He started laughing, sliding down the side of the pump like a scarecrow collapsing on its own sticks.
THE SUN HADN’T risen above the mountain when Gretchen woke the next morning. The inside of the cabin was cold, and when she washed her face, the water was like ice on her skin. Clete had just lit the woodstove, and she could see the fire through the slits in the stove’s grate, the condensation on the iron shrinking and disappearing into wisps of steam. She pulled aside the curtain on the kitchen window and looked at the fog on the pasture and the snow flurries blowing out of the darkness, as white and fluttering as moths trapped inside a closet.
She had not remembered the dream she was having when she woke, but as she looked at the outside world, she knew the man who had fingers with lights on the tips but no face had come to visit her again.
“Albert left a message on the door. An FBI agent wants you to call him,” Clete said. “Dave took the photo of the missing waitress to them.”
“I’m not sure it was Surrette who put it on my truck seat. I’m not sure the photo is of the waitress, either.”
“What are you trying to do, Gretchen? Get yourself killed or sent to prison? You want to go down for obstruction? Stop fooling yourself.”
“I want to cap Surrette.”
“You made a conscious choice to leave the life. Don’t let this guy change that.”
“I don’t know how many times I have to say this to you: I was never in the life.”
“What do you call it?”
“Getting even.”
“Are you going to talk to the FBI agent?”
“Would you?” she replied. She raised her eyebrows in the silence, her hair hanging in her eyes. “That’s what I thought. I’m going to have breakfast in town.”
She drove down the dirt road to the two-lane and ate at McDonald’s in Lolo. Through the window, she could see the sunlight climbing up a huge sloping hillside covered with Douglas fir, as though the sunrise were involved in a contest of wills with the forces that ruled the night. She knew these were foolish thoughts, but she woke with them almost every day of her life. The man whose fingertips glowed with fire and who leaned down over her crib and touched her skin would always be with her. She wanted to tell Clete these things, but he had started talking about the federal agent and the photo of a girl taken in a basement, a girl wearing only her undergarments, a girl with a gag in her mouth, her ribs stenciled against her sides, her identity robbed by someone who had razored the eyes from the photo.
Gretchen knew that any number of psychiatrists would conclude she had conflated Asa Surrette with the man whose fingertips had burned her body from head to foot, or with the man named Bix Golightly who had sodomized her on her sixth birthday. What if I did? she heard herself ask the imaginary psychiatrists she often held conversations with. Abusers were all cut out of the same cloth. In her opinion, they all deserved the same fate. There was nothing complex about any of them. They were craven, and they delighted in the satisfaction of their own needs at the expense of others. Asa Surrette was the embodiment of every misogynist and predator she had known. How he had been allowed to kill people for twenty years in his hometown was beyond her. Was it wrong that she wanted to track him down and force him to the edge of the abyss that had been created for men of his ilk?
In her experience, the only men who understood the level of pain undergone by a female rape victim were men who had been molested or raped themselves. Most of them did not talk about it, and most of them lived lives of quiet desperation and took their feelings of guilt and shame to the grave. Did they deserve an avenger? What a stupid question, she thought. Was she it? No, she was simply a survivor. Her abusers had made her a victim, and in doing so, they had made her powerless. The day she stopped being a victim was the day her abusers began to learn the meaning of fear.
Her cell phone vibrated on the tabletop; the words BLOCKED CALL appeared on the screen. She drank a sip of orange juice to ensure that there would be no obstruction in her throat when she answered. She opened the phone and placed it to her ear. “This is Gretchen,” she said.
“Good morning, munchkin.”
“I’m not keen on assigning other people nicknames.”
“I won’t do that anymore. Promise.”
“Can I call you Asa?”
“Who?”
“If we’re going to work together, we have to be honest about who we are.”
“Did you give the photo to the FBI?”
Don’t get caught in a lie, a voice said. “I didn’t,” she replied.
“But someone did?”
“I can’t control what other people do.”
“That’s a good answer, Gretchen. The more contact I have with you, the more I feel we belong together.”
She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “A biopic is a challenge, Asa. The story line has to be authentic. Simultaneously, it has to conform to the rules of drama. These are things you and I have to work out as a team.”
“You wouldn’t patronize me, would you? I studied creative writing and read Aristotle’s Poetics. Why do you keep calling me Asa?”
“Because you’re a famous man. Anonymity is the pretense of the weak.”
“Oh, I like that.”
“We have to meet. It’s imperative.”
Again he went silent.
“Are you there?” she said.
“Go to her house.”
“Whose?”
“You know whose. Up by Lookout Pass. There’s a flowerpot on the back porch. You’ll find something interesting under the pot. I put it there at daybreak, just for you.”
“You shouldn’t jerk me around.”
“I’m smarter than that. I’ve done a lifetime study of people. I know their secret fears and their desire for forbidden fruit. I see the weaknesses they try to hide from others. You’re different. You’re strong in the same way I am.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“What is your opinion of the cowboy?”
“Which cowboy?”
“The one who might be a player in our film.”
“Are you talking about Wyatt Dixon?”
