The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  They were sitting down to a late dinner and Sean’s face betrayed a brief smile.

  “I’m not sure what about any of this is funny,” Martha said.

  “Something Drick said up there. He said the jaws worked more efficiently than his first model, that it was so user-friendly that even a woman could operate it. Turns out he was right. Poetic justice.”

  “I guess,” Martha said. She looked like she was going to say something else, then shook her head. “I don’t want to nag you, Sean. I don’t want us to have that kind of relationship, and I’ve been holding my tongue until we were alone. All I want to say is that you could have told me where you were going this morning. You could have done that one little thing.”

  “I did. I left a message.”

  “I mean, you could have waited to leave until you were sure I knew about it. If your message hadn’t come through, you’d be dead up there, and Scarlett would have died of exposure, probably wouldn’t have endured the night.”

  “You’re right, Martha. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t know what to do with you sometimes.”

  “Well,” Sean said, “you could marry me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Catnip and Roses

  Though it was deliberate homicide, and no question about it, Scarlett Blake would never stand trial for killing her brother. There were mitigating circumstances—her abuse at Drick’s hands, the imminent threat posed to Sean Stranahan. Neither of those was the real reason, of course. The real reason was that Buck Collins, the newly elected district attorney, would never agree to prosecute a loser. And this one had loser written all over it, in blood, no less. All a defense attorney needed to do was show the jury Scarlett’s scars. The DA would object on the grounds that the photos were prejudicial and inflammatory. But they were key pieces of evidence pertaining to the defendant’s state of mind, and the judge would of a certainty overrule. And she’d walk. And in fact she did, only a few weeks into her recovery, leading Tatiana on a leash down a sidewalk in Pasadena, while attending a symposium for an environmental group called Panthera.

  It was early in the summer then, what in Montana was called a bluebird winter, what with snow still falling in the mountains. In the valley, the forecast called for a 50 percent chance of rain. That didn’t threaten the wedding, which, as the couple had agreed, was a civil ceremony conducted indoors: a judge, a witness—Sam Meslik did the honors—and the bride and groom. Sean had dressed in a crisp white shirt with pearl snaps, his best black jeans, and a turquoise stone bolo tie in the shape of a grizzly bear’s claws. Martha wore a cream silk shirt unbuttoned to reveal a bit more décolletage than she was comfortable showing and a calf-length skirt that showcased her cowboy boots with the red roses. Her right hand clutched a bouquet of wildflowers that Harold Little Feather had picked from his sister’s garden.

  “I’ll take care of you,” Sean said, taking her free hand.

  “I’ll take care of you,” Martha said.

  Walking out into the gloom of clouds, both felt a little like they’d just stepped off a cliff.

  The rain started a little after the kickoff of the party that Patrick Willoughby threw on the grounds of the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club later that day. For a time the fifty or so in attendance crowded under the big canvas tent rented for the festivities.

  But a day of overcast skies, off-and-on drizzle, and mild temperatures is a great day if you are a mayfly looking to mate, or a trout fisherman with a mayfly imitation tied to the end of his tippet. As the hatch intensified and swirls began to mar the surface of the river, a number of the partyers abandoned the canopy and donned waders.

  Sean had promised Martha he wouldn’t fish and that he’d try to make friends with her father, whom she adored even though she suspected he was on the spectrum, and whom Sean had met on only one prior occasion. Mr. Ettinger was the type of man who exhausts subjects as quickly as a Scandinavian farmer, which he was. Even dressed in his best, he looked like a man who carried a pitchfork to work.

  Conversation was difficult until Sean asked him about stock car racing. Martha had told Sean that her father had driven Montana’s dirt tracks when he was younger, and he had an endless supply of stories. After telling a few, he took a couple of harmonicas from his pocket and taught Sean to play “Autumn Leaves” in G minor.

