A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith McCafferty

  “Gentlemen, my lady,” McCaine said, “the only other metal with that richness to its texture is gold.” His tanned face had a copper tint in the sunlight that angled through the windows.

  To Sean, it all seemed like a lot of copper.

  But Bart Trueblood had been right. They’d completed the tour of the house, and not a drop of blood in sight.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The First Scarecrow

  It took the better part of an hour for Harold and Marcus to skirt the cliffs and work up through a ravine to the upper plateau. But once on top, finding their way along the rim to a spot directly below the buzzards was simple. They found themselves at the top of a cleft in the cliff face that they’d marked from below as the best route to climb down to the cave.

  Harold looked at his son for a sign of nervousness but saw none. “Don’t worry,” Marcus said as he lashed Cochise to a tree. “My mom’s dad had some Mohawk in him. He worked on the Sears Tower, one of those guys you see sitting on a beam and eating lunch a thousand feet above the pavement. Must have rubbed off. I’m not afraid of heights.”

  Harold wanted to ask Marcus about his mother, what she’d been like, but knew this wasn’t the time. He told Marcus to wait until he was in the cave before following, and stepped down into the cleft. The path, if you could call it that, was no wider than Harold’s boot, but there were plenty of handholds, including a few stunted trees. Still, it was a sheer drop to the boulders some three hundred feet below, heart in your throat climbing if you stopped to think about it. The trick was not to. The wrinkle in the rock face went down at an angle and Harold had descended perhaps thirty feet when the scarecrow they’d spotted from their canoes came into view. Harold glanced at it but didn’t allow it to distract him until he’d safely contoured the cliff face and entered the cave mouth.

  From the river the scarecrow had looked as conspicuous as a black widow spider on a scoop of caramel ice cream, and now Harold saw why. It was made of bark-on spruce boughs, dark and twisted, while the color of the limestone cliff rock was ochre with a mottling of yellow. To the right of the cave entrance, on a large boulder blossoming with white lichen, four words were scrolled in black paint: Not on my watch.

  The scarecrow was not upright but tilting forward, so that it appeared to be leaning out of the cave mouth. Like the one Harold had seen in the shed, the head was woven from red willow branches, with a hunk of rotting meat pierced by the stick that served as its neck. With the warming of the day, hornets that were sticking to the meat were beginning to buzz. As Harold watched, teardrops of blood formed on the meat and dripped with silent regularity into the void. The effigy appeared to be supported by God or sorcery, and it wasn’t until Harold walked around the back of it that he saw the cords that extended from the branches to the recesses of the cave, where they were looped around jagged rocks on the cave floor. The engineering of the suspension was almost as impressive as the scarecrow itself.

  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he began to make out pictographs—swirling red lines that resembled bleeding claw marks, a bearlike figure, two animals that looked vaguely like turtles.

  Harold turned around to see his son ducking into the cave, his camera slung over his shoulder.

  “Pretty cool,” were the first words out of his mouth. “But the scarecrow, man, that head, it’s messed up.” He wrinkled his nose.

  “He’s putting venison in the heads to attract birds so that the floaters will spot the scarecrows.”

  “How do you know it’s a he?”

  “I don’t, but be surprised if it wasn’t.”

  “Yeah, I get you. The Y chromosome. We’re the fuckups, no explanation necessary.” He was taking photos of the scarecrow, then stepped toward the back of the cave as Harold held up a hand.

  “I haven’t examined the floor yet. Give me a couple minutes to trace any shoe impressions.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Harold switched on his flashlight. The dust on the cave floor had been swept into swirling lines, as if raked with a giant comb.

  “Looks like somebody dragged a Christmas tree,” Marcus said.

  Harold nodded. He looked around for a pine bough that could have left the marks.

  “He probably had a branch and threw it out of the cave when he left,” Marcus said. “Covering his tracks.”

  Harold nodded. “Are you filming or just taking pictures?”

  “Both. I got extra batteries so I should be good.”

  “Do you want to look around, see some of your heritage?”

  Marcus stepped forward and peered at the pictographs. While he did, Harold scraped up a pepper of granular dust and light gray pea gravel he noticed in a corner of the cave. It was bone residue. He placed it in one of his chest pockets, wondering if it was human and, if so, what it meant. Marcus had been preoccupied with the cave art Harold pocketed the gravel without drawing attention to his discovery.

  “I like the abstracts,” Marcus said at length. “These finger trailings.” He shot with the camera. “And the turtles. A lot of tribes consider them magic. Because they live on land and water, they’re travelers between this world and the underworld.”

  “What tribe do you think made them?”

  “A test again, huh?”

  “No. You know more history of this canyon than I do.”

  He said it as a flat statement and saw Marcus looking for the motive behind the words. Finding nothing, he shrugged.

  “This was Flathead country in the 1600s and 1700s, far as you could ride in a month. Problem was the Flathead didn’t have no horses. So the Shoshone came and drove them out. They had the horses, that gave them the upper hand. Then the Blackfeet, your people. They traded with the Cree and Assiniboine for guns, which they had got from the French. So they had horses and guns, that gave them the upper hand. Then the white man came with the smallpox. But the kiss of death was killing the buffalo. They say it was the white man’s rifles, but our people had guns, too. We shot the hell out of the herds, though nobody wants to rewrite that into the history.”

