A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith McCafferty

  She waved her fingers like birds in flight. “Personally, I don’t see what the deal is. It’s a pretty piece of water, but I’ve seen a lot of pretty water.”

  “Give it about fifteen miles,” Sean said. “That’s where you enter the Gates of Eden. The cliff walls climb right out of the river on both banks. Goes on for about a hundred bends of river.”

  “So you’ve floated it?”

  “Once, a few years ago. To paint it. In fact, I’m hoping to give it another try. Montana Parks is sponsoring an art competition for their new poster.”

  “That’s right. You’re a Renaissance man. Painter, fisherman, gumshoe, spy.”

  “Not so sure about the spy.”

  “But you’re a private investigator, right?”

  “I’m licensed. I haven’t worked at it for a while.”

  “So tell me, Mr. Investigator, what’s going on with the scarecrows? There was a story in the Tribune last week. Now they’ve shut the river down. Is there really any danger to the public?”

  “I don’t know. I do know that one of the scarecrows will be coming up on the west bank below Indian Springs, which is just a couple miles down from where we’re picking up our clients. The ranger told us it’s about three hundred feet above the water, at the mouth of a cave.”

  “Then that’s going to be the first stop.”

  “I was told not to get too close. There’s a state investigator trying to figure out who’s putting them up and he doesn’t want anyone muddying the tracks. Friend of mine, actually.”

  “Oh.”

  “Harold Little Feather. He used to work for the sheriff’s department in Hyalite County. I’ve been contracted by the county a few times to help out in investigations.”

  “How does that work?”

  “It’s a manpower issue. Something the sheriff would like to look into, but can’t spare the eyes.”

  “And you’re deputized?”

  “I have been, but usually it’s just a straight contract.”

  “Interesting. This Little Feather, he’s Indian, I take it.”

  “Blackfeet.”

  Sean saw a flash in her eyes under arching eyebrows. “And he looks like an Indian?”

  “Sure. Hair in a braid and everything. But I haven’t seen him since last summer when he came to my place to pick up a tipi he’d loaned me.”

  “You lived in a tipi?”

  “For three winters, that’s the way Indians count it. I finally got the walls of my house up last summer.”

  “This Little Feather. Tell me about him.”

  “He’s not much in the way of small talk, if what you’re thinking about is putting him in front of a camera. Tends to say what he means, no elaboration, doesn’t suffer fools. Best tracker I’ve known. Harold even has his mark, three slashes of black on each cheek. Streaks it with a piece of campfire charcoal when he’s hunting elk.”

  “Better and better. Will we see him?”

  “He’s a day ahead of us, but he’s not tied into a schedule. There’s a good chance we’ll catch up.”

  She nodded. “Let’s see if we can make that happen.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tracking Tendencies

  In his dream, Harold saw fire behind his eyes, saw the black of his soul streaked with flames, the conflagration flaring in a starburst like the world’s big bang as he came awake with a start, hearing the crackle of burning branches and smelling the woodsmoke. He felt a cold nose rubbing up and down his cheek. A dog, smelling like two.

  He pushed the flap of the tent aside to see his son squatting on his heels, pushing at splinters of wood with a stick. Morning, but the sun well up.

  “Hey, Cochise,” the boy said.

  “Cochise was Apache.”

  “Not talking to you. Calling the dog.”

  Harold felt embarrassed. He knew his face was shiny with sweat and lack of sleep. It wasn’t the image he wanted to present to a son he’d only met a few weeks before. He unzipped his sleeping bag and coughed as he breathed in the smoke.

  “But back home,” the boy was saying, “there’s some call you that, so he’s sort of named after you. I started asking around. Old grandfather named Melvin Campbell said you reminded him of Cochise, you being tall and Cochise being a BFI in his day. Me, I think to be a big fucking Indian you got to be at least six-six. It’s like there’s something in the water now, BFIs everywhere you look.”

