Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (28 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Return of the Gray Ghost

H
er first words were, “This had better be good.”

Ettinger ushered Stranahan into her home office, where she had cleared space on her desk for Weldon Crawford's Rigby double rifle, the one Stranahan had shot at the charging buffalo target and later Crawford had carried to Sphinx Mountain to shoot Emmitt Cummings through the wall of his tent. As Stranahan had remembered, the right barrel was split where the rifle had accidentally discharged when Crawford fell on it, driving the muzzles into the ground, and there was a chunk of the wood missing near the pistol grip. Despite the damage, the rifle remained a potent instrument of death, incongruously beautiful in repose, the Circassian walnut stock gleaming under the overhead lights.

“I checked it out of evidence like you asked,” she said. “Now what's this about?”

“The final piece of the puzzle, or at least that's what I'm hoping,” Stranahan said.

“Maybe you better explain.”

“I'll try, but can we go out on the porch? I left the dog in my rig and he gets antsy when he can't see me.”

“You know what you are, Sean? I thought about it when you took up with that riverboat siren last summer. You're a taker-in of strays. Stray women, stray men like your buddy Meslik, who's so feral he'd just as soon use a litterbox as a toilet, stray dogs, stray anything.”

“Does that mean you're a stray, Martha?”

“No, I'm a misfit. There's a difference.”

They moved to the porch. “Speaking of puzzles,” Martha said, “there's something you'll want to know. Remember how we never found Cummings's pickup at the trailhead. That bothered me. Well, we found it. He'd parked down at Indian Creek and ridden in from there. That's a long way around.”

“Careful man,” Stranahan said.

“He wound up dead all the same. So back to your puzzle, tell me about it.”

“When I left your office this afternoon,” Stranahan said, “I thought this boy I'd met on the river had stolen the flies. I'd seen where he pushed a stump so he could stand on it to reach the hidden key to the clubhouse. And my hunch was right. But then when I confronted the boy this afternoon, it turns out our good congressman had caught him stealing the fly box. Crawford had returned it to Willoughby's vest, where the boy had found it. But first he'd removed two flies from the box, the valuable ones—the Quill Gordon and the Gray Ghost.”

“Crawford or the boy took the flies out of the box?”

“Crawford.”

“I'm with you. I've got my doubts about where you're going with this, but I'm with you.”

“Just hear me out,” Stranahan said. “Crawford had no interest in the flies, but he did have an interest in one of the club's members.” Stranahan told her about Polly Sorenson and his illness, the prospect of dying in a hospital bed fighting for breath, and how he'd confessed his condition to Crawford the previous summer. “‘A man who rubs you two ways at once' is what Polly called him. There were things you didn't like about Crawford, but you found yourself wanting him to like you. He'd get you under his thumb, watch you wriggle, listen while you said things you hadn't meant to reveal, then get you to do what he wanted you to do, even if it wasn't in your best interest.”

“He wanted Sorenson to play the Most Dangerous Game,” Ettinger said.

“Exactly. Crawford wanted to find out what it was like, hunting down a man. He'd lived it vicariously through Cummings. Now he had an itch to use his own finger to pull the trigger. And Sorenson was a prime candidate. He had a terminal illness, but he was strong enough to get around. Plus he was right here in the valley. So what I think is, when Crawford took the fly box from the boy, it occurred to him that if he removed the flies, he'd wait for a moment when he had Sorenson alone, and then he'd return them to him, say the boy had stolen them and he'd caught the little thief. He'd use the flies as leverage to worm his way into the old man's confidence. Then he could exercise his powers of persuasion, butter him up for the kill. I doubt it would have worked. Polly has a wife back east, a married daughter and two grandchildren. I think the family is close-knit. But Crawford had an ego the size of his mansion and thought he could pull it off.”

Ettinger scratched at her throat. “That seems like a lot to infer,” she said.

“Not really. Crawford told me as much on the mountain. When I asked him if he was recruiting Polly Sorenson to be Cummings's next arrangement, he corrected me, told me he was going into the arranging business for himself. ‘I suppose you could say I was baiting the hook' is the way he put it. He said he was working on Sorenson, that he had a plan and I should be smart enough to figure it out. I think the flies were the plan, to insinuate himself with the victim.”

