A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith McCafferty

  Sex, she said—on the rare occasions they had sex—was strictly by the numbers.

  “Guess how many numbers?” she said.

  She held up one finger.

  “Richard doesn’t think outside the box, so to speak.” She drank her cider. “If you know what I mean, Harold.”

  That hung for a beat or two.

  “You look too young to have a child in college.”

  “I started early. Now you. How does a manly guy like you get called Little Feather?”

  “You ever hear the Johnny Cash song ‘A Boy Named Sue’?”

  She nodded. “I grew up in honky-tonks.”

  “Well, that was me. My father named me Little Feather knowing I’d have to get tough, and I did. When I was older and could pick my own name, I kept it out of spite for him, and because it had made me who I was.”

  I’ll give you the short version of life on the rez, he told her, and did, greatly to his surprise for it was unlike him, and she said he should be proud, getting out but not deserting his heritage, accomplishing all he had. And she did hope he’d meet up with his son and be patient, the young man would come around and Harold would have his chance of becoming a real father to him.

  She hesitated after her last declaration and said, “Look at me, I’m acting like I know you.” She said she had a confession. Jeanine felt okay. The real reason she hadn’t come was because she knew she wouldn’t be able to resist temptation.

  “You know. You’re tall, you have long hair, and you have a sense of humor. And you have wolf tracks traipsing around your arm.”

  “And you can resist?” Harold smiled.

  “I could if it wasn’t for the damned tracks. I mean, deer tracks I can handle. Deer tracks I can stop at a kiss. But wolf tracks? Really? You don’t give a girl a choice.”

  “What are we going to do, Carol Ann? I don’t want you to do something you regret.”

  “Oh, I’m long past that.” She rose from the fire, and as Harold stood, she put her arms around the back of his neck and pulled him into a kiss, opening her mouth, pressing the length of her body against him, smelling like woodsmoke and apples. More to her than met the eye, and no doubt about it.

  “I have to warn you though,” she said. “We’ve been on the road. I didn’t exactly anticipate any extracurriculars. I haven’t, ah, exfoliated for a few days. It might be a little scratchy down there.”

  “I’ll risk it,” Harold said.

  Later, in the dark of the tent, she pressed two fingers to his lips and then back to hers, and they passed an imaginary cigarette back and forth.

  “Was that enough thinking outside the box for you?” Harold said.

  “I’d say just the right amount. I should say goodbye, get back to Jeanine so she doesn’t worry.”

  “I’ll walk you.”

  “That isn’t necessary.”

  “It isn’t, but might be wise.” He told her about the scarecrow and the little girl losing her shoe.

  “That happened here?”

  “Just up the hill.”

  “Is there a reason to think something might still be around?”

  “No. But I’ll have a look in the morning. Could be the girl was seeing things. Imagination plays tricks in the dark.”

  “Will I see you again? We’re camping at Sunset Cliff tomorrow, the upper site, I think.”

  “No, the map that ranger gave me shows three scarecrows between here and there. I have to check them all out. It could take a couple days.”

  “Then this is goodbye?”

  “Probably.”

  “We were just getting to know each other. I mean, the sex was great, fabulous. But we were really getting to know each other.”

  “We were.”

  “You know you ruined me for any man in Missouri. What am I going to do?”

  “Follow through with the divorce. You said your youngest will be in college next fall. Get her settled and start over somewhere else.”

  “Maybe I’ll move out here, ring you up.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’ll give me your number?”

  “I’ll give you my card.”

  She sighed. “But it’s probably not going to happen, is it? People hitch onto each other, they make promises, then they’re like this river, they just flow downstream where it takes them. That’s where life goes, doesn’t it? Downstream through time. We never make the changes we say we’re going to make. We never see each other again. In the end all we have is the moment.”

  She’d been lying on her side, circling a finger around and around the wolf tracks on his arm, and moved her hand down his body.

  “You have scars. Don’t tell me they’re from a wolf.”

  “No. I got a little too close to a couple grizzly cubs. Mama took exception.”

  “You’re just too good to be true.” She kissed a welt of skin on his chest. “I’m going to ask you to make love with me one more time, then you can walk me back. Is that all right?”

  “I don’t seem to be arguing.”

  She rolled on top of him and settled herself, rose up and settled herself again, then leaned forward, dragging her breasts across his chest. She whispered into his ear. “I just figured it out. What the two of us are, Harold.”

  “What are we?”

  Rocking with him, smiling down with shining eyes. “Canoes in the night. We’re canoes passing in the night.”

  “Why are you crying, Carol Ann?” He could taste her tears when he kissed her eyes.

  “I’m just happy this happened. I’ve been sort of desperate and I’m just really, really happy.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sleeping Like the Dead

  Harold was up on five hours’ sleep. He was always up before dawn, and while he waited for the gray to come into the sky, he built a small cooking fire and drank a cup of tea. The mother and daughter had visited the toilet just before dawn and he wanted to hike to the “loo with a view” having the same view that they’d had when they’d seen the scarecrow.

