The Royal Wulff Murders (34 page)

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t take your concern seriously. But some days I tire easily.”

After he left, Stranahan mentioned that Hoss was a big man’s name. It seemed incongruous for someone so frail.

“You wouldn’t have said that if you knew him before he got the big C,” Sam said. “He says he’ll drown himself before it goes much farther and I don’t doubt it. He’ll be sleeping with the trout before Labor Day.” Sam jabbed a thick finger into Stranahan’s chest. “So will you, Kimosabe, if you keep sticking your nose into other people’s business.”

On this unsettling note, Stranahan drove to Quake Lake to meet Lucas Ventura.

M
aybe he wasn’t coming. It had been ten days since Ventura had asked Stranahan to meet him at the boat put-in near the outlet. For all Stranahan knew, he was still in California.

But then he heard the rattle of a trailer and one glimpse of flaring gunwale told him his drive would prove worthwhile, after all. Ventura turned the Ford Expedition around and expertly backed the trailer hub-deep into the lake. He swung out of the cab wearing hip boots and grabbed Stranahan’s hand in a hard, brief clasp.

“Glad you could make it, Sean,” he said in his chesty voice. “Now if you could just release the lock on the winch, I’ll pull the boat off.”

Ventura handed Stranahan the bow line when the boat was floating free and parked the truck. He came down to the water with a gear bag in one hand and a fistful of fly rods in the other.

“Beauty, isn’t she,” he said. “Built in 1888 by a craftsman named Elbridge Ricketson. They have a museum for these boats at Blue Lake in the Adirondacks. A little tippy”—he tilted an outstretched hand back and forth—“but
plenty stable to cast from. How about it? All set?”

“Let me just grab a rain jacket,” Stranahan said, glancing at the sky. A bank of violet cumulus clouds were building to the west. Ventura seemed anxious to push off and was sitting on the rowing seat when Stranahan returned.

“Give her a shove.”

Stranahan leaned against the folding back of the cane-weave stern seat while Ventura pulled the long oars in scissoring strokes.

“God,” he said a second later. “It’s a relief to be back in Montana.”

“You were on business, I take it.”

“Not really. I’m more or less retired, at least in a hands-on sense. But along the way I accumulated three wives who bore me five children. Most summers I get the kids up here en masse, but there has been some recalcitrance on the parts of wives one and two, a conspiracy if you ask me, and I had to see the lawyers about it. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another, right?”

“How are we going to fish?” Stranahan asked.

Ventura jutted his chin. “Last hour of light there’s going to be a mayfly emergence about a mile uplake, Callibaetis duns sitting on the surface just pretty as sailboats. But I’m going to start you off with a pair of leech patterns under a strike indicator. Purists frown on that, but when that indicator goes down, baby, it goes
down
. I got a twenty-seven-inch brown on a seal bugger last October. Kype like a sockeye salmon.”

Ventura kept up a steady stream of patter as he stroked the oars, and in what seemed like only a few minutes they had crossed the lake. Above them was scar tissue from the ’59 earthquake, a giant scoop of rubble studded with dolomite boulders the size of houses. Ventura set the oars in their chocks. He lowered a mushroom anchor, taking care not to scrape the side of the craft.

Gesturing for Stranahan to hand him his rod, he deftly tied a
dropper strand to the leader and rigged it with an olive-brown micro leech on the point and a purple one on the dropper.

“Cast crosswind. Mend to the right and let ’em drift. When the flies come under tension, inch them in with a hand twist retrieve. Mind what I said about breaking them off.”

As Ventura instructed him, Stranahan noticed the concentration on the man’s face, how the inverted Vs of his heavy eyebrows drew creases in his forehead. Stranahan remembered back to his first handshake with the man, thinking that he had looked like a jovial Satan.

“Does something about my face bother you?” Ventura asked in a serious voice. “You seem to be looking at me more than the lake.”

“Nah,” Stranahan said. “It’s this whole place that bothers me—the water, the trees. Everything has a skeletal look. It gives you that little tick of dread.”

