A Blessing from Heaven
With the mercury in the bowl of the thermometer and a north wind a harbinger of worse weather to come, the Madison at McAtee Bridge isn’t the best stretch of the river or the best conditions under which to fish it. Nonetheless, Sean strung the rod, having learned long ago that the key to catching trout was grasping opportunity. Katie Sparrow was to meet him at the bridge, and with time to kill, it was either practice being a Westerner and lean against the hood and work a stem of grass in his teeth, or cast.
Spotting a few Baetis mayflies being bandied about on the surface, Sean added a tippet of 5X monofilament to his leader and knotted on a size-eighteen parachute Adams. An early hour for a cold-water hatch, but there they were, sailing down the river with their upright wings keeled over like the head sail of a sloop. Now all Sean needed was a trout rising. There wasn’t one, par for the course this late in the season, but points, he told himself, for trying.
A bald eagle had taken a perch on the limb of a tree downriver and Sean kept an eye on it as he changed reel spools to a sinking shooting head. He was muttering to himself, fishing a streamer fly called a zoo cougar that brought a smile of irony to his lips, but not much faith to his fishing, when the rod tip dipped sharply. A trout walloped the surface with its tail, silvering the river, then swung out and downstream in an arc as Sean stumbled after it, trying not to slip on the rocks. The fish wasn’t as active as it would have been in warmer water, but it was heavy and gave ground grudgingly. Sean coaxed it in, minutes passing, the sliver of bamboo dipping like a divining rod, and was easing it to hand when he saw Katie Sparrow walking along the bank. He had been so absorbed with the trout that he’d neither heard nor seen her truck crossing the bridge. Had he paused to think, he would have realized that those lost moments were the oblivion he fished for, a forgetting of the world and a glimpse through water’s window into his past. As Sean looked down at the trout finning by his boots, the child he’d been, before he’d donned the layers of manners that adults wear like second and third skins, stared back at him in a wavering image.
He glanced away from the mirror—Katie was still some distance away, the eagle still on its branch—then slipped his hand under the trout’s belly and removed the hook. The big brown rested, its gills pulsing in crimson slashes as its ventral fins dusted the cobblestone bottom. Spots the size of fingernails blinked inside yellow and aqua haloes. It was there. It was gone.
As a fisherman, Sean had been asked many times to name his favorite river and tell the stories of his most memorable fish. His answer to the first question was generally the Madison, though it was getting too crowded of late, and, as to memorable fish, there were too many to choose from, including this one. But were you to ask him about his most memorable moment while fishing, the answer never varied.
He’d been fishing that day on the Gallatin River near its junction with Portal Creek, a tumbling race of champagne riffles that had never been kind to him, nor was it that evening. He had just made a cast when he looked up and saw a bald eagle flying over his head, a trout in its talons. Sean saw eagles almost every day he was on the water and he saw many catch fish. But none that flew so low he could feel the air stirred by the wing beats or that looked so big and powerfully formed. As the bird passed over him, two downy feathers fell from its undersides and wafted like thistledown in a breeze. One disappeared into the branches of a pine tree on the bank, but the other drifted straight down to Sean, who, after transferring the rod to his left hand, caught the feather as it kissed his palm. As he folded the fingers of his right hand over it, he felt a tug on his line. It was the first strike he’d had since starting to fish. The trout was small and off quickly, but Sean couldn’t help but feel that the feather was a gift given from one fisherman to another, and that of all the anglers the eagle had seen that day, he was the one chosen to receive its blessing.
When he got home, he took the feather from the pocket of his fishing shirt and sealed it in a Mason jar. It was so tiny and ethereal, a few filaments of pure white fluff, that there really wasn’t anything to see. Like the translucent snakeskins that he had collected in his childhood, this memento of the wild did not maintain its luster behind a piece of glass, and, understanding what he needed to do, he transferred the feather to one of the small spring-lidded compartments in his Wheatley fly box. He’d been carrying it there for six years, waiting for the right moment, and as the eagle on the cottonwood limb flew from its perch and plunged into the riffles to come up with a small fish shining in its talons, Sean realized that the moment had arrived. He shook the feather from the compartment in the fly box and watched it waft away into the sky.
