The Bluejay Shaman (Alix Thorssen Mystery Series)

by Lise McClendon

  THE BLUEJAY SHAMAN

  By Lise McClendon

  Copyright (c) 1994

  Lise McClendon

  All rights reserved.

  Thalia Press

  Jackson, Wyoming

  ISBN: 1-4196-8133-8

  ISBN-13: 978-1419681332

  THE BLUEJAY SHAMAN

  By Lise McClendon

  Prologue

  THE TETONS SCRATCHED the summer sky, still sporting a hint of orange from the long-gone sun. Rough and hard, the mountains proved man's impermanence. Woman's too.

  When I pointed my old car north, leaving behind the gallery in Jackson, the hum-the hymn- of the road gave me the feeling my life going somewhere. Being on the road was like that, a trickster highway. Somewhere in the distance is happiness, satisfaction, whatever it takes to feel good. Over that rise. Just a little farther.

  The mountains were quiet, sleeping. They never looked the same twice but they always sounded like peace to me. But I crossed the pass into Idaho and drove north. For a Norwegian a purity fills a northern mission, like the search for the Holy Grail. The lights shine bright in the North.

  I grew up in Montana but my northern mission wouldn't bring me back my childhood. Montana had changed. The mountain ranges still sprang up from the prairies like gopher tunnels in a rich man's lawn. Cowpunchers still tried to live out their fantasies. And some of the original inhabitants, the Indians, remained. But sure as I'd left, some other folks had moved in. The people I met in Montana were older but not necessarily wiser. That happens to a lot of us. But they should have known the wheels of time go in one direction only. You can't fight it.

  Try as you might.

  1

  THE HINGES OF the metal doors of the U-Haul trailer complained, the sound multiplying in the cavernous police warehouse. The darkness in the trailer cloaked unrecognizable shapes. I peered harder, willing my eyes to adjust, smelling mildew, dust, oil paints melting, and canvas rotting. The heat in the metal bam was stifling. Sweat trickled down my back as I shifted my clipboard to my other arm, stuck the pencil behind my ear, and stepped in the open jaws of the trailer.

  Before I could begin examining the art objects inside, the job I was being paid to do if I ever got the chance, the sound of footsteps echoed across the space. The warehouse must have been an old airplane hangar, designed to make humans feel like ants. Whatever it was, it attracted and trapped heat like a giant Buick.

  Lieutenant Malsome had just given me the pep talk, the indoctrination. Interruptions make me irritable. Make that cranky. I like to work, with order and perseverance, and most of all I like results.

  The footsteps came toward me, louder, through the tangle of recovered bicycles, shelves of unclaimed tools, toys, and guns, speedboats and motorcycles, even a moon-carved wooden outhouse. I wondered briefly why an outhouse had been seized, and if it was still in use. Montana, land of my birth, was not that backward. Not anymore.

  The feet belonged to a lady cop, Rita Fenimore, young and dark with chipmunk cheeks and sleek figure, a rookie no doubt. She looked at my blue business suit, heels, and purple blouse (the only concession to my true nature) as I stepped back out of the trailer.

  "Miss Thorssen?"

  I smoothed down the jacket of my suit, wiping dust off the skirt. This outfit had gotten me lots of places and lots of information. I had to be nice to it.

  "Call me Alix."

  Ms. Fenimore held her head straight on her rigid neck. There must be a class in eye contact. "The lieutenant wants me to ask you a few questions for the files." She held a clipboard like mine.

  I tried to smile at her. Ms. Fenimore needed a smile. "Can I work while you interrogate?"

  Her face darkened. I climbed back into the trailer. It offered almost enough headroom to stand -- but not quite. I kicked off my heels and kneeled down before the cloth-draped square on the right side of the trailer.

  "The first question is your full name and address."

  I pulled the drape from the painting. "Alix Skipp Thorssen. 36 North Broadway, Jackson, Wyoming. 36-24-36."

  Ms. Fenimore's pencil stopped. "That's your zip code?"

