‘It’s just like a good fuck,’ he told Undie, looming over him convivially as Undie shrank into his hay bale.
Undie had snorted the first line and was nodding a little, but not really asleep, and while he didn’t like everything about these bad guys, he was impressed by how comfortable they seemed to be in their skins. So he made himself stay awake to watch how they moved – so casual, like real pros. And being up here in this secret space with them satisfied something deep inside him, a need he hadn’t even known was there.
The sober outsider coming upon the loft that afternoon might be forgiven for thinking he had happened on a very dull group. Seven guys dozing in a hay loft – what the hell? Not a laugh in a carload.
But the Gamers had found their true north. Comfy was too mild a word to describe the bliss of that afternoon. So, just before six o’clock, they all signed up for more of the same the following Saturday. The price had gone up, but they were already planning ways to manage that.
Undie could always bag a few more groceries; his parents approved of industry so it was easy to get rides to jobs. Naughtie had a brother with a delivery business who would put him on the truck on weekends whenever he’d work. Crow-Bait had it easy: the lost-and-found file from all those distracted weepers at the mortuary always furnished items of value that could be pawned.
Drafty had none of those assets, but his divorced brother Stan drove to Billings every other Saturday to see his twins, and was glad to have company on the drive. While Stan played in the park or took his kids to the movies, Drafty could usually shoplift enough digital gadgetry to pawn for a couple of hits of H.
FIVE
As soon as she knew the fire was contained, Alice began to plan a return to her regular schedule. Two mornings a week, what a piece of cake. She looked around her messy kitchen. I’ll get the house squared away first. Then put the garden to bed for the winter …
But when the mop-up crew found the body, she realized there’d be a long follow-up to the fire story – many interviews with firefighters, and Stuart would have to go back up the mountain for pictures.
For a few minutes, she was disappointed – it was hard to let her own plans go. But she had already begun to feel the same responsibility for her job on the paper that she had always felt for her roomful of eighth-graders, so when Mort asked her to stay full-time for another week or two, it never occurred to her to say no.
‘We’ve got to catch up in the print shop,’ Mort said. ‘Sven can show you how to help with that. The other thing is I need you to bill all those out-of-town bookstores. Gotta get some money in here, Alice, and start paying off some of those loans we just racked up.’
‘The smoke hasn’t even settled yet,’ Alice told her sister, ‘and already he’s having a worm about the money.’
‘Well, he isn’t used to having his neck stuck out so far,’ Betsy said. ‘Are you getting fed up with all this newspapering? Do you want to quit?’
‘No,’ Alice said, somewhat to her own surprise. ‘I need to get my house tidied up and I can certainly get along without any more big scares for a while, but otherwise … It’s kind of crazy how Mort runs that place but actually, I’m enjoying the variety.’
‘You don’t seem to miss teaching eighth grade one bit.’
‘I feel like I should but I don’t. I was just thinking this morning, if I hadn’t retired I’d be just about ready to open my old copy of The Merchant of Venice. Do you realize how many times I’ve read that verse about the quality of mercy?’
‘Makes my head hurt to think about it,’ Betsy said. ‘Mr Shakespeare didn’t bring his best game to that one, did he?’
‘I don’t know. My judgment on that subject succumbed to overload about twenty years ago.’
Mulching could wait a while, she thought. She could dig up the last potatoes and carrots on weekends. And there was a big plus: she’d be first to read Stuart’s dispatches from the sheriff’s office.
But on Friday afternoon, Mort Weatherby walked out of his corner office and crossed the room to a crowded workspace where Stuart hunched over a laptop. In his time at the Guardian, he had never been assigned his own desk or chair, but this week he had cleared a little corner of the catch-all table for his iPad, smart phone and several thumb drives. Undeterred by the mess around him, he typed on under a bad light.
Mort put his hand on Stuart’s shoulder. ‘Listen, kid,’ he said, ‘you did a fine job on the fire.’
Stuart looked up from his notes, puzzled. ‘Oh? Well … thanks.’
