Crazy Mountain Kiss

Book 4: A Sean Stranahan Mystery

by Keith MCCafferty

Genres: Westerns; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

It's April, but there's still snow on the Montana mountains the day a member of the Madison River Liar and Fly Tiers club finds a Santa hat in the chimney of his rented cabin. With the flue clogged, and desperate to make a fire, he climbs up to the roof only to find the body of a teenage girl wedged into the chimney. When Sheriff Martha Ettinger and her team arrive to extract the body, they identify the victim as Cinderella "Cindy" Huntingdon—a promising young rodeo star who has been missing since November.

Was Cindy murdered? Or was she running for her life? And if so, from whom? Cindy's mother, Etta, hires private detective Sean Stranahan to find out. Jasper Fey, the girl's stepfather, believes moving on is the only way to heal. But Etta's not willing to let it go, and neither are Sean or Martha, who find clues to the death in the mysterious legends of the Crazy Mountains.

The fourth book in McCafferty's mystery series features a brisk, savvy plot and charming yet authentic characters—perfect for fans of C. J. Box and Craig Johnson.

Release date: June 9, 2015

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

 

Prologue

As he reached for the bottle of George T. Stagg fifteen-year-old bourbon, Max Gallagher thought wryly of his oft-quoted principle of writing, the first of “Max’s maxims,” which he’d once confided to an editor of American Crime magazine—“Always write on the level.” When he was working on A Nose for Trouble, the first book in his mystery series featuring a sleuth who was a “nose” for a perfume company, writing on the level meant a speedball, the cocaine slamming into his bloodstream seconds before heroin slowed the train to a more manageable speed. By the time he penned A Nose for Romance, his fifth novel and only best seller, he’d kicked his habit and was balancing the high provided by prescription Adderall with vodka and maintenance tokes of marijuana. By then his protagonist had gone through changes of his own. Having lost his wife in a car crash, he was bedding a Parisian film star who smelled of Dior J’Adore in a hotel room in Cassis, on the French Riviera. Gallagher was in fact writing a page from his own life, for he had traveled to Provence to research the setting, booked himself into a waterfront hotel, and carried on his own affair, the difference being that the woman between the sheets was not the French lovely of his imagination but his all too real Argentine mistress, who, having just come from a swim, smelled like kelp.

The mistress cost him his second wife and half his money; investing in a winery run by her uncles in Mendoza lost him the rest. His sixth and seventh books hadn’t sold, his publisher dropped him when the eighth failed to materialize, and now, halfway through the rewrite of his comeback attempt, A Nose for Tea, which his agent refused to shop until he’d made drastic revisions, he was alone in a Forest Service rental cabin in Montana’s Crazy Mountains, chickadees outside a frosted windowpane for company, chewing nicotine gum for the buzz and tamping it down with the whiskey.

“How the mighty have fallen,” he said aloud. He lifted his fingers from the typewriter keys and swished the bourbon in his mouth. At this rate, financially speaking—he permitted himself a smile—his next book would be written on Red Bull and beer. He laughed silently—his sense of humor would be the last of his qualities to desert him—then let out a sigh. Plot had never been his strong suit, and this one was particularly flimsy, revolving around an Indian mountain goat called a ghooral, which was being poached to extinction because its scent glands were valued by perfume mixers. The setting was Darjeeling, hence the title, and it didn’t help that, one, there were no ghooral in Darjeeling; two, the scent glands from an actual ghooral would make perfume smell like goat gonads; and, three, with no advance and residuals claimed by his vices, research consisted of scanning maps on Google Earth. Max Gallagher had never been to India. He didn’t even like tea.

