“A scarecrow with a heart, humpff,” she said.
“Humpff, what?”
“Nothing. Let’s look around. If this was a movie, we’d find some crucial piece of evidence about now.”
But it wasn’t and they didn’t, and they covered the remaining miles to Canyon Depth and had the tent up and a fire burning down to cooking coals before speaking of anything beyond deciding the line or other technicalities they’d faced while negotiating the river.
“What’s on the spit?” Martha said.
“Speedy goat,” Sean said. “Antelope, onion, mushroom, pineapple, tomatoes. I speared them up before leaving Bridger and they’ve been marinating in a homemade teriyaki. Do you want to eat now, or hike up to the homestead first, while we’ve still got the light?”
“Let’s save it for the morning. We’ve had a long day and I’d like to bring fresh eyes to it. Besides, there’s something else to put our minds to this evening. Is that my marinade?”
“Your recipe, yes. But I’m afraid tomorrow we’ll be eating out of cans unless I can catch a trout. In this dirty water . . .”
“Oh ye of little faith,” she said. She flicked a mosquito that had settled on the back of her hand. Then, in a voice with a sober note: “I might have a lead on the body.”
Sean placed the shishkebabs on his fold-up grill. He raised his eyes.
“I saw my guy Whatney at DCI this morning,” Martha said. “He hemmed and hawed, brought in a department lawyer who said a confidentiality contract was involved. They weren’t at liberty to say what Harold was doing, and that there were layers of insulation for undercover projects and they didn’t exactly know themselves what he’d been up to. The thing was, my involvement could throw a wrench into a larger operation and raise an alarm with the people they were building cases on, and all their work over the past couple years could be for nothing. Yada, yada. Pretty much just what I expected to hear.”
She flicked away another mosquito.
“This lawyer, she looked like she’d stepped out of an office in a New York firm, that or a coffin, all buttoned up in black with a red scarf and lips, hair like cigarette ash. She introduced herself as Miz So and So Utgoff, looked at me like I was something she’d found underneath her heel. I said who am I talking to. Am I talking to you, or to Whatney here, who was giving me his ‘This is out of my hands’ shrug. She said I was talking to her. Martina, that was her name. Martina Utgoff. I said, Miz Utgoff, here’s the deal. I don’t give a shit if my concern for Harold Little Feather throws a wrench into your operation. I know he was undercover with a poaching ring, I know what gun was used to shoot the grizzly bears, I know who it belongs to, and I know where he lives. If you don’t want me knocking on his door with a warrant, then tell me something that helps me find Harold Little Feather.
“She said I couldn’t get a warrant. I said I wouldn’t need one if all I wanted to do was ask questions. Either way, it would blow her case out of the water.”
“Good for you, Martha,” Sean said.
“Yeah, I was proud of myself. You know how it usually goes, you don’t remember what to say until you’re out the door. Well, Miz Utgoff, she retreats under the ‘I don’t know myself’ mask, so that puts us back to square one. I say, then put me in touch with his supervisor. Whatney speaks up and tells me what he did over the phone, that the guy who pulls Harold’s strings, Fitz Carpenter, had gone to visit his sick mother and can’t be reached. Maybe I could call back, say, end of next week.
“I got out of my chair and said thank you very much, I got a long drive ahead of me. I start walking to the door, it’s like I can feel a camera on my back, and I’m reaching for the knob when the lawyer clears her throat.
“‘He’s missing,’” she says.
“What do you mean, he’s missing?”
“She says sit back down. I sit back down. She says that Carpenter left word that he was visiting his mother in Tampa Bay, who had the Big C, and would keep them updated. But it had been seven days and he hadn’t checked in and his mailbox was full, so finally someone had got worried and pawed back through the mail in his office. The mom had sent him a birthday card. She was contacted through the return address. She did live in Tampa, but she hadn’t seen her son since Christmas. And she did have cancer, but it was in remission and she felt fit as a fiddle. In fact she cocaptained the champion shuffleboard team in the retirement home. Had a trophy to prove it.”