Ettinger slapped at a mosquito. She wiped the smear of blood from her forearm. “So where are they?” she said.

•   •   •

T
he trapdoor that accessed the compartment in the buttstock of the rifle was so closely fitted to the buttplate as to be virtually invisible. The recessed lever that opened it required a small, sharp instrument. Ettinger handed Stranahan a fork from a kitchen drawer and he inserted a tine under the lip of the latch.

“Moment of truth,” he said. “When I asked Crawford what was inside, the question caught him off guard. He seemed nervous, said something about hoping it would be a ruby, but it was only a set of firing pins. Then when I changed the subject, he relaxed. Crawford was a romantic. What better place to keep the flies that he hoped to lure Sorenson with than in the rifle he was going to use to kill him?”

“Quit stalling.”

The recess in the buttstock was the size of a pack of playing cards. Stranahan tried peering inside, but the recess was dark. He turned the buttstock over and shook it. The dry fly drifted like thistledown to settle on its hackle points on the stump. Stranahan shook the stock again. Then he worked his forefinger into the compartment. The hook point of the Gray Ghost had stuck into the wood. Stranahan freed it and the graceful streamer fly joined the Quill Gordon on the polished wood.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Too Blue to Fly

T
hough little more than a month had passed since Stranahan first visited the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club, the season had subtly shifted. The solstice was many casts behind him now, the nights were longer, the first of the riverside willows wore crimson leaves. He used the hidden key to let himself in and stood for a minute until his eyes adjusted to the dim light. The plaques and glass domes that had held the club's fly collection were gone from the shelves and the walls, packed up and shipped east for the winter. The pegs where the members had hung their vests were bare. The buffalo skull with the tuft of sweetgrass in its nasal cavity stared with empty eye sockets at the light film of dust covering the fly-tying table.

Stranahan pulled the letter he'd received at his studio in Bridger from his hip pocket and read it again, standing up.

Dear Sean,

I'm sorry to bear the sad news of Polly Sorenson's passing. He died of a heart attack on August 4 while fishing in the Neversink River. I've enclosed a copy of the obituary. All the Catskill rivers ran high this summer and apparently he had fallen in, for his clothes were wet, perhaps prompting a coronary. Polly died the way I'm sure he would have wanted, not in a hospital from the congestion of his lungs, but in his waders, fishing a Light Cahill tied by his own impeccable hand. His wife found him on the riverbank. She said he looked peaceful. I hope he was. He was one of the finest men I have ever known.

As you know, we are all very grateful for your assistance in returning the flies. They are, in fact, on the wall of my den from which I am writing you this letter. In one of my last conversations with Polly, he brought up the possibility of rewarding you in a unique way. You may recall that we often talked about fishing for bonefish in the Bahamas. The club leases a cottage for three weeks each winter on the Atlantic side of an island called Eleuthera. In accordance with Polly's wishes, we would like to fly you there to fish next January. None of us can make the week of the 7th–15th, so it would be only you and, of course, Martinique. You are still in her good graces? Quite frankly, I believe Polly was thinking as much of her as he was of you when he proposed the idea, and thought that it would do her good before starting her studies in Seattle. A friend of ours, Paul Thackery, will pick you up at the airport at Governor's Harbour and give you the scoop on the tides and the fishing, but for the most part you'll be on your own, which I know is how you like it. You will have the keys to our Jeep and please use the kayak in the garage, as it will open up many flats that are cut off from the shoreline by channels.

We need to reserve your flights so please call me at your earliest convenience and really, don't bother arguing. We won't hear a word of objection. This is what Polly wanted.

I expect to hear from you very soon.

Best regards,

Patrick Willoughby

President, The Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club

PS The Jock Scott salmon fly that Polly tied for you is in the top drawer of the desk. He meant to give it to you before he left, but you were rather preoccupied, all that derring-do on Sphinx Mountain. It is still difficult to accept that our club was involved, even if tangentially and in so small a manner as missing trout flies. As you have been elected an honorary club member, a chair at the poker table is reserved for you next summer. Until then, tight lines and singing reels and beware—on Eleuthera, they drive on the wrong side of the road.

