Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (22 page)

“What should I do?”

“Nothing. It's obvious Mel was communicating with this man more than he let on. If he suspects anything, he might warn him. So just go about the day and try to keep the phone away from him.”

“Are you going to call the sheriff and go to this other place? Today's the seventeenth.”

“Hey, what is this, a conspiracy?” Melvin Kauffeld's baritone boomed over the sound of the current and the sloshing of his waders.

“You caught us,” Stranahan said, holding up his hands. “We were just talking about reassigning you to the back of the boat so that Harriet has the next chance at a big fish.”

Kauffeld climbed onto the aft seat of the raft and rummaged around in his waterproof gear bag. He extracted a thermos and poured a cup of coffee, to which he added a dollop of whiskey from a gunmetal flask. A drop of liquid suspended from his red nose, then dropped with an audible plop into the cup.

“A dash of bitters won't do any harm,” he said. “Did you know that Irish coffee was born on a day like this one? Just after the war, in Foynes, Ireland. At the airport there, the planes were always having to turn back in heavy weather—I've been to Limerick, that's how I know the story—and one day the chef at the hotel prepared this drink to revive the spirits of the returning passengers. Somebody said, ‘Is this Brazilian coffee?' and the chef said, ‘No, it's Irish coffee.' To make it right you add cream on top, you pour it over”—his voice began to quaver—“a . . . spoon.” He heaved a sigh. “Oh God, what brought this on? I just caught the biggest trout of my life and I'm with the woman of my dreams and I'm on the Madison River and I'm ready to cry.” Kauffeld shook his head as if to clear out what was in it.

“We're here with you, Mel,” Stranahan said.

Kauffeld gathered himself. He conjured a smile after a short struggle, one side of his mouth having to work at it. The lopsided gesture struck Stranahan like a fist. For a few seconds he wasn't sure what he was seeing as faces blurred in his memory, then he was seeing one face very clearly, the left eye and cheek clenching tight, as if it had been stung by a bee.
Of course,
he thought.
It makes sense
.

Kauffeld was blinking away his tears. He said, “I don't mean to be a killjoy, but here's to what's left of life.” He raised the mug, the steam dissipating into the air.

•   •   •

F
or Stranahan, what was left of the float was an exercise in patience. His mind was on the second circle on the map, trying to envision the country. He knew what he had to do, had an idea how to go about it, had a very good idea whom he'd meet there. But he was on the fence about going in alone. It was hard to think of that and fishing, too. A half dozen more strikes, a couple smallish browns for Harriet, a few snapshots to remember the day, and finally they were at the take-out. Peachy had beat them and was loading his boat onto his trailer. A driver for the Double D had shuttled the rigs and was waiting beside a van to take Kauffeld and Langhor back to the ranch.

After helping Peachy with his boat, Stranahan waved him to the far side of the rigs, where they could speak in private.

“I got a big favor to ask. Do you have a rifle back at your cabin that I could borrow?” He'd returned Kauffeld's Savage rifle to Sheriff Ettinger when they came off the mountain.

“No, man. My Weatherby's at Rocky Mountain Sports in Ennis. The floor plate was opening under recoil and spilling ammo onto the ground. They're putting in a stronger spring. It's done, but I haven't picked it up.”

“When you get back in cell range would you call and tell them I'm picking it up? I'll have it back to you later tonight.”

“Sure. If you can pony up for the bill, I'll pay you back. It's a .338-06. I got half a box of handloads in the truck. She's sighted an inch and half high at one hundred yards, groups in a nickel from the bench.”

No hesitation, no question why Stranahan needed the rifle. Nowhere else he'd lived would such a conversation take place. Peachy gave him the cartridges as Kauffeld walked up, unfolding a thick wad of bills. Stranahan firmly closed his fist over the man's hand.

“It's not every day I get to grant a wish from a bucket list. I'm not going to taint the morning by taking your money.”

Kauffeld insisted on paying fifty dollars toward Stranahan's gas. Thinking of the drive ahead of him, he hesitated only a moment before pocketing it.

In Ennis, he collected the rifle, bought a turkey locator call that included instructions for the scream of a red-tailed hawk, and found a red cap with the logo of the Kingfisher Fly Shop. So armed, he motored through the town and then stopped by the bridge and got out to look down at the Madison River.

