ONE
Ora Mae Foreman relaxed on the balcony of the Cascade with her thermos of coffee, a bag of chocolate-coated doughnut holes, and the morning paper, and waited for the sun to light up the eastern face of the Rockies.
“A million-dollar view,” Sterling Noseworthy told all the agents. “That’s what you’re selling.”
It was baloney, of course, the kind that Sterling liked to slice and serve when he was trying to be motivational. To be sure, the views at Buffalo Mountain Resort were spectacular—the mountains almost in your living room, the heavy forest of pine and spruce, the river racing down White Goat Canyon and leaping over the edge of the Bozeman Fault, and the vast expanse of prairies stretching out forever under the towering sky.
But the views aside, Ora Mae knew what Buffalo Mountain Resort was really selling—the illusion that you had escaped the rush of the city for the sanctuary of the wilderness, the knowledge that you were among the elite in the vacation retreat game, and the security of the guard at the front gate.
There was wilderness out there, all right. Places to get lost. Cliffs to fall off. Bears. Moose. Maybe even a pack of wolves to brighten your day. But the condominium and casino complex was about as wild as Banff or Lake Tahoe or wherever the rich gathered for an outdoor adventure.
Ora Mae wasn’t sure that the Indians had done the right thing, building the complex. Claire Merchant had made Buffalo Mountain the main issue in the tribal election and Claire had come away with enough votes to carry the day. But not without splitting the council, dividing families, and destroying old alliances. Ironically, the most visible casualty was Claire herself, for her son, Stanley—or Stick, as he was known to everyone except his mother—disagreed with her vision of economic independence, formed a mildly militant organization called the Red Hawk Society, and began picketing the project. The protests had interrupted construction from time to time, but aside from the one day someone had bounced a bullet off an idle dump truck and sent everyone scrambling for cover, there hadn’t been any real violence. Just hurt feelings and sore voices. And the bitter taste of having to choose sides.
But that was Indian business and none of Ora Mae’s concern. When the complex opened in another week, her job was to move the units as fast as she could.
“Get a feel for the place,” Sterling told everyone. “Walk through the models. Stand on the balconies. Imagine what it would be like to own a place like this.”
Not that anyone in the office could afford one of the units. Even the cheap one-bedrooms on the north side, where the view included the top of the casino and the parking lot, were going for over a quarter of a million dollars.
Ora Mae was in the middle of the obituaries and working on the last of the doughnut holes when her cellphone went off. When Sterling first passed the phones out to all the agents, Ora Mae thought having a cellphone was the cream on the shortcake. For the first couple of weeks, every time it rang, she couldn’t get it out of her purse fast enough. But it didn’t take her long to realize that while the phone was cute even useful, it was also a tether. The longer she dragged it around, the more it reminded her of her sister in Salt Lake City and her four kids. They were cute too.
Now she hated the damn thing, and every time it rang, she would wait a little longer before she answered it. Most of the time, Sterling was on the other end, and Ora Mae didn’t mind making him wait until the pond froze and the geese went south.
“Where are you?”
The man had all the social graces of shag carpet. Ora Mae licked her fingers slowly. They still tasted of warm chocolate.
“At the complex.”
“Is everything okay?”
Ever since the models had been furnished and loaded up with all the goodies that rich people required, Sterling had worried about the place being vandalized. So, for the past two weeks, someone from the office had had to drive from Chinook to the complex each day, just to settle Sterling’s mind that all of the models still had their potpourri and none of the expensive toys had gone missing.
“Have you seen Clarence?”
“Nope.”
Clarence Fellows was Sterling’s nephew, a young, muscular man just out of community college who thought of himself as a sports car. Especially when it came to women. When it came to work, however, Clarence was more an old bus with four flat tires and a dead battery.
“He was supposed to check the models yesterday.”
“That right?”
“But I didn’t hear from him.”
“You try his cellphone?”
“Responsibility,” said Sterling, his voice wading through warm custard. “The first imperative of a good agent is responsibility.”
Ora Mae generally tried to steer clear of other people’s business. “Don’t worry, Sterling, everything’s fine.”
“No trouble?”
