The Royal Wulff Murders (7 page)

The defiant look was back on her face.

“Well, the chances are your father was fishing above where the guides put in. Most wade fishermen stick to the top section, from Quake Lake to the West Fork.”

“How far is that?”

“River miles? Nine, ten.”

“You’d have a chance, then.”

“I don’t want to get your hopes up. Those were older fish your father caught. To be fourteen inches long last year—what I think he means by a good fish—they’d have to be four, five years old now. That’s a long time for a trout to live. If he really did mark twenty—and all of us stretch the truth so it’s probably more like a dozen—well, there’s no telling how many are left. I’d feel guilty taking your money.”

“The last time a man said that to me he wanted to be paid the old-fashioned way.”

Stranahan looked directly at her.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean… I mean, I’ve
never doubted your… honor. I just… I’m alone now, you get to be around a certain kind of man….” Her voice was barely a whisper.

She composed herself. “This is what I want to do,” she said with her chin raised. “My father—each other—since Mamma died, we were all that we had. I make good money, Mr. Stranahan. I’ll give you a thousand dollars. Fish until it runs out. At least then I’ll have tried.”

Stranahan could see there was no use arguing.

“When I heard you sing last night,” he said, “you said you’d be here through tomorrow night. How will I get in touch?”

“I’ll call you.” She got a pen. “Do you have a home phone?”

He almost said, “Your hand is ten inches from it,” but what would she think about hiring a detective who lived in his office and took sponge baths in the men’s room? “Call here. I’m old school. I don’t have a cell. They don’t work in most of the state, anyway.”

She wrote the number down in a small black notebook, then put it in her purse and drew out five one-hundred-dollar bills.

“I’ll give you the rest tomorrow night after my show. That’s when I get paid. You’ll come?”

Stranahan nodded.

“I still think you’d be…” He saw the expression in her eyes and stopped. “I’ll drive down this afternoon and camp on the river tonight. I’ll be back for your second set tomorrow.”

“Then I’ll see you at the inn.” She held out her hand, insulating herself once more with a professional veneer. Stranahan took it. She stood up. Suddenly she seemed uncertain. Her lips parted, then closed.

“Is there something else?”

“Yes. It’s a small thing, really.”

“A small thing,” he repeated.

“There’s someone else who might be fishing in the river. He’s trying to find those trout, too, you see. And I thought, well, if you saw him there, you could tell him to call his sister.”

Stranahan looked up at her. His mind sighed. So that was it. Admit it, he told himself, you’re a sucker. A pretty woman walks through the door, asks you to do some fishing for her…‌He shook his head, smiling at his gullibility.

“I think you’d better sit back down, Miss Lafayette,” he said, “and tell me what this is really about.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

A
t 9 a.m. Saturday morning, Martha Ettinger stood on the Route 87 bridge watching a dozen fishermen salute the Madison River with graphite fly rods, out-of-staters almost to the man, wearing hats that advertised fishing lodges from Panama to the Kenai Peninsula. The only Montana plate on the sagebrush flat that served as a parking lot was attached with baling twine to the bumper of a battered Toyota Land Cruiser.

It was a long shot. The chance that one of these fishermen had witnessed a man—or a strong woman, for that matter—lugging a waterlogged body into the river ten miles downstream three days previously, if in fact the deceased
had
drowned in a pond or lake as the algae and microcreatures in his lungs suggested, well, it was about the same as her chance of being invited to another ball at the Cottonwood Inn. Nobody fishing this high would have seen the drowned man, that was certain, but it didn’t mean one of these anglers hadn’t fished the downriver stretch in question earlier in the week. After her meeting with Doc Hanson Friday morning, Martha had spent the rest of the day with Walt, covering the river from the place where the body had been found up to the Route 87 bridge. They had interviewed 136 fishermen, campers, and sightseers, only one of whom remembered seeing anything remarkable. A birdwatcher, looking to add the violet-green swallow to his life list, reported spotting a bear on the riverbank at twilight on Tuesday, a mile from the West Fork
bridge. Martha had pricked up her ears; the time frame was right and the body had been discovered not far below the junction of the West Fork and the main stem of the Madison. The birdwatcher said it was so dark the bear wasn’t much more than an articulated blob in his binoculars. Maybe, he admitted, it wasn’t a bear. He had never seen a bear before. He was from Illinois.

