Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1) (5 page)

Ellenberg remembered him all too well. He looked like a kid, hadn’t said much. He had stared at her from a seat near the front of the bus during the entire bus ride. He was the frail-looking one with the Red Sox cap. He could have been twenty-five; he could have been twelve. What she had seen of his scalp was hairless. His nose was a button and his cheeks were puffed hard, pink and frail. On the hike in, he had sputtered and coughed much more than the others and she had asked him directly if he was going to be able to make it. The answer was “yes” and the smile that went with it said
don’t worry
.

“Does anyone know where he pitched his tent?”

“There was a tent forty or fifty yards down in a small aspen grove. That way.” The voice belonged to an older man, thin with a long gray beard. He pointed off down the slope. “I was talking with a small guy who was putting it up yesterday.”

“Does anybody here claim that tent?” she said. Nobody spoke.

“Could you show me?” said Ellenberg. The chatter came to a halt as Ellenberg passed the man a flashlight. The group headed off.

They bumped around for three or four minutes in the dark, plunging through snow-covered bushes, until they stood next to a tent that sagged on the sides from a build-up of snow.

“Hello,” said Ellenberg. Please be there, she thought. “Anyone home?”

No answer. Her companion began searching for the zipper to the front flap.

“We can’t barge in,” said Ellenberg. “That’s private property. We don’t have his permission.”

“You’re right,” he said, a touch chagrined.

“Did you talk to him?”

“I asked him why he was putting up his tent so far away from the rest of the camp. He shrugged and said he was a light sleeper, needed complete quiet. Seemed like a nice enough guy.”

The group headed back to the warmth of the bonfire, where the concern and fear draped over them like a bad cloud. Maybe this missing man had headed down the mountain on his own. It was only an hour or so back out to the main road. Maybe he would turn up at any minute with a good story to tell and none the worse for wear. Ellenberg said a quick prayer to the public relations gods.

Three

It was fatigue all bound up with worry and weird thoughts. Allison had a hard time connecting the images from the day in her mind. She had put Bear away in the barn with a small sack of his own oats and had unloaded Eli. They both needed a good scrub but that would wait. It was midnight.

There was no one around to help or even talk to. Someone sleeping in the barn would have demonstrated concern for her whereabouts or well-being, but Allison had to remind herself not to look for such civilized touches. She was safe, dead, or struggling alone in the wilderness. Three choices. Take your pick. Had someone been sleeping in the barn, Allison would have felt like she belonged to a family. Loose-knit for sure, but still a family. But the barn’s lack of humans said it all. So much for sentiment.

Allison walked the last stretch home. David might already be there. But occasionally he’d have a beer and unwind before driving up from Glenwood Springs. She wanted to curl up and wrap an arm over his broad back and conk out. But now she was torn between wanting to avoid the long talk, in order to maximize sleep time, and wanting to discuss the details of the day and attempt to put logic to the events.

She followed the road until the fence ended at the edge of Pete Weaver’s Ripplecreek Ranch. She cut diagonally through an open field and couldn’t quite get her legs out of first gear, a common sensation after a day on a horse. Her strides felt minuscule; the earth slowed.

She crossed Owl Creek on a footbridge, followed the creek down along the opposite bank, trudged through snow to the top of a small ridge and spotted the dim shape of her cabin. A weak porch light cast enough watts to offer a bearing, but it looked as if David Slater had not yet arrived. Otherwise, the whole place would have been ablaze.

She stopped on her porch, kicked the snow off her boots with a gentle tap against the threshold and opened the door to her small A-frame. The kitchen corner faced south, so in daytime the sunlight poured through two large windows. The bedroom was on the opposite side, tucked back in the corner. A heavy, wood-frame couch and a couple of old sitting chairs framed a living area around a wood stove. A long table made for an eating space next to the kitchen. The only closed space was a closet-sized bathroom stuck off the back. A spiral staircase led up to a set of twin beds in a loft where Allison liked to sleep because she could wake to a view of the peaks off to the east toward the Holy Cross Wilderness.

