A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith McCafferty

  “I see what you mean. He’s up there leading the discussion. He’s an impressive young man.”

  “I’m finding that out. He has two or three faces. He’s not sure which one to put on about half the time.”

  Stranahan nodded. He’d had the same experience with Martha’s younger son, David. Sometimes they were best buddies; other times David found fault in anything he said and looked at Sean as an intruder.

  “Anybody get shoved into the flames yet?”

  Stranahan smiled. “Nobody’s on fire, but then it’s early, the alcohol hasn’t kicked in. That bit of bromance you witnessed, it wasn’t their better natures coming to the fore. They have a bet. The first to blow his stack owes the other a bottle of Scotch. Label of choice, hundred-dollar limit. Sam doesn’t think they’ll make it through dinner.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Where Love Flows

  “It’s foolproof,” McCaine was saying. He tossed his paper plate into the fire, the greasy residue of Sam’s elk steaks flaming up like kerosene. “I know that sounds presumptuous, I could see Bart rolling his eyes if it wasn’t dark. But if you really studied mining, you’d know there’s nothing to fear. No, I’m not conveniently forgetting that one of our extraction tunnels will reach underneath Farewell Creek, and yes, I’m aware that it is a spawning tributary for trout and that it has an unfortunate name, as our detractors seldom fail to point out. But our mining operation ensures that water cannot run out of the mine and contaminate the creek. All the water used in the extraction process will be treated with reverse osmosis; it will be clean enough to drink. Any contaminants will be sealed in the tailings facility or made into a water-impermeable paste, then backfilled into the chambers that the ore was extracted from. What Bart complained about earlier, what happened at the Gold King Mine in Colorado, that was a result of the entrance tunnels being below the water table. All our tunnels will be above it. That kind of disaster could never happen here, even if there was a breach, if for no other reason than gravity. But, gentlemen, there will be no breach.”

  He shook his head, a wry smile in the firelight. “Not on my watch.”

  He moved his chair out of the column of smoke. The smoke followed him.

  “Smoke knows hot air when it sees it,” Trueblood said. He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Clint talks a good game, but he’d strip-mine Mount Rushmore if he thought there was copper underneath it.”

  “That isn’t fair, and you know it.” McCaine shook his head.

  “No, it probably isn’t. But Clint has the backing of foreign corporations to consider, and all I have are my words. First”—he smiled up into the camera’s eye as Lillian Cartwright walked around the fire for a better angle—“there will be a breach. It isn’t a question of ‘if’; the question is ‘when.’

  “And if it happens after the extraction, say ten years down the pike, or twenty, you can bet that the Hard Rock Heaven Mining Cooperative will have been dissolved. ‘Not on my watch’? What Clint means to say is that his watch will be over and no one will be around to hold accountable. Hard-rock mining follows a classic pattern. Ore is extracted, reclamation assurances are indefinitely delayed, and then the shit hits the fan. By the time the company’s misdeeds have the inevitable consequence of a tailings breach, poisoning the water, the perpetrators—for that is exactly what they are—are long gone. If and when the original owners are sued, they file for bankruptcy. At that point the EPA steps in, and you replace one crook with another. The EPA delays, politics rears its ugly head, and all the time it takes to work through the courts, the fish are dying from heavy minerals released into the river.”

  He shook his head.

  “And it doesn’t have to be a tailings breach. The digging alone exposes sulfide minerals. When the sulfides become exposed to air and water, which is inevitable, they release sulfuric acid. Guess what that does to a trout’s gills. Maybe you don’t have to drink the poison; they don’t get the choice. They go belly-up, just like the geese did when they landed in the Berkeley Pit.”

  “What the hell does the Berkeley Pit have do with anything?” McCaine said, exasperation in his voice. He shook his head. “Keep your cool, Clint,” he said to himself. And to Trueblood and the rest circled at the fire: “That was a completely different kind of mining operation.”

  Trueblood snorted. “Was it? Anaconda Copper Company dug rock, ran it through the crusher to separate out the copper while the rest leached poisons into the water. Anything that came within spitting distance of the tailings turned belly-up—fins, feathers, or fur. I’m told all those snow geese looked like angels. The winds made two lines of them on the surface of the pit, five hundred dead geese forming the shape of a cross. Maybe that’s where the Scarecrow God found his inspiration.”

  They argued for another hour—permit process, jobs for the community, reclamation timeline, transportation precautions, greater good, the philosophy of multiple use. Spiritual and monetary value of trout. It was an educated give-and-take in a gloom that became a mist, that, with the fall of darkness, became a rain. The rain hissed against the coals. Beads of water dripped from the felt brim of McCaine’s Stetson. Bart Trueblood turned the bowl of his pipe down to keep the tobacco dry. Neither wanted to be seen as the first to seek shelter. Lillian Cartwright, who had pulled her camera tripod back up under the edge of the rain fly, kept filming as Marcus held an umbrella over her camera for insurance. One eye to the aperture, she looked at him with the other and winked. Then she caught the attention of Trueblood and McCaine and drew a line across her throat.

  “Great job, you two. Come on. Get out of the rain so I can kiss the both of you.”

