Cassie spent the remainder of the afternoon haunting the streets and alleyways of Anaconda, soaking it up. She had often found that insights and revelations came to her while simply driving around, and she tried to sort out her two interactions with Undersheriff Doug Duplisea with what she knew about Spengler’s disappearance. Things simply didn’t add up, but she came to no conclusions.
She drove by the fenced-off remains of the industrial area in town: massive soot-covered brick buildings that now housed ancient machinery or nothing at all. There were a few vehicles inside the enclosure and she wondered what the people did for a living inside the district now that mining and smelting copper was no longer viable.
At Mount Olivet Cemetery she marveled at the number of memorials and effusive arrays of flowers on the gravestones. She’d never seen such an audacious display at any other cemetery in her life, and she chalked it up to how seriously locals maintained their devotion and loyalty to their departed relatives. It was both moving and unusual.
Downtown, Cassie had noted a thin, haggard woman dutifully pushing a shopping cart filled with her possessions toward the western outskirts of town. Later, as Cassie approached her, she saw the same woman pushing the cart back the other way when one of its wheels slipped over the curb. She lost control of it and it rolled into the street.
Cassie braked so she wouldn’t have a collision with the cart. The woman scrambled after it and grasped the push bar to stop it from crossing the street. While she did she shot Cassie an angry look.
“You nearly hit me,” the woman said. She wore oversized lace-up boots and several layers of clothing. Her hair was bound back in a ponytail and her eyes were wild. Her deeply tanned skin was wrinkled like the bark on a cottonwood tree. She was younger than Cassie would have guessed—likely in her fifties—but a victim of hard living and obvious mental illness.
While Cassie put her hands up in frustration, the woman wheeled the cart around the front of the Jeep and bumped it up against the driver’s side door. Not hard enough to leave a dent, but hard enough to annoy Cassie.
“Please move aside so I can go,” Cassie said after powering down her window.
“I’m Lyla,” the woman said. “Who the hell are you?”
“Cassie.”
“You nearly hit me.”
“I stopped so I wouldn’t hit you, Lyla.”
“Yeah, well,” Lyla said. She was still disturbingly angry. She leaned over her cart and thrust her face toward Cassie’s open window. Cassie shrank back. Lyla’s odor was pungent.
“They’re still out there,” Lyla said. “They’re still doing the things they always did, only now it’s worse.”
“What are you talking about?”
Lyla thrust a bent finger toward Cassie’s nose. “You remember them from high school. You remember what they’re like.”
Cassie shook her head and looked for a way to disengage. She didn’t want to peel away and risk injuring Lyla, but she wanted no part of this.
“You remember,” Lyla said again.
“Do you think we know each other?”
“Don’t play stupid,” Lyla said. “Tim, Doug, and Matty. You still got to watch out for them. Do you remember when they passed me around like a piece of meat? That was before my accident. Didn’t they pass you around in high school?”
“I’m not from here,” Cassie said. “Please back off. I’ve got to go.”
Lyla thrust the finger at Cassie again. “Watch out for them! If anybody goes missing around this town it’s because of one of them or all three of them. Watch out!”
“Okay,” Cassie said. “Thank you.”
Lyla nodded triumphantly, as if she’d finally made her point. When she backed the cart away from Cassie’s open window, Cassie pulled away.
She watched Lyla roll the cart back to the sidewalk in her rearview window. Lyla was still shouting and gesticulating as she did so.
Cassie slowed down her Jeep when she passed the construction site on Seventh Street because it was so striking. There, among older homes in various stages of disrepair, was the obvious relocation and refurbishing of a magnificent early twentieth-century Victorian brick mansion. The home stood out like a beacon, primarily because there were so few other new homes.
It was nestled with its back into the hillside and it looked out on the town that was spread out below it. It had turrets and gables with new windows fitted into old brick window openings. Through the huge glass windows on either side of the heavy double doors she could see a wide staircase inside leading up to the second floor and a crystal chandelier the size of her car hanging from the ceiling.
There were pallets of lumber on the side of the residence and virtually no landscaping on the churned-up grounds.
There was a lone figure out front—a man loading large rocks into a wheelbarrow. She couldn’t help but notice that he was tall and fit and very well-built. He wore jeans, work boots, and a dirty white T-shirt that clung to his sweaty chest and abs. His muscles bulged from the hard work he was doing.
He didn’t look like he was part of a construction crew—no hard hat, no tool belt—so what was he?
