The Bluejay Shaman (Alix Thorssen Mystery Series)

by Lise McClendon

  I leaned out to try to read the dimly printed carbon copy of the moving contract but the girl snatched it away, slipping it back in the file.

  "What do you mean? Who are you?" Her heavily lined eyes squinted at me. "Just who do you think you are?" she said as I backed away, grabbing for the door. "Do you think I give out information to just anybody? Hey, come back here! I'm calling the cops right now!"

  I shut the dusty door, sending a cloud of dirt over my feet as I jumped into my trusty beast of burden. Let her call the cops. They're friends of mine.

  14

  STRETCHING THE PHONE cord into the dining room, I pulled my robe around my damp legs. The Saab had sputtered and stalled on my way home from Mayflower. I spent thirty minutes standing on egg-frying asphalt, waiting for it to calm down enough to turn over.

  At last it had. Five minutes in a cool shower, trying to wash away the day's entanglements, then I went to the phone. My notebook before me, I dialed the first number.

  "Tilden here," the voice harked into the phone.

  "Dr. Tilden." I introduced myself. "Do you have a minute to let me pick your brain?"

  "Not today."

  I pressed on. "Have you heard of a bluejay pictograph?" I said. "In your dealings with the Salish perhaps?"

  No immediate answer. Rustlings and a thud of a book dropping to the floor. Finally Tilden said, "Busy today," and hung up.

  "Same to you, Mad Dog." I sat in the dining room. The place smelled different when I got back. Looking around now I could see Melina had spent her day off cleaning. The smell was the Murphy's Oil Soap she used to wipe down her furniture. I smiled. It reminded me of my days at home. You can't change the world, you can't make right what's done. But you can keep your house clean, my mother would say, wiping her baseboards or scrubbing the kitchen floor.

  A small measure of control, in a world out of control. I'd been known to have an outbreak of it myself from time to time, usually when things were going badly in my personal life. Burn off that anger and get a clean house to boot.

  Now Melina took a nap upstairs. All that cleaning must have worn her out. Probably not sleeping too well either. I picked up the phone again and dialed half a number, then ran upstairs to get dressed. In a moment I was out the door trying to start the Saab again.

  When I stepped back out the door of the University library, a huge square brick building facing the old University Hall with its peaked dome roof, the air felt cool. Two hours in the library made the scent of flowers planted in the Hall's courtyard sharp as it rose in the aftermath of the day's heat. I stood for a moment, discouraged, on the steps.

  Even the reference librarian had thought it odd. She got downright hysterical. Several old journals were missing from their collection, journals that contained articles about the Salish religious rites or the bluejay shaman. Even the microfilm records had disappeared. Eventually the entire periodical and reference staff was in an uproar over the disappearances. It wasn't like one book being stolen. These were old academic journals from the twenties, a small number published to begin with, even fewer surviving. Like Kateri, they were irreplaceable.

  I didn't get hysterical. But I was just as disappointed with the disorderly state of the world. Even in libraries where order reigns, chaos had made inroads.

  The Missoula Police Department is housed in City Hall, a three-story precast concrete building behind the fire department and their practice tower covered with radio transmitters. From where I sat across the street I could almost see the side door where the officers climbed into white-and-blue cruisers. The view wasn't great, especially under mercury lights at 11 P.M.

  My conversation with Elaine rattled through my head. I had called her just an hour ago, hoping to get her to consent to talk again. But she was if anything more blunt this time. The answer was no.

  "What about the boxes in the garage, Elaine?" I had asked in a curious tone, as if I were an intimate friend of the deceased. "Was Shiloh moving out?"

  Elaine gasped. If she wouldn't talk to me at least I could get a reaction from her. It was all I expected at this point. "What gives you the right to snoop around--"

  I ignored the question. "You weren't getting along so she was moving out."

  "No! No!" Her voice broke, becoming softer. "You don't understand. Those boxes have been there for months. They're just her collections. She had so much stuff she was going to put some of it in storage."

  Her breathing was short. "She wasn't moving out?" I asked again.

