COYOTE

A Jessica James Mystery

By Kelly Oliver

Copyright © 2021 by By Kelly Oliver

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

COYOTE Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

COYOTE PART II

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

COYOTE PART III

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

About the Author

Also by By Kelly Oliver

COYOTE Part I

Chapter 1

Jessica James had only been home for two hours, and already Whitefish was a couple of sizes too small. She waited until everyone else cleared out, then loaded a paper plate with crusty potato salad and the last piece of huckleberry coffeecake.

Sitting alone at a picnic table under the shade of a hemlock tree, she was just digging in when she heard a ruckus coming from the waterfront in the direction of Specht Mill. Stopping mid-bite, she turned toward the river. All she could make out were four silhouettes, arms flapping. Jessica peered in the direction of the commotion.

To her surprise, she recognized her cousin Mike shaking his finger at a tall, overdressed woman who stood out amongst the lumberjacks. Mike was usually so laid-back he was prone. She’d never seen him this agitated. Grabbing her beer bottle and balancing her plate by its sticky edge, she headed across the park grounds to investigate.

As she wove her way through the jumble of lumberjacks, mill workers, forest service hacks, and timberland owners (and their wives and girlfriends), their unforgiving stares burned through her freckled skin; suddenly she was an alien visiting from another planet. Except for the woman in the navy-blue sheath and pearls down by the river, she was the only one wearing a dress, albeit a wrinkled gabardine vintage number with faded black-velvet embroidery. And for all the cowboy boots in the crowd, hers were the only ones painted bright red with model paint.

But it wasn’t just her funky mismatched clothes or tangled mop of blond hair that made folks shake their heads and tut with their tongues as she passed by. Even before she left Montana to go “back East” and study philosophy, she’d never been able to meet their expectations of a proper young lady.

A “klutzy tomboy” constantly getting into scrapes and a “troublemaker” constitutionally unable to play by the rules, growing up she’d always run afoul of the “natives.” Still, she hadn’t expected kids she’d known since kindergarten to turn up their noses and snub her attempted greetings.

On the way from the airport, Mike had warned her that some of the old crowd thought she’d gotten “too big for her britches,” coming back and flaunting her fancy degree and “book learning.”

But she could no more resist philosophy than they could resist reproducing. Just as their new baby bumps sprouted every spring following a cold harsh winter, her perpetual soul-searching was the natural consequence of the cold harsh reality of her childhood, starting with her birth.

Her mom loved to tell Jessica she’d been born rolling her eyes and sucking her thumb, “only a few seconds old and already with an attitude.” If she’d been born sucking her thumb, it was probably because she’d been biding her time, waiting until she could escape from the constricting grip of her maternal confines and get on with life. She bet even in utero she’d been pensive and brooding, a natural-born philosopher, and the perfect fit between her tiny thumb and the roof of her mouth confirmed her contemplative character. It also meant she’d wear braces for most of her adolescence.

The braces may have straightened her teeth, but nothing could straighten her temperament, as meandering as a Montana stream.

Concentrating on her plate and avoiding eye contact with the disapproving picnic crowd, she snaked her way toward the shore. By the time she approached her cousin, the well-heeled woman he’d been gesturing toward had taken cover behind one of two gray suits and was shaking her head “no.” When Jessica was within earshot, she heard her cousin say, “I know it was you.”

Jessica sidled up to Mike. She glanced back and forth between the attractive well-dressed trio and her shaggy, shabby cousin and took another bite of coffeecake, watching for his next move.

Mike snorted, crossed his arms over his broad chest, and stared across the river at the mill. Mouth full, she shrugged her shoulders at the suited trio now gawking at her.

After several awkward seconds, the younger of the two gray suits extended his hand to her. “Hi, I’m David and this is my brother, Richard, and his wife, Maggie…Margaret.” David’s angular jaw and full lower lip reminded her of a twenty-something Johnny Depp. His smoky voice went down like a barrel-aged Kentucky bourbon.

With both hands full she waved her beer bottle in acknowledgment. She swallowed her cake. “I’m Jess…” But before she could finish, her cousin grabbed her by the arm and whisked her away, food first.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded as he pulled her along.

“I’ll tell you in the rig,” Mike said, still tugging at her arm as he marched across the dry grass toward the parking lot.

Trying to keep up, she stumbled over her own feet, and the paper plate slipped from her hands and slid down her front, sending mayonnaise drooling down her leggings and spitting chunks of pickle into her boots. She barely managed to hang on to her beer bottle and avoid falling flat on her face.