“Whatcha doing? Saying a prayer? Selling your soul to the devil?” Katie Sparrow blew at an errant strand of hair that escaped from her watch cap.
“Offering a gift to a bird of heaven,” he said. He snapped the fly box shut and zipped it into a pocket in his vest.
“Which was bigger, that trout I saw you catching or the one that eagle just flew away with?”
“Mine was bigger.”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”
Sean smiled. “Katie, Katie, Katie.”
“Sean, Sean, Sean. You know you like me, admit it. Maybe it’s like a whatchamacallit.”
“What is?”
“The eagle. Like a harbinger. It will bring us luck.”
“Maybe. You got your detector?”
“I got a new one, an AT MAX. The county ponied up for everything but the add-ons. I can find you a filling in a tooth under a foot of granite with this baby.”
“Good. Let me change out of these waders and we’ll caravan in. Might want to lock in your hubs.”
“Ahead of you. Locked and loaded.”
“You got the doughnuts?” The doughnuts were the “usual” Sean had asked Katie to pick up.
“Day-old, but you betcha,” she said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Spy in the Woodpile
So you think it’s a camera, huh? Like a game-trail camera that’s triggered by movement?”
Sean and Katie were drinking coffee and eating the doughnuts, warming their hands on the hood of her truck. Strung from trees, tatters of crime scene tape flapped listlessly in the breeze.
“I think it’s likely,” Sean said. “A kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. If a working woman possesses incriminating video of some of the town fathers who can’t keep their hands out of the cookie jar, that might cool the heels of an assistant DA who was thinking about prosecuting a case.”
“The madam, she could be gaming you—you think of that?”
“Yep. But I don’t think she was.”
“So she’s your hooker with a heart of gold? I always pictured her as a witch.”
“Heart of nickel silver,” Sean said. “I think she genuinely cares, or cared, for the women who worked for her. But you’re right. She might be pulling my leg about there being a camera. It was more like implied.”
“You know what I think?” Katie said. “I think she was pulling another part of your anatomy. That’s what I think.”
By the end of the next hour, Katie had swept all the paths in the vicinity of the trailhead and trailer, as well as the outhouse with its cut-out quarter moon, from ground level to as high as she could reach with a broomstick extender, without once triggering the needle of the readout. Katie rummaged in her pack for a couple of sticks of jerky.
“We caught this one poacher in the park,” she said, chewing the tough venison and speaking out of the side of her mouth. “We’d set the camera up at a trail crossing and the motion detector caught him dropping his pants for a number two. The case went to court, and the defense lawyer, he tries to get the video ruled out on the grounds that it’s prejudicial. But the judge said it was obtained legally and it put the accused in proximity to an illegally killed bull elk. So they showed the video of this guy squatting down to
the jury. I mean, his junk was pixilated out, but still. I was a witness for the prosecution ’cause I’m the one set up the camera, and I was digging my nails into my wrists trying not to laugh. Or I woulda been if I had any nails.”
She swallowed the last of the jerky and smiled for Sean. “Good for the jaw muscles,” she said.
They went back to work and found what they were looking for. The camera was in the woodpile, ten yards from the trailer door. Sean had seen Katie sweep the coil over the stacked splits and quarter-rounds. And pause. Then she swept it again, back and forth, partially overlapping each sweep with the next.
She looked at Sean with a grin. She pointed to the needle on the control box’s readout. “Got the bitch!” she said.
The camera had been artfully concealed in a cavity in a Ponderosa pine round section. The round had been sawn in half lengthwise, then each half routed out to make room for the camera. A small hole in the bark was just large enough to accommodate the lens, and two powerful magnets had been inserted flush into each half of the round, so that with the camera in place, the halves of the round would clamp back together. From three feet away it looked like any other round in the stack.
