Buffalo Jump Blues (10 page)

“No.” She closed her eyes, as if thumbing back through mental rather than digital images. “It's him. That's John Running Boy.”

Sean pocketed the photo. “I wanted to ask you before I told you what I learned up there. I didn't want anything to color your judgment.”

“Now you have me worried.”

“Well, there's no need for
you
to be worried, but you might be worried about
him
.”

She listened without interrupting, though her concern was easy enough to read.

She looked at him, the obvious question unspoken.

“I'm going to make some coffee,” she said. Striking a match against one of the stove burners, she said, “Because he was up at the buffalo jump on the reservation, you think he came down here and had something to do with those bison at the Palisades? I mean, it's three hundred miles from here to there.”

“Buffalo aren't the only thing that died, Ida.”

“Are you saying John had something to do with that? I thought that man fell to his death. It was an accident.”

“I'm only saying that there was an another Indian in that car, and that a young Indian man died at the jump, and that it's hard not to draw the connection.”

A silence stretched between them. She handed Sean a cup of coffee and, sitting down, edged to the other side of the bench, so that they were no longer connected by the heat of their skin.

“If I'd known this would get him into trouble,” she said, “I wouldn't have hired you.”

“I understand that. Look”—he spread his hands on the table—“we haven't found him yet. Let's take it a step at a time.”

—

It was a night that could have gone in another direction, Sean thought as he drove back toward Bridger, had the circumstances been different. He couldn't deny his attraction to her. But that's the way they left it, a step at a time, and a step at a time was how he planned to take it at six in the morning, when he hiked down to the military ammunition container that served as his mailbox. He opened the lid—nothing but a note from the mailman imploring him to buy a real mailbox and nail it to a post.

As he smiled, he heard Martha Ettinger's Jeep coming down the canyon road and stuck out his thumb.

She powered down the passenger-side window. “I don't pick up strangers.”

“Good morning to you, too, Martha.” It was the first he'd seen her
since they'd put the cards on the table in her barn, and they regarded each other in more or less comfortable silence. There had been a time, Stranahan recalled, when Martha would walk from her house to his turnoff as the sun rose, collecting his newspaper on her way to undoing the sticks that secured the front flap of the tipi, and then helping him undo whatever buttons he was wearing and unfastening her own. There had been a time when this was almost every morning.

A few seconds passed as he thought of those mornings.

“Where's Choti?” Martha said. “Goldie will need grief counseling if she's gone much longer.”

“She's become DIR at the clubhouse. That's what Ken Winston calls her, dog-in-residence. I'll take her back when they drain the pipes and fly to their other lives.”

“So where did your case take you? I haven't seen your rig in a few days.”

“North.”

“Just north?”

“Just north.”

“Well, I'm up to something, too, and it's taking me south, so la-de-da.” She powered up the window, smiling, keeping the truce, and Sean's eyes followed the Jeep as it got smaller and then turned inward as he went back to thinking about his next step. He checked his phone to see if had a bar, and didn't, and had to walk another hundred yards or so down the road.

He punched in Sam's number.

“Kemosabe.” The voice was thick. Was he still in bed?

“Were you still planning to fish Augustine Castilanos tomorrow?”

“Uh, yes. Stop that.”

Sean could heard a muffled voice. Then: “You want it? He hired two boats. You guide one, I'll take the other.”

“I want it.”

“It's yours. No problemo. We've been doing better with the big bugs in the afternoon, so no rush to be first on the water. The plan is to
meet up at two, his party's staying at the Cinnamon Creek Guest Ranch, float from MacAtee to Varney. We'll have a shuttle waiting at the bridge.”

“Thanks, Sam. Say hi to Molly for me.”

Another muffled voice and then, clearly, “Do you think I'm a ten? Sam says I'm only a nine.”

“As a mermaid, or as a woman?”

“A woman.”

“You're an eleven.”

“You hear that, Sam? Sean says I'm an eleven.
Sans scales
.” A pause. In a pooh-pooh voice: “Sam says to hang up the phone.”

“Good-bye, Molly.”

“Good-bye, Sean.”

Sean walked back, examining the dusty strips bordering the road for tracks, the deer last night, the lion before dawn, the hunted and the hunter, a story as old as the earth upon which it was written.

“Y
ou're telling me he cut it off? Jesus, Bob.”

Martha Ettinger wasn't squeamish. She'd seen plenty of dead people, among the worst a teenage girl who'd died from exposure after becoming stuck in a chimney, whose eyes had been pecked by crows. The corpse of the twentysomething Native American male lying on the stainless steel examining table wasn't nearly so bad, a point that Doc Hanson, the county medical examiner, brought up after removing the sheet covering the body.

