Ice and Stone

by Marcia Muller

  “Nope.” He turned his back and studied the newspaper on the shelf behind him. The San Francisco Chronicle, probably two or three days old—proof that no matter how far you travel, you can’t escape the media in one form or another.

  Back on the street, foot traffic had picked up. Women and men were shedding the heavy scarves that had been bundled around their necks and turning their faces up to the pale sun. A few smiled or nodded at me; most seemed indifferent. Ahead I spied a bulky man with his jacket flipped over his shoulder. He had dark hair going gray at the temples and walked with a pronounced waddle. A shorter, thinner, blond man carrying a paper bag joined him outside the Good Price Store.

  “About time, Vic,” the other man said.

  I quickly moved past them and halted in a narrow alley between buildings. Gene and Vic. Last night, they’d seemed like not-very-bright good ol’ boys, but in the light of day, their bloodshot eyes glittered and their mouths turned down as they pushed around other pedestrians, who drew back in response.

  Not good ol’ boys at all.

  The two of them climbed into a beat-up old pickup and drove off. I went back to the main street. The air was warmer now, and the ditches beside the badly paved road ran with melted snow. The Owl Cafe and Gigi’s Curls had CLOSED signs in their windows, and the gas station—an honor-system, pump-your-own type—was deserted too. Even the hardware store was closed. Didn’t people in this town ever work?

  1:44 p.m.

  I walked back through the village and turned off on a trail that a sign indicated led to Watson’s Pond, which Allie Foxx had mentioned as a quiet place that she enjoyed. The path was partly overgrown and little used, and it ended less than a mile later at a scum-covered body of water with a couple of old wooden benches on the grass nearby. Not the most scenic place to have my picnic and think, but so what? I took out my sandwich and settled down to consider the lives of the two victims.

  Dierdra Two Shoes had been promiscuous, according to those who knew her—including her mother. Mrs. Lagomarsino had told Allie, displaying neither regret nor sadness, “That girl had every chance in the world. A couple of her men were very rich and powerful. They would have given her anything.” The mother had refused to name the men.

  Samantha Runs Close had fit her name. An activist for Indigenous women’s rights, she’d clawed, scratched, and fought at demonstrations throughout the state. Before I’d come up here, I’d asked Hy, an avid supporter of environmental causes, if he’d heard of her. He’d said, “Every dedicated activist knew and respected Sam. She would demonstrate against anything, but finally focused on Native rights. I guess she fought for them until her dying day.”

  3:01 p.m.

  When I got back to town, I called Henry Howling Wolf’s number again. This time he answered, abruptly, on the first ring. He seemed disappointed when I identified myself, as if he’d been expecting to hear from someone else. I told him I had acquired one of his pendants and would like to talk to him about it. He brightened some, then invited me to come to his house.

  The house was a white prefab on the outskirts of Aspendale, surrounded by a grove of small fir trees that had the super-green needles of new plantings. A homemade sign in the front yard read H. H. DESIGNS. Henry Howling Wolf was a short, slightly obese young man with black bowl-cut hair that covered his eyebrows. He stared at the pendant, seeming somewhat distracted, as he ushered me into his home.

  The room was a long one, with a seating area near a woodstove and a work space at the rear. There were various tools hanging neatly from a pegboard, a long bench, a stool, and several machines whose purpose I couldn’t begin to imagine.

  Henry asked, “You wouldn’t be a buyer, by any chance? My inventory’s sold out, but there’s always next year.”

  “Sorry, no, I’m a journalist. I’d like to talk with you about your work—and your success.”

  “Always glad to talk,” he said, although he didn’t sound glad at all. He motioned for me to sit down. “What can I tell you?” His gaze was jumpy, moving quickly to a telephone on a side table and then to me and the pendant again.

  Before I told him how I’d gotten it, I decided to reduce his tension. Over the course of my career, I’d been subjected to many interviews of the “How did a girl like you end up in this business?” variety. They were as numbing as a heavy dose of Valium.

