Heartbeat of the Bitterroot

by Janice Mineer

  My hopes fell. I was afraid this was going to be a rollercoaster ride.

  She picked up my empty plate and stacked it on hers. Then she paused, a fork in her hand poised over the stack.

  “Nope. I was right the first time. It was surely your mother. Kathy came with this fellow. They were on hard times and wanted to borrow money. Your mother was funny about it. Seemed to hurt her pride to ask. Stood out in the driveway with Dan a long time talking. She stood with her hands deep in her pockets, her eyes looking off down the valley like she didn’t like to look Dan in the face. Her young man seemed nice enough. Brawny fellow. In fact, Dan ended up offering him work to get the money they needed—bucking bales. The boy smoked, I remember. Dan did say he didn’t like to hire a one-armed man—you know the expression, a cigarette occupies one hand—but Danny had a soft heart, he did. Always taking someone or other under his wing.

  “So, I remember they had been hauling hay for a week or two when …”

  She stopped and looked out of the window. I heard gravel popping under tires as a car pulled into the driveway.

  “Now who could that be?” she said.

  I saw a plump, middle-aged women step out of the car and pull a huge, brightly colored tote bag onto her shoulder.

  Company? Wait! The story! What about the hay … and my father?

  The woman knocked on the door and May went to open it. I heard the cheery voice. “Third graders … bitterroot flower … seeds.”

  They came into the kitchen, the woman bubbling over with a stream of questions all about the state flower. She was a teacher, she said, at Lone Rock School. She wanted to know everything about the flower. May was the resident expert, she said, making May blush. Could she have some seeds? The children would be thrilled to grow them. Would May come and speak to her class?

  Nonstop.

  The story! My father!

  May gave me a helpless look. I bit my nails and waited until May finally checked her watch.

  “I’d love to help you, Beverly, but I actually have an eye doctor’s appointment and have to leave soon. Can I give you these pamphlets and some seeds and then we’ll talk on the phone later?”

  She finally let the woman out of the door. She came back to the table and said apologetically, “Can we talk about this tomorrow, Jenna? I really do have to go to Missoula for the eye doctor in just a few minutes, but I think I have some pictures you might like to see if I can dig them out of the closet. Will you come back?”

  “Sure, no problem,” I sighed. Well, all things come to those who wait. If they don’t die while they wait! I whined inwardly.

  And the next day when I called, she said she had caught a slight cold. Her daughter was coming to visit for a day or two. She was sorry, but our next visit would be delayed. She would call. I would wait. Some more. Not something I was good at.

  Chapter 28

  dc

  I finished an early shift at work and drove to the courthouse again. I had a few more places—old records, old newspapers—to search for information on my father’s family. I was tracing threads of a tapestry back through time, hoping to find myself amongst the weaving. I did not see the hostile face of the gray-haired clerk, which was a relief, but an hour of peering into grainy microfiche images made my head ache and to no avail. No clues about the drama of my mother and father’s early life. It was as if time had sifted over them, erasing evidence of their time together from human memory.

  A

  At home, I plopped down on my couch and removed my shoes with a sigh. My phone rang and my heart sped up when I saw Michael’s name on the screen.

  “Could you stop at my office before Emma’s party?” he asked. “I have some work I need to catch up on so I’ll be at my desk early. It’s sometimes easier for me to get things done when the place is empty. Do you mind? My mother will take Emma to the Carousel. We’ll meet them over there.”

  “Sure, no problem,” I said.

  I scrabbled in my desk drawer for a pen and paper. He gave me the address to his office on the third floor in a restored 1930s vintage brick building downtown.

  “Well, then, I’ll see you Saturday,” he said.

  “OK, I’ll see you then.”

  He did not hang up. I waited, gazing out through my living room window as a squirrel skittered across a tree limb in my yard. The neighbor’s golden lab barked below, and the tiny animal scolded him for invading his private heaven.