“Trouble” was Sterling’s noun for anything gone wrong. An unhappy client was trouble. A bounced cheque was trouble. Floods, forest fires, terminal diseases, high interest rates, loose fan belts, tooth decay. Bad haircuts. Sterling liked things that were predictable and organized. Just what he was doing in the real estate business was a mystery.
“Not a drop.”
“Because we don’t want trouble, do we?”
It was a rhetorical question, and Ora Mae had given up answering that kind of question even before she left home and headed west to see the sights and make her fortune. That was twenty years ago, and all in all, the sights had been worth it.
“Don’t forget to check all the units.”
“Maybe Clarence is putting a big deal together.” Ora Mae could hear the smile in her voice and wondered whether Sterling could hear it too. Probably not, she thought. The only voice Sterling ever listened to was his own.
“And call me back.”
Buffalo Mountain Resort had been designed by Douglas Cardinal and had already won several awards for the innovative way Cardinal had combined the demands of an upscale resort with traditional Native motifs and concerns. The most prominent building, the one you saw first as you came off the prairie floor and headed into the foothills, was the casino, a huge copper-plated geodesic dome that glowed and shimmered in the light.
The condominium complex itself was to the south and west of the casino. It was taller than the casino, but the grey concrete walls and the tinted windows made the building all but disappear into the face of the mountains.
Sterling had had an aerial photograph taken of the area and had tacked it to the wall behind his desk. You couldn’t see the pattern from the ground, but looking at the buildings from above, it was clear that Cardinal had been both creative and literal. What the cluster of buildings most resembled, if you used your imagination a little, was a buffalo warming itself in the high plains sun.
Ora Mae reluctantly stood up and brushed the crumbs off the patio table. She folded the doughnut bag neatly, slipped it into her purse along with the thermos, and checked her shoes to make sure she wasn’t tracking anything across the pale wool rug.
For just a moment, she thought about calling Sterling and telling him that a toilet had backed up and overflowed onto the carpet, or that a large bird had flown into one of the windows and shattered the glass, or that a small electrical fire had damaged a kitchen. She took a moment’s pleasure in imagining Sterling’s face, but she didn’t even think about opening her purse. That was one thing she and Sterling Noseworthy the Fourth or Fifth, whichever he was, had in common. She didn’t like trouble any better than he did.
Trouble, Ora Mae’s mother had told her and her sisters, was like a man, never in short supply, never too far away.
The Cataract was the smallest of the models, a long, narrow one-bedroom with a kitchen at one end and a living room at the other. Ora Mae had spent some time trying to find a good adjective for it, something she could use as a selling point. The closest she had come to was “cozy.” “Cozy” was almost the right size, but “cozy” also suggested good light and a warm, homey feel.
“Place is so small,” she had heard Clarence tell Sterling, “a man can stand at the front door and piss in the toilet with his eyes closed.”
It was male grunting. Ora Mae had heard it all before, and she was sure that the attempt wouldn’t be worth the watching. If the bathroom at the office was any indicator, Clarence standing across the room from the toilet with his eyes shut wasn’t going to be any better or worse than Clarence standing next to the toilet with his eyes open.
When Ora Mae opened the door to the Cataract, she had the distinct feeling that she was not alone. “Clarence?”
She knew about Clarence and Celia Brothers. It was supposed to be a secret, but probably the only
two people who didn’t know that Clarence and Celia had been touring the motels in the immediate area were Clarence’s wife, Barbara, and Sterling. Ora Mae suspected that Barbara did know, in fact, and was just waiting for the right moment to cut Clarence’s heart out.
“Clarence! You here?”
Ora Mae stood in the doorway and tested the air. It was heavy and stale. But above the formaldehyde off-gassing from the carpet and particle-board furniture, and the sharp stink of new paint, was an unfamiliar smell, acrid and sweet. An unpleasant smell. A smell that made her anxious and grumpy.
Word was Clarence had run out of motels in the area and had been bringing Celia out to the resort.
But the one-bedroom unit? God! The man had no more romance than a Kleenex. “Give it up, Clarence.”
