Dead Man’s Fancy (10 page)

A
mong Plains Indians, it was customary for a man approaching another's lodge to announce himself if the front flap was closed. Stranahan had just secured the flap of his eighteen-pole, Sioux-design tipi when headlights veered into his drive. For a brief moment, the interior of the lodge was illuminated, the way countryside is brilliantly lit by a bolt of lightning. Near his head the shadow of a daddy longlegs was thrown as big as a Halloween spider against the canvas, then the lights swept past and the engine shut off. As the son of a mechanic, Sean was tuned in to the distinctive grumblings of the cars driven by his friends, but this one he couldn't place. He pumped up the Coleman and began to split sticks to build a fire. He knelt down to splash water onto his face from the basin beside the fire ring.

“Hello, the tipi,” a woman's voice called. “May I come in?”

“Asena? Asena Martinelli?”

“I'm very sorry for the intrusion, but I really must speak to you.”

Sean brought the forester's ax he'd been splitting kindling with up to his face. The polished blade was the closest thing he had to a mirror. He peered at the distorted image staring back at him and pushed back the comma of hair that had fallen over his left eye.

“If you're busy—”

“I'm not.”

She ducked in when he removed the sticks, placing a hand on the crown of her hat to keep it from falling. Stranahan took his place behind the fire ring and sat cross-legged. As the head of the household, he faced the front of the lodge. He indicated that she enter to the left and sit to his right on a folded buffalo blanket. This also was in accordance with custom. Had it been a man entering, he would have sat to Stranahan's left.

“Are you Native American?” she asked. “You look it a little.”

“No, but my friend who gave me this tipi taught me lodge etiquette. I've found I enjoy the formality. It's respectful without being arrogant. Would you like a biscuit or coffee?” He reached for the enamelware pot sitting next to the makings for his fire. “I'll have it hot in a minute.”

“No thank you.”

She arranged herself on the blanket.

“Now if we were adhering strictly to tradition, you'd sit with your legs folded to the side, not crossed.”

When she began to move he waved a hand for her to stop. “We're not that formal in my lodge.”
I've preened and now
I'm rattling on
, Stranahan thought. Men were such predictable animals in the company of attractive women.

“How did you find me?”

“I talked to Sam Meslik. The sheriff said he was close to my sister.”

“You know about his fight with the wrangler?”

She nodded. “He's a bit of a brute.”

“He told me he was in love with her. I believe he was.”

“I'll come right to the point, Mr. Stranahan. I think my sister was kidnapped. I'd like to hire you to find her.”

Stranahan struck a match and held it to a bird's nest of tinder tucked under the kindling.

“Why didn't you mention that this morning?” He watched sparks zigzag toward the vent and let the silence stretch.

“It's . . . not for certain. But your sheriff, frankly, I got the impression she was tolerating me, despite her little speech. I thought you might have . . . better energy. Sam said you were a man who stepped in shit even if there was only one cow in the pasture.”

Stranahan had to smile.

“Did he? Well, you're wrong about Ettinger. The search is winding down because the odds of finding a person missing in the wilderness, alive, is dwindling. The possibility that she was kidnapped is completely different, and the sheriff would pursue it, I guarantee you. Give her a lead and she'll start digging.”

“I would rather have you pursue this . . . line of enquiry. How much do you charge?” Her voice had become businesslike.

He told her and watched her head move reflexively back from the fire.

“That's a lot of money,” she said.

Stranahan had no intention of taking her money, but was curious to see how far she'd go. The more she was willing to part with, the more credible her suspicions. Money was a very accurate measure of confidence.

“That is acceptable,” she said at length.

“Asena, I take what you are telling me very seriously. But I can't work for you because it would be a conflict of interest. I'm already being paid to find your sister. My obligation is to the county.”

“For how much longer?”

The promptness of her response told Stranahan that she'd thought this aspect through. It was a damned good question. Once the county search ground to a halt, Ettinger would have a hard time justifying his continued involvement.

“I don't know,” he said honestly.

Asena's shoulders visibly dropped. Stranahan found that he wanted to help her, but more than that, to help her sister, if she was alive. He noticed the way the flames patterned the tipi walls and came to a decision.

