Dead Silver

20

Madbird and Hannah arrived about half an hour later in Hannah's ride, a late 1980s Dodge Ram that she'd bought used through her job. A lot of government rigs got beaten to death in the backcountry, but this one had stayed in good condition. She'd had it painted a deep metal-flake blue and redone the interior herself. It was a sharp ride, and held the four of us comfortably.

Like Darcy, Hannah was a Blackfeet reservation girl, but a contrast to Darcy's brassiness and high visibility-petite, beautiful in a way that bypassed pretty, and possessing a sultriness the more powerful because it was contained. She was quiet but very tough-the proof of that being that she held her own with Madbird-and very smart. She'd made her way in the white world, going to college at Montana State, then advancing up the ranks in the Forest Service.

It was just about an hour's drive to the Phosphor County line, and Hannah said Astrid's property wasn't far from there. The landscape started feeling lonelier and wilder soon after we left Helena, and as the evening deepened, so did the sense of being at a dreamlike remove from everyday time and space. The road was narrow but mostly bare except for occasional sunless curves where patches of black ice lurked. Madbird was driving and spotting them was second nature to him, but they racked up a fair number of victims every year, usually unwary folks in SUVs who thought that going into four-wheel drive meant they were flying on a magic carpet.

"Any word from Darcy?" I asked.

"Nah, she'll still be pouting," Madbird said. "We figure just leave her alone for now. But that Fraker. You know what you told me about him being on that island and a woman drowned?"

Renee gave me a curious glance. I hadn't mentioned any of this to her.

"Yeah?" I said.

"Hannah started asking around about him. Tell them, baby."

Working in local government circles, Hannah was privy to a lot of gossip-a much richer source of information than the Internet.

"People say he's always played around on his wife," she said. "It's an open secret. A couple of the women ended up afraid of him. I guess he can be a mean drunk."

"Yeah, that fancy gin will do that to you," Madbird said with a humorless grin.

I explained the circumstances quickly to Renee, and then the conversation moved on. But Hannah's news left an unsavory little residue.

The last daylight was fading as we got to the town of Phosphor-with several hundred residents, the metropolis of a large area that was mostly rugged timberland. There probably weren't more than a couple thousand people in all of Phosphor County. The far-apart paved highways were narrow two-laners like the one we were on, and gravel roads tended to dead-end or loop back rather than go anywhere else. That eerie quality seemed concentrated here, fitting our purpose of visiting the site of a double homicide.

The town's main drag was a three-quarter-mile stretch lined by a dozen stores, a couple of gas stations, and several bars. Then we drove on into rural solitude again, punctuated by occasional lights and plumes of smoke from woodstoves. I'd grown up with that piney fragrance and loved it, but here, tonight, it didn't offer its usual comfort. Road signs were shot up and mailboxes bashed in, the sport of young men out drinking and letting off steam.

Abruptly, Renee swiveled to point at a mailbox mounted on a sagging fir post, beside a forlorn dirt track leading into the trees.

"Oh my God," she breathed. Madbird hit the brakes and backed up so we could see it in the headlights.

The name scrawled in crude black letters above the box number read: A SINNER.

I had no trouble believing that a private purgatory lay at the end of that gloomy lane.

The entrance to Astrid's property was unmarked, with no tire tracks or other signs of activity. The gate was closed with a lock and chain so we couldn't drive in, and Renee didn't have any real outdoor clothing, just her expensive street boots and the shearling coat that Evvie and Lon Jessup had given her. But at this altitude, the snow was frozen hard enough so that walking wasn't bad. We climbed the fence and started in on foot, Madbird leading with a flashlight.

The cabin was a quarter-mile farther, nicely situated on a rise overlooking a vista of pristine forest. But I could tell as soon as it came into sight that there was something wrong with its shape. The reason became clear when we got there. About two-thirds of the roof was gone, rafters and all, leaving a big gap open to the sky. Apparently somebody had started tearing it off, then quit. The remainder, without the support of the ridge, had collapsed under snowloads into a ragged-edged pile of cedar shakes and sheathing. The door and windows were also gone, now just dark rectangles that gave the look of a discarded jack-o'-lantern.

We followed Madbird inside and walked around, our footsteps crunching on the snow-crusted floor. It was large and nicely constructed, with walls of thick, uniform, squared fir logs that had carefully dovetailed corners. A big masonry fireplace was obviously the work of a real craftsman. Cabins built for function, like my own, were much rougher-often the work of one man with occasional help, using crude tools and smaller, easily handled timber. But Astrid's family had never lacked for money.

