Knife River, page 12
“Mmm.”
“Issues going back ten, fifteen years or so?”
“Which one? Ten or fifteen?”
Her voice was firm, overly loud, echoing inside the cavernous room.
“Fifteen years, please, ma’am. And if you’ve got issues older than that, you can bring them along, too. Do you have them on microfiche by any chance?”
She didn’t answer me directly but led the way down a long corridor and deep into the stacks. She halted abruptly and indicated a recessed area among the bookshelves that was outfitted with a small wooden desk, a reading lamp, and a microfilm reader.
“Do I need to show you how to operate the machine?” she asked.
“Thank you, but no. I am familiar with how they work.”
“Fine,” she said. “Wait here, and I’ll bring you the films.”
She returned a few minutes later, placed them on the desktop without making eye contact, then turned and departed in a fog of overtly aggressive perfume.
I scrolled through the microfilm cassettes for nearly three hours and found fewer than a half-dozen mentions of the McEvoy hog farm between the time of its founding and its abandonment. Just as Jordan Powell had intimated to me, though, each chapter of its history had ended with some sort of tragedy.
The homestead had originally operated as a poultry farm back in 1913, run by a childless couple by the name of Sanford. By all accounts, the Sanfords appeared to be well-respected in the community, successful and hardworking, until both husband and wife had fallen victim to the Spanish flu. The year was 1918, a mere five years after they’d begun. By that time, the flock numbered nearly five hundred birds, but the entire brood was destroyed by the authorities as a result of the pandemic. In the aftermath, the property lay fallow for nearly two decades.
The property was eventually purchased by an enterprising family named Wilkens at the outset of the Second World War, again boasting poultry as its primary crop. Having negotiated a successful contract with the US Army, the farm flourished for two generations, eventually expanding to include a hog and mutton operation. But in 1955, the family was beset by tragedy; the Wilkenses’ young son, a toddler, accidentally drowned in a retention pond. A mere fourteen months later, the drowned boy’s older brother, a child of five, was killed by the blades of a neighbor’s harvester combine.
As before, the property went derelict for a number of years, eventually being acquired out of foreclosure in 1960 by a family named Swanson. This time, the story concluded with the unexplained death of a local Meridian woman, an acquaintance of the Swanson family, the subject of a case that was shrouded in mystery. The only photo of the incident was indistinct and poorly defined, as though it had been shot through a window screen. All I could make out was a blurry image of my predecessor, Sheriff Lloyd Skadden, and an unidentified man kneeling beside a sheet-covered corpse lying dead on a bed of fallen oak leaves.
According to the article, there were many in town who suspected foul play, but the property again went abandoned, and the case went unsolved and forgotten.
The final owners had been the McEvoys, who simply couldn’t make a go of it, pouring every last dime of their savings into an enterprise that slowly fell victim to a mismanaged domestic economy. Mr. McEvoy slid the cold barrel of a .40-caliber revolver in his mouth and squeezed the trigger. It was said that his blood and brain tissue were still wet on the wall when his wife simply drove off and dropped the housekeys through the mail slot at the bank on her way out of town.
The only connection between any of the owners was a name I hadn’t encountered in years.
Lily Firecloud.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GRAY CLOUDS had begun to stack up on the ridgeline as I drove the county two-lane toward the junction where the Firecloud family had built their business and homestead. I crossed the trestle bridge, the woods on the hillside already deep in shadow, but the sunlight was still glinting off the riffle and cutthroat trout lingered in the lee of the streamers of green moss. On the opposite bank, I saw three children playing near the threshold of the railbed, hunting in the ballast for old spikes and fishplates and castoff ceramic insulators from long-disused telegraph poles.
I forced my attention back to the road, felt myself slipping into old inclinations, reflecting on the years of my youth and the decades I lived in this county. Some things had been irreparably transmuted, while still others remained exactly the same as they’d been since Ewing Young traded liquor and beaver pelts on the west bank of the Willamette. But I couldn’t seem to draw any meaningful recollection or significance from anything I had learned at the library. In the end, the entire ordeal struck me as a pitiful memento of local history that almost made me wish I hadn’t looked into it at all. The moral disfigurement of mankind appeared boundless, and my efforts had brought me no closer to learning why an arsonist would have taken special interest in a woeful, decrepit old farmhouse, apart from the contemptible and tawdry thrill of watching someone else’s past go up in flames.
A FEW minutes later, I rumbled across an iron cattle guard, pulled off the road and into a wide turnout that led to the Valley Meat Company, a low-volume slaughterhouse and locker plant that had serviced the small family-owned cow-calf operations in the county for decades. I had played high school baseball with Darrel Firecloud, whose grandfather had established the business at the turn of the century.
Just prior to my leaving for college, I attended Darrel’s wedding to another classmate, Lily Bird, upon whom I had nursed a heartbreaking crush. Years later, Jesse and I had been invited to a baby shower to celebrate the birth of their only son, Charlie, and little by little, we all busied ourselves with our own growing families and gradually fell out of touch. The last time I had seen Lily, she was standing beside Darrel’s grave at his funeral, her features and tears mercifully obscured underneath a black veil. I could only manage to spend a brief time at the visitation someone had arranged for Darrel afterward, at a loss for both feelings and words, numbed and worn down by the nearness of so much pointless death. That was seven years ago.
