rifle; it weighed enough to be haunted. The emotional toll of the day was having an effect on me, and I wondered if I wasn’t already in the Camp of the Dead. I wondered if I hadn’t been for the last four years. I sat the bottles down and pulled the old girl from the scabbard, looking at the rubbed spots. The barrel was round, the heavy military model rather than the expected octagonal like Omar’s. I looked at the beads attached to the hide covering on the foregrip.
Dead Man’s Body was an intricate design of triangles, points, and geometric figures showing not only the body itself, but the wounds and the spears that had done the deed. Henry had explained that it was more of a Sioux pattern, but that that might have been the reason for using it, to warn the Lakota that they should not take their alliance with the Cheyenne lightly. They were the small Venetian seed beads that had become more predominant around 1840 and had a richer color than the earlier pony style. The stitching was overlay, not the usual lazy stitch you saw nowadays, and when you held the rifle up to the light there was no space between the rows. I thought about all those little strings of beads sailing across the Atlantic from Italy. Maybe Vic’s ancestors had supplied the ornamentation for Henry’s in six degrees of beaded separation.
I smiled and made a conscious effort to be better company for the Old Cheyenne and, to prove it, I raised the rifle high over my head and gave out with the most blood-curdling war cry I could manage. I’m pretty sure I could do it better when I was seven, but the shout rattled around my little house and made me feel better, so I did it four or five more times. The last one hurt but was the best. I felt like an extra in a fifties B movie, so I put the rifle back in its scabbard, picked up my wine, and headed for the truck.
The temperature was dropping, and it was starting to look like we might get more snow. I hit the NOAA band on my radio and listened to the little computer-generated Norwegian tell me that two to four inches was expected on the mountain but only an inch down here. So far, not a flake had fallen, but I figured I could always call Henry; he could tell me exactly when it was going to begin.
I started digesting Vic’s oral report; the Espers worried me. If Reggie Esper and his wife had taken off for Colorado, and I believe his sister lived in Longmont, had the two boys gone with them? It didn’t seem likely that two college-aged boys would go with their parents to visit an aunt for a week. I had honestly believed that Cody’s death had been an accident, at least mostly, until the feather. I was getting that fretful, nagging feeling that this case might end with all the loose strands that I had picked free. The old police adage says, when you’re done and there’s nothing there, go back to the beginning and start over. So, here I was, staring at the beginning and trying to figure out what it was I’d missed the first time.
I turned into Vonnie’s drive, pulled through the opening gate, and parked in front of the house. All the motion-detecting lights came on again, and I gathered up the stuff and started for the house. By the time I got to the porch, she had the door open. “You still look tired.”
“That bad, huh?” The light from the entryway was warm and tawny, reflecting the reddish highlights of her hair as she stood in the doorway.
“Your voice is hoarse. Are you all right?”
“Yep, I just had to do some shouting today. Sorry.”
She took my arm as I got there. “No, I like it. It’s sexy.”
I was feeling better and gave her the two bottles of wine after she shut the door. “Here, I brought wine. I picked it out myself.”
She looked at me for a moment, then her eyes dropped to the scabbard. “What’s that?”
I raised the rifle and shrugged. “This is a very long story…”
“Is it a gun?”
“Yep…”
“Not in my house.”
I looked at her face for the contention I expected to find, but there wasn’t any. It was a simple statement of fact, and her eyes still held the warmth that had invited me in. I felt the need to explain. “It’s an expensive piece, it doesn’t belong to me, and I thought it would be safer in here.” She looked down at the rifle again but didn’t say anything. “I’ll put it back in the truck.” I started to turn, but she caught my arm.
“No.”
There was a moment as she tried to weigh the options open to both of us. “It’s okay, I’ll just lock it up in the truck.”
“No. I’m sorry.” Her face came up, and the smile was a little sad, but generous. “Is it okay here, by the door?”
I smiled too. “Yep, that’ll be fine.” I propped the rifle in the corner and for the first time noticed my sheepskin coat draped across the chair that was also there. I turned and looked at her. “You gonna send me packing?”
She cocked her head and was instantly delicious. “No, I like the way it smells, and if you don’t take it with you tonight you’re not likely to get it back.” With this, she turned and started down the hallway and through the living room where I had left her the last time I was here. She was wearing low-heeled ropers, buckskin leather- laced pants, and an off-white silk blouse with western accents. The effect from the rear was breathtaking. I left the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead to commune with the smell of my coat and pursued some preferred company myself.
The elevated area between the arches was a dining room and on the other side of it was the kitchen. The smell of something wonderful was drifting through the doorway, a delicate smell, tangy, but with an underlying sea scent that spoke softly to the base of my stomach. The olive loaf sandwiches had worn thin.
The kitchen was a study in contrasts. The floors were Mexican tile, and the walls were the same reworked plaster as in the other parts of the house, only these were differing shades of red. Massive hand-hewn beams straddled the room overhead, and the cabinets looked like they had been salvaged from somebody’s line shack. The actual appliances were huge stainless-steel brutes that reminded me of the DCI coroner’s lab in Cheyenne. A number of things seemed to be simmering on the eight-burner stove, but my attention was drawn to the center island where a small glass vase of tulips sat between festively painted plates and silverware that looked stately enough to have been used at the Queen’s coronation. There were linen napkins in brass-and-silver rings, and I was getting that diminishing feeling that I was there to read the meter.
“I hope you don’t mind if we eat in the kitchen?” She went to the stove, lifted the lid on something, and stirred it with a long wooden spoon that came from a crock full of implements that was tucked into the corner of the counter. The steam rose and separated as it drifted past the shining adzed surface of the beams. I was willing to bet she didn’t have to worry about mouse poop. She had turned and was looking at me. “It just seemed cozier. If we eat in the dining room with just the two of us, it will be like that scene from Citizen Kane.” I nodded, trying to think of the scene from Citizen Kane, only able to come up with the one with the screaming cockatoo. “In anticipation of the snow, I’ve made hot buttered rum, or would you rather we start with some of this wonderful wine you’ve brought?”
“I think it’s only supposed to snow an inch.” Henry had his magic; I had the little computerized Norwegian. “But the hot buttered rum sounds great.”
She sprinkled sugar, cloves, and nutmeg into two thick-faceted glass tumblers, poured rum on top, added a couple of sticks of cinnamon and hot water, and finished it off with a large dollop of what read on the wrapper as IRISH COUNTRY BUTTER.
“We’ll save the wine for later. This’ll do your throat some good.” She leaned on the counter and raised her own glass. “Here’s to our first official date.” We touched glasses, and I felt the warmth in my chest before I even took a sip.
“So, he was clinically depressed?”
“Undiagnosed.”
Dinner was everything my stomach had hoped it would be: pasta with a cioppino of spinach, tomato, clams and mussels, and homemade country bread with which we both sopped up the leftover sauce. She followed this up with a homemade apple pie, topped with vanilla bean ice cream, and continued with the hot buttered rum, in spite of the wine. My mood was so warm and tranquil that I was beginning to fear that I might fall right off the little Italian stools and onto the floor. “I remember coming out here with Dad when I was a kid. He shod your father’s horses, and I tagged along.”
“Yes. I was trying to remember if I was here.”
“Yep, you were.”
She looked into her glass. “Was I a little snot?”
