THE SHERIFF left Montana in the afternoon, feeling frustrated. The friends and protectors of Clyde Ralstin had urged him to pack up his story and never return. The sky matched his mood: flat-bottomed clouds skidded across the top of the Mission Range, edging east. It had been bright and warm in the morning, but now the sun was gone, and Bamonte could see fresh snow near the summits. Occasionally, some shafts broke through the cloud cover, very dramatic, two-mile-long beams spotlighting parts of Saint Ignatius. For a few seconds, he saw the light sweep over the ancient brick sheathing of the church. Outside, a priest handed out copies of an Indian prayer to visitors. The last verse of the prayer, handed down by elders of the Flathead tribe, went like this:
Oh, Great Spirit,
Make me always ready to come to you
With clean hands and straight eyes.
So when life fades, as the fading sunset,
My spirit may come to you without shame.
Inside the church, behind the main altar, were three panels, a triptych depicting visions that had changed the life of Saint Ignatius, the Spanish nobleman who founded the order of Catholic priests known for their intellect and political skills. Above the triptych was a mural of the Last Judgment, with the face of a benevolent-looking God staring down on those lesser beings awaiting his word.
Like those mortals in Brother Carignano’s mural, Clyde Ralstin now sought redemption. His friends said the old man, never known as a very religious person, was evoking God of late. Ralstin told one visitor that it was not up to the sheriff from Pend Oreille to decide if he had lived a just life or should escape judgment for distant sins. “It is between God and I,” he said.
Still, Bamonte wanted some lesser authorities in his county to have a chance at handing out earthly justice before Ralstin moved on. He felt alone, on a limb with the investigation. His prosecutor had not been much support of late. Bamonte wondered if he should drop it.
Driving west, Bamonte was troubled by one of Crainey’s contentions, the notion that any further investigation—particularly an interrogation of the suspect—might cause too much stress, enough to kill Ralstin. The sheriff could be held responsible, Grainey had said, if something awful were to happen to his client, some sudden deterioration in his condition. What’s more, if dredging up Clyde’s past hastened his trip to the grave, the moral burden would be on Bamonte. Did the sheriff want that on his conscience? Bamonte considered this an odd transference of blame. What happened on September 14, 1935, belonged to Ralstin; Bamonte was a messenger from the other half of the century, late to collect.
While Bamonte had mixed feelings about the possibility of hastening Ralstin’s death, he was clear on another concern: he did not want the liability on Pend Oreille County. As it was, the county barely had enough money to keep its police cars in gas and antifreeze. Bamonte’s critics were growing. The media attention was a thrill, but when the spotlight passed, Pend Oreille County was left with all the old problems—no jobs, abusive husbands, drunk drivers on winding roads, and a sheriff who chased ghosts.
“Let this old man die in peace,” Grainey had said. The words bounced along in the front seat with the sheriff as he chugged up pass through the Bitterroots. He had expected Clyde, his prisoner, to be sitting next to him. Instead, he rode home with doubts.
In all the nights when Bamonte had lain awake in Metaline Falls, his picture of Ralstin had changed very little. He was a tough-nutted, callous-hearted cop who dealt in other people’s secrets, the worst sort of character merchant. The person he had just heard about in Saint Ignatius did not fit the bill. Shielded from the years, protected behind two great mountain walls, Clyde Ralstin was a man ready to have a street named after him, not a convict-in-waiting. He had never killed another human, let alone a cop, his defenders said. Bamonte was used to such dichotomies; the man who would set his family on fire, or lead a posse of neo-Nazis to kill a talk-show host for no other offense than having an opinion, or steal butter from a hungry community, was usually the best of fellows to those who professed to love him. Rare was the newly convicted felon who could not call on a friend or brother to hail him as a good man wronged by the law.
Still, Bamonte wondered, as he had the night before, if maybe he was pushing too hard. Years ago, the sheriff had risked his job defending a person who was wrongfully arrested by Bamonte’s own deputies and convicted by a jury of the very people who kept Bamonte in office. Among cops in the inland Northwest, Bamonte’s reputation was that of a contrarian, the outsider who had to wear a V-neck instead of a crew, who wouldn’t so much as accept a cup of coffee from a friendly merchant. Some of his critics said he was soft on criminals, willing to give a guy a break when none was deserved. So his tracking of Ralstin was not the reflex motion of a cop who assumed all suspects were guilty until proven otherwise. He felt strongly about Ralstin. In his gut, there was no doubt.
AT HOME, when Bamonte walked inside, he was tired, his back muscles knotted and tense from the long drive. He knew immediately that something was wrong. Betty would not touch him. Arms folded, she pinned him down with her eyes.
“What is it, hon?” Tony asked.
She could not bring out the words she had rehearsed. When she tried to talk, tears came forth. Betty had gone to bed in grief, cried most of the night, and awoke feeling like she had slept in a mud puddle. Now, she took several slow breaths.
“I know …” she said, trembling, trying to find the courage, “… why you’ve been gone on Thursday nights.”
“I told you—”
“Don’t … lie … to … me,” she said. “Don’t, Tony!”
He sat down.
“Who’s Linda?” she said.
“Linda?”