Suddenly, he glanced up as she drove slowly by and their eyes met. He had tousled dark hair and sharp blue eyes and a three-day beard. He was, she concluded, ridiculously good-looking.
Because he had caught her staring at him, she pulled over to the curb and turned off her car.
He paused and eyed her as she got out.
“Hello,” she said, trying to maintain her composure.
“Hello.”
“I’m Cassie Dewell. I’m a private investigator from Bozeman.”
“Matthew Annan,” he said. “I’d shake your hand but mine is really dirty, as you can see. So what brings you here?”
He had a natural, easy manner and, damn it, a wonderful smile.
She dug into her handbag for her phone and punched up the photo of J. D. Spengler.
“Do you know this man?” she asked. “Have you seen him around here?”
Annan squinted. “I’m sorry—I’m having trouble seeing it in the sun.”
She stepped from the sidewalk to the rough ground and offered him the phone. Her heels sunk into the loose dirt.
He took the phone from her and fished a pair of readers from his front pocket. She was grateful he had the same flaw she did. He looked closely at the photo. She got a whiff of him. Not unpleasant.
He handed the phone back. “No, I’m sorry but I can’t help you. Why are you looking for him?”
The readers went back into the pocket.
“He might have gone missing in this area two weeks ago,” she said. “I’ve been hired to try to find him.”
“I hope you do,” Annan said. “I’ll keep my eye out for him.” Then: “If I see him, how do I reach you?”
She felt a thrill pass over her and settle just below her abdomen. It was entirely unexpected.
“I mean, do you have a card or something?” He smiled again. He asked rhetorically, “Do people still carry business cards?”
“I do and I’ll get you one,” she said. Her mouth was dry, all of a sudden. She chinned toward the house. “That’s quite a place. Is it yours?”
He turned and looked at it with her. “Yes. I bought the lot fifteen years ago. There was a little bungalow on it that had been vacant since the 1940s but as you can see the view is to kill for. We finally knocked that bungalow down and replaced it with … this.
“Moving that house here has turned out to be quite an adventure. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.” He chuckled.
“Are you remodeling it yourself?”
“No, not entirely. I’m not a craftsman, and that place needs real old-school craftsmen. I just do what I can—which isn’t much.” He chuckled in a self-deprecating way. “Like picking up rocks. That, I can do.”
“It’s really beautiful,” she said. Cassie felt a little dumb for saying it. She sounded like an old-home fangirl, which she really wasn’t.
“I want to restore the house to what it once was,” Annan said. “I’ve got some old photos and we found the original plans. At one time it was really something.”
She recalled the businessmen at lunch talking about some foolish man moving a home from there.
“Is it from Butte?” she asked.
“Good call.” He nodded. “That house used to be one of the famous Copper King mansions. I grew up here, but all of the big-shot owners of the mines and the smelters that were in Anaconda lived someplace else.”
He gestured toward Anaconda in the valley below them.
“These are the people who did all the work. Some of them died doing it. Asking these good folks to work for you but not having your own home here just seems wrong to me, you know. So I like to think I’m doing my little part to right that wrong.
“God,” he said, laughing. “That sounded so self-righteous that I can’t believe it came out of my mouth. Can you just forget I ever said it?”
She looked at him. “Sure.”
“Thank you, Cassie.”
He called her by her name. Another thrill. Cassie felt like she was in high school and the handsome star quarterback had suddenly noticed her in the hallway. She was ashamed of herself.
“It’s been really tough,” he said. “Tougher than I thought it would be. Everything costs two or three times what I budgeted. We had to number every brick before we took it down to reassemble it over here. The woodwork inside was dried out and brittle and really tough to take apart and put back together. That chandelier you can see took nearly a month to carefully take apart. We couldn’t dare risk breaking any of the crystals because they just don’t make them like that anymore.
“And the toughest thing of all is to get reliable help. Craftsmen are hard to find on their own, but it’s hell to simply hire day workers for things like I’m doing—picking up rocks. All these unemployed kids around here—and no one wants to work. All they do is stare at their phones all day and collect unemployment checks from Uncle Sugar.
“Look,” he said, “I offer them twenty bucks an hour. That’s much more than minimum wage. But when they show up and see this wheelbarrow, well, all of the sudden it’s too much. They don’t come back the next day. I can convince transients to do some manual labor but they leave, too. I guess that’s why they call them transients,” he said with a wink.
“I know finding people to work is a problem,” Cassie agreed. “Every restaurant owner I know says the same thing.”
“It’s a national tragedy,” Annan said. “And one of our own making. Our country doesn’t value hard work anymore.”