Stranahan was an instinctive person who felt his way toward decisions and found that water helped when the level was balanced, that the current shifted the weight in some inscrutable way so that he felt the decision in his heart without knowing why or how the balance had tipped. He'd be out of phone communication in another few miles, so the question was should he call Ettinger. He knew her reaction would be skeptical. Even if she was persuaded by the phone message and the map, she would insist on a group operation, which translated into time lost, not including the drive down from Bridger. Already it was noon. Who knew how long the man would stay up there, given that this was the last day and long odds on anyone showing? But against his going up there alone was the chance of being shot. He recalled Warren Jarrett's comment on overwhelming force. Stranahan knew he would be running a grave risk. He also knew it wouldn't have mattered so much a year before. He was not building a life then so much as running from one. Now there were people he cared about, a future he cared about. Not to mention a section of land on a creek, haunted by an owl in a cottonwood bottom.

But the face of the river gave him nothing. When he got back behind the wheel, he just sat there, looking within for the answers the water had refused him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Courtly Cowboy

A
woman with crow's wing hair, gray roots painting a stripe down the middle of her part, stood on the porch of the small frame house by the railroad tracks in Wolf Creek. Bird-chested, her face pinched and severe, she was an Appalachian vision in a sack dress. She folded her bony arms across her rib cage.

“Ma'am, my name is Harold Little Feather. I'm with the Hyalite County Sheriff's Department? I called you earlier.”

“You're an Indian.” It was a statement.

“Apparently,” Harold said. “Can I come inside? I'd like to ask a few questions about your husband.”

She hesitated. Harold could hear a truck shifting gears up on the highway, then the undertone of Prickly Pear Creek. The woman opened the door and let him in. “Webster, there's an Indian in the house with his arm in a cast.” She moved her chin up and down in agreement with herself. “He's a lawman.”

As Harold's eyes became accustomed to the darkness he saw that the house was sliding south, the furniture solid where you could see it under piles of clothing and newspaper, but the wood floors stained black, the boards spongy underfoot. A vaguely houndlike mutt lay on a couch littered with magazines. It opened one eye and the eye found Harold, lost its focus, and skinned back over.

The woman said have a seat, indicating the dogless end of the couch. “Where's my manners?” she said. “I got Folgers. I just opened a can.”

Harold nodded. “Black,” he said.

As the woman rummaged out of sight in the kitchen, he glanced up at a shoulder mount of a bull elk on the knotty pine wall. Mabel Webster's husband had been a hunter. Had been because he was presumed dead, having disappeared in the Big Belt Mountains the previous November. Martha Ettinger had flagged his name while searching for lost hunters who might match the unidentified bodies buried on Sphinx Mountain. Webster, a retired railroad conductor for Burlington Northern, was in the ballpark for age, midsixties, wore hunting clothes, and had disappeared at about the time the remaining John Doe was presumed to have been buried. But the Big Belts were two hundred miles north of the Madison Range and the department's investigation into Webster's disappearance had been shelved when his wife, in a phone interview, denied that her husband suffered from pancreatic cancer, contradicting the autopsy report. He was “fit as an Arkansas fiddle,” she had said.

The truth was Harold doubted that interviewing Webster's widow would reveal anything worth knowing, but his trip back from the reservation was right down the I-15, putting him in the neighborhood, and was a step toward getting back into Martha Ettinger's good graces. She'd been none too pleased when he had called after being out of communication for a day and a half. His explanation, that he'd had to intervene in a family crisis—his brother, Howard, not a day off the wagon before being accused by his wife, Bobby, of slapping her, when it turned out that he hadn't slapped her but had slapped the table so hard the dishes jumped onto the floor, after which Bobby had hit him with a broom, breaking his finger—anyway, the explanation hadn't gone over too well. Ettinger's only comment had been, “So was there a phone in that house, or wasn't there?”

Harold heard the widow's voice muttering from the kitchen and returned to the present. He caught the word “Webster” as she walked back into the living room.

“Is your husband still alive, Mrs. Webster?” he asked.

She handed him a cup and settled herself on a turned-around ladder-back chair, her legs straddling the seat. “For pity's sakes, young man, of course he is. Didn't he say so?” Her hands fluttered over her face like anxious birds.

“What do you mean?”

