The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  He said, “I can’t believe you were willing to leave Gina, now that she’s so sick.”

  He hadn’t gotten it yet. I told him, “I have a feeling she might improve quite a bit after we’ve been gone about an hour.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You guys are good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You could tell Daniel was scared last night.”

  “It was just that I couldn’t ask this of him, on top of everything he’s done already. I felt I needed to—step up.”

  “Needed to?”

  “Wanted to.”

  George just smiled.

  That he could smile at a time like this. God, I loved him. Gina had told us what this Alger had said about being able to ford the high-running Quilmash upstream from the encampment. So we at least knew which side the camp was on. We found the ford and waded in. It’s amazing how hard it is to keep your balance in fast water. The penny-in-your-mouth taste of fear surged through me as the cold current cut through my jeans into my shins. I focused on the opposite bank.

  I felt better when we clambered up the low bank and continued toward the growing sound of the big rapids where the two rivers crashed together.

  George now began chattering aloud about what he was seeing and hearing, in keeping with our goal of appearing unsneaky.

  “There’s another raven, that makes seventeen so far today. Now listen to that little call—that’s a spruce warbler. You know, my favorite animal in Bambi was the owl. Wise old owl, he never got his hands dirty. Like a mandarin, he didn’t have to. Then I grow up to be an ornithologist, isn’t that something?”

  I made no comment.

  “Watch that branch,” George cautioned. “Huh, guess I don’t have to tell you to watch it in the woods, eh, Sacagawea?”

  I took the lead in the hike, in keeping with the role I’d assigned myself.

  Presently our ears picked up something different from birds: human voices, arguing.

  We stopped immediately. Since the voices went on, evidently unaware of us in spite of our efforts to be obvious, I signaled that we should be quiet, to listen. George nodded. We continued slowly and silently as possible. I placed my feet carefully, rolling heel-toe. George moved as deftly as a salamander, dislodging neither twig nor stone.

  “Who says I don’t?” demanded a female voice that sounded like it’d been born pissed off. “You’re the boss until things start going to shit, right?”

  “Things are not going to shit! I’ve got everything under control.” A hulking guy voice that used volume in place of reason. Somehow I felt I knew the voice, and I realized that it reminded me of Ed Burris’s voice back in Wisconsin—the leader of the hoody gang of brothers Gina had sometimes hung out with. The voice of a guy smart enough to raise a lot of creative, attractive hell but too dumb to avoid getting busted from time to time.

  “Yeah, well, I ought to go along and follow Alger,” said the female petulantly, seeking to be convinced otherwise.

  George and I huddled next to a soft-needled sapling whose young green seemed to glow against the vibrant ochre of the forest floor. We kept listening. I touched one of the sapling’s branch tips with my finger. So alive.

  I’m going to miss this place, I realized with surprise.

  “You do that and I’ll kill you.” The guy grunted and spat. I smelled stale woodsmoke, as if a campfire had just smoldered out. “We get that money, even half of it, even a tenth of it, you’ll be kissing my hairy ass from here to Las Vegas.”

  “Everybody’s abandoning us!”

  “Good! The more for us!”

  The conversation devolved a little further, and George touched my sleeve. Time to reveal ourselves.

  We stood and moved forward, slowly and noisily.

  “Do you know the spotted owl is the only species,” George asked in a clear voice, “that mimics the call of the mockingbird?”

  “Who’s there?” said the female.

  We moved to the edge of their clearing and stood side by side, him smiling, me stone-faced.

  “What in the hell?” said the woman to me. “Which casino did you excape out of?”

  I gave her a cold look and folded my arms.

  Filter-tipped cigarette butts littered the clearing like mashed beige bugs.

  She looked to George for a clue, then to her guy.

  The guy was the tall ape-man who had chased Gina into the river.

  I wanted to spring at him and gouge his eyes out.

  “Hey, civilization!” exclaimed George, sweeping his arm like an explorer showing something to the fellow with the camera. “Uh, may we come in?” Without waiting for an answer, he strode up to them, hand extended. “I’m Tom Webber, University of North Dakota. This is my assistant, Mary Two Loons. We’re doing fieldwork!”