“The lawyer told you this?”
“No, Whatney. He’s the one who called the mother. The point is, if I was being told the truth, then this guy was lying to them about where he’d gone. Jump forward a few days and we find a body in the Smith River. We assume the dead guy must be the Scarecrow God, because who else was on the river, right?”
“Plus, Harold was looking for him,” Sean said. “That puts them on a collision course.”
“And that. But sitting in that chair, I’m thinking no, this guy, Carpenter, he could be our John Doe. The more I think about it, the more likely that seems. Carpenter sends Harold undercover to infiltrate a poaching ring honchoed by this Jobson character. Then, after he pulls the plug on the sting, for whatever the reason, he sends Harold to investigate the scarecrows on the Smith River. At roughly the same time, Carpenter goes AWOL. A few days pass and somebody winds up in the drink without a head, no more than a hundred yards or so from where Harold’s canoe is found. You factor in that this Jobson might be living in the same neck of nowhere, and that’s too much coincidence by two. But here’s the ace. I asked to see a photo of Carpenter and they took me into his office. And here he is, all smiles for the camera, holding a walleye he caught in Canyon Ferry Reservoir. Guess what?”
“What?”
“What did I tell you about him?”
“You said he was tall.”
“And . . . ?”
“And dead.”
“Come on, think back.”
Sean smiled. “He was an albino.”
“Yeah. They call it leucistic.”
“So it’s him?”
“What are the odds of another albino dead in the water?”
“Did you tell Whatney and the lawyer?”
“No. And remember I told you that Cashell was holding that detail back from the press, so they could weed out any crazies who wanted to confess? That means no one at DCI knows, because they weren’t one of the agencies contacted by the sheriff’s department. No reason they would be.”
“So who else does know?”
“That the dead guy is Carpenter? No one, just you and me. But Whatney and company aren’t stupid. Now that Carpenter is officially missing, it’s connect the dots. They’ll find a blood relative of Carpenter, the mother, a sister, whoever, and they’ll request a DNA comparison to the headless horseman. If it comes back positive, you can bet that the lawyer will step all over us with her pointy heels and we’ll be out of the picture.”
“So why are we sitting around this fire instead of finding the road into the compound? I think if we don’t find anything tomorrow or the next day, we take out at Eden Bridge and drive up the Musselshell and lean on the quilter. She wanted to tell me this morning. She was just too scared to.”
“If we brace her, what’s to stop her from telling him? For all we know, there’s cell reception where he is. No, that’s not the route. Sean, I’ve had some experience with types. You send child services in to take custody of the kids because they’re being neglected or used as labor, or someone with a federal warrant shows up to investigate tax evasion or squatting on land they have no paper to, and word gets out. By the time you get around to knocking on doors, the so-called compound is deserted, or the few who are present are actually minding their business. We find that road, go through the gate, if someone’s got a hammer cocked at Harold’s head, they’ll drop it. No, our best bet is to go through the back door. This is the back door.” She
waved a hand to indicate the river, which was fading into its bass notes as the shadows climbed the canyon walls.
“Are those shishkebabs done, or not? I’m hungry.”
They ate in silence, Martha occasionally stirring the coals with a stick, Sean feeding tidbits to the dog. Both were absorbed in their thoughts.
“Cochise, huh?” Martha said, sipping at her wine. “Seems like wishful thinking. But that’s what we’ve brought to the river, a hope and a prayer and a three-legged dog.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Telling Secrets
In the gray of dawn the homestead cabin and its outbuildings looked skeletal, the eroded bones of a bygone era, people with hard hands and broken dreams lost to the pages of a history that nobody read, there being no poetry in the words, no reward in the labor, and no better life than the one that had been left behind.
