A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith McCafferty

  Trueblood kicked at the bottle to right it. “Soldier down,” he said. “Soldier down.” He laughed, a from-the-bottom-of-the-chest laugh, the same place his voice came from. “Mortal wound. Don’t wake the medic.” He bent to pick up the empty bottle. “The rest of the platoon is in the cooler on the porch. Let’s hope they meet a more dignified fate. Here, take my hand.”

  Sean watched, amused, as Cartwright grudgingly allowed Trueblood to help her to her feet. Her face was flushed. She rubbed at a grass stain on her khaki pants. “Why isn’t Sam Meslik here?” she said. No thanks for the hand. No pleased to meet you. No how are you doing today.

  “He was.” Trueblood nodded. “But he made better time in the canoe. When you didn’t catch up after a few minutes, he paddled on down to Clint’s house to make sure he was ready to go. He said you were a woman who didn’t like to stand around with her hands in her pockets. Words to that effect.”

  Sean smiled. He knew that the words to that effect were probably a good deal cruder.

  “The McCaine mansion is just around the next bend,” Trueblood said. “It’s about all that’s left of the property. Clint’s dad parceled it off over the years, ten acres here, ten acres there, that’s how Clint comes by his money. He’ll be wearing a cowboy hat when you meet him, snakeskin boots, a belt buckle the size of a painted turtle. But make no mistake, he’s a virgin—all hat, no cowboy. Those Tony Lamas never penetrated a stirrup.”

  “I knew the two of you grew up on opposite sides of the river. I didn’t think you were this close, though,” Cartwright said. “I mean in proximity.”

  “Two of the oldest ranching families on the upper river. We were amigos once. Huck and Tom Sawyer, me being Huck, him the guy you’d want to sell snow cones in Siberia. Opposite sides of the river but not opposite politics about its future. More innocent times. Why, we—”

  She cut him off.

  “This is good stuff, but I think we should save it for the campfire. When I can get both of you into the frame. I want it to be fresh, not a rehash.”

  “You want mano a mano, that’s jake with me,” he said. “Come on up to the homestead. Grist for your film.”

  She put her camera on her shoulder and Sean trailed them to the house, a century-old one-story constructed of blackened logs and yellowing chinking, which was set among scattered tall pines. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d ever heard someone use the word “jake.”

  It was a typical working family’s house you’d see in any rural enclave in the state, added onto as the children came, with diminishing regard for aesthetics or continuity. At one end was an addition built of lighter-hued logs, at the other end an L-shaped plywood shed covered with Tyvek sheeting.

  “I really should cut some of these trees down,” Trueblood was saying. “They’re a fire hazard sure as we’re standing here in the yard. I even touched up the teeth on the Stihl. But they have sentimental value and I just can’t pull the trigger. ‘Harsh bark, soft heart,’ that’s what my mother used to say about me. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a hunter and a fisherman, made a living writing about it in the hook-and-bullet rags. You could go into any outhouse in any deer camp in the country and you start leafing through Field & Stream, you’ll find my byline. I had a column for twenty years. ‘Bart’s Back Forty.’ But then I’m one of those people who rescues spiders and wasps, too, worries about stepping on worms in a rain. We could see some, I’ve heard. Weather, that is.”

  “Eighty percent chance of rain by Friday,” Sean said. “And it could turn to snow.”

  “Snow in May. Imagine that? You’d think we were someplace like Montana.”

  Trueblood looked into the eye of Cartwright’s camera and raised a pair of mischievous eyebrows. “By then you ought to have your story, Lillian. Clint and I, one of us, will have shot the other by then. There will be blood in the water.”

  “Is that a promise?” she said.

  He ran his left thumb and forefinger down the opposite sides of his goatee, then nodded. Sean saw that he had a tattoo on that hand, a small snake that wound around the fingers.

  Trueblood reached into his mouth and extracted bridgework containing two false teeth, the lower lateral incisor and bicuspid on the right side.