The last room we came to, though empty of furniture like the rest, had to have been the bedroom-the exact spot where Astrid and her lover had spent their last minutes of life. We stood in the doorway while Madbird shined the flashlight around. Its beam found nothing but barren walls and the empty socket of a large window overlooking the pretty meadow sloping down to the creek. I turned away without stepping inside the room or speaking. So did everybody else. As we walked back outside, Renee stayed a little ways off to herself.

Then Madbird said, "We got company."

I caught the sound, the deep rumble of a diesel engine. A few seconds later, a vehicle came into sight, a backwoods redneck's wet dream-a big older-model Chevy or GMC pickup, jacked up so the floor was damned near three feet off the ground. The tires would have carried a semi and the body looked like it had plate armor welded on, including bumpers like sections of railroad track. A winch was mounted on the front and a heavy brush screen covered the grille.

The driver fit the picture to a tee; he was spare, lantern-jawed and handlebar-mustached, wearing a peaked hunter's cap, a threadbare brown duck jacket, and logger boots. He got out carrying a rifle, a lever-action carbine like the Winchester that Chuck Connors had made famous in The Rifleman. He held it the same way, with the barrel pointed down but ready to raise fast.

"You get one warning about trespassing, and this is it," he said in a hard voice.

My first reaction was that he must have bought the property at some point during the past several years. Infuriating though it was to be treated like this, especially with the bullshit prop of the gun, he was within his rights to run us off. Then it dawned on me that there couldn't have been a sale without Renee knowing. Her father's marriage to Astrid would have entailed a title search to clear any claim he might have, and Renee had had his power of attorney since he'd fallen ill.

She was right on top of that, and she came back at him just as combatively.

"This place belonged to my father's wife," she said. "Astrid Seibert."

That obviously startled him. "You're related to her?"

"I just said so. Who are you?"

He recovered enough to swing the weapon's barrel in a short arc toward the road, a commanding gesture like a soldier would use herding prisoners.

"Somebody that don't like trespassers, that's who. Now get on out and don't come back."

"What right do you have here?" she demanded. "I know the Seiberts, and I don't recognize you."

"They got me watching the place."

"I'll find out." She took a pen and paper from her purse, marched over to the big truck, and wrote down the license number.

"The Seiberts give you a key to the gate?" Madbird said. "Or maybe that's your own lock you put on there."

The rifleman swung to glower at him. "You look like you belong on the rez. What you doing around here?"

Madbird neither spoke nor moved-just locked gazes with him.

The guy's mouth opened to speak, then closed. A few seconds later, he tried again. Still, nothing came out.

Madbird finally turned aside and spat into the snow, releasing his invisible choke hold. He put his arm around Hannah's waist and they started walking toward the road. I did the same with Renee.

"That ain't something to be proud of," the rifleman yelled after us-probably meaning Renee's relation to Astrid. We kept going and there was no more sound from him.

But Christ, did my skin crawl from imagining those rifle sights on our backs.

As we drove away, Hannah said, "I've heard about that guy. He's just got a little place but he acts like he owns everything around it, and he's obsessed with keeping strangers away. He's threatened Forest Service workers on federal land. He parked a backhoe across a county road to block it off."

We talked for a few more minutes about him and the sad condition of the cabin. Then we fell quiet, with Madbird unusually so. That happened when he was seriously pissed.

Like my father, he'd never told me much about his military experiences. I knew he'd been a Marine forward observer in Vietnam-one of those men who slipped far behind enemy lines, alone, to radio back firsthand reports on the accuracy of artillery and air strikes. A lot of Native Americans had gravitated to that sort of particularly hazardous role; it fit with the skills that many had grown up with and the temperament that many possessed, including an unconcern for danger and even an enjoyment of it. That wasn't a trait I shared with them.

But once in a while, usually in the context of hard drinking, Madbird would let something out. Tonight's encounter made me recall one of those incidents, on the troop ship carrying his unit overseas. A couple of Merchant Marine officers had also been aboard. On a single occasion, he had thoughtlessly failed to salute one of them-not out of insolence, he just hadn't been paying attention, and the merchant seaman's appearance hadn't punched the same automatic buttons as a regular military officer's always did.

Maybe the guy was a martinet or just a prick; maybe bigoted; maybe he'd had a hard-on about being surrounded by combat Marines on their way to war. He'd gotten Madbird thrown in the brig for the duration of the voyage-eight days in a tiny stifling cell, where he'd been chained around the waist and forced to stand at attention sixteen hours out of twenty-four.

"Few years after I got back, I heard that guy was living in San Diego," Madbird had said.

That was the end of the story.