by Paul Moomaw
“She was just on her way,” Arceneaux said. “Say good night.”
Josh wheeled and headed back for his room, Jimmy Littletoes in his wake.
“He’ll come around,” Arceneaux said. “He’s just not sure how to feel about you yet. He’s not sure about a lot of things right now.”
“Neither am I,” Anne said. She gave him a look he could not read, then walked out the door and to her car. She did not look at him again as she got behind the wheel and drove away.
Chapter 32
Barbara Drake sat tucked behind her desk, nodding on the telephone and taking down notes. Arceneaux sat across the desk from her, waiting, and Butcher stretched out comfortably on a small love seat next to the wall.
Drake put the telephone down and turned to Arceneaux. “I can give you five minutes, Sam,” she said.
“You’re going to want to give more,” Arceneaux replied. “I’ve got so much stuff for you, I feel like Santa Claus.” Drake said nothing, just waited silently. Arceneaux took a deep breath and launched himself.
“First thing is that fire at Harvey English’s office.”
Drake tilted her head and smiled. “You here to make a confession, Sam?”
“Not hardly. But it occurred to me you probably don’t know that Harvey was seeing Samantha Marks in therapy. Had been for a while, in fact.”
“I expect he sees a lot of people in therapy,” Drake said. “That’s his job. And Samantha had a shitty marriage, after all, so shitty it got her murdered.”
Arceneaux nodded. “But I also know why she was seeing him, and it had nothing to do with her marriage. It had everything to do with David Crisp.”
That got Drake’s attention, and Butcher’s as well. Both leaned forward attentively, and Drake motioned for Arceneaux to go on. She even picked up her ballpoint pen and held it poised over the notepad on her desk.
Arceneaux related the story he had heard from Laura Hooters about Crisp raping Samantha and Bryce’s birth. “I’m sure Elizabeth Crisp knew her daughter was spilling her guts to Harvey, and that means her husband almost certainly knew.”
Drake had started taking notes. “So you figure Crisp torched the office to destroy evidence.” She nodded. “That makes sense, and the fire did seem to be aimed at destroying files.”
“And because Laura Hooters knew, he killed her,” Arceneaux said. “And tried to kill me.”
Drake shook her head. “Somebody killed Laura; and somebody took a whack at you.”
“You know damn well it was Crisp,” Arceneaux said.
Drake shrugged. “Like they say, knowing ain’t proving.”
“It’s step number one. He sure as hell killed Samantha, too. And Wallace, although I suppose Wallace may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“You’re obsessed with Crisp, Sam,” Drake said. “Arden Marks killed Samantha.”
“Says you,” Arceneaux snorted.
“Says the evidence, at least loud enough to convince a jury.”
“Time will tell,” Arceneaux said, “and you’ll have plenty of time to examine every move Crisp has made, because I’m about to hand him to you on a cutting board.” He paused and looked from Drake to Butcher and back again.
“Go on,” Drake said.
“The other day I was up the West Fork fishing,” Arceneaux began, and told them of spotting Crisp in his yellow truck and following him. “He turned off at Piquette Creek Road, and since, as you insist, I am so obsessed with the son of a bitch, I just had to find out what he was up to.” He stopped again and rubbed his hands. “Do I have your attention?”
“You bet,” Butcher said.
Arceneaux rocked back in his chair. “There’s a cabin up that road,” he said. “Forest Service, from the look of it. You know how they lease some of them out to us private citizens? It looks as if they leased this one to Crisp. I spotted him while he was there, hauling a couple of plastic bags out of the place. When he left, I managed to get inside. The place is loaded with drugs. Crisp is dealing, big time, and that’s his warehouse.”
Drake was writing everything down as Arceneaux spoke. She looked up and smiled. “And so you came and told us right away. I really appreciate that, Sam.”
“Any good citizen tries to cooperate with law enforcement,” Arceneaux said. I’m just not claiming to be a good citizen, he added silently.
Drake wrote a few moments more, then put the pen down.
