Reuel sighed and went on. “I think she was twenty, give a year, take a year—”
“Nineteen, according to the paper.”
“Yeah. I only saw her three or four times. Twice in here, having a meal with Harry. Pretty girl, real pretty. Once, they were sitting right here in this booth, as a matter of fact.”
Andi’s eyes traveled the length and breadth of the booth, then to the floor, as if the ghostly imprint of Peggy Atkins clung to it.
“Now it just seemed to me they were some closer than captain and crew, you know—more’n just business. Not that that’s surprising, knowing Harry. Anyway, the Atkins girl came here more than once that summer; she came the beginning and end of it, first part of June and then September. Hell, she must’ve run every rapid the Salmon has to offer, seen every drop, every eddy.”
The waitress—whose name was Cookie—or that’s what they called her—set down their shakes and coffee. Reuel thanked her.
Mary sat back with her chocolate shake, feeling left out, sorry she’d fooled with those puzzles meant for little kids. Of course, Andi was older, which was part of the reason Reuel seemed to be talking to Andi more than to both of them. But Reuel also seemed to respect Andi, for all his calling her “girl” and being sarcastic. Mary sucked the thick shake up through the straw and slumped on the seat.
“The paper said she drowned. How did she?” asked Andi.
Reuel said, “In an accident on the river. A strainer, I heard, or maybe it was a hole. I don’t know the rapids all that much.” He looked at Andi, smiling slightly. “You know what that is—a strainer?”
Mary loved the way she simply disregarded this.
Reuel went on. “Harry claimed her kayak got trapped with her under it.”
Mary frowned. “What about the others? There must’ve been witnesses.”
“No witnesses. Two of them, two kayaks. No witnesses,” he repeated. “Not much use trying to find anyone in that rough water.”
Andi was ignoring her food and rolling the still-wrapped cutlery back and forth. She stopped. “You don’t believe him. Why?”
“Because what I’d heard was, she’d had a lot of experience and was even in the expert category. That’s higher than in your league of ‘advanced.’ ”
The shot fell wide; Andi’s expression didn’t change. You couldn’t goad her.
“Her mother said she was; it was her mother come to identify the body. I heard her dad was in the hospital having major surgery. So it was left up to her mom. Terrible.”
Mary winced. It made her think of Angela, dying way off in England. “Did the police investigate?”
“Oh, yeah. Some. But didn’t find anything untoward. Coroner said she did drown. But some people sure wondered, a boatman experienced as Harry Wine is, how he could’ve let that happen.”
“Why?” asked Andi.
“Why what?”
“Why did he want her dead?”
“You’re sure jumpin’ way ahead of me.”
Andi was impatient. It was always as if time were her nemesis, trying to outrun her. “If you don’t believe it was accidental, you’re saying he made it happen. So I’m just asking. Why would he want her dead?”
Reuel slipped the cigar from its case, flicked it back and forth as he raised his eyebrows, silently soliciting their permission to smoke. Silently, they gave it, nodding. He lit the cigar, puffed in a few times, got the coal going. “I think there was more’n just rafting going on.” He pulled some change from his pocket and started fanning through the offerings on the jukebox. He found what he wanted, thumbed in a quarter.
A drift of music moved toward them slow as fog off a river. It was not country, not rock, and not new. Although Mary couldn’t place it, the song sounded sadly familiar.
“. . . I’ll come back to you some sunny day . . .”
Maybe the sadness came from the scratchy timber of the male vocalist or a scratchy recording. “What is that?”
“ ‘Mexicali Rose.’ You wouldn’t remember it. Must be fifty years old.” He gave her a look. “Then again, maybe you are too.”
“Wipe those big brown eyes and smile, dear . . .
Banish all those tears and please don’t cry.”
As it wound down to good-bye, Andi set her chin in her hands and looked at Reuel. “I guess it makes you think of Her, doesn’t it?”
Mary heard the capital H in that. It always surprised her afresh, how sentimental Andi was.