“Is that his name? Have a nice drive up to Lookout Pass.”
“No, what are you telling me about Dixon?”
“Nothing. Someone doesn’t like him, that’s all. I thought we might cast him. There’s a tautness about him that I’d like to investigate. They all break, you know. It’s like a dam bursting. I can’t tell you how pleasurable that moment can be.”
She wadded up a napkin and pressed it to her mouth, her stomach roiling. “I want to ask a favor of you,” she said.
“Anything.”
“Don’t hurt the waitress.”
“You’re a tease,” he said. The connection went dead.
GRETCHEN DROVE UP the long grade that led to Lookout Pass and the high mountains that often disappeared into the clouds on the Idaho border. During the night, a storm had come down from Canada and left the sky dark at sunrise and the tops of the trees stiff with snow that had frozen on the branches. She turned off the highway, snow flurries spinning off the hillsides into her windshield, and followed a dirt road to the small frame house where Rhonda Fayhee had lived.
The house was isolated, a cracker box in the midst of a windswept landscape that didn’t seem intended for human habitation. She parked in back and stood in the yard and gazed at the rock slides that bled down the sides of the mountains, the thin stands of pine that could barely find root, the sharpness of the peaks and crags, as though they had never been affected by the erosive forces of wind and water. Higher up, on an old logging road, someone had gouged a gravel pit into the side of the mountain, leaving an environmental wound that, in these surroundings, seemed natural.
She knew Surrette could be anywhere, watching her with binoculars or framing her inside the crosshairs of a telescopic sight. The storm clouds rolling across the mountaintops were bluish-black and forked with electricity, and she heard thun
der boom in a distant canyon. She realized her skin was prickling, even though the cold usually did not bother her, and she got her canvas coat off the truck seat and tied a bandana on her head.
Like most people with meager incomes who live up the drainages in the high country, Rhonda Fayhee had winterized her house by nailing sheets of clear plastic over the windows. Now the plastic, along with the yellow crime scene tape, was broken and flapping in the wind. On the back step was a large ceramic pot with half a dirt ring next to the drain dish. Gretchen set the pot and the dish on the grass and picked up a conventional envelope with a sheet of folded paper inside. On it was a map drawn with a felt-tip pen that showed the house, the dirt road, a mountain two miles away, and a place designated as “old mine.”
The note at the bottom read, I’m not jerking you around—You mustn’t say that about me again—Go see the mine—You’ll like what you find—Our cast is growing, even though our cast members don’t know it yet.
The slash-mark calligraphy was the same as in the letter Surrette had written to Alafair after she interviewed him in prison. Surrette was either getting careless or starting to accept Gretchen as a kindred spirit. His allusion to their conversation indicated he had written the note that morning. She was convinced he was somewhere up on a hillside, wetting his lips, enjoying the fact that his words were reaching inside her, stirring her imagination, while he watched from afar. She forced herself not to look up and got back in the pickup and drove up the road toward a mountain furrowed with slag and carpeted with miles of trees that had been denuded by a forest fire.
She turned off her engine in front of the mine and got out of the truck and stuck her Airweight .38 in her back pocket. The wind was colder and drier and smelled like ash or charred wood or smoke from an incinerator on a winter day. In her left hand, she carried a flashlight that used a six-volt battery. Down below, she could see Rhonda Fayhee’s house and the tiny lot on which it had been built and the dirt road winding away into the distance. She could see the vast emptiness in which one young, thin-boned poor woman had lived and struggled and eked out an existence until the day she met Asa Surrette. Gretchen walked up to the mine’s entrance and shone the light inside.
It didn’t go deep into the mountain. It probably was dug during the Depression, when the West was filled with unemployed men who saw a vein of quartz in an outcropping of metamorphic rock and knew that gold and silver were often wedged inside the same seam. She moved the flashlight beam along the floor and against the walls. At least half a dozen photographs were taped to the walls, all of them eight-by-ten, all of them showing a bound woman with a drawstring cloth bag over her head. In two photos, the woman was in an embryonic position on a rock floor, a blanket pulled over her. In another photo, she was sitting upright, the bag on her head, wrists tied behind her, knees drawn up, bare ankles showing above tennis shoes.
On a flat rock at the back of the mine was a bubble-wrapped thumb drive. The note on it read, She was here the first night—No one thought to look—It’s like the other places where I’ve hunted on the game reserve—What do you think of the images—I think a before-and-after presentation of our subjects will give the film more shock value—I can’t wait to work with you, Gretchen.
When Gretchen got back to the cabin on Albert’s ranch, she inserted the thumb drive into her laptop. The scene taking place on the screen was no longer than a minute. The lens had been pointed through a leafy, sun-dappled bower on the bank of a creek. A man and woman were broiling frankfurters on a grill, backs to the lens. A girl was turning somersaults in the background. Another girl was watching her. They were both blond. The lens never focused on their faces.
Just before the clip ended, a hand placed a note in front of the lens. The note read, If they only knew.
“You’d better come in here and look at this, Clete,” Gretchen said. She replayed the video while he looked over her shoulder.
