Moonshadows Read online

  MOONSHADOWS

  A NELLIE BURNS AND MOONSHINE

  MYSTERY

  MOONSHADOWS

  JULIE WESTON

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, Cengage Learning

  Copyright © 2015 by Julie Weston

  Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Weston, Julie W., 1943–

  Moonshadows : a Nellie Burns and Moonshine mystery / Julie Weston. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-4328-3073-1 (hardcover) — ISBN 1-4328-3073-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4328-3081-6 (ebook) — ISBN 1-4328-3081-3 (ebook)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3081-6 eISBN-10: 1-4328-3081-3

  1. Women photographers—Fiction. 2. City and town life—Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 4. Criminal investigation—Fiction. 5. Idaho—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.E872M66 2015

  813'.6—dc23 2015008076

  First Edition. First Printing: July 2015

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3081-6 ISBN-10: 1-4328-3081-3

  Find us on Facebook– https://www.facebook.com/FiveStarCengage

  Visit our website– http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/

  Contact Five Star™ Publishing at [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 19 18 17 16 15

  For Gerry

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The seed for this book began on a full moon night at Galena Lodge in central Idaho. My husband, Gerry Morrison, and I and two friends strapped on snowshoes and ventured out into the dark, lit by the light of the moon, round and the color of bone. Alongside the trail, wheat grass appeared, casting shadows that rivaled those of a sunny day. On our way home after a delicious dinner following our adventure, we drove past a cabin, also lit by the moon. A story line began to weave its magic when the moon set behind the Smoky Mountains. Only starlight remained to dazzle the darkness.

  For over two decades, Idaho has been the subject of my writing. Most of that time, I lived in Seattle. Now, I have returned to Idaho, a world as different from the city as can be imagined. We are surrounded by high desert—sagebrush and rabbit brush, native grasses and wildflowers. The sun shines most days; snow piles high in the winter. We ski, snowshoe, and play in the snow. Elk and deer populate the meadows and mountains behind us. Around our house, rabbits and ermine and fox leave their traces, winter and summer. In winter, the white trunks of aspen stand guard. In summer, their leaves rustle a soothing outdoor melody, accompanying meadowlarks and magpies.

  A combination of writing groups, both in-person and online, have supported and advised me, critiqued my work, and read many permutations of the chapters in this book: Mary Murfin Bayley, Charlene Finn, Belinda Anderson, Gina Vitolo, and Anjali Banerjee. Without their good advice, I doubt if I would have finally brought this story to a close. With their encouragement, I still write about Idaho, and the adventures of Nellie Burns and Moonshine will continue.

  I thank Five Star Publishing and Tiffany Schofield for believing in the fiction of the West and recognizing that Idaho is an integral part of the West. Hazel Rumney is a star editor with a keen eye and perceptive mind. Michael Seidman helped me with structure and character. The Regional History section of the Community Library in Ketchum, Idaho, and Robert A. Lonning’s book, Hailey (Arcadia Publishing, 2012), gave me pictures and narrative to bring 1920’s Idaho to life.

  My husband is my first and best reader. He is also the photography expert who has informed the pages of this book and Nellie’s vocation. His photographs inspire and he has made Nellie’s efforts reality.

  PROLOGUE

  Rosy sank to his knees, gulped in shards of icy air, and rolled his burden out of his arms. A crust blanketing the snow cracked and broke. The stalking wind flung solid pellets against his face, across his shoulders. No time. No shovel.

  He groaned and leaned back. Slow down. Time made no difference now. Standing, pulling one leg forward and then the next became an exercise in wading through sugar. Damnitall. How could he dig a hole in a bowl of drifting snow?

  Nothing to do but to do it. He had stopped sobbing when he crossed the snow bridge to the grove of trees, but tears froze on his cheeks. Ashamed, Rosy rubbed them off. His winter gloves felt like sandpaper.

  He waded and crawled toward a slight rise, backed off half a dozen steps, and began to dig. With each sweep of his hand, the snow slid back to its beginning. He crouched, legs apart, and scooped snow between his legs and back. Like a dog. Where was the dog? He could do it better.

  “I won’t . . . forget . . .” he mumbled and panted, “. . . you.” A trench began to form. “I . . . know . . . what you . . . did.” Snow slowly piled behind him. Good enough. Aspen branches clacked against each other like dancing bones. Dead leaves, still clinging, sighed, as if a soul wandered past.

  Her pale face floated just out of reach, a ghostly presence in this haunted space. He shut his eyes, held back a sob. Goddamn weakling. He needed a drink.

  The sun, a white pebble behind clouds, shed no warmth. But his efforts did. Sweat spilled off his face. His shirt was wet. The wind blew through him, making a hole of his middle. He crawled back to his burden and pushed and pulled and laid it out in the trench, gently. What else could he do? Nothing.

