Lone Creek

by Neil Mcmahon

  I slung the rifle over my shoulder and lifted out the mailer, tingling at the thought of plastic explosives or a cloud of anthrax dust. It was light, with only a slight bulge in the middle. I didn’t touch the pull tab. Instead, I carried it back to the cabin and cut off the opposite edge with scissors.

  Inside, there was a plain white letter-sized envelope. Inside that were twenty-five hundred-dollar bills.

  I sat down in the doorway with the money in my hand, staring out into the forest.

  With everything else that had happened, I’d almost forgotten that I’d demanded the bail money from Balcomb. I’d assumed that if he did pay it, he’d deal directly with Bill LaTray. But it made sense that he wouldn’t want anyone else to know about it. Gary Varna might believe that he’d dropped the charges out of the goodness of his heart, but his paying my bail on top of that would be a big red flag that there was more to this.

  I briefly considered the notion that he was spooked enough by Kirk’s disappearance to really back off. But Balcomb keeping his word made me even more nervous than him being straightforwardly out to get me. It underlined the one thing I was sure of—that I couldn’t keep on like this much longer, edging around sideways and looking over my shoulder.

  The ring of the phone was like an exclamation point to what I’d just been thinking, making my hands jerk so hard I almost dropped the bills. I guessed that this was Sarah Lynn, and tried to phrase an apology.

  “Finally, you’re home,” a woman said. “I’ve been calling you all morning.”

  It was a different voice from Sarah Lynn’s, one I’d only heard a few times, but easy to recognize—refined, musical, softened by the trace of a southern accent.

  I couldn’t say that Laurie Balcomb was the last person on earth I’d expected to hear from, but that came close.

  “My message machine seems to be working,” I said.

  “I didn’t want to leave a message. I didn’t know who else might be around. We need to talk, in person.”

  “Is that a fact?” I was already suspecting another of Balcomb’s setups, and the coolness must have come across in my voice.

  “I can understand why you don’t like me,” she said, sounding anxious now. “But I want to help you.”

  That was just how Kirk had come on. At least he’d had a plausible pitch, but there was no reason I could see why she should be feeling generous toward me.

  “Mrs. Balcomb—”

  “Laurie, please.”

  “It’s not that I don’t like you. To be perfectly truthful, I don’t know you well enough to have a take one way or the other. But right off the top, you being your husband’s wife doesn’t exactly make us buddies.”

  “When I found out how he treated you, I could have killed him.”

  She said it very convincingly. My skepticism stayed, but I scaled it back a shade.

  “What is it we have to talk about?” I said.

  “Will you just please come meet me? I’m in town, at a phone booth. I couldn’t get through on my cell phone.”

  “They don’t work up here.”

  “I should have known,” she said impatiently. “That somebody like you would be living in the dark ages. Pick a place; you know the area. Not a restaurant or anything like that—I can’t be seen.”

  I weighed it for a few seconds longer. In town, in broad daylight, I’d be less at risk than here. Whatever her pretext, I might learn something useful.

  And I had the time. It wasn’t like I had to get ready for work in the morning.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Saint Helena Cathedral was a lovely Gothic structure built in the early 1900s, designed by an Austrian architect and modeled after a church in Vienna. A pair of Irishmen had been the driving force behind it, one a bishop and the other an immigrant who’d struck gold. My own paternal grandfather had grown up in a stone hovel near the north bank of the Shannon, four miles from the nearest little village, and no one in the family even had a bicycle. He’d spent his life working in the mines instead of owning one. The name had been O’Davoren originally, but he’d dropped the “O” at Ellis Island. That was in the days when there was a lot of “No Irish Need Apply” sentiment around, especially back east, so he’d kept moving on until he ended up here.

  I’d suggested the cathedral to Laurie as a meeting place because I wasn’t sure how well she knew her way around, and you could see its twin spires from miles away. I told her to park nearby and I’d find her. The neighborhood was residential and quiet, so she wouldn’t have to worry about being seen.