“I hate to admit you could be right about anything,” she said, then smiled to take the edge off. “But you could be on target with Crisp. We have to at least look at the possibility that he killed Laura, and maybe torched Harvey’s office, too. The fire scene is still sealed off, and Dave’s guys are going over it one square inch at a time. If there’s anything to find, they will.” She stood up and turned to Butcher. “I’ll leave that cabin to you and your people.”
“We’ll tail him, and set up a net for him,” Butcher said. “Next time he goes there, he’s gonna get a surprise.”
“In the meantime,” Arceneaux said. “Maybe you ought to encourage Harvey to get himself a concealed weapon permit in case Crisp goes after him before you close that net. In fact, I’ve got a great little belly gun I can lend him for the duration. It’s a Hi-Standard, 22 magnum derringer, over and under. Packs a wallop, and flat enough to slip into his shirt pocket. If Crisp tries anything, he’ll be toast. Crisp toast.” He laughed at his own joke, but no one else did.
Drake and Butcher started moving toward the door. Arceneaux felt the urge to let them go, then shook his head. Get it over with, he thought.
“Wait a minute,” he said. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out the knife, which he had removed from the paper sack and placed into a plastic zipper bag.
“There is one other thing,” he said, and placed the knife on Barbara Drake’s desk. “I got this from the housekeeper at the Double Pine. She found it on the bed in the cabin where Samantha Marks and Corey Wallace killed. I suppose you’ll want to look for fingerprints. Mine are on file in Missoula. And I’m sure Helen Lousen, the housekeeper, left some. So did Matt Hagan, I expect. He made the blade.”
Barbara leaned over, but before she could speak, Arceneaux raised a hand. “I had every intention of getting it right to you,” he said. Only a small lie, he thought. “But getting half killed sort of distracted me for a while.” He watched while Barbara picked the knife up in its bag, turned it around in her hands, and then passed it on to Butcher.
Arceneaux forced his mouth to open one more time. “I did find out,” he said, “that it just might belong, only just might, you understand, to someone named Marks.”
Barbara looked across her desk at Arceneaux for a long moment. Then she smiled, and Arceneaux had to admit in spite of himself that she really did have a great smile.
Chapter 33
Above its confluence with the West Fork, the Bitterroot is dramatically smaller, especially at the end of autumn, when the water is at its lowest. Arceneaux and Josh stood on a gravel spit that extended a dozen feet into the water. Arceneaux had offered his son a fishing trip, and Josh had made him promise it would just be the two of them. He hadn’t been more specific than that, but Arceneaux had understand what he meant–no Anne. He had kept that part of the promise, but thanks to the cast on his arm, father and son had become father watch son.
Arceneaux had entertained fantasies about showing Josh the best knot to use to attach a fly to a tippet, and then sat and watched as his son ‘s quick, sure fingers fashioned a perfect clinch knot.
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” he asked.
“Uncle Jasper taught me,” Josh said. “He knows a lot.”
Jasper Kansah was someone Arceneaux would have thought was too attached to the bottle to find time to teach a kid much of anything. Still, he felt a twinge of jealousy, and it must have showed, because Josh looked up quickly and said, “You know a lot, too, don’t you, Daddy?”
“You bet,” Arceneaux said. “
I’d show you a neat trick to do with a streamer this time of year if I could make my fingers work.”
“I can rig you up,” Josh said with nine-year-old self assurance. “Let’s go get your rod.”
They returned to the car, and Josh pulled out Arceneaux’s six-weight Winston and the old Orvis Battenkill reel he had bought years before and never found the need to improve on. He put the rig together, fed fly line through the guides, then began to rummage through Arceneaux’s fly collection. “Beadhead or regular?” he asked.
“Beadhead,” Arceneaux said. He watched as Josh selected a yellow and black wooly bugger, slipped the end of the tippet through the eye, and knotted it on, leaving a loop instead of cinching the knot tight.
“You need to tighten that knot,” Arceneaux said.
Josh shook his head. “No, Daddy. If you leave the loop, the streamer moves more naturally. It gets better wiggle.”
“I suppose your uncle Jasper told you that, too.” He felt a brief pang again, and it occurred to him that kids change and grow up, and that he had already missed too much of his son’s life.
