Crazy Mountain Kiss (8 page)

“Did Cinderella use drugs?”

“No, never. The only time I ever saw her with a drink was at Christmas, a glass of spiked eggnog. If somebody offered her a beer, she'd wrinkle up her nose.”

“Tell me about Landon Anker.”

“What's to tell? Jasper hired him last summer to take care of the horses when I was back in West Virginia, trying to find my mother. I'm a hills and hollows girl. My mother said I'd sleepwalk and she'd find me curled up by the woodstove, that she should have named me Cinderella. That's how I picked the name for my daughter.”

“Did you find her?”

“Mother? No, but that's a story you don't need to hear. Anyway, you asked about Landon. He was a couple years older. They went to the same school.” She shrugged. “He was soft-spoken, had good country manners. I know she had . . . certain feelings for him. I just wish she'd talked to me about it. We used to be so close.”

“How do you know she had feelings?”

“Cindy kept a diary. I came across it one day, I think it was the first day of school. That's not true, I was looking for it. Since the accident she'd become distant. I felt guilty, but I wanted to know what she was thinking. There was an entry in it about how handsome he was and how he didn't notice her. She wrote about how she wanted to twirl his hair in her fingers, how she'd . . . satisfy herself when she thought about him. I wasn't shocked. I was her age once and dreamed about boys. But nothing in the diary gave the impression they had a physical relationship. It's just within the past couple weeks I heard he might
have been gay. If he was, maybe that would explain it. But I never voiced my disapproval of him, certainly not within my daughter's hearing. I can't begin to understand why she should feel the need to run away.”

“Did you turn the diary over to Harold?”

“No, where I'd found it in her room, it wasn't there. We looked hard for it. I think she took it with her, wherever she was going.”

“Etta, I talked to Sheriff Ettinger on the phone before driving down here. She attended your daughter's autopsy. There's no easing into this. Cinderella was pregnant.”

For a moment her face didn't change. “Why,” she started to say. A slight tremor blurred her lower jaw. “Why wasn't I told this?” Her eyes had a wave in their focus. “For God's sake—”

“I
am
telling you. Sheriff Ettinger didn't call because she thought it would be better if someone told you in person.”

A cloud had come over her face. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its frantic quality. It was if she was half talking to herself.

“I never suspected.”

Her eyes settled back on Stranahan. “I never suspected,” she said again.

“The medical examiner says five months. It could be why they ran away, that she'd found out. How would your husband”—Stranahan remembered he wasn't to use the word—“how would Jasper Fey have reacted if he'd known?”

“He . . .” She bit her lower lip. “I don't know really. I . . . I'm not sure how
I
would have reacted.” She blinked and looked far off, seeming to seek exactly the right words. “I would have been disappointed, but I would never disown her. I would have been there for her, for them as a couple if he stayed in the picture. Jasper, I would have said he'd kill the kid, but he seems to be trying to forget all about his stepdaughter. He did love her, though, he never had children with his first wife; you couldn't have found a more doting father. Despite what I've said, we actually were a family once, before the accident changed things.”

It was the fourth or fifth time she'd brought up the accident,
speaking as if it was common knowledge. Stranahan, though, hadn't known anything about it until a couple hours ago, when he used the computer in his art studio to scan websites, trying to get a feel for Huntington before making her acquaintance. He'd found a newspaper account in the
Bridger Mountain Star
. The accident had occurred a year ago March when Huntington was pulling a horse trailer, driving her daughter to compete in a rodeo in Sheridan, Wyoming, and had swerved to avoid hitting a deer. The truck had caromed off the road into a stack of culvert pipe, one of which slammed through the windshield and severed her right arm below the elbow. Though the pipe had an eighteen inch diameter, it had miraculously missed Cinderella, who was sitting in the passenger seat. The story was newsworthy not only because Etta had gained a measure of notoriety as the face of Chevy Absaroka, and it was a half-ton Absaroka that she'd crashed, but because less than twenty-four hours later she had ripped out her IV and walked out of the hospital to watch her daughter win the junior division in barrel racing. Fans had seen the blood seeping through the heavy sterile wraps on her arm, as well as the head bandages on her daughter, who had suffered cuts and contusions in the crash, and whose hat had blown off as she laid her head on her horse's neck while rounding the first barrel. A video posted on YouTube received more than thirty thousand hits.

“This accident,” Stranahan prompted.

“Yes. It seems like everyone knows about that particular incident. And the commercial. People who don't know you form . . . opinions.” She drew the last word out, her voice turning bitter.

