Four young men who’d been part of the initial hasty team search were gathered around a map spread on the hood of Jason Kent’s diesel 4 x 4. A type—waists like carpenter ants’, rock climbers’ arms, a certain way of holding the body. Been-there-done-that men. Kent made the introductions. They were going to climb over the crest of the Madison Range to drop into the Hilgard Lakes Basin. It was off the search grid, but if the missing woman was trying to get as far from the source of her fright as she could, if in fact she’d been frightened but uninjured, the pass the men were taking was a natural line of retreat. Kent was driving them to the trailhead, and as the men threw their backpacks into the bed of the pickup and vaulted in, he turned to Martha and said the sister had been briefed on the search and was waiting for them at the corral. She wanted to ride the trail Nicki had taken as soon as possible.
“I don’t think the fact of the matter has registered,” he said. “Usually by the third day they just want to scream. Or cry. Or sleep, finally.” Or even have sex, he had discovered. Even a man as plain as Jason Kent had found himself the subject of uneasy attention when a single mother began to give up her son for dead. “But this sister,” he shook his head, “we’re five days in and she seems to be locked in the initial phase of denial.”
“Any impression of her?”
His face was impassive. Kent was always hard to read. “Nothing you won’t see for yourself,” he said.
—
From fifty feet, Asena Martinelli was a broad shouldered, trim figure under a Stetson, sitting tall in the saddle. She dismounted the bay quarter horse when Sean and Martha drove up and handed the lead to the assistant wrangler who’d helped her with the tack. Turning, she placed her hands on her iliac crests and regarded them with a cool expression.
Martha felt her abdomen press against her belt. Too much worry, too little exercise, too many pieces of MacKenzie River Pizza. She spoke out of the side of her mouth.
“That woman couldn’t give birth to a well-fed gerbil.”
“Now Martha,” Stranahan said. “She still might have a harelip.”
She did not have a harelip. Rather, her lips were perfectly even, with commas of smile lines in her cheeks that deepened as she approached. Later, Sean would believe that she was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen, but it was the eyes that registered first. They were a pale, cold green, a color he associated with frozen waterfalls. The eyes flashed from Martha to Sean and back again to Martha.
“Hello.” She shook Martha’s hand. “I’m Nadina.”
“We’d heard it was Asena,” Stranahan said.
“It’s both.” Her handshake was firm. “My sister and I were named for mountains where we grew up, the Nadina and Nanika peaks.”
“What should we call you?”
“Nicki started calling me Asena when we were kids. It’s stuck.” Her head tilted a fraction. Something in Stranahan’s face or voice seemed to have surprised her.
Sean, who was never conscious of his appearance, was conscious of his appearance.
“I’m sorry for staring, but you remind me of someone. I usually don’t forget a face.” Her voice had a slight French Canadian accent, with the rising inflections that turned a declaration into a question.
And to Ettinger: “I got here as fast as I could.”
Martha, having done the math, let it pass. Had the woman left for Bridger even twenty-four hours after the department tracked her down, she should have been here two days ago.
“I’d like to see where this happened,” she said, her tone assertive.
“And we’ll take you there,” Martha said, “but you have to understand . . .” She began to give the talk, the talk you gave to the husband, to the wife, to the sister, to the one who couldn’t envision life without the person who’d gone missing and so refused to admit it could happen.
Stranahan used the opportunity to study the woman. Only once had he met Nicki Martinelli, at a boat launch—she was taking out, he was putting in—an encounter of a few minutes, but vivid in his mind. Like everyone else he’d been struck by her beauty, by her bubbly, playful personality, shy and bold at the same time, and, of course, her hair. The woman standing before him was obviously older, at least she acted older and her face seemed to have weathered more of life, but the physical resemblance was striking. Martha had been dead wrong. Asena Martinelli exuded fertility and shared the same body with her sister, if not the same posture. Where Nicki was comfortable in the ripeness of her flesh and did not show it off as much as not care how it was shown, that was part of her allure, this woman stood the way ranch women stand who have worn Stetsons with rain protectors and shown horses half their lives—mannishly upright, bandana knotted just so, a careful presentation of themselves to the world, with much held in reserve. If there was a noticeable difference in the faces, beyond the severity of expression, it was that this woman’s skin looked thinner, stretched to reveal the sculpture of the bones. The hair was the same autumn flame, but cropped short under the shade of the wide-brimmed hat.
As Stranahan observed her, she took her hands off her hips and folded them defiantly across her chest. She’d undoubtedly heard the same talk from Jason Kent that she was hearing from Ettinger.
Stranahan took the lead from Martha and discussed the most likely scenarios, the possibility of injury, the odds of her having walked off the search grid—lost-person behavior was a science, and a woman of Nicki’s age and physical fitness might travel quite far when gripped by panic, farther than they would if they were much younger or somewhat older. Was there a chance, Stranahan wanted to know, that for whatever reason she had disappeared on purpose or found her way out of the wilderness and not reported the incident?
No, that wasn’t possible.
“This is grizzly country, this close to Yellowstone, isn’t it.” The woman made it a statement. “And wolves. One of the people I talked to this morning, Mr. Anderson, told me that wolves were in the wilderness where my sister disappeared.”
“The odds of attack are very slim,” Ettinger said.
“But it’s a possibility.” Again, a statement.
“It has to be considered.”
