Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (5 page)

Winston stood up. He drew a slim brown wallet from his hip pocket, the movement so fluid and quick it was reminiscent of a gunslinger drawing his Colt. Counted out the money with a flourish of his long fingers, added a business card to the stack, and fanned the bills on Sean's desktop.

“I'll bet you deal a mean hand of poker,” Stranahan said.

Winston chuckled. “Let's just say more than one gentleman's lost the graces of a good woman finding out. I slipped a few more Andrew Jacksons in there, by the way. Thought you might need the incentive to keep your eyes on the ground. Wouldn't put it past a man of your nature to pocket my money and go down to the river and fish.”

“Why Kenneth, I wouldn't even think of carrying a rod. You didn't just buy my time, you bought my soul.”

“Your soul comes cheap,” Winston said. He glanced at his watch. “Shit. I got to hit the road. You can bet some TSA queen's going to pat me down so thoroughly we'll have to share a cigarette at the gate.”

He extended his hand. “Call me tomorrow?”

“Either way,” Stranahan said.

When Winston had left, Stranahan rubbed the fingers of his right hand. Shaking the hairdresser's hand was like grabbing the steering wheel of his Land Cruiser on a July afternoon.

Maybe it's why they call him Hot Hands
, he mused.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Cat Lady

S
tranahan handed one of the twenties Winston had given him to the bikini barista at the coffee kiosk at the south end of town. The tall brunette who pressed her breasts against the sill had caramel skin and wore a name tag that read “Martinique.” Sean had been working up the nerve to ask her to dinner for a month, spending money on coffees he couldn't afford.

She smiled. “I was just about to close. The usual?”

Sean nodded.

“I never asked where you are from, Martinique.”

“Seattle,” she said. “That's where the company is.”

“How do you like working in Montana?”

“The hats are bigger but the tips are smaller. It doesn't rain here so much.”

“Yeah, but it must have got pretty cold this winter.” He was stalling, as usual.

“They gave us one of those electric oil heaters. They had to or we would have to cover up and then it wouldn't be ‘Lookers and Lattes,' it would just be ‘Lattes.' It stayed pretty warm. Except for my feet. I'd have to dance around to keep the blood moving.”

“If I promise not to wear a big hat, will you go to dinner with me at the Cottonwood Inn this Saturday?”

There. It was out. Sean felt a constriction in his throat and swallowed. He'd started stopping at the kiosk for the same reason other men who never gave a damn about coffee found themselves driving two miles out of their way. And until Martinique there had never been anything personal in the exchange, a couple minutes' proximity to a half-naked woman for an overpriced java in a B, C, D, or DD cup, with or without a splash of cream called a “Happy Ending.” An eye-opener of a different sort. But whereas the other baristas were artificially friendly, Martinique surprised him with her honesty and seemed open to the point of vulnerability. There was a touch of melancholy in her voice, a sadness in her eyes that made the smile she greeted him with seem brave.

He held her eyes while she regarded him levelly. She said, “This isn't who I am, you know. Most people think we're all strippers from Teasers, but some of us aren't. I'm in pre-vet studies, senior year at MSU.”

“I'm not asking you because you wear lingerie.”

“Of course you are.” She put her elbows on the sill and rested her chin in her hands. “Aren't you?”

“Okay. I'm attracted to you. But you seem nice and you have a good smile. It's genuine. I get a mocha from you and the rest of my day looks brighter.”

“Are you married? It's a yes or no question. You'd be surprised how many men can't seem to grasp that.”

“I'm divorced.”

“Legally?”

“Legally.”

“How do you like cats? Men in Montana seem to hate cats. I see a bumper sticker every day. ‘Ten things to do with a dead cat.' That kind of stuff.”

“I've always had cats. I just don't have one now because I wasn't sure I was going to stay. But I don't seem to be going anywhere.”

“You're not just saying that?”

“No, I like cats. Dogs.” He shrugged. “I like all animals.”

