By the time Ettinger reunited Stranahan with his dog and dropped them at the tipi, the evening had all but died. He checked the fluid levels in his ’76 Land Cruiser, made a note to change the oil, and settled behind the wheel as the engine thundered out of a monthlong slumber. He motored into town to check the mail that had been held for him at the Bridger Mountain Cultural Center, mulling over Martha’s advice to get in touch with Max Gallagher. The truth was, buying a tank of gas to drive up the Madison Valley didn’t appeal to him. Still, it was the logical step and he thought about it for the twenty minutes it took to drive into town and climb the stairs to his art studio. Gallagher, standing outside the studio door, saved him the decision.
“Blue Ribbon Watercolors. Private Investigations.” Gallagher read aloud the lettering etched into the frosted glass. “All you need is somebody to scratch in a pistol with smoke curling out the barrel.”
Stranahan ushered him inside. “You need a bath, Max,” he said.
“I haven’t exactly been sleeping. Or eating. Or washing up.”
Stranahan waited while Gallagher’s bloodshot eyes crawled around the paintings on the walls. When they stopped and narrowed, Stranahan knew that he’d noticed the watercolor of the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club. It was evening in the painting, the co-owners gearing up on the porch as a swarm of caddis flies mobbed the light over the door. Gallagher was flanked by Robin Hurt Cowdry, who was stringing his fly rod, and by Kenneth Winston, whose long ebony fingers were tying on a fly. Patrick Willoughby, the club president, sat on the bench pulling up his waders, his round glasses giving him the look of a professorial owl. The initials P.S. were carved into the door, as homage to Polly Sorenson, the club’s founder who had died on the bank of one of his beloved Catskill streams a couple years before.
“Don’t tell anybody yet,” Stranahan said. “It’s a gift to the club for voting me an honorary member.”
“Maybe if I had your talent I wouldn’t have to pay my dues, either,” Gallagher said. “I’ve been a little strapped lately.”
“So the sheriff informed me.”
Gallagher nodded. “Does she really think I had anything to do with that girl dying in the chimney? I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, but the only person I ever hurt was myself.”
“Would your exes agree to that assessment?”
“Well, those two witches aside.” He grinned, the canine leer Stranahan remembered from the day he’d introduced Martinique to the club members, some two summers ago. Gallagher had bent to kiss her hand, making a titching sound, as if he wanted to devour her arm with a side of fava beans. Martinique had told Sean it made her think of the quote by Lana Turner—“A gentleman is simply a patient wolf.”
Martinique. That sweet, unaccountably shy woman with a soft spot for cats had become the love of his life, long before he’d ever worked a jigsaw puzzle with Martha Ettinger. No one could have told him that the relationship would falter after Martinique had been accepted into the veterinary medicine program at Oregon State in Corvallis, that she would gradually pull away, his phone calls going straight to message.
“I seem to have caught you at a bad time.”
Sean swam out of his reverie. “No, I’ve just got jet lag. Why are you here, Max?”
“There may have been something I didn’t think to tell the sheriff. I’d like to ask your advice.”
“In a professional capacity, or as a friend?”
“I can’t afford to pay you.”
Sean reached for the lower right-hand drawer of his desk, brought out the fifth of The Famous Grouse, and poured shots into two cups. He brought out the nose with a few drops of tap water. “It isn’t branch water from your creek,” he said, “but I doubt you’ll object.”
Gallagher didn’t.
Stranahan said, “I heard you tried to go back to the cabin in the middle of the night. Why don’t we start with what you were looking for. It certainly wasn’t your computer.”
“Oh, that. I thought I’d left some blow in the drawer of the table. But it was in my duffel, stuffed in a sock. I’d forgotten.” He dismissed the matter with a flick of his hand. “You could say I was understandably confused.”
“So, false alarm.”
He nodded. “Scared the shit out of me at the time, though.”
Stranahan smiled unsympathetically.
“It’s just a damned coincidence, the girl dying like that.”
“How’s that?”
“Do you have time for a story about how bad a man can fuck himself?”
“It’s what pays the rent.”
“Good line. Don’t sue me if I steal it.”
“I won’t.”
“Okay. You know I used to be a reporter? Well, it’s been back a few years, but I wrote a story about a professor at UC Santa Cruz who tried to break into her former lover’s house. He had a restraining order against her and she wanted to confront him about why he’d left. So guess what she did?”
“She crawled down his chimney.”
“How did you know that?”
“Why else would you be telling me?”
“Yeah, okay. Well, it gets better, I mean worse. The boyfriend was part of a farming co-op and had signed up to harvest artichokes in Castroville, see what it’s like to fill immigrant shoes. When he returned home two days later, the ex was dripping body fluids into the fireplace. They had to jackhammer a hole in the chimney to get her out.”
“Did she live?”
“She not only lived. She married him.”
“True love,” Stranahan suggested.
“True story. So you see my predicament? I had knowledge of a particularly unusual circumstance, and now the same scenario is repeated. It stinks of coincidence, or I guess the opposite.”
“Every newspaper in the state must have carried that story.”
