Miss Pink Investigates series Box Set Part Two

by Gwen Moffat

  ‘You met Shelley! Where?’

  ‘On Wolverine Creek. We camped together last night.’

  ‘You camped! But then Seale said you were an adventurous lady. Did you talk to Shelley? She was with friends.’

  ‘Yes, we talked. I met them all.’ Miss Pink stopped, uncertain how to continue. The thought of the stormswept wilderness above Prosper recurred and she wondered if this woman were the nervous type or whether, as her appearance suggested, she was totally ignorant of conditions prevailing this moment in the high country, of all the conditions.

  ‘They’re camping tonight,’ Mrs Lenhart said easily: ‘Somewhere on Cougar Creek. I can’t see poor Gale enjoying it. They’re a sweet couple: Gale and Joe. They’re to be married in two weeks time.’

  ‘Really. Where will the wedding be?’

  ‘In Cody, Wyoming. We’re all going, of course. It’s to be quite a grand affair. Gale’s mother called me today: something about the guest list. She’s a worrier, couldn’t wait until tomorrow when Gale’s going to call her anyway. The bridal gown is a dream; they showed me pictures—’

  She broke off as the door opened and a man entered as if he owned the place. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and a yellow slicker that came almost to his pointed and mud-plastered boots. Keen eyes in a bluff red face observed Miss Pink and he nodded to her before turning to the other woman.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘I’m just finished here.’ Mrs Lenhart stood up. ‘This is my husband Otis, Miss Pink. Honey, this is Seale’s friend—from England?’ Her voice rose on the questioning note that suggests diffidence, a prompting of memory.

  Lenhart shook hands genially and beamed at her. ‘All the way from England, eh? And what do you think to the States, ma’am?’

  ‘Incredible,’ Miss Pink said truthfully.

  ‘Much different from where you live?’

  She was not surprised, although amazement had been her reaction the first time she was asked the question, in Salt Lake City. ‘It’s bigger,’ she said. ‘Much more colourful.’ They waited. ‘More extreme,’ she added. She hadn’t acknowledged that in Salt Lake, but that was before her diversion into the Silvertips.

  ‘Now how do you mean that?’ Mrs Lenhart asked.

  She skirted what she knew had not been intended as a trap and said mildly: ‘There’s more of everything: huge forests instead of small woods, big remote mountains and vast expanses of them, very rough roads—but then you have the vehicles that can cope with those.’

  ‘Is that your Jeep outside?’ Lenhart asked. ‘You been on some four-wheel-drive roads?’

  ‘She was over at Wolverine,’ his wife said. ‘She met Shelley.’

  He stopped smiling. ‘I warned them, didn’t I? They’re going to have a rough night. When are they coming out?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Gale has to call her mother in the evening. But Shelley’s used to rain, and Gale’s a tough lady really. It’s just she doesn’t look it.’

  ‘It’s not the girls I’m thinking about, and Joe will survive, long as he reckons he’s looking after Gale. But this is going to shake Irving. It’s snowing on the mountain and Irving wasn’t wearing his new boots.’ It could have been an innocuous remark and he smiled as he said it, but the tone was full of venomous amusement.

  His wife said gently, almost reprovingly: ‘It’s not cold enough for snow, honey.’

  ‘Gets colder as you go high. Where they spending the night? Will they have crossed the pass yet, I wonder?’

  Miss Pink told them that there had been no one on Dead Horse Pass at around one o’clock and that she guessed they were well below the snow and the timber-line by the time the bad weather arrived. In the face of the rancher’s surprise she explained how she’d looked down on the pass from Warrior Peak. She shivered.

  ‘Close the door, Otis,’ his wife said sharply.

  ‘I’m not cold,’ Miss Pink protested. The thought had crossed her mind that on her return from the summit of Warrior she might well have passed the grizzly—if he had been travelling north over Dead Horse, following Shelley. Following Shelley? She glanced at Edna and did not dare to hint what was in her mind. She had to speak to Seale, and quickly.

  ‘I am just a trifle chilled,’ she confessed. ‘I need a hot bath Thank you for the coffee, Mrs Lenhart. If you would kindly direct me to the ranch?’

  ‘Black bear,’ Seale said firmly. ‘It would have run a mile if it had seen you. No offence meant.’

