Torey Hayden - Innocent Foxes - A Novel

‘He kissed me,’ Dixie said softly as she set the knitted duck into the box with the rest of Jamie Lee’s things. ‘Spencer Scott kissed my hand.’

‘Yeah, well, it would have been far better if he’d kissed your bank account.’

Chapter Two

The town of Abundance had had its heyday just as Montana approached statehood. The rich silver lode, first struck in 1876, was showing its worth by the 1880s. All three of the big mines – the Eldorado, the Inverurie and the Kipper Twee – were producing steadily and the Lion Mountain mine was just getting underway. Nearly 25,000 people lived in Abundance in those days. There were six banks, five hotels and 22 saloons. The Majestic Theatre on Main Street attracted shows all the way from Chicago, and the Masonic Hall was an architectural showpiece, its high false front and dramatic second-storey balcony characterizing the extravagance of the times.

Then in 1892 the world silver market collapsed. The Inverurie, the oldest mine, the one upon which Abundance had been founded, faltered first. The Panic of 1893 followed, and legend had it that within twenty-four hours of the Kipper Twee’s closure, 1,500 people had packed up and walked out of their houses, right out of their lives in Abundance and left forever. By 1898, only the Lion Mountain mine was still in operation and that was more for the gold and lead mingled in its lode than for silver. The population of Abundance dropped below 10,000. By 1905, even the Lion Mountain gave way and Abundance came to the brink of death.

Unlike the nearby towns of Cache Creek and Beulerville, Abundance survived. A branch line of the railroad, originally built to carry ore, proved a life-saving link with the outer world. Sawmills sprang up to process timber from the vast mountain forests, and there was enough low-lying land in the river valley to make ranching viable. Abundance clung to life by filling the boxcars with lumber and cattle once the ore was gone.

By the time Dixie was born, the population in Abundance had fallen below the 3,000 mark. Remnants of the glory days were still everywhere. The derelict Masonic Hall dominated Main Street. Empty false-fronted buildings with elegantly carved façades stood cheek-by-jowl with the plate-glass windows of the 1960s drugstore and the unassuming modernity of the Texaco station. Whole back streets were nothing more than rows of vacant, crumbling houses, their ornate gingerbread tracing broken, their doors and windows gone. ‘Ghost houses’, Dixie and her friends had called them, and used them as a quirky, otherworldly playground.

Then one year the Masonic Hall caught fire and burned down. Two years later what was left of the derelict Majestic Theatre was demolished to make way for a drive-in bank. One by one, the old buildings disappeared, leaving gaps along Main Street like lost teeth in an eight-year-old’s smile.

The town kept on fading. The hardware store closed. Then the dime store. Then Jack’s Redi-Mart. There were Walmarts to shop at now, and even though it took a ninety-minute drive to get to one, people liked them. They were so big and full of things that it felt wondrous going through the doors, and you could make a nice day of it, having your lunch at McDonald’s, which was another experience denied Abundance. Truth was, nothing was abundant in Abundance anymore. That’s what everyone liked to say. Nothing abundant about it, except for the view.

A view they did have. Cupped into an east-facing basin, Abundance was surrounded by startlingly enormous mountains which rose straight up out of the flat river valley with such abruptness that tourists often brought their cars to a dead stop right in the middle of Simpson’s Bridge when they got their first full view of them.

For the people living there, however, the mountains were much more than just something pretty to look at. In offering up the gold and silver from their rocky depths, they had created Abundance, and they had destroyed Abundance just as easily when the promising veins paled into worthless rock. Even now they dominated the remnants of Abundance, bringing snow in August, chinooks in February and evening shadows at a time of day when the rest of the world was still having afternoon. Their craggy profiles, the smell of their pine forests, the taste of their snow on the wind were all as much a part of the folk born and raised in Abundance as the blood running in their veins.

To Dixie the mountains were as familiar as family. They were like family in other ways too: always there, reliable and friendly some days, dangerous on other days, but always, always there for you.

When she was growing up, Daddy used to say, ‘Too bad you can’t eat the scenery.’ What he meant, of course, was that the jaw-dropping panorama was the only wealth anyone had around there. He was right. Even the folks considered rich in Abundance weren’t rich by the outside world’s standards. Everyone was just getting by. For Dixie, however, it had been enough. Unlike some of her friends at school, she’d never dreamed of escaping to bigger places like Billings or Missoula. Life in Abundance held all she’d ever wanted.

The mountains were what had attracted the canyon folk too. It started out innocently enough when this screenwriter guy bought a run-down summer cabin up on Rock Creek. Just the fact that he was a foreigner – or ‘furriner’ as Mama liked to call him, meaning that he came from outside Montana – was enough to make people’s ears prick up, but the fact he was from Hollywood … well, you might as well have said Captain Kirk had landed the Enterprise on Main Street. At the church picnic that summer, no one could talk of anything else.

Soon, though, folks got bored with it and went back to talking about hunting and fishing and cattle prices. While it was true that the screenwriter guy had bought the cabin, he was hardly ever there. When he was, he kept himself to himself. Not in an unfriendly way, but just in the way foreigners did, so that you got to know nothing about them. Spotting him was harder than spotting the mountain lion that occasionally wandered into folks’ yards and ate up the dog’s food and, if you weren’t careful, the dog as well.

A couple of summers later, however, it started all over again, when word got around that the screenwriter guy had brought some movie stars to stay with him and they were going fishing on the river every day. Someone said they saw Spencer Scott standing in waders right by Simpson’s Bridge, and that’s when everyone forgot about bluebirds and started using their binoculars for other things.

They liked Abundance, did the screenwriter guy and his friends. More of them came to visit and they started staying longer. They began coming into town, hanging out at the Stockman Bar or eating lunch at Ernie’s Diner. They never ever talked to folks, just to each other, but that was OK. Most folks weren’t so sure they wanted to talk to them anyway. The screenwriter’s new movie had come to the showhouse over the winter. Everyone had gone, just to see what he’d been up to there in his cabin on Rock Creek, and everyone was disappointed. It was full of sex and gore and not at all the sort of thing decent, church-going folks went to see. There were a few, of course, who got starstruck. They tried to cosy up whenever they saw them and be friends, but that never happened. The canyon folk always brought their own friends with them.

More and more started staying. For a couple of years, there was a mini land rush as they bought up the dilapidated cabins that peppered the narrow mountain canyons. When those ran out, they started buying ranches along the river. You couldn’t blame folk for selling up, because it was like they’d won the lottery. Never, ever in a million years could they have got that kind of money selling local. Everyone knew it was all bad land, even down by the river. Scrubby, dry and alkaline. It wasn’t fit for anything except running cattle, and you needed five thousand acres at the very least to make a living doing that. But then canyon folk would turn up out of the blue, knock on your door and right there on your doorstep they would offer you more for fifty acres than the whole ranch was worth. If you had a good view of the mountains, you could name the most unbelievable amount you could think of, and like as not you’d get it.