Mercy (Beartooth, Montana)

by B. J Daniels

  Her head hurt, her fear growing with each file she set aside as she worked her way through a history of the career she had loved.

  When she found it, her fingers froze an instant before they began to tremble. She moved from the floor to the table. Sitting down, she took a breath and then opened the file folder.

  On the surface, it was like any other case.

  This one had been before she was made a homicide detective. She’d been assigned to crowd control and hadn’t known any more details than those looky-loos who’d stood gawking behind the crime-scene tape.

  Later she got to go door-to-door, asking if anyone had seen or heard anything suspicious. It was always the same. Little old ladies would remember some strange man they’d noticed, but gave vague details or such good details that finding him had only taken her to the local grocery, where he turned out to be the young man who delivered her groceries every week.

  Dead ends, all of them.

  No wonder she hadn’t remembered the case. While her notes had been in the file with her name on them, it hadn’t been her case. She could see why Rourke had wanted to solve it for her, though. She had worked tirelessly on her own time, trying to track down a witness to the murder.

  Amusing, she thought as she read her notes. She hadn’t known anything about the murder victim except that he was a single male, drove the local bus and lived in an old run-down apartment house. No wonder the case had gone cold. She’d put more time into it than anyone else and had gotten nothing. No witnesses. Or at least no one who would talk.

  When she’d made Homicide, she’d put it all behind her and wouldn’t have remembered the case at all if not for Rourke. The other two murders that he’d found weren’t in her jurisdiction.

  Dumping the photocopied contents of the file onto her table, she sorted through her notes, the reports and the two short newspaper clippings she’d put into the file about the case. She couldn’t help but smile to herself at how much she’d been into all this. She’d wanted desperately to learn, to be the best, to go the furthest.

  Ironic that this case would be the one Rourke would stumble across and decide he had to solve. As she reached the bottom of the paperwork, she saw the corner of a photograph and pulled it out.

  A shockwave rattled through her. She’d remembered taking photos of the crowd gathered behind the crime-scene tape, but she’d thought she had put them all in the original file at the department. And yet here were more photos. At first they appeared to be identical to the ones Rourke had shown her.

  But the closer she looked, she saw that these weren’t duplicates. In fact, there were four photographs instead of three, and several were shot from different angles than the ones Rourke had shown her.

  She felt sick. Why had she kept these and not put them in the police file? What had she been thinking?

  Shaken, Laura stared at the shots she’d taken. There had to be something about them that had made her do this. But she could find nothing in them that would warrant her basically stealing them from the department.

  She quickly looked for the young woman she’d spotted in the photos Rourke had shown her. With a start, she saw her. The woman was looking right at the camera in all four of these shots. Right at Laura.

  A chill ran the length of her spine. She hugged herself as she stared at one of the photos and the odd expression on the woman’s face, suddenly filled with a horrible premonition. The woman almost looked as if she—

  Her cell phone rang, making her jump.

  Let it be Rourke.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WASN’T ROURKE CALLING. The woman’s voice was old and weak, almost a whisper. “Laura?”

  Laura glanced at the clock. It was after midnight. She swallowed back the lump that rose in her throat. “Mother?”

  “No, honey, it’s her neighbor Ruthie. You don’t know me. Your mother gave me your number and asked me to call you. I’m sorry it’s so late.” When Laura said nothing, she continued, “She’s real sick, honey. She...she says she’s dying.”

  Laura was surprised. Not that her mother might be dying, since she’d often complained of being unwell. No, Laura just hadn’t expected anyone to notify her. Most of the time, she felt as if her mother had already died. Hadn’t she once told Rourke that her mother was deceased?

  “Thank you for letting me know,” she said, wishing her mother hadn’t given some stranger her number. Why couldn’t she have done them both a favor and just died quietly in her sleep?

  Laura recoiled at her uncharitable thoughts. A stranger would think she was a horrible person. A stranger, though, wouldn’t know her mother.

  “She wants to see you,” the neighbor said. “Your mother says there’s something she has to tell you. Something you need to know and that it is very important.”

  For a moment, she tried to imagine anything her mother could tell her that would be of any interest to her. To apologize for what she’d done and hadn’t done as a mother? Too late for that.

  But even as Laura thought it, she knew there were things that her mother could tell her, things she didn’t want to hear.

  “She said it has something to do with when you were twelve.”

  Laura felt her blood run cold. The last thing she wanted was to relive her childhood. It had been bad enough the first time. She definitely had no desire to talk about the year she’d turned twelve.

  “I hope that makes sense to you,” Ruthie said. “She didn’t elaborate. The truth is, I hardly know your mother. I was surprised when she called to ask for my help. She’s always stayed to herself, making it clear she didn’t want to...socialize with any of her neighbors.” Silence. “She really is very upset about this, afraid she was going to die before she speaks with you.”

  Her mother had secrets she needed to get off her chest before she died? Laura thought of blanks in her memory, the black holes of time she couldn’t recall. But when she thought of her childhood, she couldn’t have been more grateful for those lost memories. Why open up old wounds?