  George wore Petey’s telescope around his neck and carried a small notebook and pen. He had shaved and put on Daniel’s navy watch cap, pulling it down over his ears. He also wore Daniel’s parka instead of his own, which he’d worn yesterday when we’d glimpsed this ape-man on the other side of the river—and he, perhaps, had glimpsed us.

  George looked and acted like a semi-rugged, clueless scientist.

  And I? I figured that to be safe, I’d needed to change my appearance drastically today. Moreover, we needed an excuse as to how we’d found this camp. Which we’d keep in abeyance, for now.

  I’m a natural blonde, a paleface from prairie country.

  This morning, my plan required that I borrow Petey’s brick-colored “painting stone” and grind some off, making a paste with water. I split the paste into two parts and added some fine black dirt to one portion. This I mashed into my wet hair. I combed it through, wiped my head on a Camp Saskee-wee-wit T-shirt, then combed it again.

  I checked myself in my tiny mirror. Now my hair had a reddish, mixed-race appearance.

  Using a bit of T-shirt as an applicator, I then covered my face, neck, and hands up to the elbows with the original bronze-toned paste. I rubbed it in, then rinsed most of it off in the chilly lake, leaving only the trace of the color. I checked myself in my mirror again and turned to George.

  “I don’t know,” he’d said. “You do appear somewhat Native American. But I don’t know.”

  “Wait; you don’t have nearly the full effect.” I went to the storeroom to continue to assemble my look.

  Over my synthetic long underwear top I put on two of the moldy flannel counselor shirts I’d found. Over those I laid—yes!—the raccoon pelts. I draped one over each shoulder, yoking them together with shoelaces through the eyeholes. The tails dangled down my back.

  Then I went to the toolshed. I’d been there to retrieve something already, and now I needed one more thing.

  Wrapped in his canvas shroud, Lance was no longer himself. The death-odor came up, which even if it’s faint as in this case, if you’ve smelled it before, you recognize it instantly. In case you’ve never been around a decayed corpse—which I regrettably had—the closest thing is the greasetrappy, rotten-meat smell from the drains and floors at a substandard hash house. Which I also knew.

  I’d expected the odor to be worse, but I guess George was right about the cool conditions helping. The temperature on the floor of that shed was probably forty degrees max, maybe only thirty-five. A propane deep freeze would’ve done the trick, but you can’t have everything.

  I grabbed the hatchet I’d spied lying on a stack of plywood and got the hell out of there, slamming the door behind me and exhaling hard.

  A handful of lake gravel served to buff the rust off the hatchet head, then I honed it roughly by rubbing the edge, both sides, on a flat, wet stone. The good old hickory handle was in good shape, and the head was solid on it. We weren’t gonna cut paper with it.

  I strapped my tooled leather cowboy belt—good and sturdy; do I know how to pack for a camping trip or what?—over the shirts, and stuck the hatchet in at my hip. The belt also served to anchor the raccoon
tails. I jammed my rain hat over my hair to protect the color from rinsing out in the drizzle, and went to find George.

  The difference between simply wearing a costume, as Petey did on Halloween—little boy dressed up as tough guy grubbing candy—and living your role is the difference between playing hopscotch and deciding you’re going to qualify for the Olympic track team. You must give yourself utterly to your new persona and be willing to do whatever you have to do to achieve your goal: in my case, getting a murderous bunch of crackers to believe I was a mute half-breed Indian of indeterminate origin.

  The weight and suppleness of the pelts over my shoulders, hugging my waist, felt good. Having lost my jacket in the river, I needed the warmth. Moreover, I felt—armored. Armored against the elements, armored against a knife slash, armored against the reality of my own little duplicitous personality.

  My reasoning was this: I knew, of course, that today’s Native Americans dressed in modern clothes, but I also knew that sometimes they put on regalia. I knew nothing of the local Indians’ tradition in this regard, but I also knew that just like other cultures, the Native population had to harbor its share of eccentrics. If a female Indian tracker wanted to wear pelts over her modern clothes, by the Great Spirit, she would.

