Crazy Mountain Kiss (13 page)

Jasper Fey had a bowlegged walk with a limp that hadn't registered with Stranahan at the church service. “I slow people down,” he said as Sean matched his stride. “Would you believe I've broken thirty-three bones? This hand I punched Pickle with, it was broken five times before I turned thirty. You look at it compared to the left and it's half again larger. That's not just because it built up more muscle. How it happens is, you wrap your hand in the bull rope and get tossed, you got three-quarter ton of grade A flopping and your hand stuck on his back. Something's got to give and it isn't the rope and it sure as hell isn't the bull. My hand, it's been yanked, broke, stretched, everything but dropped in the boil and buttered. That was my nickname when I rode—Lobster Fey. I've had my collarbones snapped like wishbones, upper radius stress fractures both arms, I mean corkscrewed, the long tendon of the biceps torn from my right shoulder, compressed neck vertebrae, smashed pelvis, cracked tailbone, surgeries both knees. The reason I limp is a bull sired by Whitewater came out of the chute dipping like his pa, then he spun on a dime with change left over.” Fey inscribed a circle with his arm. “When I stopped sailing, he stepped on my foot and broke all the metatarsals. It was no more use than a flipper for damn near a year.”

The Quonset-style stables had a metal corrugated roof that they entered at one end into a center aisle separating rows of stalls. It was dark, damp, and chill. Horses nickered as they walked past them. At the far end of the corridor, Stranahan could hear echoey voices. Two figures came together in the light pouring in from the east-facing doors and separated, one walking into blinding whiteness, one approaching. A tall, gaunt man with slack skin on his throat and grizzled cheeks stooped into focus, wearing overalls and a pinstripe railroader's cap. He was carrying a blue lead rope.

Fey made the introductions and the man crooked baseball-glove
fingers around Stranahan's palm. Despite the overall appearance of a Depression-era farmer, he was younger than Stranahan had first thought, midforties maybe, with a handsomely angular, well-worn face that reminded Sean of the Band's Levon Helm, who had been his father's favorite musician.

“Charlie Watt, singular, not the drummer,” he said, his smile revealing nicotine-stained teeth. “Etta told me I was to tolerate your questions. I'll do you better. You come look me up, I can talk about that sweet Cindy all day long.” He put a hand on Jasper Fey's shoulder. “How are you holding up, J.P.?” he asked.

“I'm okay, Charlie. I was just going to show Mr. Stranahan Snapdragon's stall.”

“I'll take him the paddock while you do.”

Watt led the way to a stall housing a chestnut quarter horse mare with a star blaze. He pulled a carrot out of the bib pocket of the overalls and fed it to horse, then buckled the lead to the horse's halter and led her away, chasing his own long shadow. Stranahan saw that the animal had a bobbed tail.

“The horsehair thief?” he said.

Fey nodded. “And not a clue to the culprit. You saw our trainer Charlie there, salt of the earth. We used to be bullfighters together, saving cowboys' assess after they got tossed. Charlie said we controlled hell inside the arena and raised it on the outside. Why, the man saved my life once by stepping in front of a bull that hooked me before I could duck into the barrel. Took a horn in the gut. Retired to a job with Burlington Northern. Brakeman. I hired him away to work the horses, man's a sure enough whisperer. Now Earl Hightower, the ranch manager you saw down the way, he's an AA sponsor done a lot of good for a lot of people. He'd lay right down on the tracks for me.”

“I'd still like to meet him.”

“Sure, sure. We had a colt die of the colic and Earl's got to hitch up the Mantis to bury it, but anytime, anytime at all. I was just saying that these are old friends and they're above suspicion. I suppose one of the hands we had in years past might have done it.”

“What's the Mantis?”

“That's what we call the tractor when you attach the backhoe. Looks like a praying mantis. We got a place for the deadstock up on the northeast corner.”

“Would Charlie have been Landon's boss, or Earl?”

“That's splitting a hair. They both gave him his chores, but I doubt either will hear a word against him. I understand why the boy's mother said what she said at the church, but she was wrong to think we thought poorly of her son, and I'm saying that knowing he could have been the one who got her pregnant. It's just that when two young people disappear on the same day and you're settin' in a pew on one side of the aisle, you can't help blaming the person whose people are settin' on the other side.”

“Etta said Anker spent a few nights out here. Where did he sleep?”

“In one of the empty stalls. I never asked what one. Our horses are pastured most of the year, so there are a lot of unocupied stalls. It's only when cold weather sets in we bring them inside. Snapdragon was stalled more than most just because Cindy liked to sit up with her.”

“Could Landon Anker have slept in this stall?”

