The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  “Truth has a way of repeating itself.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Shepherd and the Meadow Maggot

  To a bird looking down, and there was one that afternoon, a vulture soaring on thermals that lifted from the valley floor, the ranch looked perfectly drawn, the house set back into a copse of skeletal aspens by a creek that fell in a string of pearls to the Madison River. From the vantage given by the vulture’s wings, the waters appeared not to move, the smoke from the chimney not to curl, the only movement the slow, silent snaking of the sun-sparked vehicle climbing the road, carrying its message of death.

  Martha checked her phone and found a text from Sean saying that he had talked to Virginia Jenny, got a tip, and would tell her over dinner. A year before it would have never occurred to him to check in. She smiled. Maybe he could learn, after all. Then the smile vanished, because that morning she’d received a tip as well.

  She had gone to the office and been pulling case files for missing persons, on the off chance that the woman whose body they’d found wasn’t the cat’s first victim. She had narrowed the possibilities to three, going back six months. They included a hunter who’d gone missing in the Snowcrest Mountains on opening day of hunting season—he was a smoker and a heart attack waiting it happen, and he might have had fangs meet in his throat but more likely had just keeled over dead; a teenage girl, who lived with her mother in the Crazy Mountains foothills who had run away twice before but this time hadn’t come back, leaving no trace but her silverbelly Stetson found on a bench of timber behind the house; and a five-year-old boy who had gone missing on Halloween night while trick-or-treating. Martha was considering the missing girl as the most likely victim when her office phone gave its muted trill. It was Gigi Wilkerson, calling from her lab.

  Wilkerson asked Martha if she remembered seeing the victim’s foot, which had been sheared off at the ankle by the cat’s teeth. Martha remembered. A foot still inside the boot was not something you quickly forgot.

  Wilkerson said that the WHART team had brought her a regurgitation sample found some twenty meters from the kill site, which she had just got around to analyzing. Cats, she said, throw up all the time.

  “Don’t I know it,” Martha said.

  Wilkerson said that the sample contained bone articulations that she had at first thought were sections of fingers, then had positively identified as toes. The toes, she said, were from a right foot.

  A pregnant silence followed.

  “But the cat didn’t eat her right foot,” Martha said. “Her right foot was in her boot.”

  “Yes, it was,” Wilkerson said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Contrary to my husband’s opinion, I know my right foot from my left.”

  “Are you saying . . . there was a second victim?”

  “A second person. Not necessarily a victim,” Wilkerson cautioned. “We don’t know how this person died. But the toes of a different human being were in the cat’s digestive tract when it killed Jane Doe. I can tell you it was probably a child, or a small woman, by the size of the bones.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Well, the toes would have to have been consumed within the past week or they wouldn’t have remained in the gut system; that much is for certain.” She added that the person who had once stood on those toes could have died up to several weeks earlier than that. It had been a cold fall and cats weren’t too picky about eating well-aged meat.

  “Wouldn’t scavengers have got it?” Martha asked.

  “Not necessarily. Cats cover up their kills. It could have still been there under a pile of branches when the cat revisited the kill.”

  And like that, Martha’s three possibilities were reduced to one. The hunter was too old for the size of the toes. The girl had been missing going on three months. That left the boy, and after she finished her conversation with Wilkerson, Martha had called the residence to see if she would be welcome and was, if not with the mother’s open arms. Martha knocked on the door and watched the vulture circling.

  She could have been any ranchwoman of a certain vintage, in her knee-sprung denims and plaid snap shirt, her crow’s-feet and defiant, thin-haired mustache. But her eyes were vacant, and an invisible smoke of despair trailed her as she led Martha to her kitchen, then excused herself to open the back door to call out, “Jules!”

  “That man,” she told Martha. “Cat got his tongue and won’t let go. Let me get you some coffee.”

  Martha knew that the woman’s name was Miriam and that Jules was Jules Jackson, her father, who’d stayed on to help run the place after Miriam’s divorce, and that it was a two-person operation with seasonal hands hired during the lambing and shearing, and that there was too much going out in money and hope, and not enough coming in.

  Like many Montana ranches that had fallen on hard times, the Ross place had gone boutique, Miriam selling off most of her Angus herd for a small bull-breeding operation, and making space for a herd of Rambouillet sheep that produced merino wool and were low maintenance, summering on public forest lands, where they were protected from predators by a Peruvian sheepherder. Martha knew these details because Miriam Ross provided them, starting as soon as they sat at a battered cherrywood table. She had not allowed Martha to get in a word edgewise because she was clearly afraid of what she might say. If the law hadn’t come with new information about her son, who she maintained had been kidnapped by her ex, then why had she come?

  “I called Maggie Rawlings, like you asked,” she told Martha. “She’ll bring Ava Ann, but she wants to be present when you talk to her.”

  “That’s fine,” Martha said. Ava Ann Rawlings was the little girl who had been trick-or-treating with Hunter Ross when he disappeared.

