“Is it anything to do with poaching in Yellowstone Park?” she’d asked him.
A pause. “What makes you say that?”
At least she’d got his attention.
She’d told Whatney she’d like to speak to Harold’s supervisor. Whatney said the man wasn’t in, that he’d flown to Tampa Bay, Florida, where his elderly mother was in hospice care, and nobody in the office knew when he’d return.
“Who?” Martha asked. “I need the name.”
Another pause.
“Fitz Carpenter, but he’s not authorized to tell you what Harold was involved in.”
Martha told him there was no law against talking to him, and Whatney grudgingly gave her a number. Martha called it on her cell phone, keeping Whatney connected on the landline. Straight to voice mail, mailbox full.
“So, nothing?” Sean said. He had already turned onto I-90 East.
“I didn’t say that. Whatney’s agreed to meet with me tomorrow morning, at the DCI offices in Helena. I’m sure he sees it as a one-way street—me talking, him listening. But I think I can persuade him that it’s in our mutual interest to give and take. I’ll just have to drip a little blood into a coffee cup and drink it or something, swear an oath. Harold could be trying to catch a grasshopper poacher with a BB gun and they’d claim it was secret state business.”
Sean thought, Helena will put her that much closer to the Smith River. Sean told her to throw a dry bag with her sleeping bag and gear into her vehicle, just in case the events of the day ended up taking them to the river’s edge, that he already had two kayaks on the roof rack.
“I still don’t like you going up to the Musselshell,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
House of Quilts
It was Breaks country, a harsh, arid sagebrush and tumbleweed landscape with cracked earth and buttresses of sandstone rock showing the layers of the ages. For many people, it was the kind of place where you put pedal to the metal, making fast for anywhere else. For Sean, who examined all country with an artist’s eye for geography and geometry, it was beautiful.
As he drove east on Route 200, putting Grass Range and then Winnett in the rearview mirror, he began to register the touches of menace—the NO METH, NOT EVEN ONCE signs, with their skulls and crossbones, the gophers eating their roadkill sisters, the tire-squashed rattlesnakes strung up on barbed wire, placed like mile markers on this road heading for hell, even while meadowlarks trilled from fence posts and bluebirds flitted gorgeously over the grasses, turquoise angels in a land that had been bled by the sun until it was almost without color. It struck Sean as biblical, though he had never been to the Middle East, and had no point of reference.
He glanced at the map he’d drawn from Martha’s directions, found the road she’d said was unmarked, took the scribbled Y and found himself stopped before a locked gate. That wasn’t on his map. He dug out his GPS and extrapolated the route he’d need to take to the coordinates of the last known residence for one Rayland Jon Jobson, aka Jon Jobson, aka Job. It was five miles to approach the location from the other side by what would probably be a sketchy road, only about a mile as the buzzard flies from the locked gate where he stood. He pulled on his boots and ate a sandwich and stalled. What gave him pause wasn’t the hike in so much as the story he’d tell when he got there. Discounting the three hours he’d spent taking a stab at sleep in the back of the Land Cruiser at the truck stop in Edie’s Corner, he’d been more than seven hours on the road, plenty of time to concoct a plausible reason for his visit.
He had thought to come right out with a part truth, say he was a gun collector who’d heard from a friend that Marnie Post had sold a Mannlicher-Schönauer in excellent original condition, he would pay top dollar for it, and she had pointed him in this direction.
But what if Jobson saw through the cover and felt he was under suspicion? He’d bury the rifle before a court order reached the door. No, that strategy wouldn’t fly.
A traveling salesman? Actually there still were a few in remote parts of the state, smiling hucksters who traded their company to the isolated who desperately needed it, and who were willing to part with a little cash for something they didn’t need to get it. Garden gnomes and rooster weather vanes, antler section dog chews, ranch implements you couldn’t find in the local Murdoch’s or North 40—they sold all this and more. Sean had been visiting a house once when a white shaman with the outline of a Skoal chewing tobacco tin on his back pocket had tried to sell the owner a divining rod. Even litters of puppies were shopped door to distant door.