He drained the glass. Though the cabin was chill with a clammy odor, he hadn’t bothered to build a fire after snowshoeing from the trailhead. The exertion had warmed him and he was in too much hurry to flesh out the thoughts of his road trip, which he’d scratched down on the backs of envelopes while driving with his elbows. Now he sat back in the rough wood chair, rubbed his sore fingertips—it had been twenty years since he’d worked on a manual typewriter—and declared himself satisfied by pouring another shot of the George T. Stagg. The clammy scent he’d noted when coming in the door had a moldy taint, earthy and with an unplaceable metallic tang that made his nostrils flare. He’d chosen a nose for his protagonist because his own sense of smell was acute, and the odor bothered him. Though the drive had long since caught up to him, he thought he’d better open the cabin’s windows, build a fire in the open fireplace that faced into the bunkhouse, and air the place out good before going to bed. He threw on a buffalo plaid stag jacket that made him look like a cigarette model—he’d been that model once and it was a look he cultivated—walked outside, and rendered several blocks of firewood into splits.

Breathing heavily in the altitude, he let his eyes wander to the pond below the cabin. The shoreline was rimmed with ice, the windless surface reflecting muted smears of lilac and magenta that made a drama of the evening skyline. It was the beautiful gloom that is April in Montana: the red wine ribbon of the Shields River far below, puzzle pieces of old snow on the mountainsides, subdued skies through which the sun shone only in the gilded edges of the clouds. Gorgeous if you were an artist, but in an unrelenting way that made the native want to bring an elk rifle to his forehead.

Gallagher stacked the wood and carried it inside, where he crumpled up newspaper and built a tepee of the splits. He looked for the chain or lever that worked the damper and, not finding it, lit the fire. In seconds the cabin had filled with smoke. Something had to be clogging the flue. He picked up an iron poker and stuck it up the chimney. It jammed against something solid, and as he withdrew the iron, a piece of red cloth dropped onto the firebox. He lifted it with the fireplace tongs, narrowing his eyes as he held it at arm’s length. The look on his face was one of perplexion, his frown deepening as he saw that the cloth was a Santa hat, complete with a tassel and a band of fake white fur.

A pack rat’s cache? Part of a bird’s nest? At the clubhouse he co-owned on the Madison River with three other fishermen, there had been problems with birds building nests in the flue, clogging the length of the passage with sticks. Well, he wasn’t going to sleep until he found out. He fished a flashlight from his jacket pocket and walked outside.

He looked up at the roof. No chimney cap. Might as well have handed out invitations to every feather in heaven. Against the eaves was a wooden ladder. Snow had thawed and frozen around the feet of the ladder, and the rungs were solid as a marble staircase as Gallagher ascended to the roof. Edging to the southern exposure where the snow had burnt off the shingles, he climbed on all fours until reaching the chimney. Built of river stones chinked with hundred-year-old mortar, it was the centerpiece of the cabin, much bigger than a modern chimney, with a wide, squarish opening.

As he got to his feet, hugging the chimney to maintain his balance, a great racketing sounded from within. He ducked as a crow burst out of the chimney, so close to his head that he saw the pebble of its eye and felt the air beating from its wings. The bird, an arrow of black, flew low into the gloom, cawing.

Gallagher watched it out of sight. “One crow sorrow,” he said under his breath.

It was the first line of the “Counting Crows” nursery rhyme his Irish grandmother had recited when he was a child. He tried to think of the second line, knowing that he was stalling. Something was bothering him, a conversation, no, an argument, the details lost to the alcoholic haze in which the memory had been made. Just do it, he told himself. Shielding his eyes in case there was another bird—Two crows mirth, that was the next line—he raised his head and shone the flashlight into the mouth of the chimney. A crosshatch of sticks woven around the broken tip of a graphite fly rod obscured his view. The crow had been building a nest.

Gallagher felt the tension flood out of his body. He let out a long breath. Now it was just work, and he started pulling up the sticks, tossing them onto the roof. He paused with the tip of the rod in his hand. The crow must have flown with it all the way from the river. Gallagher had pocketed the flashlight while dismantling the nest and switched it back on. There were still sticks too far down to reach and he pushed them aside with the rod tip until he could see into the flue. What stared back at him, from about ten feet down where the smoke chamber narrowed, were empty eye sockets that were as dead black as the wings of the crow.

 

 

PART ONE

ONE CROW SORROW

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

Three Degrees of Sean Stranahan

The way I see it,” Undersheriff Walter Hess said, “is we can go through the side of the chimney with a jackhammer, which would make a Judy of a mess, or we could drop a lasso around her neck and see if we could pull her up. Harold says he’s got a lariat in his pickup.”

