Crazy Mountain Kiss Read Online Free PDF

and cold winds. There’s a remoteness factor, a godlessness. You aren’t welcome here. You can feel it.”
    â€œRock has no heart.”
    â€œIs that what your people say?”
    â€œNo, but aren’t you the poet this morning?”
    Martha shook her head. It wasn’t like her to show a feminine side, to shed the insulation that hid her from the male half of the world.
    â€œThis one bothers me,” she said quietly. “Whether she’s the Huntington girl or isn’t, she was somebody’s daughter. I woke up last night thinking about that crow mincing down the chimney and cocking his eye, wanting dibs. What must go through a person’s mind at a time like that?”
    â€œNature might have given her a little mercy there, Martha. You figure she’d have been hypothermic in a few hours. You get dreamy. They say it isn’t a bad way to go.”
    â€œI hope you’re right. Here’s Jase.”
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    M ontana was a country of three-fingered men. It was hard to find a bar where at least one of the regulars didn’t shoot pool off a bridge made of knuckle stumps, and the sheriff’s department’s contribution to the count was Jason Kent. Kent powered down the driver’s side window of his truck. He draped his big left arm out the window and drummed his pinkie, ring finger, and thumb on the door panel. The middle and first fingers he’d lost in a farm machinery accident and kept in spirits in a Mason jar in his bathroom. In the passenger seat, huddled in a puff jacket that made her look like a hand grenade, sat Georgeanne Wilkerson. She was eating a carrot.
    â€œWhat’s up, doc?” she said brightly.
    â€œGood morning, Gigi,” Ettinger said.
    Kent slowly nodded, moving his eyes from Martha to Harold. “You think you can move that truck for me, chief? Or are we on Indian time today?”
    â€œNo, I’ll move it. I know white men can’t walk.”
    Martha looked from one to the other. Kent was a “just the facts, ma’am” man, as deliberate in his manner as a mudslide. Here he was trading insults with Harold at seven in the morning, an hour when Martha had scarcely ever merited more than a grunt out of him.
    â€œYou’re getting to be downright garrulous in your middle age,” Martha said.
    Kent seemed to think about it. “Just naturally talkative, I suppose. Now, who wants to lie down on the snow and help with these chains?”
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    H arold’s perimeter search was perfunctory. It had snowed and melted several times in the past couple weeks and any tracks the girl had made were long obliterated. What first caught his eye was a tag of animal skin sticking above the snow under the eave of the cabin’s west wall. Upon excavation this proved to be an elkskin jacket that fastened with bits of bone. The jacket was stained to a dark color and had been crudely hand-sewn. Harold knocked the ice and snow off it and brought it under the porch. He continued his search, finding a link of chain that was attached to a metal contraption. He frowned, then, realizing it was a chimney cap, uttered a low whistle that brought Ettinger to his side. The cap was not a simple cover to keep rain out, but part of a top-mounted damper system that fitted flush with the chimney opening. The assembly was old and warped, the screws that had attached it rusted through, the gasket rotted away, but the link chain that dropped down the chimney so the occupant could open or close the damper was still attached. Harold thought it was possible that the girl had been strong enough to have pried the assembly off the chimney before climbing in. It threw a little water on Martha’s suspicion that the victim didn’t understand chimneys and might be from somewhere south, and he said so.
    â€œIf she had a flashlight, once she removed the damper she’d have seen it was a