The bedroom was empty, and the bed had not been slept in. Thank God she didn’t have to deal with Clarence and Celia naked and hiding in the closet. Ora Mae walked to the living room and looked out the window. Below, the top of the casino was bright gold and red, and all around it, the asphalt parking lot spread out like a lava flow, eating its way through the rocks and the trees and the thick prairie grass. She stood in the light and tried to imagine what she was going to say to prospective buyers to get them to pony up a quarter of a million dollars for a hallway with a designer toilet. Probably something about investment.
It wasn’t until she turned around and started for the door that she saw the man.
“Jesus!”
He was slumped in a large wingback chair facing the window. He looked comfortable enough, and if it hadn’t been for the way his eyes stared at nothing in particular, Ora Mae might have thought he was relaxing and enjoying the peace and quiet that came with owning a piece of Buffalo Mountain Resort.
As she stood looking at the man, she realized she hadn’t taken a breath in the last little while. When she did, it was a long, deep breath, and as she pulled it in, she willed her shoulders to drop and her hands to relax. She had seen bodies before, and it had been a long time since she had let a man, alive or dead, scare her.
ORA MAE WALKED back to the Cascade. When she got there, she sat down, took the thermos out of her purse, and finished off the last of the coffee. The sun was up now, and as she watched Buffalo Mountain come to life, she realized that she hadn’t really noticed the man’s face. She didn’t think he was anyone she knew, but she was sorry now that she hadn’t looked at him more closely or checked for a wallet or a credit card, something that would give the man a name.
Ora Mae dialed Sterling’s number first. She didn’t want anyone else to give him the good news. Trouble. Ora Mae smiled to herself. That boy didn’t know what trouble was.
Then she called the sheriff.
Then she called Thumps DreadfulWater.
TWO
When the alarm began ringing, Thumps DreadfulWater went looking for the clock with his elbow. It was one of those old-fashioned clocks that had to be wound. He didn’t remember winding it—in fact, hadn’t wound it for months. And while he had a vague notion of how to set the alarm, he couldn’t think of any reason why he would have done something that stupid. So, he was relieved to discover that the noise that had woken him was the phone and not the clock.
Thumps wrapped the quilt around his head and rolled over on the cat. Freeway didn’t yowl or move out of the way as a normal cat would. She simply grunted, stuck her claws into Thumps’s stomach, and went back to sleep. As he fumbled for the phone, Thumps reminded himself once again that he needed to get an answering machine and that it was time to clip Freeway’s nails.
“I’m not in right now.”
“Thumps? It’s Ora Mae.”
“Leave a message.”
“You don’t have an answering machine.”
“And I’ll get back to you.”
“Quit fooling around. I’m out at the resort.”
“Wait for the tone.”
“I found a dead body,” said Ora Mae. “Sheriff says to bring your camera.”
Thumps held the phone for a moment before he put it back on the cradle. A dead body? At Buffalo Mountain? Maybe Sterling Noseworthy had looked at the prices of the condos and had dropped dead of shock in the lobby. No, Thumps thought to himself, Ora Mae hadn’t sounded happy enough for that to have happened. Besides, Sterling had set the prices. The only thing the man would be concerned about at this point were the profits. And what his percentage would be.
Of course, Ora Mae hadn’t bothered to say who had died at Buffalo Mountain Resort. The woman was truly evil. She knew the hint of a mystery was one of the few ways to get him out of bed on a Sunday morning. The only idea that immediately came to mind was that the Red Hawk Society had had some kind of confrontation with the police. But a death? Not likely. Stick Merchant was young and passionate, but he wasn’t stupid. And besides, with the exception of the dump truck incident, all the protests had been peaceful so far, hardly any more contentious than an office picnic.
Freeway stretched and began licking around Thumps’s belly button. For some reason, the cat liked this particular spot on his body.
“Knock it off.”
As cats go, Freeway was a reasonable sort, and apart from belly buttons, her only other obsession was with anything that resembled string. The first week she was in the house, Thumps had discovered that all the laces on his shoes and boots had been removed at the eyelets. Nice clean cuts, as if someone had come along with a knife or a pair of scissors. He suspected about Freeway, but he didn’t really believe she had done it until he began finding the hard ends of the shoelaces in the litter box. After that, he was forced to hide his shoes in the kitchen cupboard along with the cereal and the potatoes.