She trod down the embankment at the bridge spur and crooked a finger at the first fisherman.

“Sir, I’m Sheriff Ettinger. I’d like to ask you a couple questions.”

The young man made one more cast, reeled up, and waded ashore.

As she worked up the bank, a few anglers weren’t so polite. They continued to fish during the interview and Martha let them, studying their body language for nervousness, looking for mistakes in timing that caused the loops of line to collapse. She also made a point to see what flies they were fishing.

It wasn’t a bad way to spend a day. The river was azure blue, the corridor of the current enveloped by a cool, clean breeze. “Big Sky Country” was the state motto, and never truer than here, Martha thought, where you could see mountains sixty miles distant. To the north spread a vast amphitheater of light, where weather systems developed on the limestone escarpments of the Gravelly plateau, dropped curtains of gray rain, sent lightning shivers across the valley, dissipated, and then built again in purple thunderheads on the western front of the Madison Range, all while you watched in a T-shirt with the sun poaching the freckles on your forearms.

Martha sat down on a rock. She dipped her hat in the river and let the cold water dribble down her forehead. Five feet away, a garter snake swam through the rushes at the edge of the bank. It submerged, poking its head under stones to look for sculpins; then its head periscoped, the red-and-black forked tongue flicking, tasting the air. Martha gave it a wan smile. Going stone to stone—that was what she was doing, too. And with about as much luck. She had questioned seventeen
fishermen in the first two miles, but there was no public access on this bank of the river. Anyone she found from here to the dam either lived in one of the streamside mansions on the south bank or had to have walked all the way up from the bridge. There wouldn’t be many.

In fact, she found only one more angler, a man standing ankle-deep in the slot of whitewater where the river shot out of the earthen dam of Quake Lake. To her right, the mountainside was a concave scar of rubble deposited in the wake of the disastrous earthquake that had dammed the river completely in the summer of 1959. In the collapse of the mountainside, nineteen campers who were sleeping in their tents had been buried alive. The bodies remained under this debris, and to Martha it seemed their spirits still persisted in the mists that hung over the outlet.

The fisherman who had chosen this lonely spot was broad shouldered, fairly tall, and seemed completely at home in his body. As she watched, he waded from boulder to boulder with a light dancer’s step, effortlessly navigating heavy current in which she’d be hesitant to stick a toe. He cast with none of the gymnastic waving of the inexperienced; he simply pointed his arm and the line followed. She watched his fly dancing along the seams of the current. When he turned to acknowledge her, a heavy bang of jet-black hair fell over his left eye. He scraped it back with his finger, gave her a crooked grin, and waded downstream toward her.

“Beautiful morning,” he said, removing his sunglasses.

“What?” The roar of the river was so loud she couldn’t hear him.

He stepped out onto the riverbank stones, his pant legs dripping water. He wore felt wading shoes but no waders. The stem of a pipe protruded from the pocket of a threadbare blue work shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest.

“I said it’s a beautiful morning.”

Maybe he wasn’t as young as she’d thought. Traces of silver framed
his temples and, as he smiled, lines radiated from the corners of his eyes. Martha caught herself smiling back, conscious of the sweat stains under her arms.

“How’s the fishing?”

“Great. Catching’s a little slow.” There was that smile again.

Martha checked the fly hooked to the stripping guide of his fly rod and looked up.

“My name’s Martha Ettinger. I’m the sheriff of Hyalite County. Did you know that a man was found drowned in this river a few days ago?”

“I saw the paper,” he said. “But I thought that was down around the West Fork.”

“A little lower actually, below Lyons Bridge. But fishermen get around. We’re trying to talk to as many as we can to see if anybody saw someone fall in or noticed anything out of the ordinary. Were you fishing this Tuesday?”

He scratched at a stubble of beard.

“I fished in the evening. But that was down below Ennis, in the Bear Trap Canyon.”

“It was a long shot,” Martha admitted.

The man nodded. “Well, that’s what fishing is, too,” he said. “Every cast’s a long shot and then sooner or later a trout comes up and your fly disappears.” He gave a short laugh. “Later, mostly.”

