What happened to your head?”
“I got too close to a glassblower’s pipe. Is your husband home? There’s something you need to sit down for.”
“Oh no.” She covered her mouth with her hand. “I . . . you found out.” Her jaw began to quiver. “What happened that—”
“Part of the puzzle, Etta. I found out only part of it.” He slapped his jacket against a rail to shake off the beads of rainwater.
“Jasper,” he heard her call into the dark of the house.
They sat on the sofa facing Charlie Russell’s sunset, a foot of tension between their bodies as Stranahan told them straight out that Charles Watt had been murdered, that the mountain man who had harbored their daughter over the winter was suspected, and that his probable motive was to revenge Cinderella by killing the man who sexually molested her. He said the crime lab would provide a DNA comparison with tissue taken from the fetus. They would know for certain if Watt was the father in three days.
“Have they caught him, this so-called mountain man?” Jasper Fey’s voice was controlled, but his face had undergone a remarkable transformation since Stranahan’s arrival. His smiling mask, firmly in place for the handshake, had vanished as he stepped back to minimize the height differential, the blood boiling to the surface, reddening his skin. At the mention of Charles Watt, his visage had turned to one of stunned disbelief. Then—it could not have taken a second—the blood drained, leaving a map of broken capillaries to color the right cheek. Stranahan had audited a class on reading faces at the police academy in Billings, and remembered that the reaction was a fight-or-flight response. When the body felt it was under threat or suffered great stress, the surface blood vessels constricted, reducing circulation to the skin as it pumped blood into the internal organs and heavy muscles, to prepare them for survival. Stranahan understood that Fey would be shocked to learn that his lifelong friend had violated his daughter, but even so, the reaction seemed extreme.
Fey broke the silence. “You think you know a person,” he said. He started to speak again and then didn’t, just sat shaking his head.
“He’s also your horsehair thief,” Stranahan said. “At least the horsehair was found in his house. And drug paraphernalia. We think he sold the hair to buy methamphetamine.”
“That bastard.” They were the first words Etta Huntington had uttered since sitting. “That fucking bastard. I wish I’d killed him myself.”
“Now Etta—”
“Fuck you, Jasper Fey. Fuck you. I told you a hundred times there was something about him . . .”
She turned to Sean. “You never knew who he really was,” she said. “He hid behind that leather face, give you a wink and that bullshit drawl, a fucking homily a minute. Sit through a dozen dinners but you didn’t know him. But Jasper did. Drinking buddies, fighting buddies. Whoring buddies.” She exhaled the words. “Yeah, they had rodeo groupies. Little cokehead cowgirls.”
“Etta, the man saved my life.”
“I wish he hadn’t.”
When Fey reached to touch her shoulder, she jumped to her feet. Her left hand grappled for a cup on the coffee table and she hurled it at the mantel. It bounced off the rock and fell to the Indian print rug, intact.
“Fucking worthless arm. I can’t even break goddamned china.” She stalked to the front door and slammed it behind her.
Fey sat with his head bowed. When he looked up, the color had returned to his face but he seemed to be very far away.
“I want to be mad at you,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “For bringing this calamity into my home I ought to just kick the shit out of you, but I’m all wrung out.”
“It isn’t me who’s brought the calamity. It’s you and it’s your old butt buddy. I know about the club, Jasper.”
Fey started to voice his objection, then just shook his head.
“What I don’t know is why you had Charles Watt take your place. He was rough on that girl in the cabin. Or did you know that? But then why should he be any different with her than anyone else? Did he have some kind of hold over you, is that what it was, you paying him off in sex?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He was looking at the picture on the wall, narrowing his eyes, as if assessing it at auction. “Old Charlie sure knew a sunset.” He spoke softly, to himself, as if Stranahan wasn’t in the room. “Back east, they have no idea.”
Finally he looked over. “I’d ask you not to tell Etta. The club doesn’t have a damned thing to do with Cinderella and all it will do is disturb her to no purpose. I loved my daughter. Whatever happens, happens. I’ll let God be the judge of me. But I loved her.” He looked at Stranahan. “Just get the hell out of my house before I shoot you for trespass.”
• • •
She was standing at the side of the road, her hair stringing in the rain. Stranahan was at least a quarter mile from the house and he had only been a few minutes behind her; she must have run the entire distance. He stopped and pushed open the door and she climbed in, bringing in the cold, pulling Choti onto her lap and hugging the dog until she whimpered.
He let out the clutch. “Where to?”
“Go to the stables.”
He started to turn the wheel, but she gripped his hand. “No, the second right.” A hundred yards farther down she had him turn onto a two-track. She got the gate and they followed a road that headed north, then curled around to the back of the stables. “Park behind the tractor,” she told him. She stepped out of the Land Cruiser. “I want to show you—”
She stopped. There was silence. Choti cocked her ears.
“That’s Jasper’s truck. He knows I go riding, that it’s how I deal with stress. If he tries to stop me—he won’t, but if he does—don’t get all protective or anything. I’m my own woman. I can handle him.” But the growl that drew even with the elevation of the stables began to fade.
