A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith McCafferty

  “Sure enough,” McCaine said. And then a pause, both men’s eyes swimming away to a land and time as faded as the pages of the books. A silence stretched into the corners of the overhang before Marcus’s voice broke it.

  “War and Peace,” he said.

  He read the name on the inside cover. “Bartholomew P. Trueblood.” He held it out for the lens of Cartwright’s camera.

  “My old man,” Trueblood said. His eyes come back into focus.

  He nodded to himself. “Dad would stop in bookstores when we were on the road. Pick up paperbacks in the dime bins. I can remember him saying to me, ‘What do you think? Would Scotty like this?’ He would have given him the books, but Scotty always insisted on trading. Usually whistles or animal figures. You spend the winter in caves, you have a lot of hours to whittle wood. The last time I climbed up here, years ago now, there were still some of his whittlings lying around. I think old Scotty liked the Russian writers because the books had lots of pages. He wasn’t always who people thought he was.”

  “What do you mean?” Marcus said.

  Harold studied his son, once again surprised that he was taking the reins of a conversation until he realized that Marcus was speaking for Lillian Cartwright, prompting the others to develop the story without the need for her to interject questions.

  “Well,” Trueblood said, “he’d take a bath at the house, shave, put on clean clothes he kept there, and my dad would drop him off in town. Scotty knew people there. He’d stay a week or two, once or twice a year.”

  “What Bart’s trying to say,” McCaine said, “is he wasn’t a hermit per se. The ‘people’ Bart is talking about”—McCaine scrolled quote marks with his fingers—“was a schoolteacher in White Sulphur Springs whose husband was killed in the First World War. Scotty was in the same regiment, and after the armistice he would visit her.”

  “How do you know this?” Marcus asked.

  “Because White Sulphur was a town of five hundred souls. Everybody knew everybody’s business. The story is that they had a child and the woman, I can’t recall her name, she tried to make an honest man of Scotty, but he wouldn’t leave the river. You heard about that, right, Bart? About the woman?”

  Trueblood nodded. “What I was told is she and her son left the state, went back to where she was from, Florida, I think it was. Same place he was from. Old Scotty wound up ranch-handing for the X-Bar. Room and board if you count sleeping on frozen ground as ‘room.’ He rode the property boundary with a fence spreader and a few coils of two-strand barbed. Take a week to make the circuit, mend a fence, put up a post, round up a few stray cattle, then do it all again. No more lonely than running a trap line, I suppose. Died when his ATV rolled over on him. One of those three-wheelers. Couldn’t get out from underneath and froze to death.”

  “I’m not sure about that last part, Bart. I heard he rode a horse. Horse came back and he didn’t. Had a heart attack and froze to death, that’s what my dad told me.”

  Bart Trueblood nodded. He spoke for the gathered. “That’s the way it is out here. You don’t get two sides to a story. You get two stories.”

  “Sure enough,” McCaine said. “But old Scotty wouldn’t have wanted to go any other way. He’d want his last view to be of the sky. I hope it was a horse. Least then, he’d have had somebody to talk to.”

  As the men reminisced, Harold had let half his mind and one eye return to the scarecrow. He walked over to unknot the red bandana. The fewer floaters who were drawn up here the better, he thought. As the knot ends came free, he noticed a long hair snagged on one of the thin willow branches. Harold buttoned the hair inside the breast pocket of his shirt. He looked down, and there, as he half expected, was another little mound of dust and bone gravel. He pocketed that, too, keeping the gravel from the two locations in separate pockets.

  A half hour later they were back at the boats, with another hour and a half seeing them to the mouth of Tenderfoot Creek, and, a few hundred feet below the marriage of the waters, their destination, Canyon Depth. While the tents were going up, Harold found a couple plastic bags and deposited the bone gravel he’d found at both scarecrow sites, zipped them securely, and used a black marker he kept in his fishing vest to mark the two locations, in case analysis revealed they were from different sources.