Allison lit a candle on the dining table, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and headed straight to the bathroom to start the shower steaming. Remaining on her feet would delay sleep and it might keep her perked up enough to wait for Slater. Surnames ruled among conversation and wildlife officers so that’s how she thought of him, too. Slater.

She was certain sleep wouldn’t have its way with her until she told someone what she’d experienced and she was equally sure Slater would have some ideas about what she’d seen. Telling someone would make it seem more real. She lit newspaper and kindling in the wood stove and took a long draw of Coors. She undressed. The can of beer served as friend in the now-steaming stall and she let the shower blast her from behind, expecting Slater to call out any second.

She dried off. She stuck a few pieces of wood in the stove and stretched out on the couch. She finished the beer and thought about making some tea to keep her moving until Slater arrived. She stared at the flicker of light from the vent in the stove and decided that making tea might be a bit daunting for this particular moment.

****

She felt a kiss on her forehead, light enough for a baby.

“It’s six in the morning,” he said. “Try not to cry.”

“I’m late.”

The schedule had her heading back up the mountain.

“I’ve got breakfast ready,” said Slater. Allison recalled the gentle clinking sounds from the kitchen during the last half-hour, as she wormed her way to the surface of reality. And then, from even deeper down, she remembered the sensation of him dropping the quilt over her as she slept on the couch.

“What time did you make it in?”

“One-ish. You could use an answering machine.”

“Yuck,” said Allison.

“You were down for the count. Hard. Not that I even tried to wake you. The look on your face said done.”

Allison crawled off the couch. She knew that moving wouldn’t cause any physical pain. It would be torture but she wasn’t hung over. That was one small blessing to count.

“Are you working today too?” she said.

“I wasn’t supposed to,” he said. “But we’ve got a problem.”

“Problem?”

He was all duded-up in his green, slightly rumpled uniform. She liked him best in blue jeans and old sweatshirts, sitting in an aspen grove in a high meadow, splitting a six-pack and slicing summer sausage to go with crackers, mustard and cheese. This wasn’t bad, the official dress of a US Forest Service resource conservation officer—once known as a forest ranger. But Slater looked uncomfortable in the uniform.

“Missing people-type problem. One of the protesters,” he said. “Probably dead-type problem, given the storm. It’s one of them all-hands-on-deck things. The sheriff has already called his troops together and made it clear he doesn’t want anything that would keep the publicity rolling.”

“Missing where?”

Allison pulled on a fresh set of Wranglers, an undershirt and a green and black checked flannel shirt that deserved to be washed but would have to do.

“Way up the canyon.”

“Do they know who?”

“I don’t think so.”

The storm would have been rough enough if a hiker was prepared: brutal or fatal if he wasn’t. Allison had not heard the protesters, but by the time she had come over the top of Black Squirrel Pass, the storm had probably chased them to a lower elevation.

“You must have had a rough day,” said Slater. “Snow pretty hard?”

“Like the end of time.”

“You get hung up?”

“Not by the storm.”

“Huh?” he said, stopping as he put butter and orange marmalade on two pieces of burnt toast.

“I was late as it was, dawdling a bit as always,” said Allison. “Then I heard a gunshot. A minute later I saw a guy dragging who knows what through the snow. Whatever he was dragging, it wasn’t easy and required force. It was like I could see him straining at it. I worked my way down to the spot where I’d seen him and found a dead elk. Only the elk hadn’t been shot. There were no wounds. And the elk was such a monster there was no way he’d been dragged, not by one guy and not by three or four.”

Slater stared back with concern.

“He seemed angry,” she said.

“How long between the shot and the time you found the elk?”

Allison took a breath and tried to stick to exactly what she’d seen. Her grandfather had once claimed he watched a UFO set down in a lake outside of Longmont, but he had refused to embellish it with made-up details. He told her that anybody who wanted to know what the first-hand experience could find the original police report and read it.

“An hour plus. You know the descent from Black Squirrel Pass.”

“And you really couldn’t see what the man was dragging?”

“No.”

Slater pondered things for a second, his mustache-covered lip buried in the coffee, his deep brown eyes penetrating through the tabletop. He looked like a detective pondering clues.