“Now look what you made me do!” She pitched the plate in a trash bin.

“Sorry.” He opened the passenger door to his beat-up Ford King Ranch. “Get in. I’ll take you home.”

Jessica grabbed the handhold and hauled herself up into the passenger’s seat. She remembered back five years ago when Mike had finally saved enough from working at the mill to buy the shiny black pickup, his pride and joy. He’d driven through town every chance he got just to show off his fancy ride, especially during hunting season when he could tie a buck’s antlers to the rack behind the back window. The rusty concave fender suggested he’d hit something bigger than a deer though, a moose maybe, or a grizzly bear.

“You made me dump a perfectly good plate of grub.” She glared at her cousin. She wiped at a glob of potato salad on her favorite dress and then picked crumbs out of the fringe of her buckskin jacket. “What was going on back there? Why were you yelling at that woman?”

Mike pulled onto the road. “She’s the wife of that damned business mogul, Knight. He’s trying to buy Specht Mill, along with half of Montana.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Richard Knight, one of the richest men in the country.”

“What’s he doing in backwater Whitefish?”

“Let’s just say, a lot has changed since you left, Jesse.”

“I bet nothing has changed at the trailer park. Ten bucks says my mom’s probably not even out of bed yet.”

After almost a year in Chicago, her mother and Alpine Vista Trailer Park had become a bog of soggy depression and sappy expectations. She shuddered. She imagined living in a trailer next door to her mom, married to a beer-swilling lumberjack, changing diapers and wiping up baby puke, a stash of Xanax in her nightstand and a bottle of Jack in her pantry to counteract the mind-numbing domestic routine.

“So, what’s up?” She reached across the center console and put her hand on her cousin’s shoulder.

“Somethin’ weird’s going on at the mill.” Mike stretched the seatbelt around his doughy belly.

“Weird? Like what?”

“Like dangerous.”

Mike slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a deer and her fawn leaping up from the underbrush across the road.

Jessica white-knuckled the handhold and let out a little squeak as she watched the mother and baby disappear into the forest and up the hill. The view of the rugged snowcapped peaks up ahead hit her harder than a shot of whiskey.

She may be a nerdy alien among the shaggy old hippies, neo-Nazi skinheads, redneck cattle ranchers, and gun-toting Libertarians, but damn how she loved this place. She had a visceral connection to the land itself; the blood, sweat, and tears of her ancestors were part of her DNA, and her sinews and tendons were rooted deep in the dry Montana soil. Surrounded by these fierce mountains, she felt safe in the earth’s strong arms, but the smoky haze encroaching on the horizon suggested otherwise.

“There was an accident at the mill last week,” Mike said, interrupting her reverie. “Johnny Dickerson.”

“Oh my god. Is he okay?” She dreaded hearing the answer.

“He’s dead,” Mike said as he pulled into the driveway. “And I don’t think it was an accident.”

“What?” Jessica was distracted by her mother’s dilapidated doublewide with its decrepit front porch and an overstuffed armchair oozing filthy stuffing that was swallowing up her tiny mom. Smoking a cigarette and petting an orange tabby cat on her lap, her mom sat at attention, shaded her eyes, and looked in their direction. The ramshackle scene brought back the pain and loneliness of her childhood: Her dad’s senseless death, her mom’s melancholic drinking, her own introspective isolation, all one sharp slap in the face named Alpine Frigging Vista. How could the grass be both overgrown and dead?

Her mom dropped the cat, then the smoke. She bounced across the brittle lawn, waving her spindly arms in the air. Jessica steeled herself for a sloppy reunion. She twisted a piece of leather fringe between her thumb and forefinger and regretted ever coming back home.

She waved back to her mom. When she reached over to hug her cousin goodbye, she noticed tears in his eyes. “I’m so sorry about your friend.” She sighed and pulled Mike closer, inhaling his cinnamon-roll scent.

“Johnny killed himself?”

“No, he wouldn’t do that. It was foul play.”

What the heck? “You think someone killed him? Why?”

“I don’t know.” His smile was melancholy. “Maybe you can find out, Detective Clue Slow.”

Once, during recess in grade school, Mike had found her crouched inside a box. Instead of going outside to play, she’d hidden in the ball box, pretending to be a detective, peeking up over the edge, stealthily spying on the other kids, looking for something to pin on them. Since then, Mike had called her “Detective Clue Slow” in honor, if you could call it that, of Detective Clouseau from the Pink Panther movies.

