Early the next morning, Cassie took I-90 West and shared it primarily with long-haul truckers and construction workers headed to their job sites. Later in the day the highway would fill with vacationers on their way to Yellowstone Park to the south or Glacier Park to the north, along with other cross-country traffic.
She stopped at a convenience store on the outskirts of Bozeman for coffee. Just coffee, she told herself. No donuts.
Cassie stood in line behind six young men dressed in Carhartt clothing, ball caps, and work boots. She guessed they were a highway crew headed out based on the fact that the cuffs of their jeans were stained black by asphalt. The crew held the items they were going to purchase in their arms: energy drinks, hot dogs, chips, candy bars. Probably both breakfast and lunch, she thought.
She found herself feeling very grateful for these men. They weren’t college-educated professionals on their way to the office and they likely came from tough circumstances. With males in that age group there were probably a few substance-abuse issues as well as some trouble with the law. But they were up early and on their way to work outside with their hands in the sun and rain so the roads were maintained for everyone else. They’d worked outside through the pandemic while others worked from home and ordered in food. Yet no one gave them a second thought.
Cassie hoped Ben pursued a different path in life, but she wanted to encourage him to do blue-collar or construction work on the way there. It would toughen him up and make him appreciate the fact that life wasn’t easy for everyone and that dirty jobs had a nobility of their own.
As she waited for the road crew to pay—one by one, they used credit cards instead of cash, which slowed things down—she wished she could give them an economics lesson before they headed out for the day about how much money they’d save over the long run if they grocery shopped and packed their own lunches instead of buying high-priced processed foods at a gas station. But she didn’t.
At the last second before buying her coffee she snatched a box of mini-donuts from the endcap just behind her and tossed it on the sales counter.
She hated herself for it.
Cassie had learned as a cop that there was no better way to obtain good information than to hit the streets and talk to people. Tracers, TLO, and social media were certainly good tools to build a framework around a case or a puzzle, but without getting out there to the actual locations and asking around it was generally inefficient to actually complete a proper investigation.
There was plenty to be learned by the demeanor of interviewees and by their body language. Sometimes their words didn’t really matter. Even in an age of all-pervasive social media, face-to-face interactions in small towns were invaluable. She knew because she’d grown up in one and even now she was still a little flummoxed at how quickly news, rumor, and innuendo traveled by word of mouth. And how silence itself was sometimes a confession or a tactile admission of guilt.
PIs who spent most of their time working their databases and staring at computer monitors might be successful on some cases, but Cassie had no doubt that getting out and walking around was a fine and very effective tactic even if she didn’t have a list of subjects to interview. By walking around and observing, she’d found, it was remarkable how many times people of interest sought her out. Often, it was the guilty party attempting to steer her in other directions.
Rachel Mitchell, the attorney Cassie worked for on retainer, observed that Cassie had unique characteristics that aided her in her job. She said Cassie came off as “nonthreatening” and “empathetic.” She didn’t stand out in a crowd and she didn’t intimidate subjects like so many LEOs did. Rachel said Cassie could get people to tell her things that they’d never tell Rachel, including some of her clients. Cassie took the observations as a compliment of sorts. Rachel was brilliant, attractive, aggressive, and stylish. She could also be intimidating. Cassie conceded to herself that there were times she wished she was thought of that way.
She punched up the Bluetooth on her Jeep and placed a call to the sheriff’s office in Deer Lodge County, where Anaconda was located.
“Anaconda–Deer Lodge County Law Enforcement Center,” said the receptionist. The woman had a husky voice that was all business.
“Hello, my name is Cassie Dewell and I’m with Dewell Investigations in Bozeman. May I please speak to the sheriff?”
“Sheriff Westphal isn’t in yet,” she said. “He usually gets here between seven thirty and eight. Is there a message I can give him?”
Cassie said, “Please. I’m driving up there from Bozeman today to investigate a missing private investigator from Florida whose last-known whereabouts was Anaconda two weeks ago. I’ve also got some general questions about people of interest in the area I hope he’ll be able to answer. Do you know what his day looks like?”