“Not if it was occupied. Somebody could cut loose on a coyote with the .220 Swift and Dragonfly would have four shod feet in the air. You could get your brains kicked out.” He pressed his lips together and slowly nodded. “Only Cindy, she did sleep here some. I cautioned against it and Etta backed me up, between the two of us we've only known about a dozen paraplegics. But Cindy made her own rules; she was Etta's daughter that way, but with considerably less horse sense. She'd sit here doing homework almost every school night.” He pointed to a folding chair tilted against the stall wall. “I hooked up a light for her.” He flicked a switch in the corridor to illuminate a fluorescent tube nailed to one wall of the stall. “A bulb would have been cheaper, but you got to consider the fire hazard.”

“And this is where you say you found something?”

He nodded. “You'll notice the only thing separating one stall from the next is a wall that's one plank thickness. But this one's got two
walls side by side with about ten inches of space in between. I insisted on the design because you sometimes stable a horse that doesn't make a good neighbor. When that happens, you isolate him in this stall. It helps that the stall is smaller so he can't turn around so easy, and that cuts down on the bucking. Everybody sleeps better.”

“Is Dragonfly unneighborly?”

“Christ no, Dragonfly has the same personality Cindy did. Never met a stranger. But the horse before Dragonfly was a surly cuss.” Fey fingered a screwdriver from his tool belt. He backed out a screw from a plank of pine. The plank swung down from the pivot point of the loosened screw, revealing the space between the double walls. Fey shone a flashlight into the dark recess. Glinting from the light were the heads of three nails that protruded from the inside wall of the neighboring stall. A length of red string looped to each nail head trailed down into the darkness. Fey pulled up the strings one by one. The first was knotted to the handle of a plastic grocery bag holding two paperback books:
A
Girl's Guide to Sweet Sixteen: Why It's Okay to Pleasure Your Body and Save Yourself for Love,
and a Harlequin suspense novel by B. J. Daniels, a woman on the cover held by a man who had forgotten to button his shirt. The second string was tied to a powder horn like those used in the era of muzzle-loading rifles.

Fey handed Stranahan the horn, which had been rubbed to a high polish. The horn had a graceful curve and was stoppered with a wood plug. Sean shook it. Raised his eyebrows.

“Be my guest,” Fey said.

Sean pulled the wood plug and trickled black powder into his palm. It was the texture of coarse sugar and smelled like rotten eggs.

“Does anyone on the ranch shoot a muzzle-loader?” Sean said.

“Not to my knowledge. Where do you think Cindy would get something like this?”

“I should be asking you that question.”

“I haven't the faintest idea.”

“What's on the third string?”

“Nothing. This is all there was.”

“What made you know where to look?”

“I didn't. It just occurred to me that nobody had looked in the space between the walls.”

Stranahan held the horn up to the light. It was carved in bas-relief, a mountain front of sharp-sided peaks against a recessed sky and the raised images of several birds, including a bald eagle. Inlays of what looked like bone represented mantles of snow on the peaks and the head and tail of the eagle. Sean ran the pad of a finger over letters detailed into the horn with brass tacks.

“The initials B.P.B. mean anything to you?”

“Doesn't ring a bell,” Fey said. “But I watch
Antiques Roadshow
. Some of these horns, if you can connect them to pioneers, are worth a lot of money.”

Sean nodded. “I have a friend who makes muzzle-loading rifles. I don't know if he makes horns, too.” He was thinking of Sam Meslik. During the winter months, Sam crafted stocks for muzzle-loading rifles from blanks of curly maple, mostly for hunters from states that had special black powder hunting seasons. He called the business “Uncle Sam's Smoke Poles.”

“Show it to your friend and see what he thinks.”

“He's in Florida, but I'll give him a call. You don't mind if I borrow it?”

“I trust you to return it.”

Stranahan heard a horse nicker.

“That'll be Etta,” Fey said. “I can pick Amberjack's clop out of a dozen horses.”

Stranahan heard the horse's footfalls echoing hollowly in the metal building. Jasper Fey led Stranahan to the tack room, where Etta Huntington was removing the cinch strap.

“Here, let me help with that saddle,” Fey said.

“I'm not a cripple.” She hoisted the saddle with her good arm and trapped it against her chest, using her stump to steady the weight. It took her three tries to hang it over the timber sawhorse that ran the length of the room.

“I see he didn't shoot you,” she said before turning around.

“Your husband's found something of Cindy's,” Stranahan said.

“Oh, what?” She walked over, exuding a smell of tannin mixed with sweat and horseflesh. She examined the powder horn while Jasper Fey explained the circumstances of the discovery. She said, “It came to you, huh, just like that?” She didn't look at him.

