CHAPTER TEN

“A Theft of History”

Stranahan was picking up his raft trailer at Sam’s place when his cell vibrated. He’d resisted getting one for more than a year, Montana being a state where you could cross three county lines without passing in range of a tower. But now that he worked on call, taking on clients for Sam, he’d had to cave.

“You have some explaining to do.” It was Martha Ettinger.

Stranahan put the phone on speaker and set it on the ground. He had dropped off the package with the desk sergeant at the Law and Justice Building last evening, after the sheriff had gone home. He’d been expecting the call.

“Didn’t you read my note?” He dropped the tongue of the trailer over the ball hitch.

“I did. And I quote: ‘Katie Sparrow and I used a metal detector to find these items near body removal sites on Sphinx Mountain. Unidentified piece of metal buried in root.’ End quote. There seems to be something missing here, like permission from the appropriate legal authority.”

“As I recall, you told me I could go to Canada if I wanted. All I did was broaden a search we’d already initiated. But Katie gets the credit. The trip was her idea. And the metal detector.”

“I’ll have a word with her when she comes off park patrol.”

“So what was in the root? The metal detector isolated steel.”

“That’s police business.”

Stranahan hooked up the safety chains under the chassis of the Land Cruiser.

Finally: “Where are you?”

He told her.

“Come to my office tomorrow morning. Don’t bother to dress. I can find a state-issue jumpsuit in just your size.”

•   •   •

The Oglethorpe twins, proprietors of a Ford dealership in Petoskey, Michigan, traded bad casts and finished each other’s sentences all day. They gave Stranahan a fifty each for the tip, not bad considering that neither had felt the rod bend since the elder brother—by seven minutes—boated a fifteen-inch brown on the first cast of the morning. It was the closest Stranahan had come to taking a skunking, at least in a professional capacity, and he came off the water knowing a hell of a lot more about the woes of the auto industry than he had at the launch. He hand-cranked the raft onto his trailer and was parking on the grass behind the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers clubhouse a little past six.

“No trouble finding the place?” Willoughby asked, coming around the corner of the cabin.

Stranahan shook his head. “That’s a heck of a house I passed driving off the bench.”

“It makes our place look like a shotgun shack. Please join us for drinks on the porch.”

Two men rose from Adirondack chairs as Sean climbed the steps. Jonathon Smither was darkly tanned with white teeth and a hail-fellow-well-met smile that went with a two-handed handshake. Ruggedly handsome with dark hair parted to the side, he looked like a ’60s cigarette model hunkered before a campfire, rough hands cupped to the flame of a match. Sean placed him in his midforties. By comparison, Robin Hurt Cowdry was sunburnt, sandy-haired, and very slender. Both his voice and age were hard to place.

“Robin is from Zimbabwe,” Willoughby said. “He runs a safari outfit in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana. The African artifacts you saw in the clubhouse are his.”

“Have you met Joseph Keino?” Sean asked. “He’s a Kenyan who owns a bed-and-breakfast in Bridger; it’s called the Aberdare.”

“I know that old Kikuyu camel thief. I traded him an ironwood sculpture of a Cape buffalo last year for a fine-condition Masai shield. Got the better of him for once.”

Stranahan remembered the night he had spent in the little cottage behind Keino’s Victorian inn. Vareda Beaudreux, the Mississippi riverboat singer with whom he had done some bartering of his own—his heart and his reason for an awful lot of trouble, he thought wryly—had pinned a note for him under the buffalo’s hooves while he slept.

“I saw that sculpture,” he said.

“Small world,” said Cowdry.

The last club member Willoughby introduced Sean to was bent forward over one of the fly-tying benches at the long table indoors. He peered at Sean through magnifying lenses folded down over his glasses and inclined his head. Returning his attention to his vise, he put a half hitch on a half-tied salmon fly and with some effort rose to his feet.

He said, “I used to be able to tie a fully dressed Green Highlander in just over two hours. Now it takes all afternoon. Strange thing to do, don’t you think? Spend that much time on a single fly when you may only have a few years left.” He rapped his knuckles on the tabletop.

“Now there, Polly. We’ll have none of that talk in here.” Patrick Willoughby shook his head.

“Patrick thinks that if we don’t mention the elephant in the room—I’m talking about COPD—then it doesn’t exist. I knock on wood because a few years is the hopeful outlook for someone at my stage of the disease, given that I have complicating factors that already impaired my lung function.” He was a kindly man with thinning hair who looked to be considerably older than the other club members, but to Stranahan he appeared very fit, except for the apparent arthritis in his knees and a slight laboring of his breath.

