Although he said he was working as a freelancer, I wondered what had really brought Eric to the Rendezvous, a nonpolitical family event. He usually went where there was news . . . or where he intended to stir some up. Feeling uneasy, I resented the pall he had cast on what had been a promising day.
The ’hawk-throwing competition was slated for 10:30, so I made my way to the edge of the encampment where targets had been erected away from the main Rendezvous traffic. I arrived too early. Officials had postponed the event for a half hour to wait for one of the competitors. Must have been a short list of competitors, I thought. ’Hawk throwing was definitely not ready for prime time.
The break gave me much-needed time to run back to the parking lot to replace my battery packs and get some fresh CF cards. I had three digital cameras with me: one to shoot newspaper-style photos, one for my own use, and a smaller one I was testing. Crossing the field to the parking lot, I compulsively shot up the last few megs remaining on the small digital. I usually separated the CF cards into envelopes. Since I had brought only two envelopes with me, I pulled out the card from my small camera and tucked it into the watch pocket of my jeans. Then, with new cards inserted into each of the cameras, I headed back to the contest grounds, arriving just in time to see the contest get under way.
It probably wasn’t written in ’hawk throwing rules, but every contestant sauntered in an identical walk to the throwing line. The all-male group stood motionless for a few seconds, squinting at the target. Then they swiveled their heads and, to a man, spit out a brown arc of tobacco juice. The spitting ritual over, they wiped their hands on their trousers, and then held their long-handled ’hawks in front of them shoulder high, while they took a bead on the target. The target was about fifteen yards in front of the throwing line. I’d seen one like it in my landlord’s yard—a foot-thick cutout from a fat, ten-foot round tree, propped up on its side.
Once they had sized up the target, the marksmen stepped forward, at the same time lifting their throwing arms above their heads. Depending on each of their personal styles, they took either two or three steps and then threw the ax with a powerful swing. The axes flew end-over-end toward the target. About one out of three struck the target and remained imbedded.
Finally, Tomahawk Pete was announced—the thrower I’d heard about from Ground Kisser and the one who had held up the competition. I watched as a husky, bearded man strolled up to the throwing line and began the same ritual as the contestants before him. I focused my long lens on the thrower and suddenly did a double-take. Tomahawk Pete was my landlord, Marty Madigan! Now I knew why his weird backyard hobby was throwing tomahawks.
Today, his aim seemed to be off. Maybe he was flustered because, as the latecomer, he had held up the competition. His throws were only good enough for third place. After the points were tallied and announced, I searched for him on the sidelines. “Too bad about the contest,” I said. “I heard you were the favorite to win.”
He snatched off his slouch hat and ran his fingers through his wavy gray hair. “Aw, hell,” he said, “I’d have had a better chance if I could have found the tomahawk I usually use. I searched high and low for it. Couldn’t find it.” He slapped his hat across his knee.
“Isn’t one ’hawk as good as another?”
“Mine’s special,” he said, leaning his elbows on his knees. “I have my ’hawks made by a blacksmith in town. The blade is weighted and shaped the way I want it. I even have him tap some nail studs in a particular design at the end of the handle. When I’m not using it in competition, I hang leather fringe on the end of it.”
“Don’t ’hawk handles break easily?” I asked, drawing on the little information I’d gleaned from other onlookers of the competition.
Marty fingered the ’hawk he’d used that morning, stroking the wood. “Not mine. My handles are made out of black walnut. I’ve had the same handle on that ’hawk I lost for more than a year. I expected to have it for another year . . . or even more than that.”
“Well, I hope it shows up,” I said, turning to leave. “Better luck next time.”
Eager to take a break from the Rendezvous events, I decided to maneuver towards the tribe’s encampment to “shoot a few Indians,” as Eric had sarcastically suggested. One good thing . . . I hadn’t seen anything of that menacing creep since our earlier confrontation. Maybe the Rendezvous was big enough for both of us.
I strolled along a well-worn path that cut through the woods surrounding the clearing and found it enjoyably quiet, after all the Rendezvous activity. Birds were singing in the chokecherry trees and I could hear the rippling river somewhere to the left of me, making its way to the mighty Mississippi.
