Crazy Mountain Kiss (12 page)

H
ow do you like your coffee?” Jasper Fey's voice came from the kitchen. Stranahan was standing in the ranch living room dominated by a spectacular piece of landscape art, an immensity of sky over a flat-topped butte.

“Is that an original Charlie Russell?” he said.

“That it is. I raised my paddle one time too many at an auction at the Sappington Ranch 'bout five years ago, when the getting was good. Nobody painted sunsets the way old Charlie did, except maybe God. How do want your coffee?”

“Black,” Stranahan said.

“Good, 'cause that's what you're getting.” He heard Fey whistling as he walked into the room and handed Sean a cup with his left hand. His right hand and wrist sported a cast. “Etta's lactose-intolerant, and I'm, well, I'm off on shoots so much, milk would sour waiting for me.”

Stranahan needn't have worried about his reception. At the door a few minutes before, Fey had looked incuriously at him for only a moment before smiling broadly and ushering him in, saying, “Welcome to my dacha.” He was wearing the rolled-brim silver Stetson he'd worn to the memorial and a knotted gray silk scarf with a pattern of scrolls. As a man whose preparation for the day consisted of splashing water and running his fingers through his hair, Stranahan got the impression that Jasper Fey's appearance was as meticulously planned as a politician's. He said that Etta was off on a horse ride, but he'd be happy to help Stranahan's investigation in any way that he could.

“Jam a knuckle?” Stranahan said.

Fey held up two fingers. “They throb like the dickens. You ever have one?”

“A few. I used to box.”

Fey's eyebrows said
I'm impressed.
“I guess it was wise of me not to throw down on you after you hit me with that coffee.”

“I'm sorry about that. It was just instinct. I didn't know who you were. I didn't know who the man was you hit.”

“That would be the Leroy Hunt what people call Pickle. He cowboyed up and didn't press charges, so I'm indebted. Maybe it's God's warning that I ought to get my skinny butt back to Roundup. I was just packing up.”

Fey indicated a sofa patterned with bison and they sat down.

“Tell me what it is you do besides teach people how to ride,” Sean said.

“Oh, everything. Anything to do with the West.”

Stranahan had pegged Fey for a man whose first subject was himself and noticed his eyes brighten.

“A lot of the actors are from New York, L.A., the lead's from Melbourne, Australia. He's actually the easiest to work with, just a natural actor and a hell of a nice guy. Most Aussies are. But a lot of the talent that comes onto the set, they don't know the first thing about country life. They don't know how to put a hat on, they don't know how to take it off. They don't know that if you're knocking on someone's door to give them the bad news about their son, that you place the hat over your heart before you step inside.” Fey removed his Stetson, spread his fingers across the crown, and placed it over his chest. “Or that when you kneel down to ask a girl to dance, you take off your hat and put it on the knee that's raised.” He slipped from the sofa and demonstrated. “Ma'am, may I have the honor?”

Fey stood and repositioned his hat. “Or just bearing, how to hold your body in different situations. Women need to push their hips more forward to play a western part, which is something they don't teach in acting class. Some of the mistakes are right in the script, so
the first thing I do is go over the day's pages. Horses, of course, anything to do with livestock I'm the guy.”

“Fight scenes?”

“No, we got a choreographer for that, an old stuntman. He's good at staging the action, but it's still too much Hollywood. No one gets anything worse than a black eye, when in a real fight, you break bones and lose teeth. Or at least you jam your knuckles like I did. I thought I had my drinking under control until Etta called about Cindy. I fell off the wagon. I'm ashamed of my behavior yesterday and I hope you'll accept my apology. I want you to have something. It's in the other room.”

Fey came back holding a DVD case. “This is season one. Three disks. It won't be released till July, so this is hot off the press. I haven't even cracked the cellophane.”

Sean started to object.

“I insist. I'll get another and probably won't watch it anyway. All the stuff you went to so much trouble to get right either gets cut out or screwed with. It's depressing. Make a man wonder why they hired him in the first place.”