  "I told you!" She moaned then and the spell that allowed her to reveal these facts was broken. She hung up without another word. I figured that was the end of the Elaine road; I'd get no more from her.

  I got out of the car, leaning against its cool metal door as the policemen began to come out of City Hall. They laughed and waved to each other, getting into police vehicles or their own cars. I strained to see in the darkness. The lot for personal cars was beyond the squad cards; I couldn't see the faces of the officers that went that way. I waited longer, until no more policemen emerged. Then, with a sigh, I climbed back into the Saab, pushing the bottle wrapped in a paper bag to one side.

  Elaine was hiding something. That much I was sure of. Maybe it didn't relate to the murder. Maybe it did. Maybe she loved Shiloh but Shiloh didn't return her affections. Is that a motive? She seemed so ready to talk just a couple days ago. What had changed?

  I banged my open palms against the steering wheel, frustrated. Nothing seemed to be going my way. Then I heard his voice.

  "What's up?" The car had crept silently up beside me. I jerked my head and smiled. Mendez leaned toward the side door of his car, his badge glinting off the headlight of a passing car.

  The Saab chugged to a stop against the curb, behind the dark green El Dorado. In a moment we were sitting on Carl's front step, drinking the wine I'd brought from paper cups. The small house, on the north side of the Clark Fork River in an old neighborhood, boasted a lawn that even at night I could tell was thick, green, and mowed on the diagonal. Very classy.

  The wine was pink and cheap and too sweet. It stung my nose as I sipped it, trying to think of a way to ask for help.

  "I wanted to thank you for today," I said. He started to say something but I ran ahead. "Now, wait. I have another favor to ask."

  When Mendez had gone in for the paper cups he had taken off his short•sleeved uniform shirt and holster. His day fighting crime seemed to have little effect on his demeanor; he was mellow, especially now with a glass of wine in him. He sat back, his elbows on the step above, stretching his legs out in front of him, smiling with bright teeth glowing in the dim light.

  "Shoot."

  "I want you to run someone's name through your computer. I don't know much about her, just her name."

  He looked at me from the corner of his eye. "Does this have to do with the vandalism?"

  I wagged my head and tried not to answer. "There's a lot going on. I'm not sure where she fits in." He waited for me to explain. I sipped my wine.

  "Are you going to tell me about it?" he said at last.

  The sky was bright with stars. The Milky Way shone like a freckled ribbon, glittering. Mendez hadn't turned his porch light on so the stars seemed closer. The neighborhood was quiet, sleeping. I took another sip of wine.

  "Do I have to?" I asked, smiling at him, trying to use some of that old Norwegian charm. By his frown I could see I had failed.

  "No." He got up then and went in the house. I sat, unsure if that was it. Had he said good night? I felt foolish and ungrateful. I owed him an explanation. Of course I did. But it hurt, these family problems. We had always kept them to ourselves, never breathing a word of Cousin Larry's stealing a car or Uncle Sven's drinking habits. Even in the family we didn't talk about them, keeping them inside, safe, where they couldn't escape to embarrass us. Never let it be said we spilled a family secret. Even to get help.

  A click. Music floated out the screen door. Old, sad Texas music. Bob Wills on the f
iddle. Mendez came back out, his jaw still tight, and sat down on the step above me. He had a cigarette now, the tip glowing in the darkness, and exhaled it slowly into the night air.

  "Carl," I began. I looked at him, felt that wall inside me, and turned away. "Shit." I shifted, looking at the sky again. I owed it to him, I told myself, my arms stiff against the old wood steps. "Listen, it's not that big a thing. This woman is interested in something that may have something to do with the problems my brother-in-law is having." I took a deep breath. I could hear him suck in on the cigarette and blow the smoke out.

  "Who's your brother-in-law?" His voice was low, without emotion.

  "Wade Fraser."

  He took a draw on his cigarette. "That's where I saw you. I've been racking my brain."

  "I should have told you, I'm working that trailer full of artworks down at the warehouse too."

  "You are?"

  I glanced back at him. "I'm an art dealer."