The idea that she was cozying up to a cop-like guy was a constant source of amusement. This relationship wasn’t necessarily forever, she thought, but even that idea didn’t seem unbearable. He didn’t seem to have the typical government mentality. Also, he was strong and straightforward. Allison had never before been with a man who could be classified in the “straightforward” category. Slater was a trim six-footer with an engaging face, dark eyes over a slender nose. His jaw was strong and his teeth, neat rows arranged by a perfectionist, sparkled on cue when needed. Allison liked the way he moved and talked, careful and in control, but he could flip over to the relaxation mode without much effort.

“Are you going to report this?” said Slater.

“Report what?” inquired Allison. “Dead elk in the woods? I can see the headlines.”

“The dragging part,” said Slater. “Maybe it fits in with our missing protester. Maybe not.”

“I’ll report it. You never know what it’s worth,” said Allison. “But I’ve gotta go. We’ve got two crews heading out today. It’s practically every horse in the outfit.”

“Me too. Hell,” he said, looking at his watch. She leaned up for the kiss at first, and then stood all the way up. He gave her a warm, powerful hug. Slater was a long-term possibility.

Slater grabbed his coffee cup and headed out. She stood in the doorway as he climbed in behind the wheel of his government-green pickup and grabbed his radio, trying to raise somebody.

****

“Hear someone’s missing?”

It was Popeye Boyles, retired Navy cook turned guide and all-around barn helper.

“No,” Grumley replied. It couldn’t be Rocky, Grumley thought. Hunting guides were always off in the wilderness. It could take a week before anybody even asked the first question.

“I caught some chatter on the radio this morning,” said Boyles.

His hobby was playing amateur cop. He was wedded to a scanning gizmo that picked up every police frequency that bounced around in the narrow canyons and hollows of Ripplecreek. It never hurt to know who was poking around or headed their way. Most of Grumley’s guide service was completely on the up and up. But a few clients and an ever-growing list of their friends and acquaintances could request and pay for a hunt that minimized their time in the field and maximized their chances of success—all the way to one hundred percent. Grumley considered his work nothing more than that of a good advance team. He found the prey and tracked the prey. Next, the clients were whisked into position to site down the barrel and pull the trigger. This made for an efficient use of time, who didn’t mind parting with up to seventy-five thousand dollars for the convenience factor. The size of the fee depended on the number of hunters, the size of the prey they were after and the degree of difficulty they desired to make them feel, for a day, like Teddy Roosevelt of the Flat Tops.

“What did you hear?” said Grumley. Boyles teased. He always had to be asked.

“One of them eco-freaks.”

“Them?”

“Protesters. Kids. I first heard that Dawn Ellenberg chick all concerned, talking with a sheriff’s deputy last night, getting ready to contact Search and Rescue.”

Boyles talked like he was explaining a batch of overdone scrambled eggs to the commander of an aircraft carrier.

“The guy’s tent was empty last night and when they went to check it, they didn’t even open the thing.”

“How do you know?” said Grumley.

“Because one of the deputies asked them on the radio.”

“But the missing guy had definitely gone up with the protest, hiked up the canyon?”

“That’s what the cops asked,” said Boyles. “And Ellenberg says yes, he was in the woods with the rest of them. But get this. The cops asked Ellenberg if they had actually looked inside the tent, you know, to make sure he hadn’t passed out or was sleeping. But they hadn’t looked. They didn’t want to invade his privacy.”

“His privacy?” said Grumley.

“Yeah. They’re looking for a missing person in a blizzard and they won’t even crash his tent to make sure the guy hasn’t passed out or died of fuckin’ embarrassment for being part of that stupid protest.”

Boyles laughed and Grumley joined in.

The barn was busy with pre-hunt rituals. The next batch of hopeful hunters was packing up. Grumley had already checked in with a few of them. He had chatted with them, offering information about the best locations and the proper way to quarter a carcass. Everyone liked to chew on a bit of Grumley’s world. It was part of the package, even on this side, the legal side. He had showered and chugged his way through half a pot of coffee and then fretted around and criticized a few guides, for the hell of it, as they loaded up the packhorses and mules.