  “OK. I’ll see you then,” Michael repeated.

  “OK,” I said again, and when he finally said goodbye, I hung up the phone, seeing his serene face. I was sure I could smell his cologne.

  I smiled as I made my kale and mushroom dinner that night, thinking about the party. The phone rang just as I sat down to eat. It was Ann wanting to know how my visit with May had gone. I told her I was waiting to set up a second visit.

  “How’s Zee?” I asked.

  “Not so good. She broke up with her boyfriend, I guess. She’s taking it really hard.”

  “I was thinking about coming down after work tomorrow. Maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I can cheer her up a little.”

  I doubted there was much I could do, but then again, just knowing someone cares about you can help keep despair from consuming you. And I was part of the herd in her life, wasn’t I? A “cow sitter.” The thought made me smile.

  “It’s certainly worth a try,” Ann said with a sigh. “I’ll fix your favorite—chicken and dumplings.”

  My mouth watered. “I’ll stop at the store on the way down and bring something too.”

  A

  On the way down the valley the next day, my phone buzzed with a text, rattling in the cup holder. At Super 1 Groceries, I picked up my phone and stepped out of my car. I clicked on the icon to read the message, hoping it was Michael, but stopped mid-stride. It was strange—a number I’d never seen before. No one in my contact list.

  “Consider yourself duly warned. Let things be. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

  I stood in the parking lot, staring at the message until I was nearly run over by an old woman pushing a grocery cart. What kind of message was that? Who could have sent it? I looked around as if to find the sender. I checked the number, suspecting it was the same one I received the text from on Zee’s birthday when I was with Michael, but it was not. It was disturbing. It sent a chill down my spine.

  I wondered again, as I did with the first text, if it had been sent by Jeremy Hunsaker, if somehow he was evading guards at the facility he was in and had gotten access to a cell phone. It made my skin crawl to think he still hated me enough to go to the trouble of texting me threatening messages. But I reminded myself that he hadn’t texted me before he broke into my house. If not him, then who could be doing this?

  I couldn’t disregard the possibility the message had something to do with my research, trying to find my father, but I couldn’t figure out any connection. Why would anyone care about something that happened so many years ago?

  I made a mental note to call Grant Stevens at the police station and at least make sure this had nothing to do with Hunsaker.

  I scanned the parking lot again, but other than the old woman, there was only a mom loading her two kids into a van. I pushed the phone into my pocket and walked into the grocery store.

  A

  I was helping Ann snap some green beans from the garden for dinner when Martin arrived home with a sulky Zee. After a subdued “hi” to the room in general, she glowered her way into her bedroom.

  “How’s she doing?” Ann asked her husband.

  He shook his head in frustration. “Ornery.”

  “She’s having a rough time right now, you know,” Ann said to him, trying to pacify his anger. “We need to be patient.”

  “Patient? Dealing with that girl is like tryin’ to hog-tie a cactus,” he growled, tossing his cowboy hat on the leather recliner.

  I went to Zee’s bedroom door and tapped lightly. No response. I turned the knob and cracked the
door open. I felt like I was taking on the task of defusing a bomb. I took a deep breath and stepped inside. Zee sat on the bed, nearly buried in rumpled covers and cast-off clothes. Her feet splayed out in front of her; her head hung down as she fidgeted with a long scarf, drawing it through her hands.

  “How’s it going?” I asked tentatively.

  Zee shrugged her shoulders.

  I sat on the bed beside her and we shared a wordless moment.

  “Hard day?” I probed.

  Stony silence.

  I playfully hooked my arm around Zee’s neck “How about we go for a ride?”

  Reluctantly, Zee sorted her coat out from a pile of clothes on the floor and slouched behind me into the living room. I grabbed my coat from the horseshoe hook on the massive wooden board by the back door, pulled my knit hat out of the pocket, and called to my aunt in the kitchen that we would be back soon.

