Celine

by Peter Heller

  Hank loved hearing that story. It fit with everything he knew about his mother, and he loved the transformation that came over Bobby as she told it, how she was transported from the room. She was in the past, so he gently said, “Aunt Bobby, do you know anything else about Mom’s baby?”

  She studied him. The eye of a photographer must be always framing and focusing, and he thought that the soft gaze with which she had told the story was now tightening down on his face, sharpening the features and calibrating the distances, the depth of field. How much of the background behind him should be revealed?

  “She didn’t tell you at all, did she?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not even that you have a sister.”

  “A sister?”

  “Yes. Isabel. What she called her.”

  “Isabel,” Hank stammered. “Does she know where she is? Has she maintained contact?”

  “No. No idea. It’s why she got into the whole PI thing in the first place, I think. Finding her daughter was all she thought about. She tried for years.”

  “No clue? I mean she gave her up and has no idea?”

  “She had agreed with the whole plan, under duress, mind you, and then once they laid the baby in her arms for the first and last time, she went crazy. She would have run away with her. But she was sedated and they had the sheets like restraints the way they do and they just laid her on Celine’s chest for two minutes and then they took her. Whisked her away. She howled. Mummy told me before she died—we seem to have a tradition of these deathbed confessions, don’t we?—she told me that Celine’s howl burned itself into her soul. Mummy never forgave herself.”

  “But who did they give her to? Did Mom have no idea?”

  “There was one lead—”

  The door that led to the kitchen swung open and Celine swept in. She carried a two-pint tub of Rum Raisin and three spoons. She was tired, Hank could see it around the eyes, but she was cheerful and she brought with her the scent of mown grass. She took one look at her sister and her son and knew that they had not been making idle chitchat.

  “You two are thick as thieves. Is it too early for rum and ice cream? They say the alcohol is cooked out or something but I always get a little giddy. Maybe just because it’s so good. Here.” She handed the spoons around and pried off the lid.

  Bobby died that night. Hank never got to hear more about the one lead.

  FIFTEEN

  “I’m pulling over, Pete. I want to get to know Mr. William Tanner. Do you think that lodge has Wi-Fi?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Because we’re in the middle of Yellowstone? And I almost just collided with a bison?”

  “Ey-yuh. Still.”

  “I’m getting peckish anyway, aren’t you? The sign says Fishermen’s Restaurant.”

  Set back among tall pines was a long log building with a wide-plank porch and a carved sign on posts featuring a steaming coffee cup, a rainbow trout, and an arched fishing rod. Suspended below it was a white painted sign: BREAKFAST SERVED ALL DAY. Who in their right mind would not pull in?

  They had spent the last hour driving around Yellowstone Lake, and when the trees on their right opened up, they looked across wrinkled blue water to big views of the Absarokas. The lake was big, the mountains were big and ragged with snow, the sky was big. Big big big. It would make anyone hungry. Celine parked next to a one-ton pickup with diesel tanks mounted in the bed and a sign on the door that said KELLER DRILLING SERVICES, JACKSON HOLE. The truck had one of those stickers in the back window of a little boy peeing. The word he was peeing on was “Hippies.”

  “That’s not very nice,” Celine said. She stopped on the gravel and rifled through her purse and pulled out a plastic mini bottle of Elmer’s Glue and a vial of gold sparkles, the kind young girls sprinkle in their hair for fairy dust. She also found a Q-tip. She smiled at Pa. “Leftover from the detective thing I did at the school,” she said.

  Pete was immune to this sort of behavior from Celine and looked on with professional interest: He was an artist, too, after all. Celine switched out her big oval everyday glasses for even bigger rounder reading glasses and carefully dabbed specks of glue all over and around the stream of pee and affixed gold dust to each dollop. It looked like the little boy was pissing fireworks.

  “Kidney stones!” she said proudly. “It’ll wash off. Still.”

  They made their way into the café. The place was almost full and smelled of bacon and coffee. The waitress took them to a table that looked over a dock with a dozen rental rowboats tied to cleats and a view back across the lake. Pete slid their laptop out of its neoprene case and propped it open on the varnished pine table.

  “How long do you think before our friend shows up?” he said. “Taking bets?”

  “I didn’t see him at all in the rearview. He’s probably relaxed a little since he fixed the GPS tracker to our chassis.”

  Pete smiled. Sudden and surprising. “You know that?”

  “Uh-uh. Nope. But why wouldn’t he? I already put ours in the base of the coffee grinder I gave him. I also put one under his truck. I hope the magnet’s strong enough, I’m not sure it’s made for four-wheel drive.”

  Pete’s grin got even bigger. “That’s why you were fumbling with the grinder. When? When did you put a GPS tracker on his truck?”

  “When I got up to pee last night. I was very quiet in my moccasins. It’s why I brought them, you know. Not because I needed to have my sheepskin slippers wherever I go. He had no idea. I heard him snoring through the tent the whole time.”

  “He snores?”

  “Young-man snores. More of a whoosh. They’ll be terrible when he gets older.”

  Pete reached his hand across the table and squeezed hers. The joints of her fingers were knotted and knobby with arthritis. “Right,” Pete said. All in a day’s work.

