A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith McCafferty

  The face was what was arresting. It was a dull purple color, and Harold breathed in a rank odor as he switched on his Maglite for a closer look. He fought back an impulse to gag. The face was a hunk of meat, trapped inside a birdcage of branches that were woven into the shape of a globe. The meat, which had to have been placed inside before the branches were woven around it, swarmed with maggots. White quartz river stones were wedged into holes in the weave to serve as eyes. A dark basalt river stone was the nose. The mouth had been fashioned from a curled section of deer antler. Harold drew his knife and scraped off some of the maggots. A few hairs adhered to the blade, but it was too gloomy in the shed to see them clearly. He set the blade aside.

  The scarecrow was leaning upright against a wall. When Harold tried to heft it, to guess its weight, the heaviest branch supporting the torso broke away and the effigy crashed to the floor in two parts. He tried marrying the halves, but without anything to marry them with he left the scarecrow where it lay. He pried out the river stone that made the nose—it was the only smooth surface that might hold fingerprints—and after wrapping it in his handkerchief, he went back outside, where he was grateful to drink in unfetid air. He apologized to the ranger for what had happened.

  “Can’t leave you alone for five minutes,” the ranger said.

  “What’s the plan for the other scarecrows?” Harold asked.

  “I Have No Idea.” Saying each word distinctly and as if it began with a capital letter. “Not My Decision. I’m just waiting for Macy to drive up from Great Falls. He wants to see it.”

  “All right. But don’t let him touch it. Nobody handles it until I come off the river. The other scarecrows, leave them right where they are.”

  The ranger nodded. “Look, don’t touch. I gotcha. But I’m a little uneasy about telling the regional director what he can and can’t do.”

  “Then have him call this number.” Harold drew out one of his cards that announced his position as a state investigator, and penned a number on the back. “That’s the personal cell for the state director.” The ranger took the card, then faced his hands in an I-back-off gesture.

  “It’s just better if we’re clear on this,” Harold said. “I can’t work the scenes if they get trampled on.”

  He studied the hairs on the knife blade. They were light gray behind tapering blue-gray tips. “You can tell Macy that the face was made from mule deer meat. The liver, if he asks.”

  Harold turned toward the river as a white van lifted a ribbon of dust from the access road. The van, which was mounded with gear on the roof rack, stopped at the boat launch. Five people got out, two middle-aged men and a younger couple with a little girl.

  “That would be Little Bo Peep who saw the Big Bad Wolf,” the ranger said. He hitched his pants and Harold followed him down to the river.

  The couple were thanking the men for the shuttle. Harold waited for them to say their goodbyes and introduced himself to the family. It took the mother ten minutes of fast talking to tell a story that could have been told in as many words—“I thought I saw a scarecrow but can’t be sure.” Harold asked the woman if she minded if he spoke to her daughter alone. She glanced at her husband, who said he’d go get the car. She turned back to Harold and said okay.

  Harold walked to where the girl was standing by the river a few yards away. She was tossing clods of dirt from the cut bank into the water. The girl had yellow curly hair that reminded Harold of Goldilocks in the Golden Books version his grandmother had read to him.

  He squatted to bring himself to her eye level and coached her on her throws, told her to bring her left foot forward, her right arm farther back, let the clod roll off her first two fingers, follow through.

  “We haven’t been formally introduced,” he told her. “My name’s Harold.” He extended his hand.

  “I’m Mary.” They shook. “My mother calls me Mary Louise but I don’t like it. You’re an Indian, aren’t you?”

  “Card-carrying.” Harold found his tribal ID card and showed her. “Says I’m a member in good standing in the Blackfeet Nation.”

  “Is that like another country?”

  “Seems so sometimes. We’re a sovereign nation. That means the U.S. government is supposed to stay out of our business.”

  “What’s it like, being Indian?”

  “That depends. White people have preconceptions, so they’re not surprised if you let them down. If you don’t let them down, there are some of your own people saying you have too much ambition. Can be hard to win.”

  She absorbed the information, then threw another clod.

  “There’s an Indian boy in my grade. His name’s Jimmy. He’s nice to me, but when he’s with the other boys he’s a jerk.”

  “He’s trying to fit in,” Harold said. “When he’s with you, that’s his better nature asserting itself. You’ll have to hope he outgrows the other behavior. Some boys do, some don’t.”

  She nodded. “My dad’s Irish. My mother says Irish have a problem with alcohol. She says Grandma drinks too much but my dad doesn’t because he saw what it did to her. Do you drink alcohol?”

  “Not a drop.”

  “I like apple cider.”

  “So do I.”

  The girl brought her hand way back as Harold had taught her and threw a clod that nearly reached the far bank. Harold offered his hand for a high five.

  In his peripheral vision, he could see the mother watching him closely.

  He motioned for the girl to follow him a few yards farther downriver and lowered his voice. “Why don’t you tell me what you saw that night, Mary?”

  “I saw God. He had arms.”

  “God?”