“Do you recognize it?”

“I would have said by now if I did. I'd like you to show me where it was, please.”

They showed her. “Give me your hammer,” she said. Fey handed her the hammer hanging from his tool belt and she started prying up boards with the claw. Fey gave Stranahan a
you see what I have to deal with?
shrug.

“I could care less what you think of me,” Etta said. She grunted with each pull of the claw. “I don't care what anyone thinks.” She dropped the hammer and stuck her head in the hole she'd made in the wall. She snapped the fingers of her left hand and Fey handed her his flashlight without waiting to be asked. When she tried to sit back, her braid got stuck on splinters of wood.

Stranahan moved to help her and Fey held up a hand. He mouthed the word, “No.”

Etta extracted herself and sat heavily on the floor of the stall.

“Was there anything else down there, Etta?”

“Quit asking me questions you know the answers to . . . Dammit, why couldn't she have told me? A romance novel? A fucking romance novel. My own daughter was afraid to let me know she was reading a
book
.” She wiped at her tears. “I don't believe in God,” she said to herself. “How can I? All he's done is take my husband, take my Cindy, take my boy, take my unborn daughter.” Her voice had risen half an octave. She was speaking as if they weren't in the stall with her. “The sun is my father, the moon is my mother. My daughter lives in the stars.” She buried her head in her hands. “The sun is my father, the moon is my mother. My daughter lives in the stars.” Slowly she lifted her head. Her eyes swept the stall, at first with dreamy languor, then
frantically, her head snapping side to side as her eyes rolled in the sockets.

“Look at me,” Stranahan said.

The eyes stopped on him. “If there is a god, why doesn't he kill me, too?” she said. “Wouldn't that be the mercy of a gracious being, to unite me with the only people who ever loved me?”

“I loved you, Etta.” Jasper Fey's voice was tender. “I love you.”

“You loved the woman who kicked out the stars.” The panic had gone and she'd settled back to earth again, but a very cold hard earth.

“That isn't fair. I loved every part of you. I loved your spirit.”

“You rode me like one of your horses.” She looked at Stranahan. “He wore his fucking spurs to bed.”

“You wanted me, Etta. We wanted each other.”

“You just climbed on board and had at it. That isn't love.”

“It turned into love.”

“Don't flatter yourself. All I ever wanted to do was disappear. You just provided the oblivion. You can't love, Jasper Fey. You don't know what love is. You just lust.”

Fey had sat down beside her. He stroked the empty sleeve of her jacket.

“Don't do that.” She turned her face away from him.

He put his arm around her and Stranahan saw her body stiffen. Then abruptly, she turned and buried her head against his shoulder.

Stranahan heard her sobbing as he walked away, past the tack room and the steady eye of Amberjack, out of the poison and into the sunlight.

I
n early May, the water is low but rising, clear but coloring, the trout thin but beginning to butter up. This is when a river makes its promise to a fisherman, before it breaks its vow a week or two later, when the snow on the peaks melts, the sound of the current rises to a roar, and you have to find somewhere else to cast a fly.

Sean whistled to himself as he stepped into a ledge rock reach of the Yellowstone River east of Livingston. The caddis hatch he was hoping for didn't materialize, so he tied on a streamer fly called the Madonna, which had twin strips of rabbit in a rust color to emulate the claws of a crawfish. He gave it a chance, gave up on it, and went to his ace in the hole, a marabou of his own design that Sam had appropriated and marketed out of his shop as “Sam's Skinny Minnow.” This one was black over olive, and the trout that came to his hand after walloping the surface was just over eighteen inches long and thick with muscle. He slipped the hook and watched the fish glimmer back into the depths.

One more cast would be one too many. Stranahan hooked the fly in the keeper ring and found a comfortable log on the bank. He'd driven to the river to clear his head after the scene in the stables and fished the cell phone from a sealed plastic bag in his vest. Idly, he watching a kingfisher beat a small silver fish against a river rock, then swallow it headfirst. The call went through.

“Kemo-fucking-sabe. I was just thinking how much I missed you.”

“That so, Sam?”

“Hell, no. My client just boated a permit on a crab fly. I'm tied off
at Boca Grande waiting for the incoming while he's wading around congratulating himself. I sure as hell better get a Benjamin for a tip. I was going to call you about something, what was it? Oh, I met somebody. That waitress at Louie's Backyard, the one with the Jennifer Lopez glutes, says I look like Satan.”

“You're ruining the reputation of a waitress now?”

“And she's a fucking Zumba instructor.”

“I don't know what that is.”

“It's Latin dance, rumba, samba, that kind of shit. Carolina's from Brazil.”