  “Don’t you be too long now. No guarantees on quality if this dinner overcooks,” she said, waving her spoon

  We drove in silence down to the river, a silence as heavy as Zee’s heart seemed to be. I cleared my throat but then swallowed the words of cheer I knew would fall useless against her slumped shoulders. It struck me that the world at her age could seem brutal, especially when your defenses are so low.

  I drove down into the fishing access at the edge of the river and got out. I wrapped my jacket tight around me against the chill as we wandered across the slow grade down to the water’s edge. Willows and shrubs dressed in fall-colored garments, reached over the water as if to protect it, like lithe arms of women, pulling their life from the river that mirrored their glory.

  “So … ?” I probed. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.” She pursed her lips into the perfect pout.

  I could see this was going to take some time. I stuffed my hands down into my pockets as a great blue heron flew gracefully overhead, rasping out its cry, then landed with a splash downstream.

  “So, do you want to tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  I blew my bangs away from my face, then sat on a boulder and watched the river slide by. Waiting. A bird chirped its offense at our intrusion into his territory as Zee angrily pitched rocks into the serene waters.

  Then she opened her mouth and the dam broke.

  “It’s my life anyway. Why are they always trying to control me? I just don’t see why Dad won’t cut me a little slack.” She threw her hands in the air; her voice started to quaver. “It’s just that things really stink right now for me. Everything is going wrong for me. Allison is such a jerk.”

  “I thought you guys were best buds?” I asked in surprise.

  “So did I, but Allison has changed. Ever since she started going out with Shane, she’s been completely different. Just because he has a new car she thinks she can’t stoop to talk to the rest of us.” She wrung her scarf in her hands. “And she lied about me. Meagan told me that Krista told her that Allison said that I was cheating on Josh just because I was talking to Will at the game the other day. I hate her! Now Erin and Shelly won’t talk to me either. It’s not like they don’t flirt with everyone around. They are just a bunch of hypocrites.” She kicked a dead branch at her feet, plopped down on a tree stump, and buried her face in her hands. “I just want to go away,” she mumbled. “I want to change my life completely.”

  I was getting a little dizzy trying to keep up. Let’s see, I thought … boyfriend. “And what’s going on with Josh?” I asked.

  “He said he had to go to his aunt’s house Sunday so he couldn’t hang out with me, but I think that was just an excuse. His old girlfriend is back in town. I asked him, but he was just vague about it.” She sank her head back into her hands, the weight of her small world on her shoulders. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose him.”

  “How long have you been going out?” I asked.

  “Three weeks.”

  I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. I bit my lip and searched my brain for something to say. “Well, that’s all pretty bad,” I ventured.

  “Yeah. It’s rotten,” Zee mumbled into her hands.

  Zee’s troubled spirit moved like a dark cloud into the chill air. In a way, I wasn’t surprised to find her tangled up in a nest of tender feelings. When Zee was a little girl, she loved small creatures of all kinds. Kittens, ladybugs, frogs, you name it. If they had eyes, she loved them. They were each and every one her friends.

  One morning, when Zee was five years old, we walked out into the pasture and found a tiny calf dead in the grass. Zee was inconsolable. She stroked its head and pulled on its legs to try coaxing some life back into the little body. We made a little grave and marked it with a cross. Zee cried over it for three days. Her love and compassion for animals had flowed over to all the helpless and confused kids her age, but I could see she was drowning in the flow.

  From where we sat, we looked down into a cool, green eddy at the river’s edge. An occasional shadow of a swift trout ghosted beneath the swirling ripples. It was not all that long ago that I had passed through where Zee was floundering now, and I clearly remembered the kind of dilemmas Zee faced. I was still struggling to put together an effective life for myself. What if I steered Zee wrong? The right words could be a spark firing her in the right direction. If not, I could end up merely fanning a flame into slow disaster.

  “Instead of going away or changing your whole life, you might be able to just make a little shift.”

  “What do you mean?”