  * * *

  —

  Harold raised the heavy binoculars. Relics of the Cold War, they had superb low-light optics designed to help East German border guards spot defectors climbing the Berlin Wall. They could not turn night into day, but now that the rain had let up and the moon had fought free of the clouds, the grounds of the homestead were revealed in a milky glow. Harold could not only see the cabin forty yards away, but a doe mule deer that was cropping grass within a few steps of the door.

  The tree he’d selected was downwind of the cabin, and with branches heaped in front for cover and his back to the trunk, Harold felt sure that no one approaching the grounds would either see or scent him. The deer was a godsend, for she would inform him if anyone came into the vicinity. In the meantime, he could close his eyes and let his mind drift.

  Who would tack up a photograph of a man who, if in fact it was Scotty MacAllen, had spent nearly his entire life deliberately avoiding his fellow humans?

  This was the question Harold turned his mind to, letting it eddy among possibilities. Though a recluse, MacAllen had on at least one occasion spoken out about threats to the watershed. According to the ranger, the story in the paper called him the Smith River Watchman. Looked at that way, Scott MacAllen himself could be said to be the very first Scarecrow God. Perhaps the current one was paying homage as he drew attention to the dangers the river faced from the mine.

  Or perhaps not. Harold was not a man given to speculation, and soon he found himself thinking about Marcus. He had read somewhere that the love of a father for his son is stronger than the love of a son for his father, and that the same could be said of a mother and her daughter. The love that parents shower upon their children even exceeds their love for each other. Love flows downhill, and now that Harold had finally worked past his initial bitterness over being left out of Marcus’s life, he had opened his heart and was experiencing that flow of love as a blanket of warmth, and for the first time in his life.

  He blinked open his eyes. He was shivering, the warmth he’d felt apparently not having the same affect on his bloodstream as his heart, and after zipping up his fleece jacket, he picked up the binoculars. The doe had grazed out of sight, and with her departure, his all-night vigil began.

  CHA
PTER FIFTEEN

  The Three Amigos

  Three empty wine bottles, a fourth with a swallow left, and an empty Jim Beam fifth—the latter one of the so-called “ice breakers” from Bart Trueblood’s cooler—stood beside the fire ring. The whiskey bottle glowed like blown glass. Sean found himself staring at it, through it, beyond its warm transparency to where Bart Trueblood sat, a lean and hungry Satan, the black hairs of his goatee glistening.

  “Last of the Mohicans,” Trueblood said in his gravel voice, and raised his cup of whiskey.

  It was true, the rest had retreated to their tents. McCaine, drunk and trying to ingratiate himself, be one of the boys, tipping his hat as he said goodnight; Sam, first to bed and uncharacteristically quiet, but then he was the one who shouldered the responsibility for the trip; Lillian Cartwright, dropping her guard, her Southern drawl returning.

  “I thank all y’all for your cooperation and we’ll see you in the morning,” she’d said. And drawn Marcus to her side and kissed him on the cheek. And then once more, giving him a taste of her lips this time, as she put it, “For good measure.”

  “If you weren’t so damned young I’d eat you like the peach ice cream my Nana made.”

  Marcus had left the fire when she did, though in the opposite direction, toward his tent, leaving Sean and Trueblood to add the last log.

  Trueblood pulled out his pipe. “I noticed the Meerschaum in your pocket,” he said. “You treat it with a lover’s touch, but you don’t light it.”

  “It was my father’s,” Sean said. “That and a couple bamboo fly rods he made are all I have left of him. Touching the pipe is a habit, like rubbing a rabbit’s foot for luck. Usually I’m not even thinking of him.”

  “Of course you are. You’re thinking of him whether you know it or not. I’m an expert on the subject.” Trueblood pointed with his chin. “Down by the river. Let’s smoke a bowl.”

  Sean followed him down to the bank, where the boats eddied on their tethers.

  “I’m going to ask you a question,” Trueblood said.

  “Shoot,” Sean said.

  “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

  “I took you for straight,” Sean said.

  “Don’t joke. It’s a serious question.”

  Sean looked up at the slot of sky between the spires of the pines, the belt of Orion, the Hunter, riding above the southern horizon. “No,” he said. “Soon after meeting, but not at first sight.”

  “It happened to me, though. It happened to me.”

  Trueblood got his pipe going, then leaned forward to see his reflection in the moonstone current.

  “My face is a lot older now,” he said. “The river tells me what I already know. But I was young once. Her name was Rebecca.”

  “She who must not be named,” Sean said.

  “That was unkind of me, saying it to his face like that. I couldn’t say her name either, not to anyone but myself, not for a long time.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I was nine. May thirty-first, 1962. My birthday. My father had driven up that morning with a johnboat in the bed of the pickup. He said he’d got it at a sheriff’s auction, that it had been evidence in a murder and had a bullet hole in the bottom. It was old and beat to hell and it did have a hole that I plugged up with a green stick, but I think Dad was just telling a tall one. My mother had tied a ribbon around one of the cleats. They helped me carry it down to the river. I was standing on the bank, driving in a stake with a sledgehammer to tie the bowline to, when the world changed. That sounds melodramatic, I know. But nothing that’s happened before or since in my life has had that effect.”

