“Yeah.” Dale smiled ruefully and drank some wine. “I was stupid. The garage guys helped me get the tires inflated. At least I didn’t have to deal with Sheriff Congden again.”
Michelle poured more wine for both of them. Now she was also shaking her head. “C.J. Congden a sheriff. I remember him from high school here. What an asshole.” The redhead held up one manicured finger. “But you stayed. They fixed your truck. . . but you stayed here.”
Dale shrugged. “Well. . . it seemed silly to leave after all that anger at slashed tires that weren’t really slashed. . . just a stupid practical joke. And I was still working on the novel and this seemed like the right place to write it.” The only place to write it, Dale thought. He looked at her. “And besides, we had this date for Thanksgiving.”
Michelle smiled. Her smile in sixth grade had been dazzling. Now, forty years and thousands of dollars of Beverly Hills dentist bills later, it was flawless. “So did they catch them? The skinheads? I assume that they were the ones who let the air out of your tires.”
“Nope,” said Dale. “It turns out that the one kid I knew by name—Derek—had an alibi. He was in Peoria with his aunt, Sandy Whittaker.”
“Sandy Whittaker!” said Michelle. “My God. Do people just stay within five miles of home here until they die? Sandy Whittaker. I bet she got fat and married a Realtor.”
Dale slowly shook his head. “Not quite. She got fat and became a Realtor. Anyway, the sheriff’s deputy I talked to on the cell phone the next day wasn’t too interested in trying to track down some kids who just let the air out of some stranger’s tires. So I dropped the whole thing.”
“And what about the blood?” said Michelle. When she leaned forward as she was doing now, Dale could see her full breasts press together down the low neck of her green silk blouse. Her California tan had begun to fade, and the freckles on her chest blended into the softest-looking white skin imaginable.
“What?” said Dale.
“You said that there was all this blood in your chicken coop. Do you think that the skinheads who let the air out of your tires threw this blood around your chicken coop?”
Dale held his empty hands out. “Who knows? The deputy I talked to said that it just wasn’t in the Sheriff’s Department’s charter to be chasing down foxes and stray dogs who kill chickens.”
“Do you think it was foxes and stray dogs?”
“No,” said Dale. “And it wasn’t chicken blood, either. There haven’t been any chickens in that coop for forty years or so.”
“It would have been cool if someone had done a DNA test on that blood,” said Michelle. “You know, find out if it was animal blood or. . . whatever.”
There was a silence after this comment.
Finally Dale said, “So you don’t like the logic holes in these movies. Slasher movies. Horror movies. Whatever.”
Michelle studied her glass of wine while thinking about this. The lamp behind her made her short-cropped red hair glow like a soft flame. “I don’t like it when the writers and directors have the characters act like idiots just so they can get killed.”
“Do you think I acted like an idiot by staying here?”
“No,” said Michelle. “I’m glad you stayed here. I’m glad we got to cook a turkey together. It was a nice surprise not to spend Thanksgiving alone.” She leaned forward again, and for a moment Dale was sure that she was going to put her hand over his where it lay on the white tablecloth. Instead, she pointed upward. “Speaking of surprises. . . weren’t we going to go upstairs, take down the plastic, and see what’s up there?”
Dale swallowed the last of his wine and looked toward the ceiling. “You mean you don’t mind the parts in those dumb slasher movies where the characters go somewhere they’ve been warned to stay away from?”
“Actually,” said Michelle Staffney, “I love those parts. That’s the point in the movie where I quit rooting for the humans and start cheering for the monster or psychopath or whatever. But I think we have to find out what’s up there.”
“Why?” said Dale. “It’s been closed off for decades. Why do we have to find out now?”
She showed that wonderful smile again. Dale found himself wondering why she hadn’t succeeded as an actress. “Wehaven’t been here for decades,” she said lightly. “I, for one, can’t leave Elm Haven without knowing what’s up there behind that plastic.”
“Oh,” Dale said casually, “I already know what’s up there.”
Clare Two Hearts’s first words when Dale picked her up for their long weekend of traveling to Glacier National Park and the Blackfeet Reservation were, “Does your wife know we’re going away together?”
Dale had prepared himself for the content of that question but not the clarity of it. He actually blushed before saying, “Anne’s used to my off-season camping trips up there. I often take students if students want to go. She doesn’t mind. We have a pretty solid marriage.” This last part was true, but the overall statement was a lie. He had never gone north with just one student, and usually it was a couple of male graduate students who loved to climb and camp who hitched a ride to the park with him. Anne, distracted by a swarm of life’s demands, simply hadn’t asked who he was going with this autumn.
Clare had looked at Dale as if reading all of this information from his blush and expression. Then she had thrown her gear in the back of the Land Cruiser and climbed into the leather passenger seat.
They both had a Friday free of classes—not too surprising, since, for reasons unknown to the instructor, Ms. Clare Hart seemed to be taking just the graduate courses that Dr. Stewart taught—so they had decided to leave on Thursday afternoon and camp near Flathead Lake that night before continuing on through the national park and then east to the reservation. It was early October, and while Dale had learned to mistrust the weather in Glacier and points north any time of the year, this autumn—and the winter to come—would be amazingly warm, with few blizzards. The cottonwoods and aspen were at the height of their color.
Dale drove west from Missoula on I-90 for a few miles and then exited to follow Highway 93 north about sixty miles to Polson and the south end of Flathead Lake. Past the little town of Ravalli, they jogged east a bit and then turned due north. Dale mentioned the National Bison Range that ran west of the highway, but Clare only nodded and said nothing. They passed through St. Ignatius, a sad little town on the Flathead Reservation, and Dale glanced at his passenger, but Clare only watched the passing examples of depressed reservation living without comment.
The ride to and past Flathead Lake was always beautiful—the sharp-toothed Mission Mountains spiking skyward to the east—and it was all especially striking in the afternoon autumnal light, the aspen stirring gold in the breeze, but Clare Two Hearts rode in silence and Dale would be damned if he’d be the first to mention the astounding beauty all around them.
It was almost dinner time when they came close to Polson, but Dale knew of a nice place to eat in the old timber town of Somers twenty-some miles further on and he had planned to drive straight through Polson, following 93 around the west shore of Flathead Lake. But about two miles south of Polson, Clare suddenly said, “Wait! Could we stop there?”
“There” was the Miracle of America Museum, billing itself on faded signs as “Western Montana’s Largest Museum.” Dale had stopped there years ago with Anne and the girls, but had not paid attention to it since. He pulled into the lot.
“This is a dusty old place,” he told Clare. “Tanks, tractors, collections of tractor seats. . . it’s more a hodgepodge of an attic than a museum.”
“Perfect,” said Clare.
They spent more than an hour in the ramshackle museum, almost half of that time listening to recorded music in the place’s “Fiddler’s Hall of Fame.” Clare smiled at everything—the tractor seat collection, the armored tanks from three wars, the motorized toboggan, the yellowed old newspapers behind glass, the old toys with flaking paint. Dale had to admit that it was sort of interesting, in a nondiscriminating, kitschy way.