A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery Read online

  He’s testing me, Harold thought. Before he could respond, the ranger spoke up. “I don’t know what it tells you, but what it tells me is that our guy is a floater himself, and he put up the scarecrows as he went along. He’s not accessing the river by roads through private property. If he was, then you’d expect the scarecrows to be clustered near the access points and they aren’t. The scarecrows are in remote parts of the canyon you can’t get to without a boat.”

  “He has to put in somewhere,” Harold said. “Would you have seen him if he tried to launch from here?”

  “Would I have seen him? Sure, if it was daylight. In the middle of the night, probably not. He could drive in with no headlights, and this house is far enough from the water I wouldn’t have heard. Of course he’d have to be dropped off; he couldn’t just leave a vehicle here. But if he put in at night, there’s a good chance one of the campers waiting to launch in the a.m. would have at least heard him, and no one we’ve talked to did. So I’m guessing he put in on private property.”

  “He’d still need a vehicle at the take-out, someone to shuttle or pick him up there.”

  “He would.”

  “That would mean there’s more than one person involved.”

  “It would at that. I can see why they made you an investigator.”

  Harold ignored the remark and returned his attention to the map on the wall. He pointed to the pushpin that marked a point far downstream, only a few miles above the take-out at Eden Bridge. He consulted the GPS. That waypoint was marked with the latest date, a week ago.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the ranger said. “You’re thinking if this is the last scarecrow in the sequence, then he’s floated through the canyon stretch, he’s put up his artwork, said his blessing or put his curse on it, whatever. He’s taken out his boat and he’s long gone by now.”

  “Had crossed my mind,” Harold said.

  “Thing is, though, this isn’t the last scarecrow we found.” The ranger shook his head. “No-sir-ee.”

  Harold waited. He was comfortable in silence. Silence was his friend. Don’t say anything and the other person will, that was a working philosophy he brought to any conversation where something remained to be learned.

  “The last scarecrow,” the ranger said, “was called in this morning just before you drove up. You saw how busy the launch site is; I just haven’t had time to put a pin for it yet.”

  Having said that, he plucked a yellow pin from the margin of the map and placed it on a map location. “Want to guess why this is interesting?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “It’s out of sequence. The floater who spotted it and called it in says it’s under some ledge rock where Blacktail Creek comes in. That’s only about nine point two miles downriver from this house.”

  “So you think he floated through once and this is his second time down.”

  “That’s the way I read it. You’ll be coming in right on his heels. And something else.”

  Harold waited.

  “A little girl camping with her parents said she saw a scarecrow or a man carrying a cross at the pit toilet at a site a few miles upriver from Blacktail Creek. It was night and she couldn’t be sure, but it scared her enough, scared her mom, I should say, ’cause she saw it, too. They got the hell out of Dodge and the mom called it in after they floated back into cell range. This was day before yesterday. I’d be guessing little girl, big imagination, if it wasn’t for the scarecrow being reported this morning in the same proximity. That was all Macy needed to close the river, him being the bureaucratic pussy he is.”

  Harold nodded. He was beginning to reassess his opinion of the ranger. The man worked way down the chain in a “Yes, sir” division of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. It took balls to take any kind of stand.

  Harold scratched at the wolverine tracks. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

  “There is one thing, though I don’t know what it means, maybe nothing.”

  “What’s ‘maybe nothing’?”

  “One of the scarecrows we were able to hike up to is under a ledge where an old hermit camped back in the day. Ran a trapline up and down the river. Old Scotty MacAllen.”

  “He still in the canyon, this MacAllen?”

  “Hell no. He died, must be forty, fifty years ago. Used to be a copy of an article in the Helena Standard, stapled to the wall at the sign-in hut. Something for floaters to read while they waited for campsite reservations. Photo made him look like a coyote with a serious case of mange. The Smith River Watchman, they called him.”

  “You have a copy?”

  “No. You put something where the floaters can get their hands on it, you can pretty much count on it going missing.”

  Harold nodded. “Do you think it’s a coincidence, the scarecrow being by one of his old camps?”

  “I don’t think any of this is a coincidence.” He shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t. But they don’t pay me to think.”

  “About the girl. Do you have a number for the parents? Maybe I can call before floating out of range.”

  “I do, but a belt broke on the shuttle vehicle they booked, so they’re hitching back here to pick up their car. You can talk to them in person; they should be here any minute.”

  “Then I’ll wait. Might help if I know exactly what it is I’m looking for. You wouldn’t have a picture of the scarecrows, would you?”

  “Now that I can help you with. There I can do you one better. Last week the crew took one of them down. It was the easiest one to climb up to. The rest are pretty hard to access. Whoever put them up was a mountain goat.”

  “Then you have it?”

  “In the shed around back. Wasn’t my idea to put it there. You go in, you’ll know why.”

  “You say a crew took it down. How many people work the river?”

  “There are four of us. Three from Fish, Wildlife and Parks and one from Department of Forestry. We rotate duties. One of us mans the launch while the other three float.”

  “How often do you float?”