“Do you know what COPD stands for, Mr. Stranahan?” the man said.

“I don’t.”

“Be glad that you don’t.” He measured Stranahan with slightly wavering hazel eyes. “So you’re the private detective Kenneth Winston found. Now Kenneth, once he gets his materials sorted and matched, he can tie a Highlander in an hour and a half and better than I can in four.”

“Polly, that’s simply not true,” Willoughby said.

“I’m afraid it is.”

“Polly Sorenson is the foremost dresser of classic salmon flies on our side of the pond,” Willoughby said to Sean. “When that Highlander you’re looking at is finished, it will sell for five hundred dollars and reside in a glass display case.”

“That’s nonsense, this one’s going to catch a trout in the Madison River,” Sorenson said. He looked at Sean with a mischievous twinkle. “These old Victorian patterns were designed to catch the eyes of fishermen, not fish. But I’ve found the wings slim down in water to resemble small baitfish and will snag the occasional trout. Of course, you destroy the value the first time the feathers touch the water. As I am a house husband, what the French call a man of the hearth, as opposed to Tennyson’s vision of the sexes—‘man for the field and woman for the hearth, man for the sword and for the needle she, man with the head and woman with the heart.’” Sorenson paused. “Where was I? Patrick, help me here. I’ve lost the thread.”

“You were talking about how you are a man of the hearth.”

“Oh, yes. My wife does not approve of me fishing with flies that could contribute to our retirement. As far as she’s concerned, when I cast one into the river I might as well say goodbye to five suppers at a Parisian bistro. Which”—again, he rapped on the tabletop—“I still hope to enjoy someday.”

Dinner was a bourguignon of elk rump and morel mushrooms, courtesy of Jonathon Smither, who told Sean he had burned out as a crime reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and now wrote a series of mystery novels featuring a sleuth who was a “nose” for a perfume company. He traveled the globe, bedding beautiful women and solving crimes with his superior olfactory organ. The books sold particularly well in France. “God bless a country that isn’t ashamed of its noses,” he said, touched glasses with Stranahan, and refilled his wineglass.

None of the members seemed the least interested in broaching the subject of the missing trout flies, at least not until after the evening hatch. Sean wadered up and fished with Smither for a while, or rather Smither insisted that Sean have the honor, and whistled appreciatively when Sean made a perfect parachute cast that dropped a PMD cripple into the feeding lane of a butterfat brown trout. But shortly after he released the fish, a cold wind whisked down the valley, blowing froth off the tops of the riffles and tilting the wings of the delicate mayflies that sailboated on the surface. Stranahan hiked upriver by himself as the sun dipped, swapped out the cripple for a streamer fly, and took a heavily striped rainbow that walloped the river with its tail. He had hooked and lost an even better one when Patrick Willoughby walked up the bank.

“I’ve had my eye on you. What are you using?”

Stranahan held up the slim marabou streamer. “I hope I haven’t broken a club code by fishing wet,” he said.

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” Willoughby said.

Stranahan adapted himself to Willoughby’s hitching gait as they walked back to the clubhouse, accepted a whiskey and branch water and sipped it on the porch while the others trickled back, shucked waders, put their feet up on the rail, and, except for Sorenson, lit cigars. Theirs was the easy camaraderie of men who had nothing to prove and talked without weighing the impact of the words. The proposition they put to him, punctuated by the glow of the cigars, wasn’t long in coming. The club would like to hire him for a week and invite him to use the clubhouse as his base. Willoughby had not volunteered the details of the theft on Sean’s first visit and filled in the blanks. The Quill Gordon dry fly had been presented by its originator to Roy Steenrod, Theodore Gordon’s friend and frequent fishing companion on the Neversink River, and had been in a private collection for nearly seven decades. In May, it had been offered through Gray’s Auctioneers in Cleveland, its provenance having first been authenticated by the curator of the American Fly Fishing Museum in Manchester, Vermont. Willoughby, acting on behalf of the club, had raised the paddle and purchased the fly in its shadow box display frame, draining the club coffers to the tune of $17,500. The hammer price was more than triple the estimate, but, as Willoughby put it, “all of us but Kenneth would be fertilizing Kentucky bluegrass” if they had waited for another to come onto the block.