  “Take away my pain,” Rosy pleaded. Opium. The word was a raven’s screech. The wind calmed. He stilled his rising gorge, knelt a few moments over the body, not knowing what to say or even think. Then he raised his head and yowled. A magpie, dressed for a funeral in its black, blue, and white feathers, answered him with a “Cr-r-uuk.” Two of them swooped down to land on branches, croaking, then dropped to the snow, strutting.

  “Git! Git you blood-suckin’ banshees!” Rosy staggered up and waved his arms like a blasted scarecrow. The magpies retreated two steps, and waited.

  Where was the damn dog? He, Rosy, was the dog. He reversed his stance, and scooped snow back into the hole. If only he had a shovel. Tired, Rosy lay down next to the hole, scooping and patting, scooping and patting. At last, the white berm held. He could leave. Or, he could lie there and sleep.

  Get up. He shivered like a sinner at St. Peter’s gates. Get up!

  The trip back across the river took less time, less effort. Hillocks and humps of snow where the struggle began and ended remained. Half a dozen magpies pecked and poked like ghouls fighting over gristle. The wind had sifted miniature drifts in every direction. The birds flew off, leaving scattered bloody patches, pinking and blacking the snow. With the coming of nightfall, winter would erase the fall of man, the craving, crying
need of man. Rosy kicked the snow in a frenzy, hatred still simmering. Out of breath, he stopped and then forced his legs to step and step again.

  A bottle of hooch and the devil called from Last Chance Ranch.

  CHAPTER 1

  Snow and a full moon. Nellie waded through heavy powder almost as deep as her high-topped boots. The man leaning over the automobile didn’t look like he could guide her anywhere, let alone into back country to find a night scene worth capturing on film. He scraped at the back window. She smelled liquor on him, more like old liquor than new; maybe he’d been out drinking the night before.

  Prohibition had seriously affected people’s drinking habits in Chicago by the time Nellie left; everyone talked about how to get liquor. In Idaho, no one even mentioned Prohibition. A drinking man was not something new to her, and she tried to hide her distaste.

  “Mr. Kipling?” she asked as she neared the car. “Mrs. Bock, my landlady, told me you carry people for hire.” His Oldsmobile roadster was dented, had peeling paint and two cracked side windows, and what looked like scrawny tires under metal grippers. The man himself wasn’t in much better shape.

  “Where you want to go?”

  “North of town, I think. I need a place where the moon will shine full on and create shadows on snow. I’ll be carrying camera gear on a sled, so I can’t hike too far from the road. I need time to set up all my equipment. And I need several hours to photograph different angles of light.” His hands were red and gnarled, and he coughed several times while Nellie talked to him. The noise of his scraping made her wonder if he heard her. She was ready to try again when he answered.

  “Don’t want much, do you?”

  “On my way north in the train, I thought the area around Shoshone was right except there was no snow.” The memory of the stark, flat expanses of sagebrush and the monster shapes of lava rock and trees that looked like grasping skeletons in the night still made her shiver. “But as we neared Hailey and Ketchum, the scenery closed in. Where can I find the kind of scenes I saw farther south, but with snow?”

  Her enthusiasm didn’t appear to be catching.

  “Doubt you’ll find what you want, but I’ll take you there. Charge a dollar out and a dollar back.” Scritch. He succeeded in clearing frost from the glass.

  Two dollars for one trip! “That’s too much.” She had her nest egg, but she couldn’t spend it willy-nilly. “If I hire you now and again when the moon is full, would you lower the price?”

  “Might. Depends.”

  Nellie waited. To break the silence, she asked, “Depends on what?”

  “On how much I need the money. What do you want to do at night? You can’t take pictures then.” Mr. Kipling stopped scraping to stand up and look down at her.

  “I believe I can.” In the portrait studio where she had worked in Chicago, most of the faces had been regular—made up if they were women to look as pretty as possible and clean-shaven if they were men.

  This man’s face appeared split down the middle. On the right side, his eye was milky blue and a scar near his temple pinched the skin around it, giving him a wizened appearance. On the left side, his eye was brown and his skin smooth, although he had not shaved in days and the stubble gave him a dirty look. All of his skin, smooth and pinched alike, had the rosy sheen of a common drunk.

  “Staring at my bad eye, ain’t you?”

  Embarrassed, Nellie looked away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

  He moved around to the front of the automobile. “You gonna hire me? Get in. Let’s go.”

  The scraped place on the front window was a narrow gap all the way across it, hardly wide enough to see through, but there was really no other choice. Nellie couldn’t hire a car and drive herself. Another one of her things to do—learn to drive—along with find a job, make a name for herself, and get enough money to buy an enlarger and other equipment for a darkroom. She opened the passenger door and climbed in. No ice clung to the side windows.

  The road north followed the Big Wood River for several miles, and the windshield cleared as they motored along. Cottonwoods and scrub brush edged the rushing water, which peeked out from behind snowbanks. She wished she had her camera and could stop to try several landscape shots, but she had to be chary with her film, as no more was available in Ketchum.

  “Why do you want to gallivant around all alone?”

