Crazy Mountain Kiss (31 page)

Etta tied the ribbon around the book and set it on the nightstand.

Slowly, she spread her fingers along the invisible face of the daughter who lived now only in the stars, and drew her fingers back until the tips touched her chin. She brought her forefinger to her lips and pressed. Then she pressed the finger against the lips of her daughter, before placing her hand on her heart.

T
hree weeks after Bear Paw Bill visited Etta Huntington, the Explorer he'd stolen was found abandoned in Livingston. A kid had looked through the window to see money tucked into the folds of the gearshift and decided to help himself with the help of a rock. He was caught with two twenties stuffed down his underpants. A citizen's arrest, the citizen the kid's father. The cop who caught the call found the keys in the glove compartment, along with a note.

As much as I can spare for the gas. I'm truly sorry about the blood.

“You wouldn't guess where he's headed?” Martha rolled a dart between her fingers as she held Stranahan's eyes. On the wall of her office a new page of the calendar, a leopard on an acacia branch with his tail dropping down.

“My guess is he hitched a ride to a road end somewhere. Maybe got his brother to drop him off. If it was me, I wouldn't look too hard.”

“Yeah, but it's not you, is it? Some of us are paid to uphold the law.”

Still, they were on speaking terms, an improvement since the night in the burial pit and largely the result of the arrival of Martha's son. David had grown into his body over the winter, had his mother's square shoulders now to go with her blue eyes and strong chin. He'd introduced himself to Sean with two unhesitating strides and a firm handshake, saying he was looking forward to the fishing trip and thanking him for the invitation. Three nights, four days, floating and
camping between Divide and Melrose on the Big Hole River. A guys-only trip—David, Sean, and Sam Meslik, the latter included over Martha's objection, uttered under her breath with one eyebrow lifted. “That man would be a bad influence on a prairie rattlesnake.”

But she'd known the trip would be good for David. She had gotten on with her son far better than she could have hoped for, including two late-night heart-to-hearts about his future, as they worked a crossword puzzle of a beargrass meadow. Still, he was a young man and he needed to do young man things, and the fishing trip would be a fitting send-off to the badlands, where'd he'd live in a tent for the next six weeks, chipping away at green siltstone rock to expose dinosaur bones.

“Just bring him back in one piece,” she'd told Stranahan when he'd suggested the float, and told him the same thing again as their conversation about Bear Paw Bill wound down and she jerked her arm, sending the dart into the forehead of a fugitive on one of the Wanted posters pinned to the wall.

D
oc Hanson heard the steps on the porch seconds before the knock. He looked over the top of his glasses, then set them down on the table where he'd been dealing cards from a pack he'd found in the drawer. It was Martha Ettinger who'd suggested the Forest Service cabin, when they'd bumped into each other in the lot of Law and Justice. Doc had promised himself the next time he saw her there would be no awkwardness, and there wasn't. She asked how he was doing and he'd said, “I'm so good I better hurry up before something goes wrong.” He said he was thinking of taking a few days for himself to outline a book he intended to write, a field guide to Montana's reptiles and amphibians. The only one he'd seen on bookshelves was poorly illustrated and too big to pocket.

He'd watched Martha think, pinching her chin, before saying why not the cabin. That is, if he could get past the history. The last writer to go there wished he hadn't. Doc had reminded her that dead people were his profession. Well then, how many days was he thinking about? They'd firmed up the dates on the phone that night and she'd given him the combination to the lock.

He opened the door.

A woman stood before him. She was wearing a string backpack. She had dark curly hair and looked like a gypsy.

“How may I help you?”

“You must be Doc,” she said, and held out a hand, rings on every finger.

He noticed the canvas duffel sitting on the floorboards. His expression was guarded.

“From the club,” she said. “I'm Book Girl. Are you really a doctor?”

“Yes, but there must be some mistake. We must have our dates crossed.”

“Oh, I don't think so.” She breezed past him into the dark room, a light jasmine scent lingering in the air. Doc couldn't just let the bag sit there. He picked it up and set it inside.

“I brought candles,” she said. The bracelets on her wrist jangled as she dug into her backpack. She placed a transparent gel candle with pink suspended hearts on the table and flourished a pack of matches. “Voilà.”

“I'm sorry, but—”

“It's okay, Doc. This is your first time, it's natural to be a little scared.” She frowned down at the cards. Solitaire. “Well, there won't be any more of that,” she said brightly. She scraped the cards into the drawer and lit the candle.