“How did it change things, Etta?”

“I don't know where to begin. I'd been stamped as the brazen cowgirl. ‘Hellcat in a cowgirl hat' is what a director called me once. ‘Puma on a painted horse.' I was called a lot of things relating to cats. But it's hard to live up to the image when you lose your arm. It puts a damper on the male fantasy. For Cindy, it was . . . more a personality change. She was wearing a seat belt, but her head whiplashed against the pipe. The damage to her brain wasn't determined for several months. But I
could see she was different. Cindy never took decisions lightly—the decision to buy a filly, or whether to go to the school in Clyde Park or be homeschooled—she'd agonize. She was always at odds with herself, head versus heart. The accident resulted in an injury to the cerebral cortex. It removed a filtering process and made her more likely to act on impulse than consider consequences. One thing that upset me about Jasper's decision to hire Landon was that he knew how vulnerable Cindy would be to act on her . . . urges. He should have known that bringing him in here would be giving her a green card to explore her sexuality.”

“Wouldn't an injury like hers make it more dangerous to ride?”

She looked querulously at Stranahan, held the look, then slowly nodded. “You're absolutely right. In rodeo, you're always riding on edge. People think only the guys take risks, but I would tell them to climb on the back of a blooded quarter horse and do a one-eighty at full gallop and try not to fly off the pommel. Cindy threw all caution to the wind to win that buckle in Laramie.”

“Was she still riding when she went missing?”

“Not competitively. I'd made her stop. It was for her own safety.” She paused. “It was . . . hard for her to take. Another effect of the injury was that she didn't fully understand what had happened to her, why I had to take her off her horse. We were already getting recruitment letters from rodeo schools—Cal Poly, Montana State, New Mexico State. She would be offered a full-ride scholarship, she was that good. I was taking her dream away from her.”

“Maybe that's why she didn't come to you about Landon. She was afraid you'd take him away, too.”

“It would break my heart that she didn't know me better. But I have wondered about it. You're a perceptive man. Do you have a contract, something for me to sign? Now that you'll deign to work for me.”

He watched the corners of her lips shrug, a smile that made her look ten years younger. Stranahan kept a portable fly-tying kit in the Land Cruiser, and he excused himself to retrieve his “emergency”
contract, which was folded under a rooster hackle used to tie dry flies. She signed on the line.

“In case you're wondering, I've always been ambidextrous. Its helped with the adjustment. But the signature's the hardest.”

“I'll need to talk to you again, everyone who works here for that matter. And I'd like to see your daughter's room.”

She nodded. “The memorial service is at noon. It's at the Episcopal church in Pony. It's a bit of a drive, but that's where we lived before I bought this place. Do you know Pony?”

Stranahan nodded as she handed him back the pen.

“We're having a potluck. I can introduce you to people who were part of her life.”

Stranahan said he'd be there and offered his hand. She wrapped it in her strong rough fingers and then reached to touch his face. She spread her fingers along his jaw and drew them back until only her fingertips touched the point of his chin, leaving lines of heat. She placed her forefinger against her lips and pressed. Then she pressed the finger against his lips, before placing her hand on her heart. “That's the way I would say good night to Cindy,” she said. “She called it the Crazy Mountain kiss. It was our secret.”

“I'll find out what happened to her, Etta.”

“That's good to hear. It's the first time anyone has said that to me.”

She fingered a cream-colored doeskin dress that hung from a peg in the wall. “My heritage is Cherokee, but this is a traditional Lakota design; you can tell by the ragged hem. I haven't finished the beadwork on the yoke and there's still the elk teeth to sew on. It was to have been Cindy's wedding dress, if she ever married. Now I suppose I'll be buried in it.”

“You're still a young woman, Etta.”

“Am I?” She walked to the sawhorse and swung a leg over the saddle. “God I'm tired.”

She draped a sheepskin over the two-by-fours that crossed in front of the pommel, then leaned forward so that her cheek lay against the
makeshift pillow, the neck of an invisible horse. To Stranahan the position looked awkward, one of those impossible positions cats contort themselves into. It struck him that this wasn't the first time she'd done it, and that had he not merited a measure of her trust she wouldn't have let him see her in the position. She closed her eyes and, without lifting her head, drew a lazy circle in his direction with the stump of her right arm. He had forgotten all about the arm.

“Good night,” she said.