  Even as she thought it, though, she knew there were questions, things she was unclear about, vague shadows of memories that often woke her in the night and made her anxious and afraid. Did she really want to know, though? Weren’t the memories she did have horrible enough?

  “Can I tell her that you’re on your way here?” the neighbor asked, almost pleading.

  Laura closed her eyes. She could hear the shock and disapproval in the woman’s voice. Ruthie couldn’t imagine a daughter not wanting to see her mother before she died. But then again, Ruthie, in her wildest nightmares, couldn’t imagine a mother like Laura’s.

  What was it that her psychiatrist kept telling her? “You aren’t going to get well until you face your past. You’re a strong woman. Put whatever darkness there is behind you so you can move on with your life. Isn’t that what you want?”

  Her mother had the key to a past that had been locked away for so long. Just the thought of possibly being able to put those awful years behind her and move on...

  “Tell her I’m on my way.” And not to die until I get there, she added silently, because she had a stop she had to make first.

  * * *

  P.I. EDWIN SHARP hated to fly—especially in a small plane in the middle of a thunderstorm. He stared at the dark clouds around the aircraft, wishing he’d driven. If Rourke Kincaid hadn’t insisted on the urgency of this trip—and paid him triple his usual amount—he would be on solid ground right now.

  The small plane found an air pocket and dropped into it, sending his stomach up into his throat. He’d been fighting airsickness since they’d crossed the Rockies. Now the prairie stretched below them in a patchwork of autumn colors. Edwin couldn’t appreciate any of the breath-stealing views.

  “You look a little green around the gills,” Pete, his young pilot, said and laughed.<
br />
  He wouldn’t be laughing if Edwin lost his lunch. He’d chosen this pilot because he was Montana born and bred. “You know the area, then?” he’d inquired when he’d landed at the Missoula, Montana, airport.

  “You bet.”

  “So you can fly me to Flat Rock?”

  Pete had grinned. “I can fly you anywhere you want to go.”

  Ahead the clouds parted. Edwin didn’t see a town, but the plane began to descend. “I don’t see the airport.”

  The pilot let out a chuckle. “Look closer.”

  Closer was what appeared to be a harvested wheat field. “You aren’t going to land there.” But even as he said it, he saw the ragged wind sock and felt the plane hit another air pocket. The ground was coming up fast.

  He braced himself as the plane skimmed over the top of the stubble field. The wheels hit the ground hard and the plane bounced up, then settled down on the so-called airstrip. For the moment, Edwin was just glad to be on the ground again.

  “What time do you want to fly back?” Pete asked as he taxied the plane to the edge of some old buildings.

  “I won’t be flying back. I’ll be renting a car and driving.”

  The pilot got a good laugh out of that. “You won’t be renting a car—not in this town.”

  “What town? I don’t see anything but a few abandoned buildings.”

  “That’s Flat Rock, Montana. What there is of it. Shouldn’t take you long to find out what you need to. We’ll let the storm pass. Why don’t we meet at the café when you’re finished.”

  “There’s a café?” He couldn’t help sounding doubtful. The town—if it could really be called that—consisted of a couple of grain elevators and a row of old buildings on each side of a strip of pavement. The buildings he could see appeared to be boarded up.

  “If you don’t show up, I’ll just assume you’re planning to hitchhike back to Missoula.”

  Edwin waited while Pete secured the plane, and then the two of them walked toward Flat Rock. Even at a glance he could see that there were more empty buildings than occupied ones. He looked around for a large flat rock, wondering how the town had gotten its name.

  “What’s that over there?” he asked of a huge, vacant-looking three-story building in the distance. The stone structure had gaping holes where windows used to be and a forlorn look. Probably the tall dead weeds that had grown around it, he thought.

  “It used to be a girls’ home.”

  “Like an orphanage,” Edwin said.

  “More like a home for kids nobody wanted, troubled kids. Folks claim it is haunted now.”

  Edwin scoffed at that, but quit when he saw Pete’s expression. “You believe in ghosts?”

  “Let’s just say you couldn’t get me in that building after dark.”

  He found that amusing, given that Pete seemed to be a daredevil pilot who wasn’t afraid of a thunderstorm or flying within feet of high mountain peaks. But give him an old empty building...

  “I’ll see you at the café. Don’t leave without me.” Edwin set out down what he figured was the main drag. As he passed what appeared to be a vacant school building, he saw that someone had spray-painted the words Consolidation of Schools Sucks on the front. He wondered where the children were bused to now. Apparently, another school that wasn’t close since he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of another town from the plane.

  He passed more abandoned buildings and cursed his luck. Other than a couple of pickups parked in front of the Longhorn Café, the only other sign of life was a small grocery/gas station at the end of the street.

  A woman in her mid-forties stood behind the counter as he pushed open the door. She eyed him over the glasses perched on her nose. “Help you?” She made it sound doubtful.