“Humpff. And hope her head doesn’t come off?”

Martha Ettinger rested her chin on steepled fingers. Martha the thinker, the latest in a sequence of postures she’d run through since hiking in ten minutes earlier—hands on hips while looking at the chimney, fingers searching for her carotid, then rubbing her badge as if it was Aladdin’s lamp.

She popped a Chiclet into her mouth and drummed her thumb against the grips of her revolver.

“No,” she said, “we’re going to wait for light. Meantime I want to talk to the guy who found the body.”

They were standing outside, looking at the roof where Harold Little Feather was shining a six-cell flashlight.

“Warren’s babysitting him inside,” Hess said. “Named Gallagher. Says he schlepped back to his car and drove down to Wilsall before he got a bar of reception. I figured you’d want to do an informal before anybody took his statement.”

Ettinger nodded. “Harold, get on down here,” she said. She and Walt unnecessarily braced the ladder as he climbed down.

“It isn’t pretty” were the first words out of his mouth. “She backed down the chimney with her arms extended, so it seems like she’s reaching up at you. Her eyes are gone. The ancients would tell you the birds took them up to the gods, so they could reconstruct her soul.”

“Is that Blackfeet folklore?”

“No, I think it goes back farther than the people.”

“So how do we get her out?”

“I’m thinking we could drop ropes over her hands, cinch the loops on her arms, tug her out that way.”

“I was just saying maybe her head,” Walt said.

Harold frowned. “You might pull it off, she’s really stuck.”

Ettinger’s hands went to her hips. “When I fed the chickens this morning, this isn’t a conversation I thought I’d be having.”

“Maybe we could try fairy dust,” Walt said. “My mother told me that’s how Santa gets down the chimney.”

“Fairy dust is in somewhat short supply.” Martha was in no mood for Walt’s deadpan. “No, that body’s been there a while. It isn’t going anywhere, not until we can see what we’re doing.”

“What I’m wondering about is what she thought she was doing?” Harold hugged his jean jacket about him. “No one more than a year off the breast can get all the way down a chimney. Even if they made it as far as the smoke chamber, then you got your angle space to the damper, and the damper, door open, you’re talking six inches of passage, ten tops.”

Walt shook his head. “There wasn’t no damper, that’s what the fella said. It’s a straight shot to the firebox. Maybe she figured she could worm on down.”

“But how would she know it didn’t have a damper?” Martha said. “It makes me wonder if she isn’t from the area.”

Walt climbed the steps onto the rough-hewn floorboards of the porch and shone his flashlight on a piece of wood nailed above the door. Letters had been burned into the wood. “Mile and a Half High Cabin,” he read out loud. “Three X’s. I’d say somebody has a sense of humor.”

Ettinger jutted her chin toward Harold and they sidled to the edge of the porch.

“What makes you say that, her not being from the area?” Harold said in a quiet voice.

“Most people who deal with an eight-month winter know how a chimney works.”

“What about the Huntington girl?” Walt said. “You were the detective on that case, Harold. They never found her or the boy.” He’d been listening, after all.

“Could be. Bar-4’s the next drainage up. If it turns out, I don’t want to be the one tells the puma on the painted horse.”

“That what they call Loretta Huntington?”

“Among other things. Woman like her has a lot of names.”

“Tomorrow’s April Fool’s,” Walt said, apropos of nothing.

“April Fool’s the first day of the month, not the last.” Martha kneaded her chin, thinking about how long the girl had been in the chimney before dying, wondering if she was still alive when the crow carried her eyes to heaven.

 • • • 

Martha Ettinger’s first impression of the man who stood to shake her hand was that he was Rhett Butler’s ghost, risen from the mists of Tara. Wavy black hair, something in it to keep it that way, a squared-off chin with a dimple and heavy five o’clock shadow. He even had a pencil mustache.