Stranahan thanked him and asked Fey if he did the gun scenes.

Fey nodded. “They're my guns. I have a collection I rent out for a lot of productions, not just ones I work on. I like to get the details exactly right. I worked on a biopic of Bad Man Soapy Smith a couple years back. Now he used a Model 1892 Winchester in .44-40 in the Frank Reid gunfight on the Skagway docks. Had it wrested out of his hands and was killed by his own gun. They were going to shoot the scene using an 1866 'cause it's got the brass action. I said that's like putting a push-up bra on a flapper. It's just wrong. Threatened to quit. I told myself that's a stupid move, Jasper, you're going to get your ass fired. But they ended up rearranging the schedule until I could get my hands on the right rifle.” He paused, and Sean saw Fey's face flush. He used the wrap on his cast to wipe at the corners of his eyes. “Here I'm talking guns and my Cinderella's ashes are in an urn.”

Despite his reservations, Sean felt himself warming to Fey. He was
not at all what Etta had led him to expect, but then most people were surprises. He decided to get down to the business that had brought him here.

“Jasper, did your wife tell you that Cindy was pregnant when she disappeared last November?”

Fey nodded. “She blames Landon. Between you, me, and old Charlie here, that boy's as queer as a Lauderdale decorator. And in my business you learn gay from good-looking. It's part of why I took him on. I needed a hand and figured he'd be the one boy who
wouldn't
be trying to clip the rose off the vine. But I don't know. Maybe he thought if he slept with her, he'd find out he wasn't really gay, that it was a software malfunction but the hard drive was okay. Kids experiment. Will they do a DNA test on the fetus?”

“That's in the works. You knew her friends. Who else would be a candidate?”

He shook his head. “When it comes to your own daughter, you're the last to know. Any parent will tell you that.”

“How old was Cinderella when you married Etta?”

“She was twelve, but I'd already been in the picture a couple years. But that's not what you're asking, is it? You're asking if our relationship was that of a father and his daughter. It was. Oh, we circled each other at the beginning. She was afraid I'd steal the affections of her mother, and she'd already lost one parent. But then I think she realized that I wanted to add to her life, not subtract from it. Cindy's birth father died when she was five. My understanding is that's about the youngest age that children form lasting memories. She'd cry sometimes because she couldn't remember his face. I grew up in a one-parent household myself. I understood. One of the first things I did after the honeymoon was make her a scrapbook with old photos and newspaper clippings about her father. He was a hard-luck horseman, all-around rodeo bum, just like I was. I'll admit I was trying to win her over, but it came from the heart.”

“Etta told me you didn't approve of the memorial.”

“My feeling was we'd dwelled on our loss long enough. To me Cindy's been gone quite a long time.”

“Didn't it seem reasonable to spend an afternoon remembering her life?”

“What they were remembering in that church . . .” He let the thought die and for a few moments his eyes drifted around the room. “I'll get us some more coffee,” he said abruptly. Stranahan heard whistling from the kitchen. When Fey returned, the smile was back on his face, but his voice was sober.

“I'll be perfectly frank with you. The young woman we're talking about died in a traffic accident on March 26 last spring, or might as well have. My wife lost an arm in that accident. What Cindy lost was not so visible, but she was a changed person. She'd had it all—the looks, athletic ability, a personality that could coax a smile out of a stone. And top of her class. All that changed. The way the doctor put it to me, that cerebral cortex acts like a lid, a restraint on acting upon your urges. It's like snakes in a bottle. You take off the lid, they slither out and they're everywhere. After the accident, you couldn't trust Cindy on a horse not to kill herself. You couldn't trust her to show simple modesty about bodily functions. Any itch, she scratched it. It made visitors uncomfortable; hell, it made me uncomfortable. Could she have taken care of herself well enough to lead a productive and independent life? The doctors said she could. Her age was in her favor. Young people recover from brain injuries better than adults. But would she ever reach the potential she had before the accident? No, that wasn't going to happen. They talk about the new normal, how you change your expectations and set your sights accordingly. It's easy to say. But it broke my heart. It was worse for Etta, because she was the one in the driver's seat. She took all the blame. I told her she needs help from a therapist. But she won't get it. You don't win the women's all-around five times asking for people's help.”