  As George studied the map, I closed my eyes and thought for a minute. “Let the threads give it to you,” a wise TV director had once told me. Yeah. I squared my shoulders and flattened my face by letting all my facial muscles droop. I let my eyelids hood my eyes, which I kept sharp and quick.

  I realized George had been watching me, incredulous but not daring to raise any objections. He did say, “You remember Gina said this Alger had a ponytail. D’you think any of these people could be Indian?”

  “Meaning, maybe they’ll see through me?”

  “Yeah.”

  I laughed. “Because I have zero firsthand knowledge of being part Indian?”

  “Yeah. What’s so funny?”

  “Now you’re the one assuming that life is like the movies. Where I’ll make some misstep, some tiny blunder, and they’ll realize I’m faking being an Indian and set upon us with their chainsaws?”

  “Well—yeah.”

  I faced him. The morning was actually, unbelievably, brightening. The drizzle eased off, not having turned to sleet. It was still damn cold. I hadn’t seen the sun clearly in a week. Weeks? I felt an odd inner vibe and realized I was apprehensive of the sun hitting me in the face with no curtain of clouds mitigating it.

  “This is going to be a quick situation,” I explained. “I’m not going to engage in some discourse about native American legends and folkways, nor BIA politics or anything like that. I’m barely even gonna talk. I don’t even know the names of the tribes around here, let alone what pelts are appropriate to wear after Labor Day. But I do know this: the Indians made it up as they went along. There was no central database. If some women were weaving cloth like they always did for three generations, and the matriarch said one day, ‘Hey, from now on we’re going to put a red stripe down the middle,’ they did it. Things changed.”

  “How do you know the Indians made it up as they went along?”

  “Because EVERYBODY makes it up as they go along!” His face got this faraway look like he was hearing a new sound. He said nothing.

  “It’s you,” I added, “who’s gonna get unmasked.”

  “Yeah.”

  And so here we were now, with the crazy idiots Gina had escaped from, who might still be harboring Kenner. No sign of him in the clearing, except in the eyes of the logger chick, which shifted uphill once or twice.

  Chapter 25 – Bonechopper in Control

  I had thought that George’s boorish-ornithologist act would last a bit longer than it did. Well, it lasted long enough for these two individuals to introduce themselves to us in return.

  George experienced a slight lapse. “Your name’s Bonechopper?” he asked incredulously. “Your name is Bonechopper?”

  “What’s your problem with it?” He lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke toward us in a plume that whirled upward with the wind. The woman was smoking already.

  George cleared his throat. “Well, it’s just that I’ve never heard the nickname before.”

  “Yeah, it’s short for Bonechopper of People Who Bug Me.”

  “Ah,” laughed George, “good one!”

  I studied this couple. First impressions take barely a moment, but you don’t need a hell of a lot more time to form a pretty thorough second one.

  As I gazed with my half-lidded, half-breed eyes, I reviewed what I knew about them: they were “renegade loggers,” according to Gina, which I gathered didn’t mean the same thing as wildcatters; they were wood thieves. Given the amounts of money that must be involved to make such a miserable line of work rewarding, we were talking offenses on the order of felony, as well as trespassing, malicious destruction of property, un-ecological camping habits, and God knew what else.

  Heavy enough. Now add kidnapping. Before I began studying law, I thought kidnapping meant snatching somebody from their regular habitat, taping their mouth shut, and dragging them off to a secret location.

  But I learned in first-year law that kidnapping simply means holding a person against his or her will. Therefore, you can kidnap somebody in their own house. In California, kidnapping was just short of a capital offense.

  So these wood crooks had turned into people crooks, based on the opportunity presented to them by the happenstance of running into some Sauvenards in the woods.

  They had been quarreling hard. The woman, who had just called herself Dendra—what a weird name, appropriate for here; weren’t dendrites plant parts?; hey, I’m studying law, not biology—realized she’d given me a clue by glancing uphill, and now she trained her stare resolutely at George and me, back and forth. The skin on her face was pale and saggy, the mark of a heavy smoker. She held her cigarette cupped under her hand, as if keeping it dry, even though the drizzle had subsided. Force of habit.