Katie had tripped the sensor when handling the camera and shut it off. She extracted the SD card and tucked it into a breast pocket. “I got my laptop in the truck,” she said.
Ten minutes later they were sitting side by side on the bench seat at the fold-down table inside the trailer. Katie slipped the memory card into her computer and waited for the videos to load. There was something on the order of a hundred, ranging from one to forty-six seconds long, with most lasting around seven seconds.
“They’re dated,” Katie said. “Lucky us.”
“Isn’t that standard?”
“Yeah. But you have the option of turning the function off. Same with audio. Infrared, too—that’s your thermal detection. And you can set it to ignore the little critters, birds and squirrels and stuff. Maximize your battery life.”
She clicked on the first thumbnail. The image enlarged to show the date, time, and GPS coordinates marking the location. The date was October 26 at 3:13 p.m.
“That’s the day before elk season opened,” Sean said.
Katie hit the play button. Boots, then legs, then the back of a person who was walking into the expanding cone of vision toward the Airstream. But the trees lining the path were different. Leaf-scoured aspens with gnarly branches instead of tamarack and pine. It was the same trailer, but parked in a different location.
She began to scan the rest of the thumbnails. Five consecutive hunting weekends. Five different GPS locations. But always the Airstream in the background. Not really a surprise. Service the weekend warriors in one location, then change to another before too many hunters told their buddies and one decided to be a Boy Scout.
“Sort of like Christmas morning,” Katie said. “Bunch of stockings all in a row, look to see who’s been naughty. And guess what? They’re all getting coal.”
In each of the locations, the camera’s lens was directed toward the trailer so that people approaching the door would have their backs to the lens, while those leaving the trailer would reveal their faces. With no exceptions, the visitors who tripped the sensor were clearly hunters, some still wearing their four hundred square inches of hunter orange as required by law. Or a light gray that Sean took for orange, for all videos shot after 5:00 p.m. or so, when it became dark, were cast in an eerie black and white.
“Some of these guys must smell like a bull elk pissing on himself in the rut,” Katie said.
In the first four weeks of video, the lens caught fourteen different men coming and going from the trailer, a few more than once. There was only one woman. She had a fringe of dark hair escaping a watch cap with a tassel, but her face was covered with a scarf whenever she came within range of the camera’s sensor.
“She knows about the setup,” Katie said. Then: “Here we go.”
She queued up the first in the series of videos taken from their present location. It was immediately apparent that the woman stepping outside the trailer door was not the same one who’d been in the first four locations. Whereas the latter appeared to be of medium build, this woman was slim and considerably shorter. She wore boots with ruffs of fur at the collars—the first woman had worn knee-high Muck boots—and no hat, revealing shoulder-length hair. Notably, she made no attempt to hide her face, indicating to Sean that she hadn’t known she was being filmed. Hers was a face, he thought, that was more plain than pretty, though he knew that in person his impression might have been different. In the videos, everybody looked to have a little zombie in their DNA. Mid-thirties, he thought, maybe older. He was looking at a dead woman.
“I never thought I’d say this,” Katie said, “but she looks like a nice person. Not your typical swamp angel looking to get fixed.”
It was true. There was something innocent in the woman’s face. And her posture, the way she stood, kicking her feet, her arms crossed, hands holding her shoulders. Not a person used to the cold. Someone you wanted to wrap a blanket around, who would smile up at you when you did. She was smiling now, in the frame of the lens, as a man approached her with his back to the camera, walking from the direction of the woodpile. He was carrying a small cooler and set it down. Then he wrapped her in his arms and they stood facing each other for a long minute, her face plainly visible, though the man showed only the back of his head. The size disparity revealed him as a big man, thick through the shoulders and chest, with a mane of ringlets that fell down his back. The couple disengaged and the man fished into his coat pocket for a pack of cigarettes, lit two, and passed one to her. His face came into profile, revealing a full beard.