It was true. She’d spent most of her childhood wandering off to explore bear caves, abandoned hay barns, or hunters’ tree stands. She pretended the school bus was the Starship Enterprise taking her to rendezvous with intelligent life on other planets to collect evidence of crimes committed by humans toward other species.

Now, instead of creeping around secret caves and spooky barns, she haunted libraries and museums; and instead of wielding a special gadget lodged in the tip of a ballpoint pen to unlock secret passageways, she used a pen and notebook to unravel the existential quandaries of life and searched for clues to the meaning of life in dusty old books. She was becoming a detective all right, just not the sort she’d imagined as a kid.

“If there’s foul play at the mill, we’ll get to the bottom of it.” She shuddered to think about Johnny chewed up by a saw at the mill. She forced a smile as the wild woman closed in on them from the sunburned yard.

“Wanna come in for a drink and save me from my mom?” she asked, rolling her eyes at the spray-tanned, bottle-blond, sinewy slip of a woman flying toward the pickup. She’d kicked off her shoes and was picking up speed. From a distance she looked like a young girl in her tight jeans and tube-top, but as she got closer, Jessica could see the deep lines in her mom’s leathery face. Since her dad died, her mother had started drinking hard. And gambling even harder.

“I’m afraid you’re on your own. I’ve got to be at work first thing in the morning. I’m subbing for my friend Kyo Kosi, Johnny’s brother.”

“Is that a Blackfoot name?” Jessica tugged at her backpack, trying to free it from the tumble of stuff in the backseat—old tools, greasy rags, and candy wrappers.

“Means Bear Child in Blackfoot.” Mike’s burly body slumped in his seat and he sighed. “Johnny and Kyo Kosi Dickerson are—were—my best friends at the mill.” He unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned across to wrap his arms around her. He squeezed her so hard she could hardly breathe. Still holding her tight, he asked, “Jesse, can I tell you something? That woman back there. She’s the one that took the baby. I’m sure of it.”

Confused, Jessica pulled free of her cousin’s embrace and scrutinized his sorrowful eyes. “What baby?”

“She’s the woman from the bus wreck, the one with the baby,” he repeated. “They were at the Snow Slip Inn that night. I’m sure of it.”

“The bus wreck? You mean my dad’s…” Just then, her mom rapped on the window, jumping up and down and waving. Jessica inhaled deeply, gave her cousin an apologetic shrug, and opened the passenger door, wishing like hell she’d cashed in her plane ticket to hole up in the Philosophy Department for the summer, smoking dope, drinking whiskey, and arguing about the liar’s paradox or brains in vats with the other graduate students.

“I’ll be back on Saturday to drive you over to East Glacier,” Mike said. “I have a hunch about that baby, and I’m going over to North Valley Hospital this week to see if I’m right. I’ll tell you what I find out.”

She blew her cousin a kiss, and then turned to face the flurry of maternal affection coming at her.

Still exhausted even after twelve hours of sleep, Jessica spent the next afternoon sitting cross-legged on the tatty plaid La-Z-Boy in her mom’s dingy living room, watching cartoons on television. Tom and Jerry was interrupted by breaking news, and she was about to go get a snack when Mike’s graduation photo flashed onto the boxy set. She turned up the volume as she stared at the caption “Second mill accident in two weeks.” She could barely breathe, glued to the television, waiting for more details.

A woman reporter held a microphone up in front of the mayor’s face. “It’s tragic. Our hearts go out to the friends and family of Mike James. It’s just terrible.” A group of local officials touring the mill had found the body, what was left of it. What the…No!

Her stomach flipped, and she fought off a wave of nausea. She buried her head in her hands. It couldn’t be true. Mike was dead. No. No. No.

Last year she’d been afraid to leave Whitefish, now she was afraid to be back.

Tears streaming down her face, Jessica heard the news anchor conclude, “The mill will be closed until further notice.”

She staggered outside to find her mom lounging in the recliner on the porch, playing online poker and drinking a vodka Collins, a burning cigarette dangling from her thin lips. Choking back her tears, the brutal words stuck in Jessica’s throat.

She should have paid more attention when Mike told her something sinister was happening out at the mill. Two accidents in two weeks couldn’t be a coincidence. Now she realized what Mike had been trying to tell her: Johnny had been murdered, and now, so had her cousin. Bile pooled at the back of her tongue. She’d expected her homecoming to be rough, but not gutting.

Chapter 2

Jessica was biting her nails in her sleep again, struggling through a recurring nightmare of riding her horse through a field, surrounded by fire, gasping for air, looking for an escape route. Sweating and thrashing, she rolled off the sofa bed and onto the shag carpet. She woke up and realized she was at Alpine Vista, her ancestral home.

