Crazy Mountain Kiss (16 page)

C
oming through the door, all Stranahan knew about Chico Lodge was what Sam had told him, that it had the prettiest waitresses in the Paradise Valley, but ever since the actor Jeff Bridges plucked one for his wife, they were all looking for love a little farther up the social ladder than a fishing guide could scale. “How about an artist who lives in a tipi?” Sean had asked. “Second base tops, my brother,” the big man had said.

Etta Huntington smiled at the story, sipping her scotch in the bar at the back of the restaurant. She looked trim and western, wearing jeans and a white snap shirt under a rabbit-fur vest. “Oh, I wouldn't know about that,” she said. “Some women might consider making love in a tipi to be the height of romance.”

“Better than a truck under the stars?”

She leaned close to Sean on the red brocaded love seat, her hair falling forward and her scent light, slightly musky. Her voice fell to a whisper. “I'll let you in on a trade secret. I wasn't even in the bed of that truck. I couldn't kick the boots high enough.”

“So how did they pull it off, some digital trick?”

“The AD on the shoot played club soccer. The woman who kicked out the stars had hairy legs and wore a man's size ten.”

“You just ruined the fantasy of the adolescent male viewing public.”

“Shhh. Don't tell anyone. Men might quit buying me drinks at the bar.”

This was an Etta Huntington Stranahan had not seen before. He
had seen her drunk and sarcastic. He had seen her stoic and bitter. And he had watched her cry. It was her vulnerability that touched him. But he had not seen this playful, flirting side of her, her eyes flashing in the lamplight of a dimly lit bar.

A waitress approached. “Ms. Huntington, your table is ready.”

Stranahan was aware of the surreptitious glance from a man at a neighboring table as he pulled out Etta's chair.

“You must get used to people looking at you,” he said.

She took the question seriously. “You mean men look at me. I'm told it's because I have a carnivorous face, all these sharp bones and prominent orbitals. ‘Jaguar eyes,' the ad people called me. People think they've seen you before, so you must be somebody. That's a way of saying I'm not conventionally beautiful but men lick their lips anyway. Women are the opposite. They hate me on sight. Sometimes I feel like smiling back and then casually removing my arm, just to see the expressions.”

“But not tonight.”

“No, you don't have to worry. Best behavior, I promise. But let me tell you a story. Last summer after the accident, they'd already made the arm for me, the Chevy people asked me down to San Francisco. They wanted to make another ad, but they didn't want to show the arm. Could I ride a horse one-handed? I said, ‘Get me a horse and I'll show you.' So they trailered in a horse and we're on Potrero Hill, where one of the execs lived, and we were going to drive to this park. I said, ‘I'll show you right here,' and get on the horse, and my arm falls off and starts rolling down the street. It's really steep and it's just rolling like a bowling pin.” Etta had started laughing. “These guys are running after it but they're too slow so I take off and pass it and bail off the horse. Full gallop. Like it was something I did every day, like heading a steer. By the time they got down to me I had the arm on. The exec, he's this skinny gay man who's got this way of considering things, rubbing his nose with these long fingers, they called him the Praying Hands, and he's praying and praying, and finally he nods and says, ‘I guess you answered my question.'”

Stranahan started laughing with her. Etta's skin glowed, the
diffuse candlelight softening the angles of her face. Even at their first meeting, when she had done her best to repel him, he had felt drawn by her honesty. She created an atmosphere of intimacy. There was Etta and you were with her, and the rest of the world bled away. He reached for her hand.

“Etta, there's something I need to show you later. It's a DVD, a documentary that Cinderella made.”

“Yes, I know. J. J. Aaberg.”

“There was—”

She put her fingers to his lips. “I saw it, but if there's something you have to say, please wait. Tomorrow, yes. But not tonight. By some miracle I have managed to escape from myself. Perhaps the reason is you. Perhaps it isn't. But you don't have to understand why to respect my decision.”