  Miss Pink gasped. Feeling a wave of resentment she reached for her glass of sherry. Seale had been thoughtful enough to provide a bottle of Tio Pepe, but such forethought was cancelled out by her cavalier attitude to her guest’s terrifying experience in Wolverine.

  Sim Logan said cheerfully: ‘Black bears aren’t always timid, Seale. You get between a mother and her cubs and she’ll let you know it.’

  ‘She’ll attack?’

  ‘Any female will. Cows will.’

  ‘You can say that again. I’m still bruised.’ She turned to Miss Pink. ‘I was a fraction too slow jumping for the top rail of the corral. Never try to work these range cows on foot. They can be meaner than a bull.’

  Logan said: ‘You’re not always safe on a horse. An ornery old cow will knock your horse over and you under it if she’s quick enough.’

  Miss Pink’s resentment evaporated before the sherry and this esoteric information, the threat of bears fading before the image of charging cows. Bull fights came to mind and the horror of horses impaled on horns. Sim Logan said: ‘Our cows don’t have horns.’

  She stared at him in amazement. He went on: ‘Leastways, the Angus are de-horned; the Herefords aren’t, but then Herefords aren’t mean.’ There was a pause. ‘On the whole,’ he added. ‘Like Seale says, you’re always safer on a horse.’

  A perceptive man, Miss Pink thought, beaming approval of his advice, resolving never to approach a range cow on foot.

  Sim Logan did not have the physique that she had come to associate with ranchers, who tend to be tall rangy men or, grown prosperous, elephantine as they come to spend less time on a horse and more with computers, and their creature comforts. Logan was short and broad, by no means fat; where he differed most from his counterparts was in his manner. Ranchers are a dour breed on the whole, but Logan laughed a great deal: giggling and guffawing while his eyes were dancing with a kind of delighted wonder that anything could be so uproariously funny as he found it. Miss Pink had met happy men before but they were simple, too simple ever to have mastered subjects such as literacy or the mysteries of the internal combustion engine, to be able to cope with ladies like Seale. Happy men were usually sweet, sexless souls like neutered cats. At the moment Seale was arguing with Logan about horses and getting the worst of it. This man was no neutered cat.

  Seale hadn’t changed. She could be wearing the same jeans and shirt she’d had on when Miss Pink met her first: listening to Schubert on the banks of a Welsh stream.[*] Her feet were no longer bare but thrust into cowboy boots, the thick hair was bleached even paler by the sun, but basically she was the same: careless, cool and transparent. Miss Pink knew the ostensible reason for the girl’s presence at the Logan ranch: Seale, drifting from summer climbing in the Beartooths to winter in Idaho, had discovered the Silvertips and, in her own words, pottered about until she met Logan riding herd on several hundred cows over four thousand acres with the help of one man. Seale moved in.

  She had French, English and American parentage, she had British nationality, but she had no work permit and no idea whether her work or even her presence in a country: France, Britain, the United States, was legal or whether she would be deported, extradited or imprisoned if discovered. She was never in one place long enough for bureaucracy to catch up with her. Seale was the lady who got away—but here, on the Logan ranch, it was intriguing to speculate that she might have met a situation or a man that would prove a match for her.

  She was saying: ‘Look, Archie can manage the stud. I’ll take him up to Co
w Camp and Archie can ride the devil out of him before the drive.’

  ‘We can all manage the stud,’ Logan said. ‘But even you can’t stop him kicking and I’m not having a kicker on the drive. My neighbours’ horses are too valuable. You take the roan and the grey to Cow Camp. Only reason you want to take the stud up there is you think you’ll get to ride him. The job at Cow Camp is to herd cows, not look pretty on a stallion.’

  Seale licked her lips and turned to displacement activity. ‘What’s Melinda going to ride?’

  ‘When?’ Miss Pink asked quickly.

  ‘Tomorrow for starters.’ Seale was impatient. ‘I’m taking a couple of spare horses to Cow Camp.’

  Miss Pink was cautious. ‘Where is Cow Camp?’

  ‘Nine miles up Cougar. It’s as far as you can go in a vehicle: where the wild bit starts. Melinda, don’t look like that! You’re going to have to get used to bears; they’re a fact of life in the Rockies. And horses can run faster, can’t they, Sim?’

