A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith McCafferty

  ALSO BY KEITH McCAFFERTY

  The Royal Wulff Murders

  The Gray Ghost Murders

  Dead Man’s Fancy

  Crazy Mountain Kiss

  Buffalo Jump Blues

  Cold Hearted River

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Keith McCafferty

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 9780525557531 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780525557548 (ebook)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Karen and Bill Basil

  Contents

  Also by Keith McCafferty

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Part One: Hard Rock HeavenPrologue: Loo with a View

  Chapter One: Object of Desire

  Chapter Two: “Not on My Watch”

  Chapter Three: River of Wine

  Chapter Four: Stirring the Waters

  Chapter Five: Canoes in the Night

  Chapter Six: Sleeping Like the Dead

  Chapter Seven: Born Pissed Off

  Chapter Eight: Tracking Tendencies

  Chapter Nine: Sons of the River

  Chapter Ten: The First Scarecrow

  Chapter Eleven: Writing on the Wall

  Chapter Twelve: War and Peace

  Chapter Thirteen: Ghost Town

  Chapter Fourteen: Where Love Flows

  Chapter Fifteen: The Three Amigos

  Chapter Sixteen: Yellow Ribbons

  Chapter Seventeen: Blood or Kisses?

  Chapter Eighteen: The Creature from the Black Lagoon

  Chapter Nineteen: The Mirror of Water

  Part Two: Hard Rock HellChapter Twenty: Death in Eden

  Chapter Twenty-one: Thunder and Lightning

  Chapter Twenty-two: Green Gold

  Chapter Twenty-three: Price of Admission

  Chapter Twenty-four: Harold’s Mark

  Chapter Twenty-five: The Masterpiece

  Chapter Twenty-six: The Wisdom of Beavers

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Close to the Chest

  Chapter Twenty-eight: The End of the World

  Chapter Twenty-nine: House of Quilts

  Chapter Thirty: Hope, a Prayer, and a Three-Legged Dog

  Chapter Thirty-one: Telling Secrets

  Chapter Thirty-two: The Gift Fox

  Chapter Thirty-three: Sinner or Saint

  Chapter Thirty-four: Bone Magic

  Chapter Thirty-five: The Stardust of Heaven

  Chapter Thirty-six: Showdown at Table Rock

  Chapter Thirty-seven: Last Leg to Eden

  Chapter Thirty-eight: The Silent Tickler

  Chapter Thirty-nine: The Usual Suspect

  Epilogue: The Wolves of Winter

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top.

  —Mark Twain

  Author’s Note

  A Death in Eden sends you on a journey upon the sparkling currents that have carved Montana’s Smith River Canyon over the millennia. This canyon has been called America’s Sistine Chapel by those who attempt to describe a grandeur and beauty that is truly beyond description. I have had the great fortune to float this river many times and invite you to visit my Smith River travelogue at keithmccafferty.com/smith. Here you will find a detailed map of the canyon, as well as many photographs that my brother, Kevin, and I have taken, enabling you to accompany the characters as they make their way down the river, and to see the country as it appears to them. You may spot, among other landmarks, the loo with a view, the silver threads of Indian Creek, the cave pictographs, the abandoned homestead at Tenderfoot Creek, and the strangely ominous limestone formation called Table Rock. Look closely, and you might even see a three-legged dog.

  I hope you enjoy taking this journey as much as I have.

  PART ONE

  HARD ROCK HEAVEN

  PROLOGUE

  A Loo with a View

  “I have to pee.”

  Awakened by the child’s voice, the woman rolled over in the double-wide sleeping bag she shared with her husband. She spooned back against him.

  “I didn’t hear that,” he murmured.

  “I have to pee.”

  The voice was smothered. It came from the far side of the tent, where a small girl lay curled like a snail, her head buried in her sleeping bag.

  “Can’t you wait until morning, darling?” the woman said. “It will be light in just a little while.”

  “I have to pee now.” The head was out of the bag, the girl’s indignation registering.

  The woman let out a sigh and fumbled for the zipper of the bag.

  “I’ll go,” the man said.

  “No, I’ll do it. She’s seven, Larry. She’s getting sensitive about that.”

  “I’m seven and a half on the next full moon.”

  Now where did she hear that? the woman thought.

  “It’s all right, darling,” she said. “I just have to find the flashlight.”

  “Take the bear spray,” the man said.

  “It’s packed in the boat bag. We’ll be okay.”

  “Sure,” the man said. “I paid the premium on your life insurance. If you get eaten, I’ll trade up to a pair of C cups.”

  The woman swatted him with her pillow.

  “What’s a C cup, Mommy?

  “Nothing, sweetie. Daddy’s making a joke.”