  He shone his flashlight up the path behind his tent and in a few minutes was sitting on the closed seat of the pit toilet. He’d asked the mother where she’d seen it, whatever it was, and she’d said it was to the right and uphill. But she had grabbed the light from her daughter’s hands and Harold had to figure that she’d jumped up from the seat first. That meant where she saw the scarecrow was in relation to where she stood, not where she sat. Still, there weren’t that many angles of possibility. Harold broke the forest into sectors and examined them, first with the eyes he’d been blessed with, eyes his grandfather had said were the best he’d ever known, then with the flashlight, but without seeing anything that resembled a scarecrow. His focus settled on three Ponderosa pine trees growing out of the side of the hill. The limbs extending horizontally from the lower trunks could possibly be taken for the outspread arms of a scarecrow, but it was a stretch. And where was the boulder she’d mentioned, the one with the tree growing out of it? Well, he’d come back again when it was lighter, look for tracks.

  He was almost within sight of his tent when he saw a flashlight bobbing from downriver, in the direction of the women’s camp. He expected to see Carol Ann but it was her friend, Jeanine, and when he got close, she said, “I thought you’d want to see this.”

  She told Harold to switch off his light, and in the sudden dark she brought something out of her jacket pocket and pressed the heel of her hand against it. Red points of light pulsed weakly. It was the girl’s tennis shoe, her missing ruby slipper.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “At the toilet, just now.”

  Harold had an “aha” moment. The mother hadn’t taken the girl to the toilet above their camp. Instead, she’d got turned around, had followed a different path downriver. The “loo with a view” was the pit toile
t up the hill from the lower campsite. He told the woman to show him exactly where she found it and followed her to the toilet, which was situated among several big boulders that walled it from sight, giving privacy. One of the boulders, up on the side of the hill, had a small tree growing out of a crack. Jeanine pointed to a stub of branch on a yellow pine, a spot that was well above her head. That’s where the shoe had been hanging from its shoelace. She’d had to use a stick to reach it down.

  “Carol Ann told me about the scarecrow,” she said. Harold nodded, lost in thought.

  “Aren’t you going to ask how she is?”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s sleeping like the dead. But she kept me up until four in the morning talking. Talking and crying. She said she’d come to a decision. She was going to leave her husband, there was nothing he could say that would dissuade her now. Just thought you’d like to know the result of your little escapade last night.”

  Harold started to speak.

  “No, you don’t have to say anything. She came on this trip to put some distance from her circumstances and make a decision about her future. It’s the right decision, but you helped her make it. I’m not saying you took advantage of a vulnerable woman because you didn’t know she was, but it had consequences. See, it might be over for you, but when she wakes up it isn’t going to have ended for her.”

  She stood, kicking her toe into the ground. Harold didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t mean to sound harsh. Meeting you is probably the best thing that could have happened. You want the truth? I’m jealous. It hurts my ego. I’m her best friend. I wanted me to be the one who got her to leave the bastard. Then a guy with wolf tracks on his arm shows up. Yeah, she told me about the wolf tracks. She went on about them. I just thought you ought to know.”

  Harold went back to his camp and crawled inside his tent. He wasn’t a one-night-stand kind of man; it’s what he told himself after every one-night stand. When he’d been with Martha Ettinger, he hadn’t looked at another woman until he did, and that was his ex-wife, who had a hold on him that he had never been able to break. He couldn’t live with her and he couldn’t live without her and it was a circle and most of the time it was hell and once in a while it was heaven. He’d been in the part that was hell for months now. If he needed an excuse, which he didn’t. Harold was a man of very few regrets.

  “Well, the turtle came out of his shell all right,” he said aloud.

  He was exhausted, and sleep came almost immediately.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Born Pissed Off

  Sam Meslik scratched his left armpit through a hole in his T-shirt while he watched a curtain of dust lift over the bridge at Camp Baker. The T-shirt’s logo read MASTER BAITER—ALWAYS FIDDLING WITH MY WORM. Sam pulled it over his head, trading it for a cleaner one as a champagne-colored SUV turned onto the access road. He tugged on the hem of the shirt—this one read SHOW ME YOUR BOBBERS—straightened to his full six foot three, licked the fingers of his right hand, and ran them through the long ringlets of his graying, copper-colored hair.

  “My ‘Sunday go-to meeting,’” he said to Sean Stranahan as the RAV4 ground to a stop.

  “If I didn’t know you better,” Sean said, “I’d think you were trying to make an impression.”

  Sean’s eyes scanned the vanity plate that read MYIONU—“My Eye on You.” It was the title of a television series that aired on Fox affiliate stations in central and southwestern Montana. Lillian Cartwright, the writer, director, producer, and host, was known for her looks as much as her take-no-prisoners reporting style. Sean had variously heard her called Look-At-Me Lilly, for her vanity; ChapStick Lilly, for her habit of applying ChapStick and drawing attention to her lips; and Lactose Lilly, for cavalierly exposing a nipple for the camera at a McDonald’s, sneaking it past the affiliate censors by assuring them it was prosthetic. The segment was on public breast-feeding and her on-air proclamation, “It’s a mammary gland. Half the population have them. Get over it,” became a slogan when feminist protesters picketed the state capital in response to the introduction of a House bill that would ban breast-feeding in restaurants.