“I said I can't take your case because I'm already contractually obligated. I didn't say I wasn't interested.” He removed the boiling kettle from the fire. “Why don't you tell me what you came to say, and we can go from there.”

“Will you have to report anything I . . . divulge?”

“This is an active investigation. I'd be lying if I told you I wouldn't talk to the sheriff if something you told me sounded relevant.”

“I need to think about this.”

“If there's a chance your sister's alive, we need to act quickly.”

“I don't mean sleep on it. I mean just walk around. I'm not like Nicki. Nicki does what she feels in the moment, and I'm afraid that has cost her. I have to think things through. I've spent a great deal of my life thinking things through. For both of us.”

Stranahan undid the flap and stepped outside with her, noting that the motor he'd heard belonged to a boxy SUV with a short wheel base, an old Bronco.

“I'd rather be by myself. I won't be long.”

Ever since he'd heard her voice, he'd known that his life was about to turn. It had happened before, when a Mississippi riverboat siren knocked on the door of his art studio and hired him to do a little innocent fishing for her, which turned out to be not so innocent. And it had happened last year when a search dog found bodies buried on Sphinx Mountain. Life went along—he guided, he mixed paints on his palette, he shot pool with Sam—and then it turned. Turned in a way that made you feel your heart beat. It was turning now, as he heard Asena's footsteps approach.

“You're back soon.”

She stood inside the entrance. The flames between them licked up the length of her legs so that it appeared she'd caught fire. It was an extraordinary image.

“How much do you know about wolves?” she said.

“It's hard to live here without knowing about wolves . . . Asena.” Stranahan emphasized the name. When she didn't speak, he said, “I know enough about wolves to know Asena is a wolf in Turkish mythology.”

“Yes, well, I told you, it isn't my real name. My sister got it from a book. She was into all that stuff—myths, spirit animals. I'm like my father, more practical minded, but Nicki was subject to flights of fancy. A cloud chaser. When I asked you if you knew about wolves, I meant the politics.”

“It's a volatile issue,” Stranahan said. “Most of the state was against the reintroduction. They believe the feds rammed it down their throats. Ranchers hate them. A lot of hunters think wolves are taking a lion's share of elk they want for their freezers.”

“What about the other side, not the environmentalists who want them on the endangered species list but the fringe element, people who regard wolves as spirit brothers or hold them up as gods?”

“Harold Little Feather, the Blackfeet Indian who gave me the tipi, in his culture wolves are brothers who travel with the tribe. But you mean white people. I know demonstrators have protested wolf hunting at the capitol. They've hacked into computer lists of hunters who bought wolf tags and sent threatening e-mails, hassled them over the phone. Trap lines have been sabotaged. There are people willing to stand in front of a gun barrel to save a wolf from being shot.”

Asena sat down on the blanket and faced him. “What you need to know about my sister is, she's one of those people who would take the bullet.”

“And you believe that has something to do with her disappearance?”

“In a way. It's a story that is hard for me to tell. Could you make some of that coffee, please?”

U
ntil the night a pressure ridge formed on the ice covering Two Loon Lake, life in the house in the pines on the bank of the Morice River had been idyllic, if selectively remembered. The girls' mother, Elizabeth Conner, had traveled to British Columbia by way of Aberdeen, Scotland, trading one bad weather for another, but leaving one bad man for one much better. The better man also was an immigrant, from that mountainous corner of southeastern France called Hautes-Alpes that is Italy in all but language.

A fourth generation sheepherder, Alfonso Martinelli grew up in a household so destitute that his mother shopped a block of moldy cheese from one window to another as a way of saving face, so that passersby might think they had something to eat. The boy grew up with a pair of shears in one hand and a shotgun in the other, for his duties, in addition to returning strays and righting sheep that tipped onto their backs and were in danger of suffocating, consisted of protecting the herd from predators—bears, in the spring, but wolves on a year-round basis. Like many boys of peasant heritage, he became enamored of the American Western, a black-and-white promise of freedom by six-gun, on a landscape with a quality of wildness denied him by the very age and settlement of the country where he was born—a quality that, ironically, clung to those French Alps in the form of the very wolves that were his job to eradicate. It is a common story that men drawn to wildness destroy that which makes a place wild, then move to find it elsewhere. Alfonso's quest, fueled by nothing so much as a sense of adventure, led him from France to Nova Scotia, where he met the Scottish schoolteacher who would become his wife, from there to Polson, Montana, where sheepherding had not yet disappeared as a way of life, and finally to British Columbia, to the house in the pines on the bank of the Morice River.