  “I have to pee really bad.”

  “I know. We’re going.” The woman had found the flashlight and twisted the barrel to turn it on. She got out of the bag and crawled on her knees to the tent flap and worked the zipper.

  “Don’t step on snakes,” the man said. “We’re only a hundred miles from anywhere.”

  “Fifty-three,” the woman said. “We floated six miles after we put the raft in and we take out at Eden Bridge at mile fifty-nine.”

  “You and your arithmetic.”

  “Mommy!”

  “We’re going, Mary Louise. Do you want to hold the flashlight?”

  “No. You hold it.”

  So there was no reason to get lost. There was a path and no excuse for it, except that the woods were a skeleton of branches that stood like bones against the milk spilled by the moon, and the abstract shadows they cast made you step faster than you should, before you were sure of the w
ay.

  The woman swore under her breath.

  “You said a bad word,” the girl said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Where are we, Mommy?”

  “We’re in back of the camp . . . I think.” The last two words more to herself than to her daughter.

  “Where’s the loo?”

  That’s what her husband had called it. “A loo with a view.”

  All the designated campsites along the Smith River had pit toilets with hinged seats and BEAR AWARE stenciled on the lid. Some were situated on benches of land above the campsites, so that, sitting, one might contemplate the river that glinted between the walls of the canyon.

  “I found it,” the woman said.

  Her voice was matter-of-fact. Still, she felt relief flood through her body. It was silly to have been afraid, even when the path seemed to be taking them too far from camp. They were on the river, after all. They might make a wrong turn to find a toilet, but they weren’t lost. She could even hear the cascade of Indian Springs across the river.

  “You go first, Mommy.”

  “I did earlier, darling.”

  “I don’t want to sit down until you have.”

  “What do you think’s down there, a bogeyman? Okay, I’ll go first and warm it up for you. You can hold the flashlight and keep watch.”

  Keep watch. She recalled the signboards they’d seen along the river yesterday, before they’d entered the roadless area. A yellow circle with a diagonal line slashed through the words SMITH MINE. And underneath, NOT ON MY WATCH.

  The Smith River was a crown jewel among Rocky Mountain trout streams. For sixty miles it flowed through a near-wilderness canyon of incomparable grandeur, with towering limestone cliffs that glowed gold and pink in the sunrises, and that were shot through with caves where Indians had painted thousands of ochre-colored pictographs. A proposed copper mine in the headwaters threatened the purity of its water, or so she’d learned from her husband, who had made a charitable donation to a grassroots organization called Save the Smith. He’d done a lot of research before filling out the application for the lottery. Had insisted she kiss it before he put it into the mail. With odds of drawing a permit ten to one against, you needed all the luck a kiss could give you. On the day that the results were posted online, he’d called her into their computer room, and she’d sat on his lap as he tapped the keys.

  For a few seconds they just stared at the screen. “I knew you had lucky lips,” he’d whispered, and their daughter had appeared at the doorway as he was exploring them.

  “You two do too much kissing,” she said.

  It was true. They did a lot of kissing, and the kissing that night had led to a positive pregnancy test nine days later. One they’d been trying to get for three long years. She thought of that as she sat on the loo with a view. She rubbed the just-noticeable swelling of her abdomen and felt the tenderness in her breasts. Another few weeks, she thought, and he wouldn’t have to reach very far to find C cups. She smiled to herself as she watched the moonlight play across the pool below camp. The first weeks of pregnancy had been hard, with almost daily morning sickness. But the nausea wasn’t as bad now, and life, well . . . Life, like the river, was wonderful.

  “Mommy?”

  “What, dear?”

  “Why is that man watching us?”

  The woman jumped from the seat and yanked her camp pajamas back over her hips.

  “Give me the light.” Trying to keep her voice calm.

  The cone of light flashed through the bushes and trees that surrounded them.

  “It’s nothing, darling.” But then—she swept the light up the hillside—there was something. Just for a second. A silhouette? Like a man on a cross, she thought, his arms outstretched. It looked huge. The light wavered and the silhouette was gone. She saw only trees. Had it been there at all?

  She gripped the girl’s hand. The girl was crying now. It had taken a few moments for the fear to register.

  “Larry!” the woman shouted.

  “You’re hurting my hand,” the girl said. She was crying as she was tugged back down the trail.

  The woman again shouted for her husband, waited a beat. No answer.

  They fled through the trees, the branches whipping at them.

  “Mommy, stop!”

  The girl yanked her hand away. Stumbling, the woman turned and put her hands on the girl’s shoulders.

  “I lost my shoe, Mommy.”

  “It’s okay, we’ll get you some more. Come on now.” She grabbed the small hand and started off, not running now but walking briskly, the girl hobbling.

