The Royal Wulff Murders (17 page)

Stranahan took the offered chair.

“You’re English,” he said.

“Am I? I thought it didn’t show. Would you like a drink?”

Stranahan was suddenly very tired. He’d been up since six, had almost no sleep in three days.

“Is an Irish coffee out of the question?”

The man pressed a button on the wall. He spoke briefly into an intercom.

“It will be right out. I’m Jack Osgood, by the by.”

“Sean Stranahan.”

They shook hands, Osgood lifting almost imperceptibly from his seat.

“Don’t mind me,” he said. “I strike up conversations, it’s what men of my station do. Dying art, don’t you think? Some of my cousins would argue that Americans never did learn how to converse, but that’s simply untrue. Perhaps you don’t speak English, but you communicate in your pidgin idiom and I’ve had some wonderful conversations with your countrymen on verandas just like this one. Porches, you call them, but I prefer the Hindu derivation. Be that as it may…”

His fingers fluttered briefly.

“Now then, Sean, may I call you Sean? Who did you come here to see? I was teasing before. Let me help if I can.”

“Her name is Velvet Lafayette. I thought she might be singing here.”

“Is she beautiful?”

“I think she is.”

“So do I.”

A young woman with a pixie face opened the door, balancing two drinks on a tray. She set the Irish coffee in front of Stranahan, a tumbler of amber liquid for his host.

“It’s Glenfarclas, Mr. Osgood. We’re out of the Lagavulin.”

“A pity,” he said.

When she had left, he took a sip of the whiskey and said, “The woman singing here goes by a different name. Vareda Beaudreux.” He arched his eyebrows.

“That’s her real name,” Stranahan said, covering his surprise. “Velvet is her stage name.”

“I should be honored, then, that she has trusted us with her given name. The woman arrived this morning. I put her in the end cabin. Back in the aspens. She seems a private person. She’s booked two nights and sings here tomorrow. She sent a demo CD. If she’s as brilliant in person, I won’t have made a mistake.”

“You won’t be disappointed.”

Stranahan stood up to excuse himself.

“No need to hurry. She isn’t there,” Osgood said. “She asked about renting a canoe. I told her anytime, no charge. They’re chained to the dock across the street. Here, I’ll get you a key and you can paddle out to meet her. She’ll be in a red sixteen-footer. Your transportation’s on me.”

“You’re a generous man, Mr. Osgood.”

“I’m trying to make up for a lifetime of sin. If it’s in my power to advance the cause of romance, well…don’t believe in it myself, of course. It would ruin my reputation as a cynic.”

He turned to press the buzzer again. “I’ll get you that key.”

T
he red canoe wasn’t in sight from the shore. Stranahan dug with his paddle, pushing past the float tubers. A motorboat idled by, a filament of spinning line trailing from a rod fixed to the stern.

There she was. Far out toward the eastern shore of the lake. He J-hooked the paddle to keep the canoe in line, noticing, as the gap closed, that the red canoe seemed to glide effortlessly as it angled toward him.

She was wearing khaki shorts and an oversize flannel shirt in a red-and-black check. A black ball cap labeled
JOHNSON SEAFOOD FARMS
under an embossed crawfish was drawn over her hair, her ponytail escaping through the hole above the adjustable band.

Stranahan set down his paddle. She pulled alongside, bow to bow, small waves lapping the Kevlar hulls of the canoes.

Separated by a paddle’s length of pearlescent water, she looked imploringly at him from under the bill of her cap. Her eyes looked swollen and her cheeks were flushed. Her shoulders abruptly collapsed.

“How did you find me?”

“I used to be a detective, remember? It’s starting to come back.”

Her voice was a husky whisper. “If you’re a detective, you know what I want to hear.”

Stranahan regarded her solemnly.

“I know what you don’t want to hear, and I’m very sorry to be the one who tells you.” Much better to get it over with. “A fly rod was found near the body of the man who drowned in the Madison River. It was inscribed by the maker to your brother.”

She looked down at her hands.

