Crazy Mountain Kiss (9 page)

“Are these assignations arranged through email?”

“No, the Internet's too public. Amoretta puts an ad in the classifieds at the
Star,
first of the month. It will have the date and the coordinates of the geocache and the combination to the cabin door. All the numbers are in reverse, like a code. So every month I look for an ad that says ‘Love in Thin Air,' and if Book Girl's one of the two names in it, then I have an assignation.”

“But it's your name on the register with the Forest Service, not Amoretta's.”

“Well, she does the renting but puts the rental party and contract and all that kind of stuff in the name of one of the participating members.”

“How long has the club been going?”

“About two years, but I only joined up last fall. You have to be recommended by somebody who's a member.”

“Are the assignations always in the same cabin?”

“They weren't at first, but they are now. I think Amoretta has a connection that makes it available.”

“Have you met this person?”

“I might have. But I didn't, like,
meet her
meet her. I was told that she'd seen me at a party and was going to give me a call. Amoretta interviews all of us before we're invited to join. You don't want any weirdos.”

“So you don't know her real identity?”

“No. The whole point is the anonymity.”

“Why do you think she chose you?”

“Well, it was a certain kind of party. She must have liked what she saw. Is this going to take much longer? Because if it is, I have to get somebody to cover for me.”

“Let me make certain I have this straight. You make a video and put the chip into the doll and hide the doll in the geocache for the next couple to find. And then they make a video and put it into the doll and so on?”

“Pay it forward. Now you get the picture.”

“How does Amoretta know you'll find the box? It was in the wall of the cellar.”

“Well, the coordinates are for the cache, not the cabin. That gets you within a few feet. And she puts a clue in the ad. Our clue was ‘Trapdoor.'”

“Was there a memory card in the doll when you got there?”

“
Mmm
—
hmm
. A busty blonde who looked sort of dyke-ish. And a little bitty thing. Oh, but she was the contortionist.”

“Lesbians.”

“Or bi. I'm bi. Why limit yourself, is what I say.”

“Do you have that card?”

She hesitated. “Maybe.”

“Look, Ari, this could be important.” Sean wasn't sure how it could be important, but you could never collect too much information.

“It's at home. I could mail it to you.”

“No, I'm going to need it now.”

“All right. I rode my bike here, so you'll have to drive.”

Stranahan climbed into the Land Cruiser. He turned the key when he saw her reemerge from the library. “I got somebody to cover until lunch.” She flounced into the passenger seat, turning herself sideways to face him. She'd brought a scent of perfume with her and had reapplied her lipstick. “I like an engine with a good rumble,” she said. Deliberately, she hooked her left leg over the stick shift. Whatever misgivings she had harbored were all gone now.

“Ari.”

A pause, her eyebrows going up. Innocently: “Yes?”

“Your leg.”

“This leg?” She moved her leg an inch.

Stranahan lifted the leg and put it where it belonged.

“You're no fun.”

“I'll tell you something that isn't fun. Letting a stranger hook you up in the middle of nowhere with a stranger. You could get killed over a cheap thrill like that.”

But she wasn't listening. Stranahan heard her humming, her eyes teasing him, her smile wicked.

When he pulled up in front of the house, she said, “I'll just get it,” and ran to the door the way a girl would run, legs flying as she jumped over the dog, and then a minute later ran out again, taking the dog in stride. She leaned inside the open driver's side window, breathing hard. “Feel my heart,” she said, and brought Stranahan's hand to her chest as she folded his fingers over the camera card. Her heart beat hard, her breath was warm. Her hand was very warm, with rings on every finger. Stranahan recalled her words at the end of the video, when she'd reached out that hand to turn the camera off: “
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

“Ari?”

“Yes?”

“My hand.”

She didn't release it. Instead, she reached her free hand to take a pen from the cracked dashboard and inked numbers onto the back of Stranahan's hand. “Will you come and see me sometime? Or maybe you don't like natural women. Do you like natural women?”

“I even like the unnatural ones.”

“I'm off Sundays and Mondays.”

“Sure,” Stranahan said. “Maybe I'll come by and we can rent a book on tape or something.”