Her mom was probably still in bed, sleeping off an all-nighter of booze, cigarettes, and online poker. The trailer smelled like a Montana bar after a rodeo, and Jessica was chomping at the bit to get out of there. Still half-asleep, she dialed Mike to ask when he was coming to pick her up to take her to Glacier to start her job; the park service provided room and board and just enough cash for the essentials: books and whiskey.

“This is Mike James, I’m either not home or in bed with a beautiful woman, so please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you when I can.” Mike’s voice on his answering machine shook her memory and punched her in the gut. No. No. No.

He was never coming back. His funeral was this afternoon. She’d never again hear his buttery voice call her “Bug,” or smell his cinnamon-roll sawdust scent, or see his easy, dimpled smile brighten his pale baby face. Never, ever again. He was dead forever. Jessica wiped tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands.

She untangled herself from the moth-eaten wool blanket wrapped around her legs, pulled herself back onto the lumpy mattress, where she’d been sleeping, then surveyed the dank, depressing living room.

Peeling paisley wallpaper bulged over swollen sheetrock. Stained ceiling tiles drooped, threatening to fall on her head. Heavy balding velvet curtains hung over the windows, sleepy eyelids closing over old eyes tired of looking without seeing. Jessica grabbed her jeans off the floor, tugged them on, then reached down the front of her pants to retrieve her stale socks, put them on, and jammed her feet into her boots.

Using the scuffed glass coffee table as a mirror, she tousled her dirty-blond hair to increase the bedhead effect, administered Visine drops to decrease the red-eye effect, and pinched her pale cheeks to counteract the corpse effect, then shuffled into the kitchen.

Scrounging around in the refrigerator and freezer to find something for breakfast, Jessica weighed her choices: a frozen waffle growing a full head of icy hair or swiss cheese growing a furry green beard. She settled on a toasted waffle covered in Hershey’s chocolate syrup and a shot of frozen vodka chaser.

After breakfast, she spent three hours tackling the overgrown dead grass with the push mower, then drove to Walmart and bought thick pink rubber gloves to battle the black mold growing on the bathroom grout. She’d been so busy running back and forth for paper plates, cups, napkins, and various cleaning supplies, she’d almost forgotten the miserable reason for the party.

As a last-ditch effort to tidy up the place, she dusted the picture frames on her mom’s collection of western art, taking special care with Cowboy Jesus, his long flowing hair streaming out of a Stetson as he sat on a mountaintop looking down at his father’s creation.

Growing up, Jessica had spent too many hours at The Adventures and Mysteries Bible Study escaping sappy sermons by retreating into imaginary adventures of her own. If God could see into her heart, he’d know she was a big fat liar. Even so, she wasn’t about to admit her darkest secrets to some priest with bad breath hiding in the confession box.

Her mom never made her go to confession again after Jessica “confessed” to playing with matches in the kitchen while her mom drank vodka and played poker on the porch. Jessica never had understood her mother’s faith in God or her belief that everything happens for the best, especially after the accident. If it wasn’t her dad’s fault he’d died, surely Jessica could blame an omnipotent God. And now she’d lost Mike, too. Who was to blame for that?

After Mike’s cryptic comments the day before his death, she planned to find out, even if it meant meeting her maker and confronting him.

The funeral home sat across the street from a lumber yard, and the pallets of lumber wrapped in white plastic taunted her as she wound her way toward the squat building through the cars parked in the crowded lot.

Sitting behind the curtain partition at the funeral service, sobbing silently, Jessica listened to Mike’s friends talk about what a great guy he was. Even Old Man Specht, the mill owner, talked about Mike’s integrity and hard work. It was true; Mike wasn’t afraid of hard work. Even as a kid, he’d mown lawns and sold huckleberries, saving his money to buy a bike so he could deliver newspapers.

Jessica wanted to tell a story about the time he’d used his hard-earned cash to buy her a new saddle before her first barrel race at the Flathead County fair, but she was too choked up. She kicked herself all the way back to Alpine Vista for not pulling herself together enough to say something at the funeral.

The party on her mom’s front lawn was more like a high school reunion than a wake. Jessica saw kids she hadn’t seen since graduation. Most of her class hadn’t left Whitefish, and Mike was always popular, so the turnout was good. She’d spread the buffet out on folding card tables she’d found in her old bedroom, now cluttered with discarded junk. Back in the day, her dad had hosted raucous poker games with his friends from the mill on those rickety tables. For the party, she’d spruced them up with colorful paisley plastic tablecloths from Walmart.