Katie froze the video at the forty-four-second mark. “Grizzly Adams there looks familiar,” she said.
Sean gave a noncommittal nod. He felt a prickling sensation at the back of his neck. “What’s the date on this video?”
“The twenty-second. Thanksgiving Day. Two-thirty p.m. When you look at the two of them, I mean, it doesn’t seem like he’s pitching and she’s catching. More like he’s being protective.”
Katie tapped the arrow. The man and woman unfroze and stubbed out their cigarettes. The man followed her inside the trailer, carrying the cooler. An hour and ten minutes later, the man reemerged and lumbered past the camera’s position with heavy footfalls. He was carrying the cooler.
“Whatcha thinking? He was bringing her a turkey dinner?”
“I don’t know,” Sean said. “Let’s move ahead to Lenny Two J. See how much of what he told me was truth.” Katie gave him a quizzical look and Sean clued her in about the orchestra conductor who was likely the last person to see the victim alive.
Katie ran through the thumbnails and found the appropriate videos, starting with one of the woman leaving the trailer on the twenty-third, the Friday afternoon when the maestro said he’d met her. She was wearing tight-fitting jeans tucked into the boots with fur collars she’d worn in earlier videos, a puffy zip-up jacket, and what looked like a Cossack’s fur hat.
“Night on the town,” Katie said. “Where’s her ride?”
“Her friend probably parked where we did. The camera wouldn’t pick that up.”
They watched the videos in silence, Lenny Two J arriving at the trailer in her company several hours later, the pair taking cigarette breaks and walking to and from the outhouse or woodpile over the course of the next day. Pretty mundane stuff. Lenny shoveling snow, the woman dragging smoke into her lungs and letting it out, looking far away, keeping herself to herself. Once, she tilted her chin up to catch snowflakes on her tongue, then kissed Lenny playfully on the cheek. The affection they showed each other and the times stamped on the videos supported the maestro’s version of events.
“True love,” Katie said at one point. “I don’t know how much of it I can stand. You want some more coffee? I
t’s in the truck.”
Sean got the thermos from the Ford. When he came back, Katie was looking at an image on the screen. “You better sit down for this,” she said.
Sean sat down.
“Time is, uh, a little past nine p.m. on Saturday night. It’s the last video before you and Martha tripped the recorder about six a.m. Sunday. And your buddy. What’s his name?”
“Sam Meslik.”
“Okay,” she said, “I backed it up to the start. Tell me what you see.”
What Sean saw was the black-and-white image of the woman emerging from the trailer. She was wearing what looked like a fluffy bathrobe and paused on the step to fish a cigarette from a pocket and bent her head to light it. She blew out a plume of smoke and then shook her head as if to say, “What have I got myself into?” She tapped the cigarette out against the siding of the trailer and placed it in a pocket of the robe and switched on a headlamp. Then she began to shuffle toward the camera’s position, her boots creaking in the shin-deep snow. The lens caught her lower legs as they came within view of the camera, the furry ruffs of the collars, then, abruptly, there was a flurry of movement, accompanied by a thudding sound and a gasp like the intake of a breath.
A few heartbeats of silence, then a momentary glimpse of the woman’s face, her eyes seeming to bulge and roam wildly, and a few garbled words, one of which sounded like a question with the word “water.”
Then her face was gone and there was the sound of something being dragged. And one more word before the camera’s sensor switched off, or maybe just an exhalation of breath. Then nothing. The woman had been dragged far enough away that the camera could no longer register her movement.
Sean brought the coffee to his lips, stilling the tremor in his fingers. He took a sip. “Back it up, Katie.”
They watched the video again.
“Did we just see her being taken by the cat?” Katie said.
“I think so.”
“Jesus.”
The Bangtail Ghost Page 12