“At last we meet,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder if Stranahan made you up.” The voice came from his diaphragm, the eyebrows lifting in self-amusement. But fatigue behind the gray-blue irises. The sweat sheen of man who’d been up for forty hours.

“How do you know Sean Stranahan?” Ettinger drew a notebook from her breast pocket.

“He’s a member of the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club. I own the clubhouse with Pat Willoughby and Ken Winston.”

“I feel like I should recognize your name, but I don’t.”

“That’s because it used to be Smither, Jon Smither.”

“Uh-huh.” Ettinger clicked her pen. “We’re going to get back to that, but answer a question for me first. If you own property on the Madison River, what are you doing up here in the Crazies?”

“It’s a long story.”

Ettinger glanced at Sheriff’s Sergeant Warren Jarrett. “Warren, do you have any coffee in that thermos?”

She took a chair at the cabin’s battered pine table, which was caked with swirls of wax that had dripped from candles stuck in wine bottles. She kicked out the chair opposite and nodded to Gallagher.

“Take me through what happened.”

“I’m a writer. I was writing.”

“Your car has California plates. Let’s back up a couple thousand miles.”

“One thousand and sixty-seven, door to door,” he said, and began to recount the steps leading to his grisly discovery, starting with a conversation he’d had in a bar that had inspired him to drive to his home in Marin County, throw his computer bag into his Lexus, and hit the highway. A night and a day had passed since he’d seen the Bay glitter under the lights of the Richmond Bridge. Certainly, he’d intended to stay in the clubhouse, but when he contacted the property manager from the road, asking to have the electricity hooked up and the antifreeze drained from the pipes, the manager had bad news. Getting the clubhouse up and running was an all-day job and it would be at least three days before a plumber was available. However, he knew the Forest Service supervisor and might be able to pull a string. Would Gallagher be interested in staying in one of the backcountry rental cabins? He was thinking of one on the west side of the Crazy Mountains, at the northern extreme of Hyalite County. The season had closed at the end of February, so it would need some airing out and he’d have to dispose of the mice in the traps, but there was a woodstove and he could tote water from the creek. Or melt snow. At seven thousand feet, winter waved a long goodbye. He called back in five minutes, having got the okay, said he’d leave a pair of snowshoes at the road end for the trudge in. He’d tape the combination to the door lock on one of the bindings.

As Gallagher talked, Ettinger watched the way he wrinkled up his eyes recalling details, how, when he leaned across the table to face her, his smile drew commas of irony through his cheeks. The insolent bastard’s trying to charm me, she thought.

“I’m still having trouble understanding the why,” she said. “Leave like that in the middle of the night. You’d think this big of a trip, you’d do some planning. Leave word where you were going.”

“Not really. My fishing gear is at the clubhouse. Groceries I can buy in Ennis. Do you live alone, Sheriff Ettinger?”

She looked at him without expression.

“Does anyone care what time you make it back to the house or whether you drink too much?”

“Why, do you drink too much, Max?”

“Sometimes. I did tonight. You would have, too. But that’s not my point. When you lay your head on the pillow knowing if you don’t wake up, nobody’s going to come looking until they notice the smell, it isn’t such a big deal.”

“What isn’t?”

“Anything.”

“Just up and take off, huh?”

“Why not?”

“But if the point of the trip was to write this book and there’s no electricity . . .”

He shrugged. “I didn’t know I’d be staying here when I left. When I heard, I stopped off in Elko and bought a typewriter at a thrift store.” He reached under the table for the battered blue manual, which he’d zipped back into its case. “This is a Lettera 32 Olivetti, the same model that Cormac McCarthy used to write No Country for Old Men. It was made into a movie, the one where the killer uses a cattle gun to blow holes in people’s heads.”

“I’m familiar with it. Up here we’re old-fashioned. Murderers use bullets; it’s a time-honored tradition.”

“I thought pounding these keys, some of the maestro’s magic might rub off on my fingers.”

“Has it?”

