The Royal Wulff Murders (38 page)

“Pedal to the metal.”

Ettinger said she and Walt had hit every access up the Madison on the way to Ventura’s house. When they got there the driveway was empty, so they’d
started knocking on doors. Tony Sinclair said he’d seen Ventura’s rig pull out trailering the boat.

“So now,” Ettinger said, “we’re figuring he’s meeting you at a lake. We drove to Henry’s first because that’s where your buddy Meslik got shot. Quake was next on the list. We found the boat trailer but couldn’t see the boat from the ramp, so we figured you’d gone east up the lake. We drove on up to the Beaver Creek access below the campground. Still no boat, so you had to be in-between somewhere. It must have taken an hour to hike through those goddamn woods. It’s just one log fallen on top of another. We were about to give it up when we heard the shot. You know the rest.”

“I get flashbacks about your deputy’s knife,” Stranahan said.

“You and me, both. I’ll be doing paperwork on Walt’s little stunt the rest of my year. Just don’t gush over him too much. His head’s about two sizes bigger than his hat and it’s only been three days.”

She thought of something. “You have some of Sam Meslik’s blood in you. Did you know that?”

Stranahan nodded.

“Walt’s got a bet with me, thinks you’re going to turn into the Wolfman.”

“What do you think?”

“I think a couple days in the sun and mothers will be locking their girl children behind closed doors.”

“That good-lookin’, eh? Did I tell you how pretty you are?”

Ettinger blushed.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Stranahan said. “Why did McNair kill his brother? It was supposed to be the other way around.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure. But Harold was able to follow McNair’s tracks through the woods from the highway, right on down to the lake. What I think is that when McNair headed for the hills, Ventura had arranged a meeting point. A where and when. Maybe not at the lake that night. Maybe they’d already met and then
set up the rendezvous at the lake, Ventura telling Apple that he could have his way with you. He could have dropped McNair off on the highway before he met you at the landing. One way or another, McNair was to join the two of you right where Ventura pulled the boat in. My guess is that McNair showed up before the appointed time. Harold found a bunch of tracks where he thinks McNair had waited in the trees. So he might have heard Ventura turning traitor on him. Or maybe he went in expecting as much. I think he was smarter than we gave him credit.”

“If that’s true, it makes Ventura sound like a fool.”

“You said yourself that he was worked up. I doubt he was planning to talk so much. He just got going and couldn’t stop. People who’ve kept secrets for years, they’re desperate to get it off their chests. When he started telling you about his brother, it was like a dam bursting.”

Stranahan bit on his lip, which was still swollen where McNair had stuck him with the fly.

“Do you think McNair drowned Beaudreux up at that pond where he got me? Think that’s where the boy followed him after he called his sister in Ennis?”

Ettinger was nodding her head. “I was getting to that. We drained it to remove the trout and found one of those lanyard things fishermen wear instead of a vest. It had a plastic sleeve with Beaudreux’s license in it. Probably came off his neck when Apple drowned him. And Doc confirmed that the pond contained the same species of invertebrate monsters that he scraped out of Beaudreux’s throat. I think what happened was Beaudreux followed McNair from Ennis and investigated that pond the same way you did, with a fly rod in his hand.”

“Dumb as me, huh?” Stranahan said.

Ettinger grunted.

“What about the camp host?”

“Probably the way we figured. McNair thought he’d been spotted and killed the old codger. Life’s easy to put together in hindsight, huh?”

Stranahan thought a minute, the hum of the hospital punctuated by the bickering of house sparrows on a windowsill feeder.

“The day Sam was shot. I never could figure it out. How the hell did McNair know to find us at Henry’s Lake?”

“The way Walt has it figured is that Ventura overheard Sam talking to you at the TU banquet. Apple had probably told him that he’d lost his hat in the river and that Meslik had found it. I’m guessing he trashed Sam’s trailer after the two of you departed for the lake, and when he didn’t come up with the hat, he drove to Henry’s and shot Sam. If he couldn’t get his hands on the incriminating evidence, then he figured to eliminate the man who could produce it. I doubt it was on Ventura’s instruction. He was just a loose cannon.”