“Does it have something to do with Jasper? The two of you looked—”

“It has nothing to do with Jasper Fey. Despite anything he might have told you, there is nothing between us. We haven't been in the same bed for more than a year, even before the accident. At the stables, I let him comfort me in a moment of weakness. That was all. He made his appearance. He spread his charm, his tender concern for the stepdaughter he has forgotten. He drove back to the set today. He's moved on.” She squeezed Sean's hand and then touched her fingers to her heart. “He was never here. Not in here.

“Now”—she dismissed the topic by picking up the menu—“this is my treat. They make a bison Wellington in the most luscious puff pastry; it's only for two to share, they won't make it for one.”

“Then it's the Wellington,” Sean said.

“And a big red, a Zin if they have the Maryhill Reserve. But I'll only have one glass. As I said, ‘best behavior.'”

 • • • 

T
he eye of the moon hung above the Crazy Mountains on the drive back to the ranch. They talked, or rather Sean talked as Etta drew him
out, about his life on his grandfather's farm in the Berkshires, about his move west to the rivers his father had dreamed of fishing and hoped to take Sean to, until life got in the way, and then not having money got in the way, and finally his father's death got in the way. He told her he'd married his high school sweetheart, that at some point they had become unknown to each other and divorced, in the last years having to struggle to find topics to talk about. Etta laughed softly; it had been the same story with her first husband, whom she had loved dearly though it was a marriage steeped in silence before his untimely death. Now Jasper Fey, that was different. “I stopped talking. He kept yelling.”

She asked Sean if he was in a relationship and he said he had been, with a veterinary student who lived in Oregon.

“Is it over?”

“I think it is. It's hard to have a relationship with someone who's eight hundred miles away and doesn't return your calls.”

Etta looked ahead out the window. “Oh, I don't know. I still speak to someone who is as far from me as a star.”

After that, for the last ten miles, as each became acutely aware of the breathing of the other, there was only the rumble of the Land Cruiser's straight six.

“You know what I like about you?” Etta said when Sean pulled up to the ranch house. “You're damaged goods like me. The difference is you think you've lost things so you act like you have nothing to lose. But your life is still ahead of you. Mine is behind me now. I might not last a lot longer.”

“You're the woman who kicked out the stars.”

“That's not me.”

“Then who are you, Etta?”

“A woman who spent an evening with a very nice man who's going to kiss her good night.” She leaned across the seat and kissed him, then pulled back, gently letting go of his lower lip to look at him in a questing way, the kiss the only point where their bodies had touched. The second time she kissed him, it managed not to be. She climbed
out of the Land Cruiser and Stranahan watched her walk to the house and open the door. The house was dark. She disappeared inside. He waited for the door to close, part of him hoping it wouldn't.

Stranahan counted to ten. He recalled the video Cinderella had made, Bear Paw Bill talking about the crossroads. Stranahan felt he stood before one now. He walked to the open door and stepped inside. She was standing in the hall, her shoulders slumped a little. A sad smile.
This is me, all there is
. The first thing she did, after he shut the door, was come into his arms. “Don't worry,” she said, “I won't bite you.” She nuzzled her head under his chin and nipped his neck. “Well, maybe I will.”

The second thing she did, as he followed her through the darkened house, was take off her arm and let it drop to the floor.

 • • • 

H
ours later Stranahan awoke to feel the cold on the other side of the bed that meant she had gone. He found her in the sunroom with the moon in the window, curled into the wicker chair where she had sat when they first met.

“How long have you been here, Etta?” He dropped into the chair beside her.

“A while. I woke up about four.” She sipped from a cup, then handed it to Sean and looked out the window.

“Which one is she?”

“It depends on the morning, what frame of mind I'm in. If I'm feeling melancholy, then a dim star, one fading out with the night. But it can be bright, it just depends.”

“What one is it tonight?”

Wordlessly, she got to her feet, and Sean followed her onto the porch, where the universe reeled away in a pepper of stars. “Tonight it's that one in the east there, under Cassiopeia.”

