Celine

by Peter Heller

  “Oh! Why, of Yellowstone! Of the park!” The woman was so enthusiastic. Well, Chief Farney had made it to the top! After slugging it out in the districts! Clearly the woman had been living in Mammoth Hot Springs too long. Celine had seen the pictures: Elk lay all over the lawns like sunbathers at a beach. It could drive anyone batty.

  “Right. Thank you. Please put me through.”

  “Of course!”

  Jesus. The next voice was much less excitable. “Operations,” it said. Jaded, almost put-upon. “Timothy Far—” Before she could get out the full name the line clicked and she was transferred. Now there seemed to be a secretary. The secretary must have had an office with a view: maybe a herd of antelope on a hill. Celine imagined a jar full of crumbly toffee on her desk, on a doily. She was much more relaxed. “Who’s calling?” she asked, ready to be surprised.

  “Celine Watkins. I’m a private investigator from New York.” She had no reason to be cagey.

  “Oh, how interesting. And what matter can I say are you calling about?”

  “The disappearance in or near the park of a man named Paul Lamont.”

  “Just a minute, please.” She almost sang it.

  When the woman came back on the phone she sounded like a different person.

  “I’m sorry,” she said with hostility. Wow. “Chief Farney is on vacation.”

  “I see. And when might he be back?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t divulge that information.”

  “You can’t tell me when the Chief of Enforcement will be back in the office?”

  “Security reasons.”

  “I see,” Celine said dryly. “Nor where he has gone, I suppose.” Silence. “The Caribbean is very nice this time of year, but of course, it’s hurricane season.” Silence. Then the phone clucked. The mercurial secretary had hung up.

  EIGHTEEN

  Sheriff Cam Travers met them the next morning at the bridge over Soda Butte Creek, just outside the park boundary. He got out of the truck and unkinked his back and reached into the front seat for a stained fawn cowboy hat. He wore a Sheriff’s Department parka and Wranglers. He winced as he stretched and leaned back into the truck for a travel coffee cup that said #1 GRANDPA.

  “Okay, ready for work now,” he said and shook each of their hands. When he saw their own travel mugs—MAMA GRIZZLY and PAPA GRIZZLY—he smiled. “Just a sec.” He got a thermos out of the truck and topped them all off. He was courteous and curious, and Celine liked the way he studied their clothes, their speech, sizing them up and withholding judgment. He had just driven the two and half hours from the county seat in Livingston. When he had heard that morning that they were near the northeast entrance and interested in the case of Paul Lamont, he said he needed to come down to Cooke City anyway to deal with Curly, which is what the residents were calling the local grizzly. He’d meet them at the bridge in the morning, and then schedule a bear recon with Parks and Wildlife after lunch. On the phone, he had asked for Celine’s New York State PI license number. Due diligence.

  They all drank from their cups. Travers turned up the collar of his jacket. The wind was raw and felt like coming snow. “You live right across the river,” he said. “Right in view of the Twin Towers. I looked it up.”

  Celine winced, not from the cold.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Helluva thing. The world changed last year. Still changing. I can feel it like I can feel a coming snowstorm. It makes me sad, deep down.” He shook himself off, sipped from his coffee mug. “We didn’t meet in the woods of Montana to talk about that.” He waited.

  “Sheriff, do you remember Gabriela Lamont?” Celine asked.

  “Of course I do. A smart and extremely tenacious young lady. Very pretty, too.”

  “That’s her. She said you were very helpful.”

  “Kind of her.” He sipped and looked them over carefully, glanced at the truck camper. The two didn’t jibe.

  “She came back up here a number of times over a span of two years?”

  “She wasn’t satisfied with the determination of the Park Service,” Travers said. “Neither was I, to tell you the truth.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Travers looked at the bridge, the creek. “Well. In law enforcement we are all a little turfy, that’s a fact. The park is federal, of course, and they assumed jurisdiction. They had legitimate grounds. Lamont’s truck was parked”—he turned and pointed at the opposite side of the road, a turnout of gravel just east of the bridge—“there. The bridge is the park boundary. The entrance gate is a mile and a half south but the actual border is here. Chicksaw, the tracker, determined that Lamont had been dragged—or run—into the park. So.”