  “You keep it,” Mr. Ettinger said, when Sean tried to hand back the harmonica. “You learn to play with my Martha. Couple that plays together, stays together. Me and the missus are going on fifty years, been together since we was in kindergarten.”

  Sean pocketed the harp and saw Sam crooking a finger.

  “Kemosabe,” he said. “Got a little something for you.”

  He led Sean to his truck and withdrew a green Cordura rod case from the rear bench.

  “Uh-uh,” Sean said. “I promised Martha.”

  “Hey, did I say anything about fishing? Just listen to your uncle Sam. Go on now, pull it out of the sock and swish it a few times. You know you want to.”

  The big man smiled, revealing the grooves in his teeth. Sean pulled out the graphite sections and assembled the rod. He touched the tip to the ground and whistled. “This is the longest rod I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You could pole-vault with it.”

  “Damned straight,” Sam said. “It’s a Bruce and Walker. Fifteen-footer. It’s the first half of your wedding present. Only the best, Kemosabe. Only the best.”

  “Thanks, Sam, but there isn’t a trout in Montana that could put a bend in it. Besides, I’m heading off on my honeymoon.”

  The honeymoon would be a cruise down the Rhine River through Germany and the Black Forest, where some of Martha’s people on her mother’s side had lived, to be followed by a few days in Donegal, in Ireland, where she’d learned that Sean’s great-great-great-grandparents had burned peat for warmth before being driven out by the potato famine and emigrating to Nova Scotia. Martha had caught the genealogy bug as others might catch a cold, and had planned the honeymoon with an eye toward killing several birds with one stone.

  “Of course it isn’t a trout rod,” Sam said. “It isn’t meant for no pipsqueak trout. But it’s just what the good doctor ordered for the Gaula River.”

  “That’s in Norway.”

  “I know where the fuck the Gaula is. We got a week on one of the best beats on the river. That’s the second part of your gift. After you’re done deflowering your bride in the land of fairies, you’re hopping on a puddle jumper out of Dublin. I’ll meet you in Oslo and we’ll be in fucking Lapland before nightfall. If there is a nightfall. Which I don’t think there is. It’s the fucking Land of the Midnight Sun.”

  “I’ve always wanted to catch a big Atlantic salmon,” Sean said. “I just thought I’d have to rob a bank for the chance.”

  “Yeah, well, I know some people who know some people. Only thing you got to do is tie the flies.”

  “I’ve been tying salmon flies for years.”

  “Then we’re set, aren’t we? Go on back now and mingle. I just might have to prick a lip before this hatch is over and the fish put their brains back into their heads.”

  The plaid-shirt band Willoughby had rented showed up an hour late, four twenty-something Oregonians who couldn’t fix a flat if they were handed the tools, and they didn’t know where the tools were. A passerby finally did the deed. They held an umbrella over his head while he used the tire iron to screw the nuts back on, and gave him a doobie for the road. “We got soaked,” the bandleader said. They laughed as they told Sean the story. They were still stoned.

  They were good, though, and Sean and Martha danced the night away, or the first part of it, but who was counting steps?

  “We could have just stayed lovers,” Martha said, as they danced to “Moon River.” “Couples who share dogs, it’s the new marriage, I hear.”

  “I like the old way,”
Sean said. “You know the first time I kissed you, we were dancing just like this. Your cousin’s wedding, remember? Before I asked you to take off your gun.”

  “I’m not wearing it now.”

  Nor was she wearing it later that night, after they had excused themselves from the party and driven to the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone Park for their first night as legally betrothed. Martha covered the bed with rose petals, and it was midnight when she came back to the darkly paneled room from the bathroom down the hall. Sean had lit a candle and she untied the sash of her bathrobe and took it off. Underneath she was wearing a cream silk camisole. She slipped a finger under one shoulder strap and then the other, and pulled the camisole down to her waist, led him to the bed, and, as she moved above him, her breasts swaying in the candlelight, Sean was enveloped in her warm, intoxicating scent, at once familiar and yet subtly foreign.