“Well, yes, but that isn’t the end of it. My last relationship was a literature professor at San Jose State. Barbara Louganis. The night she broke up with me—mind you I’d told her that story—I said she was going to change her mind and come back to me. She said, ‘Like hell I will,’ and then she started throwing books. My books. I have all the editions in this wall case and she was picking them out and throwing them at me one after another. I sort of tackled her to get her to stop and she called the police. We were standing at crossed swords when they arrived.
“And”—he laughed mirthlessly—“this you gotta love. I told her I wouldn’t take her back even if she wrapped herself in cellophane and came down the chimney with a red ribbon around her neck. I told her that in front of officers of the law. When I saw the Santa hat and climbed up on the roof, guess what was crawling around the back of my mind? I mean, Barbara’s certifiable. For all I know she followed me here and that was her in the chimney.”
Gallagher had elbowed forward on the desk as he talked, his whiskey breath heavy in Stranahan’s nostrils. “Now is that fucking yourself, or is that fucking yourself?” He nodded, looking straight into Sean’s eyes. Then he sat back in his chair.
Sean shook his head. “The body in the chimney’s a teenage girl who went missing last fall. How old is Barbara Louganis?”
“Barbara’s thirty-five, but she looks younger. That thing I was looking at in the chimney had a round face. Barbara has a round face. I don’t know how the hell she could have followed me out here, I didn’t know I was coming myself until I did. But it scares the hell out of me.”
“The CSI says the person in the chimney was dead two or three weeks, so that scenario is impossible.”
Gallagher shook his head. “They could say I was here earlier and came back just to report the body, to remove myself from the suspect pool. I work alone, I live alone. It’s not like I have a fucking alibi for every night in April. There’d be gaps in credit card records, phone—”
Stranahan held up a hand. “I can think of about ten reasons it can’t be your girlfriend, starting with how she could get here. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If this doesn’t turn out to be the person we think it is, I’ll make some calls.” He tore a Post-it note, scribbled a few lines, and pushed it over. “These are directions to Law and Justice. The sheriff’s at the morgue, so ask to see Warren Jarrett. Tell him what you told me. He’ll make you squirm, but it’s better to do this now rather than wait and have it come out. Besides, if you don’t, I will.”
“I talked to you in confidence, Sean. Isn’t that what private investigator means, your communication is private?”
Stranahan shook his head. “You ought to know better. In criminal matters, I turn over any pertinent information I get to the authorities. I’m just on someone else’s payroll.”
“Is this a criminal matter?”
“Not yet. Think of it this way. Even if it was this woman, as long as she died of exposure, she’s just a crazy person lusting after her former lover. It would be one hell of a story and you’d get burned as a contributing cause, but my guess is it would sell books.”
“Any publicity is good publicity?” Gallagher cocked his head. “I suppose you’re right about that.”
“Get out of here.”
Sean felt his cell phone vibrating against his thigh. He checked the number. It was none that he knew, but the 578 prefix included the Shields River Valley.
“Hello, this is Sean Stranahan. Could you hold a second?”
He took the phone from his ear and shooed Gallagher out the door. “I’ll call Warren and tell him you’re coming.”
“Why do I think I’m off to the gallows?” Gallagher said. He smiled, the commas fissuring his stubbled cheeks. He shut the door. Stranahan waited until his footsteps faded on the travertine floor tiles.
“Mr. Stranahan, are you there?” It was a woman’s voice, a nervous one.
“Yes, I’m back.”
“This is Etta Huntington. I’ve just had a call from Dr. Hanson at the coroner’s office. That was my daughter who died that horrible way.” The voice broke up and Stranahan could hear her ragged breaths.
“Mrs. Huntington—”
“It’s Ms. Huntington.”
“Ms. Huntington, I’m very sorry for your loss. It’s a terrible tragedy.”
“Yes, I suppose those are the words people say at a time like this. But they are little consolation, even though I have been preparing for this day for almost five months, or trying to. I felt her spirit for so long and so I thought she was alive, and now I know she really was, all that time she was alive and I was right to hope . . .”
Stranahan could hear her labored breathing.
“Could you drive down to the ranch? I would like to see you before dark, so you get a sense of the place.”
“Did Sheriff Ettinger give you my number?”
“She said you’re a man who can get to the bottom of a dark river. I intend to hire you to find out how my daughter ended up in a . . . in that place.” There was a silence, a sound Stranahan took as a swallow and a dull rap like a lowball glass being set down on a tabletop. Well, I might be drinking too under the circumstances, he thought.
“You understand that this is an active investigation. You’d be paying me to do a job that people with more resources are doing as we speak. It might be wiser to wait—”
“I have already waited once for authorities to fail Cinderella before taking matters into my own hands. I won’t make that mistake again.”
Stranahan told her he could be on the road in an hour. “I might be intruding on your dinner. I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”
“Mr. Stranahan, you must not have children. I have not eaten. I don’t know when I will ever eat again. I have no appetite for food. Surely you understand that.”
Again he heard the swallowing sound and the click of the imagined glass.
“Ms. Huntington?”
There was no answer. She had hung up.