The Royal Wulff Murders (10 page)

“Dad was a mechanic,” he went on. “Anywhere we drove, my mom would pray that we wouldn’t pass a car broken down, because he’d stop to help and we’d be late to wherever. I don’t know how many times I remember him pulling off the road saying, ‘This’ll only take a minute.’ He’d be rolling up his sleeves and the other guy would look up from under the hood and my dad would say, ‘What seems to be the problem?’ Next thing you know he’d pop the trunk and climb into his overalls.

“Well, wouldn’t you know, the car that killed him, he’d put an alternator in it the day before. The kid driving was fiddling with a tape deck, not paying attention. He jumped a curb and busted a fire hydrant. Dad turned around and started coming back to help. The kid panicked, water shooting everywhere, and jerked the car into reverse….” Stranahan snapped his fingers.

“I was sixteen. We moved out of the city, up to Adams to live near my grandfather, who had a rental house we could use. My grandfather was a lawyer in Boston, partly retired to the country by then. He’d always wanted my father to follow him into law school and into the firm, but all my dad’s talent was in his hands.”

“So that’s where the painting came from.” Vareda lifted his hand and put his arm around her. She laid her head against his shoulder.

“No,” Stranahan said, “the painting came from my mother. She was the artist in our family. Well, that’s not entirely true. My dad was an artist in his way. He tied trout flies. He even built a machine for milling bamboo strips to make fly rods. I still have one, his signature on the flats ahead of the cork. The action’s slow compared to graphite. But that’s what I like about bamboo. You have to relax into the rhythm of the rod. It makes fishing less of a contest.” He stopped. “I don’t want to bore you.”

“You’re not boring me, but it is getting cold.”

“Well, I ought to say good night then. Will I see you tomorrow before you leave?”

He started to stand, but she pulled him back.

“You’re not going anywhere,” she said.

She put both her hands behind his head and pulled him into a long, slow kiss, and he knew that the scent of oranges was from the rinse in her hair.

“Stay here,” she whispered. “I won’t be a minute.”

When she returned, pulling the screen door of the cottage closed behind her, a man’s shirt was loosely draped over her dress. She swiveled around on the swing until she was lying with her head resting on his lap.

“Keep me warm,” she said, and placed his arm across her chest so that his hand cupped her left shoulder. She wriggled the side of her body against him. “That’s better. Go on now. Talk to me.”

“My mother had a box of oils,” he said. “I used to go into the closet and open the tubes to smell the paints. Nothing like it… no wonder so many great artists died young. I still use lead white for oil painting because it’s a warmer color than zinc, but…”

“Gittin’ high in Mama’s clothes closet,” Vareda said, and chuckled. He could feel his arm rise and fall with the movement of her chest.

“Something like that,” Stranahan said. “She’d stopped painting by the time I was born, but there were a couple of her oils on the wall: Indian ponies and a portrait of a girl wearing a red dress and a sad face sitting on the floor of a dark room. It’s very good. But she was a mother, that’s all she wanted to be, and anyway, she never picked it back up.”

“What about you?”

“She bought me sketchbooks, starting when I was about three years old. I’d draw birds and animals, anything I could find around the pond or in the woods behind our house. It wasn’t something I had to think about, just natural.”

“The woods? I thought you grew up in Boston and didn’t move to the country until later, after your dad died.”

“It wasn’t the city exactly, about ten miles south, a place called Milton.
The Blue Hills were my backyard. The only time I actually lived in Boston was when I went to work for my grandfather’s law firm summers after college. He had a retired Boston police sergeant to do his snooping. Percy McGill. Black Irish, like me. The greatest character I met in my life. I can remember the first time I saw him; he stuck out this big hairy hand and said, ‘Sean, you don’t want to do this. It’s like drinking blood. You can’t stop, you just keep going ’til somebody sticks a stake in your heart.’ To make a long story short, I did stop. I went back to painting and moved to Vermont and got married to the sweetest girl in the world. Something happened, or didn’t happen.” He snapped his fingers again. “The spark died. Maybe it was never there.”