  He trusted his instincts as another man might trust the North Star, and though he didn’t understand his reluctance to share this evidence with the party, especially Sean Stranahan, he didn’t question his decision.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Ghost Town

  It was early evening in a month when days died the death of a thousand cuts. Harold didn’t need a watch to tell him that sunset was still hours away, and with the question of dinner to resolve, he assembled his six-weight Meiser fly rod, a gift from Martha Ettinger several Christmases ago, and hiked from the campsite to the junction, leaving Marcus behind to put up the tent. Marcus wanted to stay in camp to help Lillian Cartwright set up her reflectors for the filming, and, regardless, the truth was Harold was the kind of fisherman who liked to fish alone.

  Through the course of the day the river had swollen with runoff, its opaque current interrupted by a line of silver-black where Tenderfoot Creek added a jolt of clear current.

  Harold opened his fly box. In off-color water any color fly will do as long as it’s black, and the first cast with a rubber-legged woolly bugger shining with copper and blue Mylar strands—a fly Sean Stranahan had given him—brought a strike. The foot-long rainbow quivered, then went rigid when Harold smacked the back of its head with a stone. He shucked the insides, ran his thumbnail to clean the blood line under the spine, cast again into the seam where the colors kissed, and was rewarded with another strike and a fish the same size. A third trout would fill the pan and it took him a while, but he got it, a brown with mandarin-colored flesh—the meat of the two rainbows was blush pink—and might have caught more if he’d had the inclination.

  He didn’t. Unlike many fly fishermen, Harold was not a sport angler who practiced catch-and-release. He was a predator, and like other predators, he did not hunt, or in this case fish, after he had satisfied his need. In no hurry to return to camp, he decided to explore a little of the creek bottom. The GPS the ranger had given him had a collection of waypoints that had been added before there was any talk of scarecrows. One marked the junction where he stood, with another nearby but on a higher contour. That one was marked “Ghost Town.”

  Intrigued, Harold found a path that switchbacked uphill from the creek and arrived on a tongue of flatland bordered on three sides by steep cliffs. Several acres in extent, the plot had Homestead Act written all over it. The main structure—a tongue-and-groove cabin built from cottonwood logs with a river stone chimney—was more or less intact. Four outbuildings whose original purposes had been lost over time hadn’t fared well. The roofs were gone. The four-pane windows were broken or boarded up, the chinking between the logs eaten away, so that what Harold was looking at were skeletons of a century past, echoes of a way of life whose participants had never known anything but toil and sweat and tears and poverty, and for whom Harold had no empathy whatever.

  True, it was soldiers who had driven his ancestors from the river. But the white locusts, as Harold’s grandfather had called the settlers, put down the roots that grew into the trees that multiplied into the forests of humanity that barred any chance of his people’s return to their homeland. The bitterness in Harold’s heart was well buried, but it was there even as he did the white man’s bidding. It was there—it was not lost on him—even as he searched for a person who had the temerity to question those who line their pockets with the profits of the earth, whose assurances reminded Harold of the treaties imposed upon his people, and that were lies before the ink dried on the paper.

  The homestead had long since been picked over by human scavengers. What was left, except for the structures, were a few old st
ove parts, coils of wire and various other metal artifacts, rusting at their leisure into the earth. It was more to satisfy a mild curiosity than with any expectation of finding something of interest that Harold pushed opened the door of the house, which had once been secured by leather hasps but was now held in place by wishful thinking and a few loops of baling wire. He took one step inside.

  And stopped. He tapped his right hand to his hip, where his sidearm would be, the belt there holstering only his collapsible wading staff. Good for coaxing snakes out of the path, not a lot else.