  “His real name was Cheis,” Harold said, trying to make up some ground toward credibility. “It means ‘strong.’”

  He ignored the eyes that were judging him openly as he climbed from the tent and took a chair by the fire. His right hip throbbed from lying on hard ground, his air mattress having deflated during the night. His head was heavy behind his eyes and his muscles were cramped. He tried not to show any of that.

  “Yeah,” the boy said. “Strong like an oak. When he died, they painted his face and dropped him into a crevasse in the Dragoon Mountains. Then they killed his horse and his dog and dropped them in. And his firearms, too. He was a fighting man. In the world he was heading for, he would need them. He would fight forever.”

  “You know more history than I would have thought.”

  The boy’s face made a smirk, even as he avoided Harold’s eyes. “I know one thing. I didn’t expect to find the great Harold Little Feather sleeping it off like every other deadbeat dad I know. What kind of whiskey you been drinking?”

  “Apple cider. I have some more, if you want it. The reason I was sleeping in is I had a friend last night who had some problems, needed a shoulder to lean one. One of the young women camped around the bend.”

  “You wish. I just figured you for more of a morning person. Up with the robin and all. Guess I was wrong. Should have known.”

  So this is how it’s going to be, Harold thought. In his day, growing up on the rez, no seventeen-year-old would dare speak to an elder as he had been spoken to, not to mention his own father. And then another thought. I was a boy who spoke out of turn, too.

  “I had to borrow my uncle’s car to drive here,” the boy said. “He wouldn’t give me no money for gas, big surprise, so I had to hose some from a rig at that highway construction site outside Ashland. I coulda got arrested by the pale faces.”

  “You could have got arrested by me, if I didn’t have anything better to do.”

  “So what’s better to do? I got your messages. I only came ’cause I wanted to see the river.”

  “Solve a crime. Or maybe it’s not a crime. That’s something we’ll have to determine.”

  “You and me?”

  “You and me.”

  “You going to deputize me, make me your Tonto?”

  “Don’t have that power. You’re going to work off the books, and I’m going to pay you by paying for your education. Already talked it over with your uncle. You finish high school, you can start at MSU next fall.”

  “What if I don’t want that?”

  “Then you can stay right where you are. Keep it real, see where that gets you.”

  Harold saw a veil of uncertainty cross the boy’s face, saw his show of confidence was just that. Why, he’s no different than an abandoned bird you lift out of a nest. I will not lose him, he told himself. I will not open my hand and let him fall through my fingers.

  “Follow me,” he said. “I’ll show you the first clue.”

  They hiked down the trail, Harold filling in the blanks for Marcus, the story as he knew it so far. Arriving at the pit toilet, he pointed out the stub of tree branch where the tennis shoe had been hanging.

  “What’s that tell you?” he said.

  “Is this like a test?”

  “No. Like I said, I want your help. Fresh eyes, fresh perspective.”

  The boy looked at the tree. “Tells me whoever put it there is tall. Lo
oks like it’s newly broken. Somebody broke it to hang the shoe on it. On the stub.”

  “What’s the significance of that?”

  “I don’t know. He wanted her to come back and find it. How long we going to be here? I can’t leave Cochise zipped up in the tent too long.”

  “He’ll be fine. And that means?”

  “What?”

  “The significance of where the shoe was.”

  “I don’t know. He’s a teddy bear, got a soft spot for little white girls.”

  “What’s the most important word you’ve said so far? Think about it.”

  “You said this isn’t a test and here you are making me feel like it’s school.”

  “Take your time.”

  “I always take my time. I’m an Indian, ain’t I?”

  He’s just like I was at that age, Harold thought. Has to take everything as a challenge.

  “It’s ‘whoever,’” Harold said. “‘Whoever’ put it there. It means the girl wasn’t making it up. What she saw was real. It was human, and the evidence says it was tall, so odds-on it’s a man.”

  “She told you he was chasing her.”

  “That, I think, she was making up.”

  “The scarecrow?”

  “Something about it made her think of one.” Harold picked up a stick. “My third eye,” he said. He told his son to stay behind him, to step where he stepped, and to tell him if he saw anything out of the ordinary. He began to walk in concentric circles, using the tree’s trunk as an axis and occasionally tapping the ground or lifting a grass clump with the stick.

  They worked in silence for a time. Harold stopped and pointed with the stick.

  “What you got?”

  “Partial,” Harold said.

  “Partial track?”

  He outlined a half-moon impression with the point of the stick. “That’s a heel print. See, here’s another one. And over here. He’s walking away.”

  “Man we’re looking for?”

  “Could be. It’s size twelve, maybe thirteen—that usually translates into height.”

  “Is it old?”

  “Three days, four at most. So the same time frame when the girl was here.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because of the nap. I’ll show you.”

  Harold stepped down hard with his right shoe on a patch of bare earth.

  “Compare how sharp this is to the partial. That’s because dirt is made up of individual grains, and when you step down, the grains at the edge of your boot impression stand up. It’s called the nap. As time passes, wind knocks some of the grains down, ants crawl across, a snake wriggles by, but most of the grains that are standing on end just sag or collapse of their own weight. I can tell how old a track is by how sharp-sided the nap is and knowing how long it would take for it to deteriorate to its present condition.”

  “I heard you give classes on this stuff.”

  “I teach courses at police academies, teach sportsman groups, wildlife enthusiasts, Sierra Club–type folks, that sort of thing.”

  “I read an interview with this guy in the Safari Club. He said he took one of your courses and you were almost as good as a Kalahari bushman. I couldn’t tell whether he was dissing you or it was a compliment.”

  “It was a compliment. Those guys, the ones who start out as kids poaching bush meat, they’re the best in the world. They can track over stone, shadows in the grass, track by scent. So can I to some extent, but they can track tendencies, too, which takes a lifetime of study. Say you’re tracking a lion, it sticks to hard ground, doesn’t leave a bent blade of grass for a quarter mile. They’ll go to the next spot on the route they think he’s taken and pick up the thread, know where he’ll stop, where he’s heading, what he’s up to before he knows it himself. They track the mind, not just the animal. I’m not in their league.”

  “You’re better than any white man.”

  Harold realized that his son had taken the time to background-check him and tried to keep the pleasure out of his voice. “It isn’t something that runs in the blood. Just practice. You go back in time when man lived off the land, you could find trackers of every color. Man I worked with a few times, name Sean, he’s good.”

  “He a blue-eyes?”

  “More green. So what do we have here, Marcus? Is it Mark or Marcus? What do you like to be called?” Harold realized that in conversations with the boy’s uncle, he had always just been referred to as Emma’s boy, Emma having been his mother.

  “Marcus, I guess.”

  “Do you have a Chippewa name?”

  “Stands Like a Heron. That’s what the family calls me, ’cause I had an infection in one foot and had to stand on the other one a lot. Still do, out of habit I guess.”

  “Okay, Marcus Stands Like a Heron, the girl says what she saw had its arms outstretched and looked like a scarecrow. What could a man pick up and look like that?”

  “I don’t know. A branch?”

  “Lift your foot.”

  Marcus had been resting a shoe on a dry branch that had cracked off a Ponderosa pine.

  Harold picked up the branch, which was about seven feet long, gnarled and as big around as his upper arm. He hefted it like you would a barbell for a set of squats, resting it on the back of his neck. Holding it balanced, he turned toward his son, the branch swinging around.

  “Scarecrow,” Marcus said.

  “It’s the start of one. Look at the break. The color, that green-yellow at the center. This isn’t a dead branch that fell. It was taken off with an ax. So now we just have to figure out where he got the branch and where he intended to take it. Then we’ll know where to look next.”

  “Like a bushman,” Marcus said. “Track his tendencies.”

  “Exactly,” Harold said.

  Working on the assumption that whoever the girl saw had been gathering wood to make a scarecrow, Harold and Marcus separated to canvass the hillside. It was Marcus who found the tree from which the branch had been axed. It was a hundred feet or so away from where they found the limb, which confirmed that it had been carried off, and by a strong man, considering the weight. But they found no cut willow branches or other raw materials needed to complete his scarecrow, which suggested to Harold that the encounter with the girl and her mother had scared him off before he could collect them. This surmise, coupled with the direction of the tracks, painted a picture of someone who was not necessarily aggressive, who would retreat if confronted, at least if given an avenue to retreat.

  Harold discussed his hypothesis with his son, man-to-man, trying to keep the teacher-pupil dynamic to a minimum. Marcus seemed to be genuinely interested, and with détente established, if only for the time being, they pushed off in the loaded canoes.

  Indian Springs, which poured into the river opposite the camp, consisted of three sparkling fingers that cascaded over a staircase of ledges. They pulled over long enough to fill their water bottles and gather watercress for salad fixings—no charge, Harold said, for invertebrate protein in the form of scuds, snails, and insect larvae that were clinging to the jade green cress.

  Marcus made a face, then shrugged. “I’ll wait for you to take the first bite,” he said. “But just a second, I want to take a picture.” He went to the canoe and came back with a battered-looking camera. He fiddled with the zoom and the focus, and it was obvious from the way his fingertips manipulated the settings that he knew his way around the back of it as well as the front. He nodded. Harold held up a string of watercress and dropped it into his mouth, chewing and swallowing. Marcus shook his head, then smiled. It was the first time Harold had seen him smile.

  “You any good with that thing?” Harold said. He wanted to ask where he’d got it, but refrained. His second thought was to ask if Marcus had any images of his mother on the memory card, but he refrained from asking tha
t, too.

  “I’m okay, I guess. Better than I am paddling this canoe.”

  “You’ll get the hang of it.”

  They got back in the water and dug with the paddles. As they rounded a bend downriver, the lower campsite came into view, first a red dome tent pitched on the bank, then the two women standing behind a column of smoke that could only charitably be called a fire.

  Carol Ann waved, her long straight hair falling from a watch cap, the same flannel shirt she’d worn the night before, the same torn-at-the-knee jeans. She jumped up and down, waving, a campfire wraith holding a coffee cup, her body obscured by the smoke.

  “Hey, Harold!” She kissed two fingers, extended them toward the passing canoes. “I see you found your son. Hey, Harold’s son! Hey, Harold’s son’s dog!” She held her free hand high and waved it back and forth. “Happy hunting, you two. Save us from the bogeymen.”

  Harold extended his arm toward her, his palm up, felt his son’s eyes upon him.

  “That snowflake the head on your shoulder you was talking about?”

  Harold did not turn toward him, and if he allowed himself a smile, it didn’t show on his face.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sons of the River

  If it hadn’t been for the big sign on the front of a shed adjacent to Bart Trueblood’s house, a yellow circle with a slash through the words SMITH RIVER MINE and under it, NOT ON MY WATCH, Sean would have assumed that the man standing in hip boots by the bank was the one digging the copper, not the one trying to shut the project down.

  Not large but barrel-chested, he was clad in a red-checked stag shirt unbuttoned to show chest hair the same shining black of his goatee. A Marlboro man with a devil’s twinkle in his eye, Sean decided, one who’d discarded the cigarette in favor of chewing on a green twig, but who had yet to relinquish his other vices. Or so it appeared from the longneck-at-noon that dangled between his thumb and forefinger.

  As Sean’s raft neared him, Trueblood repositioned the twig in the corner of his mouth and set his beer down on the grass. He waded out and took the rope that Lillian Cartwright tossed to him. Dragging the bow onto the bank, he steadied it for her to step out—she acted like she didn’t see the hand he offered—and she slipped as she hiked her leg over the inflated pontoon and fell unceremoniously, half in and half out of the water, knocking over the beer bottle behind her.