Martha felt her stomach knot as the pulpy bruising around the tear in the man's midsection was revealed, and for a second her eyes lingered on a birthmark a few inches below that. The mark, a Band-Aid color, was shaped like nothing in particular, but a birthmark on a John Doe could be as valuable as dental records to ID a body.

“Of course Wilkerson and company will have the final say,” Hanson was saying, “but the end that wasn't caught on the piton is cleanly severed and the knife that you found in his belt sheath has adhered tissue that's being examined in the lab.”

“So, he slips trying to descend the cliff face, guts himself like a deer, and then for some reason he can't reach where he's caught on the piton and to free himself he cuts off a piece of his intestine.”

“Are you thinking out loud or asking my opinion?”

“Both.”

“We've seen this before, if you recall. That bow hunter who fell off his tree stand—”

“Yeah, Harold reminded me. Bummer.”

“Bummer?”

“What would you call it?”

Hanson's “ahem” died on the walls. Quietly, he said, “I think the real question is what he was doing there in the first place, but you don't seem eager to tell me about that.”

“Can you keep your mouth shut? It's public knowledge that a body's been found, but we're sitting on the details until we have more information.”

“What happens in the morgue, dies in the morgue.” Hanson shrugged. “Morgue humor. Really, Martha, you have to ask my discretion?”

“No. Sorry. And I appreciate you working the autopsy in this morning.”

“It wasn't a busy week for Saint Peter,” he said.

“Okay, the scenario we're looking at is that a few people tried to conduct a buffalo jump. We don't have an eyewitness, but it's what the evidence suggests.”

“A pishkun?”

“Yes. After Harold and I found the body, we swept the area and came up with five arrows. A couple were broken, like someone had shot them and they'd hit a rock. They look like Indian relics. But they didn't have any blood on them, though I don't know how you miss a buffalo.”

“Hmm. That does fit with the evidence.” Hanson used a probe to point to a jellylike hematoma that bulged from the upper right thigh. “I initially thought this wound had been made when he fell on a sharp stick, but in fact it was caused by an arrow. The arrow had broken off, leaving the point, which I extracted. It measures approximately six centimeters. To me it looks like obsidian, though you may want to consult a geologist. In any case it's of primitive design.”

“And you waited until now to tell me this.”

“After that stunt you pulled at the cabin,” he said, “you deserve what I give you, when I give it to you.”

“I don't remember you calling to complain.”

It was the first mention between them of what Martha had come to call her hour of insanity, when she'd played Cupid to bring Bob Hanson, an unhappily but very well married man, together with a woman of dubious reputation at a remote Forest Service rental cabin. What had subsequently transpired between the two she didn't know, but she never saw him, nor raised her eyes to the jagged teeth of the Crazy Mountains where the cabin was situated, without wondering. The silence inched across the marble floor.

“I'm sorry, Bob. It's none of my business.”

“Don't be absurd. Of course it's your business. You set me up with her. Or are you going to deny it?”

Martha blew out a breath. How the hell did they get started on this?

The medical examiner's walrus mustache quivered before he spoke. “Ariana Dimitri is a charming young woman and that's all I believe I'll say on the matter.”

So it had gone well.
Now the question,
Martha thought,
is am I a matchmaker, or a madam?

“What's that, Martha?”

“Nothing. Let's have a look at the arrowhead.”

He nodded brusquely. “It's above the sinks. Upper right drawer.”

Martha carefully unwrapped a square of burgundy jeweler's cloth to reveal the stone point. “Why isn't it in an evidence bag?”

“Because it's been processed. You can touch it.”

About an inch of wood arrow shaft was secured to the point by wraps of sinew that had hardened to an amber color.

“This is similar to the points on the arrows that we found,” Martha said, turning it in her gloved fingers.

“Do you think somebody shot him?” Hanson asked.

“I don't know. But would it break off like this? Wouldn't you think if it snapped, it would break at the skin level? Then there'd be three or four inches of shaft, not two.”

Hanson shrugged. “Perhaps the victim tried to extract it and it snapped off when he pulled on the shaft. I will tell you that had it remained in place until help arrived, the man might still be alive. Wilkerson did some trajectory tests, which indicated the initial position of the head was five centimeters from the femoral artery. About two inches. Her projections indicated that the head moved as the man walked, as the muscles relaxed and contracted. That caused it to continue sawing tissue, eventually lacerating the femoral artery.”

“Really? I didn't know a stone point was that sharp.”

“Stones shaped by pressure flaking are used as surgical instruments.”

“You learn something new every day.”

“You're getting that faraway Martha look,” Hanson said.

She removed her gloves and scratched a nail under her chin, not registering the comment. What had Sean Stranahan said about his missing person case, that it had a mermaid and an arrowhead? Yes, she was pretty sure that's what he'd said. A mermaid, an arrowhead, and true love.