  “There were drag marks?”

  “Possibly. I’ll show you in a minute.”

  Celine studied the bridge. “Which way was his truck facing when you found it?”

  “West.”

  “Huh?”

  Sheriff Travers looked at her with a dawning admiration. She was sharp, no doubt.

  Celine said, “He was returning to town after shooting pictures with the biologists at the base of Druid Peak. That’s what Gabriela told us. The report concluded that he had likely seen an animal that aroused his curiosity, probably said bear, and he had gotten out with his cameras—they found two cameras and a handheld flash, all shattered, in the trees somewhere there, correct?” Travers nodded. “So his truck should have been facing east, toward town, don’t you think? I mean, I’m driving along, there, toward Cooke City, I’m hungry after a long day, probably pretty thirsty, too, I see a bear in the road, he’s magnificent, I have no shots of a bear at night, I pull over fast, grab cameras, and run.” She turned back to the sheriff. “Wouldn’t I?”

  The sheriff made a check mark in air. “Problem One.”

  “There were no photos of a bear in the cameras, were there? I mean Mr. Night Bear, our suspect? If there were, you wouldn’t be so uneasy about the final determination.”

  Travers made another tick with his finger.

  “You can’t give us the report, can you?”

  Another tick. “I’d lose my job. Of course, I’m going to lose my job in December anyway. It’s called retirement.” He smiled. “I’m actually term-limited. Six terms is the limit.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s the termination-without-pension thing that scares me. Why I can’t give you the report.”

  Celine nodded. “Is Chicksaw his real name do you think?”

  The sheriff laughed, an easy gut laugh that made Celine trust him more. “Absolutely not. I think trackers have tracker names, noms de guerre, the way writers have pen names.”

  Celine smiled at the French.

  “I think the man is from New Jersey. One of the first disciples of that guy in the Pine Barrens.”

  “He gave Gabriela the feeling that the tracks didn’t add up.”

  “Problem Four. It’s pretty technical, you should talk to the man. I believe he’s in Red Lodge now. We have used him in many investigations over the years. It’s not woo-woo. The man is a scientist.”

  “It rained that night?”

  “Rain during the afternoon, then snow.”

  “There was blood?”

  “On a tree. A dense old spruce. Quite a lot of it. Blood smeared on the bark. Under those thick limbs, the only place it would be protected from the elements for a little while. In the woods, when it’s been raining, that’s where you go to get your dry tinder, the dead twigs under a spruce like that. So how did the blood get on the tree? Did the bear rub him up and down on the trunk?”

  “What else?”

  “We found a shirt, most of it, ripped and also bloody. Also a boot, with tooth punctures and blood. Drag marks.”

  Celine winced.

  “I can’t give you the report, but I can give you this.”

  He handed her a manila folder. She turned her back to the freshening wind and opened it. Pete came close and blocked the wind and looked over her shoulder. It was a photoco
py of an article from a National Geographic dated July 1977. The title was “Bear Attacks!” You don’t say. Celine and Pete both flinched, which Travers noticed. Two-thirds of the way through the second page was a circled paragraph: Searchers found only Leichmuller’s right boot and a torn piece of his wool shirt. The boot bore punctures from canines and the shirt was saturated in blood.

  The sheriff said behind her, “He photographed for the magazine, didn’t he? During that period? He would presumably have had them lying around.”

  Pete and Celine glanced at each other.

  “Why would a successful National Geographic photographer at the acme of his career stage his own death?” She was asking as much to gauge Travers’s knowledge of the wider context as to hear his opinion. He would not be able to tell her, of course, but she might get a lot from his reaction.

  “You tell me,” he said. Completely neutral. Unreadable. He watched her carefully. She got the strong sense he was trying to read her expression as closely as she was trying to read his. He was no fool. Much of the investigating they were now doing, he may have already covered twenty-three years ago. Had he looked into Lamont’s travels? His international connections? Maybe.