  "My phone number."

  "Really?"

  So much for Miss Know-it-a11. "It's a joke, Rita." I put my clipboard on the floor of the trailer and picked up the painting. Inching out backward I stepped to the concrete floor to look at the painting in the light.

  The large canvas was covered with the painting of a mountain landscape a la Albert Bierstadt, complete with rosy rainbow over the lake and magical mountains that looked cool yet inviting. Rita sucked in her breath.

  "Like it?"

  She nodded. "Much."

  I looked closely at an odd patch in the upper right corner. The paint was crackled, as on many old works but ... I poked daintily at the spot. A tiny piece came off on my finger.

  "Miss Thorssen! The lieutenant said to make sure you didn't damage any of the works."

  "Did he?" I leaned the Bierstadt-imitator against the trailer and stood back. It was good, very good. "This one isn't going into any museums anyway."

  Rita rounded the trailer to look at the painting. "A forgery? But it's so beautiful."

  "The best ones are."

  I hung the cloth back over the painting. The in-depth stuff was going to have to wait until later. I needed an idea of what I was dealing with first. I'd get in touch with the FBI office, the art forgery guys. I made a note on my clipboard to call Kenyon in Chicago and climbed back in the trailer.

  "I'll need the name of your business and any partners, silent or general." Ms. Fenimore was getting boring. But the treasures -- potential treasures--lay waiting in the dim trailer. "Second Sun Gallery, same address. My partner is Paolo Segundo. He isn't silent."

  "A foreign national?"

  I paused, lifting the lid on a box. Paolo could still give me pause though we'd been business partners, nothing more, for six months. When we came out to Jackson Hole from New York seven years before it had been different. But our relationship worked better as strictly business. We rediscovered that at least once a year.

  "Naturalized. From Argentina."

  Ms. Fenimore scribbled. I lifted an Indian basket wrapped in tissue paper. It was round and looked very old. It would require research to figure out where it was from. I made a note to call my friend at Sotheby's auction house in New York.

  "It says here affiliations and organizations," the policewoman said.

  I gave her my credentials. "Where did they find this trailer?"

  "Abandoned at a rest stop on the interstate about a hundred miles from here," she said. "They traced it to a U-Haul dealer in Clearwater, Florida."

  "Who rented it?"

  "Phony name and address. They're still checking."

  At noon I left the police warehouse to meet my sister Melina, my other reason--besides getting a breather from Paolo--for taking this consulting job. Melina lived in Missoula with her husband, Wade, an anthropology professor at the University of Montana. She was doing graduate work in sociology and teaching classes at the local career center.

  We settled into a booth at Montana Pies, a place that looked like a vinyl•clad truck stop but smelled like your grandmother's kitchen. I noticed the circles under Melina's eyes when she rubbed them behind her glasses. We hadn't had much time to talk late last night when I arrived.

  "So tell me about you and Paolo." Melina sipped her water.

  "History. For good this time," I said. Her question, unlike Ms. Fenimore's, didn't catch me off-guard. "He's got a new girlfriend. Rock climber, blond. Muscular thighs, sinewy arms. Thinner too."

  I exp
ected a comment about that description, like, why do you always compare them to yourself? But Melina slipped away mentally, gazing out the window at the shimmering asphalt parking lot. I tried to read her face. Becoming a salesman had made me a student of faces, of people. To kill the boredom I tried to read each one. But Norwegians were the worst. Melina and I had been brought up to show no pain; her face was placid, blank. But that could sometimes be a clue too.

  "So what is it?" I said, cutting to the chase.

  "What is what?" Melina smoothed back her frosted hair, pulled into a tight ponytail. She was shorter than me, more like our mother. I resembled Rollie, our lanky father who had died twenty years ago.

  "Something's bothering you," I said.

  She cast down her eyes at the tabletop. "It's nothing."

  "Spill it. This is your sister."

  She looked outside again. "I'm just worried about Wade. He's off doing his thing on the reservation."