  ‘I guess so. I’ve never had to put it to the test but I reckon a quarter horse could beat a bear, yes, providing the horse don’t put his foot in a hole, or you get knocked off by a low branch. I wouldn’t like to be galloping through timber with a big boar after me.’

  ‘Boar?’ Miss Pink’s voice climbed.

  Seale stared, and suddenly saw the light. ‘No, no! In Europe boars are wild pigs,’ she explained to Logan. ‘Boars are male bears,’ she told Miss Pink. ‘Females are sows.’

  ‘How degrading. The young are piglets?’

  ‘You’ve taken this thing hard,’ Seale said coldly while Logan giggled over the piglets.

  ‘Look,’ Miss Pink begged, ‘It was a grizzly, wasn’t it? A track twelve inches long, with claw marks?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Logan nodded, still smiling. ‘You saw a grizzly’s track, sure enough. They’re still around, still passing through. Not many people know that. The Silvertips are on a migration route between ranges, you see. It’s possible some bears might even den here, and they den late, in a snowfall.’

  ‘It’s snowing tonight in the mountains. Does that mean the bears will go to their dens?’

  ‘No. This snowfall will melt. Grizzlies like a long wild blizzard. They den up while the snow is falling. That way their tracks get covered so no one knows where the dens are. A bear’s cunning. But you got no cause for alarm, ma’am; you’ll be on a horse tomorrow and bears can hear horses coming a mile away, and smell ’em. They don’t want a confrontation no more’n you.’

  ‘Then why was Shelley’s friend armed?’

  ‘You didn’t tell us this,’ Seale said with interest. ‘You’ve been full of bears chasing Shelley over Dead Horse Pass; you never said they were armed.’

  ‘Shelley was armed?’

  Ginny Logan shouldered her way through the back door of the kitchen wearing a slicker and dripping hat, carrying a pail full of eggs. She was a plain, stout woman but she looked powerful for her sixty-odd years.

  ‘It wasn’t Shelley carrying a gun,’ Miss Pink said. ‘But her friend, Irving Tye. He had a Magnum.’

  ‘Oh, well!’ Seale exclaimed, and Logan nodded as if this were no more than was to be expected.

  ‘He would,’ Ginny said calmly, carrying the pail to the refrigerator.

  ‘He doesn’t seem popular,’ Miss Pink murmured.

  Seale opened her mouth, and closed it. Logan said: ‘I would call that a fair statement.’

  ‘You’re too objective,’ Seale put in. ‘I can’t think of anyone who’d have a good word to say for him. Shelley seems to be under his spell—which is a point against her—but even Shelley can’t like him. She’s blinded by morbid passion.’

  Ginny closed the door of the refrigerator. ‘Morbid?’

  ‘Unhealthy.’

  ‘I was given to understand that he’s a journalist.’ Miss Pink’s tone was flat, not questioning.

  ‘No!’ Seale rose to the bait. ‘He never took you in! I don’t believe it. You’re fishing.’

  Miss Pink nodded. ‘When Shelley told me she hadn’t read any of his clippings because they were all in San Francisco, and gave me a sensational account of his triumphs which could only have come from him, that clinched the matter for me. And he didn’t behave like a journalist, let alone a crime reporter.’

  ‘He’s a con-man,’ Seale said. ‘He’s hitched himself on to Shelley because he thinks her people are rich.’

  ‘She’s married,’ Ginny said, taking a baking sheet from the oven, studying the contents critically.

  ‘Shelley Lenhart is married?’ Miss Pink repeated, surprised.

  ‘It’s Shelley Patent.’ With a deft flip Ginny transferred cookies from the sheet to a wire tray. ‘She married a man from Chicago three years back, not long after she left home. I guess that’s broken up now, seeing she’s come back with this other man. Why would he be carrying a gun?’

  ‘It fits,’ Seale observed. ‘Like the sharkskin boots and that hat. No one’s seen him on a horse yet. He’ll be carrying a gun against—’ she glanced at Logan, paused, and finished on a lame note, ‘—against people.’

  The kitchen was curiously silent. Rain could be heard drumming on the roof of the back porch. Logan held his beer and stared into space, unwontedly serious. His mother busied herself at the stove, her back turned to the company.

  ‘Did Tye have much to say?’ Seale broke the silence.

  Miss Pink pursed her lips. ‘A lot about bears. Someone—was it him?—told a horror story about two girls killed in one night in Glacier.’