Josh nodded and handed the rod to his father. “Now you can show me that neat trick.”
They walked back to the gravel bar, and Arceneaux managed to more or less trap the line between his index and middle fingers as he stripped line and let current take the streamer downriver.
“Now, watch,” he said. He made a couple of false casts with the six weight fly rod, then released it in a tight curve that carried the line, and the large, fuzzy streamer at its end, straight across the current. The streamer hit the water with an audible splash about a foot short of the far bank. Almost immediately, he swept the rod tip a couple of feet downstream, pulled in line as he moved the tip back again, and then repeated the motion. He kept it up in a regular rhythm until he had stripped all of the free line.
“You don’t have to worry about being delicate,” he said. “Even though spawning season’s about done, those old browns still have a territorial mind set. You want the streamer to splash hard. You want to irritate the trout, piss it off, make it think it’s being invaded. Then you want to make it think the invader changed its mind, and is going hell for leather to get away. Watch again.” He repeated the cast, and the jerky, rhythmic retrieve, but got no takers. He tried again with the same results.
“Maybe there isn’t a trout there, Dad,” Josh said.
“He’s there,” Arceneaux said. “I’ve seen him.” He cast again, still with no success.
“I think you ought to try a different place,” Josh said.
Arceneaux glared at his son, then thrust the rod at him. “See what you can do, Mister Know-it-all,” he said.
“Okay, Dad,” Josh said. He looked up and down the river, then walked back to the bank and headed up stream to a grassy overhang that offered a clear space for his back cast. He stood there for a long time, eyeing the water, his face intent and serious. Slowly, he fed line out, letting the streamer sink and begin to move down stream. Then he did a roll cast up stream, circled the line over his head, and laid it out across the water. The streamer splashed down within a few inches of the opposite bank. Arceneaux shook his head in admiration, wondering where Josh had learned to cast like that. Josh swung the rod tip sharply downstream the way Arceneaux had showed him, stripped line, and the water exploded as a big brown took the streamer. Arceneaux could hear the reel whine as the fish tried to escape down stream.
“Help, Dad,” Josh yelled. “He’s too strong for me.” Arceneaux jumped to the bank and ran toward Josh, watching as the line unreeled all the way to the backing, and then kept on going. He reached the boy, trapped the rod between his cast and his other hand, and braked the spinning reel with his thumb. Then Josh worked the trout back toward them until Arceneaux could reach down and slide his good hand under the body of the fish, which immediately became quiet.
“You want to keep him?” he asked. “Or let him go and catch him again next year.”
“It’s the biggest fish I ever caught,” Josh said. “If I keep it can I show it to Mom?”“Sure,” Arceneaux said.
Josh extended a finger and touched the trout, and it shot suddenly away. The line pulled taut but the tippet held. Arceneaux tugged the fish gently back. “Better decide quick,” he said.
“Let it go, I guess,” Josh said. “Next year it will be even bigger, won’t it?”
“You bet. Can you get that hook out?”
Josh threw him a look full of nine-year-old disdain, then returned his attention to the trout. He slid finger and thumb down the tippet, grabbed the hook and gave it a quick twist, then smiled triumphantly at his father as the hook slipped out. Arceneaux released the trout, which hovered in one place for a moment, as if collecting its wits, and then shot away and out of sight. Arceneaux looked at his watch. “Time to get back,” he said, but he made no effort to rise. It felt good, sitting next to Josh, watching the river.
“Do you ever go to Elder Days?” Josh asked suddenly.
Arceneaux shook his head. “I never did. When I was a kid my dad didn’t have time to take me, and now I don’t have time.”
“I got to go this year,” Josh said. “It was neat. I got to listen to Harriet a lot.”
“Who’s Harriet?”
“She’s Salish. She’s the oldest person I ever saw, and she knows all the old stories. She says she learned them from her parents, and they learned them from their parents, and all the way back like that. They’re mostly stories about Raven and Coyote, and sometimes after she tells them she explains what they mean, but sometimes she says we have to figure it out for ourselves.”