‘But now I need to get you back to your regular job.’
‘My reg—’ He had been deep in concentration and it took him a while to come back. ‘Which is what, now?’
‘Selling ads and managing the print shop, remember? We’re way behind, got stationary orders piled up out there on the spindle and a couple of brides getting ready to cry about their wedding invitations. And I really need you out on the street selling ads. Got to get some revenue in here, start to pay off some of these loans.’
‘What about the dead—’
‘I’ll take care of the end game on the fire and the body. And cover the other stories around town the way I always do.’
Alice met Stuart’s eyes and shrugged. She had watched Mort’s uneasiness grow as everybody praised Stuart’s stories and pictures. He was excited about the attention the paper was getting, the prizes it now had a chance to win. But she could see it bothered him a lot, the way the spotlight kept landing on Stuart.
‘The fire’s contained now but the body’s a whole new interesting story just opening up,’ Alice told her nephew as they walked home together Friday night. ‘So he’s going to take back the head reporter’s job. He wants to show everybody he can handle the big stories too.’
‘Well, it’s his paper,’ Stuart said. ‘So I suppose it’s only natural for him to say who does what.’
‘Sure, but … aren’t you even a little disappointed to have the end of the fire story taken away from you?’
‘Yeah. But my dad always says nobody ever wins a pissing match with the boss. And I like my job – I don’t want to lose what I’ve earned. You and Mom have kind of a twitch about Mort, don’t you? Why does he bother you so much?’
‘He sees life as a zero-sum game. He almost can’t stand to see anybody else get anything good, attention or money or praise. To him it means he’ll have to take less.’
‘Well, don’t worry, I’ve already got my share of the fire story,’ Stuart said. ‘I’ve got all my notes and a good nibble from a big national magazine for a major story. More luck than I ever expected so soon. I just have to work on any extra pieces in my free time at home. Which is fair if you think about it, Alice.’
‘So you’re OK with moving back to ad sales?’
‘Sure, Frosty.’ He’s stopped calling me Aunt Alice, she thought. Actually, I like it.
He left her at her gate and walked on home. She watched as he topped the rise by the mayor’s house, and dropped out of sight on the downslope. Mr Get-Along, she thought. I hope you’re not too amiable for your own good.
As the following week went along, Mort began to show troubling signs that he was re-thinking how much of the fire story Stuart had a right to use. The Guardian kept a local attorney on a grudgingly small retainer, she knew from looking up his billing practices, and paid by the hour when his services were needed. He’d had a consult this week. And lately he’d begun to blur the line between Stuart’s job and Sven’s, saying, ‘One of you boys needs to run this stationary order to Conrad’s. Stuart, you got time?’
Sven would watch, surprised, as Stuart went out the door with the boxes, doing what Sven knew should have been his job.
Her other concern was that although Mort had declared the dead body on the mountain was his assignment, he couldn’t seem to get his arms around the story.
Sheriff Tasker was ‘away from his desk’ all weekend and again on Monday. Mort got so sick of hearing that taped message, he assigned Sven t
o call the sheriff’s number every hour all day on Tuesday, while he went looking for firefighters to talk to.
Looking for firefighters wasn’t easy either. One got his scholarship money, his mother said, and was already gone to football practice camp. Another one’s girlfriend said he got a job with the pack outfit hauling supplies to fire lookout stations high in the Tetons. ‘Half the time his phone doesn’t work up there. I just wait until he calls me.’ Mort pleaded in vain for a way to reach the off-duty engine driver who’d negotiated the loan of a buddy’s remote cabin and told his married sister he was going there to sleep for a week. And the whole newsroom enjoyed the angry call from the sheriff’s wife, who said, ‘Jim went fishing with his brother and didn’t take his phone. I said, “How am I supposed to find you if I need you?” He said, “You’re not supposed to need me till Friday of next week.” Men are such bastards sometimes.’
Sven soldiered on, listening to the sheriff’s ‘out of office’ message until ten o’clock on Wednesday. Then he suddenly said, startled, ‘Hey! A busy signal!’