“Hey, JJ, too bad ’bout Mike.” Tommy Dalton sidled up to her at the buffet tables. “If only he ain’t switched shifts with that Injun, he’d…”

Jessica did a double take and blinked. “What?” She stared into Tommy’s broad face and wondered why she’d ever kissed that crooked mouth. He’d been her first steady boyfriend back in ninth grade, before he’d dropped out to work with his father at the mill. She hadn’t really liked him, but her mom had insisted she “be polite” and go out with him. Her heavily padded push-up bra wasn’t the only reason she’d never let him get to second base. But the skinny kid with an infectious smile had become a muscular man with a hard demeanor, a tomcat with a head too big for his body.

“Then that Injun woulda been kilt ’stead of Mike.” He spit disgusting tobacco juice into a red plastic cup.

Jessica screwed up her face. “Tommy, surely, it’s not an either/or proposition—”

“Just Tom,” he interrupted.

“What?”

“Just Tom.”

“Okay, Just Tom.” Jessica looked over her shoulder to see if any of her friends were nearby.

“Hey, Jesse, what did the Injun say when his wife tied his dick in a knot for cheatin’ on her?” He held up one hand like in a Western. “How come.” Cracking up, he repeated, “How come.”

She flinched when he poked her shoulder with a sharp finger. She had to find an escape route and fast.

“I guess your dick’s in a knot now you’re out of a job.” She gave him a fake smile.

“You ain’t heard?” Tommy asked, stifling his crazed laughter. “Old Specht is selling out to Knight Industries, so I’m goin’ back to work soon as the ink’s dry and gettin’ promoted, too. ’Course, I got other irons in the fire, ya know. I ain’t gonna work at the mill all my life. I’m gonna—”

“Knight Industries?” Jessica asked before he could finish. Richard Knight, the suit from the mill picnic?

“Yeah, you know, the big company that’s runnin’ all them oil rigs east of the mountains?”

“Really.” Jessica’s mind was racing.

“Knight’s been tryin’ to buy, but old man Specht wouldn’t sell. He’s a stubborn S.O.B.” When Tommy chuckled his mouth was so twisted he could swallow nails and spit out corkscrews. “Now with the…accidents, he ain’t got no choice.”

“Accidents.” The word was a sledgehammer crashing against an anvil, and it made her head hurt. She closed her eyes tight to keep from crying.

“Ain’t you heard? Last week, one a them Injuns is repairing the planer when it flattens him.” Tommy smirked and took a swig from a second plastic cup in his other hand. “By the time anybody notices he’s gone, he’s already bundled and loaded on trucks to Home Depot, lumber for them do-it-yourselfers.”

Jessica cringed and dumped her half-eaten lunch in the garbage can. She pulled Tommy away from the line of black-clad mourners, crows cawing around the buffet table. “Two accidents in two weeks, doesn’t that seem suspicious?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Tommy scooped a soggy wad of chewing tobacco out of his lower lip, flung it in the trash, and gawped at his shoes.

Jessica’s eyes followed his, and when she saw what looked like a bloodstain on his worn work boots, her pulse quickened. She looked around. He wasn’t the only dude wearing work boots. Others were wearing tennis shoes with holes in them, and some were wearing hiking boots held together with duct tape.

She stared down at her Ropers and heard her dad’s voice echoing in her head: “Don’t judge others, Jess, until you’ve ridden a mile in their saddle.” A homegrown philosopher, her dad also used to say, “The answer’s not in the bottom of a glass,” but she definitely needed another drink—or five—to get through this dreadful day.

“I’m parched.” She waved her empty glass. “I’m going to go get another. See ya later, Tommy.”

Tommy dipped a furry mound of fresh tobacco from the round tin he’d taken from his back pocket and then stuffed the wad into his lower lip.

Jessica did an about-face toward the drinks table and left Tommy “Just Tom” Dalton sputtering something about getting dinner together. Her stomach soured at the prospect of seeing him again.

She darted across the brown stubble yard, made a beeline for the back door, then ducked into the kitchen. Her mom, aunt, and some other ladies from town were sitting around the small Formica table, smoking cigarettes and drinking cocktails.

She tiptoed to the hutch in the alcove, what her mom called the “dining room,” and found the car keys in the top drawer where her mom had always kept them. Seeing her mom deep in conversation, she scratched out a note and tucked it under one of the dozen cat-shaped magnets attached to the refrigerator.