A nurse entered the room carrying a tray of meds.

“I was just leaving,” Ettinger told her.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Stranahan held her eyes.

Ettinger sighed.

“Can you give us one more minute?” she said to the nurse.

They listened to the footsteps retreating down the hall.

“Your Mississippi nightingale is halfway to the land of cotton by now,” Ettinger said. “When Sam told her you had come to, he said she got this frightened look on her face. He said he had to just about push her into the room to see you. But you were asleep. She told Sam she’d come back in an hour, but she never did.”

“Oh,” Stranahan said.

Ettinger smiled at him with an expression he took for compassion.

“Forget about her, Sean. Any woman who loses her father on the riverbank and her brother in the drink, it’s a bad sign. Specially for someone who spends as much time around water as you do.”

Stranahan looked away for a long moment.

“I
was right about her, though,” he said. “She wasn’t guilty of anything.”

“Sean, the only thing she was guilty of was stopping a few hearts.”

Ettinger leaned forward to squeeze his hand, and Stranahan caught her eye appraising the necklace peeking from the folds of his hospital gown.

“Sam says Little Feather gave it to me when I was touch and go. Supposed to infuse me with the spirit of the bear.”

“Harold,” Ettinger said, in a tone that Stranahan had never heard before, and left the room.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

W
hen Stranahan heard footsteps in the hall, he lifted the brush from his palette. His heart began to race.

Nearly three months had passed since Vareda Beaudreux had tapped at his door, shut it behind her, and stood there in her white shirt with the red ribbon and her lips the color of blood. The badger-hair tips of his brush now reflected this hue the best he could match it, and the nearly finished painting awaited the final application. It was, he thought, one of his best pieces. During the last several days, as his moods shifted and the shapes that swam behind his eyes flowed through his right hand, he’d had second thoughts about sending it to Mississippi.

It was the letter that inspired his effort. When he was released from the hospital, he had tried to call Vareda at the number Martha Ettinger provided. But he’d been unable to get past the farm manager, McGruder, who had rebuffed him in a kindly low-country drawl, saying that Vareda was going through a period of adjustment and thought it best to keep to herself for the time being.

When a month passed and he still hadn’t heard from her, he wrote a businesslike letter, revealing the details of the events that had come to light after McNair’s death. He intended to end the letter by vowing that he’d keep fishing for the trout her father had marked, then had ruined his carefully guarded prose with a postscript that used the L word twice. He’d looked at what he had written, debating how much of himself he was willing to reveal, and sent it anyway.

If he had learned anything that summer, it was that risk mattered in a life stagnated by indecision. Risk had almost killed him, but it had brought him into the moment, and the colors were so much brighter that he had no intention of retreating into the hesitancy of his past.
What the hell—
that was the new philosophy he’d confessed to Sam after an autumn day’s streamer fishing on the Yellowstone, where he had caught a six-pound brown with a hooked jaw and pectorals dusted gold. “Fuckin’ A,” Sam had said, nodding his head sagely.

The letter sent in reply to Stranahan’s missive had a Biloxi postmark. It lay folded and many times read in the third drawer of his desk. He had tucked it underneath the coffee can of ashes, which he still dutifully carried down to the Land Cruiser on days when he went fishing up the Madison Valley.

“My dearest Sean,” Vareda had written, “Last night I dreamed you were here. It was cold like Montana must be in the winter. When I opened the door, the snow came in with you and I shivered. I kissed your cheek. It was rough and cold, but your lips were as warm as honey toast. If you had been lying beside me when I woke up, you would have been devoured.

“I know it must be confusing, trying to reconcile the feelings you know I have for you with the distance I’ve placed between us. It is not my intention to be mysterious. But I am encompassed—isn’t that a fine word, encompass?—by forces that isolate me and which I fear I have once again succumbed to. A time will come when I can see you again. Until then, know that I am yours, as much of me as you can hold in your thoughts. I love you with a passion I have never known for another man. You are my love.
Vareda
.”