She rubbed her thumb into the palm of his hand. The skin was smooth, in contrast to the sandpaper grip of Etta Huntington. “A book could be nice. But I vote for ‘or something.'”

She brought the tips of her first two fingers to her lips, then touched Stranahan's. She straightened up and walked to join her daughter, who had appeared on the front step. The dog hadn't moved an inch since Sean's earlier visit, even after being hurdled twice.

“Wave goodbye to the detective man,” she said to the girl.

“Don't you need a ride back to work?” Stranahan called out.

“No, I'll walk.”

The girl waved goodbye and then they both were waving as he drove away, and were still waving when he glanced at the rearview mirror, as if they were a family and he was catching a train for work.

A
s far as Sean Stranahan was concerned, Pony, Montana's motto—“The Last Best Town in the Last Best Place”—wasn't a stretch, not if you liked a one-street, know-your-neighbors town. A gold rush settlement of five thousand dreamers in the 1860s, complete with a blacksmith's shop and two Chinese laundries, it was down to less than a hundred souls, no longer even a whorehouse to its name, but the one essential business was open 365 days a year. Stranahan took a stool in the Pony Bar under a graveyard of cracked cowboy hats hanging from nails and put his boots on the brass rail.

A bartender wearing sleeve garters cut the foam off a Guinness and set it on the bar as Stranahan caught snatches of conversation:

“When the boy and I climbed Hollow Top last summer I told him that's where I proposed to his mother. I was thinking it was a tender moment. He said the mosquitoes up here are big enough to rape a chicken. Where do you suppose he heard a thing like that at?”

“I'm telling you there must have been a dozen dogs fighting. I jumped up onto the bar and yelled, ‘Okay, anything with a tail, out of here!' And Rose Marie, you got to love her, I get the last one out the door and she says, ‘Does that mean me, too?'”

“Now he wants twenty percent of the calves in addition to twenty-a-head grazing rights. I said why not take my third cutting and have a poke at my wife while you're at it?”

Stranahan's focus wavered as he finished his beer. He had decompressed from the drive and now he was just tired. He raised a finger to the bartender. “Coffee.”

The coffee came and he blew on it as he heard a man behind him talking in a loud voice. “I told that one-armed bitch the dog was coming through my fence and I was going to shoot him, and then she gets her panties in a bunch when I foller through. She said the dog wasn't getting into livestock and I said it's the principle, can't you understand that? This isn't Indi-fucking-ana. Out here people have a respect for property rights. She wrapped the dog in a Navajo blanket must be worth a grand. Took him without a goddamned word. But if those eyes could kill I'd be bullshitting from the grave. I do feel sorry for her girl. That was a hell of a thing.”

Stranahan swiveled the stool around to see who was talking about Etta Huntington as a fist flashed by his face. He heard a hollow thump like a bat striking a watermelon and the man who'd been speaking hit the floor hard, his legs twitching, his eyes rolled right back into his head. Everything locked into freeze frame, bottles stopped midway to lips, the bartender's face agape, the jukebox loud in the silence. Then the man was on his knees and trying to stand and the one who'd hit him cocked his fist to swing and Stranahan, without thinking, tossed his coffee into the man's face, then flung himself off the stool and tackled him at his ankles, immediately registering that he might have taken on more adrenaline-stoked muscle than he could handle. But the balance shifted when the bartender vaulted the bar and got the man in a headlock, his blousy shirt stretched tight across his thick right arm. Stranahan heard a muffled, “Okay, okay,” and they manhandled him to his feet and half dragged him outside, the bartender's face red as a beet and the cords in his neck standing with the strain.

“I'm going to smack shit out of you next, boy-oh,” the man said to Stranahan when they released him. Sean was surprised to see he was looking down at the top of the man's head and that the hair—the man's cowboy hat had come off in the melee—was as silver as last night's moon.

“No, you're not going to do anything of the kind, Jasper.” The bartender had stepped between them. “They're inside thinking about calling the cops right now, if they haven't already. If you'd hit that fellow a second time you'd be cooling those snakeskins in jail tonight. This young man saved the county the expense. What the hell were you trying to do, upstage your own daughter's memorial?”