“Do you have ten minutes?”

“Yeah, sure.” Sean switched off the engine. He had expected to be turned down and thought he'd be on his way to the Madison by now, talking out loud to himself and kicking himself for being stupid. Instead, he felt a little flutter in a vein in his neck, as if it had momentarily kinked and the blood started up again.

“Come on in.”

The woman stuck the “Closed” sign on the window and shuttered it. She held the door open on the other side of the kiosk for Sean to step inside. He noticed a marmalade cat curled up in a cardboard box in the corner of the cramped kiosk. It regarded Stranahan through slitted eyes. He squatted down and slowly reached his hand out to let the cat sniff it. He drew his fingers along the line of the cat's jaw. It withdrew its head and Sean held out his fingers again. This time when the cat sniffed them, it allowed Sean to scratch its cheeks. It began to purr.

“What's her name?”

“Ichiro. It's a he. Poor old pussy. He's been through all nine lives and is into extra innings.”

“You named him after the baseball player?”

“Ichiro was pretty big in Seattle. He was my dad's favorite player. The cat's name was Chester, but when Ichiro came over to the Mariners, Dad gave him a new name. I inherited him when he died. Poor old guy has to have subcutaneous fluids every day. All sorts of pills, too. And the medicine's expensive and I don't have the money but I do it because he needs me. When I moved out here, all I wanted was for him to live long enough to sit in the sun and see one more summer. Do you think I'm crazy?”

“Not at all.”

“Will you help me do his fluids?” She indicated a drip bag apparatus suspended from a J-hook screwed into the fiberboard ceiling. “I can do it on my own, but it helps if someone distracts him. What I'll do is sit down and hold him and slip in the needle. You just keep doing what you're doing. Talk to him in a calm voice.”

“But I'm a stranger.”

“No, he likes you already.”

Sean stood up while Martinique settled herself in a lotus position on the floor and scooped the cat into her lap. She was wearing the sexy cowgirl outfit today, cutoff shorts below a lavender halter top with white polka dots. Sean knelt down opposite her and scratched the cat's cheeks while Martinique pinched up a tent of skin between its shoulder blades and inserted the slim needle. As the fluid dripped, the cat developed a lump under its skin. It took about ten minutes and all the while Martinique talked soothingly to it.

“It's okay, Ichiro. This will make you feel better. I know you don't like it but you're my sweetie and this nice man is helping us and I don't even know his name.

“I don't even know your name.” She looked up at Stranahan with a shy smile. A wing of hair had fallen forward and she brushed it back with her hand. It had been a strangely intimate ten minutes. She wasn't just the pretty woman at the kiosk anymore.

“Sean. Sean Stranahan.”

“Sean. Isn't that a nice name, Ichiro? Sean is our new friend. It's all over. No more poking. What a good kitty you are.

“Thank you,” she said. “You never got your coffee.” She stood up, clutching the cat to her chest.

“I didn't really want it. It was just an excuse to come by. I've been meaning to ask you out for at least a month.”

“Do you still want to? I mean, I'm twenty-nine and here I am, already a cat lady.” She kissed Ichiro on the top of his head and placed him on the floor. She stood very close to Sean, her eyes nearly even with his, though Sean was six feet and a bit.

“It's only one cat,” he said.

“There's two more where I live.”

“I don't care.”

“I have some other baggage.”

“I have some, too.”

She locked her hands behind his neck and regarded him very seriously.

“I'll go out with you, Mr. Sean Stranahan who's nice to cats.”

“Good,” was all he managed to say.

CHAPTER SIX

The Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club

S
tranahan listened to the engine tick down in the grassy parking lot at Three Dollar Bridge. He looked for some ones to slip into the rusted box that the landowner had tacked onto a fencepost, realized that he'd never got change from the bill he'd handed to Martinique, and smiled. She'd kissed him on the cheek when they parted, the act no more suggestive than when she had kissed the cat, but still . . .