“That remains to be seen. Look, Sheriff, I’ll level with you. I went through a hard breakup a few months ago. Ever since, I seem to be gripped by inertia. And financially I’m not in tip-top shape. I tell people I changed my name to Gallagher because it starts with one of the first seven letters of the alphabet, and that’s better for book sales because it’s closer to the top of the bookshelf. Which is true enough. I’ve used Gallagher as a pen name for years, and half my friends have called me Max for just as long. But that’s not the real reason I petitioned to have it changed. The real reason is when you go bankrupt, you change your name to throw creditors off the trail. I had a good thing going and let it slide south. Now I’m trying to make amends.”

Ettinger wasn’t going to let it go. “You said you’d been talking to a bartender, a woman. What did she say that made you decide to go?”

“It’s what she didn’t. She was an acquaintance, a friend with benefits.” He scrolled quote marks with his fingers. “I was lonely and she was . . . well, not lonely enough.” He shrugged. “I walked out the door feeling sorry for myself, then thought, what the hell, why not go to Montana and finish the book? Do something right.” He sat back and gave her the right side of his face to admire.

“What were you before you were a writer?”

“I was a crime reporter for the San Francisco Herald.”

“You don’t say?”

“Ten years.”

“Why did you quit?”

“I burned out.”

“Were you drinking then?”

Gallagher folded his hands on the table. “Look, I’m just doing my civic duty.”

“Yes, you are.” Martha exhaled. “It’s late. I’m going to have Warren here take your statement and we’re going to call it a night. Then you can go crash in a motel.”

“I’d rather not. Is Sean Stranahan living in his tipi?”

“He’s in Florida.”

“Sam Meslik’s in the club. I suppose I could bunk with him. I was going to look him up and see if he wanted to fish some evening anyway.”

Ettinger scratched the back of her head with her pen. “They’re both in Florida.”

“Oh.” Gallagher nodded. “Yeah, I heard something about that. Sean’s helping Sam set up a guide business there for the off season. Key West, right?”

Ettinger kneaded her chin. “I know where Sam hides his key. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

Gallagher smiled, drawing the commas in his cheeks. He was, Martha had to admit, very good-looking.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” he said. “How we know each other. I mean, I know Stranahan because the club hired him to find those trout flies that were stolen, and I met Sam because Sean knows Sam. If I did that in my books, connected everybody up, my editor would say it was too convenient. She’d accuse me of cheating.”

“Your editor doesn’t live in Montana.”

“Six degrees of Sean Stranahan.”

“More like three degrees, and he’s a newcomer. Spot me an old-timer and I can link up the whole damned valley. Are you sober enough to drive? I don’t want you pulling a Signal 30 halfway up the valley.”

“After what I saw? I’m too sober.”

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

Love on Four Continents

It was midnight before Martha turned onto Cottonwood Road and lowered the window, hoping to hear the great gray owl who was the shaman of wilderness, whose voice, she’d often thought, was the lament of all women who lay in bed alone, sisters of a certain silence.

She let Goldie, her Australian shepherd, out for a quick tour of the property while she fed chopped-up elk venison to Sheba, her brittle-whiskered Siamese. She stood in the doorway and whistled to Goldie—she didn’t like to let her roam after dark, as there was a tom lion whose beat extended up and down the canyon. She whistled again and shut the door after Goldie bounded in.

Goddamn degrees of separation. It was bad enough to pass the silhouette of the tipi on her drive home every night, but why couldn’t a week go by without Stranahan’s name crossing someone’s lips other than her own?

I won’t hate him, she told herself. I won’t hate him for the wall I built to keep him out of my life. I have only myself to blame for the night I turned out the light.

For the light had been their understanding. On nights when she turned the porch light on, the signal that she was done with the workload she’d carried home from the office, he was free to drop by, to have tea, iced or hot as the season dictated, while they sat before the varnished tree stump that served as her desk, and on which she always had a partially completed jigsaw puzzle. They would work the puzzle and talk about their days—Sean was a fishing guide so his were spent on the river, but he also was a watercolorist, specializing in angling art, and a now-and-then private detective, which was how they’d met several years before. They’d stir the surface of life while the tension built underneath. At a certain point, it could be ten minutes, it could be thirty, Sean would carry his glass to the kitchen and come back—she’d hear the footsteps on the floorboards and shut her eyes—and he’d bend down behind her chair and wrap his arms around her, cupping her breasts while she let out a sigh.