“Why, he wrote it in a letter. I read it every night. It's in my Bible.” Then she seemed to lose track and opened her eyes to his presence as if she had never before seen him. She turned her head toward the kitchen, her clavicles straining under the membrane of skin. “Webster, there's an Indian in the house,” she said.

There was nothing malicious or condescending about it, Harold thought; she was just repeating a fact, talking the way the crazy people do on the sidewalks of big cities like Billings. Or Browning. He couldn't deny the reservation had its share of crazies.

His coffee drunk and a second cup making a sweat ring on the coffee table, Harold had the woman's confidence and the letter, the one she hadn't told anyone about at first. She certainly hadn't told that nosy woman from the Meagher County Sheriff's Department who had peppered her with questions after Webster didn't return from his hunting trip.

My darling Mabella,

Do not worry about me if I go away for a while. I'm just tired with the sickness and want to lie down where no one will disturb me. I wish you could come with me, but you must live your life here before we see each other again, in that place we have been promised. You have slipped away from me as I am slipping away from this existence, and I pray that the Lord takes you when you still know who I am and how much I love you. I am so sorry I could not give you children. They would have been a comfort to you now. But we had each other and it was a good life, all I could ask for and more. Don't try to find me. I will find you.

Your loving husband,

Webster

“See, he calls me Mabella. Ever since we was kids.”

“It's a beautiful name,” Harold said absently. He had seen a number of suicide letters and was often struck by the eloquence. You looked at people and it didn't show, that poet's soul. It was as if it took sickness or a shock to the system to remove the skins of age and habit and write with such candor.

“Who else have you shown this to?”

“I showed it to my reverend. I showed it to Missy Watkins.”

“Not the sheriff when Orvel went missing?”

“Nobody called him that. He was just Webster. And Lordy no, I didn't tell anybody then. Not that woman, all her questions.” Her hands fluttered.

Harold worked a forefinger between the braids of his hair. “Where did your husband say he was going hunting?”

“He liked that Tenderfoot Creek country up in the Belts. I used to go with him in the big wall tent. Did the cooking on a sheepherder stove. Webster and his cousins on the Brady side. Those were good times. Are you a hunter, Mr. Feather?”

“I am.”

“It's an Indian thing, I suppose.”

“When the last buffalo falls on the plains I will hunt mice, for I am a hunter and must have my freedom.”

“That's like a poem.”

“It's what Chief Joseph said when he was exiled from his homeland in the Wallowas.”

“You people have a way with words. My Webster was a silent man. But my he was strong. And bullheaded? He got a mind to do something, you could'na stop him.”

Harold took a sip of his coffee. “That's a big elk on your wall. Did Webster shoot it in the Belts?”

“No, he got that one downstate. He wasn't so strong anymore and got himself a guide and they went on horses. A place with a name like a fossil. My brain's like a sieve sometimes. It's there on the plaque.”

Harold set down the cup and walked over to the mount and read the brass escutcheon on the dark wood plaque.

TAKEN BY ORVEL WEBSTER WITH E. J. CUMMINGS

Specimen Ridge, Gravelly Mountains, Montana

“I don't see a date on this, Mrs. Webster. When was it?”

“Three or four years ago. He was in remission. That cancer, it's a terrible thing.”

“Who's E. J. Cummings?”

“He was the guide with the horses. Webster said he was a nice man. He called him something like a title—the courtly cowboy. Yes, that was it. On account of him being so polite. ‘The courtly cowboy.' He said he lived down in the Madison Valley where that man lives who has the big boil on his neck. You see him on the TV.”

“Weldon Crawford,” Harold said, sitting back down at the table. He was no longer thinking about Martha Ettinger's good graces.

“That's him. Webster said except for the Old Faithful Inn, that was the biggest log house he'd ever seen.”

Harold stirred a spoon in his coffee and watched the surface tremble. “I don't suppose there's a chance he was hunting down there last year when he disappeared.”

“He never said where he was going hunting, but everybody thought Tenderfoot Creek. That's where those search-and-rescue people looked. I told them they would'na find him.”

“Why did you tell them that?”

“I just had a feeling, like when you . . . well, you just know something, like somebody's in a room and you can't see them but you know they're there.”

“Like Webster is, you mean?”

“Yes. See, you know he's here, too.”

“Ma'am, I'm just going to step out on your porch and make a couple phone calls.”

“Do you want me to heat up your cup? Or make you a lunch? I've got some bean soup. I don't get many visitors.”