  Martha extended a tentative upper lip to the surface of the coffee. She had grown up on ranch coffee and knew it to be the thinnest, most scalding drink on the face of the Earth. Her father used to say that he didn’t know what he needed a branding tool for: You could press the rim of the coffee cup twice to the side of the calf and you’d have your double-ought brand just as clear as if you were using the iron.

  The bird clock on the wall struck the hour with a chick-a-dee-dee-dee. The words ran out, and the room fell silent.

  “She should be here,” Miriam Ross said after an interval. “She’s about the only one’s come around since the missing. You find out who your friends are.”

  The missing. That was what she’d called it from the start. It sounded like the title of a horror movie to Martha, and she knew that for Miriam Ross it was. “I’m in no hurry,” she said, and wasn’t. There was going to be no easy way to broach the subject of the lion. If Miriam’s son had been kidnapped by the father, who lived two states away and had also gone AWOL, then there was every chance he was alive. But if he had been taken by a lion, there was no hope whatsoever.

  Martha heard a light padding as a heeler dog came into the room and snuffed her hand, then turned around twice on a scrap of rug under the table and lay down and shut its eyes.

  “My name,” Miriam said. “It means ‘Sea of Sorrow.’ My mother named me that. Sometimes I wonder if she could see the future.”

  Martha heard the sound of a truck motor.

  “Here she is.” Miriam walked to open the door. Then, her stoicism cracking, she embraced the visitor and Martha could hear her sobbing.

  “It’s going to be all right, Miriam. It’s going to be all right.”

  Martha gave them time and shifted her gaze to the small girl who stood behind her mother, wiping the mud off her boots by dragging them through patches of snow.

  Miriam broke away from the embrace. “Where are my manners? You come right on in,” she said to the girl. The girl did, and took her boots off as one who doesn’t need to be told. She was slight and had lank, dishwater hair framing a face that was the near side of pretty. She smiled at
Martha, her eyes going right to the badge.

  “Are you the sheriff?”

  Martha said she was. “And what is it a sheriff has?” she asked the girl.

  The girl looked at the toes of her socks. “I don’t know.”

  “Deputies,” Martha said. “Do you know what a deputy is?”

  “Johnny Muller’s dad is a deputy.”

  “Yes, he is. And what does he have that I have?”

  “A badge?”

  Martha smiled. She fingered the button on the breast pocket of her khaki shirt and handed the girl a tarnished pewter badge in the shape of a star. It read DEPUTY SHERIFF, JEFFERSON COUNTY, OHIO. Martha had a collection of old badges, picking them up at flea markets and wherever, just for this purpose.

  “It’s yours,” she said, and helped the girl pin it to her shirt. “But wearing it means you have to tell the truth.”

  “Look, Mommy,” the girl said. She’s the only real life in this room, Martha thought, not excluding the heeler.

  Miriam Ross placed a glass of milk before the girl. Ava Ann took a drink that left a mustache and slumped in her chair, so that she could reach a hand to knead the heeler’s mottled coat.

  “Sit up straight,” her mother told her. “Sheriff Ettinger would like to ask you a few questions.”

  “You’re not in any trouble,” Martha said. “I just want you to tell me what happened on Halloween.”

  “We went trick-or-treating the house,” the girl said. “Me and Hunter.”

  “Hunter and I,” Maggie Rawlings said.

  Miriam looked at Martha. “She means that they went around the outside of the house with a flashlight, knocking on each door and getting candy. They did the same at Maggie’s house earlier, and I was going to drive them to the Martin place up Bear Creek next.”

  Martha understood. It was a common practice in ranch country, where the nearest neighbor could be miles away. You could make a night of it with only a few houses, if you hit all the doors several times.

  Martha told Ava Ann to go on. What happened after they had trick-or-treated the house the first time around?

  “We went into the barn to change our costumes,” the girl said. “We usually make like three circles.”

  “Okay, what happened then?”

  “We walked back to the house, only Hunter, he was behind me, and when I turned around, I couldn’t see him. I didn’t leave him. They kept asking me, but I didn’t.”

  “Nobody says you did, Ava. I just want to know what you remember. Was there a sound?”

  The girl fingered the pewter badge. She shook her head from side to side.

  “Nothing?” Martha asked. “Are you sure you didn’t see anything? Even a shadow, maybe?”

  Again the girl shook her head.

  Martha heard Miriam Ross sigh. “It’s my fault, she said. “I shouldn’t have let them go to the barn, not after it was dark out.”

  “You didn’t know they had, Miriam,” Maggie Rawlins said. And to Martha, “It was the children’s idea to change their costumes.”

  Martha nodded. “Do you think you could show me where this happened?”

  They pulled on boots and walked around the house. The door to the barn was open. It was a horse barn, with divided stalls. Miriam pointed out that there was only one horse, a chocolate quarter-horse mare with white stockings and a lot of years under the saddle.

  The horse was being brushed down by a man Martha took to be Jules Jackson. The man awkwardly extended his hand. His Adam’s apple rippled as he swallowed. “Ma’am.”

  Like his daughter, he was a type—overalls, canvas jacket, a string bean with crab hands and a gaunt, fissured face. His prominent ears were so red with cold you could see through them.