  "No shit. I heard about that trailer. Some of the guys like that antique stuff." We looked at the stars. "But the trailer and your--"

  "Brother-in-law. Not related. That I know of."

  I followed the Milky Way from one horizon obscured by trees to the other. An owl hooted softly, far away. "Murder, huh?" he said.

  "Yeah. This woman may be involved somehow. I have to know."

  "What's her name?"

  "Charlotte Vardis," I spit out, then spelled it. "Thank you, Carl."

  I jumped to my feet, leaving the empty paper cup on the step. I wanted to shake his hand or something but he sat stretched on the steps, cigarette in one hand and cup in the other. "Call me, okay?" I called, running down the walk to my car.

  I didn't know how, but Charlotte Vardis was thick with this. She was too phony, too weird. I rolled her name over and over in my mind on the way home. Mendez had to come up with something.

  In the light of the porch lamp Melina had left on for me I found a parking place in front of the neighbor's; somebody seemed to be having a party on Blaine Street. I drifted off to sleep, trying to place Vardis in the puzzle, trying the pieces without her, with equal success. My brain clouded with confusion and sleep.

  Melina left early, refreshed by her housekeeping vacation, eager to disappear into the problems of her students. Her files were full of graded papers, her grade book caught up. She actually looked somewhat happy, sipping her coffee in a clean skirt--pressed, no less.

  After she left I threw all my clothes in the washing machine and scrounged a baggy pair of shorts and a tank top from her drawer. I moved to the window seat to drink my coffee in the sunshine and read the paper. A trial date had been set for Wade, I read on the front page. Not until late September, it said, giving both sides ample time to prepare their cases. And for the judge to take a vacation.

  Poor Wade. He was going to miss at least the start of the fall quarter after all. Tilden had been right. Why didn't they let him out on bail? He was a gentle giant, nothing more. But maybe they wouldn't let a professor accused of murder teach a class anyway. I set my cup down. I had to organize my thoughts today.

  Notebook in hand, I reviewed my list of questions that needed answers. Tin-Tin and Marcus Tilden had both mentioned some bad feelings, "bad blood" between Wade and Shiloh. I tried to remember if that had come out at the preliminary hearing. I made a note to ask Wade and Melina about it. A question Mendez might be able to help me with: Why had the cops come to Tilden that first morning? Was there something at the scene that implicated him? If so, why was it being kept back?

  From the bay window I glanced up as a boy on a bicycle pedaled by. My coffee needed a warmer-upper. I got up to go to the kitchen and looked down the driveway to the Saab Sister. I hadn't parked too well last night, kind of at a weird angle. A strange car was parked in front of the house, like a party guest who wouldn't go home. I got a good look at it now: a brown Mercedes with tinted windows.

  I poured more coffee into my cup and headed out the kitchen door for a stroll down the driveway toward the vehicles. The flower beds had dried up from neglect. I thought of watering them, then realized it was hopeless. I rounded the Saab between the two cars, trying to see through the tinted glass of the Mercedes. The license plate, spattered with grime, read Oklahoma. The entire car was dirty, covered with mud. It wasn't often you saw a Mercedes that had that much dirt on it. Benz owners, at least the ones I knew in Jackson, were meticulous about their precious German wheels.

  I opened the door to my car, making like I was getting something. My bare feet hurt on the asphalt pavement. I closed the door again, walking lightly toward the Mercedes. I walked on the street side, lifting the handle of first the back door, then the front. The back door latch flipped up and back. Locked. I keptwalking. I expected the same for the front and was surprised to feel the resistance that meant it was unlocked. Stepping back, I checked the traffic and neighbors up and down the street. I eased up the handle, my heart beating loudly.

  The latch made a quality clunk. I stepped right, to the side of the crack that the open door made, slipping my fingers against the metal edge. I drew the door wider, its solid weight heavy in my hand. Something was resting against the door. I pulled it wider.

  A shoulder.

  I slammed the door shut. The thumping in my ears took over as my breath grew short and light. There was someone in the car. Leaning against the door. Leaning like someone who was ... I stepped back, taking a quick breath, trying to think what to do.