At a gun show of the Historical Collector Arms Society in Terrace, Alfonso reached into his pocket for the one romantic purchase of his life—an antique Colt .45 handgun with ivory bone grips, the Peacemaker model he'd seen in Westerns growing up. He collected the traps and other tools necessary to become a fur trapper, which he'd wanted to be ever since seeing Charlton Heston in a movie about mountain men in the Rockies. In time he also would work as a commercial salmon and halibut fisherman, and as a rigger for a logging outfit—not an atypical résumé for immigrants with hard muscles and dubious English in that part of Canada.

Elizabeth found employment in a one-room schoolhouse downriver near the town of Houston. The girls, arriving two years apart and inheriting their mother's features and her hair, which Alfonso called “mountain maple leaves in the fall,” were expert at constructing pocket sets with conibear traps before they had mastered their multiplication tables. Nicki, with knife flashing, had won a skinning contest in the junior division at the winter fair, skinning ten muskrats in just over seventeen minutes, with only one demerit for a slip of the blade that punctured the skin. She was ten when her father hung her blue ribbon on the mantel. Haunted by its color, she took the ribbon down and buried it in a Mason jar under the porch. It had brought back the nightmares that started a few winters before, when one of the family's two snowmobiles found the weakest part of the pressure ridge on Two Loon Lake, and the sisters had witnessed their mother drown. Asena remembered seeing a surprised expression on her mother's lips, as if she was saying “Oh,” then her face rolled under and the last the girl ever saw of her was the hair that was the color of mountain maple leaves in the fall.

The family had taken both machines that day to fish for lake trout, the girls riding with their mother, Alfonso following on a Sno-Cat laden with ice fishing gear. When the ice cracked, both girls had followed their mother into the freezing water and were it not for Alfonso's quick thinking, they, too, would have drowned. He'd witnessed the accident while still on shore, had pulled the starter cord of the chainsaw bungeed to the Cat, cut a sapling and crawled across the ice until he could extend it over the hole. Little Nicki had stayed afloat by clinging to the blue coat Asena was wearing, and after Asena grabbed ahold of the branch, Alfonso had dragged them both back onto the ice.

“Dad thought Mother must have hit her head on the machine before going in, that's why she drowned so quickly. The only reason I stayed up was because my coat was so big it trapped the air; it was sewn out of a seal skin that Mother got trading with the Indians. She'd dyed it blue and made it so I had room to grow into it. It had been my Christmas present.” Her voice was matter of fact. Stranahan realized it must be the only way that she could get the words out, to recite it as an impersonal history.

He said, “I'm very sorry for your tragedy. Is that why your sister called you Asena, because the wolf in the fable has blue fur and you wore a blue fur coat?”

“Yes, in some ways Nicki substituted me for our mother after that. She had to. After Mother's death, Daddy went days without even speaking.”

Six years after building a monument of river stones to commemorate their mother's death, the family moved into a farmhouse with a barn on the outskirts of Kamloops. Alfonso's long experience trapping wolves had garnered him a government job as a predator control agent in the regional office. As his job would take him away parts of the winter, he had tried to coax Elizabeth's sister to undertake the rearing of the girls, who were now twelve and fourteen years of age. But she lived in Scotland and was unwilling to travel to the middle of nowhere for a brother-in-law she'd not seen in twenty years. And so the girls became latchkey kids with the nearest neighbor a mile down a dirt road and no outsider the wiser about their living situation. As Asena was older and naturally a responsible person, she took on the duties of supervision, of which her sister was in need.