“Not really,” she said. “He keeps his own schedule. He comes in, checks things out around the office, and usually goes to coffee around ten. I can give him your message and I’ll ask him to call you.”
“Thank you,” Cassie said. “I appreciate it.”
“Cassie Dewell,” the receptionist repeated.
Cassie spelled out her name.
“Got it.”
The receptionist paused, then said, “He might not call you back right away, you know.” She sounded apologetic in advance. “Sheriff Westphal isn’t real fond of outside investigators.”
“You mean PIs?”
“Yes.”
“It’s okay,” Cassie said. “I’m used to it. But I make it a policy to always inform local law enforcement when I’m in their jurisdiction. I used to be a deputy sheriff myself and I always appreciated the heads-up.
“So I have to ask,” Cassie said, “How many times a day do you have to say, ‘Anaconda–Deer Lodge County Law Enforcement Center’?”
“Hell, lady, I say it in my dreams.” The receptionist laughed.
“And you are?”
“Margaret.”
“I look forward to meeting you, Margaret.”
“Thank you. I’m at the front desk.”
Cassie punched off. It was always a good idea to get acquainted with the frontline staff of a law enforcement office. They often knew much more about what was going on than their bosses, she’d found. Especially bosses who kept their own schedules and went to coffee every day at ten.
Although it wasn’t part of her initial plan, Cassie tapped on the brakes to disengage the cruise control when she saw the exit for Manhattan coming up a mile ahead. There was no reason why she couldn’t multitask, after all.
Sir Scott’s Oasis was on a corner in the middle of Manhattan, population fifteen hundred.
The town actually was a kind of oasis of its own, she thought as she left the buzz of the interstate behind her. It was green and leafy and quiet and there was a grade-school kids’ soccer practice going on in the town park. Unlike Bozeman just a few miles behind her on the highway and so many other Montana communities, Manhattan hadn’t exploded with new growth and transplants from other places. Yet.
Her tires thumped over railroad tracks and before she knew it she nearly drove through the town. Knowing she’d probably missed the restaurant, Cassie made a U-turn and cruised back and parked on the curb in front of Sir Scott’s. The throwback sign read: SIR SCOTT’S OASIS CLUB.
The building was shambling and low-slung and Cassie shut off her engine and got out. Even from the street she could drink in the aroma of decades of broiled steaks and fried seafood that had been absorbed by the walls of the building itself.
Out-of-town steak houses were a tradition in the mountain west, she knew. She could recall a dozen of them in Montana and Wyoming alone: restaurants established in the 1940s or 1950s a short distance away from a much larger city. Out-of-town steak houses usually specialized in massive cuts of beef, fried seafood, goblets of alcohol, and at one time clouds of cigarette smoke. Generations of locals made pilgrimages to those steak houses for anniversaries, birthdays, prom night, and other special occasions.
Cassie looked at the ancient sign and the steel front door and she realized she’d been there before.
It wasn’t a good memory.
She’d gone there with Jim following a camping trip in Yellowstone Park. They were on their way back to their trailer in East Helena.
At the time, they’d been married seven months. Jim was having trouble opening up his life to her, she thought. He had yet to adjust to marriage. He liked to go out with his friends at night and on weekends just like he had in high school.
She’d told him that was difficult for her and he had apologized. He seemed to feel genuinely remorseful about his behavior and he’d suggested the camping trip to get away and “reset” as a couple. She didn’t love camping or the crowds in Yellowstone, but she didn’t want to complain when he seemed so sincere.
It had been her suggestion to splurge and go out to a restaurant on their way back home. Jim had suggested Sir Scott’s in Manhattan. He’d heard about the big steaks there from his uncle.
Cassie told Jim she had something important to tell him at dinner. Jim had replied that he had something important to tell her as well.