“You know your way around a canoe paddle,” he said at length.

He watched her chest heave without sound.

“We had a pirogue,” she said without lifting her head.

Stranahan set his lips in a grim smile.

“Now it’s me who doesn’t know what to do with you.”

“Oh, just throw me in the lake.” She wiped a tear from her cheek and made a murmuring chuckle in her throat. “Save yourself a whole lot of trouble. Come on. Let’s go in. It’s going to rain.”

“T
he coffee can Mr. Keino gave to you. Those are my father’s ashes; I didn’t lie to you about that. Or about the trout my father marked. That’s something you ought to know.” They were sitting on the porch, a spool table between them.

“Vareda, it hardly seems—”

“Let me finish. I’ve known that my brother could be dead ever since I first read about that”—she hesitated—“body. I was hoping that you would find him alive. I thought that the hair, you know, being the wrong color…” She stopped to compose herself. “I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t have the courage to drive down there myself to look for him.”

“Why didn’t you call the sheriff?”

“Don’t you know me? That’s something I just couldn’t do.”

No, Stranahan thought. I don’t know you at all.

“But you do know me,” she said, as if reading his mind was such an easy thing. “You know
me
. The things you don’t know don’t really matter.”

A silence fell between them. A grid of electric wires enclosing a lightbulb suspended from the porch buzzed intermittently to incinerate moths.

“Vareda, I’m here to listen,” he said in an understanding voice. “Just talk to me. Tell me so I know what’s going on. I’m involved. A friend of mine was shot yesterday morning, in a lake not far from the place your brother drowned. I was there when it happened. Maybe there’s a connection, maybe there isn’t, but I’m going to find out.”

“Shot? You mean he’s dead and it… it’s to do with my brother?” Her voice faltered.

“No, my friend’s going to be okay.” He didn’t want to get sidetracked talking about Sam. “Tell me about your brother. Why was he in Montana? Did you follow him here? What was he involved in? The
sheriff hasn’t come right out and told me, but I know she thinks it was a murder.”

“Murder?” She leaned forward, her eyes startled open. “Murder.” Dropping her voice to echo the word, making it a statement.

“As in someone helped him to drown. Vareda, maybe together we can make some sense of this. I’m on your side here.”

“No.” She shook her head. Then abruptly looked away at the slate expanse of the lake. The wind had picked up. Waves were lapping the dock. There was the fresh smell of the rain coming, then the first drops on the roof.

Finally she faced him with a look of resignation. “I have to tell you. There’s no one else I can talk to.”

“You’ve got my attention,” he said.

“Is that all I have?” Her voice held an undertone of sadness. Then, “Where was I?” she said absently. “I don’t know where I was.”

“You were going to tell me about your brother.”

“But you’re here now.” She reached across the table and took his hand, held it to her cheek. “It’s late and… somebody shot, I mean, it could have been you. It’s all been a shock. I can’t think about it anymore tonight. I’ll tell you, I promise. But right now what I want, what I absolutely need, is for you to walk back to the cabin with me. I can’t face being alone tonight.”

“You won’t run off again?”

“Oh no. You can’t get rid of me, now.”

When they stood, she laid her head on his shoulder, then lifted it for a moment to turn her cap sideways so that the bill would shield the side of her face from the rain.

“There,” she said, nestling into him. “We fit.”

Stranahan smelled the faint scent of oranges, mixed with pine oil and wet aspen bark and the petal odor of the rain. He knew that there was something off about her, something inscrutable behind the gears that shifted her moods; he was no fool to think that he was immune
to her manipulations. But as they stepped into the rain, the questions that brought them together receded into the darkness.

L
ater, touching two fingers to his lips in the dark, “There now. Don’t say a word. Just hold me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

J
ack Osgood twirled the porcupine quill between his fingers. Stranahan had extracted it from the bloodied carcass of a porcupine that he and Vareda had found near the step of her cabin shortly after dawn. Beside the carcass was a canoe paddle, the handle sweat-stained and gnawed to a nub.