  “Like Jesus on the cross. We’re Catholic.”

  The mother had moved up behind them. “First it was a man, then it was a scarecrow,” she said. “Now she thinks it was God.”

  Harold looked at her.

  “Pardon me for interrupting,” she said. She hesitated, then turned and walked back to the landing.

  “Grown-ups,” the girl said in a withering voice. “They can be exasperating.”

  “Your mother says you thought it was moving.”

  “It did, but nobody believes me. They think it’s my imagination.”

  “I believe you. Was it walking, or sort of like floating?”

  “I don’t know. It was moving. Then Mommy took the flashlight and I didn’t see it anymore. It chased us. It stole my shoe, my ruby slipper.”

  “It did?”

  The girl threw her head up and down in a greatly exaggerated nod.

  “Both of them?”

  “No, just one.” She pointed to her left foot.

  “Do you still have the other one?”

  Another nod.

  “You want to show it to me?”

  “It’s in my backpack.”

  The backpack was with the pile of the family’s gear at the landing. The girl showed him her shoe. She took off her sandal and put it on and stepped on it to show Harold the blinking lights.

  “Do you mind if I take it, Mary?”

  She said it was okay and Harold looked at the mother, who was shaking her head in small movements.

  “It was chasing me, it was.” The girl stomped her foot down onto the ground.

  “No, darling. You have a habit of not tying your shoes. It’s easy to step out of them when you don’t tie your shoes.”

  The mother turned to Harold. “She’s gifted.” As if that explained things. “What are you going to do?”

  “Investigate,” Harold said. “Going to ask you a couple questions. I apologize in advance for their personal nature.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “You said you were actually sitting on the toilet when your daughter saw the scarecrow.”

  “Yes. She wanted me to warm it up.”


  “So, from where you were sitting, what you thought you saw that might have been a scarecrow, where was it, to the left, right, straight ahead?”

  “A little to the right. Up the side of the hill. There’s a big rock up there. I’d noticed it before because there’s a tree growing out of it.”

  “How far away, would you say?”

  “Maybe fifty feet. I can’t be sure. I can’t even be sure it was a scarecrow. There was something though. We weren’t seeing things.”

  “Your husband said he wanted to go back there when it got light, but you wouldn’t let him.”

  “We’d have been alone in the camp if he went. I thought we were safer staying together.”

  “How long between after you saw it and you left?”

  “Not long, maybe half an hour. It was still dark enough we had to look around with the flashlights to make sure we didn’t leave anything behind.”

  “You made the right decision. Middle Indian Springs campsite, right?”

  She nodded.

  Harold turned to the ranger, who confirmed the site. “Think you could reserve that one for me?” Harold asked.

  “Already done. As soon as I got the call, I made sure no other parties would be camping there.”

  “What about before you got the call?”

  “I had a party scheduled yesterday, but they canceled and the party that took their place needed a larger site. Nobody’s been there for four days.”

  “Good.” That meant the ground wouldn’t be overly disturbed. Harold turned to the mother. “Before you leave, I’d like to look at the shoes you and your husband wore at the campsite. I’ll take some measurements. That way I can eliminate your tracks and concentrate on any others I might find.”

  “If you find my shoe, you can bring it back to me,” the girl said.

  “Of course I will.”

  “It will keep you safe,” she said. “It’s magic. And I’m not gifted. I’m precocious.”

  “We can all use a little bit of magic,” Harold said.

  The husband had driven up in their rented SUV and Harold and the ranger helped them load the deflated raft and bungee-cord the frame to the roof rack. He took the shoe impressions and had one more question: Had they spotted an unattended boat in the vicinity? No, they hadn’t. The husband turned the key, and the girl put her head out of a rear window and waved back at Harold as they drove away.

  “You’re good with kids,” the ranger said.

  “I’m trying to learn,” Harold said. “That reminds me. My son might show up later today or tomorrow. His name’s Marcus. He’s seventeen. Do you have a canoe lying around he could use so he could catch up to me?”

  “We have an old beater Grumman under a tarp at the house. Canoeing on the upper river can be tricky, though. It’s pretty bony before runoff. Does he know his way around a paddle?”

  “I don’t know. But he’s a teenager. He’ll say he does.” Harold laughed, a one-note laugh. “His mother, she named him Etchemin, means ‘canoe man’ in the language. Nobody ever called him that, and as far as I know, he’s never lifted a paddle. Just tell him to look for my canoe. It will be the only varnished spruce strip on the river.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for him, and if I see him, I’ll tell him what I’m going to tell you. You haven’t floated the Smith before. It looks like a puppy dog now, but we get a couple more warm nights, the upper elevation snow’s going to go. Once it starts, it goes fast. It cranks up to three thousand cubic feet, four thousand, it’s a fucking wolf.”

  Harold nodded. “Understood. Thanks. My son, he’s got a dog, three-legged little mutt. Goes everywhere with him. I read the regulations. Will that be a problem?”