He scrounged a couple quarters that had been wedged into the tread of the floor mat. “Next time,” he muttered, clanging the change into the tin box, and came back to the Land Cruiser, shrugged into his fly vest, and slipped the old bamboo rod his father had made from its case. He breathed in the tung oil smell of the rod sock.

“That's something you don't get from graphite,” he muttered.

He fitted the German silver ferrules together and strung the rod with a double taper line. True, he'd assured Kenneth Winston that he wouldn't carry a rod while looking for the lost fly box, but what if he found it right off the bat? He'd be on one of the loveliest stretches of the Madison River with nothing to do about the circles the trout made but watch. A fly fisherman's Hades.

Along the fisherman's path, Sean resisted the urge to drink in the beauty of the afternoon, nodding off into purple blues on the ridges and deep greens in the valley, and kept his eyes on the ground. Not only for the fly box, which could have dropped out of Winston's vest anywhere in the two miles, but so he wouldn't step into a badger hole. They were everywhere, freshly turned earth to mark the new additions, and yet one almost never saw a badger. Sean did spot a small garter snake and picked it up. After it calmed he held it in front of his face and let the questing forked tongue tickle the end of his nose. He watched it slither away and looked behind him, up a draw through the bluffs. The mansion Winston had mentioned was built from blond logs in a hexagonal design, with a wraparound porch and peaked windowpanes looking toward mountains at each point of the compass. Closer to the water and downriver was the old homestead cabin, freshly chinked with a large picture window facing the river. The newly constructed porch was a long fly cast from the riverbank; there was a picnic table on the porch, slatted Adirondack chairs, a couple old oil lanterns hanging from nails driven into the logs.

Sean hated to see development of any kind along his favorite river, but the structure was reminiscent of fishing huts he'd seen in Maine and had a down-home feel he could relate to. Mercifully, the “No Trespassing” signs that Sean had come to see as the state motto weren't in evidence. Although Montana had the best stream access law in the West, permitting anyone to wade, hike, fish, or float a navigable river, the stipulation being only that one had to stay within the high-water mark, many landowners, especially the new gentry from out of state, posted their property and hassled anglers anyway.

He picked up his pace, hiked past the little bungalow, and ten minutes later turned around, facing back upstream. He could see the minute figure of a fisherman who must have strolled down from the cabin. Sean started back up, zigzagging across the path, his eyes glued to the ground. The grass was up past his knees and he realized that finding the box would not be as easy as he originally thought. He searched slowly and methodically, lifting heavy grass tufts with his wading staff to peer underneath them, his shadow lengthening so that it reflected on the water, the river sparkling under the low-angle eye of the sun. Caddis flies swarmed the wild rose bushes on the bank. Pale Morning Dun mayflies batted their wings, rising and dipping in flight. Trout kissed the surface in the slicks behind the boulders. Sean looked wistfully at the parachute Adams hooked to his stripping guide.

“Just my luck,” he said out loud. He was so preoccupied looking at the water that he didn't notice the approach of the fisherman, who had a hitch to his walk and was wearing a tweed fedora.
Shit
, Sean thought.
He's going to bawl me out for walking above the high-water mark
. A welcoming smile disavowed him of the presumption.

“You wouldn't be looking for a fly box, would you?” the man said.

“I sure would be.” Stranahan briefly explained the circumstances that had brought him to the river.

The man nodded. “I was half hoping you wouldn't show. I found it this morning. It's hard to part with a box as nice as that one. My name is Patrick Willoughby, by the way.”

Stranahan took the outstretched hand. Just for a moment the man looked down, showing a bashful expression. A portly fellow with a moon face and thin lips, he reminded Sean of the late newscaster Charles Kuralt, who also had been a Montana fly fisherman.

“Do you own the cabin?” he said.

Recovering from his brief inability to hold Sean's eyes, Willoughby peered up at him through the thick lenses of his glasses.