  “Left hook,” he said. “When you meet him, check out the ring on his little finger. It’s got a copper nugget big as a sugar cube. That’s what did the damage. But I got in some good licks, too.”

  He replaced the teeth and crooked a finger to lead them up the steps to his porch, pausing there to collect a beer from a cooler.

  “The truth is I don’t know how Clint will react to me. We’ve participated in the same forums, brushed past each other in Holiday Inn parking lots from Great Falls to Livingston, wherever they’ve held public meetings on the mine, but we haven’t spoken in years. And he has everything to lose on this trip. It’s me who possesses the rogue charm, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why he’s given me this forum. The mine’s already licensed; they’re just waiting for the DEQ’s rubber stamp. That’s the Department of Environmental Quality. The process will drag on, but the DEQ is basically a lapdog of industry and approval is all but certain. About all I can do is draw attention, put eyes on the project, try to find a chink in the licensing process for a lawyer to find a foothold. Failing that, hope to make a strong enough case that the governor frowns and the politicians think twice or the secretary of the interior steps in. That camera of yours could help me do that. You and the scarecrows.”

  “Are you the one who put them up?” Lillian Cartwright, coming straight to the point.

  “Moi?” He tapped his chest. Bared his teeth, false and otherwise, in a smile.

  “It’s a ‘yes or no’ answer.”

  “I might have if I’d thought of it. I won’t be surprised if Clint accuses me of it, or of putting someone up to it.”

  Trueblood swept a hand at the landscape, changing the subject.

  “This was my great-grandfather’s homestead, ridgetop to waterline. Came out from Illinois in 1881. His wife, my great-grandmother Charlotte, gave birth to their first son down around Independence Rock. Being imaginative people, they named him Rock. That’s on the old Oregon Trail. Dodged arrows and rode out snowstorms and cholera, or so the family legend goes. My ancestor was a cattleman with no money to buy cattle. He moved west to Montana, managed a place out of White Sulphur Springs, saved his nickels, bought sheep because they were cheap, leased these eight hundred acres you’re looking at, then bought up three adjoining homesteads one by one. My grandfather, my father, myself, all the Trueblood line was born here. It’s the only home I’ve ever known.”

  He led them into a low-ceilinged living room and kitchen with a center fireplace built of river stones. Marble eyes watched them from the walls: a whitetail deer mount, a taxidermied brown trout that looked to have been five pounds, the full rug mount of a mountain goat nailed to one of the walls, its snowy hair in stark contrast to the soot-stained logs. And the ubiquitous snakeskin, also tacked on a wall.

  “Bill Goat Gruff,” Trueblood commented, indicating the goat. “And him”—he pointed to the snakeskin—“I call him Tickler the First.”

  “Tickler?”

  “He tickled my leg with his fangs. By the time I got to Great Falls Deaconess, my calf was as big around as one of those Ponderosa rounds.” He pointed to a stack of unsplit log sections by the fireplace. “They performed what was called a fasciotomy, made a zigzag incision down the leg to relieve pressure.”

  He pulled up his pants cuff to expose the smooth foot-long scar. “Did you know that snakebite victims have a much higher incidence of PTSD than the general population? Almost as high as war vets.”

  Sean’s eye was drawn to a framed portrait of Trueblood above the mantel. It was a charcoal sketch with the face in profile. Sean was always interested by art and idled over for a closer look. The piece was quite goo
d, possessing much the same animal magnetism of its subject.

  He read the words scrawled at the bottom.

  I drink too much. I smoke too much. I make love too goddamned much.

  —Bart Trueblood

  In the far lower right-hand corner were the initials BJT. Sean caught Cartwright’s eye and she focused her lens.

  Trueblood smiled. “Someone I scarcely recognize now. About all I do too much of anymore is talk.”

  “Is it a self-portrait?” Sean said.

  “I’m a dabbler.”

  “No. It’s good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you still draw?”

  Trueblood nodded. “I have pencil and sketch pad packed for our float. But my current medium is oil. I am presently working on a riverscape for Montana Parks. There’s a competition for the new state poster. I see the look in your eye, Sean. Is it skepticism?”