Jim was drinking more than usual as they waited for their food to arrive. He got no clue about her pending announcement when she ordered iced tea instead of red wine, just like he hadn’t noticed that she hadn’t had any alcohol during the camping trip. Jim was often oblivious to things.
As she started to speak he blurted out his news: “I joined the Army.”
Stunned, she said, “I’m pregnant.”
Cassie couldn’t recall what they ate or the drive back to East Helena.
Eight months later, Jim Dewell was killed in the Battle of Wanat in Afghanistan along with eight other Americans when two hundred Taliban guerillas attacked the village in the province of Nuristan.
Cassie shivered involuntarily as she walked to the front door of the restaurant and grasped the handle. She was surprised to find it unlocked.
The lights were muted inside and there was no one sitting at the tables. A heavyset woman with braided silver hair looked up from behind the bar and said, “I’m sorry but we aren’t open for lunch yet.”
“I’m not here for lunch,” Cassie said.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw that the woman was wiping down the bar. A short man about the same age emerged from a back room with a plastic milk carton filled with liquor bottles to restock the back bar.
“Want a drink?” he asked her with a grin.
“Bert!” the woman scolded him.
“It’s a little early in the day for me,” Cassie said.
“Suit yourself,” he said with a wink.
“What can we help you with?” the woman asked. Then: “Are you one of those treasure hunters?”
“Not really. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions about the poem, though. Are you the owners?”
“Would we be here at seven thirty in the morning if we weren’t?” the man replied with resigned good humor.
Cassie introduced herself and showed them her laminated PI credential card. The woman read it carefully and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever met a real private investigator before. I’ve watched plenty of ’em on TV, though. Mannix is still my favorite. Or maybe Jim Rockford.”
Their names were Bert and Yvette Scott and they’d owned Sir Scott’s Oasis for forty-five years. Bert seemed to be a very natural glad-hander and Yvette was more suspicious and businesslike.
“I’m not looking for the treasure,” Cassie assured them. “I’m actually trying to find the man who hid it.”
“You and hundreds of other nuts,” Yvette said. “I’m afraid there isn’t much we can do to help you.”
“There it is,” Bert said, pointing over Cassie’s shoulder. She turned.
On a whiteboard was the handwritten poem in black dry-erase marker.
“We’ve had so many people come in here to look at it that we covered it with Plexiglas,” Bert explained.
“We also covered it because you said you were going to erase it,” Yvette said to Bert.
Bert shrugged. “That’s the truth. I was going to erase it because that’s the board where we write the specials of the day. I had no idea what a big deal it would turn out to be. When we found it I thought it was garbage and I was going to clean it up. But somebody called the restaurant and asked about it because I guess it was posted on Facebook or something. I don’t do that internet stuff. Yvette does, though.”
“Can you please tell me the circumstances of how you found it?” Cassie asked.
Bert and Yvette shared a look. Then Yvette said, “We came in to open up the place that morning a while back and it was there. That’s about all we know about it.”
“So was the poem written while the restaurant was closed?”
“Yes,” Yvette said. “Otherwise we would have seen who did it. Either us or one of our people, anyway. They would have said something if they saw a guy erase the daily special and write that stupid poem instead.”
“How did the guy who wrote it get in here?”
The look again. Cassie realized a longtime couple like Bert and Yvette spent so much time together at work and at home that they almost didn‘t need to talk to each other anymore. Not when a look between them would do. Bert sighed heavily. “I closed the night before,” he said. “I guess I didn’t lock the back door on the way out.”
“He didn’t,” Yvette said. “I’ve talked to him for years about double-checking that the building was locked up. But it’s just like the front door you found open just now. Bert closed last night and forgot about that as well.”
“Hell,” Bert said with a shrug. “This is Manhattan, Montana. No one locks their doors. Most of us don’t even lock our cars.”
“Sometimes Bert enjoys a few cocktails when he’s tending bar,” Yvette said with a roll of her eyes. “That leads to forgetfulness.”
“Do you have any ideas about who could have written it?” Cassie asked.