“He’s leaving,” she said. “Wherever he’s off to, he won’t be back until midnight anyway. He’ll just drive and talk to that little mutt of his. I’d say he’d go all the way to Pony if he hadn’t been kicked out of the bar. He’ll probably end up at the Cottonwood, playing poker. No, that’s only on Tuesdays.” She made a dismissive gesture. “Why am I even thinking about it? I don’t care where he goes.”
“He seemed pretty upset about Charles Watt.”
“Yeah, more upset than hearing what he did to my daughter. That’s Jasper all over.” She turned her head toward the mountain backdrop behind the property, the peaks drowned in clouds.
“It will be turning to snow in the high country,” she said. “We’ll have to wear chaps.”
• • •
If words were silver and sentences gold, Stranahan was still a poor man at eight thousand feet. He told Etta as much when they stopped to let the horses blow, having been climbing for more than an hour.
“What’s that mean?” It was only the second time she’d spoken since helping him with a stirrup adjustment at the stables.
“Something my mother used to say about my father. He never met a stranger, but at home he could go hours between words. She called him the ‘man of little comment.’”
Etta responded by clucking to her horse and another half hour passed and Stranahan was no richer.
The country they’d been climbing into was new country yet familiar, the trail following a creek bottom behind the stables into the upper acreage of the ranch, passing a graveyard of farm machinery, the rusty tines of a defunct rotary tiller looking like a dinosaur’s spinal column, before entering Forest Service land and switchbacking up the sidewall of a canyon. Topping out, they stopped again, the ribs of the horses expanding like accordions as they blew great plumes of breath. A vista spread before them, its features blurred by the haze of snowfall, but showing peaks ahead and to the south. A dark crease marked the South Fork of the Shields River. Stranahan’s eyes followed the crease to the feeder creek up which he and Martha had climbed to discover Bear Paw Bill’s camp. Farther to the west was the bald ridge, at the foot of which, facing the valley, stood the cabin. Because the foothills fanned out between the ranch house and the cabin, the distance between the two points seemed considerable. But it was no more than a couple miles or so, at least as measured by the wing beats of an eagle.
Etta tied her horse to a stunted pine and shrugged into the straps of a daypack. From this point they followed a path made by mountain goats, where their hooves had chipped the rock a lighter color than the surrounding obsidian. To either side, the ridge fell away in a shoulder of scree, then into nothing at all. “Just keep your eyes on your boots,” Etta said. “This isn’t as bad as it looks. If you fell here, you wouldn’t die.”
“Oh? Which part of me wouldn’t be dead?” Stranahan felt lightheaded and had the sensation that the ground was shifting under his feet.
He counted steps until they had crested out onto a windswept expanse of rock, from which they could look east all the way to the prairie. Directly in front and about six hundred feet below was a small lake, dropped like a pearl from heaven, with a thread of silver creek running from the outlet. Stranahan knew where they were now but decided to let Etta tell him her way, in her time. They switchbacked down to the shore, where they sat down after scraping the snow skiff off a flat rock. Choti had negotiated the precipitous terrain without a whimper or false step and started chasing after a marmot that scolded from a rock. Sean called her back.
“I recognized this place when I saw the documentary,” Etta said. “Or at least I knew that I’d seen it before, but I didn’t put it together with the lake until the night you found Bear Paw Bill. It’s the closest lake to his camp; it wouldn’t have taken them more than an hour to climb to the ridge behind us.”
Stranahan nodded. “Cindy must have shot the video from the headwall.” His eyes swept the semicircle of exposed rock that cupped the basin. The cliff faces were sheer, with a band of rock scree near the top, and pocked with caves. “Have you climbed up there?”
“No, it would be pretty hard with one arm. Anyway, I’m more interested in what she contemplated—I guess that’s the word. I’ve never been on a vision quest, but I’ve read about them. They say that when you focus on country for a long time, it releases endorphins. You become euphoric. My feeling is that no matter what Charlie did to her, she found a kind of bliss looking down at this lake. I hope she thought of me when she was up here. I know in my heart she would have returned to me, that that’s what she was doing when . . . when it happened. Now, at least, I’ve found a place to scatter her ashes.”
“Is that what’s in your pack?”
“Yes. It’s all that remains of her except what’s in here.” She fingered a silver and turquoise locket from the front of her shirt. “I have the ashes of all my children in this locket.”
“Why did you bring me here, Etta?”
“Because I shared her star with you.” She was silent a beat. “People have always made up their minds before meeting me. It’s been a curse, like the curse of being betrayed by your body when you think you’re bringing life into the world. But at least I had Cinderella for a little while. I’m sure you were warned about me, the madwoman of the Crazies, the second coming of that particular legend. But I’m just a mother who lost her children. All I ever wanted to do was ride horses and be a mother. That’s all I ever wanted to do.”
Stranahan didn’t know what to say and they sat in silence, watching the riffles skate in the breeze. His sweat had dried and he buttoned his jacket.
“Would you mind terribly if I was alone?” Etta said. “I have some things to say to my daughter before I let her go.” She took a plastic bag out of her pack and walked the shoreline toward the outlet of the lake. Sean turned his head the other way to respect her privacy.
When she returned, Stranahan was examining the caves in the headwall with a pair of binoculars.
“What part of me would be alive if I fell trying to climb up there?” He said it to coax a smile, but she took the question seriously.
“Only your soul,” she said.