As the pathway petered out, I could see a couple of teepees that had been erected in a stand of tall pines on a rise above the river. No one seemed to be around. I searched for the sweat lodge, knowing it should be closer to the river, but I couldn’t locate it. Since sweating ceremonies are considered sacred, Indians never consented to being photographed while in a lodge. I felt my excitement rise. Maybe, if I hurried, I could take a few pictures while no one was about.
I found a narrow, rocky path that led directly to the river and followed it through the brush. In less than a minute, the lodge emerged in a clearing only a few yards ahead of me. It was little more than a dome-shaped hut made of hides draped over a willow-branch frame. The door was merely a flap of deer hide. The lodge would accommodate only four or five adults, who would sit around a pile of rocks in the center. During a “sweat ritual,” they heated the rocks white-hot, then poured cold water on them to create very hot steam. Depending upon the ceremony, participants burned bunches of sweet grass, smoked or passed a “sacred pipe,” talked, prayed, or pursued visions. After they had sweated long enough, they headed for a dip in the river while rubbing themselves with sage.
No smoke was rising above the lodge. I figured the ashes must have been left to burn out after the previous evening’s ceremonies. I hurried to the structure and peeled back the hide from the opening to peek inside. Because the hides formulating the lodge were made of thick hides, the sunlight couldn’t penetrate them. It was rather dark inside, but I noticed a few wadded-up blankets near the fire pit. I paused to adjust the lens on my camera and then pointed it at what I hoped would make an interesting picture. The flash went off, illuminating the scene for only an instant. That’s all it took. A second of illumination. I jumped back, trembling, and smothered a scream with the back of my hand. It . . . it’s not a pile of blankets, I thought. It’s a . . . a man!
I backed up and swung my head in every direction to examine my surroundings. Not a single leaf on any tree stirred. I saw no one. It was unbelievably quiet. I shivered, knowing I was utterly alone. What should I do? Maybe my imagination has gone wild. Slowly, I turned to take another look. God, no! I thought. It . . . can’t be.
But it was. The man by the fire pit was Eric Hartfield. A very dead Eric Hartfield. And a familiar weapon was buried deep into the base of his skull.
I had a sick feeling I’d found Marty’s missing tomahawk.
Chapter 2
Monday
There was nowhere to turn, no place to run from my tormentors. I was penned in by flying tomahawks that swirled around me in a shower of spraying blood. Rhythmic undulations and incessant drumming pounded on my eardrums. I sank to the ground and wrapped my arms tightly around my body, trying to make myself as small a target as possible. One ‘hawk landed directly in front of me, another to my right, another to my left. There was no escaping them. I was doomed. An earsplitting, piercing scream forced me to lift my head.
I awakened sweating and shaken, the scream persisting, despite the realization that I had survived an all too realistic nightmare. Why wouldn’t the shrieking stop? I sat up and shook my head. The sound changed to something more recognizable. It was my bedside telephone!
“Cassandra, are you okay?”
“Anna? You heard—”
“Yes and I’ve bee
n worried sick! My friend Willis was at the Rendezvous.” Her voice was unnaturally high. “He just left the store. He told me what he knew about that horrible, horrible incident yesterday. I’m so sorry, Cass. I should never have urged you to go to that event.” She paused. “How are you, honey? Never mind. I’m coming over. You can tell me then. I’m going to bring you something. Coffee? Something stronger? How can I help?”
I rubbed my eyes and swung my legs off the bed. “I’m all right, now that I’m awake. Don’t come here, Anna. I’ll come to your shop and see you in about an hour.” I hung up and sat motionless for several minutes. I couldn’t shake the image of Eric wrapped around the fire pit with that ghastly hatchet in the back of his head. Maybe coffee would help. I showered, dressed, ran a comb through my curly hair, and headed toward town.
A lot of elements make a town livable, and Colton Mills had enough of them to make me rein in my Jeep, when I first passed through a year ago. Returning from a photo shoot in Duluth, I had decided to take the slow route back to the Twin Cities where I had lived for a couple of years. I still remember how the approach to Colton Mills had taken my breath away. A two-lane paved road passed through a forest of pines and descended a mile or more into a valley cut through by the Oxbow River. Then, suddenly, the town simply “appeared,” like something out of a nineteenth-century picture post card.