Martha brought her notebook out of her shirt pocket, added his name—Sean Stranahan—and his phone number to her list of question marks, which so far consisted only of the man who had maybe seen the bear. She thanked him for his time.

“Good luck to you, Ma’am,” he said.

Martha hadn’t heard a man call her Ma’am in ten years.

“Good luck yourself,” she said. She climbed up the high bank and started walking back down toward the dead-end private road where Walt had agreed to meet her.
Martha
, she said to herself,
you’re a lonely heart. You feed chickens in the morning and at night you brush
your cats and go to bed alone. The only way you’ll ever catch a man as good looking as that one is to arrest him.

It wasn’t such a bad idea. Arrest him, she thought, then jump his bones and pump the truth out of him. Ask him, for example, why, out of all the fishermen she and Walt had talked to, he was the only one with a Royal Wulff knotted to the end of his leader.

CHAPTER NINE

A
fter the sheriff left, Stranahan clipped the Royal Wulff from his leader. With its snowy wing and red floss body, it looked about as conspicuous on the surface as a hummingbird in a teacup, and that’s precisely why he’d tried it. Any trout that managed to survive in this torrent didn’t ask questions; if a fly looked like food, it ate it. He’d given the Wulff fifteen minutes to prove that point. It hadn’t.

He examined the flies in his box and selected a nymph pattern with a tungsten bead at the head. To the leader he added a blob of biodegradable orange indicator that would float on the surface as the fly ticked the gravel. This was about as far from fly fishing as a boy drowning a garden worm under a wine cork, he thought wryly. But it was just about as effective, too, and today he was fishing for his living, rather than the other way around.

Or was he? What was he really doing here? When Vareda Lafayette had reluctantly sat back down in his office yesterday afternoon, he had asked directly if her brother was missing. She had insisted he wasn’t. Her brother, who would be a senior at Ole Miss this fall, had a summer job working in a fish hatchery near Great Falls on the Missouri River. The hatchery was two hundred miles north of Bridger, but he had agreed to help find the trout their father had fin-clipped on his days off. It was his second summer at the hatchery, and, having fished his way around the state, he knew the Madison River. But he didn’t have a cell phone and she hadn’t been able to reach him. She
thought he might have driven down and could be on the Madison now—that was all. But he was a kid and she wanted to hire Stranahan because he was a professional.

“How do you know I’m a good fisherman?” he had asked her.

She’d asked at one of the fly fishing stores for a reference and his name came up, she’d told him.

That must have been the Kingfisher, Stranahan thought. He’d fished upriver from one of their guide boats while the guide was preparing a bankside lunch, and had caught one trout after another swinging a marabou streamer, much to the consternation of the guide’s clients.

“And then,” she was saying, “when I found your studio and saw that you were a private detective, that settled it for me.”

Stranahan had let that pass and got down to business. What car did her brother drive? A small sedan, if it was the same car he drove back in Mississippi. Blue, or maybe dark green. It had an Ole Miss bumper sticker. What did her brother look like? Auburn hair, like hers. He’d told her he was growing a beard. What did she really want: for him to fish or just have a look around? Both, she insisted.

“Okay, then,” he said.

She stood up.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

She looked at him with a cool expression.

“Your brother. He has a name, I assume.”

“Of course he has a name. He’s Jeffrey Beaudreux.” She spelled it for him. “Jeffrey Jeremiah. We call him Jerry. J.J., sometimes.”

“Thank you. Is that also your name, Beaudreux?”

“It was. A long time ago. Now, is that all?”

Stranahan hesitated only a moment, dreading that he might be the bearer of bad news.

“Miss Lafayette, have you seen today’s newspaper?” he asked. “Or yesterday’s?”

Again, the level gaze.

“Because a body was found in the river the night before last. You say that your brother could be fishing on the Madison. I’m not implying a connection, but it would be derelict of me not to mention it to you.”

“Yes, I heard,” she said, biting off the words. “But that poor man wasn’t my brother, if that’s what you’re asking. That man had blond hair. Long blond hair. And he didn’t have a beard. The paper said so.”