Yvette shook her head. “We’ve been asked that so many times and we still don’t have an answer.”
“Do you think he was local? Like maybe that’s why he chose this place?”
“No clue, but I doubt it,” Bert said. “Somebody would have said something by now. We’re a pretty tight little town.
“But I’ll tell you what—it’s been good for business. You’d be surprised how many people have come in here over the last couple of years and asked us that question. Sir Scott’s has always been real popular in the area but that poem there has really brought a lot more in. That and the steaks. Have you had our steak fingers?”
Cassie thought that she might have that night with Jim, but that evening was still a blur.
“Some of the treasure hunters stay for food,” Yvette said. “Most of them just poke around and ask a bunch of questions like you have and go on their merry way. Those types are a waste of our time. So it hasn’t been all that great for business if you want to know the truth.
“We’ve even been accused of writing it ourselves,” Yvette said with anger. “Like we’d do something like that for the publicity or something. I can promise you we didn’t write it.”
“I can hardly spell,” Bert said with a chuckle. “Ask anybody. We don’t need a dumb poem to get people in here.”
“Or a story about Jane Fonda,” Yvette said. Bert shook his head in agreement.
“Excuse me?” Cassie said. “Jane Fonda?”
“That was a good one,” Bert said. “There was a rumor a few years ago. It was way before the poem appeared.”
He told Cassie that a story got started that he and Yvette turned away local ranch owners Ted Turner and Jane Fonda when the two were married and lived part-time in the area. Although it never actually happened, military veterans from all over the country made a point to visit Sir Scott’s as their patriotic duty because he’d refused a table to antiwar Fonda.
As Bert told the story, the front door behind Cassie opened and a young man entered looking sheepish. The figure was tall and pale and he wore a stocking cap and a week-old beard. His movements were unsteady. He looked cautiously around the restaurant until his gaze settled on the poem.
“There’s one of ’em now,” Yvette said to Cassie. “Another treasure hunter. Let’s see if he asks to order food or not.”
When the man saw Cassie he blanched and turned on his heel and flew out the door. Cassie was confused.
“Do you know him?” Yvette asked Cassie.
“I don’t think so,” she replied.
“He acted like he knew you,” Yvette said.
Then it hit her.
Cassie pushed through the door to the sidewalk and looked both ways. She saw a glimpse of him as he turned around the corner of the restaurant. He was in a hurry, with his arms swinging at his sides. She recognized that awkward gait. It hadn’t changed.
“Hey,” she shouted. “Stop.”
She ran down the sidewalk and turned around it just in time to see the man opening the door of a five-year-old Toyota Tundra with North Dakota plates.
“Kyle,” she cried. “Don’t run away.”
Her voice apparently made Kyle Westergaard pause. He stood there with his back to her with the truck door half-open. But he didn’t jump inside the cab.
“Kyle!”
He turned slowly as she approached him. His greeting to her came off like a weighty obligation, which she found puzzling. She slowed so she wouldn’t be too winded when she got to him.
Kyle was a man now, nineteen years old. He was tall and lean and he wore an oil-stained white T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. His arms and face were tanned and his hair had lightened some since she last saw him. His eyes were the same though; a little vacant, a little unfocused.
“Kyle,” she said. “It’s you. Why did you run when you saw me?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking ashamed.
“You look great,” she said. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
Before he could respond, Cassie hugged him. After a beat, he hugged her back but with less fervor.
Cassie had last seen Kyle Westergaard five years before when Kyle and his Grandma Lottie were at the Bozeman airport waiting for their flight back to North Dakota. Cassie had pursued the kidnapped boy across both states until she finally located him at an isolated mountain cabin taken over by Ronald Pergman, the Lizard King.
Kyle had been born with a mild case of fetal alcohol syndrome and his speech was impaired, but he’d been smart enough to leave clues for Cassie along his route. He’d also been instrumental in taking down Pergman using the trucker’s own custom-made explosive device.