  “How long was the search?”

  “Ten days. Neither long nor short. The Park Service called it on account of weather.”

  “And this guy”—Celine palmed her phone and lit the small screen—“Farney. The enforcement ranger, he signed the certificate of death.”

  “He made the determination of death. The judge in Livingston signed the certificate. There were several factors. A warm front came through and it rained heavily the afternoon just before he went missing. That evening the temperatures dropped into the teens, and then it snowed. He was badly mauled, clearly, if not dead. I’m speaking now in the terms of the report. The determination was that had he survived the initial attack and somehow escaped the bear, he would not have survived the successive nights of snow and freezing temperatures. A reasonable conclusion when you are in the last fiscal quarter and your budget is wearing thin. Search-and-rescue operations are expensive.”

  Celine detected a certain dryness in the sheriff’s tone, even irony. “Gabriela said something about the kindness of the ranger. ‘Taking pity on her’ were the words she used. Signing the certificate so she could move on.”

  “Seven years is a long time to wait, I guess.” The sheriff turned away from them and spat. Downwind. “The judge in Livingston went along with it. The hearing took twenty minutes.”

  “I gather, Sheriff Travers, that you don’t think it was kind at all.”

  “Do you?”

  Travers gave them his card with his cell number penned on the back and drove into town to meet the wildlife officer. Celine and Pete got back into the cab of their truck and sat for a while with the engine and heater running and watched the first scattered snowflakes hit the windshield softly, splaying into tiny stars before they beaded and ran.

  “I got the sense he was relieved,” Pete said. “To talk to someone about it. Someone who clearly didn’t buy the party line. What did you say to him when you walked up to his truck before he left. When he rolled down his window?”

  “I asked him if he got the sense at all that there was more than just investigative process or budgetary considerations that went into calling off the search and signing the death certificate. He had both hands on the wheel and he stared straight ahead for a full half minute before he answered me.”

  “I saw that,” Pete said. Of course he did.

  “Finally he said, ‘I’ve known Tim Farney since he was practically a kid. He played halfback for Shields Valley when I was linebacker for Gardiner. I was always taking him to the ground. And he always got up and rubbed the grass off his neck and said, “Nice grab, Cam. For a fat man.” Something like that. And he had an eighty-watt smile. He was my friend. When I asked him why he signed the certificate so fast when there were so many anomalies, he got a look I’d never seen before. Hard and tight. “Because I did,” is all he said. Period. Case closed. He’d never talked to me like that.’ ”

  Elbie Chicksaw was not at the address in Red Lodge that the sheriff had given them. No one was. No one, it looked like, had been there for quite a while. The little clapboard crackerbox was on a side street on the north end of town, which it shared with a double-wide trailer and an abandoned body shop. The small front yard was overgrown with knee-high dried grass and sweet sage and there was a tumbleweed pressed against the front door like a stray dog hoping to get in. The windows were boarded up with weather-stained plywood and a plywood sign at the gate said in spray-painted letters: FOR SALE BY OWNER. No phone number, no address. Interesting marketing, Celine thought. To be worthy of buying his house one had to hunt down the tracker. Well, we can do that, she thought. She eased the truck fifty yards down the rutted street to the trailer and got out. A wheelchair ramp led to the front door. She rapped. The little girl who opened it held a squirming puppy and her face, and the puppy’s, were smeared with chocolate.

  She pushed her lips around, cocked her head, and gave Celine a twice-over while trying to keep the puppy’s licks out of her eyes. She thumped the dog on the head; he squirmed happily, and she yelled “No, Tucker, no!,” tried to blow a strand of hair out of her face but it was too heavy with chocolate. “We’re making moose,” she announced.

  “Moose?”

  “Yep, chocolate moose, with giant antlers. Wanna see?”

  “Definitely. Are your parents home?”

  The girl turned her head and screamed “Maama!,” turned back. “We call him Tucker ’cuz no one gets no rest till he tuckers out.”