Who else had bid? Stranahan wanted to know. Willoughby said both the Federation of Fly Fishers and the Bud Lilly Trout & Salmonid Initiative at Montana State University in Bozeman were aware of the Gordon fly and had expressed interest in its acquisition, but only as the beneficiaries of donation. The three bidders who pushed the price had used agents, preserving their anonymity.

“I see where you’re going, Sean,” Willoughby said, “but as much as a private collector might have wanted the fly, do you really think anyone would follow me out to Montana and break into the clubhouse?” He shook his head, his jowls wagging.

Sean had known avarice to take many forms, with consequences ranging from petty theft to murder, but didn’t push an argument.

“What about the other fly, the Gray Ghost? You mentioned it had sentimental value.”

“Yes. Carrie Stevens gifted the fly to my father only months before her death. She had written to him that this particular fly had two additional feathers in the wing with a blue tinge, which made it more attractive to landlocked salmon. The letter is in the box. Sean, you can’t buy that kind of provenance.”

Stranahan asked Willoughby to take him through the days leading up to and following the thefts. Willoughby said that he had packaged the majority of the club’s fly collection and sent it via UPS to a friend in Montana for safekeeping until his arrival the previous week. The half dozen frames displaying the most valuable and rare patterns, including the Quill Gordon and the Gray Ghost, he had wrapped in bubble wrap and put in his carry-on, not trusting them to checked luggage. After Sorenson had picked him up at the Bozeman airport and they arrived at the clubhouse, he had hung the frames on the wall overnight and then the next afternoon taken them apart, removed the flies, and placed them in a large fly box that he kept zipped in his wading jacket.

“Why not leave them in the display cases?” Sean asked.

Willoughby seemed embarrassed. “The truth be told, I wanted to touch the flies, particularly the Quill Gordon,” he said. “I suppose it would be the same for a concert violinist given the opportunity to cradle a Stradivarius. Not even dreaming of playing it, mind you, the way I would never dream of fishing with a fly tied by Theodore Gordon. But Polly and I were alone here. It was two days before Kenneth flew in and nearly a week before anyone else arrived. We’d be fishing, buying groceries in West Yellowstone, we’d be in and out. I just figured the flies would be safer on my person. We were going to have a ceremony when everyone arrived and hang the cases in their place of honor.”

“What if you’d fallen in the river?”

Willoughby said the box was sealed inside two Ziploc bags. He laughed. “I thought if I drowned, then at least I’d be leaving the flies for posterity.”

Stranahan turned his attention to Sorenson. “So you examined the flies also?”

Sorenson nodded, the flip-up magnifying lens attached to his glasses reflecting bright moons of light from the porch lanterns. “Yes, but my priorities were different than Patrick’s. It was the Ghost that held my interest. Carrie Stevens accented the heads of her streamer patterns with a few turns of red thread, and I wanted to put the fly under a magnifying glass to examine the wraps. It was her signature.”

“Did anyone else see them?”

Sorenson seemed to hesitate and Stranahan gave him a questioning glance. But before he could probe further, Willoughby spoke up. “Kenneth came in Saturday. He saw them. As a tier of the Catskill school, he was probably more excited to examine the Gordon than I was.”

Stranahan probed for detail. When exactly had Willoughby discovered that the flies were missing? Willoughby said that would have been Sunday, when he’d had the urge to examine the Quill Gordon in natural light. He’d taken the box from his vest and opened it on the tying table.

“And there’s no possibility Kenneth took them?” Stranahan thought that a storyteller of Kenneth Winston’s caliber would have no trouble feigning surprise over a couple missing flies that his own larcenous fingers had filched the night before, while Willoughby slept.

“Mr. Stranahan”—it was the first time Willoughby had referred to him by his surname—“the members of the club are beyond suspicion.”

Sean backed off. “Show me the box,” he said.

During his exchange with Willoughby and Sorenson, neither Jonathon Smither nor Robin Hurt Cowdry had uttered a word. They seemed as entranced by the mystery as Stranahan was. He watched as the long ash on Cowdry’s cigar dropped onto the porch floor. And why wouldn’t he be concerned? Sean thought. As the five club members had contributed equally to the fly’s purchase, each had lost an investment of more than three thousand dollars.

•   •   •

They gathered around the tying table, Willoughby’s Wheatley fly box opened under the intense halogen eye of a goosenecked lamp. The box layout was similar to the one belonging to Winston that Sean had seen on his first visit, with lidded compartments on one side and steel clips to hold wet flies and streamers on the other.