She nodded. She didn’t know how to respond to that.
“I’m sorry to go off on that rant,” he said. “It’s just that I grew up taking every dirty job I could get so I could get a car, go to community college, all that. Sometimes I worked two or three jobs at a time. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t turn my nose up at hard work. Crap, there I go again.”
He shook his head and said, “Pretty soon I’m going to say, ‘kids these days.’ I never thought I’d say that.”
“No worries,” she said. Then: “I hope you can find some help. Your house will be spectacular.”
He looked at her. Deeply. It was thrilling and unnerving at the same time.
“If you weren’t on a case I’d love to show you around inside. They don’t build homes like this anymore. I have a feeling you’d appreciate the details.”
“Thank you for the offer,” she said. She knew she was flushing. “Maybe next time.”
“So you’ll be back around here?” He arched his eyebrows as he asked.
“I’m sure I will.”
“I’d say that is about the only good news I’ve heard all day.” He grinned.
She turned and walked back to her Jeep. She hoped she wasn’t using that stiff-legged gait she sometimes lapsed into when she was nervous or distressed.
As she reached for her door handle, Annan called out.
“Cassie?”
She paused.
“Your business card?”
“Oh, right.”
She fumbled for one and he was right there when she turned.
“Dewell Investigations,” he read. “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you,” he said, slipping the card into the back pocket of his jeans. His tight jeans. “I hope you find the guy you’re looking for.”
“It was a pleasure to meet you as well, Mr. Annan.”
“Call me Matthew,” he said.
Cassie circled the block and found a place to park so that a huge untrimmed hedge blocked her view of Matthew Annan’s home. She attached a long zoom lens to her digital camera and got out.
Through an opening between hedgerows she snapped a series of photos of Annan working in his front yard. He never looked up to spot her.
Then she backed down the street out of view.
Cassie was careful to keep below the speed limit as she drove out of Anaconda on her way home. Cassie didn’t want to give Duplisea or any of his deputies an excuse to pull her over.
She wasn’t that surprised, though, when she glanced at her rearview mirror to see that a sheriff’s department SUV was tailing her as she drove out of town. Had they been watching her all day, she wondered? Or had they picked her up on Main Street?
The cruiser followed her as far as the entrance to I-90 East. Once they were sure she was headed back to Bozeman, it slowed to a stop and turned around.
Although April called her on her cell phone, Cassie let it go to voice mail. The reason was she was having a hard and somewhat painful conversation with herself.
Matthew Annan was charming, attractive, and charismatic. He lit up the room even though he was wearing a dirty T-shirt and he was outside. She shifted uncomfortably in her car seat when she thought of him.
She knew she’d think of him later, when she was alone in bed. His pull was that powerful.
But she also knew that a man like that wouldn’t normally make a play for her like inviting her into his house. He was unusually interested in learning her name and getting her details, she thought. Annan acted like he was anxious to see her again—but was he?
He knew what kind of effect he had on her and probably 99 percent of all the women out there.
He was too good to be true, which was painful to concede to herself. He was the kind of man, she thought, who could approach an unattached older woman on a golf course and say, “If you’d like me to, I’ll wrestle that alligator to get your ball back.”
Cassie pulled over and parked on the side of the highway. She scrolled through the photos and tagged five good ones that clearly showed his face and upper torso. After transferring them to her phone via Bluetooth, she emailed them to Candyce Fly with the question, “Is this him?”
Between Butte and Bozeman, Cassie returned April’s call.
April said, “I’ve put together a pretty good list of male writers, I think. Once I dropped the ones who were dead, too old, or had moved from the state I came up with fourteen names.”
“Excellent job,” Cassie said. “Let’s go over them first thing tomorrow. Pay special attention to the ones who describe themselves as poets. Even the ones who are really bad poets—maybe self-published types.”
“I love this,” April enthused. “I love finding pukes.”
“He isn’t necessarily a puke,” Cassie said. “How many are in the Bozeman area?”
April paused as she scrolled through her list. Then: “Five. Most of these guys live in Missoula or the Flathead Valley. A couple in Billings.”
“I’m not surprised,” Cassie said. “And I might have something else for you. You and Ben, I mean.”
“Me and Ben?”
“How would you like to do some manual labor? Putting in sod, planting trees and bushes? That kind of thing?”
April got quiet.
“You’d be doing that work, but you’d also be keeping a close eye on the homeowner.”
“You mean spying?”
“I mean spying,” Cassie said.
April said, “Cool.”