She zipped up the rabbit fur she'd worn to the restaurant and leaned back against Sean, reaching behind her to take his hands and cross them over her chest.

“This is where the man says, ‘About last night,' and the woman feels her heart sink, knowing what he's going to say next.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“You don't have to. If you want me to let you off the hook, I can say you didn't have a choice and I'm releasing you now. I won't make a scene.”

“But I did have a choice.”

“Did you?”

“I don't make a habit of sleeping with married women. Even those who say they haven't been with their husbands in more than a year.”

“Life is more complicated than marital status.”

“No, I don't think it is.”

“Aren't you young.”

She extracted herself from his embrace and walked back into the house and switched on the light in the kitchen. She kept her back to him as she poured coffee. “If you aren't going to go,” she said, “then tell me what it was you wanted to say last night, before I made you compromise your principles.”

A bitter tone had crept into her voice and Stranahan was aware of her posture, how she had erected a wall against him and pulled into herself. Her face remained impassive as he spoke, and he told her everything, the Mile and a Half High Club, the ghostlike figure running on moonlit snow that the women had seen, and the mountain man, Bear Paw Bill.

“Where is this DVD?” she said. “I have a right to see it.”

Stranahan got the copy from the Land Cruiser and they watched the documentaries on the flat-screen television in the den, the room slowly becoming pale with dawn. Etta began to cry silently halfway through the first video, the one with Cinderella and Landon Anker in the stables, but her eyes were dry by the end.

“Have you ever seen this man before?” Sean asked.

She shook her head. “I only knew Cindy was making one about J.J. I was worried she'd get stung by the bees. Do you think this mountain man, do you think he would . . .”

“We can't say for sure that he was even with her. But we'll certainly try to find him.”

“Who will?”

“Anyone I can muster to help. The brother is seeing the sheriff this morning. I'll show Ettinger the video and see if she'll kick loose a couple of her men. It's a solid lead on a suspicious death. Plus, we have the shot I heard behind the cabin. So there's a starting point.”

“I'll go with you.”

“Etta—”

“Etta what? What do you expect me to do? Sit around and guess what star when I might be of actual use?”

 • • • 

M
artha Ettinger ejected the DVD from her computer and leaned back in her office chair, staring past Stranahan to the Wanted posters on the corkboard. She rolled a dart between her right thumb and forefinger.

“So,” she said, “this Bear Paw Bill, do we consider him kinda sorta armed, or sorta kinda armed? You see my predicament.”

“Not really. But I saw his brother in the hall. You talked to him. What do you think? A muzzle-loading rifle is a far cry from an M-15.”

“I think it was enough gun to kill grizzly bears in the day. Plus he has a history of antisocial behavior. So I'm going to come down on the side of discretion and consider him armed and dangerous. That rules out SAR volunteers because I can't send civilians up there.” She scratched her chin with the point of the dart. “Here's what I will do. I'll call Katie because we might need her dog if we hit a track. I'll provide myself because I'm overdue for a horse ride and Walt can run the department. To hear him talk you'd think he's the sheriff, anyway—wait, Walt's off.” She nodded. “That's actually better. We can pull him in, too. And I'll check Harold's schedule. Technically, he's in charge, and he's the one you want in the mountains, regardless. When do you want to go up?”

“This morning. They're forecasting snow above six thousand feet
tonight. It hasn't snowed since Katie and I heard the shot. So we've got maybe eight hours before the white story—what's Harold call it?”

“The white book.”

“Anyway, before it closes and the tracks get swallowed up.”

“I understand the urgency.” She nodded. “This could be coming together. I received a text from Wilkerson. She performed the test to compare the DNA of the fetus with DNA collected from a cheek swab of Anker's sister. Landon Anker wasn't the father. I was going to call Etta Huntington with the news.”

“It would be better having it come from me.”

“You two are close now.” It was a statement. “Okay then, you.”