Mary read it again and again, but she didn’t get it. What was accidental asphyxiation? And the time and place of death didn’t jibe with what Mr. Milton had told her. Amadeo was supposed to have hung himself in the field at lunchtime and had been dead all afternoon. But that wasn’t true, according to the death certificate.
Mary slid the certificate back in the envelope, hurried up the stairs and down the hall to her room, and perched on the edge of the bed to call Missoula information for Mr. Milton’s number at home. When she heard his soft voice on the line, she said, “Mr. Milton, it’s Mary, sorry to bother you.”
“It’s no bother, dear. I did enjoy our lunch together.”
“Me, too. I’m calling because I got a copy of Amadeo’s death certificate and it says that he died by accidental asphyxiation, which sounds impossible to me. And it also says that he died around seven o’clock at night. Does any of that make sense to you?” Mary paused, and the line went silent. “Mr. Milton?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I guess, well, I only told you part of the truth.”
Mary felt a jolt of surprise. “Okay, what is it?”
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to upset you, and it didn’t matter. I told you what happened, pretty much.”
“Please tell me everything. Like they say, the whole truth and nothing but.”
“The accidental part, well, I don’t know for sure. I guess it says accidental so they didn’t make your client look bad. You know, a suicide and all. It was kinda embarrassing to him.”
Not to mention to the camp. Or maybe the FBI wanted it covered up. In any event, that must have been how Amadeo was buried in the Catholic cemetery. He wasn’t listed as a suicide. “But what about the time difference? You said he died around noon.”
Mr. Milton paused. “Well, uh, this Brandolini, your client, he didn’t die right away. As I recall it, he was unconscious when Sam picked ’em up, but he didn’t die until later, in the hospital.”
It jibed with the certificate. “Why is that? Do you remember?”
“Oh, I remember. You know, my memory is very good.”
Mary remembered he had told her that, even if he didn’t. “So what happened?”
Mr. Milton paused again. “You really have to know? It’s kinda upsetting, the gory details.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, the rope he hung himself with? It didn’t hold.”
“What do you mean, it didn’t hold?”
“It broke. It wasn’t strong enough to hold him.”
Mary swallowed her distaste. “But he was only a hundred and fifty-five pounds.” She remembered from Amadeo’s alien registration card. “What kind of rope was it? Just string or something?”
“No, it was strong enough rope, that wasn’t the problem. Problem was, he made the rope by tyin’ two ropes together. They weren’t long enough, either one of ’em. They musta been ropes they used to tie the tools together, like I said. The rope broke where he tied it.”
No. Mary heard someone whisper. Okay, officially, there are no sprinklers or wind in my hotel room.
“Mary, you all right?”
“Sure, fine.”
“Sorry I didn’t tell you, but you can see how come I didn’t want to mention it. And don’t think on it, too much. Your client, he didn’t suffer.”
Yes, he did. “Is there anything else you remember?”
“No, dear. That’s all. I’m sorry about your client.”
“Thanks so much,” Mary said and hung up.
She sat on the edge of the bed a minute. The hotel room had been cleaned, and housekeeping had opened the curtains on either side of her sliding glass doors. Outside her window, the sun was glimmering on the ripples of the Clark Fork, which was doing its gurgling and rushing thing. A little boy in a striped shirt and rubber overalls was fishing in the river, which came as high as his knees, and his father stood behind him, holding on to him by a strap of his overalls. The father wore a green vest with a wooden net hanging from his collar in the back. Mary watched them idly. She had never gone fishing, but she felt like she was fishing now. Casting a line into waters she didn’t know, seeing what would bite. Amadeo had evidently joined her, as a guide. Thank God one of them could fish.
Mary tried to imagine the day of Amadeo’s death. The rope tying him to the tree, coming undone. Amadeo falling to the ground. The horror of the friend when he woke up, unable to call anyone to help. Not that anyone could have helped anyway. Mary had worked on enough murder cases to know a little about strangulation. The rope would have ruptured the carotid and other vessels in Amadeo’s neck, and he would have bled to death, internally, over a period of hours. He would have known that he was dying. Would that have made him happy? Finally given him peace, knowing that he would join Theresa? Mary couldn’t help but shudder at the thought. Even in her grief over Mike, she had never considered suicide. Her parents would have killed her.
Part of her wished Mr. Milton hadn’t told her the truth, because it hurt to think of Amadeo suffering. She tried to dismiss the thought but couldn’t. She sighed, needing suddenly to lie down. She took off her blazer, folded it in half, and laid it flat on the other bed, near the glass sliders. Outside, the father was bending over the little boy, evidently instructing him as he tied something to the end of his fishing line. A lure, she guessed, or a fly of some kind. Last night there had been people fishing in the same spot, not fifty yards from the Doubletree. Mary knew that fly-fishing was big in Montana, from a movie she’d seen on Encore with Brad Pitt. Broad Street Runs Through It.
She kicked off her loafers, went back to bed, and sat down, bending over and pulling off one nylon knee-high, then the next. Nobody else at Rosato bothered with nylon knee-highs, but Mary had grown up watching the mamarellas on the C bus wear them with dresses and had nursed a secret fondness for their taupe ugliness. She was about to drop the mamarella socks on the floor and lie down, but she looked at them again. They were the cheap kind from the Acme and had shriveled to nothing without her calf to give them shape. In fact, they looked like two pieces of brown rope.
Just then Mary heard an excited yelp from outside her window and looked up. The little boy’s fishing rod had bent almost to breaking, and he was reeling something in, braced against the strain and the moving water. His father held on to him with a sure hand. In the next instant, a fish shimmering with color and water burst from the river into the air, its long body torquing before it fell sideways into the river, with a splash.
Mary watched, transfixed; the fish was a strong, wild animal, fighting for its life, which is not the kind of thing you see at Tenth amp; Ritner. The boy cranked his reel, the father held on tight, and the trout jumped from the river again, thrashing more weakly. It happened one more time, the boy and the fish locked in a lethal battle that the boy eventually won, reeling in the fish close enough for his father to scoop it into the net. The boy jumped with glee, and the father gave him a hug. Then they bent together over the fish, and the father reached into the net. After a minute, they let the fish swim away.
Mary smiled at the happy ending. She had no idea that a fish could be so big or so powerful; they were so calm in the Chicken of the Sea can. Whatever the boy had tied on his fishing line had done the trick, and the line itself had to have been strong. She considered it. Fishermen had to know how to tie things onto other things. Knots were something that fishermen knew about. Even a city girl like Mary had heard the term fisherman’s knot.
On impulse she went with the mamarella socks to the borrowed laptop she’d set up on the desk, then hit the enter key to wake it up. She logged onto Google, typed in “fisherman’s knot,” and the cheery blue-and-white screen yielded the results of her search. She eliminated the first few links, which looked irrelevant, then about the middle of the page came upon what she was looking for: Get Knotted! Animated Knots for Scouts! She clicked on the link, and the screen changed as the computer found the website, which was for a Boy Scout troop in East Sussex, in the United Kingdom. Underneath the title was a bright blue list of all sorts of knots: bowline, clove hitch, figure-of-eight knot, fisherman’s knot.