  And it was as unlikely a spot for an ambush as I could think of.

  But I recognized something else at work in my mind. The cathedral carried a strong association with Celia. Except for my own brief boyhood fling with piety, my family had pretty much been the Catholic equivalent of jack Mormons—sincere enough, but playing fast and loose with the rules. Still, we rarely missed Sunday Mass. Celia would go with us, always wearing a pretty dress and behaving like she was at first communion, although by the end of that summer her confessions must have burned the priests’ ears.

  She’d just gotten her driver’s license then, and in the afternoons after church, my folks would let her take our old Ford Falcon for a couple of hours and I’d tag along. Our usual routine involved a stop at Gertie’s Drive-In for whatever fast food we could afford, then just cruising. She liked to drive the steep hilly streets on the west side, checking out the majestic old houses that had been built when Helena was awash with mining money. It was the kind of wistful daydreaming that all kids did, but hers had a practical and determined edge. She’d guess at their values, and if one was for sale, she’d look it up in the paper and find out. She’d even describe the kind of furniture she’d buy for the place if it was hers.

  For a hardscrabble ranch girl like her, there was only one way that was ever likely to happen—hooking up with a rich guy like Pete Pettyjohn. And oddly enough, we started running into him more and more often. Soon it became clear that on those Sunday excursions that had started with just Celia and me, there was no more room for a fourteen-year-old little-brother type.

  I cleared my head of the past when I got to the cathedral, and started looking for the vehicle that Laurie Balcomb had told me she’d be driving, a new silver Mercedes SUV. It wasn’t the kind of rig you’d want to take hunting, but no doubt it was fine for the highway and around town, if a little over the top. I circled the block in my pickup until I spotted it.

  She was waiting in the driver’s seat, wearing huge sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat, and a scarf covering her hair and tied under her chin. It wasn’t a bad look—the sort of thing you saw on tabloid covers in grocery store checkout racks, of celebrities trying to dodge paparazzi—although around here, it was likely to draw more attention than it deflected. But it was true that she was hard to recognize.

  I pulled up next to her and leaned across the seat to open my passenger door. She stared like she couldn’t believe I was driving this old crate that she’d seen hauling trash yesterday—and that I expected her to get into it. But she did, with her nostrils twitching. I had quickly showered and changed again, but that hadn’t done anything for the truck.

  She gave me a nervous smile and pressed my hand with her own. The warmth of the gesture took me aback. She was wearing the same kind of tight jeans I’d seen her in yesterday and a soft eggshell turtleneck, an outfit that showed off her figure. I couldn’t help remembering that image of her on Kirk’s video, rising bare-skinned out of the stream.

  Couldn’t help remembering what had happened to me next.

  “I appreciate your thinking of me,” I said. “Sorry if I was bristly on the phone.”

  “I understand completely. You’ve had a terrible time.” Then she bit her lower lip, like a little girl. “But I’m not sure you’ll still thank me after what I have to tell you.”

  “I’d rather know it than not,” I said.

  Her grip tightened on my hand. “Will you promise to keep it just
between us?”

  It was another echo of Kirk.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She let go and settled back. I started driving, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror for anyone following.

  “My husband was very upset after you called last night,” she said. “What did you say to him? He didn’t tell me.”

  “That somebody came to my place while I was gone and burned the lumber I took from the ranch,” I said.

  I couldn’t see Laurie’s eyes behind those sunglasses, but her mouth opened in dismay.

  “And that I figured he was behind it,” I went on. “That I was going to call the sheriffs and start an investigation, and it was going to mean a whole lot of trouble and bad publicity for him and his business. But if he dropped the charges against me, I’d call it even.”

  “No wonder he was so enraged,” she murmured. “Wesley does not like it when someone puts his back against a wall.”

  I wasn’t heading anywhere in particular, just letting the pickup find its way. We’d been going south on Rodney Street toward the city’s outskirts, but I turned right on Broadway, looping back downtown.