I braked to a stop at the edge of a circular drive, behind an old truck with skinned-up blue paint that was hitched to a vacated tagalong stock trailer. I climbed out of my pickup and crossed the driveway, spotting Lily. She was conversing with a man in a down vest who was waving a flag on stick, urging a handsome black Corriente steer into an enclosure with a scale on the ground. The steer gave his tipped horns a shake as he stepped forward calmly into the pen, where a young boy I took to be Charlie Firecloud clung to the steel railing and called out the animal’s weight.
“Seven seventy-two,” he said, and his mother turned to the man in the vest.
“You want to keep the offal?”
“Just the tongue and the cheeks,” he said. “Unless you can let me have the skull and horns, too.”
“I can give the whole head back to you if you want it.”
“If you don’t mind, Miz Firecloud. Thank you.”
“You can go on back to the house, Charlie,” she called out to her son. “We’re almost finished here.”
Lily noticed me then and showed me a familiar smile that purged the years.
“Excuse me,” she said to the man in the vest. “Just for a minute.”
Lily Firecloud had the same heart-shaped face I remembered so well, with eyes that were the color of topaz, her complexion and high cheekbones like those so idealized on movie screens and the covers of magazines. Her long chestnut hair was pulled up in a bun, and she wore silver earrings fashioned into the shapes of hawk feathers.
“Am I seeing a ghost?” she asked me.
“Hello, Lily.”
She moved to me and embraced me gently, then leaned away without letting go.
“‘Sees With His Heart,’” she whispered to me. It was the First Peoples’ name that Darrel’s father had given me when Darrel and I had been mere schoolboys.
Lily was wearing an oversize pullover sweater and cotton-duck work pants, a capture bolt pistol stun gun in a leather sheath on one hip, and a long-bladed knife on the other. She let go of me and took a step back.
“What brings you all the way out here, Sheriff Dawson?”
“There was a fire at the old McEvoy place. I was hoping you might be able to help me out.”
“Name it,” she said. “But I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
“I can wait.”
“Come on inside. Nothing in that slaughterhouse you haven’t seen before.”
Lily shook hands with the man in the vest, then waved to him as he ambled away to his truck. I followed her up a ramp and into the refrigerated confines of a small outbuilding where the Corriente steer waited calmly, gripped in the braces of a narrow chute. Lily circled around to face the creature, gently stroked his muzzle, and spoke to him in a language I did not understand. The steer’s eyes showed no sign of fear or distress as she drew the bolt pistol, pressed the barrel to its forehead and depressed the trigger. His end arrived in an instant, swift and silent as his knees buckled and he folded to the floor.
Lily leaned down, proficiently employed the razor edge of the long blade on her hip, and I watched the steam rise from the steer’s crimson blood as it coursed from the beast, exposed to the refrigerated air.
“We can step outside now,” she said to me. “My butcher will take it from here.”
I knew Lily to be as adept at dressing and processing animals as anyone I knew, but I was also well aware that she took special pride and care in the humane dispatch of the livestock she handled. Her customers were primarily small family operations—cattle, sheep, swine, and goats—processing no more than three or four animals per day; their collective livelihoods depended upon the quality and purity of their product. It was the reason the Valley Meat Company had survived nearly as long as had the Diamond D.
“Beer?” Lily asked me as I followed her along a curved gravel path toward the house she and Darrel had constructed shortly before he’d been killed.
“I still have a long drive ahead of me,” I said.
“Hope you don’t mind if I do.”
She kicked off her boots and stepped inside the back door, took her time washing her hands and forearms, in the manner of a surgeon, at a stainless steel sink in her mudroom. She dried her hands on a terrycloth towel as she moved into the kitchen and removed a beer for herself and a bottle of soda for me.
“I’m impressed,” I said, and I could tell by her reply that she knew what I meant.
“We’re their caretakers, Ty,” she answered. “Animals suffer enough in this life, just like we do. But we get to choose whether their last day is a good one or a bad one.”
“I had an old friend who used to tell me the same thing.”
“And did you take it to heart?”
“Every day.”
She looked into my face for a long moment before she turned and moved into the living room, where a picture window looked out across the stillness of a slough bounded by willow trees and leafless alders whose branches were strung with Spanish moss. The atmosphere inside was fragrant with the sweet, earthy scent of palo santo, and in the distance, I could feel the vibration, the irregular rhythm of flatwheelers as the engineer windjammed the air brakes and reduced speed for the train’s downward grade into the valley.
“I didn’t realize your place was so close to the tracks,” I said.
“For better or worse,” she said. “Used to be good for business, I guess. Small ranchers could ship their livestock here by rail. At least, that’s what Darrel’s old man used to tell us.”
“What do you mean, ‘for better or worse’?”