W
hen part of your job is heading up a search-and-rescue division that performs more searches than any other Montana county, every vista elicits a memory. As Martha Ettinger drove west from Bridger, she caught sight of a basin in the Tobacco Root Range where a backcountry skier had become so lost she hooked back into her own trail twice, skiing in circles at twenty below zero and stripping off her clothing a piece at a time in a misguided effort to ski faster. Nearly naked, she was found in the very early stages of rigor, only her eyelids, neck, and lower jaw having stiffened. That one still haunted Martha because Jason Kent's one-ton had bogged down and the hour they spent digging it out of a snowdrift was the hour when the skier had died.

A half hour later, taking the 287 dogleg south out of Ennis, Martha glanced westward to the scene of another search, where a dark triangle in the Bear Creek drainage marked a feeder where she and Walter Hess had found a lost hunter. The hunter was shivering so violently that he'd bitten off the tip of his tongue. They had sandwiched him with their body warmth until help arrived, and on the first anniversary of the rescue Martha received a bottle of apricot moonshine from the hunter with a note:
To keep your blood moving as you kept mine
. She'd drunk a little of it with Stranahan, a little with Harold Little Feather, and a little more with Sheba on her lap and Goldie at her feet, ruing her relationships with all men.

With such recollections to keep her company, the miles passed quickly. It was a little past five when she turned off at the West Fork,
crossed the bridge, and snaked down the two-track to the log-and-mortar cabin that served as home base for the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club. Patrick Willoughby and Robin Cowdry rose from wood-slat chairs on the porch, Willoughby rolling his right hand in a flourish as he bowed. Martha's smile was forced. She'd once played poker with “the boys,” as she called them, and sat in the very chair Willoughby had risen from, stripped to her bra on a dare. Sam Meslik had never let her forget it, calling her “36C” ever since.

“Gentlemen,” she said.

“M'lady,” Willoughby said. “I will have Jeeves set another place at the table.”

“I'm not staying.” She indicated the Land Cruiser on the grassy turnaround. “I just have to talk to Stranahan.”

“Nonsense.” Willoughby peered over his glasses. “The only further discussion of this matter will concern vintages of the burgundy grape.” Martha recalled Stranahan telling her that Willoughby, a former naval officer, had been a hostage negotiator for three presidential administrations. He'd carved a career from his ability to get people to see things his way. It was no use arguing and Martha didn't try.

“He's just up the river with Dorry,” Cowdry said. “He's teaching her to cast a fly rod.”

Martha found them at a pool of the Madison known as the Looking Glass, Sean bareheaded, his black hair in contrast to the girl's straw mop that peeked from the frayed edges of her hat. He bent to whisper in her ear as Martha approached.

“Sean says to tell you you'll let me see the buffalo.”

“Hmm. Have you caught any fish?”

“I caught a whitefish, but he says to tell my uncle it was a rainbow trout.”

“He tells people a lot of things, doesn't he? Sean, a word?”

He instructed the girl to keep casting and walked up the bank. “What brings you to the river?”

“Sam said you had a guide day tomorrow and if you were out of cell
range, it meant you were bunking at the clubhouse. I had a question that couldn't wait.”

“Shoot.”

“You said the case you'd taken on involved an arrowhead. Would that be a stone point? Maybe yeay big.” She held her thumb and forefinger two inches apart.

“A little smaller.”

“You said you were heading north? Would that have been to an Indian reservation?”

“That's two questions.”

She gave him a look.

“I went to Browning and to Heart Butte.”

Martha blew out a breath, a bubbling sound. She shook her head. “Sometimes I hate being right. Where's this arrowhead now?”

“It's in the glove compartment of the Land Cruiser.”

“Tell Dorry it's time to reel up.”

—

They carried chairs from the porch, unfolding them on the bank where spring water burbled over an apron of watercress. A kingfisher beat a silver fry against a midriver rock, then turned it in his beak and swallowed it whole, headfirst. The bird repeated the process as Martha filled Sean in on her morning at the morgue and he briefly wrestled with his conscience before deciding that it was in the best interests of his client to bring Martha into his confidence.

She listened, two fingernails drawing white lines down her right cheek.

“I'm just going to think out loud here,” she said. She nodded to herself, fingering the arrowhead that Sean had retrieved from his rig. “Okay, here's what we have. We have two Indians and two white men, said to be brothers, visiting a buffalo jump historical site on the Blackfeet Reservation. A week later we have a group with the same makeup seen at a grocery store in West Yellowstone. We have the
reenactment of a buffalo jump right here in the Madison Valley, with eleven dead bison and an Indian man killed by an arrow. We have the American Bison Crusade the brothers are reported to be involved with, and we have your mermaid, who a different Indian man from the dead one reached out to in a bar. If, that is, your Ida Evening Star is being completely forthcoming. That's what we have.”