Harold had told Sean that the photo was on the wall above the cot, and that he had tucked it back under the broken pane of glass after photographing it. He found the frame hanging a little crookedly, but no photograph. A kerosene lantern with a cracked globe sat on an overturned wood crate. When Sean shook it to see if there was kerosene in it, a triangular piece of glass broke off the globe.
He and Martha exchanged glances. Martha shrugged.
“It’s called police work,” she said. “You walk in one direction, turn over a stone, and nothing’s there. You walk in another direction, you turn over a stone, and nothing’s there, either. You keep walking, you keep turning over stones. As opposed to what you do, play hunches and step into shit.”
Sean had noticed that the end of a short length of floorboard near the cot was raised above the ones to either side. He tugged at it. It didn’t move. He pushed down. The other end levered up just enough for him to insert a couple fingers. He raised his eyes to Martha, who met his expression and reached for her Maglite.
“Here’s to stepping in shit,” Sean said. He lifted the board up and set it aside.
The beam of Martha’s light made a bright circle in the cavity under the board. Sean saw a rag cut from burgundy cloth, similar to those found in gas stations. He pinched the edge between his thumb and forefinger and brought it to his nose, then Martha’s.
“Gun oil,” she said. “Smells like the mutton lining of my shotgun case. Harold mention anything about a firearm?”
“No. But he was planning to come back here after we left the campground. Stake it out another night. At least that’s what he told Marcus.”
Sean set the rag aside and scraped at the layer of fine sawdust that had accumulated under the floorboard. Droppings of deer mice were scattered like wedding rice on a church step.
“Regular hantavirus hotel,” Martha said in a dry voice.
Sean’s fingernails scraped against metal. He answered Martha’s flexed eyebrow with one of his own as he extracted a tin box with a fitted lid and blew the dust off. It was a two-deck playing card case, the cover embossed with live oaks dripping moss in a swamp. The raised lettering read: WAKULLA SPRINGS STATE PARK, HOME TO THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. The rubber band holding the case together was so dried out that it snapped when Sean tried to take it off, spilling the contents of the case onto the floor. A quick inventory revealed a stack of photographs—Kodachrome snapshots gone to sepia, sepia photos faded to black and white, black-and-white photos bleeding into unrecognizable patterns of light and shadow. Six pencils had been cut to fit the case, the ends showing the distinctive scallops of being sharpened with a knife blade.
“Two H, two B, four B,” Sean said.
“What’s that mean?”
“They’re sketch pencils. Different hardnesses.”
The apparent target for the lead was a soft-sided notebook with an elastic band, black and unlined, similar to the Moleskine sketch pad that almost always rode in one of Sean’s shirt pockets.
He tapped one of the photos, a four-by-six folded once to fit the compartment. “An enlargement of this one, that’s what was in the picture frame.”
Martha nodded. “Let’s take this stuff outside. I don’t want to breathe in any more mouse poop than I have to.”
Among the scattered farming implements were rusty spools from a disk harrow that had once been used to plow furrows behind draft horses. Sean tipped one upright to make a flat surface, spread his handkerchief over it, and fanned out the photographs. Most were of the same person, a thin, wiry-looking man with black hair and hollow cheeks. In one photo, the man was bare-chested and holding a dead snapping turtle by the tail, the shell so large that it covered his entire torso. In another, he was bearded, wearing a herringbone Jack-Shirt with the tails hanging long, displaying a beaver skin on a round stretching board. Behind him was a forest of pine, the boughs laden with snow.
Two photos, one black and white, one color, depicted a woman sitting on a rocking chair on a porch with a trellis growing around the columns supporting the awning. She was holding a baby in the black-and-white. In the color photo—same pose, same half smile, only the angle of sun different—the baby had grown into a toddler and balanced on her knee. There was only one photograph that showed the three subjects together, but it was arresting because only the woman and the boy were actually in the frame. The boy, a stripling of nine or ten, was wearing a straw hat, his short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the collar. The woman wore a summer dress, her face plain, her countenance stern. The man who’d been absent most of the boy’s life, if what Sean and Martha were looking at was the family they thought they were looking at, was behind the lens. He was the ghost in the photo, visible as a cast shadow, perfectly positioned between the woman and the boy.