  He pulled on the pipe, spoke as he looked out over the current that glittered like mica. He said that about a week before he got the boat, a family had opened up a campground on ten acres they bought from Clint’s folks on the west bank, a bend in the river with a stand of cottonwoods. His parents had met the couple who bought the land. They had operated a campground in Maine, on the Bay of Fundy, but they couldn’t take the mosquitoes and the no-see-ums anymore. So they’d sold the place, packed up, and just kept driving west until they ran out of bugs. They had put in a couple of picnic tables down by the water, and the day that Bart got his new boat, when he was pounding in the stake, a girl came walking up from the direction of the campground. She took her shoes off and sat down on the bank with her feet dangling in the water. She had yellow hair, but it was difficult to see her face under her hat and she didn’t look across the water at him.

  So there they were, her on the one bank and him on the other, going whack, whack, whack, beating the hell out of the stake with the flat of an ax head, maybe fifty feet from each other, both acting like there was no one for miles around. Trueblood said it was very strange because he had gone out of his body even before she sat down. He caught himself breathing fast and missing the stake with the sledge. He walked back to his house to see if the light-headed feeling and the tightness in his chest would go away, because he wasn’t sure that she had caused it. But it was still there, so he went back out, and this time he pulled the boat into the water and started to row across, his back to her and watching his own house get smaller and smaller. He could see his mother working in her garden and she waved to him, and he waved back, and it felt like he was saying goodbye.

  “I was, in a way,” he said to Sean. “I was an only child and my mother and father were the most important people in my life, and now there was this girl I had not even spoken to. I was so light-headed that when I got to the shore and stepped out of the boat, I stumbled and fell in the water.

  “It made her laugh. The first thing I ever heard from her was laughing. It was an inauspicious start. ‘You’re going to catch a cold,’ she said.”

  She’d asked him if he could catch a crawfish without getting pinched. He said everybody from Montana could do that, and she said anybody from Maine could, too, and quicker, and it went like that, each of them being patriotic to their state and catching crawfish and watching them shoot away when they let them go. She said she had a younger brother who was always following her around like a dog, getting underfoot, but he couldn’t swim and wasn’t allowed to go to the river without an adult with him, so that’s why she had walked up from the camp. To get away.

  He could remember it so clearly, the smell of her skin when their heads were together to look at a little snake he’d picked up, her breath on his forearm, the warmth that radiated from her head, the sound of her breathing. The snake was a rubber boa, not much larger than a big earthworm, and he’d pass it into her hands and she’d pass it back, the snake going from one finger to another and curling around them, so that her fingers were in its coils at the same time his were. It looked like they were wearing identical rings. “Look,” she’d said, “we’re married.” Then her mother rang a triangle and she had to go to dinner.

  “So that’s where the tattoo of the snake on your hand comes from,” Sean said.

  Trueblood nodded. “I wear it the way I would wear a wedding ring. It means no less.” In the moonlight, Sean saw him bend over his reflection in the water.

  After that, Bart said, he and Becky were together every day. Clint wasn’t on the scene yet. His parents were summer people, his father was in the state legislature, a bigwig. Every year they’d come for the Fourth of July and stay until school started up in Helena, where they lived the rest of the year. For a month, there were the two of them, Bart and Becky, and when Clint showed up, there were three. The three amigos, Bart’s mother called them. Clint was two years older than Bart, three older than Becky, and though he tolerated her, sometimes he treated her like she was a nuisance. That went on for two more summers. Then the third summer came, and as soon as Bart saw her, he knew he would lose her. The ugly duckling had grown into the swan. Clint saw it, too.

  He pulled on his pipe.

  “I tell myself he never
loved her like I did, and I believe that to be true, but no question he was smitten, to use one of my mother’s words.”

  Trueblood shrugged. Clint was older, taller than him by half a foot, went to the big high school, had gone on vacations to California. He’d even seen the Beach Boys, wouldn’t let you hear the end of it. He was popular, athletic, and a natural leader. Bart was a river rat who went to a two-room schoolhouse in White Sulphur Springs.

  “What chance did I have? I ask you, Sean.”

  It wasn’t a question that required an answer, and presently he went on.

  Clint staked his claim and Becky became aloof, finding fault in anything Bart said. He found himself tagging along behind them. “I wish you’d just get lost,” Clint told him once, and Becky had, by her silence, echoed the sentiment. He was forced out of their circle, and finally he just stayed on his bank of the river and they stayed on theirs. He was so devastated that he dreamed of killing Clint, even went so far as to take his father’s elk rifle and aim it at him from across the river.

  “I put the crosshairs of the scope on him, and with a live round in the chamber. For just a second. I didn’t push the safety off, but . . . still. That’s how mad I was for her.”

  The next summer the anguish they’d put him through was over. Becky’s parents couldn’t make a go of the campground. It was too far away from any tourist destination, wasn’t on the way to anywhere, and the road in was awful. Becky’s family moved back East, where her dad and mom got jobs managing a summer camp at a place called Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondack Mountains, for rich kids from Boston and New York.