  “No dogs on the river. The only exception is for hunting dogs used to find and retrieve game. Is your son’s dog a hunting dog?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s he hunt?”

  “He hunts his missing leg.”

  The ranger smiled. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “One last question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You said that some of the scarecrows were difficult to spot. Did anything in particular draw your eye to them?”

  “Well, we knew the general areas to look, because the floaters described it for us. But funny you ask, because like three of them, we saw them because crows and buzzards were circling overhead. Strange, huh? Scarecrows are supposed to scare them away. Instead, they seemed to attract them. Makes you wonder if they all have meat in them.”

  Harold nodded as he pulled on his hip boots. The ranger pushed him off, his smile coming back.

  “Indian Springs,” he said. “It’s like someone had a premonition that an Indian would be coming. In the stars or something.”

  Harold returned the smile, a thin one. He was beginning to form a theory and stopped himself. Let the river reveal its truth in its own way, its own time. This was ancestral land and he wanted to absorb it, to drink it in with all his senses. The Blackfeet, Shoshone, Crow, Assiniboine, Salish, even the Gros Ventre, had been so moved by the Smith’s splendor that they painted images of their passage on the limestone walls. The shadows here were long shadows. The voices carried long-ringing echoes. Harold dug deep with his paddle, stirring up the waters of the past as the notes of a new story, perhaps long covered by the current, perhaps as recent as the last rain, were beginning to surface.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Canoes in the Night

  Everything Harold Little Feather liked best about camping was sensory. The sound of Indian Springs as it silvered over watercress and moss. The resinous scent of the pine blocks when he split them. The mesmerizing dance of the flames as the angels took the hand of the devil. And the woodsmoke itself, pungent, as salty as a smoked ham.

  You could smell the spirits of the grandfathers, Harold thought, if you took the time to and your mind wasn’t somewhere else, like it was with most white people and even the younger generation of his own people.

  He smelled the sizzling of the trout he’d caught before the sun died, a fine brown whose flesh was as orange as the flames. That was one of the best smells of all.

  When she helloed the camp, walked into the firelight dangling four cans of a six-pack from the fingers of her left hand and with a sling-back folding chair slung on her shoulder, he didn’t know if he was happy to see her or not. He’d thought about it on the two-and-a-half-hour float from the put-in; even when he told himself to concentrate on the river, he’d thought about the chance that she’d show up, that one of them would, and that it would require a decision on his part, and yes or no, he’d have to extend his neck from his shell.

  “How did you know I was camped here?” he said.

  “Smoke signals,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “Our camp’s just below the bend, not very far. We didn’t know it would be you. Hoping though. You want a Rainier to go with your trout? Mountain fresh, they say.”

  “I drank a few too many of those once. You go ahead though. I have some cider I made from my sister’s trees.”

  “Can I have that, then? I really don’t like beer, just thought you being a guy and all.”

  She smiled, and Harold noticed the slight gap between her front teeth. She fingered her hair. Her face was guttered by the firelight, but she was attractive in an outdoorsy, straight-haired, flannel-shirt-with-the-tails-untucked way, and standing close to him, Harold realized she was a bit more woman than he’d noticed when she’d stood in the shadow of her more gregarious friend.

  “I don’t know why,” he said, “but I thought it would be Jeanine.”

  “That’s because she couldn’t promise that she wouldn’t bite you.”

  “No. She just did most of the talking, as I recall.”

  “That Jeanine, she’s a talker all right. But she’s not feeling so
well. Anyway, she’s more married than I am.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I hope she feels better.” He worked a pine chip under the trout and turned it over. “How married are you, Carol Ann?” he said, not looking up.

  “Aren’t you forward? We haven’t even had a drink yet.”

  Harold lifted his head and held her eyes.

  “The truth? More than I want to be.”

  “Why don’t you unfold your chair and tell me about yourself? But first, let’s have a little of this brown trout. He’s plenty enough for two.”

  He lifted the flesh from the skeleton of the trout, it pulled away easily, and he pushed it onto two paper plates.

  They ate and drank in silence. “I think that’s the best camp meal I’ve ever eaten,” she said at length. “You cook good trout, Mister Harold Little Feather.”

  They tossed their plates into the fire, and Harold refilled their cups.

  “Start wherever you want,” he said.

  It was a small-town-girl story, Missouri on a broad brown river, a tomboy who climbed trees and played second base and rode a head for figures to college, then to grad school, and who for fifteen years had been working beneath her degrees as an accountant for several businesses. A husband from the hometown, two children, one a sophomore in college, one finishing high school, the husband’s contracting business being sued for fraud, the fish rotting from the head down, his being the head that would roll. And no, she didn’t feel sorry for him because he’d brought it on himself and she and the kids were the collateral damage. In fact, if it wasn’t for the kids she’d have left him years ago. When did he change from the young man who quoted Kipling and wanted to sail the globe and share adventures and who adored her, absolutely adored her, and who now looked past her into bankruptcy with his eyes vacant and his sports car repossessed and his catamaran sold for a song?