  Someone had been living here. More accurately, he had been occupying the few square feet of floor space cleared of debris. Harold gave the single room a once-over while his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The plank floor was strewn with the detritus of dreams—a woodstove but no pipe, a stack of white-painted windows, the glass panes cracked, harkening, Harold thought, the early years of occupancy, when there might be hopes of expansion. A bedspring tilted against a wall; a rolled mattress spilled its guts where mice had gnawed the pilled ticking. There were two paint cans, the cemented pigments cracked in whorls. A pine table stood on legs turned by a lathe. One piece of handicraft puzzled Harold until he realized that it was a baby’s crib makeshifted from odd pieces of board—the shoddy, haphazard craftsmanship, in contrast to the well-made pine table, made him wonder if the child had come on the heels of the first hard times. Standing against the wall behind the crib was a metal pantry with rounded shoulders, the drawers rusted shut, its facade painted in a motif of red flowers on elegantly curved stems. It was the only woman’s touch in the dwelling.

  Harold turned his attention to the other side of the cabin, where a military cot stood on steel legs. Beside it, on an overturned wood crate, was a kerosene lantern. Above the cot, empty loops of jute cord dangled from J-hooks screwed into the roof timbers. This was for hanging a mattress or a bedroll, anything you wanted to keep from the industrious teeth of rodents.

  He peered down into a wood-slat bucket positioned under a gaping hole in the roof. An inch of evil-looking water floated with dead spiders and earwigs. As a storm had moved through the area a little more than a week ago, Harold would have expected more water. That meant to him that the bucket had been emptied within the past few days, during which the periods of rain had been light and intermittent.

  A large wooden picture frame hung not quite evenly on the wall behind the cot. Harold flicked away a few clinging flakes of gold leaf with his thumbnail. He fished his headlamp out of his pocket and switched it on to cut through the gloom. A sepia-toned photograph was trapped under the edge of a partial pane of glass. The photo showed signs of having been folded, the paper worn white in the folds, so that it appeared in quadrants. In two of the quadrants a couple danced, the woman with curly dark hair, her skirt flying, the man wearing a shirt with a small checked design buttoned to the collar. Their faces were blurred, though not so badly that Harold couldn’t have picked them out of a room of square dancers. For a square dance it clearly was, the silhouette of the caller, a man wearing a straw cowboy hat and holding a fiddle, elevated on a stage in the background. There was a banner against the wall behind the caller. It was grainy and out of focus, but Harold thought he could make the first letter out as an “I” or maybe an “L,” another perhaps a “V.” All the other dancers were blurred to anonymity—the camera’s focus was on the couple in the foreground, who danced side by side in what Harold recognized as promenade position.

  He smiled to himself. Martha Ettinger was a square dancer. She’d dragged him to a dance once that was held in a big barn up out of Wilsall—that’s how he knew about promenade position. He thought of her for a second, Martha, then put the thought aside as one might take a shovelful of dirt from one place and set it in another. Not being disrespectful, just being Harold.

  He worked the photograph out with his fingertips, taking care not to cut himself, and turned it over. The back was unstained by normal exposure, leading Harold to believe that the photo was a reproduction of a much older photograph. His first thought was that the dancer was the hermit. Not that the old man had actually hung the frame. Far too many larcenous fingers had passed down the river for anything like a photograph to have remained over the decades, but that MacAllen was its subject. And the woman? Perhaps she was the schoolteacher McCaine had mentioned.

  He took several photographs of the eight-by-ten, then replaced it under the glass. Harold thought of the mysterious Scarecrow God, as he had come to think of him. Could he have chosen this place as a base of his operations? And if so, what was his relationship to the couple in the picture?

  He flicked his headlamp from the low to the high setting, engaging all five LEDs. He cast the bright circle along the walls and then the floor. He was looking for something, and it was the breeze sifting through the gaps in the logs, lifting the dust of mouse feces and making him cough, that brought it to light. A hair had been trapped between one of the cracks in the glass and was nearly invisible until stirred by the air. Plucking it, Harold suddenly felt claustrophobic and stepped back out of the cabin into the slant of light.

  He was aware that there could be eyes on him, and up until this point he had done nothing that any inquisitive boater who stumbled upon the homestead might not have done also. Like others who move about unarmed in those pockets of the wild still ruled by tooth and claw, Harold had a finely honed sense of danger. But the air did not carry the electrical charge that on other occasions had made him aware of unwanted company. That, coupled with finding no food, water, or sleeping bag at the homestead, made him think that the occupant had left, taking his provisions with him. That was on one hand. On the other, the photograph suggested to Harold that the squatter planned on returning.