I couldn’t resist stopping to photograph the downtown area’s brick and stone facades that marked Colton Mills as a once prosperous grain and lumber-milling center. Then, places, such as the wooden grain elevator on the edge of town, which sat by long-abandoned railroad tracks, charmed the photographer in me. I was hooked. It was such a contrast to the traffic-blocked city I wanted to leave behind that, before leaving town three days later, I had rented a second-floor studio. Heading south, I had purposely overlooked the unsightly subdivisions sprouting in the soybean fields and the year-round brick McMansions displacing the tiny summer clapboard cabins around Oxbow Lake. After all, a working photographer had to get her potential clientele from somewhere.
Now, and in retrospect, I knew I’d have had to reconsider my decision if it weren’t for The Grizzly Bar. All the town’s qualities wouldn’t be worth the paper the Colton Miller newspaper was printed on, without a decent place to get a real cup of coffee. Although a resistor of trends, I was fully in favor of the Starbucks craze.
This morning, as usual, Roxy, a fellow refugee from the rat race, was working behind the counter. “Morning, Roxy,” I said. Roxy and her husband Mel, transplants from Minneapolis, had transformed a building that once housed a machine shop into a coffee shop with a northern Minnesota feel. A six-foot cardboard cutout of a grizzly bear holding a steaming cup of coffee loomed over me as I entered. The coffee bar’s tag line was emboldened on the bear’s cup: roarin’ good coffee. The shop looked as if a chainsaw demon had been turned loose in a pine forest. Whole trees—stripped of their bark, cut into ten-foot lengths and shellacked—flanked the counter from floor to ceiling. A half dozen booths, faced with pine slabs, lined one wall. Throughout the shop, several square tables and chairs, also made of pine, had been conveniently placed for relaxation. Near in a cozy seating area, Northern Minnesota objets d’art graced shelves interspersed with used books and magazines.
Roxy greeted me the way she did every time I came into Grizzly’s, as the locals called it.
“Hi, Cassandra.” She leaned her forearms on the tall counter. “What’ll it be? The regular?”
The relationship I had established with Roxy, while exchanging pleasantries over my morning coffee order, made her one of my closest acquaintances. Thankfully, she hadn’t yet heard about Eric’s demise and my involvement. “I’ll take two to go,” I said. “The flavor of the day and one extra-large hazelnut, with a shot of espresso.” Minutes later, I stashed the steaming paper cups in the Jeep’s cup holders and headed across town to the Vintage Clothier.
Anna’s store was located on the edge of the business district, one block off Main, where the old buildings were being turned into shops that drew tourists to Colton Mills every weekend. It was situated in the former Ames Ladies Wear store, between Ye Olde Fudge Shoppe and Embroidery Heaven. With the weekend tourists gone, I had no problem snagging a parking place.
Before entering the store, I paused to check out the show windows. Anna had dressed the window mannequins in long white summer frocks, featuring balloon sleeves, high neck-hugging collars, and tiny, cloth-covered buttons that would have taken an hour to fasten. They were appropriate for a game of tennis at the old Minneobi resort, circa 1880, but simply looking at them made the perspiration bead up on my forehead. Of course, my usual jeans-and-red-shirt uniform, was contributing to my discomfort as well. It was a combo I might have to abandon in the already too intense June heat.
The antique wooden door that opened into the store featured an oval of stenciled glass. It immediately set the tone for what was to come. I pushed the door handle with the side of one hand, while juggling the two coffee cups. As I entered, a bell chimed to announce my presence.
Anna was behind the counter talking on the phone. She tipped her elegant head and peered over the rims of the half glasses perching near the tip of her nose to acknowledge me, rolling her eyes upward in gratitude, as I set a coffee container on the counter and pushed it toward her.
