Pegasus, Cinderella will be gone forever. I'll no longer be able to remember her.”

She didn't seem alarmed by anything he told her, starting with the death of Jasper Fey and going back to Sean's discovery of the pictographs. He was reminded of Fey's comment about a knowing expression, as if she possessed a secret knowledge. He was too tired to come at the question obliquely.

“What aren't you telling me, Etta?”

She ignored the question in favor of her own, asking if he was all right.

“I'm just tired.”

“No, I mean, will there be consequences? Will they say you killed him?”

“The sheriff says I'll get what's coming to me. But I don't think I'll be charged, if that's what you're getting at. Jasper had me buried up to my neck. He swore he would kill me. I suppose the Board of Security could suspend my investigator's license. I'm guessing they frown at PIs wielding hay hooks.”

“But was it you who really killed him?”

Sean saw what she was getting at. “You mean did the initial penetration tear the artery, or did Jasper kill himself by setting the hook deeper?”

“Can an autopsy determine that?”

“Maybe. But it's a technicality. I intended to hurt him as badly as I could. And I've had a while to think about it. He might have been trying to take it out. I'm not sure he knew what he was hit with.”

“I'm sorry I got you into this,” she said. “I don't want you to have to bear a burden.”

Her voice seemed to carry from a distance. Sean felt the space between them growing.

“Don't do this to yourself, Etta.”

“I'm not doing anything.”

“There's something you're holding back. I just about lost my life trying to find out what happened to your daughter. I want to . . .” He stopped. He was thinking about the day when she'd led him to the lake.

“You know because you've seen the pictographs,” he said. “That talk about how you couldn't get up there because of your arm. You climbed there, and you went down that rock chimney and found the cave. Did the pictures tell you something I missed?”

“No, you're wrong. I didn't know. I know now, I mean yesterday I found out about the pictures and . . . other things.”

He waited.

“I tried to call you, but you must have already been up there at the pit, you and your friend with the dog. It wasn't something you put in a message.”

She turned her face to him. He could see the artery pulsing in her neck. “He was standing right where we are. Sean, he was the one who made the paint for the pictures.”

“Bear Paw Bill?”

“He drove up here in an SUV, an old rattley one. Jasper was gone by then, thank God.”

“Was it an Explorer? That's what he stole from the hospital lot.”

“I guessed it was stolen. I knew the police were looking for him, so I parked it around back. You should have seen him. All he had on was a hospital gown with a blanket wrapped over the top of it. Even on crutches he could hardly walk. I asked when was the last time he'd eaten. He said he had no idea.”

“Did he say he'd killed Charles Watt?”

“He knew everything. He told me everything.”

Sean waited for her to continue, but she seemed to have gone
somewhere else and just stared at the sky, the wafer of light that was false dawn losing its lie.

Finally she spoke.

“Charlie found her diary, that's how he got to her. Bill said it had happened in the stables, that Charlie had seen where Cindy hid the diary between the walls and threatened to give it to her stepfather, unless she would take off her clothes for him. He told her that was all he wanted. So she did it. The next day, or night I guess, when I was in Helena and Jasper was gone, when Charlie was alone with her, he wanted, you know, more. He told her that a body like that was too fine to be throwing at a boy who wouldn't know what to do with it. He could give her what she wanted a lot better, that if she did she'd get the diary back. He set it on the stall divider, just higher than she could reach. Then he . . . did what he did.”

She stopped, and again she contemplated the sky.

“Bill said Charlie laughed in his face when he confronted him about it, said the bitch begged for it. He didn't seem to be afraid of Bill showing up on his doorstep. Bill hugged him, that's the word he used. ‘I hugged him until his chest broke, the Lord have mercy on my soul.'”

“What happened that night, afterwards?”

“You mean after my daughter was raped? You can say the word.”

“Then.”

“Then Landon showed up. Charlie hadn't expected him that night. He decked Charlie and she ran with him to another stall, and then Jasper came, and, well, I guess you know what happened then.”

“Did Bill say she hid in the chimney, at the cabin?”

“Yes, like in the pictographs. He said she made it up to his camp later that night, but it was a week before she spoke a word. She didn't tell him about the rape until she was getting sick every morning and she began to suspect she was pregnant. He tried to convince her to go home, but how could she come back here when she'd been raped by her father's best friend, when she'd fought against Jasper while he strangled the boy she was in love with? All along I thought she was running from me, but it wasn't me, it was them.”

She stopped, and Sean could hear her breathing.

“That bastard,” she said. “All goddamned winter he plays along like Cinderella's disappearance is never going to be solved, and it's time to stop grieving and get on with life, and he knew what happened and didn't have the courage to tell the truth.”

“Etta, when he told me he didn't know it was Charlie who raped her, I believed him.”

“Maybe he didn't, but he knew why she ran away. He knew she could be alive and he didn't tell anyone. He let me fall to pieces so he could stay out of jail and keep being Jasper Fey.”

“Etta . . .” He reached out, but she batted his hand away. Then, shutting her eyes, her shoulders falling, she came into his arms, blood and guts and all.

After a time he heard her murmur.

“Etta?”

“You're going to have to burn these clothes.”