  "He does that every summer, doesn't he?"

  "This year there are all these groups around that drive him crazy. Crystal types, you know? Easterners. I don't know."

  "So?"

  "Well, he hates them, to put it simply. He just hates them."

  Our burgers came. There was little more to say about ol' Wade. My sister's husband had always been different from us, wearing his heart on his sleeve, ready to do battle with the forces against him and the Indians he loved. Worrying about him at this late date was like stirring the ashes of a forest fire after the trees have burned. Interesting but beside the point.

  Under Ms. Fenimore's eager eye I worked through the afternoon, cataloging, measuring, sorting everything in the trailer, from pots to baskets to paintings to ancient beads and ceremonial masks. The thief, or owner, had a penchant for Indian artifacts and old western art. The Indian items would require more than a bit of work to track down since they were probably looted from public land. Some traveled in underground circles, from dealers to collectors and back, for years before surfacing at a major auction. At Second Sun Gallery we were offered not a small number of artifacts of questionable provenance. We did our homework and steered clear of most of them.

  The policewoman and I wrapped up each piece and put it back in the trailer rather than risk leaving it sitting out, even in a police warehouse. The heat made my business suit a soggy rag. The artworks would be better off protected from the atmosphere. By the time I got back to Melina's I was ready for a shower.

  I climbed out of the Saab Sister, my trusty '67, maroon with gray-primed rust spots, in front of Melina and Wade's house. Their bungalow on Blaine Street had a permanent look. Nothing ever changed here. I sighed, feeling the ache in my shoulders and the prospect of changing out of my suit.

  At eleven o'clock the sleeping porch was still. A breeze struggled to form in the elm tree but gave up. Somewhere a dog barked rhythmically, trapped, a broken record. Melina and I had eaten dinner outside in the purple dusk on the broken concrete patio, cold tuna sandwiches and carrot sticks and potato chips. Anything not to cook, not to heat up the house. She still looked preoccupied, distant, and I worried about her. She refused to talk about Wade. A hot summer electricity hung in the air like a live wire.

  Now, after sitcoms, local news, and too many gin and tonics. I lay on top of the sheets in an old T-shirt, staring at the family pictures arranged artlessly on the cheap wood paneling of the screened porch. Photographs of past lives, including my own. That wasn't me, was it, with blond curls, grinning at my dad? Was I ever that young, that pure?

  The phone rang. I heard Melina jump from bed and run to the hall. When she gasped, I sat up. She stood in the doorway, a righteous look in her eye, a trembling hand tugging her streaked hair.

  "It's Wade." Her voice rose, breaking.

  "What is it?" I crossed my bare legs, my stomach tightening.

  "Someone has died." I was on my feet.

  "Not Wade. No, Melina."

  She shook her head, holding her ribs to keep the sobs inside. "He's in jail, Alix. They think he killed her."

  At one o'clock, I answered the door to find a young policeman, Missoula City, standing uneasily under the porch light. He and Paolo could have been brothers. His dark eyes had trouble finding mine. Just a courtesy, he said, to let us know Wade had been charged. Melina fell apart in the kitchen, over the sink. She had been waiting for this to happen, for something to boil over, all her married life. Her first nervous breakdown, waiting in the wings, finally free. The tears were bitter, the moans pierced my heart. By four in the morning we piled into the Saab Sister and hit the road for Polson.

  Even in the dead of night the hum of the road had the power to soothe me. Whatever mess Wade Fraser had gotten himself into, we would get him out. It was a mistake. He was a scientist, not a killer. He was a husband to my sister.

  The road lulled Melina into a fitful sleep that provided the body, not the mind, with a semblance of rest. She needed that rest. Her cheek lay against the seat back as I kept my eyes on the white line, the edge of the headlights' glare. The road bucked like the earth was tipping off its axis, careening crazily through space, to a place I didn't mow, didn't want to know.

  But to get back, I had to go forward. That much I knew.