  “Tell me how you got started,” I said.

  He motioned at the shop area. “A few years ago, I was thinking of quitting this and going to school to learn refrigerator mechanics. I’d even enrolled at the technical college, but then my first big order came in. Ever since, I’ve been overwhelmed with work.”

  “Who do you primarily sell to?”

  “Souvenir companies. H. H. Designs makes pendants, key rings, pins, and any other number of whatchamacallits that are all available at airports, bus stops, and convenience stores nationwide.” His smile was self-deprecating, but beneath it I sensed a well-deserved pride.

  “Good for you.”

  “Well, some of the stuff is downright tacky—not the great Indigenous art I’d aimed for—but the people who buy them like them.”

  The phone rang. Henry jumped up, but it immediately stopped.

  I said, “Is there a problem, Mr. Howling Wolf? Anything I can help you with?”

  “I don’t see how. It’s my girlfriend, Sally Bee. She’s missing. She’s been gone for almost forty-eight hours.”

  “Gone. You mean she left you?”

  “I don’t know what’s happened. Sally’s a photographer. She went out in the morning two days ago to get some shots of a place where she was having difficulty getting the right light. When she didn’t come back, I called around to our friends, thinking she might have stayed with one or another of them. She does that sometimes. But I’ve heard nothing.” His big hands dropped heavily to his sides.

  “Do you think this pendant might be hers?”

  He leaned forward, studying it. “I don’t know. It could be.”

  “Could you tell by examining it?”

  “No. I made only three with that design, all identical—one for a woman who died four years ago, the other for a friend who moved to Portland two years ago. It could belong to one of them. How did you get it?”

  “I found it in the woods, on the trail to the old monastery.”

  “That’s where Sally was going to get her photographs! You…you didn’t find anything else around there?”

  “No, nothing. Just the pendant. Mr. Howling Wolf, I don’t mean to be unkind, but since you’re not sure it’s Sally’s, I’d like to keep it for the time being. When she comes back and if it is hers, of course I’ll return it. I’ll be here for several days.”

  He didn’t put up an argument, merely drew a deep, steadying breath and then said, “Sally, she’s a talented woman. A photographer. She’s already published a couple of books on native California plants with a small press in Berkeley. She came here with the idea of doing a book on the Meruk. Her work complemented mine, and we used to talk about getting away someplace else where we could live quietly and practice our arts. But now she’s gone. Just…gone.”

  “Did she take anything with her?”

  “Only the camera she was using that day. She has several others, but they’re still here.”

  “You didn’t hear or see her leave?”

  “No. I was upset the night before and I’d taken a sleeping pill.”

  “Upset?”

  Again he hesitated, then, seemingly glad to have someone to tell his problem to, replied, “The county sheriff, Noah Arneson, had been coming around asking if we had business licenses, that kind of crap. But we knew what he was doing.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Arneson hates Natives. Especially successful ones. He’s been trying to make us leave the county, but we got our backs up and stayed. I wish to God we hadn’t.”

  “You think the sheriff had something to do with Sally’s disappearance?”

  “I don
’t know. But it’s funny that he pestered us almost daily before she left and hasn’t bothered me since.”

  It was interesting, I thought, that Henry hadn’t mentioned the murders. Maybe he didn’t want to believe that his Sally might be another victim.

  I asked him for a photograph of Sally Bee, saying I might need it for the article I was writing, and—surprisingly—he didn’t have one. “A lot of photographers don’t like having their pictures taken, I guess,” he explained. We talked some more; he said they’d experienced no harassment except for Sheriff Arneson’s.

  God, I wished the investigation weren’t leading toward corrupt law enforcement. Cases like that are hard to prove and incur the wrath of the public.

  And they can turn ugly. Very ugly.

  5:15 p.m.

  There was nothing more to be done in town today, and darkness was setting in, so I made a hurried return to the warmth and relative comfort of the shack.