 • • • 

I
t was past midnight when Stranahan let himself into his studio. He booted the computer and found the video. The volume key had stopped working, so there would be no soundtrack to the commercial.

She was leaning against the rail of a lunging pen. Noticeably younger, her cheekbones sharp as ax blades. Red cowboy boots well worn, morning sun glinting off a spur. She brushed the hair back from her eyes and centered a black Stetson as she strode into the pen, holding the lariat at her side. The horse reared when she roped him, she brought her cheek to his to settle him down. Whispered to him, the camera having a love affair with her lips. She loaded the horse into a trailer and climbed into the truck. Mountains passed by, snow on the escarpment. Then she was in sagebrush country on a road like an arrow, a line of dust in her wake, her hand on the wheel ropy with veins.

At the rodeo, she paired up with a man for the team roping, gave a grim-faced nod to the gatekeeper for the break. She headed, he heeled, the steer stretched out as the flag went up. A glance at the clock, her eyes fierce. Six point two seconds.

She trailered her horse, parked the Chevy under a hangnail moon. Middle of nowhere, didn't turn her head as he drove up in a battered pickup. The kiss was deep, somehow the hats stayed on. They looked toward his truck, then hers with the longer bed. No comparison. The camera pulled back, the Chevy was center frame. You couldn't see
them over the sidewalls, but the implication was clear. The sky black with white pepper until now, a single red cowboy boot kicked high against the stars. Then the other.

Stranahan read the banner as the frame froze:

ABSAROKA, FOR THE WOMAN WHO
KICKS OUT THE
STARS
.

I
n the tipi, Stranahan sat behind the center fire looking toward the flap, Martha Ettinger sitting cross-legged to his right. If his guest had been a man, Stranahan would have indicated the space to his left. It was the Blackfeet custom Harold Little Feather had impressed upon him when he'd lent Stranahan the tipi. Martha brought the coffee cup to her lips, pursing them out tentatively. She made a face.

“Don't you know better than to serve a hot drink in an enamel cup? You might as well kiss a branding iron.”

Stranahan smiled. It was the first time she had visited since their breakup and already she was being critical. Vintage Martha.

“All I have for breakfast is tuna jerky Sam made in Florida.”

“I'll pass. How is Sam?”

“He's in Sam heaven. The fishing clients down there expect the guide to berate them for their incompetence. His only regret is it's against the law to put a shock collar on them.”

“Sam,” Ettinger said. “You're waiting for me to smile when I think about him.”

“You never did like Sam.”

“I don't have as much tolerance for bullshit as you do.”

“Did you see Wilkerson after the autopsy? Now that I'm officially on the clock for Etta Huntington, I'm interested to hear what she's found out.”

“Not much we don't know. She confirmed that the fibers collected above and below her position were in fact from her clothing. So she went down, but she went up, too, and we don't have an acceptable explanation
for that. Her body hair had grown out and it didn't look like she'd washed in weeks. Gigi found abnormally large red blood cells that suggest a folic acid deficiency. She wasn't eating enough vegetables. It all points to her living very rough. Not much else except the nail broken off in her foot is made of iron. It's called a type B cut nail. They started being replaced by steel nails about the turn of the century, but of course there must be millions rusting in coffee cans and wherever.”

“Where do you think she stepped on it?”

“The only place we know she's been is the forest cabin, so I suggest that's where you'd start. But that's not why I stopped by.”

“Why did you?”

“I'll get to it, but tell me, what did you make of Loretta Huntington?”

Stranahan pressed his lips together. “She was drunk. Mad at the world. I got some coffee in her you could stand a snake in and she became a human being, but that only went so far. There's a wild animal quality about her.”

Martha nodded. “Walt YouTubed her to see the truck commercial and said that she was, and I quote the man, ‘a Johnson straightener of the first order.'”

“That's one way of putting it. She has an excess of vitality, like she breathes a purer form of air. She places a lot of blame on her second husband, who's in Roundup shooting a series TV show about a modern-day sheriff. The actor had never been on a horse. Jasper Fey is his coach.”

Martha grunted. “Seems like for every real cowboy, you have someone sitting saddle who plays the part on camera. ‘All hat, no cattle.' It ought to be the new state motto.”

“From what I heard, Jasper's the real deal. Etta told me he was a pickup man, one of the horsemen who rescues the bronc and bareback riders from bucking horses. Before that he was a bullfighter, the guy with the baggy britches who distracts the bull so it doesn't kill the cowboy it's tossed in the air. He was a champion bronc rider before he was twenty. A walking catalog of broken bones.”