  “Every week. Make sure campers are obeying regs, hanging their food from bears, clean up the sites if anybody trashed them. Basically, it’s outhouse detail and a glorified fishing trip. You think you’d get tired of it. But you don’t. It’s a different river every time you float it.”

  Climbing down the steps, Harold looked toward the launch site, hoping to see an old truck or rez-type, kicked-the-shit-out-of vehicle that his son might have driven up in. But there was nothing.

  The ranger opened the big sliding door on the barnlike shed. “Ta-da,” he said. “You don’t mind, I’ll wait here. I wouldn’t breathe any more than you have to, trust me on it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  River of Wine

  Sean Stranahan was one of those fly fishermen who, like his father before him, had been guilty of comparing a trout stream to a woman. A river could be fickle, his dad told him. There would be evenings when you knew her desires and evenings when she could not be tempted.

  This was one of the former evenings that, in the span of a few dozen casts, became the latter. Two species of mayfly and one of caddis sailed the surface of Rock Creek as the sun was near setting, and three species of trout examined the silhouettes that the flies refracted on the surface. Stranahan chose the wrong imitation more often than the right one, caught a couple small cutthroat trout early, then a larger brown with circles like blood drops on its sides. Then, as so often happens as hatches progress, the fish dialed in, setting a higher and higher bar for being fooled until it reached a point that Sean’s fly might as well have floated on a river of wine. Intoxicating, but not offering much in the way of solid nourishment. Well, not catching was fishing, too. That was something else his dad liked to say.

  He hooked the #16 parachute emerger to the keeper ring on his rod and walked along a f
isherman’s path, whistling to announce his presence to the cow moose and calf that called the tangled river bottom home. Cow moose weigh about eight hundred pounds and don’t react well to surprises, as he’d learned on prior occasions. He heard a crackling in the brush as the moose moved away and picked up his pace, following the path toward a curl of smoke in the distance. His camp came into view, his old canvas tent pitched on the riverbank. He saw Martha Ettinger sitting in a folding chair, reading, setting down her book, drinking from her wine cup, setting it down on a stump, leaning forward to poke at the sticks in the fire. She smiled up at him as he approached.

  “Home from the hills,” he said. He tilted his bamboo fly rod against a tree.

  “How was the river?”

  “Finicky as a redhead, as my old man used to say.” Martha had auburn hair that shone red in firelight.

  “You’re saying that just to get me to call you a male chauvinist. It isn’t going to happen. Nothing’s going to spoil this trip, not even you.”

  “We’re like an old married couple, bickering around a campfire,” Sean said. He took the charred stick Martha had set down and rearranged the sticks she had just arranged.

  “I wish,” she said, just loudly enough that Sean could hear if he chose to.

  Almost a year had passed since the walls of Sean’s house had gone up, a year of relative domesticity. The tipi he’d borrowed from Harold Little Feather and had been living in—surviving, perhaps more accurately—had come down, and Sean’s presence in Martha’s bed had changed from once or twice a week to almost every night. It remained to be seen what would happen when the interior of his house was finished, but for the time being he was hers, more than he’d ever been, and a large part of her wanted him to put a ring on it, though a smaller part, the part that remembered two failed marriages, thought to leave well enough alone.

  She looked at her left hand, at the fourth finger that ended in a fist of skin between the knuckles. She’d lost it in an accidental shooting and shook her head. You could put a ring on it maybe, but it would slip right off.

  Story of my life, she thought.

  “It’s got to be a record,” Sean said.

  “What’s a record?”

  “We’ve been gone two days and I haven’t once seen you packing heat.”

  “Black Beauty’s in the glove compartment. Five chambers loaded.”

  “I know, but still.”

  “Well, I got a big strong man to protect me, whenever he’s not comparing me to a trout.”

  “Trout stream,” Sean corrected.

  “Whatever.”

  They had chosen Rock Creek because it was outside her jurisdiction in Hyalite County, where Martha was in her third term as sheriff, and where Sean worked as a watercolor artist, a fishing guide, and a now-and-then private investigator. The now-and-then had been few and far apart for months and he’d found himself tapping his foot lately, willing the blood to move more quickly.

  “A penny,” Martha said.

  “I’m thinking of the float coming up with Sam, the Smith River trip.” Sam was Sam Meslik, Sean’s best friend. It was under Sam’s outfitter’s license that Sean guided. “Not sure what to make of it.”

  “All you have to do is row a boat while two middle-aged men argue about copper. I don’t have to tell you it’s going to help Sam’s business, so that means you’ll get a boost, too. Really, it’s not like you to overthink things. ‘Always certain, often right.’ The code you live by. Remember?”

  “I guess.”

  “What are you really worried about? That you’ll be tempted by Lillian Cartwright and forget all about your girlfriend keeping the home fires? That woman’s a snake if I ever saw one. She sticks her forked tongue out, men just roll over and kick their feet.” A smile as she said it, at least on the outside.

  Lillian Cartwright was the documentary maker who had arranged the trip. It was a coup for her, getting the most prominent mine proponent in the state to float the Smith River with the state’s best-known mine opponent, childhood friends at that, who had grown up on ranches on either bank of the river.

  “Have you met her?”

  “I don’t have to. Women know these things. What’s your real problem?”