“It's a joint ownership by our club,” he said. “When the estimable Weldon Crawford of yonder mansion bought the old Anderson ranch, he financed the construction by selling off a few parcels. When this one came on the market, we pounced.”

“You mean Weldon Crawford Jr. from Kalispell? The congressman who introduced the bill to reinstate hunting for grizzly bears?” Bears were a polarizing issue in Montana. Crawford's efforts to remove federal protection and turn management over to the state had drawn national media attention.

“He does make waves,” Willoughby said. “But to tell you the truth I've not had the pleasure. Oh, we've said hello a few times and Polly Sorenson was invited up to the house for dinner last year—Polly is one of our members—but I've been here a week this summer and seen no sign of the man. The congressman, I mean.”

They had arrived at the cabin porch, having followed a small rill of water up from the river. Sean read the lettering burned into a piece of driftwood above the door:
THE MADISON RIVER LIARS AND FLY TIERS CLUB.

Willoughby stepped out of his boot-foot waders, hung them from one of a series of pegs driven into the wall, and slipped his feet into sandals on the porch. He hung his hat on a nail.

“You can leave your rod beside mine here in the rack,” Willoughby said. “Who made it, by the way? I'm something of a student of vintage bamboo rods. You don't see them anymore, at least not many that catch anything but the dust over a mantelpiece.”

“My father, actually.”

Willoughby peered at it through his glasses. “Looks a little like a Thomas Payne rod. That's a compliment, by the way. Does it cast a nice line?”

“You have to settle into its rhythm, but once you get used to it, it casts a very nice line.”

“Mr. Stranahan, I can see you are a man after my heart.”

He opened the screen door and ushered Sean inside.

“Don't you want me to take these boots off?” Sean said.

Willoughby made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “We go in and out of here in waders all the time.” He reached along the wall inside the door. The candle-tip bulbs of a chandelier flared. He hit another switch and a half dozen copper sconces cast the room in a warm amber glow.

The front room, consisting of the living area with a small kitchen alcove, was paneled in light wood and except for an ornately carved stool and two wicked-looking spears crossed over an African shield was furnished in American hunting lodge motif—slat-back couches and stuffed chairs with ducks in flight, casually arranged around a glass-topped coffee table littered with fishing magazines. On the shelves of matching bookcases were miniature glass domes like those used to display pocket watches. Classic British salmon flies tied with exotic feathers stood on clear pins protruding from the walnut bases. Other flies, mostly dries, were housed in custom-made wall display boxes that reflected prisms of light from the elk antler chandelier. Against the south-facing wall were a fireplace and chimney built from smooth river stones. The skull and horns of a bison were mounted above the mantelpiece, a tuft of dried grass protruding from the nasal cavity.

Willoughby followed Sean's glance.

“Sweetgrass is a Cheyenne good-luck charm, hoping for bountiful vegetation,” he said. “With the rains this spring, the grass here is higher than I've ever seen it, so I'd say the homage we've paid our predecessors has paid off. Though not entirely to our advantage. The river is taking its time dropping into shape. Most stretches I couldn't wade if I wanted to.”

“What is that chair?” Stranahan asked.

“It's a Chokwe throne. A tribal chief was said to have ruled from it. One of our members imports African artifacts.”

“Mmmm.” Through the screen door Stranahan could hear the undertone of the current, sinking into bass notes as the evening erased the polish from the surface. He turned to face the picture window, before which a rough-hewn table ran nearly the entire length of the room. Desk lamps of varied designs—gooseneck, banker, Tiffany—presided over a half dozen fly-tying benches. Feathers, furs, and other tying materials littered the tabletop.

“Bunkhouses and the bathroom are in the back,” Willoughby was saying. “We can sleep eight here with the new addition, though there are seldom more than four or five of us at any time. All the necessities as you can see, including a humidor and the bar. I'm going to have a branch water and bourbon in a tin cup, which is the only way. Would you care to join me? The water's from the creek outside the door. We run it through a filter pump. There's no worry about giardia.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“In that case I stand corrected. I suggest you do get out of your waders. It's too good of a drink to hurry.”