“My father,” Arceneaux paused. “Your grandfather. He used to tell me stories sometimes. I remember one he told me when I was about your age.”
“What was it about?” Josh asked.
“It was about how Raven taught the angry boy to swim,” Arceneaux said.
“Tell it to me.”
Arceneaux sat silently, and for a moment could almost feel his father sitting beside him, his arm around Arceneaux’s shoulders. He put his own arm around Josh.
“Long time ago, there was an angry boy, sitting on the bank of a river, just like this one. That boy was angry because he couldn’t swim. All the other boys swam across the river every day to hunt and play, and that angry boy had to stay behind, all by himself. It made him mad, and sad. Now, Raven flew over the river every day, and he saw that boy sitting there, and he felt bad for him. So he decided to help him out. So one day, when the boy was sitting all by himself on the river bank, eating a piece of fry bread, Raven flew down and landed right in front of him and did a little dance; but that boy just stared at him, his face like a big old thunder cloud. So Raven sang a song with that croaky voice of his, and that sounded pretty funny, and the boy smiled just the tiniest bit.” As Arceneaux talked, it began to feel as if he were listening to his father, and repeating after him, his own words beginning to fall into the soft cadences of his father’s voice.
“Next, Raven did another little dance, and stood on one leg and hopped around in a circle, and that boy smiled a little bigger. So Raven stood up on one leg again, and stuck the other one straight out, and fell over, pretending like he couldn’t stand up, and that boy laughed right out loud.
“Then Raven hopped real close and bent his head over the fry bread, and cocked his head first one way, then the other, looking at the fry bread, and then back at the boy. And the boy gave Raven a piece of his fry bread, and Raven ate it and did another little dance, and the boy gave him another piece, and before he knew, the fry bread was gone, so the boy said, ‘I might as well go home now, because that bird ate all my fry bread.’ But before he could stand up, Raven said, ‘It was good fry bread, too. Thank you very much.’
“That surprised the boy, because he knew animals could talk to people long ago, but he didn’t think that happened any more, and he said, ‘How come you can talk?’
“Raven said, ‘All us Ravens can do that, but m
ostly human people don’t want to listen anymore.’
“The boy asked Raven if he knew what was on the other side of the river. Raven said he did, because he flew around there all the time, and the boy said, ‘Tell me what is there.’ And Raven said, ‘On the other side of the river there’s a big mountain, and beyond that there’s another one, and beyond that the biggest mountain of all, and in that mountain there’s a cave full of beautiful blue sapphires, just like the sky on a spring day, and sometimes I like to go there and pick up a sapphire and fly up into the sky and play with it.’
“And the boy said, ‘Can you bring me one?’ And Raven said, ‘No. But I can lead you there. All you have to do is swim across the river and I’ll show you the way.’ And the boy shook his head, and said, ‘I can’t swim. My mother ran away, and my father never has time.’
“And Raven said, ‘Maybe I’ll teach you how to swim.’ But the boy just laughed. ‘How can a bird teach a boy how to swim?’ he said. ‘You can’t do that.’
“But Raven just said, ‘Maybe I can,’ and flapped his wings and flew away.
“Next day that boy was sitting on the river bank again, eating his fry bread, and waiting to see if Raven would come back, but Raven didn’t come along. And that happened two more days, and the boy decided Raven didn’t want to come any more because he knew he couldn’t really teach anybody to swim. But on the fourth day, when the boy was sitting on the bank, eating his fry bread, he heard a big splash, and when he looked out on the river, there was Raven, floating down the river, all lop sided, with one wing stuck up in the air kind of funny. And Raven yelled out, ‘Help me. I broke my wing and I can’t fly, and I can’t get off the water.’ But the boy just sat there and ate his fry bread, because he was mad at Raven for trying to fool him about teaching him to swim. So Raven cried out even louder, and then began to roll over and sink, and all of a sudden that boy just jumped up and dove into the river before he could even think, and started splashing his way to Raven, and when he got there, and the current pushed them together, Raven hopped up on that boy’s head, and the boy swam all the way back to the river bank, with Raven up on his head.