But Sean didn’t have any weather vanes, or gnomes, or puppies. His fallback, to pass himself off as a hunter asking for permission, he had abandoned because turkey season had closed and archery deer was still three months down the road. Now he considered it again. He could say he was scouting, trying to line up properties to hunt before landowners were swamped with requests. Hunters’ knuckles had undoubtedly rapped on every door in the county; the addition of Sean’s would raise no suspicion. It could easily get a door shut in his face, though. Well, it would be his job to make sure it didn’t. He climbed up and over the fence, swinging his leg high so as not to rip his pants on the rusted barbs.
The road skirted the upper edges of jump-across coulees that crooked like broken fingers, deepening and widening as they fell to the riparian corridor of the Musselshell River. Sean could see the river as an intermittent milky slash a mile or more below, and for a while he thought that the house would be tucked in a lee down there. But then rounding a bend, he saw it in front of him, less a house than a two-story industrial middle finger, a “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want with my land” structure with metal siding and a metal roof, an eyesore in a countryside full of them, though possibly no others for several miles. There was a jacked-up silver-and-black Silverado in the drive, caked with dried gumbo except for the two window crescents cleared by the wipers, the sleepy half eyes through which Montanans in mud country see the world. Sean found that he was whistling, trying to keep his mind nimble if he was to get beyond the door. Provided anyone was home. The fact that there was no ranch dog tugging at his pants cuffs wasn’t encouraging.
But at his knock he heard footsteps start and stop, and the woman who opened the door was preceded by a shotgun barrel, which she tapped in front of her as one might tap a walking stick, with nothing in its sights but her own purple-painted toenails peeking out from pink flip-flops. She was blonde, or chose to be, for her eyebrows and lashes were as black as crow wings, and sturdily built, with fingernails painted the same color as her toes, and jangles of charm bracelets on both wrists. She looked like someone who would wear silk scarves and give you back ten for a twenty before reading your fortune, assuring you of a long life and the woman of your dreams. Sean told her why he was there while watching her face go through changes—a nodding, I’ll-hear-you-out look, pleasant enough, then a rolled eyes you-must-be-kidding look, a level stare, finally an assessing look at an angle, the hooded eyes conveying that she wasn’t buying it.
“I saw a couple bachelor bucks about a half mile west. I think the one would go one eighty, once he gets rid of his velvet,” Sean finished up. The book was the Boone & Crockett record book, the points awarded to a trophy deer a sum of the length of its tines and beam circumferences, minus points for asymmetry.
The woman’s laugh was musical, and not as hard as her eyes.
“They’s all bachelors this time of year. No nookie ’til November. But I know what you’re here for,” she said, “and it isn’t permission to hunt deer.”
Sean waited, trying to keep a neutral expression and hoping she’d clarify.
“I’ll tell you what I told that other fellow,” she said. “It’s my house free and clear, it’s my name on the deed. I’m not indebted to the man in any way, we’re not cohabiting on a regular basis, and I’ve not entered into a common-law arrangement by mutual consent or ag
reement. So if you want to talk restitution, you’ll have to dig him out of the compound and you can leave my property out of the equation. For that matter, you can leave my property.”
Sean, winging it, said, “If you cooperate, you will be left out of it. It’s Job who owes the government back taxes and penalties, not you.”
“Good to hear. At least you got the name right.”
A yard of silence separated them, and Sean could feel it growing longer. Where was Choti when you needed her? In rural Montana, a dog was an ice breaker; it gave you something to do with your hands, a reason to turn your head away, and a little more time to think about what to say next. But he’d left her at the clubhouse on the Madison with Willoughby and company, and now he was seconds from being kicked down the road.
She was speaking again. “The last fellow didn’t even know he’d changed it. He’s still Rayland as far as I’m concerned, which isn’t very. But you haven’t shown me any paper says you’re who you say you are, and if that’s all the business you got, you can back up a step so I can close the door without being rude about it. I have a show coming up this weekend and I need to be working.”