“Take off your gun,” he’d whisper against the side of her neck, and she’d feel the tickling in the soft down of her hair. And she’d set down the puzzle piece in her fingers and stand up, lean back against him for a long minute, both of them feeling the other’s arousal, and she’d take him by the hand to the bedroom.

The first time they’d made love, she actually had been wearing her gun when he’d told her to take it off, and the puzzle on the stump had been elephants against the backdrop of Kilimanjaro. Since then they had shared each other’s desire after working other puzzles—the Spanish Steps, Machu Picchu, a box of gaudy steelhead flies called Dead Man’s Fancy, and a pride of lions in the Okavango Delta. They’d made love on four continents without ever leaving the log walls of her hundred-year-old farmhouse. Or so she had liked to think of it.

And then the day she didn’t like to think about, when she had walked to the door to switch on the porch light and hadn’t. She’d told herself it wasn’t any one thing, although it had happened the same night she’d had a call from her youngest son, David, who was a sophomore at the University of Arizona in Tucson. David, who, like his older brother, Derek, had chosen to live with his father after the divorce. David who made her heart jump when he said he’d like to visit her this June, do some fishing and hang out with her before earning credits toward his geology degree by spending six weeks in the Montana badlands on a dinosaur dig sponsored by the Museum of the Rockies. Martha hadn’t even known he’d applied for the position, and the prospect both thrilled and terrified her. Immediately she’d thought of Sean, what a good mentor he could be for her son, not only on the river. But how would David react, her dating a man in his midthirties when she had seen forty flow under the bridge last October? Of course, that wasn’t it at all, not if she was really being honest. She was simply, utterly terrified of being hurt when it ended. Because it was going to end, like every relationship in her life had ended, and how much it hurt was a function of how long it lasted. And so she had made the excuses, she had built the wall, and the light stayed out.

Stranahan had called her on it. “You cut your happiness to cut your losses later, that’s not a very courageous way of living your life.”

“That’s just it, though. It’s my life.”

Her porch had been dark now through the heart of the winter and into the thaw, four months during which they’d barely spoken. Now, because Sean knew Max Gallagher, she’d have to call him about the body in the chimney. She got into bed and opened her book, the Franklin Library illustrated edition of Gone with the Wind with a cracked spine that she’d glued and reglued, and yellowed pages that she had read and reread since she was a girl. Though she hid it under a dour smile and acerbic wit, what Doc Hanson, the medical examiner, called her “warts and graces,” Martha was a tragic romantic, her doomed love affairs the ever-present minor key of her life. The saga of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, with its deceptions and revenges, its cross-purposes and earthly passions, was the most tragic romance of all.

She propped the book on her chest, thinking about Gallagher, who had the blackguard’s insolence and devilish looks, and wondered at the color of his heart. He had showed her one side of his face. What did the other conceal? In her line of work, people changed their names either to hide something or hide from something. Gallagher’s explanations sounded logical enough, yet it bothered her. She looked over the book to regard Goldie, who was looking up with her amber eyes, her head resting on Martha’s thigh.

“I’ll take Scarlett’s advice,” she said to Goldie. “I’ll think about it tomorrow.”

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

Entertainment, Romance, and Live Bait

Key West, Florida, is the end of the road in the way that the darkest bar is the end of the day. It’s a place where shattered lives exhaust their final hours, where fortune-tellers manufacture hope for the hopeless for a ten-dollar bill, where men who can’t recall when it all went wrong lean in 2 a.m. shadows among six-toed cats that are scarcely more than shadows themselves.

In Key West, people who would pause to consider if they were farther up U.S. 1, or farther up the ladder, don’t. And those who don’t smoke might just light one up.

When Sean Stranahan hopped onto his bicycle at five in the morning, the town was at slack tide, the only sound the hiss of the tires. A liquid trail of Spanish beckoned him toward the deli at the M&M Laundry, where he stopped for C