Like Roxy and me, Anna was one of the “new people” in Colton Mills. About to celebrate the two-year anniversary of the Vintage Clothier, she’d been a resident a year longer than I. Anna reminded me of my foster mother, Mrs. Andrews—Crazy Mrs. A, as most people called her. Instead of trying to disguise her considerable bulk, Mrs. A flaunted it, with swaths of bright purple and red fabric. I can still see the discs of silver, bigger than half dollars that always hung from her ears and the silver-crafted squash-blossom necklace that splayed across her ample bosom. She swept her gray hair high on her head and secured it with combs. Wisps of it would escape and frame her round, unlined face, as she expressed whatever outlandish opinion she had on any subject that particular day. As I came up in the foster care system, Mrs. A was the closest thing to a real mother I ever had.
I’d taken to Anna, because she exhibited Mrs. A’s zest for life. She would be about the same age, but where Mrs. A was big and loud, Anna was slim and sophisticated, gliding through her vintage shop as if it were a Paris salon. She wore her hair slickly pulled back from her lovely face and fastened with a pearl barrette. Today, she was dressed in a black silk sweater over a long, slim mauve skirt. “Yes, yes,” she said. Her refined voice ran counterpoint to the clicking keys on her computer perched anachronistically on the antique wood counter, looking as out of place as a motor on a stagecoach.
I strolled around, waiting for the conversation to end. Anna’s shop was crammed with racks of period clothing. Prim hats with fragile netting, pointy-toed shoes, turn-of-the-century under things, and other items I couldn’t identify were neatly displayed on shelves. Scarves and gloves were draped out of dresser drawers or over period furniture. It was all a part of Anna’s artfully designed jumble. Whenever I saw what women a hundred years were subjected to wearing, I worshipped anew at the altar of Levi Strauss.
My own closet consisted of a row of shirts in various patterns and shades of red. I used my creative brain cells behind the camera, not in composing outfits to wear every day. I never deliberated about the day’s outfit . . . only whether I’d tuck the shirt in, wear it unbuttoned over a tee shirt with the tails out, or whether I’d roll up the sleeves. Pair any shirt with my jeans and boots and I was ready to go. When the occasion called for it, I’d trade in the jeans for a pair of slacks, but the red shirt with jeans and boots ensemble had become a uniform.
Many of the pieces in Anna’s shop were copies of the real thing. Anna had learned early on that few modern women fit into the small sizes that ladies of the past wore. She had turned her business into a reproduction-clothing establishment, when she opened the Vintage Clothier. Now, she also had a thriving business
on the Internet.
“Cassandra, dear,” she said, finally off the phone and gliding over to my side. She gave me a big hug and pulled me onto a red velvet settee beside her. “Tell me exactly what happened.” She listened without comment as I filled her in on the details.
Anna had introduced me to the Rendezvous concept when I visited with her about a month ago. I had come to discuss a client’s project. Heather Wilson, who was planning a 1920s theme wedding, was renting clothing for the event from Anna, who had carved out an area in the back of her shop where people could pose in their vintage clothes. I had photographed several groups there and also called on Anna for props suitable for other occasions. Because I had acquired a reputation as a wedding photographer of the different-drummer variety, I attracted my share of nontraditional projects. As nontraditional went, Heather’s was pretty tame. Nothing like the ceremony I photographed the previous spring, while scrunched shoulder to shoulder in the dinky basket of a hot air balloon with a couple, their minister, a witness, and the pilot. Recording the momentous I-dos in a vehicle that was gliding a thousand feet over the Oxbow tested more than my photographic skills.
Anna had suggested props for Heather’s photo shoot. “This velvet settee (the very one we were now sitting on) will be perfect, don’t you think, dear? You could pose the wedding party just so around the bride and groom.”
“Maybe so.” I had stepped around her to find something more appropriate to the occasion, and that’s when my destiny jumped up and bit me, as something furry brushed against my face. “What the hell is this?” I had thrust the thing away from me.
“A fox pelt!” Anna had seemed surprised that I wouldn’t recognize such a varmint. “There’s a huge market now for frontier clothes, and fox pelts are one of the accessories most often requested. So, I stocked a few.” Sure enough, she had added racks of buckskin dresses and pants, calico dresses, plain dresses, boots, kerchiefs, beaver hats . . . and the fox pelts.
A Rendezvous to Die For Page 2