“They come for the salt,” Osgood said, taking a chair in the breakfast nook of the inn. “It’s their Achilles, the salt. A porcupine is safer in a tree. He can climb a limb where the fisher—that is the rarest member of the weasel family, if you didn’t know—has to attack from behind and can’t get past the armor of his quills. But when the porcupine comes down to eat the canoe paddle, the fisher attacks his head.

“The relationship is cyclical. The porcupine population goes up, fishers produce more fishers. The more fishers there are, the fewer the porcupines. Fewer the porcupines become, fewer fishers to the litter. Fewer fishers, more porcupines.” Osgood drew circles in the air with his coffee cup. “And round and round. The patterns of God, as intricate as the designs on the wings of butterflies. A man learns so many useless things….”

He placed the quill on the table. “I’ll leave the two of you to your breakfast.”

Stranahan saw mirth dancing in Vareda’s eyes. The weight of her brother’s probable death seemed to have lifted with the morning light.
Even last night, when their resolve to only hold each other had evaporated, it had been a strained love, marked by melancholy and distance.

She whispered, “He looks like Peter O’Toole.”

“Gone to seed and then some,” Stranahan agreed.

“I know what,” she said suddenly. “Let’s get the canoe and go fishing.”

“There are things we have to talk about, Vareda.”

“On the lake. I promise. Come on, Mr. Fisherman.” She shrugged into her flannel shirt, grabbed a handful of salt and pepper packets from a dish, and put them in the breast pocket.

“For the trout I’m going to catch,” she said.

S
itting backward on the bow seat, Vareda trolled with the rod tip down as Stranahan had instructed, right forefinger trapping the line against the cork grip. The rain clouds of the evening before had torn apart and were disappearing beyond the mountain horizon. From the stern of the canoe, Stranahan watched rays of sunlight flirt with her hair.

She said, “I’ll bet I’ve caught more kinds of fish than you,” and rattled off a dozen, ending with long-nosed gar, which she said she’d caught in the pirogue with Jerry. “I thought it was an alligator. Those teeth. The long nose. Oh, I had an imagination as a child.” Her dusky voice played with the words, extending them.

“Jerry,” Stranahan prompted, digging with his paddle.

“Don’t.” Suddenly glaring at him.

The rod tip bent sharply. A trout jumped clear of the surface, a shard like silver metal, glinting. Vareda let the trout run, pumped the rod when it stopped, reeling up only when she dropped the tip.

Stranahan cautioned, “Easy around the boat now.”

A moment later he lifted the net, the trout shaping the meshes into a bow.

“How beautiful he is,” Vareda said.

She motioned him to hand over the net, held the fish steady through the netting, and banged its head hard on the canoe gunwale. The trout stiffened, then relaxed.

“You’re just full of surprises,” Stranahan said.

He opened his pocketknife and dressed the fish with swift strokes, spilling the vermilion insides overboard and running his thumb under the backbone to clear the clotted blood. He laid it in the shade under the canoe seat.

“Daddy smelled like earth,” she began. “When I was little, I’d see him coming across the fields and run to jump up on him. That smell, there’s nothing like a field of plowed bottomland to take me away. Yeah.” Cocking her head to remember, talking to herself, the story coming out.

She said that after her mother’s death, from ovarian cancer, her father just faded away. Each day he was thinner, his daily walks became longer, each night was darker than the last. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore and drove off one morning before dawn. Vareda was living at home then, working at the catfish ponds that were part of the farming operation, when Old McGruder, the foreman, handed her a letter with his eyes averted. Her father had written all the heart-wrenching words he couldn’t summon the voice to tell her, said he had to get away, and Vareda had spent a week in terror, afraid he was going to hurt himself. Then a postcard arrived of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park. Her father wrote that he had bought a fly rod and caught his first trout in the Firehole River. He had always been an old-fashioned man’s man, liked hunting and fishing, had read about the trout fishing in the Rocky Mountains and wanted to try it. And that’s how he began to recover, and when he returned home a month later he was a semblance of the man that Vareda remembered.