“Hi, Cassie,” Kyle said. Then he quickly looked away.
“You do recognize me,” she said. “So why did you run?”
Kyle shrugged and looked at his boots.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
He stared at the town park across the street and didn’t answer. Cassie knew Kyle well enough to remember that look. Kyle felt guilty about something. She was pleased to know that he still couldn’t lie to her.
“I need to get going,” Kyle said.
“Not before we have a cup of coffee together and catch up,” Cassie said. She looped her arm through his and gently steered him down the sidewalk.
He sighed and reluctantly agreed.
They found a diner on the next block and took a booth away from other patrons. Cassie ordered coffee and Kyle ordered a Mountain Dew.
“Really?” Cassie chided him. “Just soda?”
“I am kind of hungry.”
“Then order what you want.”
A grin formed on his mouth as if he was smiling at a secret joke. He ordered pancakes, eggs, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, and two orders of bacon. He’d always been a big breakfast eater and by the look of him, she thought, he hadn’t eaten recently.
“So what’s going on, Kyle?” she asked. “What brings you back to Montana?” She asked it in a friendly way and she deliberately steered away from using her interrogation voice.
He paused and for the first time that morning his eyes met hers. “I’m trying to find Sir Scott’s Treasure.”
“Ah. And are you making progress?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“You didn’t know I was in that restaurant before you came in?”
“No. I shouldn’t have run away. It surprised me that you were there. I feel kind of stupid about that.”
“You wanted to see the poem in person?”
“Yeah.”
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” Cassie said. “You’ve really matured.”
“Thanks, I guess,” he said.
Kyle’s speech had improved measurably over the past five years, Cassie observed. Although he likely still sounded slow and disjointed to people he encountered for the first time, he could at least be clearly understood. He no longer slurred his words and he remembered to pause at the end of sentences.
“Why?” she asked.
He looked up.
“Why are you spending your time trying to find the treasure? Don’t you have a job?”
“I’ve got a job in the oil patch in Bakken County,” he said. “I deliver parts to the wells. But I get three weeks of vacation.”
And he was spending it looking for a chest full of gold. “What if you found it? What would you do with the money?”
“I need it.”
“But do you?”
“Yeah,” Kyle said, “Grandma Lottie needs help. She’s got dementia but she wants to stay in her old house. I gotta help her before something terrible happens or the county hauls her away to some kind of home. Last month she was making lefse and she forgot to take it off of the griddle. She nearly burned her kitchen down and she would have if I didn’t stop by and smell the smoke. I found her sleeping in her recliner. She could have burned up.”
Lottie had been Kyle’s primary caregiver while he grew up. His mother, Lottie’s daughter, had been a meth addict and alcoholic until she was killed.
Cassie reached across the table and placed her hand on his. “Kyle, I’m sure there are programs that could help her out. Like in-home health care. Have you checked into them?”
“She won’t take no welfare,” Kyle said. “She’s told me she’d rather die than count on the gov’mint. So I gotta help her. I need to hire a nurse or something. I can’t stay with her all day and I worry about her when I’m out at my job in the field.”
“That’s very admirable, Kyle.”
“She took good care of me,” he said. “She’s all I got.”
“I know that. But is treasure hunting your only option?”
“You know, it isn’t easy,” he said. “You have to know that a guy with my issues can’t ever really make real money out there. I’m never going to be no supervisor or anything like that. I’m about as high on the totem pole as I’ll ever get.”
He said it in a matter-of-fact way that broke Cassie’s heart.
“So you think finding the treasure will do it, eh?” she asked.
“I know it would. I know it.”
The waitress returned with a cup of coffee for Cassie and a big platter of steaming food for Kyle. He dug right in. As he ate, Cassie studied his face. His expression was as guileless as it had always been. She wondered if in a strange way his disability had been a blessing, considering what he’d gone through in his life. None of the trauma he’d experienced seemed to reflect in his face or his outlook.
As he ate, he talked.