  “What are you wearing?” he said.

  She smiled. “Just a little something from a bottle.”

  “Is that Calvin Klein’s Obsession?”

  “A woman never tells.”

  The houndsman from New Mexico, Cecil Flowers, had been delayed by car trouble and finally arrived in Bridger three days after Drick Blake died on the mountain. But by then the trail laid down by the cat had washed away in rain and wind, and though he stayed on for close to a month, putting his Walkers’ noses to the ground in all the places that the cat had been known to visit, he never cut the track of a female whose track showed an inturned right foreleg. He told Martha that it was likely that she had either died of starvation or recovered and found a mate who had led her to parts unknown, and that he was wasting her time and the county’s money. He turned the nose of his truck around and headed south, leaving her a promise that he would return if there was another human kill. Martha had kept the bottle of eau de parfum.

  “Do you like it?” she said. “They say it’s catnip to mountain lions.”

  Sean started to speak, but she put a finger to his lips.

  “Shh now. That’s enough. I know the answer to my question.”

  And as she smiled down at him, the odds she had given for them staying hitched rising with each intake and exhalation of her breath, no further words were spoken.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  They That Believeth

  Schools in Montana opened for the fall semester on August twenty-eighth. At three o’clock that afternoon, the woman whose name meant Sea of Sorrow, who had worked the day shift at the Ennis Public Library, drove a few blocks out of her way to watch the children streaming out of the elementary school on Charles Avenue. Miriam Ross was in no hurry to return to the shell of her existence that less than a year before had been a life, before her five-year-old son, Hunter, had been taken by a mountain lion. For months, she had clung to the hope that Hunter was still alive, that he had been kidnapped that night by his father, her estranged husband, and not killed by tooth and claw. After all, her ex had disappeared from the grid, and though cat tracks and sign had been found in the ranch vicinity, the only human body parts ever recovered that could belong to a child were regurgitated toes that were too degraded to DNA-test. Sure, the toes were small, but then all children had small feet, and there were always lions prowling about. Weren’t there?

  Such is a story you tell yourself to keep breathing, to keep putting one foot in front of the other in your shattered life.

  “You’d be six now,” she said, as the last of the children came through the double doors. “You’d be going into first grade.”

  She smiled. It was a wan smile, one her lips fought to remember. The smile faded when she put her truck into gear and began to drive south toward the ranch. As she turned off Highway 287 onto the mile-long gravel road that led to the house, a truck she didn’t recognize was coming the other way. As it passed by, the driver touched the brim of his hat in a two-finger salute. Miriam returned the gesture. Probably some crony of her father’s. The driver’s face had been in shadow, chin down, the hat brim pulled low.

  “You’d have been somebody,” she said, not even aware that she was speaking. “You would have made your mother proud.”

  Why chin down? Hat brim, Miriam understood. But chin down, like you’re saying a prayer? She knew only one person who did that, who sat in the driver’s seat like dinner was on the dash and he was saying the blessing.

  Feeling her heart pounding as the house grew larger in the foreground, the porch coming into view, she couldn’t believe what she saw. No, she couldn’t believe it, she wouldn’t. Not and draw another breath ever again. No merciful God would do that to a person. And then she was out of her truck and running, and she scooped him into her arms and hugged him to her chest until she thought her heart would explode.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, Hunter, we thought you were dead.”

  The boy’s voice was muffled against her shirt. “Daddy said to tell you he didn’t have what it takes.”

  “To what, be a father?”

  “I don’t know. Stop it, Mama. Stop it. You’re breaking me.”

  She’d looked at the line of dust raised by her truck driving in and the other going out, the vehicle just a glint now in the distance. It was Earl, it had to be. Finally doing the one good thing he could.