  “I put the one on his truck for him to find,” she said. “A man with his training will sweep it once a day.” She turned her hand in his and gave it a squeeze.

  “I’ve got a signal. Maybe you can ask the waitress for a password. Shall we start with a general search or do you want to go right to the federal database?”

  For an old fart from Maine, Pete was pretty tech savvy. He had linked their laptops and could run their home PC with either one. All their documents were uploaded to the building’s server and could be accessed remotely. They logged on to Dale Earnhardt—what they called their home PC because he was super-fast—and went straight to a database of federal employees, nonmilitary. This was one of the most expensive data collections they bought and once in a while it turned out to be extremely useful. William Tanner came right up. DOB 05/04/1969, Lafayette, LA. Vet tech, USAID. The age was right, thirty-three.

  Celine tapped at the jiggly yolk of her egg with a piece of crisp bacon and burst it and scooped up as much of it as she could. Yum. Pete had asked her if she meant to eat breakfast again, which was a silly question. Sometimes she ate eggs and bacon for dinner. Since she’d quit smoking she figured she could do whatever she wanted on the gastronomic front. She said, “What the heck is a vet tech, do you think? And for USAID?”

  “I know exactly what it is,” Pete said. “What it might be. Do you remember that story about swine fever in Haiti? More than a million pigs were euthanized.”

  “Ahh.”

  “The U.S. Department of Agriculture has what are essentially sniper teams that can hunt and quickly dispatch wild animals, too. Say if a case of brucellosis were to start spreading in a deer population.”

  “I see.”

  “So sometimes these guys are sent to other countries to help them with their eradication programs. Then, I guess, they might be under the auspices of USAID. ‘Vet tech’ is a pretty title.”

  “He seemed former military to me. He kept calling me ‘ma’am,’ which you know I can’t stand. So he might be a killer, hmm. Of animals. In foreign countries.”

  “Or he might be on loan to help poor countrie
s neuter their pets.”

  “His ears must be burning.” She nodded toward the door where Mr. Tanner himself appeared carrying a stainless travel mug. The same waitress smiled broadly at him and led him to a table in the middle of the room. Celine noticed that she put her hand on his forearm briefly when she asked if he wanted coffee. “He’s a charmer,” she murmured. “Without even trying.”

  “What?” Pa said.

  “Nothing. How do we check if he really is military—former or current?”

  “We don’t have access to that database, but law enforcement does.”

  Celine brightened. “So we e-mail Harold! Slide that over, will you please? Wouldn’t young Bill”—she tipped her head toward their tail—“be tickled if he knew what we were doing twenty feet away?”

  She happily drank her coffee and composed an e-mail to her former AA sponsee. Celine had quit drinking twenty-five years ago, when Hank was a senior in high school. She had been very active in Alcoholics Anonymous, tapering off in the last two or three years as her own family needed more of her time. One core principle was that one of the best ways to stay sober was to be of service to others, and Celine took it seriously.

  Newly sober members came in shaky droves to ask if she would be their sponsor. She had mentored a bunch of sponsees over the years and, remarkably, most of them had succeeded in staying off the sauce, and their loyalty to and love for Celine was always touching to see. In their eyes, she had saved their lives. Hard to imagine anyone else garnering that kind of devotion except maybe a great platoon leader.

  Harold was particularly fond of Celine. When he met her he was a homicide detective for the 84th Precinct, Brooklyn, and he was on the ropes—suspended for driving a department car into the East River while on a bender. Right off of Pier Two, when it was the dock for the Columbia Line, the big freighters that brought in the net loads of bananas and shipments of cocaine. He had been on a stakeout. The one lucky turn of the whole night was that neither he nor his partner were in the car when he reached in for his shotgun and hit the lever that knocked the transmission into Drive. He was so drunk that he tried to dive in after the car—maybe to put it in Reverse—but his partner tackled him. That was a time in the NYPD when the Thin Blue Line wasn’t all that thin, and Harold’s captain gave him a choice: get sober for good or get fired and pay for the car, and the two other vehicles he had deliriously reconfigured. The day he came into the church basement on Henry Street, Celine was qualifying—telling her story. She was thoroughly honest, but nobody knew that she was only telling a carefully constructed selection of highlights. She never mentioned having a child as a teenager, but she did talk about getting into investigative work to help reunite broken birth families. Harold perked up when this elegant woman talked about working for a detective agency, about her first cases and the surreptitious drinking that went with them. “Imagine!” she implored. “I was doing, finally, what I’d wanted to do my entire life—detective work! And I was going to drink it into the trash bin. I can’t adequately express the shame that caused me.” Harold actually straightened in his seat, leaned forward. The woman said she had been sober for seven years. If he was going to learn from anyone in this odd outfit, it would be this striking private eye.

  Harold was a captain himself now and he ran a section of the racketeering division. What section, for some reason was never discussed. He was overweight and diabetic and one of the most deeply happy men she had ever met. He must be, to generate the kind of infectious gut laugh that came out of him with such ease.