  He shrugged. “Bullets don’t care who’s behind the trigger. You get rid of the buffalo, you get rid of the people. Anyone who stuck it out in this country, the soldiers drove them away. That place we put in, Camp Baker, used to be Fort Logan. Whole reason for its existence was protecting settlers from the likes of our grandfathers.”

  Harold smiled. He was no longer surprised at the two faces Marcus revealed to him, like opposite sides of the same coin. One was tarnished, the tough rez kid with his sarcastic wit, his seen-too-much-of-the-world eyes, his understandable skepticism and his reluctance to engage this man who was trying to step into his life. And then the flip side, the intelligent, interested young man with a winning smile behind the camera, whom Harold had caught looking at him when he thought he wouldn’t notice, perhaps even looking up to him. Marcus had taken advantage of his education, Harold thought, and was not yet hardened to the point where he couldn’t find his way back toward hope.

  Marcus was speaking again. Harold followed his eyes to the walls.

  “I’m guessing it’s blood-based. That iron oxide was the key. They’d use animal fat as a binder, make a liquid paint. Pretty durable considering the fragility of the rock, all this limestone like to crumble just if you look at it. Who made it? Who knows? Could be people from a lot of tribes.”

  “But what does it tell us about the person who put the scarecrow here?”

  “The art? Nothing.”

  “No, the fact that he put one here.”

  “Another test, huh? But okay, tells me he isn’t just getting lucky. You have to figure for every fifty caves, there’s like, what, art in one or two of them? He’s not just some floater with a spray can tagging a little graffiti, making a little mischief. He knows the paths of the grandfathers.”

  “That’s my feeling, too. What do you t
hink he’s trying to say?”

  “Don’t fuck with my river.”

  “As in, please don’t fuck with my river?”

  “More like, ‘Fuck with my river at your peril, dude.’”

  Harold nodded, though he didn’t agree. He was building a profile of the scarecrow maker that contradicted Marcus’s statement.

  He walked back to the cave entrance and peered down at the sandbar where they had dragged their canoes. As he watched the light dance on the water, a blue raft nosed around a bend upriver, a man at the oars, one in the stern, and a woman hefting something on her shoulder. Harold lifted a hand and the man at the oars did the same.

  “You know that guy?” Marcus had his camera lens directed toward the river.

  “The tracker I was telling you about. Sean. The woman, she’s the one making the film I told you about.”

  “I don’t want to talk to no white people. They fucked us, man. They gave us the pox.”

  Harold gave him a look as Marcus shrugged. “I hate them. Just telling the truth. Up on the rez, they’re either gassing up at the Town Pump, look at you like a monkey in a zoo when they think you’re not watching, or they own some store and look at you like you’re a thief.”

  “I understand why you feel that way. I did, too, for years. But hate is like a cancer. It makes you dead to life.”

  “You’re a psychiatrist now?”

  “No. Just someone who’s worked with quite a few white people. Something that helped me is remembering their ancestors were tribal, too. You scratch them, they bleed the same color you do. I had a grizzly up in the Madison Range toss me like a toy, lost a lot of blood. When it came to looking for a transfusion, nobody much cared about the color of my skin.”

  Marcus shook his head. “I still don’t trust them. You got scars?”

  Harold unbuttoned his khaki shirt and pulled it off, showing the ropelike scar tissue on his upper chest and left arm. He remembered the woman, Carol Ann, tracing the welts with the tips of her fingers.

  “Looks like you have snakes breeding under there.”

  Harold could see that he was impressed.

  “My mom never said anything about you fighting a bear.”

  “She wouldn’t have known. This was a long time after.” Harold saw the opportunity to ask the question he’d been wanting to ask since the first time he’d met his son. He asked it now, saw the cloud come over Marcus’s face in the better light of the cave entrance. Marcus leaned over the void and spat. When he looked at Harold, it was the dark side of the coin that had claimed the expression on his face.

  “I asked her about you. She said you were dead, that I was better off never knowing you.”

  Harold felt his heart sink.

  “What, you going to tell me you were a good guy, she’s making it all up?”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t matter, anyway, does it? You weren’t there. Good guy, bad guy, what’s the difference?”

  “She didn’t even know my name.”

  “Just some drunk she picked up in Rocky Boy, huh?”

  “We picked each other up.” Harold knew how lame that must sound.

  “If she didn’t know your name, how come my uncle knew to call you?”

  “I don’t know. The rez is a small place. Maybe she recognized me later.” Or maybe she recognized me in you, he wanted to say.

  At Indian Springs, when they were collecting water, Harold had brought his face down to the surface to show Marcus a sculpin, a small, catfishlike creature whose mottled back perfectly matched the colors of the river bottom. For a few heartbeats, their reflections on the surface had been side by side, slightly wavering. Harold had already seen that Marcus walked like him and had other mannerisms that reminded him of himself, and the boy who stared up at him from the surface was his own image, or would be with time.