  “Let’s get back to your bad news,” I said.

  “The sheriff came by and talked to Wesley, early this morning. Kirk’s gone missing. Did you hear?”

  I nodded.

  “When Wes came back inside, he went ballistic—even worse than last night. He told me not to breathe a word to anybody that there was any kind of trouble. The way he looked was frightening. And—he can be dangerous. I thought you should know that.”

  Leaving aside that this wasn’t exactly news, it was very interesting that she was both warning me and betraying him.

  “Has he ever hurt you?” I said.

  Her face turned away. “Not directly. He has other ways of handling things.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a very cordial arrangement.”

  “Maybe I’ll tell you a story some day,” she said, with her face still averted.

  In a perverse way, that made me feel better—her fear helped explain why she was siding against him.

  “Why not now?” I said.

  But she backtracked. “I don’t mean he’s a bad man. He’s charming, and most of the time he treats me well. But he’s such a control freak. The truth is he’s very insecure. He grew up dirt-poor.”

  That didn’t buy him much sympathy from me. I knew a lot of people who’d been in that boat—Madbird had flat gone hungry sometimes as a kid—and my own family had never been more than a paycheck or two away from disaster.

  “I think that’s the real reason he wanted to raise thoroughbreds,” she said. “They’re beautiful, graceful, well bred—everything he feels he’s not. The irony is, he doesn’t like horses.”

  The parallel between the thoroughbreds and Laurie herself was clear, and she must have realized it. Maybe it was another part of the reason she was doing this.

  There was no telling how genuine her concern for me was, and I didn’t want to come right out and suggest that Balcomb and Kirk might have been involved in something illicit. I decided to try sneaking up to it.

  “So when Balc—your husband—blew up this morning, it was about Kirk?” I said.

  “I don’t know what it was about.” Her curtness dead-ended the probe. “Are you friends with him?”

  “We’ve known each other a long time. I wouldn’t call us friends.”

  “Of course I hope nothing bad happened to him, but he creeps me out,” she said. “I started to get the feeling he was almost stalking me.”

  She’d have been a lot more than creeped out if she’d suspected how close to the truth she was.

  We coasted down the Sixth Avenue hill and crossed Last Chance Gulch. Downtown was as quiet as an old photograph, with nothing open but the bars and nobody moving on the streets. The truck, of its own accord, climbed the next hill toward the west side and the grand old houses that Celia had loved.

  “Well, thanks for the heads-up,” I said. “I admit I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “You’re not going to leave here?”

  “I would, but I can’t.”

  “Funny,” she said quietly. “It’s the same with me.”

  “You mean leaving your husband?”

  She nodded.

  “Can’t or won’t?” I said.

  She held up her hand palm first to silence any more questions. I realized I was crossing a line.

  “I’ll try to help,” she said. “I’ll watch him like a hawk. If I think he’s up to something I’ll call you. So answer your damned phone, OK?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Where were you all morning?”

  I was startled at her sudden, out-of-the-blue left turn—and I imagined a hint of jealousy in her tone.

  “Sweating out a hangover,” I said. “Cutting firewood.”

  She sniffed. “How manly.” Then her voice took on the teasing tone she’d left me with yesterday. “By the way, I haven’t forgiven you for not being honest with me.”

  “Who told you about my old life?” I said.

  “I have my sources.”

  I pulled the truck over to the curb and swung around to face her.

  “More to the point, why’d you ask?” I said. “Why are you bothering with me?”

  Maybe I spoke more strongly than I meant to. Her coquettish look vanished, and she pressed back against the door, turning her face aside again.

  “I feel drawn to you,” she said. “You seem so at home here, in a way. But really, you’re not at home anywhere.”

  “I guess I don’t see the draw in that,” I said.

  “Maybe I should have put it differently. A kinship.” Her left hand fidgeted to the gearshift, fingers brushing it lightly, then dropped away and returned to clasp her right.

