The Royal Wulff Murders (18 page)

She looked at Sean.

“He said once, I’ll never forget, ‘The thing about fishing is that it
gives a man hope. Each cast builds a little hope and if he can lose himself to that hope, then the worries and the heartache fade into the background. The wind inside him dies down for a while.’ Papa said it was like the river was the window he had to climb through to reclaim a lost part of himself. Isn’t that beautiful? I think so. It’s what brought him back to me. Maybe that’s why I have a thing for fishermen; I’m always grateful.” She allowed the corners of her lips to lift in a brief smile.

“There are some people, they’re born with the sunlight inside them. I wish you could have met him. Daddy would have liked you.”

T
he canoe tapped bottom. Gravel grated under the hull.

“Do you mind stopping?” Stranahan said. “I have to answer the call, as they say.”

“I love to pee in the woods,” Vareda said. “Especially if there’s a breeze, umm.”

She helped drag the bow of the canoe onto the shore.

“Oh, you shock so easily,” she said, and shivered deliciously, pulling her shirt snug around her like a jacket.

When he came back from his walk, she was gone. Off to catch the breeze, he guessed. He thought of the trout on the canoe bottom and started to gather sticks on the shoreline, building them into a teepee below the high-water mark. He added lint from his pockets and held a match underneath. He blew gently until the flames grew tall.

Vareda came back and rinsed her hands and her face in the shallows.

“Thanks for… out there,” she said, sitting on the sand beside him. “I’m not trying to hide anything about Jerry, it’s just that if I talk about him, it’s like admitting he’s really gone. It’s hard to start.”

“Tell you what, while you think about how to get started, I’m going to cook that fish you caught,” he said.

“Oh, you’re mad at me. Don’t be.” Stranahan felt the press of her lips against his ear.

“I’m just thinking,” Stranahan said, getting up. In fact, he was thinking about Sheriff Ettinger. He’d told her about Velvet Lafayette. He hadn’t told her about Vareda Beaudreux. She was going to want more than a few words with Vareda Beaudreux.

Stranahan found a flat piece of driftwood and set it beside the fire. He split the trout lengthwise along the backbone. Pressing the skin sides to the plank, he fixed the two halves in place with fishing flies, the hooks bent through the skin to attach it to the punky wood. He propped the wood at an angle next to the fire.

“This is called planking,” he said, scraping coals against the wood. “Do it right and the fish cooks before the wood catches fire.”

The orange trout flesh began to sizzle. Stranahan banked the coals, kept rearranging them until he judged the trout done.

“Do you still have that salt and pepper?” He teased the backbone and ribs from the halves of fish and dropped them into the fire.

Vareda sprinkled the smoking flesh. She examined the trout flies that pinned the fish to the plank. The hair had burnt away. She flicked a few curled strands of scorched feathers with a fingernail.

“This reminds me,” she said, “I have a couple boxes of Daddy’s fishing flies. I have his net and his rod, too. I brought them up here thinking I might use them to find the fish he marked. But there’s too much to learn to do it myself. The first time I tried to cast I hooked my earring on the watch-a-callit—the back cast.”

Stranahan thought about the fly in Jerry Beaudreux’s lip. It was something Vareda didn’t know about.

“I want you to have them,” she was saying. “You can use Daddy’s rod and maybe one of his flies will be on your line when you catch his fish. I have other things to remember him by.”

Stranahan stood up and without a word walked to the canoe. He came back with the case he’d carried the Winston fly rod in, the one Sam had found near the body.

“This is the fly rod I told you about last night. Look at the inscription.
Someone tried to scratch it off, but it was definitely your brother’s name.”

“It was a high school graduation present,” she said in a flat tone. “Daddy had two of them made, the one I have has his name on it. They’re the same. I remember now, Jerry saying afterward he figured Dad probably hoped he’d fish with it in a storm and electrocute himself. He was at that rebellious age—but don’t get the wrong idea, he loved Daddy as much as I did.”

“Vareda, we need to talk about him.”

“My brother reminds me of you,” she said. “He has to find answers to questions. I’m afraid that’s why he’s… missing.”