  Seated on the air bed, I thought of home and Hy. My husband was probably working in his office at our house on Avila Street in San Francisco’s Marina district. McCone & Ripinsky, our joint firm, had recently experienced an overload in his bailiwick—international security and executive protection. No wonder, given how crazy the world felt these days. Almost everybody was afraid and feeling vulnerable, although many weren’t sure exactly what they feared.

  I remembered accounts of the Cold War of the 1950s; at least then there’d been a recognizable adversary: the Russians, who had the bomb and were gaining the lead in the race to space. But now we were overwhelmed by threats from all sides: various violent factions in the Middle East; white power and other hate groups seemingly everywhere; crazies who wanted to use their bombs and guns against innocent schoolchildren; the Russians (again) interfering in our elections; unhinged people in our own government; mysterious viruses creeping around the world; even household products threatening to poison us all. Where and when would it all stop—if ever?

  I smiled wryly. This was the kind of rant Hy would appreciate, but I hesitated to call him. It would only make me miss him more. Him and our cats, Alex and Jessie, who right now were probably making his life hell. They made their displeasure known when one or the other of us was away.

  Well, enough woolgathering. I opened the iPad I’d brought with me—glad that I’d remembered my battery-powered charger—and pulled up the case file to add information on my day’s progress.

  Not much so far, at least in respect to the murders.

  But Henry Howling Wolf’s girlfriend, Sally Bee, had been missing for over forty-eight hours now. If the pendant was hers, how had she lost it? Was she another victim of the anonymous killer? Or was there some other reason for her disappearance? The couple had been harassed by the county sheriff, Noah Arneson, who, according to Henry, hated Natives—especially successful ones. Could Arneson have had anything to do with Sally Bee’s disappearance?

  I ate a few bites of the salami and cheese the Sisters had provided, then tried to read an old paperback of War and Peace I’d brought along. But I couldn’t concentrate, and my eyelids grew heavy; it had been a long day. I crawled into my sleeping bag and was soon asleep.

  MONDAY, JANUARY 7

  10:00 a.m.

  Allie Foxx had told me that the local tribal police had looked into the killings, but there was no copy of their report in the file the Sisters had provided. To my surprise, they had no office on the reservation. In Aspendale, however, I found that they had a small storefront in the middle of a side street. I introduced myself as Sharon McNear to its only occupant, a pleasant, stocky, middle-aged man named Herman Baldwing.

  Baldwing looked like a cop, which he said he indeed had been for twenty years in Denver. “I was born on the rez here, but left to join the army when I was eighteen, then moved to Denver after my tour ended. But the city grew in ways I didn’t like, so I ended up back here. It’s a nice place—mostly.”

  I was interested in the “mostly.”

  Baldwing interrupted himself. “Where are my manners, as my ma used to ask? Please, sit down.” He motioned at one of the chairs in front of his desk.

  I sat.

  “So you’re interested in our dead girls?”

  “Right. I came up here to write a travelogue, but I can’t represent the area as a tourist destination until I have an idea of how the investigation is going.”

  He fiddled with a letter opener on his blotter. “The investigation is going exactly nowhere.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the murders didn’t happen on tribal land. We started to look into them and were told to butt out.”

  “By whom?”

  “The county sheriff, Noah Arneson. He also told the FBI to butt out, and they did. Not their jurisdiction; nobody—that they know of—had crossed state lines.”

  “What about state authorities?”

  “They respectfully declined. Their jurisdiction is over the highways. Neither girl was found by a highway. All we know is that we’ve lost two women in the prime years of their lives, and the authorities are stalling on finding out why.”

  “Is it possible to get a look at your files?”

  He spread his big arms wide. “I might allow it, if I still had them. But I don’t. They were confiscated.”

  “By whom?”

  “The sheriff, who else?”

  “How can he do that?”