“She can move, huh?”

“Oh, my goodness gracious.”

“All right, Sam, I'll leave you to your dance card. But tell me something. I'm working the chimney case and there's an artifact that's surfaced, a powder horn with a lot of carving. Who would know about that?”

“If it's an antique? Brad Amundson, he's an adjunct prof at MSU. Brad's a Lewis and Clark scholar, one of those people who are always digging around up on the Missouri. Drop in to the Mint at happy hour. He's the one looks like Custer.”

“Thanks, Sam.”

“Watch your topknot.”

Stranahan smiled. It was a line from
Jeremiah Johnson,
Bear Claw Chris Lapp warning the famous mountain man to watch out for Indians. Sam quoted from it almost daily.

Sean picked up the thread. “Yep, watch your'n,” he said.

 • • • 

S
tranahan drove to the university, where he was kicked around from office to office in predictable fashion—bureaucracy at Montana State being no different than at any other academic institution—finally learning that Amundson taught a morning class and was gone for the day. No, they wouldn't give him a phone number. Stranahan could
have played the Ettinger card but didn't; he'd catch the professor at the bar later. With a couple hours to kill, he drove to the tipi and took Choti on a walk up the road, and was surprised to see the department Cherokee parked in Ettinger's drive. His feet took him to the door.

“Martha, you look—”

“I'm blaming you,” she said, ushering him in, her voice scolding but not cross. She pulled up the tail of her flannel shirt and rubbed at the black filth streaking her face. “I was putting in the new faucet when I heard Goldie barking. I got distracted.”

“Tell you what. You go take a shower and I'll replace your faucet.”

“Are you a plumber now? Toolman Stranahan? Let's see. Artist, fishing guide, detective, tracker, boxer, bricklayer, candlestick maker.”

“I'm my father's son. I got a Craftsman socket set for my tenth birthday.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Can't I just drop in on an old friend?”

Martha grunted. “Make yourself useful. Everything you need's in that box.”

When she came back in freshly laundered Carhartts and work shirt, Stranahan poured water from the new tap and set a kettle on the stove.

“Montana's the only state I've ever lived in,” he said, pouring the tea, “where the only difference between your work clothes and your dress clothes is date of purchase. Do you know a prof named Brad Amundson?”

“Buckskin Brad. Sure.”

He told her about the powder horn and the drama that had unfolded in the Bar-4 stables.

Ettinger nodded, speaking as if to herself. “‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'”

“What's that mean?”

“It's the first line of
Anna Karenina
. Tolstoy.”

“I've heard of him.”

“I hope so. What he's saying is that for a marriage to be happy, it has to avoid a deficiency in any aspect. Just one deficiency dooms it to failure.”

“Sounds like an impossible standard.”

“It's called the Anna Karenina principle. It's why I've been divorced twice. It's why you couldn't maintain a relationship with Martinique. It's why Harold and I didn't work out, and it's why the two of us are fixing faucets and not working a puzzle.”

“If you apply that logic to Etta Huntington and Jasper Fey, they don't stand a chance. So where do I go from here?”

“You're doing fine. In my experience, all roads lead back to the family. Find the deficiencies, you'll find the answers to your questions.”

“Do you want to go to the Mint? Happy hour ought to be starting.”

“Nah, bars where women nail their bras to the ceiling aren't my thing.”

 • • • 

T
he Mint was west of Bridger, out by the railroad tracks along the lower Gallatin River. It was only a few hundred yards from the limestone bluffs where Lewis and Clark camped at Three Forks, pondering a route to the Pacific. The man sitting on the barstool in period attire looked to be contemplating his own way west in the reflection of an empty beer glass. Stranahan took a neighboring stool, noting the bras nailed to the low ceiling. Holding the position of honor over the bartender's station was a pink underwire with cups that looked big enough to coddle marmots.

“Last Cast Pale Ale,” he said to the bartender. “And another for my friend here, whatever's his pleasure.”

The man who turned toward him wore a buckskin jacket with fringe, had an impeccably coiffed goatee, and wore his long golden hair in a braid. Despite a baby beer gut pressing against his shirt, he was as handsome a human being as Stranahan had ever seen, with a profile that belonged on a shiny coin. “One always depends on the
kindness of strangers,” the man said, and rolled his right hand on a loose wrist in the pantomime of a bow.