Stranahan folded the letter and found the shadow-box in the drawer, with the regal Jock Scott mounted in the indentation and an inscription underneath.
Tied for Sean Stranahan by Polly Sorenson
. He decided it would hang on the wall in his studio until the cabin he intended to build on the three acres along the creek was finished. He'd put the down payment on the property only a few days before, after the check cleared from the sale of his grandparents' house in Massachusetts. When his grandmother had succeeded his grandfather in death the previous December, Stranahan and his sister inherited; it was Karen who had arranged the sale. Stranahan hated to say goodbye to the old place, so many memories, listening to his father and grandfather tell stories while their pipe bowls glowed cherry red amid the smaller lights of the fireflies, night-fishing on the pond for largemouth bass, sketching bullfrogs and garter snakes in the reeds. But he had known for some months now that his life was here, along the ribbons of river that reflected the clouds and the peaks and the deep autumn blue of Montana skies.

•   •   •

H
e celebrated the purchase of his small corner of this paradise with a glass of Martha Ettinger's homemade hard cider on the first Sunday in September, the two of them sitting on Ettinger's porch while the little Sheltie and Martha's Australian shepherd sniffed each other and got acquainted. It was one of those early autumn twilights when the mosquitoes are gone and the evenings chill enough to drape a jacket, or, the way Stranahan read weather, when the summer mayflies had folded their tents and the trout had turned on to hoppers.

The coroner's inquest of the shooting on Sphinx Mountain had cleared the sheriff of wrongdoing, Stranahan too, for that matter, and the silence as they drank their cider was one of the easiest they'd shared in several weeks. But if the department was off the hook with the long arm of the law, the sheriff's celebrity had not been so easily shed. The story had run its course in newspaper ink, but a
Vanity Fair
article had yet to be published and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author who'd penned it was said to be considering expanding it into a book.

Ettinger shuddered to think of it. “If I didn't have this place to get away from it all, I'd have gone crazy a month ago.” She drained her Mason jar in a long swallow and set it on the porch rail. “Once you get your cabin built, you'll know what I'm talking about. You come out here after a day in the uniform and you step back in time a hundred years. What are you, still a couple years away from building?”

“Actually,” Stranahan said, “I'll be moving next spring. I probably won't even have the foundation dug, but Harold said he'd lend me one of his tepees to live in. A big one—eighteen poles. Be like camping out, but it's still a step up from sleeping on the futon in my studio.”

“Harold,” Martha said in a reflective voice. “I guess you know we're taking some time off from each other.”

Stranahan nodded.

“Martinique? I assume you're still with her?”

“I am.”

“How involved are you?”

“Pretty involved.”

Martha tried not to let anything show in her face, but couldn't hide the trace of bitterness that crept into her voice. “One thing I've learned about men,” she said. “Give them a little time and they tend to become uninvolved.” She looked away, not wanting him to see the slight quiver of her jaw.
Was this the way it was going to be even when they were neighbors, the man and woman who could have been, who watched each other form other attachments when they should have been, who grew old and never were?

She composed herself and changed the subject. “I haven't heard that great gray for a while. This is the time of night you usually hear him.”

She fingered the button on her shirt pocket and drew out her harmonica, the Hohner Big River that had been a gift from her father. She'd grown up listening to his old vinyl records—George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline. Patsy had a voice that was as clear as water from the mountain, but every time Martha opened her mouth, just squawks came out. Once, she'd overheard her father saying his little girl wanted to sing like a nightingale but she'd be more at home in a nest of baby blackbirds—
acht, acht, acht.
She'd heard her mother laugh in spite of herself. “You shush now, Martin Ettinger. That's cruel.” Martha, all of ten years old, had cried herself to sleep.

“What's that you say?” She came out of her reverie.

“I said I didn't know you played.”

“Like I keep telling you, there's a lot of things you don't know about me.”

She ran a scale on the harp, wetting her lips. “Any requests?”

“How about a little Hank Williams. ‘I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.'”

Story of my life,
Martha thought.

“If you don't know it, then anything's fine.”

“No, it's one of my favorites.” The first of the plaintive notes bounced around the rock walls of the canyon. They quavered and died there, like the whippoorwill of the song, too blue to fly.