  “The problem here, as I’ve said, is with overlapping jurisdictions. Sheriff Arneson can do anything he wants within the county. We can do anything we want on the reservation. But there have been crimes that have been perpetrated by white men against Native women on the reservation, and when the men left the tribal lands they were immune from prosecution.”

  “That’s unbelievable!”

  He nodded. “And archaic, but until the lawmakers wake up and do something about it, our hands are tied.”

  “These lawmakers—”

  “Are politicians. They don’t want to offend their base. Look at how long it took to nominate a Black man for the state supreme court.”

  He was right about the whole scenario, but it made my blood boil. I controlled my anger and said, “If I have any other questions, may I call on you again?”

  “Definitely. And good luck to you.”

  10:35 a.m.

  After I left Baldwing’s office, I debated going to the county seat to interview Sheriff Arneson and find out if he was as much of a horse’s ass as Baldwing and Henry Howling Wolf had indicated, but I decided against it. From all indications he was aggressive and unpleasantly territorial. Given my present agitated state, a confrontation might result. And if my loosely constructed cover story didn’t convince him, he’d probably make my life hell or sabotage my investigation in any way he could.

  There was one man I could trust to give me facts about the county, so on the way into town I called Hal Bascomb, Hy’s old friend who ran the airstrip. We hadn’t had a chance to talk much when I flew in on Saturday, and now seemed like a good time if he was available.

  It was another cold, mostly clear day—good flying weather if there was no snow in the forecast—and Hal was at the airstrip. He said he’d be glad to come get me and that we could talk there. “The only traffic I’ve got is a student wobbling around, trying to figure out how to steer the trainer,” he said.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to leave him?”

  “Sure. If he steers into the ditch, he can learn how to pull it out.”

  10:55 a.m.

  Hal picked me up in front of the Good Price Store, swung a U-turn, and headed back up the highway.

  “Your student still wobbling?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. He shouldn’t be wasting his money on lessons, ’cause he’ll never make it as a pilot. Tries to steer with the yoke like you do a car, thinks the rudders are for braking. I tried to discourage him, but he’s determined—and I need cash customers.”

  We arrived at the airstrip on the bluff above Aspendale, and soon we were seated i
nside the largest of the three Quonset huts in big old chairs by the wood stove. Hal provided coffee, looked out the door at the wobbler, and shook his head. He said, “So you want the dope on our little piece of heaven. Or hell, as the case may be.”

  “From a reliable source like you.”

  “Where should I start?”

  “Anyplace.”

  “Okay. I’m not from here, you know. Grew up in Oklahoma. Took up crop dusting there. Avoided a couple of wars, and then your hubby and I engaged in some…let’s call them shenanigans…in Southeast Asia. After that I’d had enough of taking risks, so I looked around for someplace ‘peaceful,’ found out this strip was for sale, and here I am.”

  “You stressed the word ‘peaceful.’”

  “Yes, I did.”

  The UNICOM crackled and Hal spoke into it. “Okay, tie her down.” He lowered the volume and said, “The Wobbler, asking permission to proceed to the tie-downs. Do you see any traffic out there? Does he need permission?”

  I smiled, shook my head.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “we were talking about peaceful. Not. This is cowboy country. Bar-brawl country. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to persuade drunks from taking off in their—or other people’s—planes.”

  “How’d you persuade them?”

  He grinned. “I used to be a golfer, and I still have a set of clubs.”

  “The sheriff ever interfere with what goes on up here?”

  “Arneson? Hell no. He knows about my golf clubs and stays away.”

  “So what about other airstrips in the area?”

  “Lots of them, but most are private—on ranches or big estates. The Harcourt place—or SupremeCourt, as they call it—is one example. Paved runway, lights, self-service fuel.”

  “Who are the Harcourts?”

  “Rich ranchers, run cattle on a few thousand acres. I don’t know them personally; they keep to themselves.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Three. The father, Ben Harcourt—known in these parts as the Old Man—is a widower; his wife died years ago. The sons, Paul and Kurt, are in their thirties or forties.”