  ‘That was fifteen years ago,’ Logan said tonelessly, not looking at her.

  ‘But it did happen?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sighed, seeming to emerge from his reverie. His attention focused on her, his face lightening visibly. ‘But that was in a park, ma’am, and the bears were conditioned to feed on garbage and fish remains. Those deaths—well, I’m sorry for the girls, but if you’re going to bed down on a trail where a hungry old bear walks every night to get his feed, it’s asking for trouble, isn’t it? Bears are pretty harmless, generally.’

  It was pitch dark in the bunkhouse and so still that Miss Pink could hear a soft brushing sound below the floor.

  ‘What’s making that noise?’

  ‘A skunk.’ The immediate response from the other side of the room showed that Seale was wide awake too. ‘Ignore him if you see him. They only put their tails up when they think they’re threatened.’

  Miss Pink gave a doubtful sniff but all she could smell was dust, sweat and Chanel Number Five, which was what one might expect when Seale made her home in a bunkhouse.

  ‘So what did Irving Tye talk about?’ came Seale’s voice.

  ‘You guessed. About ranchers killing bears, about the Audubon reward and a bear with a radio collar that stopped transmitting when it came to Cougar Creek. I thought Tye had a death wish.’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s granted. That man can’t open his mouth without putting someone’s back up. He tried to make me in the bar once: cowboy boots, hat with peacock’s feather and all.’

  ‘And you snubbed him.’

  ‘I don’t snub people. I just moved away.’

  ‘You wounded his vanity. He has to be the expert wherever he finds himself. He proposed going up a mountain on the way across the divide—in shoes, without an axe. Shelley championed him: said he was an expert climber.’

  ‘She had to be quoting him.’

  ‘That was obvious. But people like Tye do try to get up mountains, you know that yourself. I thought of that when I was walking with Shelley. She caught me looking at Warrior Peak and, evidently remembering something you’d said about me, guessed I was thinking of going to the top. I told her I’d go up the ridge a little way to look at the view. It crossed my mind that when she overtook Tye, if she said I’d gone up Warrior, he would have to reach a summit himself or lose face with his party.’

  ‘That’s a bit far-fetched.’ Miss Pink was silent. ‘Okay,’ Seale conceded. ‘I ho
pe he does try to get up some peak. He’s not long for this world anyway, the way he’s going on.’

  ‘Is there any truth in his contention that ranchers shoot bears illegally?’

  ‘Sure to be. Not all ranchers. Otis Lenhart would. Otis reckons all vermin should be exterminated: rattlesnakes, bears, raptors—they should all be destroyed, same as the wolf.’

  ‘Raptors. I saw an eagle that was missing one pinion. I thought it was late for moulting.’

  ‘Shot. Probably by Otis. He’s a redneck. He doesn’t like his potential son-in-law either. You see, it’s Edna has the money, not Otis, and if she leaves it to Shelley, and Shelley marries Irving … It doesn’t have to go as far as that. Otis is mean—in the English sense: miserly—and when Edna spends her money, Otis suffers. That is, when she spends it on someone other than him. He doesn’t do so badly himself, but he’s greedy. He has the best bulls around here, he’s got a gorgeous saddle: worth a thousand if it’s worth a dollar. No one ever buys a new saddle in Prosper; ours are held together with baler twine. Heath Robinson isn’t in it. A broken cinch or a collapsing stirrup is an occupational hazard. You don’t have to worry; there’s a tolerable saddle for you. We never said which horse you were to ride. Blaze will do; he’s about your weight and very smooth.’

  ‘Is he fast?’

  ‘How fast do you want to go?’

  ‘Fast enough to beat a bear.’

  ‘Grizzlies can do thirty but only for short distances. A quarter horse is one hell of a sprinter over a quarter of a mile. Hence the term. I wish you’d stop worrying about bears. It’s spooky in you.’

  ‘It’s a new horror—and I haven’t even seen the animal. Anticipation is always worse than the event. I was quite terrified until—why, I didn’t tell you about the odd hitch-hiker.’

  ‘You shouldn’t pick up hitch-hikers in the States. Where was this?’

  She described her encounter with the solitary walker. ‘Curious fellow,’ she mused. ‘He had something on his mind. I was quite relieved to have brought him out of that place. It was sinister: I mean, the juxtaposition of wilderness and a man in trouble.’