  She said, “I’d better go.”

  I started driving again, this time back toward her car.

  “These old houses are so beautiful up here,” she murmured. “Don’t you wish you lived in one?”

  It was the kind of thing anybody would have thought.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Laurie hadn’t told me much that I didn’t already know. I was still skeptical about her motives, and I had a strong sense that she’d evaded my question about what had set Balcomb off this morning. But she’d convinced me that I’d damned well better keep him on my radar until I was sure he was really done with me. Then there was Gary Varna nosing around.

  All together, it got me thinking that as long as I had time on my hands, I’d be wise to find out as much as I could about what was going on behind the scenes. Information might be my best defense, and possibly my only one.

  I decided to start with somebody who’d be easy to approach—Elmer Stenlund, the ranking cowboy at Pettyjohn Ranch, who’d been present yesterday at my confrontation with Balcomb. Elmer was an old friend, rock solid in all ways, and I was sure he was sympathetic to my situation. He’d lived on the ranch most of his life until it was sold; then he’d bought a little house near Scratchgravel Hills. The new place was closer to town and easy to maintain, and with his kids gone and his wife having died a few years back, he was glad for neighbors. But I knew that the real reason he’d moved was that he didn’t like Balcomb any more than I did.

  Still, I was a shade uneasy. Elmer had been Reuben Pettyjohn’s right-hand man since before I was born, with a connection and loyalty that went so deep they were impossible to fathom. For sure, he’d know by now that Kirk had disappeared. If he’d also heard that there was a shadow over me, that might change things. But if so, he’d be straight about it; and as stock manager, he was my best bet for finding out where those slaughtered horses had come from.

  I found a phone booth on Euclid, the long commercial strip that became the highway west to Missoula. As I got out of my truck, I realized I’d subconsciously picked a place that was clear across town from the phone where I’d called Balcomb. It was silly, but that was the way I was starting to think. />
  “Elmer, it’s Hugh,” I said when he picked up. “How’s it going?”

  “I’m OK. How about you?”

  “I’ve been better. Things were settling down. But now there’s trouble over Kirk.”

  “Yeah, I talked to Reuben a couple times. I’d of figured he was out chasing tail, but I guess he still ain’t turned up.”

  “I’ve got a feeling I’m a suspect, Elmer. Gary Varna came to my place and grilled me pretty good.”

  His pause was so shocked I could almost hear it. It came as a relief.

  “The hell,” he said. “Where’s he getting that?”

  “Because of the flap yesterday, mainly. Kirk standing guard on me with that rifle.”

  “Aw, for Christ’s sake. Nobody’d take him that serious—it’s just Kirk.”

  My relief deepened.

  “There’s some other strange stuff going on I’d like to run by you,” I said. “OK if I swing out there for a few minutes?”

  “Sure, I ain’t doing nothing. Watching one of them ball games where nobody ever gets a hit. Pitchers’ duel, I guess they call them.”

  “Well, if you’re feeling restless, how about I buy you a drink?”

  “You know, that don’t sound too bad,” he said. “I got a few things I could stand to take care of in town anyway.”

  “When’s good?”

  “Oh—why don’t you give me an hour, maybe a little more.”

  “Red Meadow?” I said, naming his favorite watering hole.

  “That’ll do ’er. See you there.”

  It was just three o’clock. I wouldn’t have time to check out other possibilities, and I was too owly to do anything practical like buying groceries. I was tempted to go straight to the Red Meadow and get a head start, but that was a bad idea.

  I got back in my truck and drove on west to where the town pretty much ended and the Rockies started. Then I turned off to the veterans’ cemetery at Fort Harrison.

  Laurie’s words about not feeling at home anywhere kept resonating in my head. Until yesterday, I’d considered myself about as well off as a man could be—broke, maybe, but free in all the ways that counted, at least to me. I had good health, a marketable skill, a place to live that was all my own, and, above all, I wasn’t beholden to anyone.