When he reached for her in the morning, the place on that side of the bed was cold. He walked to the window and braced his hands on the sill. A watercolor morning. The vague shapes of whitetail deer with dropped heads in the yard.
Sean got dressed and found her in the kitchen, standing over a skillet, still in her nightgown. He reached around her and cupped her breasts, and she leaned back against him.
“I fly all the way from Michigan, and the weather here is the same weather I had there.”
“You weren’t complaining about the weather last night. You know what I think? I think you thought about it long and hard. That’s why you bought me the necklace.”
Sean released her. “She’s twenty years older than me.”
“All cats are gray in the dark.”
“Martha . . .”
“Do you know who said that? It was Benjamin Franklin. He was counseling young men on their choice of mistresses. He said older women were discreet and they didn’t get pregnant and they knew more tricks in bed.”
“She wasn’t my mistress. All I did was hold her awhile. Can’t you just say you like the necklace?”
“I do like it. It will go with my hair when I get gray.” She turned and kissed him good morning. “I’m just giving you a hard time. I think.”
The necklace’s pendant was a Petoskey stone, a fossil coral found in Lake Michigan, with a hexagonal design brought out by lapidary polishing. Sean had stopped at a roadside stand on the outskirts of Traverse City on the day he’d flown in and bought it on a whim, before he’d met Margarethe Harris.
“Sit down,” she said. “We’ll have breakfast and then I have something to show you.”
“Show me now.”
“No. In this house we follow the rules.”
“What rules?”
“We don’t talk about work at breakfast, we don’t talk about work at dinner, and we don’t talk about work in bed.”
“When do we talk about work?”
“During work times.”
“But we don’t work at the same place. You haven’t thought this through.”
“Don’t tell me what I have or haven’t thought through. Anyway, you know what I mean. Now eat your eggs.”
The three sheets of paper Sean was studying ten minutes later were in Harold Little Feather’s handwriting, which meant they were in cursive and took concentration to decipher.
“This is a ledger of some kind?”
Martha nodded. “It’s a client list. These are people Freida Toliver sold elk antler chandeliers and whatnot to. The figures on the right-hand column are installation fees. Freida worked as an electrician for the phone company before her accident.”
“Four thousand dollars for a chandelier?” Sean whistled.
“It’s a lot. But I don’t think it’s out of line with other outfits that sell them. Freida didn’t keep very good books. Harold put this together from a couple half-assed ledgers, envelope scribblings, this and that.”
“Why give them to me, if Harold’s on it?”
“Harold isn’t on it. There is no ‘it’ to be on. She died of hypothermia, remember? But he found the body and I instructed him to look into her background, which led to what you’re looking at. I thought this was an avenue you were anxious to pursue.”
“I am—will. Thanks for this. So Harold’s done, right? I don’t want to step on his toes.”
“Harold’s work was preliminary to cause of death. We were just covering bases. He’s not even in the county as of yesterday. The state investigative office has him doing something with an Indian connection in Lewis and Clark County. He was up in the rotation. Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”
“You make him sound like a number. Is that for my benefit?”
“No. I’ve always managed to separate work from play. That’s not the right word.”
“Hardly.”
“Harold’s the past, you know that.”
“I’m just teasing you.”
“Is that a way of saying you don’t care about my relationships?”
“No. How the hell did we get started on this?”
“You being attracted to what’s-her-name in Michigan. Her with the lake storm eyes. What is it with you and every woman having a name starting with ‘M’? Martinique, Margarethe, Etta—”
“Etta?”
“Loretta. ‘L’ is only one letter over from ‘M.’”
“You’re crazy.”
“Oh, and don’t forget Martha,” Martha said. “That’s what I am, a familiar letter of the alphabet. You probably picked me because I had a name that would be easy to remember.”
“I can see I’m not going to win this one. But I don’t want to leave here today on this note.”
“What do you propose, that we go back to bed? Will that patch things up?”
“Now that you mention it.”
“Give me five minutes to freshen up.”
“How will I recognize you? I mean among all my ‘M’ women.”
“I’ll be the one wearing a Petoskey stone.”
Forty minutes later, she watched him walk down the lane toward his tipi, a man with his hands in his pockets, whistling. She loved watching him walk. She fingered the stone resting against her breastbone. Goldie had come up from behind and Martha reached down to pat her head.
“I do love you, you know.” Working her fingers into the dog’s coat, feeling his touch all over again.
—
“So how did you like the famous Au Sable?” Patrick Willoughby asked. He gave Sean his owl eyes. “I always meant to fish the Hex hatch there. Drifting a dry fly at night, a pipe to keep away the mosquitoes. It has a romantic allure. I’ve heard it can get quite crowded, though.”
They were sitting on the porch of the clubhouse, talking softly as Ken Winston read the story about Jack Hemingway. Sean had transferred the photos of the manuscript to his computer and printed out a copy before driving up the river.
Winston placed the papers on the table and set a rock on them so they wouldn’t blow away.
“You’ve both read it now, what do you think?”
“I think I’d like to catch a steelhead in the Thompson River,” Winston said. “But I’m not sure they let black people into British Columbia.”
They shared the laugh, except for Willoughby, who folded his arms across his chest and lifted his moonlike face, regarding a vista in some indeterminate distance.
“He gets the same look before he howls to the pack,” Winston said.