  “You’ll think it’s silly.”

  “Try me.”

  “Remember the hillbillies in Deliverance?”

  Martha shook her head. “I read some James Dickey in college and all I recall is there was a lot of Zen stuff about archery. I never saw the movie.”

  “Well, one of the hillbillies has this stubble beard and his front teeth are gone. He’s the one tells Jon Voight’s character he has a pretty mouth. A couple nights ago I had a dream. I saw him opening his mouth and blood was coming out. You were asleep. I forgot about it until now. I don’t know why I remembered it.”

  “You remembered it—you dreamed it in the first place—because you’re about to float a river, like they did in the book. It’s just you’re in Montana and they were in the South somewhere.”

  “The Chattooga River, in Georgia. They floated it before the dam was built and flooded the valley.”

  “Then that’s your association. If the copper mine gets the nod and tailings leak, it’s the same scenario. One last float, then a river lost.”

  “A river lost, huh? I’ll try to remember that.”

  “What’s the worst can happen? The snow melts and the river goes out. What’s it running?”

  “About six hundred cfs. Clear last time I talked to Sam. Nothing forecast. But you’re right, runoff’s just around the corner. It could bump up overnight. It could get dangerous.”

  “You have nothing to worry about.” But she rapped her knuckles on the sawed stump she was sitting on. The red wine in her clear plastic cup jiggled, firelight dancing in it. “My grandmother’s name was Ruby,” she said absently, lifting the cup to look through the wine.

  “I know you’re right, Martha.”

  “I am right. Want to cook those deer steaks? I’m hungry.”

  So they ate and drank wine and stared at the fire. The moon rose. Sean added another split from the pile and the flames shot up.

  “The invitation’s still open,” he said. “Might be good to have another woman on board. I’m told it engenders civility.”

  “You’re already going to have ChapStick Lilly. Word is she pretty much sucks the oxygen out of the room. Or the boat, if you will. Not sure what you’d need me for.”

  “I haven’t met her,” Sean said. “But really, think about it. When’s the last time you had a chance to float a river as beautiful as the Smith?”

  “Never. If what everyone says is true.”

  “It is,” Sean said.

  He thought back to his only float down the river. It was during his second autumn in Montana, when he’d been seeing Martinique Carpentras. She had persuaded him to take a trip with her to France. There was a town in Provence that bore her name, where she had relatives and had spent two summers of her childhood. Sean, who had never been overseas, agreed on the condition that they visit Italy as well, so he could see the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the great architecture of old Rome. He recalled standing in line to see the Sistine Chapel, the two Americans a head and a half taller than the nuns who lined up in front of and behind them, looking, in their white coifs and black veils, like tree swallows perched upon invisible telephone wires, waiting for a mayfly hatch.

  Michelangelo’s masterpiece was worth the two-hour line, inspiring Sean to pick up a neglected paintbrush upon their return. He had thought, at the time, that the Sistine Chapel was as close as he might ever come to seeing the hand of the God that his mother had so wanted him to believe in. Three weeks later he’d floated the Smith River in a solo canoe to sketch it for future paintings, and revised his opinion. The hand of God did not reside in Rome, glimpsed through the brushstrokes o
f a thirty-three-year-old genius. The hand of God was in Montana, in champagne riffles and golden cliffs in a canyon that had been cut and molded over three billion years, and could not be described in words, nor captured by any artistic medium.

  And so he was quiet for a while, as was Martha, each with their private thoughts, alone in the night but for the undertone of the river and the bats dipping in and out of the firelight.

  “I grew up out of White Sulfur,” Martha said. “Used to go into all the bars while my dad shopped for feed and whatnot. Buckskin Martha, I ever told you that’s what they called me? ’Cause I wore a buckskin jacket with fringe. That and Annie Oakley.”

  They were like that now, Sean and Martha, the easy familiarity that didn’t require answers to questions, but bred answers to questions unasked.

  Martha stood up and took Sean by the hand. “Let’s see if we can unworry you,” she said.

  “You want to get lucky, huh?”

  “Honestly? Not really. I haven’t had a shower since Sunday. But I don’t want to disappoint you.”

  “You don’t disappoint me.”

  “Then if it’s all the same, we’ll wait until we get home and I’ll see you off for your float in proper fashion.”

  “You’ll wear the blue camisole?”

  “I won’t wear anything at all.”

  “You know when we first got together, you wouldn’t let a little detail like a shower get in the way. See, we are getting to be like an old married couple.”

  “I wish.” This time the words were plenty loud enough to be heard. They hung, ringing, as the night stars shivered in the sky.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Stirring the Waters

  It took a few moments for Harold’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. He hadn’t known what to expect, but whatever he could have imagined wouldn’t do it justice. For starters the scarecrow was enormous, at least eight feet tall with a corresponding arm span, and it was constructed in the shape of a cross, with a framework of heavy gnarled tree branches that were intricately, even artistically, woven with peeled willow branches. Dried grasses were in turn woven into the secondary framework of the willow branches. No nails to hold it all together, just the binding of the branches, and no clothes except for a scrap of red cloth tied around the neck.