She sneaked out the back door, scooted around the side of the trailer, then jumped into the mustard Subaru Forester; the rattletrap was almost as old as she was. She rolled out of the driveway so no one would notice her leave. She couldn’t stand around making small talk with jerks from her childhood while Mike’s killer was on the loose. She drove halfway to the highway before she took a breath, and white-knuckled the steering wheel the rest of the way to town. Detective Clue Slow was on a mission.

Chapter 3

Stopping for some liquid courage, Jessica James pulled up in front of a familiar washed-out wooden building sporting a faded mural of a muscular bulldog in boxing shorts and gloves ready to fight. The place was at least a hundred years old. It had been everything from a doctor’s office to a boxing ring, but it had been the Bulldog Saloon for all of Jessica’s twenty-one years.

When she opened the front door, the smell of stale beer, burger grease, and Alpo dog food hit her in the face and brought back memories of fake IDs and high school dates gone wrong.

A pudgy white-and-brown bulldog was snoring next to the woodstove—even in June, they had a fire going. A sign above the bar read, “Find us online at www.Fart-Slobber.com.” With his jowls and bald head, the bartender-slash-owner resembled the chubby bulldog. Some things never change.

At the bar, she sat on an antique barstool and swiveled back and forth in time to the ’80s rock blasting from the jukebox. When the bartender saw her, he tapped a glass of beer, slopping Coors Light onto the floor as he delivered it. He tossed a fart-slobber bulldog coaster onto the bar in front of her and set the frosty mug on top of it.

“On the house. Welcome back, Jesse.” His jowls wobbled as he leaned over the bar to kiss her on the cheek.

“Thanks, Boomer. Beer, it’s not just for breakfast anymore.” Picking up the overflowing glass, she tried not to spill as she sipped. “Hey, Boomer, do you know what’s going on out at the mill?” she asked, distracted by the collection of antique jockstraps hanging from the wall.

Glancing around her old haunt, she saw Tommy Dalton’s older brother, Jimmy, sitting at the other end of the dark bar. Illuminated by flashing neon signs, his fat face was pointed right at her, and it was too late to duck back out of the tavern. Why was it, everywhere she turned there was a cursed Dalton brother?

Jimmy shouted down the bar, “Why if it isn’t Miss Jesse James. Get your butt over here, girl. I’m gonna buy you a drink.” He patted the stool next to him.

He was the last person she wanted as company. She’d left the reception to get away from his idiot brother Tommy, but now she was trapped.

Growing up, Tommy Dalton was the nice one, Jimmy Dalton was the obnoxious one, and Frank Dalton was the responsible one.

Reluctantly, she scooted to the other end of the bar and pulled up a stool next to Jimmy. In the sickly green light, his dark glassy eyes peering out of his round, flushed face had a sinister glow. She prayed somehow he’d become the nice one. You never knew with the Dalton brothers. She’d heard rumors they all still lived together in some shack out in the hills near Hungry Horse.

“You don’t need to buy me a drink, Jimmy,” she said.

“Jim,” he corrected. “Honey, I’m loaded.”

She was puzzled. “You’re loaded? Are you sure you want to have another drink?”

Spittle formed around the corners of his mouth when he laughed. “No, stupid. I’m loaded in coin. Just sittin’ here on my ass, I’m makin’ five hundred bucks a day.” When Jimmy leaned toward her, she was assaulted by the rank smell of booze emanating from every pore of his body.

She blinked and stepped off her stool.

“Best investment I ever made. That old dozer paid for itself in the last week just sittin’ up there on a lightning fire in Flathead National Forest. From here on, it’s all gravy.” Jimmy slapped the bar and sent pretzels flying in all directions.

Jessica downed her beer. “Thanks, Jimmy, er Jim. Gotta run.” She’d heard the Forest Service paid loggers to keep their equipment on fires to build fire lines and trenches, but she had no idea it was that much. The high pay explained the two-hundred-dollar Stetson on Jimmy’s ten-cent head.

“Wait, JJ. Boomer, get Miss Jesse here a whiskey.”

“No really, I have to go. But thanks anyway.” When she turned to go, Jimmy grabbed her sleeve.

“Sit down here and have a drink with me. What? Are you too stuck up now? Too good to have a drink with old Jim? I remember when you wasn’t above snugglin’ up with my little brother Tommy.” As Boomer dropped off her whiskey, Jimmy gave her a lecherous look and a menacing drop of saliva fell from one side of his mouth.