That was true enough. A wolf pack had moved into the Gravelly Range and they had heard the wolves howl from the clubhouse and joined the chorus.
The president of the club found that his pipe had gone out and relit it.
“The cult of celebrity is an odd phenomenon,” he said presently. “Here we are, more than half a century since the man was buried, and we are still enamored of objects solely because he has touched them. I am reminded of the elk antlers stolen from Hemingway’s Ketchum residence by the journalist Hunter Thompson. Even he fell under the spell of the man.”
“Speak for yourself,” Winston said. “I’ll add a Gillum to my quiver even if the only one who’s fished the rod was Lucifer himself.”
Willoughby conceded the point. “I’m not helping, am I? That’s because I see no solid thread to follow, unless Margarethe Harris knows more than she’s told you. I consider that probable, but as she isn’t here, we must follow any thread available to us, however fragile and likely to break. Sean, you are in possession of a list of Freida’s clients. What leads you to think that one of them would have given her the fly wallet with Hemingway’s initials? Or the Gillum rod that ended up in her brother’s hands?”
“She tried to throw the wallet into the pot when she was haggling over the price of a saddle with Etta Huntington. Etta told me that Freida liked to barter and they’d horse-traded before. I can see her getting it in a deal with someone else.”
“A fine Native American tradition,” Willoughby said. “Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. Why would someone deal it away to her, if they knew its provenance and thus the value?”
“Perhaps the owner didn’t, but Freida did.”
“Gentlemen,” Kenneth Winston said. “We can go round and round on this, or we can start knocking on doors.”
They agreed to reconvene for burgers and beers later that afternoon. Willoughby, who was the voice of authority in any room, or on any porch for that matter, took command of distribution. The original list included fifty-two names, of which Harold had found addresses for forty-one. Of those, twenty-three were not in the Madison Valley at all, but spread across neighboring counties. Those could be saved for a later day. The remaining addresses were rather evenly distributed from Ennis to West Yellowstone, a span Willoughby divided into three geographic sections. He would take the dozen or so clients whose addresses were in the lower valley north of Varney Bridge, Winston would take their second rental car to visit a similar number residing from Varney upriver to Lyons Bridge, while Sean concentrated on the upper valley. Quite a bit of driving for each, and an ambitious day’s work—that is, until you took the month into consideration. Most of the Madison Valley’s residents were snowbirds who were sipping chardonnay in the Sunbelt, their summer homes silent except for the periodic snapping of mousetraps set by property caretakers.
“Shall we say the mermaid bar at six?” Willoughby said.
They were agreed.
—
Vic Barrows, the bartender at the Trout Tails Bar & Grill, scratched the new tattoo on his left forearm as he took their orders. The tattoo was a date in February, underneath the words Free at Last. He was wearing a starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and his gold front tooth shone under prisms of light cast by a multifaceted chandelier. The battered upright piano on the south wall, the warm wall, just collected dust, and the mermaid tank behind the bar showed a six-foot-long crack in the inner layer of its triple-glazed glass. It hadn’t held a drop of water since Labor Day. Vic said they were hoping for a Memorial Day opening, but the owner, who lived out of state, was balking at the cost of fixing the tank. Barrows shrugged. He’d done two months in the Hyalite County Jail for breaking the head of an innocent bystander as collateral damage while breaking up a fight between two fishermen smitten by a woman flaunting a vulcanized tail. Hence the date of his release on his arm. Hence the gold tooth. Hence his indifference about the future of this particular mermaid tank.
“Tits, tails, and drunken fly fishermen,” he said. “What could possible go wrong?”
“This place is starting to become depressing,” Patrick Willoughby said after the bartender had turned his back.
“It’s April in Montana,” Kenneth Winston said. “Everything about it is depressing.”
The beers came and Willoughby placed a legal pad on the table. “Shall we begin? Kenneth, do you want the honor?”
Winston sipped the foam from his Cold Smoke Scotch Ale. He said he’d knocked on nine doors, three of which had opened, three sets of eyes registering surprise at seeing a black man in southwestern Montana, then trying to be blasé about it. Two couples ushered him in the door, shook their heads when he brought up the subject of the fly wallet—yes, Freida Toliver had sold them an elk antler chandelier; no, they had paid in full with personal check; hmm, what are you trying to get at?—and ushered him back out the door. The third door was opened by a woman who insisted Ken drink a cup of tea with her. She was a college professor on sabbatical and she was writing a book, and he was a lot more interesting than the subject, which was personality projections based on spatial models in urban living situations. Ken had sipped the tea sitting under an antler chandelier. The woman was a friend of the home owner, who wintered in Santa Fe, and she didn’t know anything about the chandelier. Could he stay for dinner? She’d made barley soup and had baked gluten-free bread. Her body language said she was available, and she was attractive enough in a faded hippie kind of a way, and he was, alas . . . married.
You know what they say, she’d told him. What happens in Montana . . .
“Stays in Montana?” Willoughby finished the thought.
“What she actually said was, ‘Dot, dot, dot.’”
“I’m afraid I have nothing so exciting to relate,” Willoughby said. “I talked to more people than Ken, six out of the twelve names allotted, but none of them knew anything about a fly wallet or a bamboo rod, and I took them at their word. Sean, you look far away. Did you have any better luck than we did?”