“Where’d you get this?” he said.
“From Asa Surrette.”
“Are you kidding?”
“He left it for me in a mine by the Idaho border. Do you recognize anybody on the screen?”
“No. Who are they?”
“His next victims. I called the FBI and the sheriff’s department in Mineral County. I suspect the feds will be out here soon. Give them the thumb drive and tell them to go fuck themselves.”
“Where are you going?”
“To find Wyatt Dixon,” she replied.
“What for?”
“I think Surrette is after him.”
“Why is Surrette interested in Dixon?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody in his right mind would want Wyatt Dixon as an enemy.”
“Last night I bruised up Caspian Younger and Jack Boyd a little bit. I think Younger was setting me up.”
“This was over his wife?”
Clete ignored the question. “Boyd was carrying a drop,” he said. “There’s something else I should mention.”
“What?” she asked.
“Felicity and I might get married. One thing bothers me, though: Her husband says she got it on with the old man.”
“With Love Younger?”
“That’s what he said.”
“What did she say?”
“What she always says: Her husband is a liar. I believe her. I think.”
“Nobody can get in this much trouble,” she said.
“I was trying to be straight with you. I wanted to bust up Jack Boyd worse than I did. It wasn’t because he was out to clip me, either. He called you ‘butch’ up by the cave, and his friend Bill Pepper kidnapped and assaulted you. So I made sure he’ll be taking his nutrients through a straw for a while. If I see him again, I may finish the job.”
She opened a tin of Altoids and placed one on her tongue. “What am I going to do with you?” she said.
“Nothing. I’m your father. It’s the other way around. You need to understand that, Gretchen.”
“You’re an absolute mess,” she said. She stood up on her toes and kissed him on the forehead. “Don’t let the feds throw you a slider. They’d like to jam both of us.”
THE RODEO AND county fairgrounds were midway down in the Bitterroot Valley. All week an army of carnival people had been erecting the Ferris wheel, the Kamikaze, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Zipper, the pirate ship, the fun house, the merry-go-round, planes that swung on cables, and a miniature train that ran on a looping track never over five feet from the ground. The sun was still high in the western sky when Wyatt returned from a concession trailer and sat down at a table under a cottonwood beside Bertha Phelps, a paper plate loaded with chili dogs in each hand. Indians wearing beaded costumes strung with feathers and tinkling with bells walked past them to a huge open-sided tent where the snake dance was about to begin. Wyatt popped open two cans of Pepsi and set them on the table.
“You know what rodeo people call Christmastime?” he asked.
“No, I don’t. But I know you’ll tell me,” she replied.
“Christmastime is the two weeks before and after the Fourth of July,” he said. “That’s when all the prize money gets won.”
“You’re not going to put on greasepaint, are you?”
“I might.”
“The years take their toll on all of us, Wyatt. You should think about that.”
“I say ride it to the buzzer. I say don’t give an inch.”
She put her hand on his.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” she replied. “You’re just a special kind of man, that’s all.”
The breeze came up, and the leaves in the cottonwood tree seemed to take on a life of their own and flicker faster than the eye could record their movement. Their sound reminded Wyatt of a matchbook cover in the spokes of a bicycle wheel. He started in on his chili dogs, then stopped and stared at the mountains in the west. In minutes the sun had become a reddish-purple melt above a canyon already dark with shadow. He stared at the sun until his eyes watered
and he saw a woman separate herself from its radiance and walk toward him in silhouette, her chestnut hair blowing on her cheeks, her legs longer than was natural, her posture like that of a man.
“Is something wrong?” Bertha asked.
“I get these lapses in my head. Time goes by, and I don’t have no memory of where it went or what I done. My head gets like it was before I drank all them chemical cocktails. It’s been happening to me of late, and it gives me feelings of anxiety I don’t have no name for.”
“You’ve been right here,” she said. “With me. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“You see yonder?”
“See what?”
“The woman walking out of the sun. She’s coming straight to our table. I already know what she’s gonna say and why she’s here. How come her words are already in my head?”
“The sun is too bright. I can’t see her. Wyatt, you’re not making sense.”
“She’s been sent.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Her name is Gretchen Horowitz. She’s come to tell me about him. I knew it was gonna happen.”
“I can’t follow what you’re saying. Let’s eat our food. Don’t pay attention to that woman or these crazy thoughts. Pick up your fork and eat.”
“People don’t want to believe he’s here. That Lou’sana detective, Robicheaux, he knows it, too. So does the woman. He did your brother in. Stop pretending, Bertha.”
“You were raised among primitive and violent people. The superstition and fear they taught you is not your fault. But you cannot let their poison continue to cause injury in your life. Are you listening to me, Wyatt Dixon?”
He stood up from his folding chair. He was wearing garters on his sleeves, his gold-and-silver national championship buckle, a spur with a tiny rowel on one boot, and an oversize cowboy shirt that wouldn’t bind when he rode a horse. He was wearing all the things that told him who he was and who he was not. Except now these things seemed to mean nothing at all.
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