  “But you couldn’t remember her face?” Marcus said, not letting go of it. “You did what you did and you never saw her again.”

  “If I did, I don’t remember. That’s why I drink cider now, Marcus.”

  “You don’t remember nothing ’bout her?” It was an accusation.

  “She had green eyes.”

  “She was Turtle Clan.”

  “I figured that,” Harold said.

  “You know, you ain’t stuck with me if you got second thoughts. I just came because I was curious. It’s not like I’m looking for a dad.”

  “No.”

  Harold felt the silence in the cave. It seemed an odd place to be having the conversation, and he reminded himself that people had been having conversations in caves like this one, overlooking this canyon, for more than sixty thousand years. A long time, but no longer than sons had fought with their fathers.

  “When we go down there,” he said, “keep your head up. I know lowering your eyes is showing deference to your elders, but to them it’s a sign of weakness, that you don’t think you’re as good as they are.”

  “This guy, the tracker, will he know who I am?”

  “No.”

  “So are you going to tell him?”

  “Yes.”

  Look where secrets have gotten me, he wanted to say. They’ve only stolen seventeen years of my life.

  Instead, he said, “You’ll be fine. Just be yourself.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Writing on the Wall

  By the time they climbed down to water level, the canoe with Sam Meslik and Clint McCaine had joined the rafting party and everyone was sitting on logs, eating lunch. There were handshakes all around, Sean commenting on how much Marcus resembled Harold, that add seventeen years and thirty pounds and they could be the same man.

  Lillian Cartwright stood to take Harold’s hand.

  “Heard about you,” Harold said.

  “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  “I don’t.”

  Cartwright focused her lens on Harold and asked if he minded.

  “The camera stole my soul a long time ago,” he told her.

  She asked him about the scarecrow. He shrugged, the tracks on his arms rising and falling.

  “Just what you see from here,” he said. “It’s made from spruce wood. Bark-on, that’s why it’s dark. Red willow to weave the pieces together, venison on a stick for a head. The one back at Camp Baker was driftwood, but the construction followed the same blueprint, right down to the meat.”

  “I was just asking Sean if we could go up there after lunch. I’d like to film the pictographs.”

  “Are you afraid of heights?”

  “No. Well, maybe a little.”

  “Then not a good idea. You’ll be coming across another scarecrow a few miles down the river. My understanding is you won’t have to swallow your heart to climb up to it.”

  “Any idea who did this?” Cartwright asked.

  “He’s a tall man with big feet.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You heard about the little girl who lost her shoe and thought she saw a scarecrow?” He waited for her to nod, and told her why he’d made the deduction.

  “That’s why they pay him the big bucks,” Sean Stranahan said.

  Cartwright didn’t smile, just let the camera roll. She made a circular gesture with her left hand. Go on.

  Harold looked up at the cave. He wasn’t a person you could hurry.

  “He’s athletic. Safe to say he’s not afraid of heights. He cut the branches up on top, I’d say an ax, but it was no easy task getting them down to the cave. Like I told Marcus, he’s highly motivated, a man on a mission. He’s self-reliant, and again, if it’s the same guy who was up at the girl’s camp, nonconfrontational. May seem contradictory, but he’s not trying to draw attention to himself. The mine, yes, but he’d just as soon stay in the shadows. And he’s smart. He knows people will be look
ing for him, and he’s doing a decent job of covering his tracks. If he’s traveling by boat, I’m guessing he’s floating at night and hiding in the daytime.”

  “Wouldn’t that be dangerous?” Cartwright spoke as she panned the camera across the rough surface of the river. “It’s hard enough to dodge all the rocks in the daytime.”

  “It is. But we’re two days off the full, plenty of moonlight for the next few nights. I’m guessing that’s no accident. I’d bet his first trip through the canyon last month also coincided with a waxing moon. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “And he knows where the caves are with rock art,” Marcus said. “It’s not common knowledge, so that tells us he knows the canyon. Maybe has a history with it.”

  Harold looked at Marcus. He was mildly surprised that he’d offered his opinion. McCaine, who’d been rubbing the head of Marcus’s dog, swallowed the last of his sandwich and cleared his throat.

  “You’re forgetting something,” he said. He tapped his chest with his right forefinger. “He’s trying to make yours truly look like an asshole.”

  “Probably no fan,” Harold agreed. “Do you have any enemies who would do this sort of thing?”

  “Do I have enemies?” His look was bemused. “I’ll have to give that one some thought.” He cocked his head for theatrical effect. “Maybe that gentleman at the other end of the log. What do you say, Bart? Are you my enemy?”

  “Better than half the people in the state of Montana wouldn’t shed a tear if you drowned in this river,” Trueblood said. “In fact they’d consider it just deserts.”

  “I don’t think you have that figure right, Bart.”

  “Oh, but I do.”

  “Then I guess I need to work on my message.”

  “Why? It’s simple enough. You want to make yourself rich, and to do that you’re willing to poison the Eden you grew up in.”