Ventura’s face relaxed. “It does that for me, too,” he said. “Seven point five on the Richter scale, twenty-eight dead, nineteen still buried. See that post sticking up there? That’s part of Ghost Village. The roof and some of the walls are gone, but underneath the waterline there’s a cabin, one of eight that were swept away by the flooding and washed against this bank. Your flies, they’re fishing in the living room. I’ve caught trout in just about all the submerged cabins. It’s eerie. But then, I’d row this boat through the swamps of Hades if there were ten-pound browns cruising the surface.”

Stranahan caught the first trout, a small rainbow. Ventura followed suit and then one-upped Stranahan with a decent fish of about two pounds. As he bent over the gunwale to release it, Stranahan noticed a vein in the man’s neck twitching rhythmically. Ventura’s face wavered in the surface reflection. Something about him gave Stranahan a vague feeling of discomfort. Instinctively, he looked up and down the lake.

As if sensing his mood, Ventura said, without looking over, “Quake’s
always deserted this late in the evening. That’s what I like about it.”

For a time they fished in a silence that was uninterrupted by trout, and Stranahan found his uneasiness seeping away. His mind drifted back to the case. Twice, earlier in the day, he’d tried to call Martha Ettinger to see if she’d learned anything from Walt about the hatchery, or something more about McNair or his brother. When he got through, she’d been short with him.

No, she hadn’t consulted with her deputy yet. In case Stranahan didn’t know, she had a full jail and a county to run. She’d find time in the afternoon. If she didn’t call back before he left, then good luck with the trout. End of conversation. She hadn’t even asked where he’d be fishing.

Ventura’s voice brought Stranahan back to the present. “Heard you had an exciting time when I was gone.” He was appraising Stranahan’s still-swollen lip.

“You could say that. How did you hear?” The paper had reported the manhunt, but Ventura had been out of state.

“Tony Sinclair called when I drove in from the airport. Told me you knocked on his door looking like a drowned muskrat. Said Apple McNair had kidnapped you. He wasn’t too certain of the particulars.”

Stranahan remembered what Ettinger had told him, that anything he could learn from Ventura about his neighbor might be helpful.

“The particulars are that the man is an asshole,” Stranahan said. “I was fishing in the beaver pond on the Sheep Creek outlet stream and he jumped me, damned near drowned me, and then taped me up in his workshop. I managed to get away when he went into the house. Did Sinclair tell you there was a manhunt for him in the mountains?”

Ventura nodded. “But they didn’t catch him, right?”

“Far as I know, he’s still up there.”

“Grizzly bear bait,” Ventura said.

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

Ventura stripped his line in, snipped his leech fly off with his teeth, and bent to tie on another.

“A little odd to be going there at night, isn’t it?” he mumbled, wetting the knot in his lips. “I shouldn’t think there’d be a trout in that old beaver pond worth the effort. Besides,” he continued, “it’s private property. You know better than that.”

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have. But I noticed it when I went out for a hike and thought I’d check it out. I figured I’d get there before last light but the walk took longer than I’d expected.”

“So the man just overreacted to the situation?”

“You might say that,” Stranahan said. “It was like setting off a Doberman. But I really don’t know what he thought I was doing that got him so upset.”

He saw his opening. “Look,” he said. “You’re his neighbor. What makes him tick?”

Ventura appeared to consider the question. “I think you’re asking the wrong person,” he said. “I doubt I’ve had three conversations with the man. He came over for my Fourth of July fireworks display last summer—I invite all the neighbors. But he didn’t cause any trouble and it’s not such a bad thing to have at least one person in the development who lives here year-round. For security reasons, that is.”

“Seems like people were avoiding him at Summersby’s party,” Stranahan prompted.

Ventura grunted. “His place is an eyesore.” He seemed on the verge of saying more, then bit it off.

Stranahan pressed. “You know where he’s from, anything in his background might cause him to be so hostile?”

“What do you want to talk about him for?” Ventura said. “You can’t let a guy like that fuck up your life.”

Anger had crept into Ventura’s voice. Stranahan could feel it as a heat. Again he noticed the vein in Ventura’s neck. Suddenly he understood what
had bothered him before. It wasn’t pulsing with a normal heart rate, but throbbing.

Ventura gained control of his voice.

“I promised you some fishing,” he said. “Up the lake there will be some better trout rising.” As he reached behind to pull the anchor, Stranahan took advantage of the distraction to glance at his wrist. The second hand of his watch was coming up on the half-minute. He started to count the pulses in Ventura’s neck. Two, three….‌He counted to thirty-four as Ventura hauled on the anchor, then glanced back down as Ventura brought the anchor aboard. Sixteen seconds had passed. Thirty-four times four—one hundred thirty-six. It was twice a normal heart rate.