“She was drunk when I came here the other night,” Stranahan said. “Does that happen often?”

“If you'd asked me that before the accident, I'd say that isn't the woman I know. She drank socially. We were a drinking couple. But we were never behind-your-back drinkers and it never got out of hand. Now I'm afraid she drinks more than she should, but it's the insomnia that makes me worry the most. What she said in that church was dead true. Every night, small hours, she's up. I feel the cold sweep into the house and know she's standing with the door open. Back in February it fell to twenty-six below at the airport. God knows how cold it got up here. And four in the morning she's outside looking at the stars, just shaking like an aspen leaf. Now it's the horse rides. Every morning she saddles up and I don't see her until noon earliest. She won't let me go with her. There's no cell service up there, she rides up with no saying goodbye, she comes back with no explanation. I'm watching my wife fall apart day by day, piece by piece, and there's nothing I can do about it.”

You could be here more,
Stranahan thought, but as Fey had opened up, he thought better than to interrupt.

“Etta has dismissed me from her life. I speak to her when she walks into the living room, into the kitchen. She looks straight ahead. We could have been a comfort to each other. Instead, she's created a gulf. To tell you the truth I don't think we're going to make it. We've lost our daughter and now we're losing each other.”

“You could take some time from the series.”

“No, you're wrong there. Work keeps me sane and all Etta's money has been swallowed by medical bills. We couldn't afford full-coverage insurance. The premiums are too high for people who make their living on the back of a horse. We turn a breeding dollar and she gives riding lessons, but she doesn't have anything coming in now from the outside. The income from my television work is the only thing that keeps the horses in the stable. If I quit, we'd have to sell the place.”

“Maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea.”

Fey nodded. “Get away from the memories. Move someplace she has to see people, engage in conversation, not be so isolated. Don't think I haven't thought about it.”

“Do you have a problem with me doing the job Etta's paid me to?”

“You mean do I take issue with you airing our dirty laundry to anyone you please? Hell yes I do, and I made that clear to Etta.”

“Then why did you let me in when I knocked?”

“Because I had all last night to think about it. This isn't about me. And it isn't really about Cindy, because Cindy's past caring. It's about Etta, and nobody says no to Etta, not me, not anyone. She's going to keep riding off into the mountains and staring at stars until she knows what happened. The way I see it is you're the only one standing between someone I love and the woman's descent into madness. You've seen her yourself; she can't turn the corner on this thing. Do you know how the Crazy Mountains got their name?”

“I know the legend.”

“Which legend? There's a couple.”

“I know the story of the settler woman.”

Fey nodded. “She became a wanderer whose spirit haunted the mountains. A woman who'd lost her children, now who does that bring to mind? What's clear to me is that if somebody doesn't find out what happened to our daughter, Etta's going to ride out one day and she won't come back. It will be her spirit that haunts the mountains then.”

“Do you think she'd commit suicide?”

“I was speaking metaphorically. This morning, when I got a cup of coffee and some eggs under my belt, I went up to Cindy's room. I do that sometimes because . . . well, just because. I stand there for a minute or two. Anyway, I found myself looking at this Wonder Horse Cindy rocked till she wore the paint off it. It got me thinking about how much time she spent in the stables, so I went out there, nothing particular in mind, but by God I found something. I left it where it was because Etta will want to see for herself. Now that you're here, I don't see a reason to wait.”

Sean followed Fey's compact shoulders into a mudroom, where he buckled a tool belt over his jeans. “No, you stay here, Poupette,” he said as a diminutive terrier-like dog appeared, licking at his boot.
“Etta calls Poupette my ten-gallon-hat dog account of her being small and she likes to sleep in the crown of my Stetson. But she's a sweetie, yes she is.” He moved the dog with his toe, a gentle nudge, and they stepped out and he shut the door.