Clete had left the valley the previous day for two days of fishing in the Swan River country. But at one P.M. on the following day I saw his maroon Caddy coming hard up the dirt road. He passed Albert’s stone-and-log house up on the bench, passed the barn and horse pasture, and turned in to the rutted lane that led to our cabin. It was a bluebird day, one that had started off beautifully. I had a feeling that was about to change, and in truth I did not feel like fitting on a Roman collar.
He told me what had happened that morning beside the creek on the ranch owned by a man named Ridley Wellstone.
“You think they’re neo-Nazis or cultists of some kind?” I said.
“A guy at the courthouse said Wellstone is a rich guy from Texas who moved here about a year ago. What doesn’t flush is this guy who ran over my fly rod. He said he remembered me from Lake Tahoe, that he was a driver for a car service there. Then he said he saw Sally Dio and his gumballs combed out of the trees after their plane crashed into a hillside in Montana.”
Clete tried to hold my eyes, then looked away. His association with Sally Dio was not one he was fond of remembering. The circumstances of the plane accident that killed Dio were not details he cared to revisit, either.
“Go on,” I said.
“The guy was trying to tell me he never worked for Dio, but at the same time he was telling me he drove Dio around in Nevada and was at the site where Dio’s plane crashed. It’s coincidence he was in Montana on the res when Dio smacked into a mountain?”
“In other words, he was one of Sally Dio’s people?”
“Yeah, and a perv who molested a thirteen-year-old girl on top of it.”
“Blow it off,” I said.
We were sitting on wood chairs on the porch now. My fly and spinning rods were propped against a hitching rail, my waders hanging upside down from pegs on the front wall. The hillsides that bordered Albert’s ranch were dotted with ponderosa and larch and Douglas fir trees, and when the wind blew, it made a sound like floodwater coursing hard through a dried-out streambed.