“You know I always liked puzzles. It’s something I’m pretty good at. I can do puzzles even though other things I’m not so good with. At all.”
She smiled.
“Well, I studied ‘Sir Scott’s Treasure Poem’ for months. I got out my maps and I memorized that poem. I could tell you it word for word right now if you want.”
“That’s okay.”
“I read that poem and I said: It’s got to be in Montana. You know I’ve only been to Montana that one time and it was pretty awful for me, but I didn’t forget how it looked and how it felt. It was so different than North Dakota. I just know that treasure is in Montana. I didn’t even know about Sir Scott’s Oasis right here. When I found that out it made me even more sure.”
She sipped her coffee and urged him on. As he delved into the lines of the poem his enthusiasm was palpable.
“First, that line, ‘Begin where the rivers marry,’” he said. “That can only mean the confluence of two or more rivers, right? Montana has plenty of ’em. You remember how I used to know all the rivers?” he asked.
“I remember.”
It was true. Kyle and his friend Raheem spent months planning their river expedition from Grimstad to New Orleans on a boat they’d equipped themselves. It had been a wildly ambitious and dubious expedition for two fourteen-year-old boys to float on the Missouri to the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. Kyle had made lists of the gear they’d need and he’d scrounged river maps so they’d know where to navigate. Unfortunately, after the two boys set off on their adventure they’d been intercepted by Ronald Pergram.
“You’ve got the Missouri, that’s the big one,” Kyle said. “Lots of rivers flow into it: the Yellowstone, the Judith, the Marias, and others.
“Before that there’s the Yellowstone. Rivers that flow into it are the Clark’s Fork, the Bighorn, the Rosebud, the Tongue, and the Powder River. That’s not to mention Three Forks, where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin all come together.”
“That’s a lot of possibilities,” Cassie said.
“It is, it is. But you gotta figure the treasure isn’t on private land. It’s got to be somewhere on public land where it could be hidden. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair at all.”
“Who says the guy who hid it is fair?” Cassie asked rhetorically.
“I just think he is,” Kyle said. “He wants it to be found. He says so and I believe him.”
“Okay.”
“Then those lines about ‘walls closing in.’ So a canyon. And ‘depending on the season.’ That means the river doesn’t have a constant flow, I think. Which says to me it isn’t downstream of a dam where they regulate the flow.
“There’s a lot more to it,” Kyle said, mopping up the last of the pancake syrup on his plate with a strip of bacon. “I could keep going for hours. Like the burn thing. Where do rivers meet near a canyon that had a forest fire? That’s what it boils down to.”
“So you go out to where rivers come together and hike around?” Cassie asked.
“I’ve been to twelve places in the last two years,” Kyle said. “I’m narrowing down the others. None of them have had everything I’m looking for. But I’m getting close. I can feel it,” he said.
“Do you see other treasure hunters around when you’re looking?” she asked.
“Some. But I don’t talk with them.”
“Do you spend a lot of time online in those treasure hunter chat groups?” Cassie asked.
He shook his head. “Too much bullshit on them for me. I think most of those guys are making it all too complicated. I want to figure it out on my own.”
“How would you characterize the man who hid the treasure?” Cassie asked. “What do you think he’s like?”
Kyle looked up suspiciously. His eyes narrowed. That was a tell, Cassie thought.
“I think he’s fair, like I said. I gotta trust him.”
“Have you learned much about him?”
Kyle looked away. Cassie could see Kyle’s neck redden.
“Did you find anything worthwhile when you broke into my office?” she asked.
Kyle jerked as if he’d been slapped. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. And he didn’t deny it.
“How did you get in?” she asked.
He looked away. “There’s a key under the mat outside.”
“There is?”
Cassie thought it must have been left there by an earlier tenant. She’d never thought to look. She made a note to herself to do a better job of hiding a key to the new locks when she got back to her office.
“How did you know I was working for him?” Cassie asked.
“He made a post that said he hired a private investigator to find him, and you’re the only private investigator I know. Plus, you’re in Montana. I feel really bad about this. I really do. You’ve only ever been good to me. You and Grandma Lottie.”