Ventura pulled on the oars, then dropped them and let the boat drift while he slapped at his forehead. He leaned down to reach into his gear bag.

“Damn bloodsuckers,” he said. “You can always count on the mosquitoes when the wind dies down.”

After spreading the DEET onto the back of his hand, Ventura tossed the tube to Stranahan. Stranahan found his hands were shaking and deliberately calmed himself to apply the repellant.

Ventura was digging his nails at the bite on his forehead. The movement made his slicked-back hair fall into its natural part to the side, and when he leaned forward to take the tube of repellent that Stranahan returned to him, a bang of hair fell across the left side of his temple. Stranahan felt a tingling on the skin of his forearms, then a rapid flush of blood up his neck. For a second, he couldn’t breathe. Then the boat lurched forward as Ventura manned the oars.

Sitting back, Stranahan took a deep breath, squeezed his eyes shut, opened them, and… watched the face before him lose twenty years in the span of a second. The face he was looking at—aggressive, arrogant, a bang of hair over the left temple that half hid a purple eye—was
that of a teenage boy. It was the face that he had seen on Ettinger’s computer screen, the face of Apple’s older brother, Jonathon McNair.

Stranahan saw Ventura looking at him. He sought to cover the alarm in his expression. “God,” he said, forcing a catch into his voice. “I had one of those moments when you can’t breathe. Like bad heartburn.”

“You all right?”

Stranahan burped, then inhaled audibly. He hoped he wasn’t overdoing it.

“Yeah, I think so. It’s gone now.”

“That’s good, Sean, because I wouldn’t want you to miss out on the hatch. We’ll be there in just a few minutes.”

This is impossible, Stranahan thought. It’s just because I was looking at the yearbook photograph and my mind’s painting it on the first person who bears a resemblance. Ventura’s a goddamn film producer, for chrissakes. He’s got a different name, he’s lived a different life.

Stranahan looked at Ventura for assurance, but the falling darkness was obscuring the contours of his face even as it dimmed the last glimmer from the lake surface.

“You’ll need to extend your leader to five X and tie on a dry,” Ventura said. “About a sixteen parachute Adams. I like a cripple pattern myself. Best to rig up now.”

Stranahan tried to recall the voice on the telephone from McNair’s knife shop. Could this be the same man? But that voice had been distorted by the speaker phone.

“See the dimples in the cove,” Ventura said. “You’re lucky, one of those trout will have your name on it.”

Stranahan could see fish rising as he fussed with the leader. They were up into the most remote bends of the lake now, about a mile below the Beaver Creek Campground where the host had taken a blade in his heart. Ventura pulled on one oar to turn the boat into an alley of open water through the spires of the drowned pines. He let it
glide nearly to the shoreline. The trees of the forest made a solid wall.

“Damned prostate,” he said. “Keep her steady there while I hop out.”

Stranahan put his hand against the barkless trunk of one of the snags poking out of the lake while Ventura stepped off the side of the boat in his hip boots. He waded up toward the bow, the water thigh deep, his back turned, one hand holding onto the gunwale. Seconds passed. Stranahan waited to hear the tinkling in the water. Dead silence. A trout swirled an oar’s length away.

“I never asked where you were from?” Stranahan said. He tried to make the question sound innocent, but he could feel his heart beating in his chest.

“Someplace I hoped I’d never have to revisit, Sean, in any sense of the word.” Ventura’s voice was heavy, as if he had to forcefully inhale enough air to get the words out. “But it revisited me.”

As he spoke the last words he shrugged his shoulders in a defeated gesture and turned, bringing a flat automatic to bear on Stranahan’s chest.

CHAPTER FORTY

S
eparated by the length of the boat, the men stared at each other through the gauze of twilight.

A sound came out of Stranahan’s mouth, not his voice at all.

“You don’t have to… this isn’t something…”

“Please,” Ventura said. “Just… please. Do you think I want to be here any more than you do? If I could make this go away with words, I would. You can’t possibly know how much I wish that was true. But I can’t.” His hand shook on the pistol.