This is what CSI has done to America, Chance thought. We’re all forensic experts. “Tell you what,” Chance said, “Why don’t you call them? Tell Sheriff Solheim you found the letter and to come over.”
Swoboda nodded and Chance, careful to touch only the edges of the paper, quickly read through the neat, dark blue-inked letter on light blue stationary. It must be from a woman, or someone pretending to be one.
He was not one to read anyone’s private papers, but he felt a sudden urgency to do so. The woman had written how surprised she was by how quickly the last year had gone, and that she could imagine how excited he must be about his release. She would see him soon. Then her signature, “Kate.”
Kate? He felt deflated. If this was a woman in Butte, she might as well have signed the letter “Honey Bun.”
An estimated ten thousand men had left the Emerald Isle to make their fortunes as miners in Butte in the last century. The scope of the St. Patrick’s Day celebration—the biggest in the West—was living proof of their impact. Every other family had a Kate or some other variation of Kathleen or Katherine. He could think of half a dozen women who might fit the bill, and he had a terrible memory for names.
“They’re on their way,” Mr. Swoboda said when he returned. “Did you read the letter? Was it any help?”
Chance shook his head. “It’s from a woman named Kate. He mention her to you?”
Daniel nodded. “He had a snapshot of her.”
Chance turned back to the vinyl bag and gave it another once over. No photo. He made another sweep of the bedroom, even looking under the pillow. Nothing. Maybe it was with the wallet.
“He used my phone to call her. I reckon it was the same woman,” Daniel said. “I was kind of surprised but in a good way.”
“We joked about it. I mean, that it was a woman and he said it had been some time since he had talked to any female besides a dentist who came to the prison. I think he was only half joking.
“I showed him the phone in the hallway. He thought it was the damnedest thing that it didn’t have a cord. I think he was a little nervous calling this gal.
“When he came back into the kitchen, he looked like his ship had come in.” Daniel smiled. The memory of the conversation seemed to cheer him. “He picked at his shirt and asked where he could get a new one.
“After the drivers’ test, I took him to the mall. He seemed optimistic about the job, and that evening he talked on the phone to the woman again. He asked about a nice restaurant that wasn’t too expensive. I recommended Lydia’s and even offered to lend him a car.”
“Do you know what he did on Saturday?” Chance asked, hoping to trace as many of Austin’s movements as possible.
“Let’s see. He asked about directions to the Club Boxing arena. I lent him that old pickup.” Swoboda pointed to a small blue beater truck. “Then he went out in the afternoon and didn’t come back until after midnight. On Sunday morning, I invited him to go to church, but he was already dressed and said he had made plans. He never mentioned anything about flying,” Swoboda said. “But then, like I said, he wasn’t the type to volunteer much. Most newly released men don’t.
“I left a little after eight to pick up my mother-in-law for church. That’s the last I saw of him. When he didn’t come back, I didn’t feel it was my place to question where he was.”
Mr. Swoboda sighed and then ran his hand over his balding scalp. “I was a bit surprised he didn’t call, but then I figured maybe this gal had taken him in. He wasn’t on parole, you know. He served his time. I didn’t think he’d be inclined to want to answer to me.”
He paused for a second, looking around the room. “It’s such a shock. I feel like I let him down. They’ll be disappointed over in Orofino, that’s for sure.”
Maybe so, Chance thought. But he also wondered if there were others who thought Austin had finally gotten what he deserved.
* * *
Mesa walked over to Erin’s desk in the newsroom and waited while the young reporter finished a phone call. “Okay,” Erin said, “I’ll get Irita. Between the two of us, we should be able to generate a list of possibilities.”
Mesa couldn’t help being curious about the pieces in the puzzle of the Austin story. And the look on Erin’s face made Mesa even more curious. “What’s going on?”
Erin looked up with her usual deer-in-the-headlights response to anything Mesa asked. She said, “That was Chance. Apparently, Austin was corresponding with someone in Butte. He’s trying to figure out who it is.