  “I want to find unusual subject matter.” Why should Nellie tell a stranger? She had hardly told herself why she was doing this. “Nobody pays much attention to a woman in a man’s field. If I do something no one else is doing, I can open doors.” I hope, she added to herself.

  “Why don’t you get married like every other woman?”

  “You sound just like my mother, Mr. Kipling.” Nellie’s mother had warned her she was attempting the impossible; she should instead find a man, get married, and have children. Nellie had to restrain herself from making a smart remark about drunken husbands and slaving wives.

  “Nobody calls me Mister. I’m just plain Rosy.”

  “Rosy? That sounds like a girl’s name. Why are you called Rosy?”

  “Now that ain’t none of your business, is it?”

  Nellie turned her face back to the landscape passing by the wide window. She’d been rude twice, and his name was obviously related to the color of his face.

  After a few bumpy miles, the river swung out of sight and the automobile passed between rolling snowy meadows. A snowfield at night without a foreground to attract the eye would merely appear gray. It was the contrast between black and white and pattern that she wanted.

  It wasn’t long before Rosy pulled a brown bottle from a sack on the floor beside him and took a drink. “Want a taste?” He held the bottle toward her. “Some of the best moonshine around.”

  Nellie edged closer to the door. “No thank you. I don’t drink.”

  Rosy drove in silence, sipping from time to time.

  The hillsides to the right of the road were white in the brilliant sunshine and bluish gray where clouds shadowed them. Without trees, they resembled pillows cut across with what looked like narrow terraces. “What makes those parallel lines on the hills?” Nellie asked, hoping to divert her driver’s attention to something besides his bottle.

  “Sheep.”

  The odor of whiskey in the automobile grew—a strong, almost antiseptic smell. Nellie took her handkerchief out of her bag and held it to her nose. The aroma of carnations, her mother’s scent, replaced the whiskey and Nellie felt a pang of homesickness.

  “Sheep,” Nellie repeated. “I don’t understand. How can the lines be so straight?”

  “The Basques run ’em all summer into the canyons and gulches around here. A straight line is quickest and easiest for the animals ’stead of climbing up and down, so that’s what they follow.”

  “What’s a Basque?”

  “You don’t know nothin’, do you? They’s people from Spain. They come here to take care of the sheep for the rich ranchers, who don’t want to get theirselves dirty. The mine owners hire us miners, and the sheep owners hire them Basques. ’Course, none of us’ll work with sheep, so the ranchers got to bring someone in to do it.”

  “I suppose the mining pays better,” Nellie offered. “But aren’t most of the mines around here closed down?” Mrs. Bock had lamented the failing of one.

  “Damn sight better. And sheepherding is nigger work.”

  Nellie stiffened. The memory of the riots of 1919 in Chicago when so many colored people were killed was still strong. The Negroes there were a proud people, by and large, and her mother and she would have starved if one of the Negro professors at the University of Chicago hadn’t found her mother work at the school library. The same man had found Nellie a part-time job in a portrait studio, setting her on her life’s work.

  “Tell me what kind of mining you do.” She wanted to concentrate on possible photographs. Riding with Rosy Kipling was a big mistake.

  “Did. See this eye?” Ros
y tapped his right temple with the bottle. “Blasting cap went off and did that to me.”

  “Oh, dear. I’m sorry.” Mrs. Bock had warned about Rosy Kipling’s “weakness.” Maybe it was his eye, rather than drinking.

  “What for? You didn’t do it.” Rosy lapsed into silence again.

  The car’s motor rumbled and bumbled, but seemed steady enough. The grippers clanked in the snow, which wasn’t very deep. Other autos had traveled this way, leaving ruts. One appeared in the distance, a dot that grew larger and puttered past them going back to Ketchum. Mr. Kipling didn’t comment so neither did Nellie. The road crossed over the river and the mountains on either side narrowed the valley. At last, they were close to the kind of terrain she was looking for—meadows, mountains, river, and trees. Along with naked cottonwoods and aspen, there were stands of almost black evergreens. A small white creature bounded across the snowfield.

  “Stop!” she shouted. “What’s that?”

  Rosy stomped on the brake, throwing Nellie forward and down. “You b—!” The whiskey spilled on the seat.

  Nellie pulled herself back up. “That little animal, what is it?”

  “It’s a weasel, you flatlander.”

  “But it’s white, not brown.”

  “Ermine, it’s called, in the winter.” The disgust in his voice was so thick, Nellie could feel her face warm.

  “I want to get out here. This looks like a good place.”

  Her driver stared at her as if she were crazy. “Suit yourself.” He pulled the car to the side of the road, stopped the motor, wiped off the bottle top, and slumped back.

  Nellie looked at him a moment. She had hoped he might get out too, help her break trail maybe. Her boots were tall enough, she hoped, that snow wouldn’t fall in; if it did, her legs would get very cold because she wore a skirt. She stepped out, closed the door, took one step, and sank up to her knee in snow. From the car, a muffled laugh. She kept wading, poking one hole after another up to her knees. Rosy continued to chuckle and she felt herself blush again.