  As Sean recalled what he’d heard about her, the woman in question stepped out of the SUV. Older than she looked on camera, a trim-waisted blonde, she wore a tropical-wear shirt the color of a Georgia peach, which Sean had read she’d been once, before dropping the accent, the dear-me manner, and the smothering veil of politeness. She ran her ChapStick routine and approached in a strong athletic walk with her right hand extended. They shook hands and, all business, hands on hips, blowing a wayward strand of hair from her eye, she told Sean and Sam to haul her gear and to be careful, it was expensive.

  “We aren’t even in the water yet,” Sam said out of the corner of his mouth. “Already being treated like help from the neck down. You get what I mean, Kemosabe?”

  It took the two men three trips—camp gear, camera cases, reflectors, even a portable generator to run the lighting equipment for sitting-around-the-fire night scenes—and all the while she was drumming her fingers and looking preoccupied, her cornflower eyes focused at some indeterminate distance. Sam looked at Sean and, as he grunted under the weight of a boat bag, said it was good they decided to bring Sean’s thirteen-foot Avon raft in addition to a canoe, rather than two canoes as originally planned.

  “Shuttles arranged?” she asked.

  Sam said they were.

  “You reserve the campsites I requested?”

  He said he did, adding that it didn’t matter now that the river was closed to the public. They could camp wherever they wanted.

  “But we’re on schedule, right? They’re going to be waiting. I don’t tolerate tardy and I don’t like surprises.”

  “I’m not their keeper but I suspect they’ll be ready. How could they resist the chance of seeing you?”

  That brought her head back an inch. “I beg your pardon.”

  The slabs of muscle on Sam’s shoulders lifted and fell. “I’m just saying it could get old, sixty miles of your attitude.”

  “Are we going to have a problem? This is my show and you’ve been paid generously. You couldn’t buy this kind of exposure for your business.”

  “No problem.”

  She looked the big man up and down. “Do you have something else you can wear? You look like a derelict. Do you really want the camera to record what a pig you are?”

  “Why thank you.”

  She cocked her head. She looked from Sam to Sean as the hardness in her face fractionally lost the support of the underlying muscles. A smile came and went, and the voice, when she spoke, held a note of reflection.

  “I was born pissed off,” she said. “People come around to me or they don’t. But you get what you see. I consider that better than what you get from the nodders of the world. In my business it’s either take what you want or play the puppet, and some of the guys I’ve had to work with, grabbing at you, talking like you weren’t in the room, saying ‘bitch’ under their breath, it gets old. Subtract five IQ points and you’re dealing with a geranium.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t really care as long as I get the story.”

  Sam pulled his T-shirt over his head, revealing a pelt of hair that would insulate a black bear in November.

  “Hey, man, the dude abides,” he said. “This better?” He buttoned up a khaki shirt with his Rainbow Sam insignia stitched above the left breast pocket.

  She nodded. “Just try to keep food out of your beard.”

  “You know, I’m already starting to like you,” he said.

  Sean felt like a bystander.

  “Like I said,” Cartwright said, “I don’t care.”

  * * *

  —

  That was the note they pushed off on, Sean manning the oars of his raft, Cartwright on the swivel seat in the bow, already with her camer
a in hand, Sam out ahead by half a bend of river in the canoe and soon gone from sight.

  When she turned the camera on him, Sean smiled.

  “Don’t smile,” she said.

  He didn’t and the river did the work, Sean dipping an oar only for direction. He pointed out a mink, slipping like spilled oil through the bankside grasses. It was being shadowed by a kit from the spring’s litter and she swiveled the camera and caught them as they hunted.

  “It’s helpful to have birds and animals to cut away to,” she said. “They give movement to the piece, plus they create empathy for what you’re trying to get across. If this mine goes in and the tailings pond ruptures, if trout die as a result, that mink suffers, too. And the little one, for a videographer, that’s like striking gold. Or in this case, copper.”

  Sean nodded.

  “You don’t have to be afraid to talk to me, you know. I just get wound up tight for a story and I thought your friend might try to highjack my trip, and there’s only room for one captain on a shoot. Once I get some good footage, my pulse rate will come down. I can be a good old girl. I work hard. I don’t complain. I can sleep on the cold hard ground. I’m not a bitch.” Suddenly there was a flash of smile. “She said.” And, a beat later: “Said like a bitch.”

  Then she laughed, a wonderful peal of laughter with the South in it, and Sean saw she was like many interesting people he’d met, a person of layers, one you only got to know over time.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” she was saying. “It makes me nervous not having a dedicated cameraman. I’m good behind the lens, but I’m better in front of it, but there was no room in the boat. My Eye on You is a regional show. We’re not even in every media market in the state. This is a big opportunity for me. The Smith was just named the fourth most endangered river in the country by American Rivers. People trip over themselves when they talk about it, the grandeur, the splendor.”