Sean sat in one of the Adirondack chairs on the porch to remove his waders. The outside walls of the cottage were hung with framed quotations.

If fishing is interfering with your business, give up your business.
Sparse Grey Hackle.

Game fish are too valuable to be caught only once.
Lee Wulff.

There's more BS in fly fishing than there is in a Kansas feedlot.
Lefty Kreh.

“This place reminds me of a Catskill fishing lodge,” Sean told Willoughby when he had rejoined him inside. “Like Sparse Grey Hackle wrote about in
Fishless Days, Angling Nights
.”

“Ah yes, what was it he said? Something about not wanting to be in any club that would accept him as a member. Which was a falsehood. I met old Alfred—his real name was Alfred Miller—oh, I think it must have been in the early seventies. He was a friend of my father's. On the river he gave the appearance of a basset hound. A jowly face and a big chin, wore a porkpie hat and smoked a pipe. Always had mischief in his eyes.
Such
an erudite writer. It heartens me to know that a young man like yourself recognizes the name. So many fishermen today, all their gung-ho talk about Jedi sticks and hot fish and so forth, why when I floated the Gunnison last year the guide clicked the number of strikes on a digital counter!” He shook his head. “I'm afraid I'm showing my age, but when you begin to count trout you've lost sight of the reason to go to the river. It reminds me of something Henry David Thoreau wrote, men fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not the fish they are after.

“Here, have some of this. Consider it Viagra for the mind.”

Sean sipped at the whiskey. It was nectar.

“That may be the best bourbon I've ever had.”

“It ought to be. George T. Stagg is better than Maker's Mark Gold Label in my humble opinion.”

“Well, here's to good whiskey and a well-tied fly.” They tapped cups. “If you don't mind my asking you, where are the other members of your club? On the river somewhere?” Sean had noticed a couple pairs of waders hanging on the porch besides those that Willoughby had taken off.

“Polly Sorenson was the pilot fish this year. He came on the twenty-second, beat me by a week. He's in town today. The core membership arrives tomorrow. It sounds like I'm talking about a committee, but these are my best friends. We're all disciples of Sparse Grey Hackle in a sense. By which I mean men who understand that how many you catch is not nearly so important as who you sit around the fire with after. Speaking of which, would you so terribly mind if we took our drinks to the hearth? I've been on my feet about as long as I can today.” He tapped his right thigh. “I took a bad spill this spring. I wish I could say I slipped in a trout stream, but it was the front step of my house. Hairline fracture of the femur. Apparently I inherited a chemical deficiency that did not allow the bones to properly knit. My doctor made me promise that I would fish from the bank and not attempt to wade the Madison.”

“When I saw you, you were wearing waders,” Stranahan pointed out.

“Was I?”

“I seemed to notice they were wet, too.”

“Just freeing a snag, my dear man. I didn't want to lose the fly.” Willoughby winked, then settled himself into one of the stuffed chairs and heaved a sigh of contentment.

Sean looked at him, smiling, and for just a second Willoughby looked away, the quick dipping of the eyes that Sean had noticed when they met. He frowned inwardly. Patrick Willoughby seemed to have stepped from the pages of a book. A fox-eared book of the history of American fly fishing in which Catskill anglers who were only a few generations removed from the clubs of London fished bamboo rods in rivers with names like Neversink and Beaverkill, using flies called Hendrickson and Cahill. He had the manner cold: the self-assured, self-deprecating patter, the diction and enunciation that belonged more to a Yorkshire chalk stream than a Montana freestone river. It was a pat performance, but Sean suspected it was still a performance.

He sat down opposite Willoughby, wondering when the man intended to hand over the fly box, which he had made no further reference to. He decided to test the waters of his suspicion.