  I stepped up to the car again, opening the latch quickly this time, firmly. My hand slipped into the crack, pushing the shoulder back from the door so it wouldn't tumble to the pavement. The door swung open. I took a deep breath and smelled the sour, tainted odor of death.

  15

  BY THE TIME the police arrived I had gotten a good look at her. Too good. It was the kind of thing you had nightmares about. A bullet hole in the temple, as if some astral void had sucked the life out of her with a straw. Her bluish complexion, dark, lifeless hair, features contorted in agony, mouth agape, teeth dry, eyes wide with ... fear.

  Her face was not familiar. This, at least, was a relief. I scanned my memory of women from Manitou Matrix, trying to place her, thankful that I could not. An older woman, in her fifties maybe. A cap of sienna hair and blue eyes.

  Those eyes.

  I called Melina, told her not to come home but did she know anyone with a brown Mercedes with Oklahoma plates? She did not. Just the news of the murder, though, shook her. My hand trembled so badly as I tried to punch out 911 that I had to hang up and take a deep breath before trying again. I didn't remember ever shaking that bad. The coffee spilled as I tried to pour it. I set down the pot and sank to the floor beside the puddle, pulling up my knees, dropping my forehead against them.

  The proximity to death: quick, uncontrollable, final. The fear, the screams rang in my ears, unheard screams but very real. She--whoever she was--didn't want to die. Someone else had made that decision for her.

  The woman in the Mercedes was dressed in expensive woolen slacks, an odd choice for the torrid summer days we were experiencing. The light blue blouse was long• sleeved. Her bare feet lay against the car's mat. I stared at her too long.

  A detective named Knox asked me questions. I told him I saw the car--I thought--last night when I came home at about midnight. Then this morning. He said they would ask neighbors about it.

  We sat in the living room. I felt thankful Melina had cleaned her house, with all these strangers walking through. I made more coffee and talked to Knox, who was heavyset, in his fifties. He was kind while being official, a trait I greatly admired. As I drank coffee another policeman came to the door. They conferred, and Knox turned back to me.

  "We don't know if this is her or not. It'll be a bit before we get a positive 10," he said, glancing down at a small spiral notebook similar to my own. "But the registration on the vehicle is to a Charlotte Vardis, Stillwater, Oklahoma."

  An asphalt ribbon draped over the hillsid
es, the road spun beneath the car. If I stared at the center line long enough it seemed to go backward while the car stood still. A treadmill spinning round and round, the earth turning, the sun with its yo-yo planet on a string. Round-the-world, round-the-sun.

  My father, the slouching Norsky salesman, told me about roads. They were his companion. He said the reason the road has so many curves is because somebody made it too long. To get it to fit in the space they had crimped it, making curves and turns over hills, down through valleys, around mountains, over bridges. I loved that, the gray ribbon that had been cut too long. I hoped someday they would get their measurements right and the road would become straight, smooth, and perfect, a line as unbending as the graphite lead in my third-grade pencil tracing the edge of the old wooden ruler.

  The road had been too long for Rollie. For years he had traveled up and down Montana selling girdles and brassieres, then hammers and wingnuts, sometimes into western Washington, northern Wyoming. and Idaho. Coeur d'Alene was his destination the day he died. He traveled this road that day, I thought, my mind preoccupied by death. This very road.

  He had wound his dirty white Impala through the rolling hills of the Flathead Indian Reservation, past tourist traps and verdant meadows, past ponds where chunks of ice the size of a house had broken off Ice Age glaciers and melted. Past ducks swimming, oblivious to their proximity to disaster, paddling orange feet below the

  crystal green waters.

  His Impala was not so fleet of foot as its namesake but serviceable, Rollie liked to say, practical to the end. They crossed the Jocko River over the high bridge at Ravalli, named after yet another Jesuit priest who came to save the Flathead nation. The Impala probably strained on the hill to Camas Prairie, feeling the road wave with the giant ripples from prehistoric times, the bed of an ancient torrential stream that drained through here into the Flathead River.