  “I see.”

  Behind her came an electric wheelchair. The woman driving it was in her twenties, broad-shouldered, with a thick blond braid lying over her breast. Dark circles under her eyes but prominent freckled cheeks, cute in a straightforward, no-nonsense way. She looked to Celine like maybe a ranch girl who had practiced on the cheerleader squad before heading home to do chores. Her daughter hopped out of the way like a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Celine was going to tell these neighbors that she was Elbie’s mother, but seeing the woman she knew that wouldn’t wash. She found that some people she met just expected the truth and it was almost impossible, and probably a sin, to tell them otherwise.

  “You looking for Elbie?” the woman said.

  “How did you know?”

  “Anyone looks like you shows up on our doorstep they’re looking for Elbie. We pay our taxes, and I can see you’re not a Mormon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You know that hundred-mile stare ex-cons have? Mormons have it too, except they’re gazing at the afterlife. Try to hide it but you can tell.”

  “Well.” Celine laughed. “I was a Catholic, though, in the beginning. I always thought that was a great disservice—to teach a little girl to believe in Hell.”

  “Ha!” the woman barked. It caught them by surprise. “There’s hell all right. But you don’t need to die.”

  “Amen.”

  “Elbie’s on vacation.”

  “Seems to be a pandemic.”

  “Be back in the spring maybe. You can leave your number with me. I’m guessing, though, you’re not interested in the house.”

  Celine shook her head.

  “Well what, may I ask, are you interested in?”

  “Helping a young woman find her father.” Celine was not smiling. She said it with such pathos the light in the entryway seemed to dim. The words settled on the young mother like a flock of exhausted songbirds.

  “We know a little about that,” she murmured. Celine noticed the scuffed gold band.

  “Your husband?”

  “Let’s just call him the father of my child. The way I’m feeling lately. Jay’s been in the oil fields five months and counting. If he doesn’t come back for elk season I’ll know we’re pretty much toast.”

  Celine whistled without knowing it. Long and soft.

  “Yo
u two wanna come in?” said the woman.

  Celine wanted to find Elbie before the morning was over. But she had several creeds, one of which was that if someone made the effort to invite one in, well, one went. “Thank you,” she said. “We’d love to.”

  By the time they left the trailer they had eaten enough dark chocolate mixed with whipped egg whites to feel queasy. They helped Lydie and Raine pour the mixture into the little moose-shaped cups and set them on a rack in the fridge, and they both got peed on, a little, by Tucker. When they stepped back out onto the ramp and into the brisk and windy morning they had a detailed map of the logging roads that led to Elbie’s camp.

  They’d driven half a mile when Pete said, “Can you pull over, please?”

  “Pete?”

  “Something’s bugging me.”

  Celine pulled half off the road and they got out. Pete went to the back of the truck.

  He got stiffly to his knees, then lay prone on the dry weeds and slid half under the frame as if he were checking for an oil leak. He slid himself back out, shook the gravel and dirt off his jacket and khakis, and held out a small black box the size of a Zippo with a little wire antenna poking from one end. The way they were looking at each other, a passerby might have thought he was handing her a rose, or a silver pendant.

  Celine said, “Bingo! Let’s leave it for now,” and back under he went.

  NINETEEN

  Hank was just twenty-one when he drove down Interstate 91 along the Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont, back to Putney and the school he had loved so much. He was a junior at Dartmouth, most of the way through an English major that thrilled him, and which he fully understood did not prepare him for the job market the way, say, premed would have done. He didn’t care. He was reading Faulkner and Stein, Borges and Calvino, Bishop and Stevens. He felt wreathed in the music of language, and as long as he heard it and could write it down, as long as the pulse was in his veins, he didn’t care if he lived out of the back of a truck or in some crappy rent-by-the-week for the rest of his life. The rougher, maybe, the better, because he also understood that somehow hunger sharpened the notes, cleared the static. He wasn’t sure why, but he could see that the most comfortable writers—the most well-heeled people, even—were often the most deaf. Ah, youth.