“He insulted my wife, my own goddamned neighbor.” The man had a way-down-in-the-well voice, but with melody in it, despite the vitriol of the words. “A silver-tongued bastard,” Etta had called him. Now that bastard was looking around the bartender's barrel chest toward Stranahan. He may have been short, but Sean saw that the body was tight with muscle that strained the seams of his snap-up shirt.

“You burned about half my goddamned face off, mister,” the man said.

“So you're Jasper Fey. Your wife told me you'd be skipping this occasion.”

“My wife?” He said it a second time, his voice rising. “What's my wife have to do with you throwing coffee in my face? Shit. Everything's a blur, I can't hardly see. If I—”

“It's just the surface of the cornea that's burned. You stay out of bright lights and you'll be fine tomorrow.”

“What are you, an ophthalmologist?”

“I'm a private detective. But I've been snow-blind and it's the same burn. Your wife hired me to find out about Cinderella. You mind your manners, I'll take you to the service. You're in no condition to drive and it's going to start in ten minutes.”

“You sure you got this under control?” the bartender said.

Stranahan nodded.

“Then I got to go back in there and pick up the goddamned pieces. This isn't a fighting bar; there's families, for Chrise sakes. I'm not back in five minutes means nobody's pressing charges—yet. Either or, don't you never come through the door again, Jasper. Not never.” He straightened his bolo tie and shot his cuffs.

“It's not like you own the place, Sidwell,” Jasper Fey said. But he said it under his breath after the bartender had gone.

 • • • 

I
n the cut stone Episcopal church with its towering steeple and stained glass windows, Loretta Huntington sat in the front left pew, beside her an equally tall but considerably blonder version of herself, undoubtedly the sister from Sweden she'd mentioned. When Jasper Fey made his appearance, standing in the aisle with his hat in hand and his silver head catching the prism light, the two women edged down the pew to make room for him. He sat; the crown of his head came up a little past his wife's ears. From where Stranahan was standing against the back wall, he saw Etta glance at her husband's burned face and abruptly turn her head away. Sean took in the gathering, bowlegged men with middle-age spread and two-tone foreheads, women who had meat on their bones. Ranch people—knuckled hands folded on top of each other, skin that had spots. Among them were a smattering of suits, or rather what passed for them—crisp shirts, silk accent scarves, jeans with decorative stitching, the main difference being the faces weren't so leathered, having seen the seasons change from behind the picture window. Toward the back on both sides of the aisle were at least a dozen teenagers, Cinderella's schoolmates, Sean surmised.

What he learned about her from the Reverend George Crookshaw he could sum up in a sentence—“She had too much life to be called to heaven so young, but who are we to question the ways of the Lord?”

Etta was the first speaker from the family; she took the steps holding herself carefully erect. She'd braided her hair and was dressed in western mourning attire—a black pearl snap shirt, black skirt, and
black boots with embroidered pink roses. Her right arm looked natural from a distance, but the plastic clacked off the wood of the lectern as she leaned forward. In the silence that stretched she seemed shaky—for a moment Stranahan wondered if she'd been drinking—but she steadied as she found her voice.

“As some of you know, my spiritual belief system is more aboriginal than the prevailing Christian doctrines you subscribe to. My daughter also adopted my beliefs, and as we do not disparage your faith I would hope that you respect our belief that the sun, dawn light, is our father god, as it is for Native Americans of many tribes, and that the moon, night light, is the sun's wife. What some of you may not know is that Cinderella was my third child. My first son died shortly after childbirth, and my second, a girl, died in a miscarriage. In Native belief, the only surviving child of the union between the sun and the moon was called A-pi-su-ahts, the morning star. Cinderella was my morning star. Since the day she disappeared I have risen in the night and gone outside the house and stared at those rising stars, trying to find that one that is the vessel containing her light. I could not move forward with a new day until I knew that one of those stars was her, because, as I've come to understand, the heart never buries the dead. They remain alive in here.” She placed her hand over her breast. “So when I learned that a crow had pecked out her eyes I did not react with horror. Rather I rejoiced, knowing that it had taken her eyes to heaven so that she might be whole again, that today she is there among those stars with her soul restored, and someday I might follow her and we will be reunited.

“I would like to tell you about Cindy . . .”