  It’s nothing, she told herself. Nothing.

  “Larry!”

  And to her daughter, “Come on, you can do it. Just a little faster.”

  In the darkness, the firefly of a headlamp.

  His voice. “It’s me. Over here.”

  She ran the last yards and flung her arms around him.

  “What’s wrong? Did you see a bear?” He had the pepper spray gripped in one fist, a hatchet in the other.

  “It was like a ghost.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Mary Louise saw it first. What did you see, darling? What did you see?”

  “I don’t know.” She was still crying. “It had b . . . b . . . branches. It was walking.”

  “Maybe it was a tree blowing,” the man said.

  “There wasn’t any wind,” the woman said.

  “It had arms. Like a scarecrow.”

  “You mean like in The Wizard of Oz?” the woman said.

  “Tigers and lions and bears, oh my,” the girl said.

  “That’s backwards,” the man said.

  “Larry, your daughter is frightened. Be serious.”

  “Tigers and lions and bears, oh my,” the girl said again.

  “That’s right, darling. And we’re all together now, like Dorothy and her friends. We’re all safe if we’re together.”

  “Who am I, Mommy?”

  “Who do you want to be?”

  It was a game they played when they watched movies. What character do you want to be?

  “I want to be Dorothy,” the girl said.

  “Then you’re Dorothy, darling. And nothing can hurt you, not even the Wicked Witch.”

  “But I lost one of my ruby slippers.” And she had. The tennis shoes she’d got on her birthday pulsed red LED lights with every step.

  “That’s all right. You only need one to protect you.”

  The girl looked down at her remaining tennis shoe. The battery was starting to draw down, but the lights still flickered when she pumped her foot.

  “Tigers and lions and bears, oh my,” she sang.

  And the words strung out behind them as they walked the path back to camp, the girl hand in hand with her father and the stars losing their sparkle, but the forest holding fast to the terrors of the night, and with every other step a pulsing of the lights.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Object of Desire

  Harold Little Feather lifted his hand from the wheel to scratch at the tattoo of wolverine tracks that circled the lower biceps of his left arm. The tattoo was recent and ran underneath the elk tracks that circled the upper arm, which he’d had inked more than twenty years before. On his right arm, badger tracks circling below wolf tracks. Like the wolverine tracks, the badger tracks were new, but they didn’t itch. When his sister had caught him scratching at his arm at the kitchen table that morning, she’d said, “Somebody has too many spirit animals if you ask me. That might have been okay when you worked for the sheriff, but you’re a state investigator now. Tattoos are unbecoming for someone of your stature.”

  “I know,” he’d said. “It must be an Indian thing.”

  She’d smiled, but hadn’t laughed. Harold an
d his sister were Pikuni Blackfeet, though Janice had been called Snowflake by her own people, and could have passed if her orbital bones weren’t so pronounced. She hadn’t put a foot onto the reservation more than a half a dozen times since marrying a white boy out of high school, the last occasion being her mother’s memorial wake the year before.

  But Harold straddled the two worlds. In the one, he braided his hair and wore khakis and a badge, newly issued, with MONTANA DIVISION OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION lettered inside a blue circle. In the other, he let his hair fall down his back and wore shit-kicker boots, jeans, and one of his three flannel shirts, the long-sleeved one for winter, the two with the arms cut off the rest of the year.

  That’s the way he dressed whenever he drove up through Browning. Browning was the Blackfeet tribal agency headquarters, at the foot of the peaks that girded Glacier National Park. It was where his ex lived, where a bunch of relatives lived, and where, he’d recently learned, he had a son, born from a liaison with a Chippewa Cree woman. The union had taken place on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation eighteen years, four months, and some small change ago, a figure he knew down to the day not because of the woman—he recalled little beyond that her eyes were green—but because it was the last time he’d ever drunk alcohol. That was a long time for a Montanan of any skin color to go without a drink, and except for Harold’s grandfather, whom he had worshipped, probably a record for anyone in his family.

  He placed his hand back on the wheel and thought about his son, whom he’d made the acquaintance of only because his mother had died in a car accident and his mother’s brother, who had taken custody, had decided to divulge to Harold the family secret. Probably, Harold thought, because the man knew Harold had a job in the outside world and figured there could be money coming his way. Not a charitable way to look at it, but it had made Harold bitter, being kept in the dark all those years. Bitter, then mad, finally, only sad. How could you ever make up for the lost time?

  He tapped at the Bluetooth in the truck and saw he was out of cell range. It didn’t matter. He’d only be leaving the same message that he’d left yesterday and the day before, when he first learned that he’d be heading to the northern part of the state.