She reached up and removed the pin that had been holding her hair in place. She shook it out as it fell across her shoulders, the narrow band of solid white still there, extending down the length from where she parted it, originating at the crown of her head. Rumor was that it had turned white overnight, but nobody knew why. And Lily never said.
“Hoboes took over the old icehouse up the road a while back. There’s a whole hobo jungle up there now.”
As sheriff, I had made it a practice to keep an eye on the drifters’ old gathering place, several miles southeast of town beside the railroad right of way. For the most part, they kept to themselves—harmless rail tramps, sundowners, and out-of-work boomers waiting for a free ride to Sacramento or points east to seek work. What Lily was now telling me came as news.
“They ever give you any trouble?”
“I see them on foot, or thumbing rides from time to time, but nobody bothers me here. Besides, who’d want to break into a slaughterhouse?”
I watched her tip back her beer and perused the room, noticing the head of a ten-point trophy buck hanging at the center of the fireplace mantel. The taxidermy was impeccable, its umber eyes practically illuminated from within.
“Darrel did that one,” Lily said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Spectacular. How did he take him?”
“Traditional bow, handcrafted arrows; he even made his own fletching from turkey and duck feathers. But that’s not what I was referring to.”
My puzzlement must have been transparent.
“I meant that Darrel mounted that buck,” she said. “He was becoming a gifted taxidermist.”
“Darrel never did anything halfway,” I said. “I always admired that quality in him.”
“I did, too. He was a perpetual student.”
She opened a glass sliding door and we stepped outside to an open deck, the air rapidly cooling as the sun slid from the sky. Between the trees at the near end of the slough, I saw that the adjoining property lay unplanted but newly harrowed. The sight of her son, Charlie, scavenging stones along the culvert and the smell of upturned earth put me back in mind of the young child who had been killed by a harvester combine so long ago and reminded me of the nature of my errand.
“I can see you have something heavy on your mind, Tyler. You mentioned a fire.”
“What can you tell me about the McEvoy place?” I asked. “I understand the Fireclouds did business with a few of the owners over the years.”
ON MY way home, I stopped off at Half Mountain Studio. There was no sign of Jesse and Cricket, so I assumed they were filming indoors, but I spotted the man I was looking for standing at the foot of the stage. He was talking with an older tradesman who was occupied with connecting electrical wires where the footlights and sound monitors would be linked, his two pals—I didn’t see the third—absorbed with rolling extension cords and stacking them into the back of a panel truck. The tan madras shirt he was wearing was patterned with sweat, the back of his neck lined with dirt. He turned when he heard me approach, sidestepped toward the truck without letting me out of his sight.
It was clear that this man had been spawned at the bottom of the barrel, what some might refer to as white trash, his life story literally tattooed on his skin. But I did not mistake the mere fact of his upbringing would mean that he was stupid. I pushed through the protective knot the three men had formed and looked into his face in the same manner I had when I’d first seen these men at the Cottonwood Blossom. His eyeballs jittered in their sockets as if he’d just swallowed a fistful of speed.
“Tell Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dipshit to take a hike for a minute,” I said to the man with the tattoos. “There’s something I need to say to you.”
He threw a glance in their direction and the two men stepped away to share a cigarette beneath the tent canvas.
“You seem like a man who’d be familiar with certain addresses in places like Deer Lodge and Folsom,” I said.
“Am I supposed to know what that means?”
“I advised you to hit the road when I saw you last. For some reason, you didn’t take that to heart. So, here’s the deal: if I sense one whiff of trouble out here, you’re the first person I’m coming for. I will bury your nose in the dirt and drag you back to Meridian in cuffs, you read me?”
Over the man’s shoulder, I saw Mickey London striding a beeline in our direction. His hands were balled into fists at his side, the skin of his throat red with rage where it showed through his unbuttoned shirt.
“Anything else, Sheriff?” the man with the tattoos said. His lips twisted into a grin, but his pupils had spun down to pinpricks, vibrating inside their sockets. “I need to get back to work.”
Ian’s manager arrived and stepped in between us before I could reply, moving himself into my personal space.
“Are you bothering my foreman?” London asked me. His words came out staccato, the tempo of his breathing abbreviated by the brisk walk he’d just taken and the rush of adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream.
“I certainly hope so,” I said and walked slowly back to my truck.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING, after church, I came home and changed into a pair of cargo pants and lightweight nylon shirt. I grabbed my creel and fishing gear and went into the kitchen to make a sandwich for later. Through the window above the sink, I saw Jesse outside filling the hummingbird feeders and the seed box for the bluebirds and their brood. Cricket came in behind me and stepped to the refrigerator to see what was inside, already changed out of her church garb and wearing a pair of cutoff shorts and men’s plaid flannel Pendleton with the sleeves rolled up on her forearms.
“How’s work been going?” I asked as I slid my ham and cheese into a plastic bag.
“Do you mean, ‘How are things going with Ian?’”
I placed the sandwich bag on the counter and looked at her.
“No,” I replied. “I meant exactly what I said.”
She withdrew a bottle of orange juice and shut the refrigerator door, stood on her toes, and reached into the cupboard for a drinking glass.
“Is this some kind of test?” she asked.