Ewwww. Jessica grimaced and pulled her shirt loose from his grasp. “That’s not it. I just—”

“Sit back down here, girl.” He slapped the barstool. “I wanna tell you something about your cousin Mike. Yeah, good ol’ Mike.” His head bobbed and swayed to some inaudible music. Suddenly, he slammed his beer down on the bar. “Sit!”

Jessica dropped back onto the stool, sipped her whiskey, and waited. Jimmy stared into space as if she weren’t there. After a few minutes of silence, wondering why the heck he’d wanted her to stick around, she turned to him and asked, “What about Mike?”

“What?” Jimmy gaped at her. “Mike?” He swiveled his stool to face her and put one foot on the bottom rung of her stool in between her feet. “Mike was a helluva guy. Let’s drink to Mike.” Jimmy missed his mouth and spilled his beer down his shirt. “Shit! Get me another barkeep!” His maniacal laughter clawed at Jessica’s skin. He put his hands on either side of her stool, and like a caged wildcat she was desperate to get out.

“Please Jim, I need to go. Thanks for the drink. But let me go.” She tried to stand up, but Jimmy still had one foot and two hands on her stool.

“Yeah, Mike was a helluva guy. Too bad he was an Injun lover. What about you? You an Injun lover too?” Jimmy narrowed his watery eyes and bared his teeth at her.

Jessica pushed his arms away with both hands, knocking the nasty Dalton off his stool and onto the floor. Asshole. She hoped he’d broken a bone or two. She stepped over his spread-eagled legs and marched out of the bar into the night.

Chapter 4

Frazzled from an overdose of Daltons, Jessica drove to the junction of Whitefish River and Hellroaring Creek to clear her mind. When she was a kid, she and her dad would wade up the crystal-clear stream in their felt-bottomed boots and waders, fly-fishing for cutthroat trout.

Now, her dad was gone; so were the trout. Sitting beside the creek, she lost herself in the reassuring sounds of water rushing over rocks. No matter what else changed, this place was forever. As she marveled at the rhapsody before her—river, stream, and sky—time stood still. She watched the sun burn its way to the horizon, a blazing reflection on the water chasing after it. The approaching darkness forced her out of her dream state, and she brushed the dirt off her black pants and headed back to the Subaru.

Still not ready to go back home to face the stragglers and leftovers from the funeral party—or risk running into another Dalton brother—Jessica continued driving up the river.

She could have followed the Whitefish River all the way to where it joined the Flathead River. But when she passed the road to Half Moon Bridge, she turned around and parked near a picnic area.

The bridge was one of Mike’s favorite spots on the river. Just up the bank was one of the places they used to come to pick wild huckleberries. She’d always admired the mysterious little berries for resisting domestication. She intended to do the same.

For as far back as she could remember, every August her grandfather would drive her and Mike up the windy roads to his secret huckleberry patch. To distract her from her car sickness, Mike would teach her silly songs to the tune of John Philip Sousa marches: “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the ants play pinochle on your snout….”

Her grandmother would demand a full-gallon Crisco can full of berries before they could go home. They’d sing as they picked. “Comet, it makes you vomit, it makes your teeth turn green….” By the time they finished, they had purple stains on their hands, tongues, and pants from picking, eating, and sitting amongst the berries.

On the way home, they’d start singing again. “Don’t ever laugh when a hearse goes by, ’cause one of these days, you’re gonna die….” And now Mike was dead. She wiped a tear from her eye with the back of her hand.

A flickering light in the distance ignited a startling realization: she was just across the river from the Specht Mill, where Mike had been killed. She’d returned to the scene of the crime.

She narrowed her eyes and tried to process what she was seeing, a light in the office at the closed-down mill. She gazed across the river at the abandoned mill, wondering who was over there at this time of night.

Mike had tried to tell her something wasn’t right at the mill, and she planned to find out what. She couldn’t bring Mike back, but if it wasn’t an accident, she was going to determine who killed him and why.

Growing up, he’d always been there for her, driving her to the hospital to get broken bones mended when she was bucked off a horse, fell out of a tree, or skated off the roof. Now, it was her turn to do something for him.

She headed for the wooden bridge to cross the river toward the mill. But as she grasped its rickety railing, the buzz of her cell phone knocked her off balance.

“Hi, Mom, what’s up?” she whispered and then switched the phone to her left hand to get a better grip on the rail with her right.

“Why didn’t you ask before you took my car? Where are you? It’s almost midnight.” Her mom sounded tired.