Mort grabbed the phone and began dialing the number every ten minutes until 10:40. He was about to hand the job back to Sven when the sheriff picked up the phone and said, ‘Tasker.’
‘Mort Weatherby. You’re a hard man to get hold of.’
‘I can only give you five minutes, better not waste them complaining,’ Tasker said. ‘I’ve got a call-back list as long as my arm. Say what you want.’
‘We’ve got to put something in the paper, Sheriff,’ Mort said. ‘Stories about the fire every day for two weeks, and then you find a body … We can’t just drop it and—’ Someone asked a sharp question close to the sheriff’s phone and Mort said quickly, ‘Can you tell me where the body is now? And if it’s male or female?’
‘It’s a male body and it’s at the medical examiner’s office in Helena. But it may not stay there. The medical examiner is considering moving it to the crime lab in Missoula.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there’s no ID on the body. Facial features are pretty well obliterated, fingerprints – hell, there aren’t any fingers. It’s going to take a lot of fancy science, blood work and DNA and dental records to find out who he is and how he died.’
‘How he died? He died in the fire, didn’t he?’
‘Well, yes, but that leaves plenty of questions. I’ve got a badly burned body with no ID and no fingers and toes, just stubs. And I can’t find anybody who saw him die. He must have been with a crew, but nobody claims to know him. I’ve got no evidence except the body, which is so fragile we hardly dared to touch it. But we had to move it because you can’t leave remains out in the weather once you know they’re there. This is complicated as hell, Mort, so do you see why I might be a little short with you?’
‘Yes. When’s the autopsy, can you tell me that?’
‘Next Wednesday. I think. The doctors are a little short with me too, to tell you the God’s honest truth. So get off the phone now and let me work. When I have anything to tell you, I’ll tell you.’
Mort said, ‘Sheriff, can I quote you?’ He heard the line go dead as he asked the question, but as he put his phone down he said, ‘I’m sure that was a yes.’
‘Good,’ Alice said. ‘What did he say yes to? To quoting him?’
‘I think so. He didn’t say much, though, is the trouble. And what he did say was so …’ He told her about the missing digits. ‘I don’t know if we should print that, it’s a little rough for this audience. Maybe we should just say fingerprints may be problematic but they’re going to try for DNA. Everybody loves DNA now.
‘And he mentioned dental records, so I guess even though the face is gone the head’s still got some teeth.’ Seeing Alice wince, he said, ‘We’ll have to be kind of careful how we write this up, won’t we? I think I’ll have you take a look at it, Alice, once I pull my notes together.’
Stuart came in for lunch with an order book full of ads. He heard Mort pleading with one of the firefighter’s, Gus Swartz’s mother for his number, and said, ‘You want me to call Judy, see what she knows?’
‘I’ll do that, just give me her number,’ Mort said. ‘You keep bringing in those ads. You got a lot of them, did you? Good boy.’
At least, he told Alice, Judy was right there in the national forest office and she answered her phone when it rang. Sensitive to the needs of the press, she rearranged her schedule to allow him an interview that afternoon at her office. Mort asked Alice to go along, saying ‘Some of these gals, it helps to have a woman there.’ Alice raised her eyebrows at the word ‘gals,’ but got in the car without comment.
Judy wasn’t just one of ‘these gals,’ Alice saw, and immediately understood Stuart’s attraction. Judy had started on a pumper crew, she told them, a job that required passing stringent physical tests. She held her own for several years on a summer crew of first responders to fire sites, and went full-time with the Forest Service after college.
Her career was mostly in the office now, but she still held the incident commander’s job when necessary during small, local fires and often led walk-alongs near the fire line to keep the public apprised of the growing problem of big fires in western forests. A natural beauty in blooming health, her obvious high spirits reminded Alice of an old song she couldn’t quite remember. ‘Something about a girl with popsicle toes,’ she told Betsy later. ‘What was it, do you remember?’