“What is your work?” he heard himself saying. The piercing eyes that were like java chips narrowed as she smiled, and Sean saw where a tooth was missing on the upper right side.
“It’s the quilting show in Hardin. We got two more until the big one in Lewistown, the Harvest Moon Celebration. Next to the state fair, that’s the biggest around.”
“My sister quilts,” Sean said. Well, he thought, she appreciates them, anyway. He’d never seen her sew so much as a button onto a shirt.
“Where’s your sister?”
“Adams, Massachusetts. It’s about six miles from the Vermont line.”
“That’s quilting country, it sure is. I used to live upstate Connecticut and I’d give anything to be there in the fall again. All those colors, just rolling hillsides of them, and pumpkins and that crisp feel to the day. If you’re a landscape quilter, it doesn’t get any better for material. Not like this country at all. Here you just go from fires and haze one day to rain and mud the next. I might as well be living on the moon. Who wants a quilt looks like that? We got weeks on end here you can’t get out to the road. You don’t have pickle jars and a pig hanging, you’ll be counting your ribs by Christmas.”
“Would you show me one of your quilts? My name’s Sean, by the way.”
“I’m Darlene Cook. My husband was one of the Hardin Cooks. He’s gone now, ten years, three months, and six days, and God rest his soul. He was a good-hearted man, that man. If I hadn’t gone on the pill, I might of had somebody to stick up for me by now, but you know how it is when you’re young, the time is never right and you think you have forever.”
She looked past him over his shoulder. “I suppose you might come on in. It’s my house, isn’t it?”
“It says so on the deed,” Sean said. And risked a smile.
“Okay then, but just for a minute. I never know when he might be coming back. He finds you here it wouldn’t be good. He can get wicked mad. It’s when he’s shifting his weight, like a mountain cat switching its tail. That’s when you keep your head down. If you can’t look at him right, then don’t look at him at all. Somebody sang that, I can’t recall who.”
And Sean was in the door.
The house was airy and, despite its stark exterior, inviting. It had an old-fashioned shabby-chic feel, with comfortable furniture, calico throw pillows, everything round-edged except for the Mesa-design, faux Navajo rug that commanded the living room. It was a place you could sit back and put your feet up without taking off your shoes, while you admired the ribbons that hung above the fireplace mantel and the quilts that won them.
The quilts were everywhere—folded on the backs of chairs and sofas, hanging from all the walls, draped on racks like ironed newspapers in a London gentleman’s club. Some were no larger than place mats. One looked big enough to warm a moose on a Berkshire winter night. The quilt that drew Sean’s attention had photographs imbedded or rather fabric patches with some kind of photo transfer that had been stitched into the quilt. The photos looked to be of a family—father, mother, two daughters, a son, dogs—taken at various ages. One photo showed a young woman sitting on a horse with some kind of banner diagonally across the front of her Western shirt. A Stetson tipped up to reveal a face that could sell soap.
“You were beautiful,” Sean said. When in doubt, he thought, flatter.
“I was Miss Nebraska 1984,” she said, coming up beside him. “They took that photo for posters to promote my appearance at the state fair. I went to a lot of ribbon cuttings and all the fairs, but that Nebraska State Fair, that’s where I saw my first quilt show. They just took my breath away, the colors, the intricacies, all so beautiful. I thought, ‘I want to do that.’”
“How did a professional beauty get from Omaha to Connecticut to nowhere Montana?” Sean wanted to ask. But she was opening up and he didn’t want to interrupt the stream. She began to talk quilting then—mixed media, glue sticks, machined versus hand-pierced—it was a foreign tongue to Sean. As he half listened, his eyes walked the furniture and climbed the walls. She’d said she was a landscape quilter, that was where her heart was, and Sean took in and went by a mountainscape that looked like Glacier National Park and another that had to be the White Cliffs of the Missouri River, and yet a third quilt that showed a peculiar rock formation up in cliffs above a bend of a river, and then his eyes came back to that one and he tapped his lip with a forefinger, thinking, as a slight crawling sensation worked up the back of his neck. He knew the place, had seen it from below rather than from above, or would have recognized it immediately. They had floated past the formation the day after Bart Trueblood had been flown out by the helicopter.