  As I looked out over the river, a huge tree limb came floating slowly along, bumping into boulders and snagging logs in its path.

  “You see that big log floating down the river?” I asked.

  She looked up. “Yeah. So?”

  “If you let it, life can sweep you away, just like that. You have things in your life that you can rely on. They make your life stable. Things like school, your family, and the things you believe in that guide your life. They keep you from being swept away.”

  Zee rolled her eyes and sighed. I was losing my audience.

  “OK, what ever happened to trying out for cheerleading? A few months ago, you emailed me that you were trying out.”

  “Oh. Well, we started practicing and learned all the cheers, but Rachel decided it was too hard, I guess, and she got this new boyfriend so she didn’t have time to practice with me anymore. So …”

  “So, you just quit?”

  “Well,” she said with bitterness in her voice, “I wasn’t going to go try out by myself.”

  “Zee, you have to find things you stick to that mean something to you, no matter what other people choose to do. No one writes your life story for you, Zee. You have to do it yourself.”

  Zee seemed unconvinced.

  “I know you aren’t very happy with your parents right now, but our family can be a source of strength in your life. They’re solid, stable. But who you have for friends changes over time.” And here I knew I walked on thin ice. “Except for Bobbie, I don’t talk to very many people I graduated high school with. Friends may change, but your family can be a constant in your life. It depends on what you make of your life together.”

  Zee heaved a sigh and folded her arms in front of her. “I don’t know. It’s just hard. Everybody makes me so mad.”

  I wished somehow I could reach in and fix everything for her. It was like teaching someone to drive a car and not having control of the wheel.

  Zee kicked rocks dejectedly with the toe of her shoe. The sun was beginning to sink over the trees. The shadows deepened around us.

  I put an arm across her shoulders. “I love you, Zee. I’m sure you’ll figure it all out.”

  I was relieved when Zee quietly slipped her arm around my waist.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get back. Nothing I hate worse than over-cooked chicken and dumplings.

  As we climbed the rocky slope toward the car, I noticed a thin, angular man in a blue plaid jacket watching us from the t
op of the bank. He was hunched slightly, a bony elbow crooked from the hand in his pocket. His cap was low over his head, a ragged, pale ponytail dangled behind him. He pulled a cigar away from his lips and threw it into the grass. We were yards away, but I could smell its rank scent. He turned and walked away from us and climbed into a beaten red Ford truck. There was something about him that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. He pulled away slowly, craning his neck in our direction.

  “Do you know that guy?” Zee asked.

  “No, but he gives me the creeps for some reason.” I shuddered as we got into the car.

  A

  After dinner at the ranch, I drove home to Missoula. I thought again about the man at the river and the text I had received when I was in the grocery store parking lot. As much as I hated sounding like a drama queen, I thought I’d better call Grant. Maybe the incident with Hunsaker had just made me jittery. I didn’t know, but it was getting weird. And scary.

  Could this have something to do with my going to the courthouse and researching my father’s family? The clerk looked so angry. I shook my head. I was getting paranoid—seeing shadows.

  Maybe Jeremy Hunsaker was still on the rampage? I really should call Grant and have him check, I thought. But I hesitated. He will think I’m crazy, I told myself. But still, this was the second strange text, and the hard face of the man at the river haunted me.

  I put on my Bluetooth and voice dialed Grant’s number.

  “Hello, this is Grant Stevens.”

  I explained the texts I’d received and told him about the man at the river. He said he would check on Jeremy and make sure he wasn’t behind the texting. I pulled over for a minute at a park and ride and gave him the phone numbers that I had gotten the texts from. I apologized for bothering him, but he said he was happy to help.

  “You seeing that Michael Callahan, Jenna?”

  I felt a blush move into my cheeks as I remembered the warmth of Michael’s kiss. “I guess I am.”

  “Well, just let me know if that doesn’t work out. I’m around.”

  “Thanks, Grant,” I said, then clicked the off button and drove home.