In Stranahan’s painting, droplets of water fell from the canoe paddle. The bow angled obliquely into the foreground, the water underneath was dimpled with reflections. The mood was somber, the expression on the woman’s face hard to place. Apprehensive, hopeful, or infinitely sad? Perhaps all of those.

Stranahan heard the tapping at the door. It isn’t her, he told himself.

He got up and walked to the door.

“This is becoming a habit,” Martha Ettinger said. “I drop by for a visit, and your eyes tell me you were hoping to see someone else.”

Stranahan wasn’t proud of himself for feeling a greater measure of relief than regret. He gathered himself.

“Martha, you look great,” he said heartily. “Your hair is different. Are you blushing, Sheriff?”

“Nonsense,” she said, “It’s windburn. I’ve been out riding, getting my butt into shape for elk season.”

“Right,” Stranahan said. “Well, to what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

“Have something for you.”

She unsnapped her breast pocket and reached inside.

“By the way, when are you going to have that removed?” She gestured with her free hand toward the subscript lettering etched on the frosted glass door.
PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS
.

“A guy’s coming in next week,” Stranahan said. He hesitated. “I’ve been thinking about going back East for a while,” he said. “I seem to get into trouble out here.”

“Really,” she said. “What the hell would you fish for?”

She handed him a small film canister.

Stranahan lifted his eyebrows in a question and opened the plastic lid. He shook out a small wet fly, a size 14 Gold-ribbed hare’s ear. It was the fly Stranahan had caught the trout at the pond with, the one McNair had stuck into his lip.

“Been meaning to get around to it,” Ettinger said. “But with the election coming up and all….‌Anyway. I thought you’d want it.”

“I do. I’ll paint a self-portrait and hook it in my mouth, hang it on the wall to remind me to stick to my brushes in the future.”

“You’re really leaving us, huh?”

Stranahan shrugged. “I’m still trying to sort a few things out.”

“Like Vareda Beaudreux? There’s a lot of good women in the West. You need to get over her.”

“The only other woman I’m interested in has a star on her chest. Where’s the future in that?”

He saw Ettinger blush. She said, “Wait till they count the vote next Tuesday and maybe she won’t.”

“Martha, you’re a rock star in this valley. Gary Cooper himself couldn’t beat you in an election.”

The tension between them was more in the open than it had been before. They bumped into each other every week or so and always were reluctant to part. But they had developed a teasing banter to deal with it, which kept them at a fixed distance neither wanted to be first to breach. The attraction wasn’t as visceral as he’d felt with Vareda, not that he understood it and maybe there was nothing to understand beyond the fact that he liked the nearness of her.

Ettinger had brought some news. The manager of the hatchery had finally crawled out from the cover of his lawyer and decided to cooperate. He’d cleared up a point that had bothered Stranahan, who had never been able to understand what the diseased fingerlings were doing in a pond so close to the Madison, a river that already harbored the disease. The manager said that Ventura was using the pond as a staging area because of its proximity to Yellowstone Park. Ventura had intended to poison rivers there as well as in Montana. If the state wouldn’t cooperate by stocking fish into affected rivers, maybe the feds would.

Ettinger said, “The good news is that the scheme was still more in Ventura’s head than in the water. According to the manager, Apple McNair had dumped trout into no more than a handful of rivers—the Blackfoot, the lower Clark’s Fork, a couple others I can’t recall. But Ventura was gearing up for a much more widespread campaign, if you want to call it that, so it’s a good thing he was stopped. You deserve a lot of the credit for that.

“The man wanted to be some kind of trout god,” Ettinger went on. “He had this grandiose idea, but his ex-wives were milking the last of the movie money out of him. About all he had left were his name and some property.”

Stranahan nodded, thinking of Sam, who’d be happy to hear that the scope of infection was limited. He asked Ettinger if they’d ever found the rifle McNair carried into the mountains during the manhunt, most likely the .243 he’d used to shoot Sam. She said no, in real life some of the threads are left hanging. But they did find Jerry Beaudreux’s fly box, filled with flies his father had tied. McNair had slipped the box inside his own fishing vest.

“Just couldn’t bring himself to do the smart thing and throw it away,” Ettinger said. Stranahan understood McNair’s reluctance. They were fine flies.