“Who sent you?” Doc managed. All the air seemed to have gone up the chimney and he heard his voice as if from a distance.

“Amoretta, silly. The assignation was in the classifieds. Don't you know anything?”

She stepped closer to him and laced her hands behind his neck. “We have to have faith in our fellow human beings, I always say. You have to step out onto that branch. You're shaking, Doc. Oh, you are a dear. But that's okay.” She kissed one corner of his quivering mustache, then the other. “I know the cure.”

 • • • 

M
artha lit the fire in the woodstove, leaving the door open so she could watch the flames. On Valentine's evening, when she'd opened
Gone with the Wind
for her annual sojourn to Tara, she'd pictured herself sitting before crackling embers as she turned the last page. Only twenty now to go, she'd draw them out, savor every word. She padded to the kitchen to make chamomile tea, another part of the
ritual. Sheba on her lap, Goldie with her chin on Martha's slippered feet, that would complete the evening's preparations.

She opened the front door to call Goldie inside, listening to the vesper song of this bird and that one. Soon it would be dark and the crows that sat in a solemn row on a bare branch of the old dead cottonwood, that had perched there for the past three evenings, would assimilate into the night.

Had they come to tell her that their work was done and Cinderella was made whole in heaven? The daytime Martha would have shaken her head, said it was romantic foolishness to think so. But with the sun down anything was possible, even lore, even love, and having that thought she wondered about Doc, if the woman had shown up at the cabin. If she had, Doc would either never forgive her, or already had. Well, everybody needed what he was looking for—how had he put it, “a shudder in the bloodstream before the hands reach midnight”?

She could use some of that, too. But tonight she'd settle for the literary equivalent.

“I won't think about him,” she said aloud.

But of course she had been, ever since he'd swung by to pick up David. They'd have floated into the heart of the canyon today. The tents would be up, Sean's raft pulled onto the bank. They'd have polished off their antelope steaks and would be sitting with cups of whiskey, their thoughts drawn by the catalyst of the campfire. Or so she envisioned.

But what did men left to themselves do? What did they talk about? She'd belonged to the boys' club of law enforcement for so long that all her friends were men, and yet what did she really know about them? That good ones like Sean and Harold meant well, but hadn't a clue. As for the Jasper Feys of the world, the Sam Mesliks? She shook her head. Scarlett hadn't understood men, either.

But when she turned to follow Goldie inside, she flicked the porch light on. She'd screwed in a new bulb, one of those spiral ones that lasted forever. She'd turn it off after Rhett didn't give a damn. Tonight was only a trial run. But tomorrow, and the day after, when David was
gone and she was alone in the house? One could always reconsider. Tomorrow
was
another day.

 • • • 

P
ay attention now,” Sam said. “This is your basic salsa side step.”

He shuffled to his right, his thick arms pumping to the rhythm of his steps, then to his left. “Quick-quick slow. Quick-quick slow. It's one of your basic Zumba moves. You want to peel down some of that Latina spandex, you got to have your moves.” Dancing behind the flames, his mane of hair glowing in the firelight, sparks shooting past his face, he looked like a radioactive Smokey the Bear.

“Now, when you're working your minnow fly”—Sam pantomimed fly casting—“it's the same rhythm. You make your cast, let it swing, then pulse it. Quick-quick slow. Or you can go slow quick-quick, like the bolero, or a three count with the emphasis on the first pull. I call that last retrieve the wooly bugger waltz, but you can do it with any pattern, even the Crazy Mountain Kiss that Sean had you fishing today. Biggest trout I ever caught was waltzing a sculpin streamer, right here in the Big Hole. Eight-pound brown. Come on, get on your feet, show me your stuff.”

Sean and David leaned back in their camp chairs and rocked with laughter.

“You did real good today,” Sean said, still laughing. “I mean it, David, you were solid on the oars, made some decent throws, that last bow . . . a very nice fish. I almost wish your mother had been here to see it.”

“She wouldn't like the pissing on the campfire part. She'd put her hands on her hips and say, ‘Humpff.'” He mimicked his mother, his gestures expansive after three fingers of Wild Turkey. “She's in love with you, you know. She'd shag you in a heartbeat.”

“Hey,” Sam said sharply. “There's no talk of love on a trout stream. Give the river some respect. Come on now, shake that thing.”

So they circled the fire as their forebears had, a blue moon above and the first stars as witness, conjuring trout from the flames, dancing the wooly bugger
waltz.

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