The club president pointed to the only empty compartment. “That’s where the Gordon was.”

“It was the only fly in that compartment?” Sean asked.

“I didn’t want to crowd it and mash the hackles. The Gray Ghost was in one of the large clips, this one to be precise.” He tapped a clip with his forefinger.

Sean scanned the box. Most of the compartments contained several flies. Together with the flies in the clips, the box could easily hold a couple hundred. “Are any other flies missing?”

“None of the collectibles. About the rest, I couldn’t say. I don’t count them each time I go fishing. But if more than a couple dozen were gone, I’d like to think I would notice.”

“What about the rest of you? Has any gear disappeared, not just flies?”

“What are you getting at?” Jonathon Smither said.

“There are two ways to look at this,” Sean said. “First, as the theft of two valuable flies. If that’s the case, someone had to know what he was looking for, have a good idea where to find it, and then—and this is key—be able to recognize the flies when he saw them. It limits the scope of the investigation to people who would know their value. Besides Kenneth Winston and the four of you in this room, and maybe the mystery bidders for the Quill Gordon, I don’t know who that could be. Once Patrick transferred the flies from their display frames, which identified them as antiques, they become trout flies like any other. You see what I mean?” He went on, “But if you look at this as part of a larger-scale burglary—rods, reels, fly boxes, cameras . . .” He shrugged. “Then the flies become part of the haul and whoever took them doesn’t know what he has.”

Willoughby shook his round head. “I must be getting old,” he said. “I honestly never considered the angle that the specific flies weren’t the target.”

“But why just take one or even a couple dozen flies out of a box?” Cowdry asked. “Why not take the whole box?”

Sean frowned. “Maybe because a missing box would raise more suspicion, although that points to theft of a very petty nature. But to get back to my original question. Have any of you suspected that any of your gear was stolen since you built the clubhouse?”

Nobody had. Then Sorenson, even as he was shaking his head no, said in a reflective voice, “But the damnedest thing happened last summer. I put my Orvis in the rack on the porch and the next morning it was gone. I thought I must have broken it down and cased it, and you guys were hurrying me along—it was that day we fished Willow Creek—so I grabbed my six-weight Sage and got in the car. Then when we got back, I found that the Orvis was in the rack, all strung up and right where it was supposed to be. How had I not seen it there in the morning? Honest to God, I thought I was having a senior moment. I didn’t tell anyone because it was embarrassing.”

“We’re all getting there,” Willoughby said.

Sean didn’t know what to think about Sorenson’s story. Who would steal a rod only to replace it in the rack the next day? But the incident called into question the vulnerability of the cottage, which was only a short distance from the riverbank. Was it customary for the members to leave six-hundred-dollar graphite rods in an outside rack overnight?

Willoughby spoke for the group. “I know it looks like we’re inviting someone to steal, but honestly we haven’t had a problem. It’s against regulations to fish this stretch from a boat, so there aren’t many floaters, and anyone who hikes this far from the public access doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who would swipe someone else’s gear. And you’ve seen how hard it is to drive in here.”

The latter remark was in reference to the two locked gates that led to the development, which until a dozen years ago had been a sprawling ranch. Stranahan had been loaned a key to the first gate, three road miles downriver at the entrance to the development, and given a four-digit combination to the second lock on the spur road that led to the clubhouse.

“You never left your vest hanging outside on one of those pegs, did you?”

“Oh, gosh no. Whenever I wasn’t fishing, I hung it on the chair you’re sitting on. I was careful to lock the place when I left.”

“Did you ever return and find that it was unlocked?”

“No. I would have noticed that.”

“Who has keys?”

“All of us here. Then there’s the caretaker of the development, who used to be the ranch manager back when it was one. His name is Emmitt Cummings. These are mostly summer homes, so someone has to be able to get in if there’s a fire or gas explosion or something of that nature. The only other person who has a key is Geneva Beardsley from Ennis. She’s the cleaning person who opens the place up before we fly in and closes it back up in the fall. Her husband is sort of a jack-of-all-trades, keeps up the grounds, drains the pipes before the cold weather sets in. The inside of this place falls well below zero in the winter. You can leave whiskey or a bottle of vodka in the liquor cabinet, but last winter we forgot a couple bottles of zin and there wasn’t enough alcohol to keep them from exploding.”

“It was Maryhill Proprietor’s Reserve, too,” Jonathon Smither said.