She turned the arrowhead Sean had given her. It was smaller than the head Doc Hanson had extracted, but it was flaked from obsidian and was of similar design.

“Do these things have, like, fingerprints?”

“You mean peculiarities that identify the hand of the maker?”

“You took the words out of my mouth.”

Sean shook his head. “Brad Amundson might know.”

“Buckskin Brad. Yeah, we should run them by him.” But she was just saying words.

“All right, what don't we have?” She pursed her lips in and out, a new bad habit that Harold had told her made her look like a carp. She caught Sean looking and stopped.

“We
don't
have the car the men were seen driving, we
don't
have their reason for conducting a buffalo jump, and most of all, we
don't
have a motive for anyone killing the Indian man. We also lack an ID of his body. Which reminds me, I want to take a look at that video, the guy who's supposed to be John Running Boy. I don't have to tell you that he's become a person of interest in this other fellow's death.”

Sean nodded. “We can use Ken Winston's laptop.” He thought of something. “The guy whose house I slept at, Joseph Brings the Sun, he saw the other Indian man John was with up on the reservation. He didn't get the guy's name, but he could ID the body as being that man. I think he'd come down here if I asked him.”

“Good. We can keep that in our back pocket.”

They chewed on what they did and didn't have for a while, the river talking it over with them.

“There
is
something else,” Sean said at length. “The father of the
white kids booked two boats with Sam's guide business for tomorrow afternoon. No guarantee the boys will be part of the fishing party, but if they are, I'll be at the oars of the boat that they're in.”

Martha drew her head back, canting it a fraction. “How old are these . . .
boys
?”

“They're college-age, according to Sam.”

“Hmm. Again, she caught herself pursing her lips. “Look, Stranny,” she said, “I'm not going to tell you this is police business and don't stick your nose in it, but run things by me first.”

“That's what I'm doing.”

“Yes, and I thank you for that. Listen to me. The only reason this isn't an out-and-out murder investigation is because we can't rule out accidental death. We don't jump to conclusions, and I'll tell you why. When I took on this job, one of my first investigations was a hunter who was killed by an arrow. He was with a buddy who was sleeping with his wife, and they'd fought over her before. I wanted to put a jacket on the buddy—he had motive, opportunity—but Harold, this is when he was freelancing out of Browning, he concluded that the arrow had been lying on the ground with the nock over a deep hoofprint made by an elk. What happened was the man had thrown his bow and arrows into a ground blind, then jumped into the blind after them. His foot came down on the nock, the arrow stood on end and drove into his thigh. His buddy found him down to his last pint and the last thing the hunter told him before dying, so he claimed, was take care of the wife.”

“Did he?”

“I heard they married after a decent interval.”

“So the moral of the story is don't kill your buddy, if you take him hunting he'll do it himself?”

“No, the moral is, Martha knows best. Reserve judgment, and when in doubt, ask.”

They were watching the kingfisher down his third fry when the dinner triangle rang up the hill.

—

Sean could still taste the kongoni steaks that Robin Cowdry cooked on the grill when he helped zip Ida into her tail for her last swim of the evening. He told her about the autopsy while she dusted waterproof glitter across her shoulders and collarbones.

“I just thought you'd like to know that the arrowhead that killed that man was a lot like the ones you showed me,” he told her. “The sheriff doesn't believe in coincidence. I don't either, for that matter.”

“Good for you,” she said. From the bar they heard the dolphin chatter that was her cue.

“Sorry for being so abrupt,” Ida said. “I'll see you in thirty.”

But a half hour later, when she ordered a mineral water and they took seats in the bar, the distance she'd created was still there, stretching across the tabletop. It was in her posture, her chin defiant, her eyes narrow. Her glance darted from her lap to the glazed starfish in the nets suspended from the ceiling, never catching his eyes in the arc. She seemed to have pulled an invisible film across her face. An attempt at small talk stalled, and when she finally got around to looking at him, it was only to thank him for his work and add that he needn't investigate further. Surely he could understand that the last thing she wanted was to be responsible for her childhood friend getting into trouble with white man's law. The adjective, Sean thought, was a clear attempt to emphasize their differences.

We are not the same people after all,
her expression said.
It was nice meeting you. Good-bye
.

She stood, her glass, untouched, making a ring on a mermaid coaster. She extended her hand, the palm cool, the green eye and the purple one as opaque as the stones you pocket because their colors are beautiful in the water, only to find that they dry to the color of nothing.

Sean drove the seven miles back to the clubhouse in time to find Martha cutting the cards at the fly-tying table, giving him her dead eyes, dealing him in.