  From those initial apprehensive glances, I sensed that Kenner was not dead. If they’d killed him, they’d have buried him or otherwise disposed of his body, and they’d be out of these woods.

  So it was good that we were all here together, and at the same time it was bad that we were all here together.

  Dendra was defiant but scared. It appeared to me that while she might have the stomach for casual cruelty, whatever they’d done to Kenner had challenged her threshold. But she wasn’t ready to bail. She wasn’t a quitter; she wasn’t the type to suddenly see the light and repent, join the Tupperware sales force.

  She was the type that considered quitting anything tantamount to failure. A stubborn streak, that was it. Gosh, yeah, the not-able-to-let-go-of-the-plan-or-your-man no matter how to hell things are sliding—that was a combo I realized led to a whole lot of grief in this world.

  In short, there wasn’t going to be a wedge into Dendra. I saw her sizing me up just like I was her. What did she see? A part-time Hollywood actress and full-time law student dressed up like she’d just crawled out of a rotting log?

  No, it was clear from Dendra’s worried bafflement that I had her fooled; I had both of them fooled. She was trying to figure me out at the level of how dangerous is this Indian, rather than is this person an Indian in the first place? I swelled my chest confidently against my raccoon pelts and spread my feet slightly farther apart. I worked to project intelligent savagery.

  As for Bonechopper, I knew him too: a marrow-bred badass who’d recognized the Sauvenard name and seen opportunity in it, just add water. And violence.

  How could I tell these things? Their postures, for one. Pure defiance, pure self-justification, chins out, Dendra’s inclined slightly toward Bonechopper—and their eyes. The eyes always reveal how much people need from you, and how much of themselves they’re trying to hide. Dendra was trying to hide her greed, and for some reason needed me to believe it. A shred of shame, I guess. The instant she’d seen us, she’d frozen
in place, her knees locked, a posture most women believe is strong but actually betrays tension as well as being useless for action.

  Bonechopper’s legs were slightly flexed, his arms at his sides, fingers curled. As well, he had turned slightly, so that his body was side-on to us: a male’s unconscious reaction to an anticipated threat—the body side-on is a smaller target than full-on. Bonechopper didn’t give a fuck about us, her, or anybody else. Up close, he was a scraggly guy in a filthy work jacket.

  You learn a lot about body language and psychology in acting school, and then if you want to get good you learn more on your own. Moreover, acting self-selects avid students of the human condition.

  I felt my heart accelerate as George talked with Bonechopper.

  “I sense you two would be just as happy being by yourselves,” George said, “and believe me, I can appreciate that! Truly!” He leered at me, then grinned to Bonechopper. “Truly, I can!”

  He was so unconsciously good. People use extraneous words when they feel weak or insecure.

  George babbled about birds and field counts, making up species like the spruce warbler and the “mullet-headed lesser heron,” which almost made me break character.

  “We’ll be moving right along,” George said, turning uphill, where Dendra had first glanced. But quickly, his timing perfect so that they had an instant to feel sudden panic but not react, he turned back to them. “But first, I wonder if I might ask you, have you seen any ravens around here this morning?” Bonechopper answered slowly, “Seen ’em and heard ’em. Down by the river,” he added, flipping his cigarette butt. “That way.”

  Dendra flipped her stub too. “Lots of ’em! That way.”

  “Ah! Thank you! Lastly, any, ah, hummingbirds today? I ask because I’m studying a particular species—”

  “Which one?” interrupted Bonechopper.

  “The, ah, the red-tailed.”

  “You mean the rufous?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  Bonechopper’s eyes narrowed like a lion’s. “I oughta just shoot you now.”

  “Oh, do it later, later,” said George, as if he thought Bonechopper was joking, also during the short course of that sentence dropping from batty scientist to defeated trickster. He hung his head. “No such thing as a rufous hummingbird, right?”