  “I’m trying to get some information on a woman by the name of Caligrace Westfield,” he told the woman.

  “Westfield?” she said, one finely drawn-in eyebrow shooting up.

  “Do you know the Westfields?” he asked hopefully.

  She gave him an impatient look. “The only Westfield around here is the manor.”

  “The manor?” He couldn’t believe that he’d hit pay dirt.

  “You didn’t see it on the way into town?” she asked incredulously. “Hardly anyone misses that big old eyesore.”

  He blinked. “Are you talking about that abandoned girls’ home?”

  “Girls’ home?” she scoffed. “Some locals called it that, giving it a fancy name to cover up what a terrible place it was.”

  It couldn’t be a coincidence that Caligrace Westfield shared the same name as the girls’ home. “How long has it been closed?” he asked.

  “Twenty-five years now. I remember because I was fifteen when it shut down.” She shuddered. “I’ll never forget the night they came to take those girls away.”

  “They?”

  “The state. Loaded all those girls into a few vans and off they went. Just like that, they were gone and the place was closed.”

  “So it was state run?”

  She shook her head. “It was privately owned by some big corporation from Michigan or some place. The state finally stepped in.”

  “So you don’t know who would have the names of the girls who were there?”

  “Names?” She scoffed at that. “Maybe first names. Most of them were dumped there in the middle of the night. Babies left on the doorstep. Older girls brought there in handcuffs from other towns. The sounds that came from that place at night...” She shuddered again. “Then one day the state shows up and takes the whole lot of them, never to be seen again.”

  Edwin told himself that the woman was probably exaggerating, and yet he felt a chill move up his spine as he remembered what Pete had said about it being haunted. “Where did they take them?”

  “No one ever knew what became of them,” she said, then looked around the empty room as if she thought someone might be listening, before leaning toward him conspiratorially. “I think they got rid of them. Some of those girls were the worst there was.” She shook her head. “There’s a whole lot of country around here where you could dispose of bodies that would never be found. And with at least one of them being a murderer...”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She looked surprised that he didn’t know what she was talking about. “That’s why they finally shut the place down. The murder of the young man who worked there.” She grimaced. “I heard it was brutal. Used a knife from the kitchen and cut him up bad.”

  * * *

  WITHIN MINUTES OF the construction crews arriving, the Branding Iron Café was a madhouse. Callie tried to keep up with the tables, all the time aware of the cowboy. She was glad to see that he’d gotten his order and seemed to be more interested in eating than in studying her. And yet, she suspected he was just as aware of her as she was of him.

  “What’s going on?” one of the regulars asked her, surprising her for a moment. She’d thought he’d seen her staring at the stranger at the front table.

  “You hear yet what’s going on across the street?” The rancher was seated at a large table by the window where the bunch gathered each morning to discuss cattle prices, the weather and complain about the government over coffee.

  “One came in to refill his Thermos with coffee and said they’re rebuilding the store,” Callie told him. She felt disoriented by the clatter of dishes, the roar of voices, the crush of bodies packed into the space. She was doing her best to tune out the flashes of information that kept coming from the construction workers who wandered in and out.

  “So it’s not Nettie Benton’s doin’?” another rancher asked.

  The Beartooth General Store, which had stood across from the café for more than a hundred years, had burned down last spring. There’d been all kinds of speculation about what owner
Nettie Benton would do now.

  “Doesn’t take five truckloads of men to rebuild one general store,” another commented as he looked toward the street where more men were unloading materials next to the old hotel.

  Callie shrugged. “That’s all I’ve heard.” She moved on, refilling cups, leaving bills and clearing dishes as she went. She’d been as surprised as anyone when she’d overheard one of the construction crew talking about rebuilding the store.

  For the year Callie had worked as a waitress at the café, Beartooth, Montana, had looked and acted like a near ghost town. It was one of the reasons she’d taken the job. She had loved that it was twenty miles from the nearest “real” town. She’d loved the isolation, the quiet and the remoteness of the small old mining town.

  That the waitress job came with an apartment over the café made it perfect. Callie loved the feeling of being far from everything, as if living at the end of the earth. She’d settled in quickly, liking that people here didn’t ask a lot of questions, and had swiftly fallen into the rhythm of this easygoing life.

  Her days all blended together in a familiar pattern. Each morning like clockwork, a group of ranchers would come in and take the large table by the window, order the same thing and talk about the same topics. At lunchtime, cowboys often stopped in from the many ranches around the area.

  By afternoon, the quilters would come for pie and coffee and a visit. Some nights they would all gather at the café and change out the quilts on the walls. Callie often came down to the café from her apartment to listen to their chatter. She and Kate agreed they couldn’t sew a stitch, but they loved the patterns and colors and the enthusiasm of the quilters.

  The rest of the evenings the café crowd could be large, depending on whatever “special” owner Kate French was serving that day. This was a community of women who cooked. They went all out for potlucks and made huge meals for the help at brandings, cattle drives and harvesting. So eating at the café a few nights a week seemed to be a treat for them.