“How did the pregnancy news go over?”

“About as you'd expect. She got mad at the messenger. But I don't think Cinderella being pregnant came as that much of a surprise. She stills thinks it was Anker, the hired hand. By the way, why didn't you tell me she had only one arm?”

“I didn't want you to have preconceived notions. Did she talk about any of her daughter's relationships besides the one with the boy?”

“Well, the mother-daughter bond was strained. They had a falling-out after the accident.” Stranahan related the story of Cinderella's brain injury and its effect on her behavior.

Ettinger took a swallow from her cup. It was just cool enough.

“I did not know that. And I don't remember Harold mentioning it last fall.”

“I don't think it's something the family wants to advertise.”

Ettinger nodded thoughtfully and they sat in easy silence, watching the smoke curl up toward the tipi's top flap.

“I better get my butt to work. What's on your schedule today?”

“The memorial service is at one. I was thinking about looking up Anker's parents for their side of the story. The news that Cindy was alive all winter must be hard on them. You've been trying to come to terms with the likelihood your son is dead, and now you have to think if she was alive, maybe he was, too. Or still is.”

“Won't they be at the memorial?”

“I'll find out.”

“So that leaves you the morning. I have a suggestion. Remember the date on that sex tape?”

“February fourteenth, wasn't it?”

Martha nodded. “I called the Forest Service and got a scan of the reservation. Ariana Dimitri.” She fished a piece of notepaper from her shirt pocket. “You might want to find out how she came to be wearing a Santa hat two months before it dropped out of a chimney.”

“It will be interesting to see if I recognize her in clothes.”

“Somebody has to point you in the right direction. Say, ‘Thank
you, Martha.'” She uncrossed her legs and got stiffly to her feet. “Now I'm going to smell like woodsmoke all day.”

“Thank you, Martha,” Stranahan said.

Ettinger squared her hat. “All part of the service.”

 • • • 

T
he address led Stranahan to a one-story clapboard house on the north side of Bozeman. Stranahan generally avoided the Bo-Zone, as the sprawling community was called, preferring the quieter backwaters of Bridger and Ennis, but had to admit parts of the town were attractive. This wasn't one of them, the houses run-down and this one needing a roof and a coat of paint it would probably never get. Stranahan would place a bet that it would be torn down to make way for a Craftsman cottage for a California couple before the decade was out, protection provided by ADT Security. As it was, the patch of dandilion lawn was protected by a cocker doodle leashed to the rail of the porch. Or not protected. The cocker doodle raised his head to be patted when Stranahan approached. The girl who answered his knock had twin braids and was a younger image of the woman Stranahan had seen in the video, with thin facial features and a bulging forehead. All of ten. No, her mother wasn't in. Was her father around? Her father lived in Boise. “They're D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” Was there anyone else at home. “I'm supposed to say there is because you're a stranger.” Where is your mother? “She works at the library.”

Of course she's a librarian,
Stranahan thought.

He thanked the little speller and found his way to the library. The woman manning the checkout desk was wearing a name tag on a scoop top that played peekaboo with a lacy camisole. The tag read
ARI
. Her glasses were big for her eyes, magnifying dark brown irises.

“I'm Sean Stranahan,” he said, and offered his hand.

She took it unhesitatingly, her rings pressing into his fingers. He had that effect on people, disarming them with his touch before they could erect a subconscious skin of posture to keep their distance. It had the desired effect now, for she brightened and smiled up at him
from her chair, a little magenta lipstick smeared on her front teeth. Her face was its own constellation, with silver glitter twinkling from blushed cheeks and half moons of midnight blue eye shadow. Her earrings were bolts of pewter lightning. Her bracelets clicked. It was the gypsy look, but not unattractive.

“Can I make you a card? You look like a reader of . . . let me guess”—her voice fell to a delicious whisper—“espionage. John Le Carré, Alan Furst. I love Alan Furst. He puts you right there in prewar Europe.” She worked a finger into her curls—her nails matched the color of her lips—and raised her eyebrows.

Stranahan told her he'd got into the habit of listening to books on tape. Like a lot of immigrant Montanans, he'd found audiobooks to be something of a necessity in a country where driving distances were so enormous.

“We have quite a few of those,” she said. “CD, cassette, Playaway. If you're into police procedurals, I recommend the Harry Bosch novels by Michael Connelly. Len Cariou is the reader, what a voice. And anything that Simon Vance or Rick Holmes narrates. It's the reader makes the book.”