Stranahan listened as Etta talked about the girl with the unbridled ambitions and love of horses, hoping to hear something he didn't know before his mind inevitably strayed. Ever since he was a child going stir crazy while the reverend droned, Stranahan had adopted a habit in church of examining the faces in the congregation and attaching stories to them that were spun entirely from whole cloth. This habit had not gone over well with his mother, who'd once taken his
bicycle away when Sean convinced Karen, his younger sister, that old Mr. McManus had brained his wife with a shovel.

Now, his attention flagging, he turned his eyes to a man sitting down the pew whose crew cut was gray and whose hands, clasped together on top of his Bible, bulged with muscles as they kneaded each other, writhing in isometric turmoil. The man, who wore a frayed Carhartt jack shirt, had made the floor creak when he'd walked by Stranahan earlier, and, with piglike eyes, broad nostrils, and hair sprouting from his collar and curling out of his ears, brought to mind a semi-domesticated boar. Stranahan watched his head bend forward so that his heavy jowls sagged over his Bible. The man's eyes closed, and Stranahan was beginning to build a story of a sinner overcome with remorse who prayed for God's forgiveness, when he heard the church door open. He turned his head to see a couple enter, the man Depression-era thin in defeated overalls, battered felt fedora, and shirt buttoned to the collar, an embarrassed expression on his face. Sean's eyes settled on the woman, who stepped past the man as he held the door and stared incuriously back at the gawkers, for now all the eyes of the church were on her. She looked to the left, then to the right, then to the stage at the back of the church. Etta Huntington had surrendered the microphone to a young woman who was fingerpicking a guitar, singing a song said to have been a favorite of Cinderella's but that Stranahan had never heard before, and held the last note. The strings rang into silence and it was the bar again, everyone holding a collective breath.

“Well don't mind me for livin',” the woman said.

The pastor rose to offer his professional smile. “Donna, Clyde, you're welcome to—”

“You're right I'm welcome. Grieving for this young woman is as much my right as anyone's. But who sitting here is grieving for my son? My son”—her jaw began to tremble—“my son who is, who is”—Stranahan could hear indrawn breath as she tried to calm herself—“the sweetest boy . . .” She had become unsteady and the man took her arm in support. “Landon never did a wrong thing. I
know what people been saying, but he would not hurt Cindy, he thought the world of that girl, and you should be, well you should be ashamed, who think he could possibly, who don't understand the way he is . . .”

“Come on, Donna. You said your piece.” It was the first the man had spoken, and she leaned into him and then went down to her knees, hugging his waist like the trunk of a tree. “Come on now, Donna.”

Stranahan rose and helped the man get her to her feet.

“Thank you,” he said. “I can take this from here.”

“I'll hold the door.” Stranahan stepped out with the couple and steered them to one of the picnic tables set end to end for the potluck. The woman had composed herself, and after sitting down she wiped at the tears that streaked her face. She wore no makeup and her face was as plain as her front-button prairie dress that belonged to another era. Her eyes searched Stranahan's face and then turned to her husband. “Oh, I shouldn't have done that, you shouldn't have let me done that.”

The man patted her back. His colorless lips played with a smile as he turned to look at Stranahan. “As if I had a choice,” he said. He coughed. It was a smoker's cough; Stranahan could see the outline of the cigarette pack in his shirt pocket. “I'd like to thank you for helping us back there,” he said. “There was no one else got out of their seats, it was like they'd all sat down in a puddle of glue. I guess a person isn't worth saying a prayer over but that she's pretty or their folks have the money. At least they know what happened to Cindy. But our boy, it's like the world went flat and he stepped off the edge.”

“I'm Sean,” Stranahan said. “I know this is a difficult time for you, but I came here today because I'm trying to find out what led to Cindy's death. If I can find out how she disappeared, there's a good chance I'll find out about your son, too.”

“What exactly is it you're trying to say?”

Stranahan told them and watched the man's face harden.

“So that's why you got the door?”

“No, that's the way I was brought up. But yes, I would have wanted to talk to you at some point. For what it's worth, Etta Huntington found Landon to be a nice young man.”

“Just not good enough for her daughter.”

“No, she worried that her daughter was too young to get too serious.” That Cinderella had become pregnant was not public knowledge and Stranahan refrained from mentioning it.