‘Google it,’ Betsy had said. ‘I’m busy.’
‘The two local firefighting crews are accounted for, no problems there,’ Judy told them. ‘Several of our volunteers are already back in school – three students and two teachers. I’ve talked to all of them.’
Mort said, ‘Weren’t there some that wanted to go full-time on firefighting?’
‘Yeah, and this year they didn’t have to ask twice. Four of them – they’re up on Meredith Mountain working with mop-up crews. They all called in after I left messages, said they’re fine but they don’t know anything about a body. Only ones who want to talk about that are the crew that found it; they can’t seem to shut up about it.’
‘Oh?’ Alice said. ‘Was there something particularly strange about it or …’
‘I don’t know, I didn’t have time to listen. Talk to Frank Navarro, he was one of the guys on that crew.’ While Alice wrote down the name, Judy turned back to Mort and added, ‘Oh, and the sheriff asked me to get in touch with the hotshot crew chiefs. About possible missing members? So I did, and they confirmed what I’d already told him: they count heads several times a day. We’d have heard right away if they’d lost anybody.’
‘What about the people you escorted on the walk that day?’
‘I checked them in when we started out in the morning, then checked them out when I got them back to town. I didn’t follow them around after that to check on their welfare.’
‘No, of course not. Ever lost one?’
‘No.’
‘Never?’
‘Better believe it.’
‘Curiosity seekers – ever find any of those wandering around?’
‘The supervisor’s a real beast about sightseers wandering loose, Mr Weatherby,’ Judy said, getting a little testy. ‘So we police our lines constantly and we’re not at all shy about handing out a ticket and a good, stiff fine if we catch anybody nosing around a fire without an escort. Stuart’s the only observer I can remember who ever got permission to stay more than one day.’ Her voice warmed up a little when she added, ‘He’s just such a handy guy to have around. Knows where all the little creeks are, helped me fill the tank on my pumper truck. Ran around and found people when our radios failed in rough terrain. So we signed him on as a volunteer.’
‘You got fond of that freckle-faced boy, huh?’ Mort’s resentment was beginning to show. He gave her a look that was perilously close to a leer. ‘Nothing wrong with having a little fun while you fight the fire, is there?’
Alice shifted in her chair, watching Judy’s face cloud over.<
br />
Mort winked and said, ‘Tell me, honey, do you have any theories about who this dead man might be?’
The cloud began to look like it might drop some hail. ‘I don’t do theories, Mr Weatherby,’ she said. ‘I do my job, I watch closely what happens and take good notes.’ She stood up to indicate an end to the interview.
‘Well, she was kind of snippy, wasn’t she?’ Mort said on the trip back to the paper. ‘Stuart kept saying she was so helpful. I guess she saves that for the young and well-built, huh?’
‘Probably not a good idea to call a certified firefighter honey,’ Alice said.
‘Oh, nuts,’ Mort said. ‘Who’s she to get uppity? I know her dad, he’s a bartender at the Vets’ Club.’
Alice thought of several good answers to that statement but stifled them all. They were back at the newsroom by then and it was time for the Guardian’s weekly nervous breakdown, which she had learned to call ‘Omigod Wednesday.’ And Fred wasn’t there. So Mort, having insisted Stuart get back on the street and sell ads, had to face alone the fact that he did not take very good notes.
Alice took pity on him when he asked her for help, and together they assembled a fairly respectable narrative about the mop-up crews, how they triangulated till they got GPS points for pop-up fires and got assets assigned to squelch them. But as press time approached and no information surfaced about the burned corpse, Mort grew desperate.
Alice said she thought the very fact that there were no missing persons reports made an interesting story.
‘Alice,’ Mort said, ‘we can’t print a story that says we’ve got a body but have no idea who it is. In a little town like this? Makes us sound like a bunch of dodos.’
‘But he wasn’t from here, was he? Nobody seems to know him. And we can relate how intensively we’re investigating this mystery,’ Alice said.
Burning Meredith Page 5