Thumps fluffed the pillows, straightened the sheets, and arranged the quilt so that it tucked under the pillows and hung over the other three sides of the bed equally. Freeway sat on the floor and watched him as she always did.
“You could help, you know.”
Freeway blinked and headed down the hall.
“I get to use it first,” Thumps called after the cat, but it was a futile gesture. And he knew it. By the time he got to the bathroom, Freeway was already standing on the seat, her head in the toilet. In addition to her passion for shoelaces, the cat also had a relationship with water that Thumps couldn’t quite fathom. He had given her a nice, heavy ceramic bowl for water, a bowl he had made in art-something class during his first year at university. It was a pretty piece, its sides decorated with plump yellow fish trying to swim through a thick blue glaze.
“This is your bowl,” he had told the cat with a certain amount of pride and goodwill. “It’s handmade.”
If Freeway ever used the bowl, Thumps had never caught her at it. Instead, she drank out of the toilet. Thumps found this particularly disgusting and had tried closing the bathroom door. But closed doors drove Freeway crazy. She would scratch and howl and reach under the door with one paw and try to pull herself through.
The mirror over the sink was in a sour mood. Thumps tilted his head to one side to see whether a different angle would help. He was beginning to look like his father. Or, more exactly, he was beginning to look like the pictures of his father that his mother had kept. Eugene DreadfulWater had been a tall man with no ass, a long face, and heavy lips that looked as though they had been edged with a razor. He had worn his hair short and cut close against his head. But what people noticed first about him, Thumps’s mother had said, were his eyes. They were dead black and so tightly slanted, they appeared to be closed most
of the time.
Thumps had his father’s face. But he had his mother’s hair. His father’s hair had been black and straight. His mother’s hair had been black and wavy. In the ’70s, when he was at university, he had tried wearing his hair long and discovered that if he kept it at his shoulders, he was fine. But if he let the hair go with the idea of working it into a ponytail or braids, in an effort to keep up with the rest of the Indians who were trying to look like Indians, his hair would simply curl up in unruly twists and ruin the sought-after effect. Now, like his father, he kept his hair short. At least it was still black with no trace of grey.
Thumps checked his teeth. The one real benefit of having skin a little darker than the people around you was that your teeth looked whiter than they were. He tried to remember when he had last had them cleaned. Before he left California? That long ago?
Thumps turned on the shower and stepped in. Okay, he was curious. People in Chinook didn’t die all that often, and as he recalled, the condos weren’t going on sale until next week, so it was too soon for the Birkenstocks from Los Angeles and Toronto to start shooting each other over the views. Maybe it was a tourist with foresight who had decided to kill himself before the casino opened and he lost all his money. But the cop in Thumps, the cop he had tried to leave behind in California, told him that the body at Buffalo Mountain Resort wasn’t going to be anything so simple.
Of course the death could be something simple. Something uncomplicated. Something ordinary. A heart attack. A stroke. Out of habit, Thumps had assumed that foul play was involved. Homicide had been his game. Bodies that came his way when he was on the force had not died of their own accord. But Ora Mae hadn’t mentioned how the body became dead, had she? Thumps had merely jumped to that particular conclusion.
He padded down the hallway to the kitchen, Freeway weaving her way around his feet, complaining about the late hour and starvation. “You need to lose weight,” Thumps mumbled, though it wasn’t clear whether he was talking to the cat or to himself.
He opened a cupboard and took out his favourite bowl. One of the heavy water glasses was out of place, and he moved it slightly to the right, so that it lined up with the rest of the set. There was a satisfying feeling to order, Thumps had to admit. Bowls where they should be, glasses in straight lines, flatware in perfect stacks. Cereal boxes arranged by height.
Claire would be up by now, would have already finished her breakfast. If frosted cereal and white toast could be called breakfast. How anyone could face each morning with only sugar and carbohydrates to give them energy and courage was beyond Thumps. Thank heaven for Shredded Wheat. And soy milk.