“The lost father,” Martha said.
Sean nodded. “She must be the schoolmarm Trueblood was talking about. And the boy, he’s the son. Are we looking at the future Scarecrow God?”
“Fifty years down the road.” Martha nodded. “I think so, anyway. But I’m not sure how Harold fits into the equation.”
“It was his job to find him. I think he found him. Let’s have a look at the notebook.”
A cursory thumb-through was enough to show that if information was to be gleaned from the pages, it would not take the form of the English language. The writer—artist, to be more accurate—was a man of few words, though he spoke eloquently with his pencil. It was, Sean decided, a form of wordless diary, each page including a date in the upper right-hand corner, a short notation, usually nothing more revealing than the weather or water clarity, and a sketch or two. Animal sketches were most numerous, not just the big animals but the minor denizens—mink, muskrat, red squirrel, pine marten. Trout. A kingfisher swooping low. Cliffs. Pictographs. Whatever, Sean guessed, had struck the artist’s fancy that particular day.
The most detailed sketches were the scarecrows. Sean counted eleven, most large enough to merit two facing pages, with one or two preceding pages of cursory sketches showing the scarecrow as it was in progress, and revealing that each one entailed two or three days of labor.
Sean unfolded the river map that the ranger had provided him. It was a photocopy of the map the ranger had given Harold and was marked with the locations of all the scarecrows seen by floaters, including GPS coordinates. The scarecrows in the illustrations had been penciled in sequence, the first, Sean surmising, representing the farthest upstream scarecrow and the last, the farthest downstream. This was confirmed by the descriptions. The first scarecrow, for example, was marked:
¼ mile downstream Rock Creek, 300 ft. above left bank, cave mouth.
That was the scarecrow Harold and his son had climbed to before the documentary party met them on the sandbar below the junction. The pencil sketch was an accurate rendition of the scarecrow in the photos Harold had shown the floating party.
“There’s one missing,” Martha said. “It’s in the book but not on the map.”
She tapped the last page of the notebook.
The sketch was a partial scarecrow, no head or legs, only skeletal branches supporting the torso, with the head suggested with a few willow shoots. It was dated May 15.
“That’s two days before we floated through,” Sean said. He read the description.
Pictograph site above Crow’s Foot, left bank, ledge rock overhang.
“Why are you nodding? Do you know the place?”
“McCaine pointed it out. Crow’s Foot is a boat camp; it’s a long mile upstream from Table Rock, where Marcus said he was going to wait for Harold. Lillian Cartwright wanted to stop and climb up there because there were pictographs, but we vetoed her. I did. The river was coming up fast and I didn’t want to lose any time.”
“If we find the guy behind the pencil,” Martha said, “I think we find Harold, too.”
Sean took out his own sketchbook, picked up a pencil from the card tin, and with a few deft strokes sketched Harold in profile. He tore it out and did another one, also a profile, but of the other side. He handed the first to Martha, tucked the other into his shirt pocket, and answered the question she hadn’t asked.
“For luck,” he said. “When I was a boy, my grandfather told me I would have better luck fishing if I first envisioned the fish I wanted to catch. I was always drawing, so the night he told me that, I went home and sketched a bass. I put it in my pocket, and the next time we went fishing, I caught a bass. When I moved to Montana, I envisioned catching a ten-pound trout so I sketched one, a big brown with a kype jaw.”
“Did you catch it?”
“I had the sketch in my pocket for six years, but I finally did, fishing the Madison last summer. Swimming a deer-hair mouse at night.”
“You never told me that.”
“I never told anyone. The river told me a secret that night, and I decided to keep it. Besides, I didn’t think anyone would believe me.”
“I believe you.”
“That’s why I told you.”
A Death in Eden Page 23