  Rounding the last bend before camp, he saw a long filament of fly line unfurling over mid-current. The angler was out of sight, but Harold knew it was Sean Stranahan. Stranahan painted the water with the most elegant line that Harold had ever seen. But dirty water was dirty water, and at Harold’s approach Stranahan’s shrug told him that all the fish must still be in the river.

  Harold explained what he’d found, keeping his voice low, adding that he intended to stake out the homestead on the chance someone might return.

  “Let’s take a look at the hairs,” Stranahan said.

  Harold brought them out, setting them side by side on a dark slab of basalt. The one he’d found with the effigy was straight, about a foot long and a dirty yellow color. The other, the one the wind had revealed in the cabin, was perhaps half the length, kinked, and gray.

  “Different man? Same man?” Stranahan said.

  Harold thought about it. There were the obvious differences, but if the shorter, curly one was beard hair, as he surmised, they still could have come from the same person.

  “I think same,” he said. “Now look at this.” He placed the plastic bags with the bone gravel on the rock.

  “Human?” Sean asked.

  “No way of telling without analysis. But they were placed in neat little piles, in a dark corner of both caves. Like in a ritual. Someone scattering the ashes of a loved one.”

  “If that’s the case, then they’re from the same person.”

  “That’s the way I read it.”

  Sean again looked at the hairs. “Long hair and a beard in recluse country. Doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”

  “No,” Harold said, “but it’s got me thinking. If this scarecrow guy is holed up at the homestead, where’s he keep his boat? I looked up and down for quite a while, no trace that a boat had been dragged up from the bank.”

  “Maybe he’s floating. On his way to build a scarecrow.”

  “Then what’s he do when he’s done? Leave the boat downriver, hike back here to lay his head?”

  “You’re right, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “What if there isn’t a boat? We just assumed he had to be a floater. But you look
at the map, this river twists like a snake. You can float for an hour and be lucky to cover a mile as the crow files. But if you climb above the cliffs, it’s a plateau. You can walk ten miles on top, cover twenty river miles. And there’s hardly anyone lives up there. A lot less chance of being spotted than if he was on the river.”

  Stranahan nodded. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “We can split the watch.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I think I’ll go alone.”

  He raised his chin toward the tents standing on the bench. “Lillian, if she knew about the homestead, she’d want to set up klieg lights.”

  “She wants you on camera tonight.”

  “She’ll have her hands plenty full with those two. Tell her that Marcus and I will stay with the party all day tomorrow; that ought to pacify her.”

  “How will I explain your absence?”

  “Maybe I like to sleep apart from everybody, listen to what the river says. You know, me being your mystical stereotype.”

  “What about the others? The photo you found, if you ran it by McCaine and Trueblood, they might be able to ID him. They knew MacAllen.”

  “Maybe, but that doesn’t change what I need to do. You still have those binoculars, the Zeiss?”

  Stranahan nodded.

  “I’ll borrow them, you don’t mind.”

  “All right, but let me have a look at the picture?”

  Harold showed him the photo he’d taken with his phone.

  “I thought it best to leave the original in place. I didn’t want to arouse any suspicion if he comes back.”

  Stranahan, enlarging the image, said, “Not to change the subject, but we’re friends, right? Martha and I, that doesn’t get in the way, does it?”

  “Not a problem. Martha makes her own way.”

  “You never mentioned your son before. I just thought maybe—”

  “Nothing to do with it. His mom, she died a couple months ago. I didn’t know I had a son. He didn’t know he had a father. I introduced him to you this morning, I had to think about it. Do I say, ‘This is Marcus, my friend’? Or do I say, ‘This is, Marcus, my son’? I do it one way, he thinks I’m ashamed of him or something. I do it the other way, then I’m being presumptuous about the relationship, man who’s never been in his life before.”