H
er kid brother, it turned out. Jerry had been born when Vareda was twelve, and from the start had preferred the back door to the front, eighty-foot loblolly pines to a two-lane town. When Vareda’s father had taken up fly fishing the year his wife died, so had Jerry, who by then was a teenager. Father and son had made annual fishing trips to the Rockies in the three succeeding years, leading up to the heart attack that had taken the elder Beaudreux’s life the summer before. That had been Jerry’s first summer working at the hatchery up by Great Falls, and it had been their father’s plan to fish his way north to visit him, but he had died on the bank of the Madison only days before they were scheduled to rendezvous.

Stranahan asked Vareda if she had ever accompanied them on their fishing trips. No, she’d been too busy divorcing her husband. “Marry young, marry dumb—it’s the oldest Southern story there is,” she said, and Stranahan did not press her to elaborate.

“H
ave you ever heard of whirling disease?” Vareda asked. She hugged her knees to her chest, then glanced up. She said, “Look, an eagle.”

Stranahan turned to see the bird soaring against a ridge of pine, its head and tail falling like snowflakes as the eagle abruptly dived
to the lake and emerged, flapping heavily, with a fish clasped in its talons.

Stranahan pointed to the bird. “I know enough about whirling disease to know that’s one way it can be transmitted.” He explained that the parasitic cyst responsible for decimating the Madison River’s rainbow trout population was ingested by fish-eating birds, which could infect other rivers in turn by defecating into the water. The hardy cyst would survive the digestion process, then, once deposited, could begin the cycle of infecting infant trout…. He was just regurgitating what he’d learned from Sam.

Vareda frowned. “All I know is it’s bad,” she said. “Jerry told me the hatchery had a grant to study the disease, but there was something about the operation that bothered him.”

Stranahan interrupted. “When was this?”

“Just a couple of weeks ago. I was still in Mississippi. He called me. I didn’t understand much of what he was saying, just that he was real excited. That was Jerry—he had enthusiasm, but no common sense. I kept saying ‘be careful’ but it was cops and robbers to him—he’s so naive, I’m afraid he did something terribly foolish.”

“Back up a second. You lost me. What bothered him at the hatchery?”

“He saw something he says he shouldn’t have, that he wasn’t meant to. He thought it might have something to with the whirling disease. There was this truck.”

“A truck?”

“Yes. He said there was this truck that was collecting some fish, and I think he said it wasn’t supposed to be there or maybe he just hadn’t seen it before.”

The truck, Vareda told him, had arrived at the hatchery before dark but after Jerry had left work for the day. Jerry had been fishing—he was living in a tent in a campground on the Missouri River only a couple of miles away—and was driving past and noticed the truck
and became curious, because a couple of men looked to be loading fish into a live well in the truck bed. The next morning he’d asked the hatchery manager, who dismissed it as a supply truck bringing chemicals to clean the runways. The manager had volunteered nothing about loading fish into the truck, and later Jerry had overheard whirling disease mentioned when the manager was talking to another employee who was around only occasionally. That confirmed Jerry’s suspicion and he had started spying on the place after hours. When he spotted the truck a second time, he decided he would follow and see where it went. But when it turned south onto the highway, he chickened out. The first time he saw the truck was Tuesday, then on Thursday. He didn’t see the truck over the weekend but decided if it came again on Tuesday, he’d be ready and follow it.

“I think when he talked to me,” Vareda said with a sigh, “it was a way of working up his nerve.”

Stranahan thought about Vareda’s comment about cops and robbers and had an inspiration.

“Vareda,” he said, “you never actually saw your brother after he came up here for the summer, did you?”

“No. I haven’t seen him since Easter.”

“The reason I asked—do you think Jerry would have shaved his beard and dyed his hair to disguise himself? To reduce the chance that the truck driver might recognize him? That would explain why the description in the newspaper wasn’t a match.”

“No. Yes. I mean, that makes sense. Jerry would do something like that, like it was part of a game.” Her voice broke and a tear slid down her cheek.