“Kyle?”
“I didn’t steal anything,” he said. “I didn’t break anything. I really didn’t. I’m really sorry.”
“Did you take anything with you?”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t in your office long enough to find anything useful,” he said.
“So how did you know he hired me?” Cassie asked again.
He sighed and said, “I did what I learned from you. I kept to myself and I listened.”
She arched her eyebrows indicating he should go on. It worked with Ben and it worked with Kyle.
“I came to Bozeman thinking I’d see you and Ben since I was there. I went to your old office and somebody there told me about your new one so I went downtown. I stopped at that coffee shop in your building to wait for you to come back. While I was down there the waitresses were telling each other about some envelope that somebody dropped off with them for you and that it all had to do with Sir Scott’s Treasure.
“I’m really sorry I did what I did,” he said. “I feel like shit about it.”
Cassie was suspicious of the story. How would the baristas downstairs have any idea of who Cassie’s new client was? All they’d been involved with was making sure the manila folder was delivered. Then she realized what had likely happened.
Isabel had coffee down there every day. She’d befriended most of the employees. Isabel liked to talk.
Cassie wanted to kill her at the moment.
“Why didn’t you just come to me?” she asked. “Why all the sneaking around?”
“Because I knew you wouldn’t tell me,” he said.
She started to argue but she knew he was correct. She wouldn’t divulge any confidential information about a client—even to Kyle. He knew her well enough to know that.
“I won’t press charges,” she said. “But you better not do it again. I have to say I’m disappointed in you, Kyle.”
His eyes filled with sudden tears. “I’m disappointed in my own damn self,” he said. “And I didn’t really learn nothing. Other than you think the guy is from Montana, too.”
Maybe because he was upset his speech pattern reverted to his younger self. Dish-appointed in mah own dam shelf.
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“You wrote it on the side of your report. You wrote, ‘He’s from Montana.’”
She hadn’t remembered scribbling it but she was sure Kyle was right.
“How did you know it was me?” he asked.
“It was a guess,” she confessed. “But usually when a burglar breaks in they do some damage, even inadvertently. You were careful not to mess anything up. That seems like you, Kyle.
“I don’t know the identity of my client,” Cassie said. “I don’t think I’m breaking any rules by telling you that.”
Cassie sat back and drank the last of her coffee. Kyle squirmed across the table. He couldn’t wait to leave.
“How long will you be around?” she asked.
“Another week or so,” he said. “Then I need to head back.”
“Where will you be?”
He hesitated, not wanting to answer.
“Kyle, I could care less about the treasure,” she said. “Whatever you tell me stays with me.”
“I’m going to go check out Three Forks,” he said. “Where the three rivers meet. Then the Little Blackfoot River.”
“Where are you staying?”
Kyle gestured to his pickup. “It isn’t so bad,” he said. “I got a sleeping bag and everything.”
“Let’s keep in touch while you’re here,” she said. “I know Ben would love to see you before you go. He talks about you all the time.”
“He’s a good guy,” Kyle said.
“I agree.”
“I bet he’s different now that he’s older.”
“He’s much taller, for sure,” she said. “But he’s still my gentle boy.”
They exchanged cell phone numbers.
“I’ve gotta go as soon as we get the bill,” he said.
“It’s covered,” she said.
“Now you make me feel even worse.”
“Good,” she said with a wink.
Out on the sidewalk, they parted ways. As Kyle lumbered toward his truck he said, “I’m really sorry, Cassie.”
“It’s not okay but it doesn’t mean we can’t move on,” she said. “Is Lottie still at her old number?”
“Yeah, she doesn’t believe in cell phones.”
“I’ll call her.”
“She’d like that.”
“Keep in touch, Kyle. And good luck.”
He did an awkward skipping move and flashed her two thumbs-up in the street before continuing to his pickup.
Cassie thought, If anyone deserves to find that treasure …