“No children?”

“She couldn’t have them. I told her it didn’t matter, but it mattered. She never felt like she was whole. But there’s more to it than that.”

“There always is,” Vareda said.

She smiled sadly, then he watched her smile lift, transforming her face.

“And now you’re here.”

“Now I’m here.”

“What am I going to do with you?” She looked at him, playing a little, letting the words fall with a buttery drawl.

“What do you mean, what are you going to do with me?”

“Well,” she said softly, “I could let you go. I suppose that would be the smart thing to do.”

“Or I could go,” Stranahan said. “Save you the trouble.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. No, we women have our ways. At least we do in Mississippi.”

She lifted her face to be kissed, then, taking his hand, stood with him and moved to the door.

S
tranahan was dreaming. He was dreaming that a cat was lying on his chest, its front paws curled under its chin, its small motor purring.
Stranahan scratched its cheeks tentatively. If he moved the fur the wrong way, the cat would leave, and he wanted it to stay for the comfort and warmth it provided. Then the cat was gone and it was Beth, moving from his touch to her refuge on the far side of the bed.

He reached out in his sleep and his right hand brushed Vareda’s hair. She was lying with her head against his shoulder and his left arm was numb. He ran his hand through her thick hair, stroking her scalp with his fingertips. When she stirred, he eased his dead arm from under her head. She murmured something and rolled over, pulling him against her so that they lay together like spoons.

“This isn’t going to work,” she whispered after a minute.

“What isn’t going to work?”

“Anything. Everything.” She breathed in deeply. “You. Me.”

“You haven’t seen me fish yet,” Stranahan said.

She laughed softly and rolled over, bringing her lips to the hollow of his neck. He could feel the air cool his wet skin as her kisses traced down his throat and across his chest.

“My… fisher… man,” she whispered.

CHAPTER TWELVE

W
hen Stranahan awoke, she was gone. He had known she was gone, feeling the difference, that humidity change and palpable hollowness, for some minutes.

The note was pinned down by the hooves of a carved ironwood Cape buffalo standing on the table before the window. Lifting the buffalo was like lifting a brick of black gold. Stranahan held the note out until the narrow, backhand letters came into focus.

Stranahan glanced around the room. He was looking for the coffee can of her father’s ashes. But the only traces she’d left were a long auburn hair on her pillow and the earthy smell of her skin. He wound the strand of hair into his shirt pocket. Before leaving he read the note again, noticing the left-handed script.

Be careful
. His lips formed the words.

“Of what?” he said out loud.

Stranahan folded the note into his wallet and stepped outside the cottage. It was early, the grass wet with dew. A grackle with iridescent
feathers cocked its head on the clipped lawn, then darted its beak down and tugged at a night crawler. The night crawler elongated and snapped free. The grackle bit it sharply and cocked its head once more while the worm writhed in knots on the grass.

“I believe that Americans say it is the early bird that gets the worm.”

Stranahan looked up to see a tall black man in cutoff jeans and a faded denim shirt standing by the back door of the house. He was watering the hanging plants suspended from the roof of the wraparound porch.

“None of the other guests are up, but if you would be so kind as to take breakfast with me, both Ullana and I would be delighted. I believe we have huevos rancheros.” The man’s voice was deep and resonant, with a reserved British accent that belied his casual dress.

Stranahan climbed the steps to the porch. He shook the man’s outstretched hand. The ebony face split into a smile.

“Joseph Keino. I believe you are Sean?” Stranahan pulled his head back slightly. “I am not a soothsayer, Mr. Stranahan. Miss Lafayette told me you might be coming for breakfast.”

“You saw her this morning?”

“I saw her leave, yes, from the window. Very early. She spoke to me yesterday at supper.”

Stranahan followed Keino inside to a table facing a side window off the kitchen. He sat down, absorbing the news while trying not to betray his surprise. So she had known beforehand that he would be spending the night with her. He felt slightly let down and shook it off. Hadn’t she said that women like her had their ways?