  The next day, Hunter Ross was enrolled in the Ennis Elementary School. Martha Ettinger took the call from the principal, who’d got the story from the first-grade teacher, who’d got it from Hunter’s mother, who hadn’t yet notified the authorities. Martha set down the receiver and punched in the number for Harold Little Feather, who was still stealing an hour now and then to compile the data for the last interagency report on the two lions that had terrorized residents of the valley.

  “There is a God,” Martha told him. “I wasn’t sure.”

  Though Harold’s god was the sun and never in doubt, he rejoiced with Martha, which meant he spoke more than a few words before clicking the phone off.

  He told her that there had been two developments since Blake’s death. The first was that an antler hunter had come forward to say that he had shot the guard dogs. They had charged at him and it was self-defense, but still, he felt guilty and had been a coward for leaving the scene without informing the herder. One mystery solved.

  The second development concerned the regurgitated toes that Martha had suspected belonged to Hunter Ross. Harold’s son Marcus had told his father that a fellow student in Native American Studies said that his kid brother had died in a car accident the past November, and that they had constructed a scaffold to bury him on, as his ancestors had been buried in the Sioux tradition. The student told Marcus that when he had visited the site a few days later to pray and scatter a few keepsakes for the departed, he saw that the toes from the boy’s right foot had been eaten, apparently by coyotes or other scavengers. No other part of the body had been touched, except by birds. Marcus, knowing that the date was only a week or so before the toes were found in the regurgitation, asked where the burial had taken place. The Gravelly Range, the student told him. On the QT, as the practice on Forest Service land was prohibited.

  “Maybe the cat was put off by the taste and only ate the toes,” Martha mused.

  She hesitated. “Tell me something, Harold. Have you thought any more about running?” A short silence. “If you have, I just want you to know those things I said, it was heat of the moment. I was wrong to say it. You have to do what you have to do. I’m not part of the equation. And it won’t affect our friendship. I just want you to know that.”

  “We’re more than friends, though, aren’t we? There’s more to lose. But thanks, it’s been bothering me. I don’t know if I’ll run. If I do, you’ll be the first to know.”

  After they’d hung up, Harold limped to the map on the wall behind the desk. His eyes moved over the colored magnets that identified the locations and dates of lion confrontations and attacks. He found the sparkly magn
et painted with fingernail polish called Starry Night, which marked Hunter Ross’s disappearance on the family ranch up the south fork of Bear Creek on October 31, Halloween night.

  Many times over the past year, Harold had thought to remove the magnet and replace it with a cross to mark the boy’s death, but each time he had refrained from doing so. Not because he held out hope against hope, as Miriam Ross did. No, Harold was not a man who clung to threads. It was the family dog, the one that didn’t bark that night. That was what bothered him. When Martha had first told him the details of the boy’s disappearance, that one inconsistency was what had struck him. If there had been a lion prowling about that night, surely the dog would have barked, or in some other way betrayed its unease. But if it was Miriam’s ex coming to abduct the boy, then perhaps not. Perhaps the dog would have stayed silent.

  Harold removed the magnet and went into the kitchen. He looked at the refrigerator door, which his sister had peppered with magnets to pin down her favorite Bible verses. Harold chose one that she had altered to be more inclusive of women and placed the magnet on it.

  ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE TO THEY THAT BELIEVETH. MARK 9:23

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The Lovely Dark

  In the hour of the dying light, on a day savaged by thunderstorms and lightning, the cat left the shallow cave where she had been nursing her three cubs and took up a position behind a log. In front of her, two game trails formed an X where they crossed a creek that sang a quiet little song. Here she crouched with her belly to the pine needle floor of the forest.

  The two trails, in addition to being used by mule deer and elk, were traveled by backpackers, hikers, and, in season, hunters. Archery season had in fact begun the previous Saturday, a week after Labor Day, and in this last of the twilight, the lion watched a bow hunter hurrying down one of the trails. The hunter was dressed in camouflage clothes and had approached to within twenty feet of the lion when the sky was lit up by a bolt of lightning.