  “No.” Sean smiled. “It’s just that I will be your competition, if I can meet the deadline.”

  “To adversaries then.” Trueblood tapped his beer against Sean’s empty fist and tipped it back. They talked painting until Cartwright interrupted.

  “I read that you were married, Mr. Trueblood,” she said.

  “My name’s Bart. Bartholomew Joseph Trueblood, that’s my given name. But yes, twice. Once by church, once by God. The woman who took my name died of breast cancer two years ago August. I miss her every day.”

  “You were married by God.”

  “It was a very long time ago. But that’s something I can’t talk about. You can lose your soul if you talk about some things.” He shook his head. “Enough of that,” he said to himself, his voice turning soft.

  “Does it ever get lonely, living this far out?”

  “Since Dolores died?” Trueblood nodded. “It surely does. But I still have the river, and I can make out what it’s saying if I leave the window open. Ours is a conversation that began when I was born and has never stopped. The Smith is my wife, my mistress, my muse, my love. She haunts me. And my mission, to save her, is what keeps my ticker beating. I’m always on the road speaking, trying to raise the funds for legal expenses. It’s not easy to go up against the kind of money Clint and his offshore investors bring to the table. Hard Rock Heaven Mining Cooperative is an Australian outfit with money from Canada, Europe, and Australia, everybody, it seems, but our own country. They haven’t built the tailings facility or dug tunnel yet, let alone extracted ore, but they have already spent more than fifty million dollars drilling core samples. This is a David and Goliath story with the lifeblood of a river at stake, and all I have is my paintbrush and my charisma.”

  He showed them his charisma with a wicked grin, a clenching of facial muscles that ran a delta of creases back into his hairline. They were back on the porch, where he shrugged into a fishing vest and picked up a rigged fly rod and a spinning rod leaning against the cabin wall, shook off Sean’s offer to tote his hard-sided boat bag, and nodded to him to get the cooler.

  “What do you have in here besides beer?” Sean said. It was a heavy cooler.

  “Ice breakers,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Trueblood was right about Clint McCaine’s appearance, as far as it went. He was wearing a cowboy hat, a sweat-stained silver-belly Stetson with a rancher crease, but as he also was wearing chest waders, no belt buckle was in evidence, no snakeskin boots. Sean knew he’d been a football player at Montana Tech in Butte, graduated from the School of Mines and Engineering—his bio was on the mine website. Still, he was larger than Sean had thought he’d be, one of those men who go through life looking down on their fellow man from their six-four, two forty. In McCaine’s case, looking down with a wink and a disarming smile. He was one of those big men, Sean saw at once, who spread their legs and lean back from the waist to minimize their size and make your acquaintance more comfortable.

  Sean had expected an arm’s-length personality, a man with a long arm at that. He’d been prepared to dislike him. Instead, he found himself drawn to McCaine, his broad, handsome everyman’s face, his crinkled-up eyes, the way he nodded when you spoke, as if what you had to say was of the greatest interest and you, personally, were the best thing to have happened to him that day. His short sandy hair was revealed above a tan line when he removed his hat to greet Lillian Cartwright.

  “Lillian, may I call you Lillian, what a pleasure,” he said. He bowed slightly, placing his hat over his chest. As he did, Sean noticed a birthmark at his hairline that had been covered by the hat. It was as large as a silver dollar and shaped vaguely like Montana. It lent him the touch of the common man, no doubt an advantage for someone whose job was persuasion.

  Cartwright, who was filming, scrolled the fingers of her hand to say keep talking. They were standing on a varnished dock, with a flagstone pathway leading up the hill toward a river-stone-and-timber A-frame house that looked big enough to host a mining convention, which, Sean had read, it had.

  “And, Bart”—McCaine shook his head—“whatever happened, it’s past.” He turned to the rest. “We were like this as kids,” he said, pairing two fingers on his left hand. Sean noted the heavy copper nugget in the ring on the little finger.

  “I know we have different views on the mine,” he was saying, “but can’t we please start over or at least turn the page? I’ll start by saying I’m sorry. Sorry about letting my temper get the better of me that time. Sorry for all of it. And I’m very sorry about Dolores. She was a fine woman.”

  He extended his hand. “Bygones,” he said.

  Trueblood shook his head, then, with visible reluctance, the hand. “Sure, Clint. Whatever you say. But the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “If you don’t know, you don’t know.”

  McCaine shook his head for the camera. He brought his shoulders up and let them fall. You see the way it is, his gesture said.

  “Would anyone like to see the house before we push off? Going once?” He flexed his eyebrows. “Twice . . . ?”

  Sean said he’d like to, and Cartwright waved the back of her free hand for McCaine to lead the way. They all followed except Trueblood, who said he’d stay at the dock watching over the boats. He flicked the cap off a bottle of beer with the spine of his belt knife and tilted it back. “Can’t have the scarecrows stealing our gear,” he said.

  McCaine stopped. He stood, his back to Trueblood, twenty feet of charged air between them. He turned around.

  “You call yourself an honest man, Bart. Answer an honest question. Do you have anything to do with the scarecrows? Any knowledge of them at all?”

  “No, Clint, I don’t. You’re just going to have to accept that someone else objects to what you’re planning to do to this river as much as I do.”

  “I don’t plan to do anything to the river. The mine is twenty miles from the river. It’s not going to affect the water quality whatsoever.”

  “You’re going to tell these good people that you’re planning to dig ore under the main spawning tributary of the Smith River, and water quality won’t be affected? What planet are you living on?” He shook his head.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen.” Lillian Cartwright had taken her camera from her shoulder. “Save your talk of the planet for the fire tonight.”

  McCaine put his smile back in place and nodded. Determined to get in the last word, he said, “Do any of you really think that I’d mine copper if there was a chance it would poison the river I grew up on?”

  “You poisoned this place years ago, Clint,” Trueblood said, his voice weary. “For both of us. And that’s something I will never forgive you for.”

  Sean exchanged another glance with Cartwright. Whatever they were talking about, it didn’t sound like copper.

  “Go on,” Trueblood said. “Show them your house. I’m sur
e they’ll be impressed. Don’t forget your bedroom.”

  “I won’t dignify that remark with a response.” And, wordlessly, McCaine continued up the stone walkway to the house.

  Sean looked back at Trueblood, whose Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed the last of his beer.

  “You okay?” Sean said.

  Bart Trueblood no longer resembled the man in the self-portrait with the piercing eyes and the devil-may-care countenance. He was smaller than that man now, the stag shirt hung on his frame, the greater part of him was simply not present. What past the two men shared, Sean had no idea, but one seemed to have survived it better than the other. That much was clear.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Go see the house. It’s a nice house. All the blood was mopped up years ago.”

  He looked away, and Sean turned to follow the group. It really was a handsome house. McCaine smiled with paternal pride as he showed it to them, the big empty-sky Russell Chatham landscapes, the genuine Navajo rugs, the Western-themed furniture, the bison skull over the fireplace.

  He said, “Voilà,” and ushered them into what he called his Copper Room, which glittered in the slant of afternoon sunshine pouring in the windows. It was a man’s office out of a page of history when men of importance commanded dark offices, heavy mahogany furniture with copper beading, a big dark wood desk with a copper-cornered blotter, twin copper lamps with elk pattern shades, copper picture frames showing photos of copper mining operations, copper knickknacks under glass, a copper Rolex watch that had to have cost a pretty copper penny, displayed in a shadow box. A cabinet with a hinged glass lid held a core sample taken from the proposed mining site.

  McCaine encouraged them to run their fingers over the tube-shaped sample, which was about thirty inches long and as big around as a Louisville Slugger. Sean volunteered, the smooth, flaky-looking surface feeling cool to the touch and slightly slimy, as if it was covered by a film of skin lotion.