“Turns out Daniel Swoboda—you know “Preach” from the high school? He gave Austin a ride to Butte, as part of some prison missionary program,” Erin said and clicked her cell phone closed. “Austin wanted to come to Butte because this woman named Kate lives here and has been writing to him in prison. Chance wants to track her down to talk to her.”
“How many Kates do you suppose live in Butte?” Erin continued. “Not counting the ones like me. My grandmother still calls me Kate. My first name’s Kathleen, even though I officially became Erin when I was in junior high. I’d say twenty percent of the girls in Butte, and that’s just the Irish ones.”
Mesa had to agree. “Why couldn’t her name be Isabel or Dagmar?” Even she knew several Kates in Butte, and she wasn’t even a bona fide, full-time Buttian. Kate Callahan, who had sat behind her in homeroom junior year, was assistant director at the Arts Chateau. Katy Drennen, who sat behind Katie Callahan in that same homeroom, now worked up at the college. And those were just the first two Kates that came to mind.
“Chance thinks that maybe this Kate woman is the driver of the maroon SUV,” Erin said, her eyes agleam with the “games afoot” mindset that had launched Sherlock Holmes.
“So how did Chance find all this out?” Mesa asked. She was impressed with her brother’s investigative efforts despite the fact that he claimed to have no real interest in journalism.
“He saw Preach waiting in the police station to talk to a detective.”
Erin’s cell rang again, and Mesa gravitated back to her office, feeling oddly distant. For the first time, she wasn’t writing the story but overseeing it, an altogether different perspective. Her own experience as a reporter had taught her that the life of an editor, while more stable, was boring. You worked the story secondhand. Tracking the facts, uncovering sources and piecing together what people want to know was replaced by the steady workings of the newsroom and being in charge, whatever that meant.
Then her cell phone rang. “So I hear you were hanging out with Hardy at the Hoist House last night,” she heard Tara say in a coy tone.
“Don’t you have children to raise?” Mesa said, half kidding. She did not relish revisiting the previous night’s indiscretion, which Tara would no doubt intuit.
“Two-year-olds take naps, thank God,” Tara said. “You slept with him, didn’t you?”
“How did you even hear I went out?” Mesa asked.
“Mary Connelly, I’m trying to get her into a duplex uptown.”
Mesa nodded as she spoke, remembering the nurse at the bar last night. There was no denying Tara.
“So what he’s doing back in town?” Tara asked.
“Sounds like his dad is really fading,” Mesa said.
“Jeez, that’s sad,” Tara said. “My dad and Mr. Jacobs started out in the mines together.”
Mr. Jacobs had worked for the Anaconda Company underground and then in the pit. When the mine finally closed, miners were faced with a difficult decision. Leave Butte and move the family to where there was work, or let the family stay and work in a mine out of town. Mr. Jacobs had gone to Alaska to work as a welder, making six times what he could in the lower forty-eight.
He lived small and sent every extra nickel home. For five years, he saw his family a week at Christmas and for two weeks in the summer. Meanwhile, Hardy’s mother worked as a waitress at the Uptown Café so they could bank all that her husband made. When he came back, they had enough money to buy into the
windshield replacement business—steady commerce in the land of pickup trucks and back roads.
“Funny the hold this town has on people,” Tara said. “Yukon Glass never used to mean anything to Hardy.”
That was true in his younger days. Baseball was going to be his career, until a belly slide into third base while trying to stretch a double had changed everything. “Things change,” Mesa said, although she knew Hardy and his father had never been close. All those years apart had created a permanent gulf. By the time his father came back for good, Hardy no longer saw himself as a child. In fact, he had never really grown up at all.
“You tell him you’re headed west?” Tara asked.
“Like he really cares,” Mesa said.
“Oops, I hear a baby crying,” Tara said. “Gotta go.”
Mesa had barely hung up when Irita came bustling in from the back office, looking at her watch. “Today’s the last Lunch in the Park concert. Come on. I’ll take you down there. You can rub elbows with the locals and grab a pasty.”
Mesa tried to summon up a sincere response. Historically, pasties—pronounced like “past” and not “paste”—were the mainstay of Cornish miners who referred to the beef, onion and potato pie as a “letter from ’ome.” The locals’ love for the concoction defied her understanding. Too bland for Mesa’s tastes. Still, she knew better than to cast aspersions on one of Butte’s culinary specialties, and acquiesced.