“Come on,” he said to Freeway, and headed for the stairs.
The basement was damp and cool and dark, and the feel and the smell of being underground always reminded him of the eight years he had spent in Eureka on the Northern California coast. He had liked the town, had especially liked the weather. Grey. Foggy. Wet. Green. It was an isolated community, to be sure, but you could go up to Clam Beach and walk the two miles from the river to the cliffs and not see another person. Or farther on to Trinidad Head and have a sandwich on the pier and watch the ocean run in around the point. San Francisco was six hours to the south when the road was open, but coastal people tended to stay put. Tourists came north, but they were a seasonal occurrence, like migrating birds and mudslides.
Chinook, on the other hand, was high prairies, cold and dry. In the summer, the sweat would fry on your face and leave salt lines around your neck, and every morning you’d have to pry each eye open with your fingers. Winter was worse. You’d
spread lotion all over your body to keep the skin from splitting apart and still get smoke simply by rubbing your arms together. Or start a fire by snapping your fingers.
But the weather in Chinook was not why Thumps had moved here, and the weather in Eureka was not why he had left.
Thumps unlocked the door to the darkroom. His nose had been right. The stop bath was dead. He tipped the tray out, washed it, and leaned it against the side of the sink to dry. Freeway loved the darkroom, and she headed straight for the shelves under the sink where Thumps kept the amber bottles of chemistry. Once behind the bottles and buried in the plumbing and the open stud wall, there was no way to get her out until she had had her fill of darkness and mystery.
“We’re not staying.”
Before he had received Ora Mae’s phone call, Thumps had planned to spend the day printing, sitting in the dark in front of the old Omega D-2, sorting through proof sheets and negatives. He hadn’t been looking forward to working in the darkroom particularly, but now that he wouldn’t be able to hide away in the basement, he found himself feeling resentful for having lost what he now considered to be . . . leisure. He sat down in the chair and slid in under the easel. This was his favourite spot. Quiet, dark, private. Sometimes he would work on one negative for days, lose himself in the variations of light, pull print after print until the image was perfect. And then, more times than not, he would decide that the contrast wasn’t quite right, or the toner was too strong or too weak, or the paper was too warm or too cold, and he would begin again.
“Come on.” Thumps rolled out of the chair, grabbed the Leica and the Vivitar flash, and slipped the seventy-millimetre lens into the bag. “Time for a treat.”
“Treat” was one of a handful of words that Freeway knew. Or, rather, it was one of a handful of words she cared about. She loped out the door and up the stairs, and by the time Thumps arrived in the kitchen, she was on top of the scratching post, complaining and doing her cat dance.
Thumps hadn’t seen Claire for over a week, and he tried to remember whether they were friends again. Claire was a terrific woman, but she tended to be, well, tense. Mostly, it was her job. He understood that. As head of the band council and a single mother, Claire was always under some sort of pressure, and unfortunately, she wasn’t the type to delegate responsibility.
Or pain.
And between the council and her teenaged son, she had plenty of both. Not that Stick was a bad kid. He was bright, enthusiastic, and a general pain in the ass. Thumps just wished that Claire could keep her feelings about the two of them separate. If she was angry with Stick, Thumps caught the fallout. If she was annoyed with Thumps, Stick heard about it. Thumps had the distinct feeling that Claire could only manage one man at a time, and he found it confusing trying to remember who was in the doghouse and who was in the yard.
He opened the cupboard, took down the box of Kitty Num-Nums, and placed a tiny brown fishy-smelling biscuit on the scratching post directly under Freeway’s nose.
“This is it. Don’t ask for more.”
Through the window, Thumps could see that it was going to be another bright, high-sky day. He missed the fog and the damp. Sunshine was overrated. Freeway gulped her treat down and began dancing around for another.
“No way.” Thumps washed his fingers in the sink.
Dead bodies could be simple affairs. But as he opened the door, Thumps had the distinct feeling that the one at Buffalo Mountain Resort wasn’t going to be the easy kind, the distinct feeling that things were about to get complicated. The distinct feeling that this one was going to ruin more than just his morning. ...
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