“Sean—may I call you Sean? This is my wife, Ullana.”

“Don’t get up,” the woman said. She held a breakfast tray balanced on an upturned hand and with her other hand set plates on the table. She bent to pour coffee. The edge of her palm, where she held the handle of the coffee press, was the coral blush of the inside of a conch shell. She was the most beautiful woman Stranahan had ever seen.
Her mocha skin was perfectly smooth. Her wide-set brown eyes were illuminated by flecks of gold around the iris.

“Thank you,” he said.

“It is my pleasure.” She turned, smiling, her long black braid shifting in the hollow of her back, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Stranahan found he was very hungry.

“This is delicious,” he said at length, and, thinking to make conversation, asked, “How did you come to America?”

They talked about Kenya, how Keino had come to the states as an agricultural student and was back and forth until the political climate in his home country made an educated democratic man persona non grata. But he seemed distant as he spoke, as if he was thinking of something else.

Finally he said, “Sean, while we have been sitting here I have been debating whether to tell you something that might be important. I’ve decided to because I very much like Miss Lafayette and she made it clear that you were a friend to be trusted. Yesterday, when she was helping us with the supper, I saw her looking out the window. She seemed highly nervous. I cannot say if she was frightened, but that is what I felt.”

Keino rose. “Perhaps it’s best if you see for yourself.”

Stranahan followed him into the kitchen. Copper pots hung from an oval track over a tile island where Ullana was chopping peppers.

“You can see the cottage,” Keino said, standing before a small window. “But not the front yard or the sidewalk. She was not looking at the street. I asked her if she was expecting anyone. She said no.”

They walked back through the kitchen and sat down.

Stranahan said, “It couldn’t have been me she was expecting.”

Keino tapped the side of his nose. “Where I lived, you trust this more than these.” His fingers separated to touch his eyes. “I sensed that whomever she expected, she did not want to see this person. Later she spoke of you and it was plain to see that you did not affect
her that way. She has asked a favor from me. She said do not let you leave without giving you her package. I will get it.”

He stood and walked into an adjoining room. When he came back, a chamois cloth shirt in a forest green was draped over his arm and he was carrying a package wrapped in brown paper. It was the shape of a coffee can. He set the shirt beside it. The shirt cuff was monogrammed MJD in gold thread and Stranahan suspected it was the one she had been wearing the night before.

Keino held up a hand as Stranahan started to speak.

“You don’t need to say anything. I am doing this for Miss Lafayette. As I said, I am quite fond of her. But please take the package. And the shirt. She said you were to wear it when you fished for her. You do not need to explain these mysteries to me.”

Stranahan said, “You overestimate the extent of my knowledge.”

“No, I understand perfectly,” said Keino. “She
is
a beautiful woman. And you… and I”—he smiled—“are men.

“Now let me show you the house before the guests awake. You are an artist, Miss Lafayette tells me. I have a collection of artifacts I think you will find interesting.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

S
tranahan hung the shirt on the hat rack in his office. He sat down and stared at the paper package for a long minute. Then he opened his fly-tying kit, removed the scissors, snipped the paper around the coffee can, and lifted the plastic lid. He thought he was prepared, but the pea-sized gravel of bone gave the remains a gravitas that was unsettling. He could smell smoke and something darker. Tentatively, he stirred through the ashes with a pencil. It seemed to be what it was supposed to be, what a human being was reduced to in a two-thousand-degree oven. But heavier than you’d expect.

He closed his eyes, trying to resurrect bone chips into the father of the woman with the bloodred lips. He pictured a man casting in the Madison River. He could see the Royal Wulff dancing in the swirl behind an exposed boulder, the strike, diamonds of water shedding from the line, the gray head bowing and thick, farmer’s fingers engulfing the tiny scissors of a Swiss Army knife. But why would anyone want to clip a trout’s fin? When he’d pressed Vareda on the point, she had said you have to understand farmers. They brand cattle, notch pigs’ ears—they leave their mark. Stranahan wasn’t sure he bought it.