Reuel tapped ash from his cigar into his palm. “Yeah, I guess it does. You girls want to hear anything?” He was fishing another coin from his pocket.
Andi said, “Let’s hear ‘Mexicali Rose’ again.”
“You say so.” He smiled, slipped the quarter in.
Cookie had come over to wait on a man who’d just sat down in the booth behind them. They were laughing, and she took his order.
The scratchy-voiced singer started in again:
“Mexicali Rose, good-bye, dear . . .”
Andi listened intently, then asked, “Do you think you’ll ever see her again?”
“Not likely.”
The man in the booth behind Reuel turned and said, “Reuel? Thought that was your voice.”
“Jack! Hey, come round here, there’s some people I want you to meet.”
Jack picked up his coffee cup and eased in beside Reuel, nodding to both girls.
Reuel said, “This here is Jack Kite. You remember, I mentioned him? He’s with Fish and Game.”
Andi asked him what he did in his job. “Try to keep poachers out of wildlife reserves, stop canned hunts, coax bears out of folks’ backyards, that sort of thing.” He smiled.
“You’re kidding?” Andi looked uncertain. “About the bears?”
“No, I’m not. Just got a black bear today out on the edge of town.”
“But how?”
“Shot him with a tranquilizer, got him up on the truck—with help, of course—hoped he wouldn’t wake up before I got him home. His, not mine. One did wake up once in the bed of the truck.”
“What did you do?”
“Drove like hell.”
They all laughed.
Andi asked, “You said ‘canned hunt.’ What’s that?”
“Shooting animals inside cages or in some area been fenced off. People who run ’em charge big bucks. People who go to ’em are willing to pay. These ranches mail out brochures just like ads for any kind of vacation, but instead of pictures of swimming pools and staterooms, you get pictures of cougars, tigers, antelope—even ones on the endangered species list.”
“Don’t tell me that’s legal.” Mary was shocked.
“No, it’s not, but the rest is legal, providing you don’t transport the animals over state lines.” Then he asked Reuel, “You hear about what happened over in Medicine Bow National Forest?”
Mary looked quickly at Andi, who didn’t even blink.
“One of the government ADC guys—Animal Damage Control is what they call it—” He had to stop and laugh. “It appears—appears— this guy got mugged and tied to a tree with barbed wire.”
“Good lord,” said Reuel. “Did they find ’em, the guys that did it?”
Cookie came back and set a tuna sandwich and fries in front of Jack Kite, refilled their coffee cups, walked away.
“No. According to him, it was a motorcycle gang set on him. He says there were eight or nine and he was trying to get them out before they set fire to the whole damn forest or shot the place to hell and gone. All of them had handguns—”
What amazed Mary was that Bub had enough imagination to make this story up. She glanced at Andi, who sat with her arms tensed around her middle as if holding back something.
“So this agent, he said what could he do? They jumped him.”
“All of them?” Andi asked.
“More or less is the impression I got. The damned fool was lucky it wasn’t those guys in Deliverance.”
“What’s that?” asked Andi.
“Movie about some guys go fishing or hunting, and one of them—” Jack glanced at Reuel, the adults conferring silently over the heads of the children as to whether they’re too young to deal with some especially salacious material. Apparently, they weren’t.
Mary heaved a sigh of annoyance. “One gets it in his butt.”
Jack Kite looked shocked, said, “This ADC guy made the whole damned thing up, start to finish, is my guess. A motorcycle gang in Medicine Bow? Get real. What the hell would they be doing there? Besides, there weren’t any tire tracks. And besides that, it was a female called the state police and told them this guy was tied up. Probably some animal activists. They do weird things.” Jack took a bite of his sandwich, looking thoughtful.
Reuel looked from Mary to Andi. “Well. Imagine. You girls didn’t chance to go through Medicine Bow, did you?”
They both shook their heads. Andi said, “It was out of our way.”
Reuel looked at her but settled for that and did not pursue the matter. “We was talking about the Atkins girl.”