It wasn't boy trouble. That would come later. Rather, it was rebellion against the absent father and a young-adult book titled
Lobo, My Brother
that Nicki had checked out of the school library, about a boy in the Northwest Territories who is raised by a pack of wolves when his parents drown in the Great Slave Lake. The book was fiction and she knew this, but the highly anthropomorphized depictions of the wolf family coupled with the coincidence of her own mother's drowning moved the young girl to identify with the boy. Her response was two-pronged—first, to lash out at her father for killing these magnificent creatures and second, to begin a gradual withdrawal into a fantasy world in which she allied herself with animals, both real and mythical, and dreamed of becoming their savior by exacting revenge on their persecutors.

When her father scoffed at the vitriol of her pronouncements regarding his livelihood, telling her she'd grow out of such fanciful notions and asking her to pass the ketchup, she responded by squirting it all over her face, to show what happens to wolves when they break their teeth trying to chew their way out of leghold traps. She then left the table and ran to the barn where Alfonso kept the tools of his trade. There she depressed the toothy jaws of the biggest trap she could find, set the toggle sear and stepped onto the pan with her bare right foot. Her howls brought both father and sister running. What they saw in the diffused light of the barn was young Nanika with an otherworldly blandness of expression, tears streaming down her cheeks, ketchup staining her mouth, standing in a steadily expanding pool of blood. While Asena ran forward to free her from the trap, her father averted his eyes, for his young daughter, in the first blushes of puberty, was completely naked.

“I don't mean to interrupt you,” Stranahan said at this point in the narrative, “but why do you think Nicki was naked?”

Asena raised her coffee cup and, seeing it was empty, set it down. “I think it was because of the book. The boy was naked when the wolves found him and grew up free and uninhibited. Later on, when he returns to civilization, he feels shame and is forced to cover himself. He eventually conforms to society, but then in the end he hears his brother wolves calling to him and runs to join them in the wilderness, shedding his clothes as he goes. Nicki saw herself as that boy.”

Stranahan reached for the pot of coffee to pour some into her cup, and as he set the pot down she caught his forearm with her right hand.

“I'm not making a mistake telling you this, am I?”

As she had not yet told him anything that touched upon the mystery of her sister's disappearance, Stranahan was unsure of his response. He pressed her hand and gently extricated himself.

“I need to be sure,” she said. “My sister's not going to walk off the mountain on her own. There will be a price.”

Stranahan nodded at the cryptic remark, but she was already reeling back through the years to the second defining moment in her sister's life, which occurred during her high school years. By then, Nicki had not only blossomed physically but also was starting to exhibit the combination of innocence and joie de vivre that would form her adult personality. Fellow misfits found themselves drawn to her, if not to her interests. But she bent them to her specific sympathies through the sheer force of her charisma, attracting a cadre of willing cohorts to aid her quest to bring to light the atrocities man committed against wildlife.

The north fork of the Thompson River, near where the Martinellis lived, was home to British Columbia's most famous sockeye salmon run. The run peaked every fourth summer, drawing thousands of visitors to a boardwalk viewing area, from which they could witness the spectacle of a river literally running red with fish. As Nicki's junior year coincided with the fourth year of the cycle, it was her idea to draw attention to the plight of salmon that suffered from unsustainable commercial fishing practices by having her followers strip naked and lie down among the fish, feigning the death that is the inevitable conclusion of the salmon's spawning ritual.

The day arrived, but only two of Nicki's compadres met her at the appointed spot. With the boardwalk thronging with camera-carrying tourists, it might have been predicted that modesty would prevail. In the end, only Nicki took off her clothes, and after folding them neatly on a rock, walked out into the river, her hair only a shade lighter than the salmon that swam about her. Reclining in a stretch of shallow, boulder-strewn water with her head to the current and her hands folded over the joining of her legs, relatively little could actually be seen, for the sunlight bounced off the water in glittering coins and her hair flowed in ripples across her upper body, obscuring her breasts. But that was more than enough to draw a photographer from the
Kamloops Daily Reader
, and the paper, with the headline “Venus Swims with Salmon,” sold out at newsstands the next morning. The word
Venus
was not an inspiration of the copywriter's, but an obvious choice, for a feeder stream called Botticelli Creek was only a stone's throw from the spawning grounds. Nanika Martinelli became known as the Venus of Botticelli Creek; she came up with the moniker Fly Fishing Venus several years later.