Erin joined them and explained Chance’s search for the mystery woman to Irita, who began chewing on her left thumbnail. “Women who write to convicts,” she said and rolled her eyes. “I guess there’s the added plus of not having the guy underfoot. I’ll start a mental list on our walk down to the park. You want a pasty?” Irita asked Erin, who nodded enthusiastically, as did Micah, Phade and Cinch when they were asked.
Outside the sky was blue and cloudless, a day made for the tourist guidebooks. “You know any Kates that might qualify?” Mesa asked with muted curiosity.
Irita shrugged, and then said,” I’m amazed how much Chance has charmed out of the FBI.”
“This Kate with a maroon SUV in a town this size can’t be that hard to track down.”
“What did you say?” Irita said in a whisper.
Mesa turned to Irita. “This Kate could be the one driving the maroon SUV.”
“Oh my God,” Irita said stopping in the middle of the sidewalk.
Irita had grabbed at her chest. “What?” Mesa said. “Are you sick?”
“No,” Irita said, “just in the throes of another possible moral dilemma.”
“What are you talking about?” Mesa said. She had already become accustomed to Irita’s flair for the dramatic. Clearly, this reaction was visceral.
“My daughter-in-law, when she was a kid, they called her Kate. She owns a maroon Bronco.”
Chapter 14
“That soup’s getting cold.”
Chance looked up to see Adrienne standing over him.
“For a minute there, I thought you were in a trance,” Adrienne said with good humor.
Chance stood up. “Just thinking about you,” he said and took her arm. What was it about her that made him such a sap? Romance had never been his strong suit. His ex-wife would attest to that. But something about Adrienne made him feel gallant, when in fact she seemed to need less protection than any woman he had ever met.
Adrienne shook her head and ignored his comment. “Shall we meander down to the park?”
Emma Park, a memorial to the one Anaconda Company mine actually inside the taxable city limits, thanks to clever gerrymandering, covered two city blocks of uptown Butte. Its existence, plain and simple as it was, stood as a sad commentary on the company’s idea of reclamation.
A red-roofed white gazebo now stood where the Emma mine head frame once pulled hundreds of miners and ore up and down, twenty-four seven, in and out of the largest source of manganese in North America. Despite its once staggering profits, the mine’s yard was now no more than a grass-covered expanse where small children played and elderly people sat in lawn chairs to listen to the Community Orchestra’s last lunchtime concert of the summer. They were playing “A Bicycle Built for Two.”
Chance and Adrienne sat on the grassy slope on the north side of the park. Steam billowed from the cartons of thick minestrone soup Chance had bought at the Uptown Cafe. Adrienne licked her lips. She attacked with a plastic soupspoon, then looked up and said, “This must be an historic moment. I’m eating and you’re not. What’s going on?”
Chance picked up his spoon and began stirring his soup, “Soup’s hot.”
“In the three months I’ve known you, I have never seen you ponder over a single bite of food. You even eat the candy suckers at the bank. I’ve seen you pick up meat grilling on hot coals and toss it in your mouth. What’s wrong?”
“You ever feel like you know someone so well, better than they even know themselves sometimes, and then out of the blue they say something that totally shocks you?”
Adrienne sipped her soup, and said, “Like when Devlin told me he wanted a divorce?”
The story of Adrienne’s divorce did have its shocking elements, especially how her ex had apparently slept with every nurse in their bustling Los Angeles medical practice. Adrienne said she knew he was a jerk, just not how big of one.
“More like when somebody whose opinion you value makes a judgment that’s so off-base,” Chance countered.
“That would be like my sister in Seattle when I told her about you.”
Chance looked at her with a frown. “It must be in the air.”
Adrienne put her spoon down and said, “Why, who said something to you?”
“Mesa,” Chance said, trying to keep a light tone in his voice.
Adrienne sighed and shook her head. “Mine says you’ll break my heart. What’s yours say?”
