Peter Heller - Celine

“Ouais, ouais,” he said in the vernacular, on the inhale, like a true Frenchman. He smiled and pouted his lips and assumed a completely different persona. Pete said it was like watching a brown octopus pass over a bed of green coral and almost disappear. “C’était réellement un maître, ce professeur. Un vrai don du ciel pour éclairer la littérature française classique, Molière, Racine, Voltaire. Vraiment.” Deep sigh. “Requiescat in pace,” he added, shifting smoothly into Latin. Celine was surprised he didn’t cross himself. Damn. What a weird world. Wonderful, really.

“What bothered you about the disappearance of Paul Lamont?” she asked abruptly, also in French.

“The tracks,” he said without hesitation in English. “The fucking tracks were all wrong.”

“Just a sec,” he said.

Chicksaw got up from his lawn chair and went into the house, came out a minute later with a bag of marshmallows and three long barbecue forks and handed them around. “No Graham crackers or chocolate. Still.” He browned himself a perfect treat and began to give them a lecture on grizzly tracks. He said that grizzlies walk with an “over-step” in which the rear track will appear just ahead of the front track of the same side. “The tracks will be offset, anglewise, something like twelve degrees and the rear track will be just a little deeper on account of the bear carrying more weight in the hind end. Now when he’s dragging something, usually a carcass, the rear tracks will set even deeper and the front tracks tend to lose their regular offset and may smear. If you get on all fours and try dragging that branch across the yard with your teeth you’ll see why.”

“We might skip that part,” Celine said with a sweet smile.

“Right. But the Lamont Bear—that’s what everyone calls him—his tracks ran in and out of the drag mark with the normal offset. Also, the depth of the impressions did not change.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm. That’s what I said. Also, the impressions of the toes. Over uneven ground and especially dealing with cargo, so to speak, the toes will flex and move and the space between them will vary. Not to the untrained eye, but if you look closely.”

“And these toes stayed put.”

“Perfectly. Kept their spacing to the millimeter.”

“But you didn’t have that many tracks to check,” Celine said, peeling the blackened skin off her burned marshmallow.

Chicksaw looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it snowed the night he would have encountered the bear, didn’t it?”

He stared at her. “That’s right. I had the set beneath the big spruce by the road, the tree with the blood on it, and that was it. Five prints. A drag mark. The rest all covered up by snow in the night.”

“So if you were going to plan your own disappearance you’d pick just such a night, wouldn’t you?”

He studied her for a long beat. He had pieces of toasted marshmallow stuck to his beard. “Kinda what I was thinking,” he said.

“What does L.B. stand for?” Celine said.

“Lawrence Burton.”

“Lawrence Burton Chicksaw?”

“Chillingsworth.” He picked the bits of goo out of his whiskers. “In Montana you gotta pick your battles.” He took a flaming marshmallow out of the fire, blew it out, and gave it to the dog.

Elbie explained that a plausible track could be carved. “I knew an eccentric painter once in Colorado who carved a set of huge clawed tracks and glued fur between the toes and bolted them to a pair of running shoes. Jim Wagner was a character. He stomped all over the mudbank of his favorite fishing hole and it worked. Scared the crap out of everybody and he had the place to himself. People thought he was crazy for fishing there in the evening. The rancher brought in the game wardens who just scratched their heads, they’d never seen anything like it.” He laughed his gravelly laugh.

“Couldn’t you see human impressions off to the side? Of the Lamont Bear?”

“There were plenty under the snow. It’s the first creek and first pull-off outside the park. It’s pretty, I guess. Seems people pull over to picnic and pee.”

“Did you share your concerns?”

Elbie squinted at her. “I’m not at all shy.”

“And?”

“Travers hired me. The sheriff. This is before he got overruled by the park. I gave him my report.”

“Did you ever talk to Farney?”

“Farney is ex-marine. Kinda the charge-the-beach mentality. I’m not saying he can’t be subtle because he can. But his first instinct is to go straight ahead. Go for the simplest and most plausible explanation of anything. Lex parsimoniae. The more assumptions there are, the more out of his depth he gets. He’s a good man, and I guess over the long run, all things being equal, he gets more right than wrong. Going with the simplest explanations, maybe he comes out ahead of the rest of us.”

“Occam’s razor.”

“Right. Bear tracks, drag mark, bloody boot, case closed. Plus, he really looked pained every time the girl showed up.”

“Gabriela?”

“Right. That was her name. We had a meeting, the four of us.”

“You did ? Who?”

“Travers, Farney, Gabriela, and I. At the site. She kept insisting and finally Farney thought it was the least we could do. Show her how they found everything. Give her a little closure.”

“Good God, the sheriff didn’t mention that.”

“I don’t think it was anyone’s finest hour.”

A gust blew along the pallet porch and sent sparks against Celine’s and Pete’s legs. A few dry snowflakes blew into their faces. The tracker got up and fetched more broken sticks from the stack and built up the fire.

“How do you mean?” Celine said.

“Well. Farney set it up. I wasn’t invited but Travers called me in. Like he knew what all Farney was going to tell her and he wanted me to be there. Like maybe the conscience of the outfit, I guess. She was so young and I gathered now she was an orphan. It was heartbreaking. But she was sharp as a tack.

“The sheriff wasn’t allowed to give her his report and he never expressed his doubts about what all the park concluded. He had to keep a united front for so long—especially with the media. I mean. Imagine if he had broken ranks and started bringing up questions. What a media clusterfuck that would have been. And what would it have accomplished? Pain and doubt for the girl. Suffering, that’s what. Everyone knew they would never find this guy. Not dead, not alive. Whatever the hell happened that night it was for keeps. Sometimes you can just feel it, in your bones like a change in weather.”

He shuddered. Celine could see that, like her, he took his assignments to heart.

“So we all met,” he said. “She came in her own car, a little compact out of Bozeman probably. We parked at the bridge and walked the short distance into the trees. Cold, mid-November, a dry fall so far—except that one week—and not much snow, a lot of patchy dirt showing through. She was wearing a hooded parka that was too big for her, it had patches that said ‘Smithsonian-Arctic Institute Antarctica Expedition 1975.’ I guess it was her dad’s. And she wore mittens, I remember, and held a little picture in a frame. I asked her what it was and she showed me: her mother and father, close up, arms around each other, leaning close and smiling big as anything. There was a railing in the picture, looked like they were on a boat, their hair was blowing around. Lord, they were a handsome couple.”