  2

  SWEAT BEADED ON my upper lip. The stale, hot air in the cement-block room where my sister and I waited for Wade made me sleepy. My eyelids closed. The long night of driving melted away. My body seemed to rise from the wooden chair until I could no longer feel the straight-railed back against my spine. The shake and rattle in my head was the river -- the black satin water tickling smooth stones and fish snouts. Rising... rising, breaking the cool, clean surface, smelling of bark and pine and river muck.

  Melina coughed. I opened my eyes, the weight of an anvil on my forehead. The river was gone. We sat, waiting, the closest thing to inmates, in the Lake County jail.

  Melina didn't look much better than I felt. She stood up as the guard led in her husband by the arm, wrists cuffed behind him. She looked like she might hug him but something held her back. Her hands shook. She stuffed them in her pockets. "Wade," she whispered and sat down again.

  I tried to smile at Wade. No death sentence yet. I pulled out a chair for him and we both sat down at the scratched wooden table.

  Several years had passed since I'd seen Wade Fraser. He was heavier now, an extra twenty pounds on his big bear frame, with graying brown hair pulled into a thin ponytail and sliding back off his forehead. His dark, brooding eyes were bloodshot. The Roman nose glowed red from a sunburn above his unkempt salt-and-pepper beard and mustache.

  Melina began. "What happened?"

  "Wait a minute." I held up my hand. They looked at me expectantly. "Have you seen your lawyer?"

  "Hondo came up early this morning."

  "Hondo?"

  Melina frowned. "He's an old friend."

  "A lawyer named Hondo?" I searched their grim faces for answers. "Isn't that like having a dentist named Cowboy?"

  There was in fact such a person trying to pull teeth with a lasso back home in Wyoming, someone I avoided like the plague. Humor. Mark one in the Not Appreciated column. Wade turned a grizzled cheek to me. "He's my lawyer," he said, his voice flat and final.

  Wade slumped in his chair and moaned. "I gotta get out of here. It smells like piss and rat turds. I need sunlight, sky, the stars. I'm going to die in here." He moaned again, hanging his whiskered chin to his chest.

  Despite my sympathy for Wade's situation, his whining seemed to confirm my suspicions about my brother-ill-law. Leaving my sister for weeks at a time to go off cavorting with his Indian buddies in the name of research: it seemed juvenile and self-indulgent. I felt like slapping him. Take it like a man, Wade. Show some spine. He obviously wasn't Scandinavian. He made no attempt to conceal his pain. My grandmother Olava, a stoic from the old country, would have wiped down the windowsills and mopped the floors twice with the same energy Wade used whimpering.

  Melina reached ou
t to put a comforting arm around her husband. A gruff voice behind me barked: "Hands to yourself, ma'am." The guard stood with an authoritative glare against the cement-block wall. Melina sat back in her chair and began to cry silent, wrenching tears.

  I stared at her glistening face, tried to think of a way to comfort her. What did she know about Wade's doings? How could I help her?

  "Wade," I said matter-of-factly, "tell me what happened."

  He turned to me, no reaction to Melina's tears visible. His face twisted, remembering. "Last night? Last night I just went to sleep in the car. At Moody's cabin. We ate some dinner, then I went out to the car."

  He glanced sheepishly at Melina. She stopped crying. "I had a bottle out there."

  "Liquor?"

  "I sipped it a little, stashed it back under the seat, and fell asleep."

  "Why did you sleep in the car?" Melina asked, wiping her nose on a tissue.

  "What time was this?" I asked.

  "It was about nine-thirty, I guess. It had just gotten dark." He flicked his eyes to his wife. "Moody only has one cot."

  "The sheriff says you argued with Shiloh. Or what's her real name? Doris?"

  "Everybody called her Shiloh," Melina said. "She was kind of a spiritual counselor."

  Wade sat back in the chair as best he could with his hands cuffed behind him. "Moody and I went up to talk to Tin-Tin about the vandalism." He looked at his wife. "Did you tell her about the vandalism?"