Chance hesitated, looking around to avoid being overheard in case Adrienne reacted negatively. “I’m your boy toy.”
Adrienne chuckled discreetly, and gave him a little nudge on the thigh.
Chance suddenly felt uneasy. “Well, I’m glad you’re not upset.”
Adrienne smiled. “I wouldn’t want you to think you’re not excellent boy-toy material.” Then she sighed when Chance did not join in the kidding. “Does it really bother you that much?”
“Kind of like a paper cut. It’s not all that big a deal, but it’s hard to ignore.”
“Her opinion means a lot to you, I know. And it’s not that I don’t take it seriously, but what can you do? People form their own opinions without the slightest bit of information. Granted, I did tell my sister that I was through with men, so I can see why she was surprised, but she’ll get over it.”
“Wow, I guess I didn’t realize I was swimming upstream,” Chance said with an unexpected feeling of warmth.
Adrienne took hold of Chance’s hand. “How I feel about you has nothing to do with what other people think.”
When Chance still didn’t smile, she added, “My sister thinks I should gradually begin to dye my hair so you won’t notice.”
“No kidding. Mesa mentioned your hair too.”
“Would you like me to become a brunette again?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. If anybody’s going to dye their hair, it’ll be me. Is there such a thing as reverse Grecian Formula?”
* * *
“I can’t believe she’d be involved in anything illegal,” Irita said and shook her head. “She’s a paralegal and won’t even walk against the traffic light.”
Which was exactly what Mesa and Irita were doing at that moment. Mesa strode briskly along Mercury Street toward Emma Park to keep up with Irita, who walked as fast as she talked.
“Her name is Kathy, but she used to be called Kate,” Mesa repeated to be sure she had heard correctly, “and she does own a maroon SUV.”
By now, they were at the edge of the park, headed toward the line in front of the vendor trailer for Pete’s Pasties. The
y walked past the community band, now playing, “In the Good old Summer Time,” complete with a tuba solo. Mesa finally interrupted Irita’s ramblings. “Exactly who are we talking about?”
“Kathy—you met at Stodden Park at the Labor Day picnic Monday?”
“With the two kids?” Mesa said, the surprise clear in her voice. Kathy looked like a soccer mom—certainly not like anyone who might be involved in hijacking a plane.
“Actually, she’s my step-daughter-in-law. My ex-step-daughter-in-law, to be precise.”
“Say again?”
Irita sighed. “It’s not as complicated as it sounds. When I was young and foolish, I married a good-looking son-of-a-bitch named Dominic DiNunzio who, besides having a mean streak as wide as the Missouri, had a son from his first marriage. I divorced Dom after he sent me to the hospital twice. But I kept up with the kid.”
“So where does Kathy fit in?”
“She married the kid, Phil, although it didn’t end well. Five years ago after the state deregulated electricity, the mine closed and he was laid off. Next thing you know, he started in on Kathy the way his father had on me. But she wised up faster. She divorced him, took the kids, and moved back to Bozeman to her mother’s. Unfortunately, her mother died last year. So, Kathy and the kids ended up moving back to Butte.
“Since then, I’ve been a kind of surrogate grandmother. She hasn’t got anybody else really. Her father died when she was small, so it’s just Kathy and her brother, the soldier. Remember? You met him too.”
Mesa nodded. She had met a lot of people in the past three days, but the polite soldier with the vacant eyes was hard to forget.
“So I help out picking up the kids from school when she needs me to. Take them to the movies when she’s ready to throttle one of them. That sort of thing,” Irita said, her tone a mixture of concern and confusion.
They were at the front of the pasty line now. The faint aroma of onions and pastry drifted toward them. While Irita ordered pasties for everyone in the office, Mesa stepped away to listen to the band that was now playing a lively rendition of “Seventy-six Trombones.”
She scanned the crowd, mostly parents with preschool children, office workers on their lunch hour. Beyond the gazebo along Silver Street, she saw adults from the sheltered workshop getting off a minibus. And on the hillside edge of the park, she saw Chance and Adrienne huddled together. They were deep in conversation. She wondered with a tinge of guilt if Chance was telling Adrienne about their conversation.