“Thanks. I'll look into them, but that's not why I came here, Ariana.”

“You know my name,” she said. She was smiling but her eyes had narrowed.

“Is there a place we can talk privately?” He awarded her his best smile while inwardly wincing. He was getting to be as bad as Max Gallagher, offering the better half of his face.

“Are you flirting with me?” she said. “I'm not that kind of librarian.”

Yes you are,
thought Stranahan.

She pulled a shawl over her bare shoulders and he followed her outside, past a homeless man curled around an open guitar case on a manicured lawn. The guitar was minus three strings. She paused to rummage in her purse and dropped a five-dollar bill into the case. “That's for food, Henry,” she said in a loud voice.

The man stirred and opened his eyes. “God bless you,” he said.

They walked toward a picnic table bolted to a concrete slab.

“Jackie wants us to run him off, but I don't have the heart. He's like a bird, all the homeless are this far north. In November they fly away and you never know if you'll see them again.”

Stranahan saw that the library grounds bordered a big park. He produced his card, the one with the eye under the logo—
Blue Ribbon Investigations.

She fidgeted with the shawl. “Are you a private detective? I've never met a private detective.”

“Then you're in luck.”

She smiled again, but her expression had become guarded. “Is this about Jeremy Cusack? He has an overactive imagination, that boy.”

“No.” Sean saw the relief in her eyes. “It's about the night you rented a Forest Service cabin in the Crazy Mountains.”

“Oh.” She was still worried, but it seemed a milder apprehension. Stranahan had a feeling that her problem with Jeremy Cusack—or maybe it was his parents who had the problem with her—was more serious in nature. He was sure that the boy, underage or not, considered himself lucky.

“Ari, I know about the video you made in the cabin. Now, you're not in any trouble, it's consenting adults and there's no law against what you did. But I'm working with the Hyalite sheriff's department on an open investigation and I need to know a few things about that night. I can put you in touch with Sheriff Ettinger if you want to verify my credentials.”

She was looking down at her shoes. “No, I have nothing to hide.” A small laugh, then a shake of her head as she looked up. Her cheeks were blushing under the blush. “Nothing to hide, I guess that's a Freudian slip.”

“You were wearing a hat, a Santa hat. Where did you get it?”

“It wasn't mine. I found it in the box, the geocache. You . . . know about that, too, right? I guess you'd have to.”

“I know about the box in the cellar.”

She nodded. “When you take something you're supposed to put
something of equal value back. My uncle gave me some playing cards with fishing lures on them, so I took the hat and left the pack.”

“What did you do with the hat?”

“I was going to take it home, like a souvenir. But then I didn't because, in the end, the next day, I wasn't so wild about the guy. He wasn't as advertised and it's not written or anything, but wearing a mask seems like a cop-out. I tried to get into the spirit, but the devil face freaked me out.” She spoke quickly, nervously. “And there were other things, not so good at all. No, he was a creep. So I just hung the hat on a nail and left it. Am I in trouble?”

“Not if you're telling the truth.”

She was shaking her head from side to side, her hair falling in loose curls that alternately hid one or the other side of her face. “Dumb, dumb, dumb,” she muttered to herself. “You make one little sex tape, next thing you know the world's seeing it.”

“Just two people,” Stranahan said. “And it's probably all that ever will.”

“You're not, like, passing it around the office?”

“No. You mentioned the guy you were with. What's his name?”

“Well, we all choose our club names. I'm Book Girl and his was . . . I can't remember. It was a girl's name. Shirley, that was it. But I said that was silly, so he said call him Gus. I don't think it's his real name.”

“You didn't know him?”

“No, the way it works is Amoretta matches me up with someone from her list. After we make the video, we put the card into the troll doll for the next couple.”

“Does Amoretta rent the cabin?”

She nodded. “That's what the dues are for. We each put in a hundred dollars a year and the cabin costs fifty, so divide it by two 'cause it takes two to tango, that's twenty-five. So the dues cover four assignations a year. That's what Amoretta calls them, assignations.”

“Who is Amoretta?”

“She's the one who does the matching up. It's called the Mile and a Half High Club because the assignations are in the mountains.”

“So you're a swingers' club.”

“Kind of, but there's no group sex or anything.” Her smile flickered back. When she spoke next, her voice was singsong and dreamy. “Not that there's anything wrong with that.” She touched her tongue to her upper lip.