  “Going to be a corker rolling in tonight.” His eyes searched past Martha. He took a felt hat from a nail in the wall. He was one of those men who were given stature by a hat, and he tipped it.

  “Miriam said you were with her in the house when the children trick-or-treated,” Martha said.

  “That’s right.” He swallowed again.

  “So you didn’t know they were coming here to the barn.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Martha looked at Ava Ann, who had started to tremble. “I’m sorry,” the girl said, barely able to get the words out. She was enveloped in the steam of her breath.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Martha said. “Come on, look at me.” She squatted down so they could be at eye level. “You wear a badge now, don’t you?”

  The girl nodded.

  “And you promised to tell the truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. What were you dressed up as?”

  “A fairy princess. Same as I was last Halloween. Same as I am in forever.”

  “You liked being a fairy princess,” Maggie said.

  “I did when I was in first grade. I’m almost eight years old.”

  Martha took her hand. “It’s okay, Ava. I never wanted to be a princess, either. I was a tomboy myself.”

  “What’s a tomboy?”

  Martha realized it was an old-fashioned term. “A girl who climbs trees and catches frogs and plays like a boy,” she said.

  “I shoot gophers. Does that make me a tomboy?”

  “Card-carrying,” Martha said. “What was Hunter dressed as?”

  “A hunter.”

  “You mean like with a gun?”

  “A BB gun. He had an orange hat and a vest. How original.” She rolled her eyes.

  Martha knew this from the report, just as she’d known the girl was a princess. In fact, the boy’s description as a hunter was in the APB bulletin put out that night, after he’d been reported missing. Which was a mistake, if in fact the children had changed costumes. It begged Martha’s next question, which she’d held off on asking until now, when they were in the barn.

  “What was the costume you changed into?”

  “A shepherd,” the girl said. “I had a crook.”

  “A crook?”

  “Like you catch runaway sheep with. Cesar taught me.”

  “He’s the sheepherder,” Miriam said.

  “From Peru,” the girl said.

  “The crook she’s talking about was an antique, a wood one with a curved grain. I found it at an estate sale and bought it for Cesar.”

  “But he doesn’t use it,” the girl said. “Shepherds use fiberglass crooks now. They have, like, locks so the sheep can’t twist out of them.”

  “Where was this crook?” Martha said.

  Jules Jackson spoke up. “It was hanging from this ten-penny nail.” He pointed. “I found it outside where she dropped it, ’bout halfway to the house.”

  Martha nodded absently. There had been no mention of a shepherd’s crook in the paperwork, nor of any change of costume for either child.

  She turned back to the girl. “You dropped it when you realized Hunter wasn’t with you?” she asked.

  “I guess. I don’t remember.”

  “Okay. You were a shepherd. What did Hunter change into?”

  “A meadow maggot.”

  “A meadow maggot?”

  “A sheep,” Miriam clarified. “He put on a sheepskin. White rice on green grass.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Martha said. “He put on a sheepskin? Where would he get it?”

  “It was hanging from the rail.” The girl pointed to a rail that fenced off a space like a crib.

  “That would be a ewe we muttoned out last month,” Jackson said.

  “So the skin was green?”

  He swallowed. “I wouldn’t say that. It would have dried some.”

  Some, Martha thought. But not all the way. It would still carry the scent.

  And felt her heart sink. She could picture it, the lion lyin
g out of sight, perhaps taking cover behind a hay bale—there was one just around the corner from the door—the children walking out into the darkness, the flashlight beam pointed toward the house, the shepherd leading her sheep. And then the silent creeping forward, front paws pulsing, and the pounce, the great jaws locking onto the throat so there was no sound, no blood trail, just the muted padding as the cat carried him away, the shepherd none the wiser. Yes, it was possible.

  “Where was the dog when this happened?” Martha said.

  “Patches? I think she was with the children,” Miriam said.

  Martha’s eyes turned to Jackson.

  “I don’t recall, rightly. You got a dog, it’s invisible after a while. Like you have a frame picture—it’s right there on the wall, but you don’t see it.”

  “Did she bark?”

  “Nope, I don’t believe she did.”

  “Was she with you?” Martha asked Ava Ann. “Did Patches go to the barn with you?”

  The girl shrugged. “It was dark. She wasn’t, like, underfoot, like she always is.”

  So the dog was either inside or outside and had never made a sound. Wouldn’t a dog react to the scent if a lion was around? But then, maybe not. Martha’s own Aussie shepherd, Goldie, had cowered at Martha’s leg once, when they were out for a hike and had stumbled into a black bear. She’d never made a peep.

  “You’ve all been a big help,” Martha said.

  She had driven to the ranch to broach the possibility to Miriam Ross that her son could have been taken by a lion, and that they would need a DNA sample from her to match against human tissue, in the form of toes, that had been coughed up by a lion. She had the swab kit in the Cherokee. There was no soft way to introduce the subject, and she knew that it had been negligent of her not to mention the reason behind her visit at the outset.

  She would wait now until Maggie and Ava Ann left, wait until they were alone under the vulture’s soaring wings, then take a deep breath and say the words that confirmed the nightmare, like the knock on a door in times of war.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN