Peter Heller - Celine

“Let’s think of two more, Pete, there must be two more. Wouldn’t it be elegant to have an even ten?” Pete’s murmur. They walked slowly.

“What is that bird we keep seeing?” Celine said. “Flying back and forth along the bank, lilting like that? He’s lovely.”

“That’s a kingfisher.”

“He’s very beautiful.”

So: 9) Something about Tanner. The man is really disturbing. Oh, of course: He was practically in their faces as he followed them, and then as soon as they turned the tables and began to hunt up information on him, he went dark. Just vanished.

“It makes me uneasy.”

“Me, too.”

10) The sum of all these bits of fact and supposition suggests that someone with substantial resources and power wanted Paul Lamont to stay dead.

They got ice-cream cones at the Big Dipper on Cooper. Pete got a chocolate cone and Celine taught the young staff how to make a Dusty Miller, which she strongly advised they make for themselves, “But be careful, it is highly highly addictive. Enough said!” It was the sundae she and her sisters clamored for every weekend at the beach club on Fishers, named for the low, dusty green plant that spread over the sand dunes. Baboo adored it, too, and allowed herself one a week, and she always got one for Gaga, who pretended indifference. Coffee ice cream, marshmallow sauce, Hershey’s chocolate syrup, a generous dusting of malt powder on top. Enough said.

They sat at a picnic table in the shade of a big cottonwood in front of the ice-cream shop and ate. The day had turned almost warm. What Celine loved about fall: You could only depend on it being wildly unpredictable. She was enjoying herself now, greatly.

Perhaps most mothers and grandmothers her age do not like change much, or sudden swerves, or bearded assassins on their tail. Celine loved it all. She pretended that Tanner made her nervous, but Pete knew that she was thrilled. She thrived on it. He was the most immediate challenge and he sharpened her focus. He did not just fall off the map, give up, go home. She could smell him, as she could often smell coming rain and danger and goodness.

“Pretty good,” Celine said as she scooped up another spoonful of heaven, dusted in malt. “I bet if we come back in a year it’ll be on the menu. And all those kids will be fat.”

Pete was serious. He said, “It seems to me that our concern right now should be making sure we’re around in a year. I think we are beginning to touch on events and sensitivities that are bigger than Gabriela and her lost father.”

Celine frowned. Casual passersby—like the teenage couple walking along the river path—might have thought that Celine was angry. A very glamorous older woman perhaps peeved at the shoddy service in a Podunk dairy stand. Her lips were tight and her eyes were big and her cheeks taut. She breathed heavily. She was not angry. She was steeling herself for a fight, as she had had to do her entire life. She was certainly not going to let this one go. When she took the case, she had nothing to lose. Mimi’s extra morphine had beckoned from the gun safe.

Now she had the safety of the girl to think about, and Pete’s safety, too. Her husband’s course was not yet run, not in the least; she knew he could live out the next two decades happily writing memoirs about life on an island in Maine, and about being a Finder of Missing Persons. She was mad, part of her, that anyone would have forced the situation to the point where a father felt he had to abandon his daughter. Danette certainly had something to do with that, and Lamont’s self-destructive behavior as a dad, but so probably did larger pressures and circumstances—Celine felt sure of it. Lamont, she suspected, had gotten himself in too deep and wanted out of it all, and the only way to do that was to die.

But he was not dead. She smelled it on the wind. She did. Just like a scent hound.

“We need to find him,” she said. “Now. I want to call Gabriela.”

“What about Tanner?”

“Tanner will be Tanner. That’s one thing we can be sure—”

The streetlight over their table exploded. The air thinned and cracked—could only be a second bullet. That whanged hard off the steel post. And glass rained. It bounced off the picnic table like bad hail. Shards hit their hats and stuck on their chocolate sauce in glittering sprinkles. Celine was mid-spoonful. Her head jerked up and the spoon dropped to the rough wood—and in her hand as if conjured was the black Glock. It was not the response one would expect from an older woman, or anyone, really. The kids in the open window of the ice-cream shop crouched and gawked at the customer holding the handgun.

“Whoo,” murmured Pa. “It’s as if he heard us.”

“Maybe he did. We’ll have to sweep.” Her face was hard. “I do not like glass in my Dusty Miller. I like it less than geen.”

“Ey-yuh.”

“Anyway, I feel safer. If he had wanted to kill us he would have.”

“Um, not so sure. That might be the next move.”

“Fuck Tanner. I hope he hears me. We better scoot before the police come and make us fill out forms. Life is definitely too short.”

Pete let his thudding heart slow down, chewed on the inside of his mouth, and quietly assessed his undaunted wife. So far, she hadn’t gotten either of them killed. She squeezed his arm. “I don’t think they have any interest in doing real harm to two little old people, do you? It’s scare tactics.”

“Hmm.”

“I just had an idea,” she said as she holstered the handgun. “Getting shot at clarifies the mind.”

“For me it has more to do with the bladder.”

“Remember that artist, Pete, the one in the National Gallery in Santiago, whose painting Lamont photographed in that big feature on Chile? Remember? The one they called a national treasure? She was there. He may have known her. She would have moved in elite circles. I wonder if she is still alive, Pete. If she is, we need to call her. It’s a stretch, I know, but we need to place him there.”

They shook the glass out of their clothes and drove straight back to Cooke City. They could try to call the artist from the Poli’s phone. And there were a couple of Afrikaner refugees they needed to talk to.

There were gaps in Celine’s life that Pete had puzzled over and never figured out how to fill. She had skill sets that were not at all ordinary, reactions to crises that were not at all normal, and it was clear that at some point she had undertaken extensive training. He had asked a time or two and had been brushed off. He wondered if it were really any of his business and decided it might be. Then again, maybe not. As a genealogist and a family historian, his yen for research and investigative rigor competed with his congenital modesty and respect for people’s privacy. An inner life, he had concluded long ago, was inner because someone had decided they wanted to keep it inside. Respecting someone meant respecting that boundary. Biography, when it was done well, carried with it a sense of that tact. History, on the other hand, was the story of everything that had been exposed. And a wife… well. A wife’s mystery must at all costs be preserved. Probably.

He was thinking this as Celine navigated the truck to Cooke City. It was the first time they had ever been shot at, and he was wondering where she had gotten the training to draw her gun that fast, and even more impressively, to stay so calm in the face of surprise gunfire. No, even more than that: To come alive. To quicken and harden. He had seen how fast she reacted, rising instead of shrinking, scanning and searching, reckoning angles and cover. He also noticed that her breathing, if anything, got more relaxed, fuller. He could only conclude that this kind of crisis made her happy. Kind of a marvel. Well.