—
In a search, relatives of the missing got in the way. They wanted to help, which meant if you couldn’t dissuade them from going into the forest you had to take someone off the search to act as a bodyguard. One person missing was bad enough, let a city slicker have his head and you had two. Asena Martinelli was no city slicker, but it was clear she wasn’t to be denied looking for her sister. Ettinger, letting exasperation show in her voice, went off to saddle Petal and Big Mike. She’d taken up Bucky Anderson’s offer to stable them at the ranch until the search effort was over.
“I’ll help you,” Stranahan said, waiting for her cue.
“Nah, Big Mike will just barrel his chest if you try to put a sternum strap on him. He knows better than to try that foolishness with me.” Meaning, I want you to stay with her and report your impressions later.
Martinelli turned an appraising eye on Stranahan, her gaze level and very cool, and said, “What exactly is it you do, Mr. Stranahan? You don’t look very . . . official.”
“I used to be a private detective,” he said. “Now I consider myself a Renaissance man. I guide during the trout season, I write for the fishing magazines a bit, and paint in the winter; actually I paint whenever I get a commission.”
“So you’re an investigator for the department, like a freelancer,” she said.
“More like a helper-outer. I’m another set of eyes on the ground when there aren’t enough to see around the corners.”
“I see,” she said cautiously. It was clear she didn’t. She offered a brief smile. “You have a funny way of talking,” she said. Then the resolution he’d read in her face seemed to crack to reveal her vulnerability. The eyes that were the color of waterfalls warmed somewhat; they deepened to a green that reminded Stranahan of storm waves in the sea.
“I suppose you think I’m crazy, thinking I can find her when all of you can’t. But I have to. She’s my little sister. She’s all I have.”
“We appreciate your help,” Sean said. “You know her better than we do, how she might act in a stressful situation. Knowing her tendencies can help give us direction.”
“You aren’t just saying that?” Her tone was hopeful, but as they saw Ettinger come around the stable leading the horses, bitterness crept in. “Your sheriff thinks the time’s past when we have any chance to find her. She didn’t say that, but I could tell. That big man I talked to this morning, Mr. Kent, he made it pretty clear.”
“I find it’s best to try not to think too much, but just keep at it. If she’s out there, we’ll find her.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” She turned her back and walked to her mount, swinging effortlessly into the saddle. The wrangler who’d been holding the lead for her cocked his hat and walked away with his hands in his back pockets, trying to look like a cowboy for the pretty woman.
—
She’d obviously spent time in the stirrups. Stranahan, in line behind her as the horses reached the timberline, eyed the rhythmic motion of her buttocks not with lust but envy; his own butt, still sore from the ride the other day, bounced hard off the saddle with every step.
Ettinger reined Petal to a stop. “That copse of whitebark pine,” she pointed to the clump of trees about a quarter mile downslope, “that’s where we found the wrangler’s body. Her hat was found on a line between those trees and where we are now. We figure she got bucked. Maybe the horse smelled the wolves.”
“It’s big country,” Martinelli said. “But not as big as B.C. Nicki wouldn’t be intimidated by a few trees.”
Martha turned a sober face to the slide rock at the timberline. What are we doing up here? Her “Let’s go look at the scene” lacked conviction.
The scene told them nothing it hadn’t already, but had a pronounced affect on Asena Martinelli. She became silent and for a time appeared oblivious to Stranahan’s and Ettinger’s presence, wiping almost angrily at two tears that ran crookedly down the planes of her left cheek.
“Do you think he suffered?”
Ettinger nodded for Stranahan to answer.
“The medical examiner said he bled to death. He said it was quick.”
“I was told it was an accident. Is that the truth?”
Ettinger swallowed. “We don’t know.”
“Do you think my sister saw . . . this?”
“We think she was here, but we don’t know what she saw. It snowed that night. The tracks were covered and hard to read.”
The hopelessness of the situation seemed to befall her at once. “I don’t know what to do,” she said in a small voice. “Tell me what to do.”
“Miss Martinelli,” Ettinger said, “I’m terribly sorry about this. You think I don’t care because I didn’t want to ride up here and you’re half right. I didn’t want to come here because I don’t think it will get us any closer to finding your sister. But you’re wrong that I don’t care. Just because the physical search has a time limit doesn’t mean I do. I’ll find your sister, I promise.”
It was midafternoon by the time they returned to the corral. Stranahan went to get the Jeep while the two women brushed down the horses. Martha had wanted a little time with her alone.
“So what’s your impression?” he said, when Ettinger climbed into the passenger seat.
“I told her someone from the department searched her father’s cabin, didn’t say it was you. Didn’t mention any shooting. I meant to, but I sat on it and I don’t know why. Maybe because it would be a distraction. But she deserved to know we were looking other places than the mountain. My impression? It struck me as odd that she seemed more concerned about Grady Cole’s fate than the disappearance of her sister.”
“Oh, I didn’t pick up on that.”
“You don’t have the antennae I do.”
“I did notice you told her you were going to find Nicki. The Martha I know doesn’t build false hope.”
“I was sorry as soon as I said it. It’s a part of the job I could do better. But we will find her. It fell below freezing that night. She’s either dead of hypothermia three days ago, dead of hypothermia two days ago, or dead of hypothermia yesterday. The dogs will find her. Or else she deliberately disappeared, in which case I’ll find her just so I can strangle her.”
“Aren’t you the pessimist?” Stranahan said. “Comes with the badge, huh?”
Ettinger grunted. “More like with two divorces.”