“Thank you. Just the coffee.”

•   •   •

J
ittery with caffeine, Harold punched the wrong numbers into his phone twice before hearing the ring.

He muttered to himself, “Imagine that—an Indian who can't handle his coffee. What's next, alcohol?” Stranahan's voice mail picked up and Harold left a message. Ettinger was on speed dial, one finger tap away. He managed it. She picked up on the second ring.

“I'm at Orvel Webster's place outside Wolf Creek, with the widow. He's our John Doe, good chance.” Harold told her why before she could ask. “Another thing—a couple-three years ago he went on a guided elk hunt on Specimen Ridge with an E. J. Cummings. The woman says Cummings is a neighbor of Weldon Crawford.”

“I know the name. Sean Stranahan mentioned him.”

“That's what I remember, too. Did Sean file a report?”

“No, it was in connection with looking for that missing trout fly. He met a few of the neighbors. I think Cummings was caretaker of some places, a year-round resident there. His first name's Emmitt. Are you thinking what I think you're thinking?”

“Well, the man guides on Specimen Ridge, I'd lay odds he knows Sphinx Mountain. One throws its shadow on the other. Plus Cummings knew Webster. Maybe they talked on that hunt, both of them looking at the end of a short road, and a couple years later got together for the so-called arrangement.
And
he's Crawford's neighbor. Not a stretch he could have laid his hands on the congressman's gun.
Be worth seeing if Cummings fits the description Kauffeld gave us, the guy he called Wade.”

“Seems a coincidence, Stranahan stumbling into him like he did.”

“You said it yourself. Sean's a guy who manages to step in shit even if there's only one cow in the pasture.”

“I think I better talk to him. And I think you better get down here.”

“I tried his number just before calling you,” Harold said.

Ettinger heard him sigh audibly. “Are you okay, Harold?”

“I'm jittery or tired. Take your pick. I slept on the couch at my brother's and listened to the two of them make the beast with two backs half the night. They were banging that headboard louder than Howard slapped the table, I'd lay odds on it. Sometimes I think they fight just for the makeup sex.”

Ettinger grunted, a stab at sympathy. She was still thinking about Stranahan. “I'll call his guide buddy, Meslik,” she said.

“Best bet would be look up his girlfriend. Her name's Martinique. She works at Lookers and Lattes.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Then you're the only one.”

•   •   •

W
hen she swung the department Cherokee up to the window of the kiosk, Martha felt the air go out of her lungs. She'd been hoping the barista would have a tramp stamp peeking above a thong or lipstick-smeared teeth, someone she could feel superior to. A “butterface,” as she'd heard Walt refer to a waitress at Josie's who had the profile of a smoke jumper's Pulaski. Everything
but-her-face.
But the tall woman with the flashing dark eyes had a face you looked into and kept on looking. A brunette to make a bishop forget he'd cried over a choirboy, to use another of her deputy's euphemisms. Martha knew she wasn't unattractive herself, but this wasn't fair. Why did Sean's girlfriends have to be so beautiful?

“What can I get for you, ma'am?”

Martha felt her shoulders slump.
Ma'am?
Had she fallen so far she was a ma'am?

“I thought you used suspenders to hold up your pants,” she said dryly.
Just a quarter moon of areola
, Martha thought,
and I'll cite her for indecent exposure
.

Martinique crossed her arms over her chest.

“I'm looking for Sean Stranahan. It's department business.” She relented. “I'm sorry. You have the right to make a living any way that's legal.”

“You're Martha Ettinger. Sean says nice things about you. It's a pleasure to meet you.”

They awkwardly shook hands, Martinique leaning out the window of the kiosk.

“Sean guided on the lower Madison this morning,” Martinique said. “It was that man you interviewed about the bodies on the mountain. Melvin Kauffeld and the woman he's with, from the teachers' convention at the ranch. He just called me from Ennis.”

“Who, Sean?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me about the float. Then he said something about looking at water for the answers to life's persistent questions. Only this time it wasn't working.”

“Do you have any idea what he meant by that?”

“No. It was just something he said. Like he was making fun of himself.”

“Did he say anything else?”

Martha saw Martinique's face color.

“He told me he loved me.”

Martha felt herself breathing. “Is that . . . is it something he says often?” She watched the woman's face color again.