She said the name that had already come to him—“Table Rock.”
“It’s on the Smith River,” she said. “The one you have to draw a permit to float it?”
Sean nodded. “I’ve heard of it.”
“We drew last year. Judy did, that’s my sister-in-law. I went with her and her folks. You couldn’t get Job to go with that much company. You put three people in a room and he takes his plug tobacco and heads for the hills. It was really a little too low to float, we had to drag the raft a lot, but it was beautiful. Breathtaking. The Portals of Eden is what they call it. We climbed up to the rock and I took a lot of pictures. Such a strange formation. Like a mushroom. That top of the table, it must be big as a queen-sized bed. I told Job it sounded like the title of an old Western—Showdown at Table Rock.
“I wouldn’t have picked it for a quilt, but Job, he saw the pictures I took and told me to put it in a landscape. See, that compound he’s always driving off to is near the river there. So he knew the place. I didn’t think it was material for a quilt, but it turned out better than I thought. It was People’s Choice at the Quilt-O-Rama in Bismarck last February. Shows to go you, you never know.”
She led him up the stairs to the second floor, where she had her quilting room looking out over the landscape. Halfway up the stairs, Sean stopped at a framed photograph on the wall. It was a campy, staged photo of the pitchfork couple in American Gothic, the painting by Grant Wood. The man was tall, narrow-faced, and serious, the woman in her colonial print apron, a younger Darlene Cook, trying for stern but playing with a smile.
“That’s Rayland and me. Back before he blew his hand up. Better days, those. When he lost his son, it changed him. Lost his faith after that. Started saying he was like Job in the Bible. Always did the right thing, and still God made him suffer and wouldn’t say why. He became bitter. One of those world-on-his-shoulders people, much as one can be who can’t hold down a job. That’s how come he changed his name.”
“What happened to his son?”
“He was taking his wife to the hospital after her water broke and tried to beat a t
rain to a crossing. It stalled out on him. Him, his wife, the unborn son, all gone in less time than it takes a train to whistle. Job says that railroad track is the river that divides his life. He used to be a preacher, you know. Lutheran. He could talk real eloquent.”
“Darlene, I really would like to talk to him. I won’t say I was here.”
They’d reached the landing and she studied her toes.
“He’ll know. I just can’t.” Her eyes were pleading when they finally looked up at him. “I already told you more than I should.”
“Why don’t you leave him?”
“You say it like it’s simple. And go where? I sank every dime I had to build this house. His specs, but it’s my house, my land. Why this place, that’s what I asked him. He says it’s beautiful, the Badlands of Montana. I said I don’t want to move to no bad lands. I want to move to good lands. I didn’t really want to move at all. I liked where I was.
“He says, ‘You’ll love it,’ so I looked it up. I’d never been to Montana and he’s wanting me to buy land sight unseen. So I looked up Montana Badlands and it really was beautiful, all these cliffs, like drenched in molten gold. I thought, I can work with that. The quilter in me can work with that. It might be nowhere, but it was somewhere, too, if you had the eyes for it. Then I make the down payment and wind up here in the Missouri Breaks. Rayland, he thought Breaks, Badlands, it’s all the same. But it isn’t the same at all.
“You know what I call it, this place—Folsom, Montana. Like the song. It’s a prison and he’s the warden, and guess who’s in lockup? But you never heard that from me. And him gone half the time anyway. He comes back from the compound, it’s as romantic as an oil change. I’m just something to grease the gears and get him back down the road. It isn’t rape ’cause I let him, knowing what he’d do if I didn’t.”
A Death in Eden Page 21