Something dark, like the shadow of a hawk’s wing, passed over Jack Kite’s face. He unbuttoned the pocket of his khaki shirt and pulled out a cigarette, which he held but didn’t light. “Peggy Atkins.” He said the name almost reverently, but quizzically too, as if it suggested all sorts of unfinished business. “I will never understand that. You know how many fatalities we’ve had on the Salmon all told? Maybe half a dozen, and if memory serves me right that was all in one raft, when the discharge rose overnight from around nine thousand to nearly twenty thousand. That was freakish, doesn’t often happen. But when Peggy Atkins drowned? There was nothing out of the ordinary. At the most that was a class-four rapid and she’d have been expecting it; she’d have scouted it. She was real experienced in using a kayak, is what I heard. So that was one strange accident. The only eyewitness was Harry Wine.” Jack finally lit the cigarette he’d been playing with. The match flared. “He was the only eyewitness,” he said, as if it needed repeating. He picked up his coffee cup, set it down without drinking. “Every once in a while, you hear talk about Harry, things he’s into. Harry wants you to think he’s nothing but an easygoing river man, when in reality he’s in up to his eyeballs.”
“In what?” asked Mary.
“Politics, money into the campaign of any politician that’s against all these environmental groups. But he never shows. Know what I mean? You never see Harry in any public way; he never comes out; he never really talks. Money talks, so Harry don’t have to.” Jack paused, looked from one to the other of them. “You girls really interested in all this? You’ll have to excuse me, but Mr. Wine’s one of my favorite topics. Least favorite, I should say. Nothing bad goes on around here, but Harry Wine’s into it.”
“Such as?” said Andi.
“Pornography, that’s one thing—”
Reuel interrupted. “She don’t need to know all this, Jack.”
Jack stopped, apparently changing his mind about what he’d been going to say. “And worse.”
“What’s worse?”
“Never mind.”
Andi kept looking at Jack Kite as if she’d stare the answer out of him.
“Stuff.” Jack was not saying any more.
Andi went back to the subject of Peggy Atkins. “What happened, exactly?”
“It was river hydraulics, which covers a lot. It was at Big Mallard rapids, about eighty miles down the Main Salmon. There’s a hole there that’s really bad—or so I’m told, I don’t do rafting myself—what’s called a keeper. She never surfaced. They had to pull her out.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “You’d of thought she’d be well protected with Harry Wine there. Just about the only way that could’ve happened would have been to fail to read the river or to read it wrong.” He paused. “Harry Wine can read a river like a rat.”
30
“I just don’t understand how you could tell Harry Wine we were advanced at rafting,” Mary said, who understood completely; it was hardly the first time. “We’ve never been near a raft, either of us.”
They were now lying in their separate queen-sized beds in their motel. Mary didn’t say it, but she thought it was great, this driving and stopping in motels whenever you felt like it, watching cable television. Right now the big-screen TV was on and the sound off. Mary found it restful to watch lips moving with no words coming forth. “How’d you know all that about those other rivers, anyway?”
“It wasn’t a lot; it was just a few facts I got from a book in that bookstore we stopped in.”
“What if he’d asked questions you couldn’t answer?”
“He did. But the idea is, you don’t let the other person ask questions. If they manage to wedge a question in, you stomp on it and go on talking. Pretend confidence; it doesn’t matter if you don’t feel it.”
Mary thought this over, lying there with her hands crossed under her head. Andi had been convincing, no doubt of that. “I don’t think just anybody could pretend that way. I couldn’t, for instance.” She supposed she wanted Andi to contradict her, but Andi didn’t, so she went on. “I don’t want to toss cold water on your plan, but I can’t say I particularly want to get in one of those rafts. Nothing but rubber and air. I don’t see how they make it across a fishpond, much less white water.” Mary saw, in her mind’s eye, the canyon walls, the tiny buffeted figures who might have been drowning right before her eyes. “And I especially don’t much want to get in one after you’ve gone and told everyone we’re advanced boaters. How did you resist saying expert?”