“Jonathon has an interest in a couple Argentine wineries. You could call him the club’s sommelier. The wine you had with dinner was a Malbec.”

“From the Lujan de Cuyo in Mendoza Province,” Smither added.

“Sean,” Willoughby said, “at the risk of coming across as self-satisfied bastards, we’re all of us comfortably well-off. We’re not concerned about the monetary loss. This is not a theft of money. It is a theft of history. Come stay with us this week. You’ll get paid for having a good time, if nothing else. Meals and drinks included.”

“And if you need to get your mind right, we have some wicked bud, mate,” Cowdry added.

“Christ, Robin.” Willoughby shook his head. “Sean’s going to think we’re a bunch of old hippies.”

“And that would be wrong?”

“I like to think of us more as Renaissance men.”

“You had me at ‘wicked bud,’” Stranahan said.

He had one more question about keys. Was there a hidden spare? Willoughby said he’d show him on his way out. He led him around the side of the clubhouse, past a woodblock used as a base for splitting firewood. The key was under a glass electrical insulator in the shape of a bell. The insulator was on top of the electrical meter, a little above head height. It was maybe the third place a prospective burglar would look for a key, after lifting up the front doormat and turning over the big stone beside the steps.

“I know,” Willoughby said. “It probably expands the pool of suspects, huh?”

To anyone with half a brain, Sean thought.

Instead, he just said good night and walked to his Land Cruiser, his mind already having traveled sixty miles up the road, to a grain elevator with a cat calendar on the wall.

•   •   •

As he pushed open the door, Stranahan saw that the lamp on the end table was on, with the shawl Martinique had worn to the Inn draped over the shade. She was in her print nightgown, sitting at one end of the couch with the two cats, Mitsy and Miss Daisy. Her sad smile told him that Ichiro’s suffering was over.

“He died a couple hours ago. I gave him some kitty Valium and he was peaceful, he just slipped away. I hoped maybe you could help me bury him tomorrow, maybe take a drive somewhere in the country.”

She patted the couch. “Come sit with me. I can’t go back up to that bedroom tonight.”

“I’m sorry it’s so late,” he said.

“That’s okay. I should be exhausted, but it’s a relief now that it’s over.”

She rearranged herself so that she was leaning into him and rested her head on his shoulder. “Tell me about your day.”

Sean did, feeling the comfort of her body pressing softly into him and the rhythm of her breath, and realized that what Martinique offered was a tranquil envelope of life that he had never really known. He had been caught in the snare of infatuation before, and in the course of his troubled marriage the phases of deeper love had opened like doors before him, and had shut behind him, isolating him in rooms that more and more he’d just wanted to escape from. By comparison, Vareda Beaudreux, the riverboat singer he’d fallen for last summer, was a burning fire; her passion was the tail of a comet that he was still riding. But Martinique, Martinique was a warm scent and a slow heartbeat and a window wide open.

Martinique turned her face up to kiss him, and kissed him warmly and then more urgently as she twisted into his lap and pressed her breasts against his chest.

But when she pulled back to look at him there were tears in her eyes.

“I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to go home,” she said. “There’s part of me that wants to love you all up, right here on this couch. It would be an affirmation of life that I really need. But this isn’t the way for us to start, with me crying and you wondering what kind of crazy you’ve gotten into. You come back tomorrow morning, though. I’ll make you breakfast.”

•   •   •

Sean was in time for last call at the Cottonwood Inn. He took his draft beer to the pool room, empty except for Sam Meslik, who was practicing rail shots on a battered Brunswick.

“Kimosabe,” Sam said. “Doris told me you were here last night with a lady friend. Said the two of you looked like Branga-Fucking-Lina. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she sold mochas with her ta-tas.”

“How do you know who she was?”

Sam cocked his face sideways, his head down over the cue. “Bro, there can’t be two Martiniques in the state of Montana. If that’s her name.”

He rammed the two-ball into a side pocket.

“I got to go drop a few buckeyes,” he said. He ambled off to the men’s room.

When he returned, Stranahan picked up the conversation in stride. “I’m going to disappoint you, Sam,” he said. “All I’ve been doing is sleeping on her couch.”

“Why don’t you just borrow an apron and wash her dishes?” He lined up another shot and handed Sean the cue. “Get your head down over the ball. Now stick your butt out. Farther. Farther.”

Sean raised his eyebrows.

“What?” Sam held up his hands. “I just thought the position ought to come natural for you.”