“Yes. Linda.”
“A friend.”
“And …?”
“She’s a friend. She … has some problems. We’ve been talking a lot.”
“And you love her?”
“Why do you say that?”
“And she loves you?”
“What are you—”
“Don’t … lie … to … me! I found the message on your desk. ‘Linda loves Tony.’ ”
He was sinking. He didn’t feel caught; he felt weak, and spineless, and miserable, and full of self-hatred. He was no better than his mother, quibbling and lying about the silver miners parading through as Bull worked underground.
“Did you sleep with her?”
“Betty. Please.”
“Did you?”
At that instant, Betty knew they were through. It no longer mattered what the explanation was; the deed was done and confirmed. She was overwhelmed by tears, and he started to cry as well. Partners for twenty-three years, lovers for all but the last few months, they could do nothing now but weep at the collapse of their marriage, a union that had been sealed in years of mutual pain. The skinny kid just back from Vietnam and the waitress had vowed to live with each other for life. A few years into their marriage, they both had been stricken with hepatitis, but Tony had refused medical help. He took yellow roses to his wife’s bedside, fell asleep with his head on her stomach. When he could walk no more, he entered the hospital, and then went twenty-one days without food. Betty recovered, but Tony continued to decline. His weight fell from 160 pounds to 120, and his fever held on for days. When at last he pulled out of it, they were joined by something stronger than their wedding vows: a shared defiance of death. From then on, the Bamontes felt they could whip anything. Bouts of near-bankruptcy, the harassment of the Newport newspaper, a crushing miscarriage—they remained strong.
She looked up, eyes clouded and puffy. “You betrayed me, Tony.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any idea what that feels like?”
He did. Yes, he did. And couldn’t Betty understand? Remember: his mother had betrayed the family when Tony was five, and he never forgot, or forgave. He was a victim for life. Which made it all the more tragic that he could repeat the very type of transgression that broke up the family.
“I’m … sorry,” he said. “It’s me. It’s all my fault.” When he started to see Linda, he did it almost without thought, following urges, floating with a current. Never did he foresee this moment when his wife would stare at him with the same barbed look he had fired at his mother.
“I can’t explain. You know me. I get … so I feel like a failure. I was looking for something, and … with the stress of the Conniff case—”
“The Conniff case?” The mere mention of Tony’s midlife obsession angered Betty. Shut out of the recent discoveries, Betty realized in the last few days that the recent moments of great good fortune probably had gone to Linda.
Betty did not doubt that Clyde Ralstin had killed George Conniff. Initially skeptical, she became convinced of Ralstin’s guilt after going over the research which Tony had piled up downstairs. But his guilt or innocence was of secondary concern to her. What she had come to believe in the last few months was that Tony and Ralstin were very much alike. Her husband—compulsive, tough, a loner, stubborn—and the Conniff killer shared more than a Spokane police background.
Betty saw her husband, like Clyde Ralstin, as a victim of his past. And when it caught up with him, he refused to recognize it.
She had one bag already packed. Moving through a closet, she started to stuff another. “I’m leaving, Tony.”
He was stunned. Yet he could not bring himself to stop her, or even try to touch her. All he could do was watch her slow-motion exit out of his life.
HUNGRY AND RESTLESS, Bamonte could not eat or sleep. He went outside for a walk. Metaline Falls seemed emptier and more abandoned than ever, the factory wheezing its last breaths, the streets empty. Though it was still early, only a few lights distinguished the village from the shroud of dark that engulfed the valley. Bamonte walked toward the river, unthinking, following an internal compass. At the edge of town, he dropped down a hill, then followed a muddy and deep-rutted road to a point where it disappeared. In a small clearing he found the cabin built in haste by Bull Bamonte nearly forty-five years before. His father’s ashes were across the river on a flank of Mount Linton, but his ghost resided here, in the one-room log pile where Tony used to sleep on a cot, listening to Bull’s labored breath. This was the home they had lived in before moving to the Red Rooster dance hall. When Bull dragged his broken body down from the mine shaft in time for dinner with Tony, he checked his gloom at the threshold. They were going to make it, he told Tony, because he worked hard, relentlessly, and life owed him a break. The mine would produce—it had to—and then Bull would have more time to spend with his boy.
Heavy with runoff, the Pend Oreille rushed through the canyon, just below the cabin—a sound so familiar it carried Bamonte back to the days when he lived in the hut. He could hear his father again, his lungs kicking up mining dust, straining for every breath. He always feared the stuttered breathing would end, without warning, and he would be left by himself. He felt that way now—deserted. With Betty’s departure, the family was gone, and he alone remained in Metaline Falls. It wasn’t likely that Tony’s son would stay in town. The boy and his father were so far apart; and that was his fault as well, Tony felt.
Abandoned long ago, the cabin smelled of rat shit and mildew; its roof sagged and leaked, and its walls were shredded of the chink that kept drafts at bay. Bull used to hang venison outside; inside, he kept his collection of Great Books and his Sunday clothes. Now the cabin was such a foul, decaying rot that even the kids from the village would not play inside it. Like the town of Metaline Falls, it was dying; and going down with it, he felt on this black night, was Tony Bamonte himself.