“Because then he’d expect us to be a lot better.”
Mary turned her head from watching the moon drifting through the branches of a tree beyond their window to stare through the dark. “Better? Well, advanced is sure ‘better,’ at least where I come from. I mean, it’s better than beginner, which is what we are.”
“He doesn’t take out beginners. You heard him.”
Propping herself on her elbow, Mary said, “Listen to yourself; you really think that answer makes sense, don’t you? Whether he does or doesn’t, we’re still beginners.” She turned back and pummeled her pillow into shape, then laid her head heavily on it. “I still don’t see why we have to run rapids.”
“How else would I be able to hang around him? Rafting is how he spends his time.”
“But you won’t be able to talk to him is my point. He’ll have his mind on those eddies and deep drops. And the six-foot waves, don’t let’s forget them.”
“While we’re actually on the river, yes. But we’re going to be off it for hours at a time. There’s lunch”—here she held up the brochure she’d been reading by the weak bedside lamp—“ ‘on a gorgeous secluded inlet, where wildlife abounds.’ I bet. Then we’ll be camping overnight, too.”
“There are going to be other people besides us. They’ll all want to talk to him.” She could feel Andi looking at her and rolled on her side so her back was to the other bed. The trouble was, Mary’s argument sounded unconvincing even to her. She just didn’t want it pointed out.
Which it was, of course. “If he’s who we think he is—”
“We think?”
“—then I won’t have any trouble getting his attention. And if he’s not—well, it doesn’t matter if I do or don’t.”
Mary rolled back over again and looked at Andi. “If Harry Wine’s him, wouldn’t he have reacted more? I mean, God, if I ran into my victim, I don’t think I could just talk about where the takeout point on the Gurley River is—”
“Gauley.”
Mary sat straight up. “If he’s Daddy, why would he let you get away back in February? That man had you right in his truck.”
Andi had an answer. She always seemed to have an answer. “Because he knew I didn’t recognize him. And because Patsy Orr would have told him what I told her at breakfast. Yet no one called the police. He knew something peculiar had happened, and when he saw me at that country store he knew I didn’t remember him. If I didn’t remember
him, I wasn’t any danger to him. The things I told him in the truck—about my father and brothers meeting me to go skiing on Sandia Peak—he knew I was making it all up. He knew I was alone.”
Mary thought about this. “What a low-down dirty bastard.”
“We knew that already, didn’t we?” Andi raised up on her elbow, supported her head in her hand, pulling back her hair, which was the color of moonlight. “Listen, Mary, he doesn’t think anyone can touch him. He’s so confident. It’s like he’s playing a dangerous game and he makes it even more dangerous by doing things like taking me to a bed-and-breakfast place; he makes a big impression on Mrs. Orr, talking her ear off. If he’d wanted to make sure she could identify him later, he couldn’t have done more.” Andi flopped down again on her back. “He must have been pretty sure there wouldn’t have been any reason for the cops to look his way. Which means he had plans for me that didn’t include my future.”
Mary felt the cold at the base of her spine as if a frozen hand had dropped there.
“He knows I don’t know,” said Andi.
“Andi, you have to tell the police.”
“No.” She was quiet for a moment. “It’s been too long. Why would they believe me? Me against him? In this town? I don’t think the police would do anything.” Andi was shaking her head. “He thinks he’s safe. He must feel safe.” She turned her head again toward Mary.
“What about the gun?” asked Mary. “Maybe they could trace the gun.”
“That might not worry him either. Like I said, he just must feel safe. If he didn’t, he’d be after me. He’d be after me,” she said again.
“You could tell Reuel—”
“No. He’d just say to go to the police.”
“I don’t know about that. He doesn’t seem to be a man who’s very fond of cops. He sounds like someone who’d just as well take care of business himself. Like some other people I know.” When the silence lengthened, Mary thought Andi might have dozed off. She whispered, “Are you asleep?”
“No.”
“What’re you thinking about?”
Biting the Moon Page 18