“Sorry, Mom. I can’t really talk now. I’m driving”

“When will you be home?” her mom asked.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Jessica said. She could hear her mom tapping on her computer in the background. Online poker.

“Okay, be careful, sweetie,” her mom said. Tap, tap, tap.

“I’ll be home soon,” Jessica said, then whispered under her breath, “and if I’m not, call the police.”

Chapter 5

Specht Mill was dark and deserted except for the one light in the main office. Jessica inhaled the scent of pine bark and sawdust, a smell familiar from her childhood. It was the smell of her father returning from work at the mill, metal lunchbox swinging in one hand and a big hug for her waiting in the other.

Mike was right: a lot had changed. Now the smell of sawdust made her think of death, and the abandoned mill was a grizzly reminder of Mike’s dismemberment.

Illuminated by the ominous full moon, the massive gate blocking the entrance to the mill was dead ahead. When she yanked on the heavy chain link, she discovered it wasn’t locked, and it squealed as she heaved it open. She cringed. She glanced around the mill, then tiptoed through the gate onto the grounds, hoping whoever was inside didn’t hear her trespassing.

Across from the office building, a lone train car sat empty next to a gigantic rusty warehouse; the bunching grapple on a knuckleboom loader menaced with its monstrous claw dangling overhead; and stacks of logs awaited their mutilation. On the other side of the warehouse, packages of lumber wrapped in white plastic suffocated waiting to be hauled to Home Depot.

Still dressed in all black from the funeral, a stealthy avenger, she crept around a pile of empty pallets to the side of the office building and squeezed behind the shrubbery, then crouched down under an open window.

Voices came from inside the office. She soundlessly stretched out on the cold ground under the prickly ornamental bushes, and lay on her stomach, straining to hear what they were saying.

A smoky voice boomed, “I ordered you to slow down operations, not kill people for God’s sake.”

“But, but, sir. Them was accidents,” a high-pitched voice responded.

“I sincerely hope so for your sake. There are thousands of wines that can take over the mind. Don’t think all hell is the same.”

“What?”

“Never mind. If I’m going to get this mill up and running again, unfortunately, I’m going to need your help.”

That voice, it sounded familiar.

“Yes, sir. Whatever it takes.”

Where had she heard that voice before?

“Maybe you should lay low and get out of the country for a while until this investigation dies down,” Smoky Voice said.

Jessica clasped her hands over her mouth and almost choked on a clump of grass she’d pulled along by accident.

“Do you have a passport?” Smoky asked.

“A what?”

“Never mind. I’ll make sure you get an identification card to cross the border under an alias.”

“A what?”

“Never mind,” Smoky said.

Jessica involuntarily gasped when she recognized the raspy voice. She propped herself up on her elbows, straining to hear.

“I don’t want anyone else at the mill or Knight Industries to know about these arrangements. That’s why I came to meet you myself. There’ll be hell to pay if anyone finds out,” Smoky said.

“Don’t worry none. My lips are sealed.”

“They’d better be or I can make you disappear faster than a bottle of Thunderbird at a homeless shelter.”

Jessica couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Was that the smooth-voiced businessman from the picnic? She was sure she recognized his sultry voice.

The office door creaked open, and then a truck door slammed shut. Crap! She burrowed farther into the bushes. As she peeked out, she saw a pickup pass by. Her heart was galloping. She tried yogic breathing exercises to calm down and get ready to make her escape.

She had to flee before they left and locked the gate behind them. She didn’t want to be trapped inside this eerie place. Even if Mike hadn’t died here, the full moon looming over the empty warehouse and the coyotes howling in the distance gave her the creeps.

After the truck was out of earshot, she counted to three and then lifted herself off the ground. She was about to make a dash for the gate when a shiny Cadillac sedan rolled into the driveway, its paint job reflecting the moonlight. She dropped back down behind the bushes. She was shaking with fear.

The Caddy stopped on the other side of the office building, gravel crunched when someone got out, and then she heard knocking on the office door.

“Come in, my friend, come in,” Smoky Voice said.

“Good to see you again, napekwin.” The Cadillac driver’s voice was deep and sonorous.

“Napekwin?” Smoky asked.

“Napekwin means… it means, honored friend.” The baritone laughed. “An enemy of my enemy is always my friend.”

“And do we have a common enemy?” Smoky asked.

“The ecoterrorists who want to kill our livelihood and stop progress. Sovereignty by the barrel, my friend. That’s what fracking is to us. Sovereignty by the barrel.”

“We need to build cheap housing for the men to attract workers. I’m going to supply the lumber to build that housing, boards from this very mill.”