  Celine knew how much he owed her—how much he believed he did, because of course the accounting was all his. In fact, according to him, he could never repay her. And so she was extremely sparing in asking for favors. So. Well. They had Wi-Fi but no cell service and given the sensitivity of his job she couldn’t just e-mail him her request. In plain language, that is, and on his government e-mail. She used a Yahoo e-mail address and wrote: “Harold: How is William doing? And his father, Tanner? I met them both long ago, around about May 4, ’69. I would love to meet them again. They were military men, I think, and it affected their bearing for the rest of their lives.”

  That would do it. First name, last, DOB, and focus of data search. The code was nothing formal, nothing even that they’d ever agreed on, and certainly not elaborate or hard to decipher. It was more of a game, and not too tough a one, and it was meant simply to keep the lawyers and Internal Affairs people at bay. No one could ever prove that she’d requested information from Harold, or that he’d ever shared any with her, because he always arranged to have her call him at a certain time between random phones.

  SIXTEEN

  God may have made the world for the last week of September. Celine had thought that about Vermont when she was a child, and she thought that now. They drove along the Yellowstone River in mobile sunshine that tugged cloud shadows over the ridges and into the canyon. The river flowed low and clear over the gravel bars and the willows were yellow and orange and the box elders and cottonwoods loosed their leaves over the water when the wind blew.

  When the wind blew the aspen groves sent gusts of leaves into the road. They drove slowly. They saw the silver V of a beaver cutting across a pond banked with alder, and saw his stick lodge covered in mud, and saw one the size of a bear cub clamber out onto a rock ledge and glare. “You are king of the river for sure,” Celine murmured. “But how on earth do you get the mud onto your house?”

  She liked to give a quiet running commentary as she drove, it was a habit Pete thought charming. The leaves stuck to the windshield and they drove with the windows open and the smell of sage and grass pouring in with the cold. They saw a grizzly bear running flat out across a meadow. He was huge and humped and he more flowed than ran, and the long sun rippled over his sleek fur like water and changed his colors. He stopped at the edge of the spruce and began digging. “Jesus,” Celine said. She had no idea a bear could move like that. Or that his shoulders would be so massive, or that he could throw up dirt like an excavator.

  They drove over a wooded rise and when they came out of the spruce they could see a hundred bison grazing in grass in a bow of the river and white trumpeter swans on the slate-blue water. “Do you think,” she said, “that the whole country was like this once? I mean these mountains? Or is this like some game park? It’s incredible. Living was easy.” She imagined that the Shoshone who had lived here would never have gone hungry.

  They lost the river to her canyon and the road rolled through hills of burned lodgepole and down into a broad open valley with a thin creek threading the meadows and stands of black timber like islands. When they smelled sulfur and saw plumes of steam and big parking lots they kept driving. Celine had no desire to join throngs of people; the usual attractions of Yellowstone were not for them. At Canyon Village they pulled in for gas and coffee and beef jerky and bought a book on Yellowstone’s wolves. The store clerk saw them studying the maps in a spinning rack and came over to help. She wore an olive ranger shirt and thick glasses and a pin that said, Ask Me About Bison! “Are you guys on a bus tour?” she said. Celine turned to her and smiled and said, “That would be nice.”

  “They have round-trip day tours right from the village, just two miles down the road. They serve lunch at Old Faithful.”

  “How lovely.”

  The girl looked pleased with herself. “I can get you the brochure if you’d like.”

  “What we’d like to know is who handles law enforcement for the park.” This would be a good person to get to know. There would probably be a file on Lamont, even if he went missing just outside the park boundary. A sketch of the case and a discussion of jurisdiction, if nothing else.

  The girl frowned. “Is there a problem?”

  “No, but we’d like to know where the law enforcement headquarters are.”

  The girl was puzzled.

  “Just in case,” Celine added helpfully.

  “Oh, right,” said the girl. She’d pretty much seen ever
ything; once a Taiwanese man in a tour group asked her in excruciatingly composed English at what age a deer became an elk. “Well,” she said, “I’d just recommend you call 911?” It sounded much more like a question than a recommendation. “If you have reception that is. There are emergency phones at all the restroom facilities.”

  “How convenient. But what we’d really like to know is where your chief law enforcement ranger resides.”

  “Oh,” she brightened. A lightbulb, high watt, seemed to have gone off. “We have a law enforcement ranger right here. I think I saw Chad in the interpretive area.”

  Celine knew when she had been whipped. She beat a tactical retreat. “We’ll just take the book,” she said.

  It didn’t matter. They weren’t ready for that talk anyway. Celine and Pete liked to get the lay of the land, literally, at the outset, before they dug into a case. And of course they could find the headquarters and the park’s chief officer in two minutes with another Wi-Fi connection. They bought travel mugs in the gift shop that said MAMA GRIZZLY and PAPA GRIZZLY, and filled them up in the small restaurant. There was a good cell signal, so Celine called Gabriela. She wasn’t worried about a possible phone tap, as everything she needed to know now was old news.

  “Without the file in front of you, do you remember the names of the people you worked with up here? Both in the sheriff’s department and in the park?”

  “Yes, of course. There were three main people. I can text the names to you as soon as we hang up.”