Sean extended his hand and the man took it and the beers came and they knocked them back. Brad Amundson set his glass down and licked the foam off his mustache. “Now that we're drinking friends, I'll tell you a story. That bra”—he indicated the pink one—“is a 40 double D, and the woman who wore it wasn't just any woman with a mature set of hushpuppies. Her name is Dora Evans and she was hiking with her husband in Glacier Park when they startled mama grizzly. This is back before everybody carried bear spray and the going wisdom was you lie down and play dead. It's one of those things sounds good before you try it. Well, the bear got her husband on the ground and playing dead wasn't doing the trick, so she whipped off her bra, filled the cups with rocks, and smacked that bear in the head, whirling it like a bolo. Bear ran off. It made all the papers—‘Woman Fends Off Grizzly Attack with Bra.' The next time she came in here—they live just up the road in Logan—I said, “Dora, darling, may I have the honor?' She took it off and I nailed it to the ceiling with the butt of a Colt revolver.” The man finished his beer and cocked a finger at the bartender for another round. “Do you know what the moral of the story is?”

“Wear a bra?”

“No, it's if you got them, God put them there for a reason. Dora was going to get chest reduction surgery because lugging all that weight around was giving her back pain.”

“Did she end up getting the surgery?”

“Sit here another hour she'll put your hand down her shirt and make you guess. You want to know the second lesson of the story?”

“That's why I'm here.”

“Don't use an antique firearm as a hammer. It reduces the value.”

Amundson drained his glass and raised a finger for another round. “Are you drinking here per chance or did you have a question for me? Either way is fine, I just like to know who I'm telling my stories to.”

“Sam Meslik told me you were the man to see about Lewis and Clark–era artifacts.”

“There's a fellow knows how to warm a barstool. How may I be of service?”

Stranahan took the powder horn from his knapsack and unfolded the handkerchief he'd wrapped around it.

Amundson brought up a monocle he wore on a silver chain and screwed it into his right eye. He nodded, looking at the horn. “It's bison, that puts it post-1830. Prior to that, most horns were cattle; people brought their horns with them when they came west. After settlers were here in better numbers, you start seeing buffalo horns taking over, because pre–
Lonesome Dove
there were a hell of a lot more buffalo than cattle. So Lewis and Clark I don't think. More likely it's later mountain man era, American-Indian war era, roughly 1840 to 1890. Or that's what who made it wants you to think.” He nodded to the bartender. “We're just going to be outside, Lou.”

Amundson studied the horn in the better light of the parking lot, resting it on the hood of Sean's Land Cruiser. “Interesting,” Sean heard him say a couple of times.

“Is it authentic?”

Amundson removed his monocle. “The base plug is convex, round rather than oval, and secured by wood pegs, not tacks. Iron staple for securing the cord. And here, at the bulb end, just a simple hardwood plug with a carved ring to hold the end of the suspension cord. All true to the period. Beautiful patina, some mouse gnawing, hairline cracks, what we call good attic condition. The horn is original. If it was left the way it was found, I would appraise it at two hundred to three hundred dollars.”

“But the engraving—”

“—is not original to the horn. Nicely done, none of that folksy, whimsical design you see on eastern horns. The bone inlays representing the snow are very well fitted and something I've never seen before. The head and tail of the eagle, also. But the etching is raised slightly, the scrimshaw. Feel it.” He took Stranahan's finger and ran it across the grain of the mountains. “After a hundred and sixty years or so, that would be worn perfectly smooth and you'd start losing
detail, but this is crisp. The birds are quite interesting. Most horns from this era are plain, but if there's engraving of any sort, it tends toward hunting motif. Yet here we have several species of birds—eagle, raven, even a songbird. My guess is that the horn was bought plain, or found that way, and someone altered it within the last thirty or forty years, probably whoever added these initials. I'd speculate that the artwork is highly personal, that the mountains represent an actual mountain range that is part of this person's life and that the birds tell a story. I hate to see history defaced like this, but would almost make an exception for this horn. I'd like to meet its maker.”

“So would I,” Stranahan said.

“May I ask what your interest is in the horn?”

“It came into someone's possession and I was hired partly to find out how that happened. I'm a private investigator.” He handed Amundson one of his cards.

“You could have said so earlier.”

“And missed the story of the bra?”

“Hell, I would have told you anyway. Come on back inside. It's your turn to buy. I'm a licensed appraiser and you just took up my valuable time.”

“All right, but only one more.” Stranahan looked west toward the bluff where Lewis and Clark had camped. “Have you been up there?”

“Many times.”

“What do you look for—musket balls, canteens?”

“I should be so lucky. No, mostly what I do is triangulate possible campsites using the best data available, which is the journals and other personal accounts, and then search for evidence of a latrine. The corps carried a laxative in which the active agent was mercury. Mercury does not dissolve from the soil.”

“Here I thought your work was glamorous.”

“That's Dora driving in. She'll nudge you with her fenders, just remember to come up for air and you'll be okay.”