“I’m sorry to press you on this, Vareda. But I think we have to accept the probability that he did come to harm and focus on finding who’s responsible.”

She wiped a tear away and looked far off for a second.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m okay. You’re right. Ask me what you want.”

“Try
to remember. What did Jerry say specifically, about the disease?”

“He just mentioned the name and then sort of skipped to the next thing about the truck. That’s the way he is. He starts to get a thought out and then by the time he ends the sentence he’s talking about something else.”

“You said he called a couple of weeks ago. When exactly?”

“He called on the twelfth of July. I remember because I’d marked the dates for my trip on the calendar.”

“Was that the last time you talked?”

“No. He called at the inn last Tuesday. I’d just gotten to Montana.”

Stranahan registered the date as the day before Sam found the body.

Jerry had told her that he’d followed the truck to Ennis. It had stopped at a bar and he was waiting for the man to come back out. He called from a pay phone and told her he’d call again when he found out where it was going.

“He never did.” Her voice caught.

“One man?”

“I think so.”

“Height? Hair? Build?”

She shook her head.

“Did he say what kind of truck?”

“No.”

“Nothing else?”

“No. Oh, wait now, he mentioned a dog. He said there was a dog riding shotgun. But we only talked a minute. It wasn’t, like, a conversation.”

“So let me get this straight. After he told you he was investigating, you got worried and came up here. Then, before you had a chance to see him, he called to say he was following a truck from the hatchery.”

Vareda nodded. She was signing the register at the Cottonwood
Inn when Jerry called. She had called ahead and booked a couple places to play that she’d already sent CDs to. She just bumped up the dates. The original plan had been to meet Jerry in August. They were going to scatter their father’s ashes together before caravanning back south.

“We were going to meet after I played the Bridger dates. I was going to drive up to Cascade where he worked.”

“Is there anything else that could help? Something I haven’t asked you about?”

“I… I drove up there last Saturday, after I met you. I thought if you didn’t find him on the Madison there was a chance he had gone back to his campground. But I didn’t find him there, so I asked at the hatchery. It was sort of on a back road and hard to find, but I found it.”

“Who did you talk to at the hatchery?”

“Some man, I don’t know who he was. He said Jerry had told them he was taking a couple of days off, going to go on a fishing trip. But he didn’t say it right away like that. He had to think about it. I could tell he was lying.”

“What was the man’s name?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Describe him to me.”

“Uh, he had short hair. Cowboy boots. Sort of a rancher type. But not a presentable person at all, if you ask me. When I asked him who Jerry’s friends were, someone I might contact, he got sarcastic, said how the hell should he know. He damned near shut the door in my face. I got paranoid. I thought maybe he was following me. I just had this feeling when I got back to Bridger.”

Stranahan thought back to Joseph Keino at the Aberdare Bed and Breakfast. He’d said Vareda kept looking out the window.

“And you’ve told this to no one?”

“Just you.” Her cheeks were wet with tears. “After I left that message
for you, right after, I was sort of crazy. If you hadn’t come last night, I don’t know what I would have done.”

Stranahan got to his feet and kicked sand over the dying coals.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re going to drive back to Bridger and you’re going to tell the sheriff what you told me. And you’re going to have to go to the morgue to identify the body.” He held up a hand when she began to object. “I’m just doing what you wanted me to do in the first place. You got me involved in this, now you’re going to have to trust me.”

She toed the sand.

“One more thing,” he said, after they had pushed off in the canoe. “Whoever killed your brother, if it’s the guy who took a potshot at my friend, then what he is looking for, or whatever he’s trying to cover up, he’s getting desperate. He’s going to sever any threads that can tie him to Jerry. You, me too for that matter, could be at the ends of two pretty short ones. When things are taken care of in Bridger, maybe it would be best if you disappeared for a while. Do you have a third name you could use?”

She had to smile. “Look at me,” she said. “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid.”

Stranahan dug his paddle, feeling the resistance of the water.

Underneath, trout prowled.

Stranahan dug deeper.

He thought of the water down there, a worm twisting on a hook.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“G
et me a couple rocks, will ya, Walt?”